My Love Affair with Creativity

Creativity is personally a dynamic topic for me because it is directly correlated to various external and internal motivators. For example, as I write this blog and all blogs in the past, I cannot use the suggested Times New Roman font in Word because I find that it limits my creativity and insight. Something about its basic and banal look reminds me of the rigid, constricting requirements of other class assignments. But don’t worry… I make sure to change the font after I’m done writing to ensure it meets this class’ requirements – but ever so briefly!

Individually, I believe I am a creative and inspired person – and this something I am proud of. In fact, ask my family and they will say that this has been my “differentiator” in the family. I was always prancing around the house making up new songs, choreographing dances and painting my favorite objects. Creativity and art has always gone hand in hand for me, and I can confidently assert that art and music bring out the purest and strongest forms of creativity from me.  I have danced all my life, and choreography is my way of translating sound into movement – the endless options of moves and rhythm is incredibly exciting and movingly inspirational. For some, the abstract nature of dance can be daunting and overwhelming. For me, I embrace the white space ahead and find myself producing some of my best work when I have the least amount of constraints and limitations. 

A big Indian dance recital at the age of 8. I know what you're thinking... I'm SO excited to be on stage.

This, however, cannot be applied to all areas of my life. For example, mathematics is a subject area that I am fairly weak in and the fact that this too is vast and overarching is incredibly scary! Without set rules, guidelines, and familiarity I tend to flounder and feel overwhelmed with quantitative tasks. Although one may think math is by nature a fairly uncreative subject, I would disagree because its most compelling application and use are closely tied to creativity and resourcefulness. Just ask astrophysicists or chemical lab technicians (yes, I actually asked people in these fields of work!). It is incredible how OPPOSITE my experiences with dance and math are! But the true revelation I have gained after years of working in spaces where my individual creativity has both flourished and been challenged is that creativity is directly linked to my self-confidence: when I am confident that I am able to succeed in a certain setting, my ideas are pointed and unique; when I fear a subject or correlate past failure to a certain situation, I am unimaginative and very timid. It is extremely important that I continue to identify work spaces, both professionally and personally, where I can cultivate my self-confidence because that is truly where I shine the brightest.

I have had the privilege of working for companies/teams that have truly allowed me to stretch my creativity abilities. From a work perspective, this may be attributed to the fact that most of my past employers have been smaller, more entrepreneurial (or intrapreneurial) establishments. It’s not to say that larger organization stifle creativity (as per my experience at Target, I believe they focus on this topic and make strides to promote creativity and inspiration), but I think it is easier to cultivate creativity when you are on a smaller team/work force that dedicate resources and emphasis to this notion. When working for my parents’ business, I was working on many nebulous and large projects that required a lot of inventiveness and the wearing of many hats (ugh I really hate that phrase), but because I was allowed to think outside of the box and provided with tools to cultivate my creativity is when the real golden nuggets were produced. Whether it was a simple conversation with a passionate employee or the freedom from management (yes, that would be my parents haha) to explore untapped markets and ideas, I was allowed to take risks and be bold. But of course, I was in a safe environment and this could have factored into my comfort with creativity and exploration. 

Sample project that resulted in my suggestion to enter the Indian beauty market. Talk about over-delivering.

Now on the flip side, without the comfort of a safe and supportive environment, my creativity levels are abysmal. My very first job out of undergrad was with a start-up fashion and beauty editorial website in NYC as an editorial assistant. Doesn’t this just scream creativity and imagination?! Well, it was at first when the team was small and functioned cohesively. The minute one bad apple joined the team, our entire group struggled to come up with new and innovative content for the website. We felt unsupported and limited to sharing our ideas because ridicule usually almost followed suit. It was a nasty place to work, and I knew right away that I need a place that supports creativity and individuality to excel in the workplace.

I already addressed above that I know first-hand it is possible to be creative individually, but when considering a group setting I also believe creativity is achievable – but in the right context. For my Pricing Channels class, we discussed the idea that cross-functional teams (CFTs) are highly valuable to firms. I agreed with the statement, but added stipulations that CFTs are really only valuable when all team members are communicative, collaborative and respectful of the process and project at hand. If a firm does a poor job of putting a team together, silos and inefficiencies are created that make any business opportunity more challenging and sometimes impossible to conquer. Therefore, creativity can only be produced with the right mindset and right context. 

 

I struggle sometimes when trying to identify which creative process or framework to apply in some situations. Maybe this is because I’ve been taught both in school and in the workplace that there is a framework for virtually everything, so sifting through the many models and approaches is a daunting exercise. However, I usually always tend to resort to my gut instinct on how best to approach a creative solution. I’m not sure if I could explain or teach this intuition if I had a class of my own one day about this subject, but I hope that I can always be a great value-add to a team, organization, personal relationship and situation given my passion and desire towards creativity and innovation. If I could, I would start my own Indian dance studio and attend fashion school to eventually start my own fashion line because those to me are my passions – the center of this passion is free-flowing creativity that excites me more than anything else in this world!

Visualizing Insights through Data

I've always found it easier and more compelling to visualize data vs. reading it in text-form. Maybe it's because I'm more of a visual person, but I truly believe even the simplest data set can be better understood and comprehended if created into a visual. 

To illustrate, I used a report created by Barkley titled, “American Millennials: Deciphering the Enigma Generation”, to source a data set that showcases millennials being early technology adopters and how they are comfortable with owning multiple, complex devices. Although the data is simple with percentages, I find seeing the depth and magnitude of the percentages helps truly understand the penetration of these complex devices within the millennial population. The data set I used was displayed in the report as following:

Source: "American Millennails: Deciphering the Enigma Generation" report

 I flipped this data to create a simple visual that portrays this data:

Nerdy Karika, meet your next obsession and assignment.

On the very first day of class, when we were going through the syllabus and discussing the class paper assignment, I instantly knew right then what topic I wanted to cover. Firstly, I enrolled into this class during registration last semester with great anticipation because I greatly value customer insights and what I believed this class had to offer. But once completing my internship over the summer and learning even more about customer insights with hands-on experience, I have grown even more passionate and curious about this course and specifically my project topic:

The omni-channel phenomenon and how retailers are adapting to evolve.

The now very popular buzz word “omni-channel” is a fascinating topic because it not only includes the complexity of channel collaboration but it is also a highly relevant and current movement occurring in the retail space today. Now add on the critical layer of how this affects customers (consumers and vendors) from a loyalty and experience lens, and things get even more interesting! I am constantly reading articles and publications about omni-channel trends because it is interesting to see how companies are responding to the pressures of evolving quickly and strategically. So it was this article and blog post that really piqued my interest further and what I found as a solid source of inspiration for my paper:

http://risnews.edgl.com/retail-trends/5-Ways-to-Crack-the-Code-for-Omnichannel-Loyalty88104?googleid=88104

http://www.selligent.com/en/blogs/tips-practices/the-rise-of-omni-channel-retail-definition-and-5-tips/

The article offers many “omnichannel loyalty tips,” some of which are quite compelling. This spurred the notion of how retailers begin to synthesize and prioritize their evolving efforts because there is more information and insight out there than one can even handle! Some strategies work for some and not for others, so what are the guiding principles of this channel evolution and what does that mean for us as consumers on how we interact with retailers and what we expect from them. 

This thought segues well to my true source of inspiration for this topic – my summer internship at Target.

While working on the Target.com Home team, I encountered many instances where the omni-channel phenomenon was the core and underlying foundation of initiatives and business opportunities. My entire project ultimately centered on the firm's massive shift towards becoming integrated and omni-channel, and I left my internship extremely intrigued and eager to learn more. My internship at Target further solidified my interest in the retail industry, and this particular topic is personally important to master because it will change the landscape of the retail environment and how I can best serve customers in my corporate role.

The first goal for this project is to understand the omni-channel movement with a series of exploratory objectives. First, I intend to put some of my curiosity and theories to test by learning about companies doing it right, aiming to adopt, and unwilling to adopt all together. I also aspire to develop effective strategies and best practices for companies looking to adopt the omni-channel model. Finally, I intend to collect and synthesize key learnings and “do not do’s” based on historical data and activities conducted by companies. The second goal is to provide a robust analysis and understanding of how omni-channel directly and indirectly affects customers. Because serving customers in the right way results in greater loyalty and affinity, the growing focus on omni-channel will change how we collect, synthesize, and apply customer insights. In addition, technology will enable us to capture more data than before, which is a positive implication of omni-channel and showcases the importance of truly streamlining omni-channel efforts. 

Regarding the connection to key customer insights, the business model framework is very interesting in this context because omni-channel suggests that the current business model framework we think of today is changing and evolving. I am really interested to dive deeper into this to see how exactly it is changing and what that means for businesses and customers. And as mentioned above, providing customers with a valuable and relevant experience is one of the critical underlying goals of a successful omni-channel model so understanding what those experiences look like will be critical to the paper. 

As I begin to think more about my topic, below are a few questions that come to mind and that I will explore in writing the paper:

• Who is doing it right? And what does right mean?
• What will Amazon do next and will that reshape the retail industry... again?
• Do customers understand omni-channel and what it means to them in the future?
• Does omni-channel predominately affect the retail industry or does it have wide-spread implications to other industries and functions?
• How the business model framework is affected – are some of the pillars more important than others now and can any be combined/eliminated?

I am really excited about writing this paper and exploring this interesting topic, and I look forward to sharing my findings and suggestions on how to conquer omni-channel!