conversations
P: Part of why failure is not an option is because we
P: What’s your creative process?
fear accountability. How can we ease this fear, especially in a work setting where expectations are high?
K: Accountability is important, but it’s just as important to be
flexible in the ways we hold employees accountable. Rigid
measures discourage creativity. Performance reviews—if
employed at all—should include recognition of innovative
approaches being tried by employees, even if those
approaches don’t always produce immediate results. In the
long run, nonconventional, hard-to-measure approaches are
the ones that will produce the biggest successes.
K: My creative process involves alternating free-form musing—
just letting ideas come from wherever they will; however they
will—with subsequent hardheaded assessment of the viability
of these ideas, looking for the best ones. One key is not worrying if my new ideas might not be appreciated by others, or
might even be laughed at. Netscape’s co-founder Marc
Andreessen once said that any idea which doesn’t invite ridicule
is stale; a dozen other people are already working on that
idea. This is a profound observation, in my humble opinion.
P: What’s the one thing few people know about you?
P: What’s your biggest failure?
K: It’s hard to pick out my greatest failure from a long
list. One that leaps to mind is the several months I spent
developing a can’t-miss idea for a book on the underground
railroad that no one wanted to publish.
22 PULSE
n
November 2012
K: Those who don’t know me might be surprised by how
ordinary my daily life is: four-bedroom brick ranch in a small
rural town, long-term marriage, two sons, Honda Accord,
lawn to mow, pizza on Fridays. I’ve always liked Balzac’s
observation that the best way to work unconventionally is to
live conventionally. n