THE idea that we might get pleasure out of work may seem far-fetched. Certainly, it does to me at seven o’clock on a Monday morning, or indeed at any time during the working week when things get stressful, tiring, boring or just downright infuriating. But life management expert Hubert Jaoui, who is in Cyprus this week for a seminar entitled Creative Directions for Business, believes it is actually possible. It is all about tapping into your innate creative sources. Luckily, creativity is something we all have.
“I have not met a non-creative person,” Jaoui insists. “Even the most conservative person expends a wealth of efficient imagination on not changing”.
Tunisia-born Jaoui has earned the title ‘business guru’ as a result of the work he has been doing for the last 30 years, but says he hates the title.
“They [gurus] know the truth and pretend to follow the path they have designed. Everyone has to design his own. We help people to reach their own goals.”
Jaoui is a scientist and a philosopher who spends much of his time working with companies and organisations, helping them to become more efficient by getting them to work in creative and pleasurable ways.
Among one of the main tenets of his philosophy is that business and pleasure, contrary to popular belief, can be mixed. He has coined a phrase – ‘recwork’ – which combines the notions of pleasure, or recreation, and work.
“Today the main source of energy is pleasure,” Jaoui tells me at the offices of Performa Consulting Ltd office in Nicosia. Performa are Jaoui’s partners in Cyprus, who, like Jaoui, work with anyone from multi-national companies to individuals to boost creativity and efficiency.
Jaoui shows me his ‘wheel of pleasure’, a drawing of a star-like pattern with 12 points, each point representing what he calls “legitimate ways to have pleasure at work”. Without naming all 12, it is enough to say that if you feel useful, respected and liked in your workplace, your chances of enjoying your work are much greater than if you feel superfluous, held in low esteem and disliked.
But enjoying your job, and thereby gaining energy from it may not be enough: One needs also to be creative and efficient, and to have a goal.
“Your goal is the polar star which illuminates the path.”
To be creative one needs talent, and methods through which to channel that talent, Jaoui says. He expresses the motion diagrammatically through what he calls his ‘model of creative efficiency’.
Talent, Jaoui says, is something that exists in all of us, “even in accountants”.
He informs me that the first research on talent and creativity was not done until the 1950s when psychologists in the US were commissioned, with unlimited state funding, to figure out what creativity was.
The research, Jaoui says, was centred on 1,000 known talented individuals and 1,000 “normal people”. The upshot was that there was absolutely no difference between the imaginative powers of the normal and the talented. The only difference detected was that those deemed to be talented and successful used their talent more than the normal.
From this research stemmed the notion that creativity could be taught.
“Today, there is not one college in the US that does not have creativity courses.”
But Jaoui bemoans the lack of interest in Europe.
“With very few exceptions, it is not a state priority.”
As a result, Americans are more creative, Jaoui believes.
“But they are handicapped in a way too. They do not have very much culture and they are highly specialised at what they do. But they have decided to overcome this through teamwork, at which they are champions. In Europe people are very individualistic and there is very little cooperation”.
He also believes European lack goals.
“They know what they don’t what, but not what they want,” he adds.
The way workplaces are organised is also very much a part of Jaoui’s remit.
“The old triangular model with the bosses as the head, management in the middle and the body of workers at the bottom does not work any more. It has been discovered that the body has a head too.”
Jaoui shows me another diagram, this time with an upside down triangle superimposed on top of the traditional hierarchical triangle.
“This shows how people at the bottom are responsible for what they do and that the fate of the company is in their hands too.”
This, of course makes great sense, but I want to ask whether, if the workers are being asked to think as well as work, will they get a pay rise. I don’t, of course.
We move on to look specifically at Cyprus. Jaoui believes there is plenty of work yet to be done here in a country like Cyprus where status and power are jealously sought after. In this, he is backed by his Cyprus-based partner, Performa’s Dimis Michaelides who says, “Cypriot companies need to be exposed to creativity. Quite simply they just have to change”.
“In a changing world, dinosaurs have to disappear,” Jaoui adds.
In Cyprus, one can never hold a conversation without reference to the Cyprus problem. Both men say they are keen to have a crack at it.
“The most important thing is to make connections, both internally within the brain, and externally within society,” says Jaoui.
I wish them luck.
