Creative Execution: What Great Leaders Do to Unleash Bold Thinking and Innovation

Chapter 5

Creative Execution Marches East

In battle, one engages with the orthodox and gains victory through the unorthodox.

—Sun Tzu

If you weren’t one of the approximately one billion people watching the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, where more than 10,000 performers put together a show that took seven years to orchestrate, or if you haven’t walked the streets of Shanghai’s bustling financial district, or watched Andre Agassi and Roger Federer duke it out on the helipad of the Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai, you might still think that Creative Execution is a purely Western concept, and that the Japanese use of Creative Execution at Pearl Harbor was a historical fluke. But make no mistake: Creative Execution is making ...