The Most Creative Man in Silicon Valley

By: Curtis SittenfeldWed Dec 19, 2007 at 12:18 AM

Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Michael Ray has taught some of the best-known innovators in Silicon Valley how to be more creative. It's no wonder that both students and executives are clamoring for his lessons.

Ray does not require students to speak in class, not even on the day that they turn in their final project. "At the beginning of the quarter, I always say that you can go through the course without saying anything if that's what you want to do," he says. "I certainly like it when people participate, but the point of this class is really to work on yourself." Although most students do actively participate, one particularly quiet woman took Ray at his word, even during her final project. "She dressed as a clown and just sat there during the whole class," Ray explains. "Some people asked her if she wanted to do anything, but she didn't. She was almost like a mime. That was her creative expression." It was, incidentally, wholly acceptable to Ray.

Although "Personal Creativity in Business" can seem, at times, like a giant love fest between the professor and his current and former students, the course does have some critics-of a sort. "I thought the course was a waste of time when I was taking it," says Bob Moog. "I considered myself a person who was pretty in touch with his creativity before I took the course, so I was a skeptic throughout the whole thing. I just thought, either you're creative or you're not-you can't teach people to be creative."

Once Moog re-entered the work world, his perspective shifted -- though the shift didn't occur overnight. In 1985, he founded a toy company, University Games Corp. Competing against such giants as Hasbro and Mattel wasn't easy, and Moog was forced to rely on pluck and innovation. "We would call buyers, and they would say that they were too busy to talk to us," he remembers. "At the time, we had a new game called the Batman Game. So we printed up some of those do-not-disturb tags that are hung on hotel doors, and we mailed them to all of our buyers. On one side of the tags, there was a picture of Batman with the words 'Don't disturb me, I'm saving the world.' On the other side, there was a picture of the Joker with a caption that read, 'Diabolical plot in progress, come on in.' A lot of buyers put the tags right on their doors, and we could call their assistants and ask, 'Which side is showing?' Whenever the Joker was showing, we were put right through."

Moog was similarly resourceful in his approach to selling to the public. "We decided that we weren't going to define whom we sold our products to in a traditional way," he says. "Most toy companies sell board games to either toy stores or game stores. We decided to sell our games wherever people who buy games go-airport gift shops, hotel gift shops, gas stations, museums. Nobody had ever sold games in those places before, but we knew that we should, because that's where our customers were going."

It slowly dawned on Moog that perhaps the business-school class that he'd been so skeptical about had helped him after all. "When I was breaking the rules, I wasn't thinking, 'Oh, I learned this from Michael Ray,' " Moog says. "But when I looked back, I asked myself, 'Why did I think of these innovations when nobody else did?' And the answer was, there were things in that course that led me to think in a different way than I had in the past. It probably took five years for me to realize that the course had even inßuenced me at all."

These days, Moog (who, for the record, is a convert to the idea that creativity exists within everyone) is effusive about the course-even about some of its wackiest ideas. He still practices many of the course's live-withs today, including this one: "Think about water."

"It's kind of weird," Moog admits. "I'm not even sure what it means. But I find that if you go someplace where there's water, and then you just stare at the water and think about it, that releases tension. It can be an ocean, it can be a lake, it can be rain, it can even be a glass of water -- there's just something about that ßuidity that's really relaxing. It opens up your mind and allows you to think differently about things."

Before going off to draw a bath, be warned : Another of the course's fundamental assumptions is that creativity is idiosyncratic. That means that the water trick might work for Bob Moog but not for the next person. "Knowing that creativity is idiosyncratic leads to a mass principle," Ray says. "We have many different kinds of exercises-meditation, movement, dance, artwork, music, singing, martial arts. The idea is that for any one of those activities, 90% of the people who try it might not find it useful at all. But for the other 10%, it's a way of tapping creativity."

The idea is not for everything to work; it's for something to work. When it comes to creativity, Ray's goals may be ambitious, but his expectations are much more modest. "The best thing that we can hope for-and I think it does happen-is that people will get on a path of their own," he says.