Hi. My name is Jeff Loewenstein. I'm a professor of organizational behavior. My name is Jack Goncalo. I'm also a professor of organizational behavior. What a coincidence. Right. We both study creativity. That's right, although we got to it through different routes, right? Exactly. So, where did you go to school? I had an undergraduate degree from University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and then a PhD in Psychology as well from Northwestern University. My background is also in Psychology and my undergraduate degree is in Psychology from Berkeley, and I got interested in research so I pursued a PhD also at Berkeley at the business school. They didn't let you out. No, they didn't. What got you interested in creativity? Yeah, that was actually an interest that came up in a course I took as an undergraduate, much like this one. It's an intro to creativity and I was so fascinated by the whole thing that I decided to become a research assistant to a Professor in the Psychology Department and then it just snowballed from there. I kept doing more studies and writing more papers and here I am. Right. Yeah we got addicted. So, how did you get addicted? Similar kind of thing. I was a painter and doing really badly added, but fascinated by the creative process and so I started studying the psychology of creativity as an college undergraduate and ran with that all the way into graduate school. So, do you have a perspective in your research that you have argued over the years or what's your take on creativity? Yeah. So, my view on creativity has been pretty much entirely focused on how people think. So, what's the process that you go through when you're thinking to generate a different way of understanding the world and you had coming in. What about you? What's process? What got you at your angle on creativity? Yeah. Well, my focus is more on teams. So, I'm interested in how people interact to share ideas that may be in their heads, but they may be reluctant to share with others. So, my view on creativity is teams are more creative when they encourage individualism and permit people to stand out to be different and to be rebellious and unfortunately, those are qualities that tend to be stamped out corporate America. We're going to put them back in. So, I've married into creativity, my wife is a theater director and acting teacher and an actor herself. I have two daughters also who act and sing and dance and play music as well. So, a pretty creative household and you? Yeah. My wife is also a professor of organizational behavior in the same department as us and we met in graduate school and and she's a sociologist who studies corporate demography essentially at the firm level, why do some firms live longer than others and what are those dynamics over time and she's also interested in innovation. So, we really span the creativity innovation spectrum and we have one daughter who's eight years old. What's been the most exciting part about creating this class or what's been the highlight so far? So jumping in and teaching in the iMBA for the first time has been really exciting, but also really different because it's the first time I've ever co-taught a class. So, we did it together. Yeah. Which I've never done before. Normally, you're inventing your own materials in your own course and this time we got to do it together. Yeah. That was a highlight for me as well and actually teaching the course with someone with a different view or you're looking at different elements of creativity, I feel like I learned a lot. Absolutely. So we hope you do, too.
