The Most Creative Man in Silicon Valley

The Creative Curriculum

Since 1979, the details of "Personal Creativity in Business" have been altered from time to time -- what's a course on creativity without a bit of internal tweaking? -- but the core themes remain the same. At the course's foundation is Ray's conviction that creativity exists within everyone. When people can't tap into their creativity, Ray argues, that doesn't mean that it's not there; it's just being suppressed by what he calls the "voice of judgment," or VOJ -- that pesky internal self-esteem destroyer, heavily inßuenced by both society and parents, that says you can't, you shouldn't, and you're going to look stupid if you try.

"There was an exercise that Michael had us do to silence our voice of judgment," remembers Michelle Barmazel, 33, a management consultant at McKinsey & Co. who specializes in e-commerce for financial institutions and a member of the Stanford B-school class of 1994. "He told us to write a negative trait, something that we wanted to get rid of, on a little piece of paper. Then he lit a candle in the middle of the room, and one by one, we went up and dropped our papers into the ßame-to burn our negative traits. It was a very powerful exercise."

Negativity, Ray says, is the enemy of true creativity. "The creativity that we're going for in the course is enormous," he says. "It's like the experience you have when you make a perfect shot in a tennis match or say just the right thing in a meeting or make just the right move in a relationship. That experience tells you that there's something really great inside of you-that you're somebody who can hit that perfect shot, and that you can probably hit it all the time. Creativity is feeling that you're making a contribution all the time and feeling totally absorbed by what you're doing. The great Boston Celtics star Bill Russell wrote in his autobiography that there were certain times when he would be so into a game that he could be spitting up blood and not even care. In those games, he would know where people were going to be before they got there, and he wouldn't even have to think about what to do. Sports psychologists call that mentality being 'in the zone.'"

According to Ray, we all have at least one "singular recognition experience" during childhood or adolescence -- but our VOJ covers up the positive feelings that the experience leaves behind. Ray's own such experience occurred when he was nine years old and spending the summer with his family at their lakeside cottage in Wisconsin. "One day," he says, "I was walking down a gravel path that led to the beach. It was a beautiful, sunny day. I didn't have anything in particular on my mind, and I suddenly got this sense that I was as big as the whole scene around me-that I had all kinds of power, all kinds of potential, to do whatever I wanted to do. It was a very full feeling. But there was also a bit of sadness mixed in with it, because I knew that I would someday die."

Such poignant moments are not at all uncommon, says Ray. When he asks his students at the beginning of each quarter if they've ever had such an experience, about half say that they have. "People know what I'm talking about," he says. (One student recently told Ray that his breakthrough occurred at age 16, when he was swimming across the Seine River in Paris at midnight.) The importance of these memories, says Ray, is that they are a recognition of our "inner creative resource."

For people who have doubts about their inherent creative gifts, Ray suggests a plethora of exercises meant to tease out those talents. His approach to creativity can, ironically, seem like a math problem. There are, he says, five qualities of creativity: intuition, will, joy, strength, and compassion. Those qualities are drawn out of people by four tools -- faith in your own creativity, absence of judgment, precise observation, and penetrating questions-and are meant to aid people in addressing the five challenges that Ray refers to as purpose and career, time and stress, relationships, balance, and finding true prosperity.

That framework allows students to tackle creativity -- a subject often discussed in uncomfortably abstract terms -- in a very real and systematic way. Additionally, at the beginning of the quarter, each student chooses an issue to confront that has been problematic in the past. For example, one recent student said that he considers himself too dependent on the approval of others-and that he fears becoming like an older relative who died professionally successful but personally unhappy. The way that students pinpoint exactly what to focus on is by answering a question: "What is a problem or obstacle that, if solved, would cause an immeasurable change in your life for the better?"