Creative Thinking Report: Leadership, Innovation, and Strategy

This report critically analyzes creative thinking, leadership, and innovation through four tasks. Task 1 examines the management styles of creative people like Larry Page and Steve Jobs, contrasting empowerment with the need for organizational goal alignment. Task 2 develops and evaluates an airline marketing strategy, considering pricing, branding, and customer relations, while contrasting competitor pricing strategies. Task 3 analyzes Tesla's innovation strategy, focusing on market share capture through low prices versus the importance of sustainability. Finally, Task 4 addresses Netflix's customer dissatisfaction following the DVD service discontinuation, proposing incentives and considering the potential for discrimination. The report uses provided case studies and academic literature to support arguments and counterarguments.

Running head: CREATIVE THINKING
CREATIVE THINKING
Name of the Student
Author note

1CREATIVE THINKING
Task 1
This task will be taking the examples of Larry Page and Steve Jobs as creative people,
and how they used to manage their creative employees when they were required to. Larry
Page once stated that the idea of his foundation in Google was to create a culture in which
creativity could strive (Bel 2010). Interactions between people from various departments
were and still are always encouraged to interact with each other, and any element of fear
regarding communication with the higher authority were always eliminated for the purpose of
making sure that innovations kept coming in. This is because, Larry Page believes that when
there is a positive culture with no fear of embarrassment, innovation thrives (Bel 2010).
This is the same form of management of creative people that was followed by Steve
Jobs. He left the entire innovation process to his employees, giving them the power to make
innovative decisions (Bel 2010).
This is a highly positive trait in these creative influencers. Employee motivation
comes from their empowerment. When employees feel that they do matter to the organization
and are free to communicate, they feel that that their opinions matter in the organization and
this employee motivation works as the catalyst to innovation and performance in the
organization (Lăzăroiu 2015).
Countering this argument, Shanker et al. (2017) say that enough power is required to
be kept in the hands of the authority to make sure that the innovation that takes place in the
organization, is in alignment with the organizational goals, without which the effort goes in
vain.

2CREATIVE THINKING
Task 2
The airline marketing strategy that has been developed includes a marketing strategy
to attach the value of a first class customer relations along with first class. The pricing
strategy is to calculate the fuel costs, staff costs and maintenance costs of the airline service
in the entire month, and forecast the ticket sales in a given month based on market research,
and then price the tickets on the basis of the sum of costs divided by the total tickets to be
sold, and adding 20% of the total sum of costs to that. The branding has to be done in a way
that portrays the company as serving quality treatment to customers besides offering the
quality service.
This would be an effective form of marketing strategy, since research suggests that
politeness and exquisite behavior towards the customers matters to the customers almost as
much as the product or service itself. In fact, this adds extra value to the service or the
product that is to be provided to the customers, meaning that they would be more willing to
spend for that particular product or service (Gretzel and Fesenmaier 2016).
However, on the contrary, Shaw (2016) says that the main thing that pricing should
rather be done based on the pricing of the competitors to stay competitive in the market.
Calculations based on any sort of assumptions could lead to a pricing that would backfire the
company. It is best to keep the pricing same, while also serving the same deliverables as
those of the competitors.

3CREATIVE THINKING
Task 3
Tesla has been facing losses every year, with the Model X and Model S. However, the
innovation that the company provides far exceeds the imagination of the people, and
therefore, the forecasts say that the profitability would ultimately go up in the coming years.
It is for this reason that the main thing that has to be considered is the fact that the company is
sacrificing current profits for the purpose of capturing the market and slowly building on the
profits.
This is a highly effective idea. It is because of the fact that once the market share is
captured by the low prices, continuous production would lower down the production costs
due to a factor called scale curve. Once that happens, the profitability would go up for the
sale of the total number of units, and therefore, it would mean that the company not only has
a wide market share but also significant profit to make out of it (Dockner and Jørgensen
2018).
However, Laszlo and Zhexembayeva (2017) argue that the main thing that has to be
noticed in this regard is the factor of sustainability. It is not a very wise idea to incur losses to
capture the market share, since if it continues for a very long period of time, the company
would not be able to sustain itself, and at that point, hiking the prices would backfire on the
company even more. Therefore, it is best to come up with innovation that is understandable
to the customers as being beneficial to capture the market share.

4CREATIVE THINKING
Task 4
The main problem that Netflix has faced is that of dissatisfied customers as a result of
their decision to stop DVD’s by mail services in America. This has caused a high uproar in
the market consisting of the Americans, and a lot of dissatisfied customers.
What Netflix could do in this regard is to make sure that some form of incentives are
provided to the customers for the loss. This could be in the form of limited free subscriptions,
or by simple customer relations efforts such as birthday wishes via mail, to the customers
who previously used to avail the services of DVD by mail service. Netflix could possibly
make sure that loyalty points are given away to the consumers who would be sticking to
Netflix’s streaming services, despite not being able to avail DVD by mail services anymore.
These loyalty points could be used again for free subscriptions and waive offs.
Providing incentives brings down the cost of purchasing a product, and therefore,
adds more value to the product in comparison to the money being spent for it, and therefore,
the purchase intention is higher (Wong, Paylou and Gong 2016).
However, the main thing that has to be noted in this regard is the fact that providing
selective benefits to a section of the customers based on those who used to avail the previous
service of Netflix is not a good idea, since it would make the other customers feel like they
are being discriminated, and would in turn backfire the company (Morris and Davis 2015).

5CREATIVE THINKING
References
Bel, R., 2010. Leadership and innovation: Learning from the best. Global business and
organizational excellence, 29(2), pp.47-60.
Dockner, E.J. and Jørgensen, S., 2018. Strategic rivalry for market share: a contest theory
approach to dynamic advertising competition. Dynamic Games and Applications, 8(3),
pp.468-489.
Gretzel, U. and Fesenmaier, D.R., 2016. Customer relations 2.0–implications for destination
marketing.
Laszlo, C. and Zhexembayeva, N., 2017. Embedded sustainability. In Embedded
Sustainability (pp. 116-140). Routledge.
Lăzăroiu, G., 2015. Employee motivation and job performance. Linguistic and Philosophical
Investigations, (14), pp.97-102.
Morris, M.H. and Davis, D.L., 2015. The Use of Price Discrimination as a Demand
Management Technique in the Service Sector: The Case of Tourism. In Proceedings of the
1986 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Annual Conference (pp. 204-207). Springer,
Cham.
Shanker, R., Bhanugopan, R., Van der Heijden, B.I. and Farrell, M., 2017. Organizational
climate for innovation and organizational performance: The mediating effect of innovative
work behavior. Journal of vocational behavior, 100, pp.67-77.
Shaw, S., 2016. Airline marketing and management. Routledge.
Wang, S.A., Pavlou, P. and Gong, J., 2016. Monetary Incentives, Online Reviews, and
Product Sales: An Empirical Investigation.

6CREATIVE THINKING

7CREATIVE THINKING
References