Need for discipline

Writers on the subject of creativity and innovation invariably emphasize the essential primacy of the creative impulse itself. Almost as an afterthought they talk about the necessity to teaching people to sell their ideas and stimulating executive to listen to the ideas of subordinates and peers. Then they often go on casually to make some unconscious statement about the importance of creating a permissive organizational climate for creative people. They rarely try to look at the executive's job and suggest how the creatives genius might alter his behavior to suit the boss's requirements. It is always the boss who is being told to mend his ways. The reason for their siding with the creative man is that the put side critics are generally as hostile to the very idea of the "organization" as the inside Creative men themselves. Both actively dislike organizations, but they seldom know exactly why.

Most likely the reason is that organization and creativity do not seem to go together. Organization and conformity do. Writers, critics, and other professionally creative people tend to be autonomous men, preferring to live by their personal wits. For them, to live in a highly structured organizational environment is a form of oppressive imprisonment. Hence, their advocacy of a "permissive environment" for creativity in an organization is often a veiled attack on the idea of the organization itself. This quickly becomes clear when one recognizes this inescapable fact : one of the collateral purposes of an organizational is to be in hospitable to a great and constant flow of ideas and creativity. Whether we are talking about the United States Steel Corporation or the United Steel Workers of America, the United States Army or the Salvation Army, the U.S.A or the U.S.S.R., the purpose of organization is to achieve the kind and degree of order and conformity necessary to do a particular job. The organization exists to restrict and channel the range of individual actions and behavior into a predicable and knowable routine. Without organization there would be chaos and decay. Organization exists in order to create that amount and kind of flexibility that are necessary to get the most pressingly intended job done efficiently and on time.

Creativity and innovation disturb that order. Organization tends to be inhospitable to creativity and innovation, though without creativity and innovation the organization would eventually perish. That is why small, one man shops are so often more animated and " inflationary  than large ones. They have virtually no organization and often are run by self willed autocrats who act on impulse.

Organization are created to achieve order. They have policies, procedures, and formal or powerfully informal rules. The job for which the organization exists could not possible get done without these rules, procedures, and policies. And these produce the so called "conformity" that is so blithely deprecated by the critics of the organization and life inside it.