Creative intelligence as the basis for new business strategy
Every business must adapt to stay relevant and viable in today’s society, and finding solutions to current complex problems often needs much more than the review of a business plan. It requires confident and persistent creativity.
In Boardroom Creativity, Anne Mieke Eggenkamp and Fennemiek Gommer, bring this concept to life, exploring the importance of creative intelligence and how to make the most of it in practice. Anne Mieke and Fennemiek are experienced board chairs of several companies and co-founders of Caracta Business Innovation. Through Caracta they work as a duo to help entrepreneurial leaders design their future direction, brand positioning and transformation journeys.
In the book, Anne Mieke and Fennemiek encourage the reader to approach the task of planning a business’s direction as a design challenge, something to be experimental, innovative and adventurous with. Shifting the focus away from optimizing current strategy frees leaders and board members to try new things and take intentional ownership of an organization’s next steps.
Boardroom Creativity is the essential companion for any leader or executive on a journey to transform their business, or simply those who are curious about the process that radical change or reforms could require. Anne Mieke and Fennemiek combine a clear, nine-step process to introduce more creativity into boardroom decision-making with examples and varied exercises to help people put theory into action.
The book starts slowly, explaining the importance of creativity, then inviting the reader to consider what needs to change or evolve within their business. It then emphasizes grounding any future plans in an organization’s unique purpose to ensure that processes don’t overrule essential values.
Anne Mieke and Fennemiek’s ideas are then unpacked, covering strategy design as an iterative process and then how to engage, envision and explore that outline. This includes who to involve in planning and how, fitting future ambitions into the current world context, eventually setting change in motion and then concluding with the pivotal role of board members in fuelling and facilitating the course of action that has been set out.
A future-led approach to business planning requires a growth mindset, sustained culture of innovation, endurance and accepting that the strength of an organization’s plan comes from its ability to evolve. Throughout the chapters, Anne Mieke and Fennemiek coach the reader on how to become comfortable with uncertainty as an opportunity for creative thinking.
Boardroom Creativity is the perfect read for business leaders, entrepreneurs and both executive and non-executive board members. Challenging those at the top to step out of their comfort zone first, Anne Mieke and Fennemiek explain how designing a business’s future needs a disruption of the status quo at board level before anywhere else.
Boardroom Creativity is published by Rethink Press and available on Amazon.
ISBN: 0781781337400
Launching: 19th January 2023
About the authors
Anne Meike Eggenkamp and Fennemiek Gommer are co-founders of Caracta Business Innovation, a consultancy helping leaders to get serious about creativity and design better futures for their businesses. Separately, they are also both chairs of several company boards.
Fennemiek is a purpose-driven strategy and innovation consultant with a background in industrial design, design thinking and brand strategy. She specializes in future-led strategy development and connecting people and ideas. Anne Mieke studied graphic design and pioneered digital design surfing on the growth of world wide web and tech developments when she started her own creative studio. She now acts as an innovation partner, specializing in circularity and sustainability, leadership development and designing boardroom learning.