5.5 Can Organizations Show Creative Characteristics?

During recent years, Caluin W Taylor has given numerous speeches on whether organizations can show creative characteristics. In his writings, he has asked many questions such as: Should we ask organizations to display the same creative characteristics that are found in creative individuals? For example, should organizations be alert and responsive to opportunities? Should they sense problems that haven’t been sensed before and face up to these problems and try to do something about them, especially in the way of a diversity of fresh attempts toward better solutions, rather than ignore or postpone them for future generations ?

Can an organization learn to set the climate so that the inner resources of its people may be more fully developed and utilized? Can an organization have the characteristic of welcoming long strides of progress instead of only being able to tolerate inching ahead? Can an organization learn to adjust to ideas from its people so that both will work together, or will they tend to pull in different directions with the result that many of the good ideas may get killed and, as a result, the organization may also show signs of dying?

As an organization grows older, does it lose some of its potential by building into itself certain self-imposed restrictions and limitations in the process of developing its own set of intellectual and personality characteristics? Or does it develop creative characteristics so that it retains its creative potential and even increases its effective creative mind power? Does it develop the characteristic and principle that its system is made for man, or is its guiding principle that man is supposed to be made for the system? Does it require its workers to adjust to its organizational environment, or does it allow and even encourage workers to adjust their own environment and build a better climate and organization for creative work?