5 Rules for a Creative Culture

5 Rules for a Cre­ative Cul­ture
Ben Chest­nut, CEO of MailChimp

1. Avoid rules. Avoid order. Don’t just embrace chaos, but cre­ate a lit­tle bit of it. Con­stant change, from the top-down, keeps peo­ple nim­ble and flex­i­ble (and shows that you want con­stant change).
2. Give your­self and your team per­mis­sion to be cre­ative. Per­mis­sion to try some­thing new, per­mis­sion to fail, per­mis­sion to embar­rass your­self, per­mis­sion to have crazy ideas.
3. Hire weird peo­ple. Not just the tattoo’d and pierced-in-strange-places kind, but peo­ple from out­side your indus­try who would approach prob­lems in dif­fer­ent ways than you and your nor­mal com­peti­tors.
4. Meet­ings are a nec­es­sary evil, but you can avoid the con­fer­ence room and meet peo­ple in the halls, the water cool­er, or their desks. Make meet­ings less about del­e­ga­tion and task man­age­ment and more about cross-pol­li­na­tion of ideas (espe­cial­ly the weird ideas). This is a lot hard­er than cen­tral­ized, top-down meet­ings. But this is your job — deal with it.
5. Struc­ture your com­pa­ny to be flex­i­ble. Cre­ativ­i­ty is often spon­ta­neous, so the whole com­pa­ny needs to be able to piv­ot quick­ly and exe­cute on them (see #1).

via Cre­ative Cul­tures: MailChimp Grants Employ­ees “Per­mis­sion To Be Cre­ative” | Fast Com­pa­ny