How to turn creativity into a rigorous business strategy
Unleashing the power of creativity isn't just for artists and writers. It's a vital ingredient in business strategy too. Discover how to harness your creative potential and transform it into a robust, results-driven business strategy.
Natalie Nixon
President of Figure 8 Thinking, a global speaker, and a creativity strategist who advises and emboldens leaders to transform their businesses through creativity and foresight
- She holds a PhD in design management and is the author of The Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation, and Intuition at Work
- When did you first realize you were interested in design?
- Retrospectively, I think my interest in design stems from my mother.
- Growing up, her home should be a place of beauty that you return to at the end of each day
If you are equal parts terrified and exhilarated, you should leap for the opportunity
Your terror will ground you, but the exhilaration will keep you optimistic and dreaming.
Influenced her education and career path
She went to Vassar and ended up with a double major in anthropology and Africana studies
- While studying Africana Studies, she learned that shifts in one part of a system can have a cascading effect on other areas of the system
- All these different actors and nodes were part of one thing called culture
After graduating from college, she started sewing all of her outfits for work, primarily because she couldn’t afford all of the pretty frocks in the boutiques in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
A few years after that, she entered a master’s program in global textile marketing studying in Israel and Germany, where she gained incredible exposure to the entire vertically integrated industry from fiber to yarn to fabric to cut and sew to distribution and merchandising, and ended up living and working in Sri Lanka and Portugal.
- While teaching, she decided to pursue a PhD in design management because she was tired of traveling and being on airplanes all the time.