The Most Creative Man in Silicon Valley

Ray continued to feel the power of that creative moment as the quarter wore on. "There was such chemistry in that class," he says. "When you have a great idea, it's so exciting to talk about it. There's something about creativity that people recognize, that touches them. And, at a more superficial level, we like to hear about creative people because it lets us know that we can be creative. We get that way about athletes, scientists, even ordinary people who have done something heroic-because it's great stuff to hear."

Leading an entire course on creativity at Stanford, however, would be more daunting than delivering a single lecture on the subject, and when Ray arrived at the gsb in 1967, it was not to teach the creativity principles that have since become his trademark. Instead, it was to teach a course called "The Management of Marketing Communication." It was not until several years later, when he found himself at a personal crossroads, that Ray reconsidered his professional priorities.

In 1971, he and his wife (with whom he had five children) divorced. It was a period of mixed feelings for Ray. "In many ways, it was a very successful time in my life," he remembers. "As a visiting professor, I carried out a lot of research at Harvard, and in 1974, I was made a full professor at Stanford. But at the same time, I was living in a little apartment, and I was on the edge of depression."

He embarked on a kind of spiritual quest, undergoing therapy, studying various theories on family and love, and delving into meditation. In September 1977, he traveled to Australia. "I invited a woman to go with me," he says, "but she didn't want to go. That was a blessing. It was the first time that I took an extensive trip by myself. Being alone gave me a lot of time to think about things, and to read and meditate. Because I didn't have a traveling companion, I met lots of people. I had some wonderful experiences." Upon his return from Australia, Ray gelled his experiences and ideas into a personal mandate: He wanted to teach a creativity course at Stanford. "I had experienced a sort of awakening," he says. "I realized that I wanted to do something else with my life, because advertising and marketing were no longer fulfilling. I thought about how incredibly alive I felt when I was being creative, and I wanted to share that feeling with other people."

To design a creativity course, Ray teamed up with Rochelle Myers, an art therapist whom he'd met in a class during his spiritual odyssey and the colleague with whom he would later write the groundbreaking book Creativity in Business. "In many ways, we didn't know what we were doing," says Ray. "But we did know that we wanted to get to a profound level of creativity, a level of creativity that would leverage everything else that our students were doing. We put together a proposal that talked about dealing with ambiguous situations and with the creativity that's within people. In a sense, the concept sounded kind of spacey, but I added something about the business side of it to the course description and gave it to the associate dean, who at that time was an accounting professor. And, lo and behold, he really liked the idea."

Students liked it, too, especially the insights that it provided on a subject rarely mentioned in their other courses, focused as those classes were on the "hard" side of business-numbers, algorithms, decision-making rules. In Ray's course, students don't just read sanitized case studies of success. They can actually ask successful businesspeople about the role that creativity has played in their careers. Past speakers have included Steve Jobs, Phil Knight, and Tom Peters, as well as a triathlete and a dream analyst. The speakers are often both informal and personal, opening up about issues that students are struggling with, such as maintaining work-life balance and cultivating purpose.

In the early years of the course, some students (even those who were fans) expressed incredulity that a class called "Personal Creativity in Business" existed at the GSB. Recalls Ray: "They were telling me, 'If the deans knew what you were doing in this course, you'd be out of here so fast.'"

In fact, Ray had tenure -- so his concerns had less to do with his own fate than with the fate of the course. "We have a mechanism here that's called the 'one-year rule,'" he says. "You can teach a course for one year without full faculty approval, which creates a lot of innovation in the curriculum." But after a year, the course has to go through an approval process. When his course came up for approval, Ray was filled with dread. To his surprise, it was approved unanimously, without even a discussion. Ray was free to forget about politics -- and to focus on teaching.