The Most Creative Man in Silicon Valley

These days, Marenzi finds himself passing on to his employees the lessons that he gleaned in "Personal Creativity in Business." Says Marenzi: "I manage around 100 employees. People are always coming up to me all upset about a problem, and I tell them to relax and to think about how it might be solved, to think about its effect on the other people in the department, to think about what the results of various actions might be. I tell them that it's not just the numbers that are important-does it make money or doesn't it make money? It's more, How is it going to affect people? Is this how we want to spend our time as managers or as teammates? Is it going to make us happy?"

Creative For Life

Marenzi's willingness to continue doing his creativity "homework" more than two decades after he finished the course is exactly what Ray hopes will happen with all of his students. "A lot of students are liberated by the live-withs," Ray says. "I tell them, 'Stay with this! You can live the rest of your life this way. Don't think of it as an anomaly.'"

Another way that Ray recommends cultivating personal creativity is by noticing and celebrating it whenever it occurs. That's where journal entries come in -- and why Ray encourages his students to share with the class their experiences dealing with a particular live-with. "I'm suggesting that people notice their creative moments throughout their whole life," he says. "Whenever you're dealing with a situation in a way that's better, you notice it. I tell people, 'Don't just pay attention to something when it happens -- pay attention to it afterward too.' That way, the next time that you're in a similar situation, or in a more difficult situation, you can say, 'Let me try this and see what happens.' It's all about being conscious, about being aware of what's happening to you."

It's a technique that Ray himself uses. "It's no surprise that I'm not fully liberated with all of my creativity," he admits. "One of the issues that I have to work on all the time is that I always tend to dwell on problems. Recently in class, I didn't get to everything that I had wanted to do, and at the end of the class, I was just berating myself. I went home and told my wife, Sarah, that there had been a glitch in class, and she said, 'I don't want to hear about that. Tell me 10 good things that happened today, and then you can tell me about the glitch.' By the time I finished telling her about the 10 good things, I didn't care whether I talked about the glitch. It's that kind of recognition and celebration of creativity that increases the probability that it will happen again."

A large-scale celebration of creativity occurs at the end of the quarter, when students turn in a two-part final project. The first part is a written statement of their self and work, meant to answer the questions that are at the course's center: "Who is my self?" and "What is my work?" The written statement also details how students have come to terms with the problem that they chose to tackle at the start of the quarter. Finally, each student's statement includes a personal myth-a narrative about that student's life and its challenges in which the student, thinly disguised, is the hero of the story. Explains Ray: "A hero might live in the town of Notsob, which is 'Boston' spelled backward. Or students might talk about their family, describing their parents as a king and a queen, and the characters as plants and animals. They tell their story in a very profound way, and what they often find is that by just coming up with an idea and not thinking about it too much, the story starts to write itself. It becomes a way for people to describe what they got out of the course and to figure out what they need to do in the future."

The second part of the final project is a form of creative expression, which the students choose themselves. Over the years, these works have precipitated some of the most moving moments in the class. Although some of them occurred years ago, Ray still becomes emotional when recalling them. One woman composed and recorded a piano piece. She then wrote a poem, which she read accompanied by the recorded music. The poem was about her relationship with her mother-and the woman's experience finding out that her mother was dying. "It was gripping," Ray says. "The music and the poem and everything all together was amazing." Another time, a student performed a dance in which he represented different facets of his personality by the clothes that he was wearing. He started out in a business suit, removing layers of clothing to reveal various outfits throughout the dance. He ended the routine in athletic clothes.

Not all students perform before the class. One woman transformed an unused school closet into a room that symbolized her life: She decorated it with wall hangings, books, and a burning candle, and she played music in the background. "The room provided visitors with a sense of peace and quiet," Ray says. "People would file in one at a time to see it."