The heavy burden of evidence is that creativity is much more available to us than we tend to think. The most significant constraint as with all kinds of exceptional performance, is mostly likely to be our willingness to do the difficult work required.
Organizations can take two other steps that are especially effective in light of how innovation really happens: telling people what's needed, and giving them freedom to innovate.
One of the main reasons why the people in organizations don't produce more innovation is that the culture isn't friendly to it. New ideas aren't really welcomed. Risk taking isn't embraced.
Organizations that are the most successful at building team performance are especially skilled at avoiding or addressing potential problems that are particularly toxic to the elements of deliberate practice, such as:
Give us people who are dedicated to making the team work, as opposed to a bunch of talented people with big egos, and we'll win every time. -- John McConnell
Top performers understand their field at a higher level than average performers do, and thus have a superior structure for remembering information about it.
We can abstract from the research a few ays, directly applicable in business, that top performers perceive more. They understand the significance of indicators that average performers don't even notice.
