7 Extreme Creativity Lessons from “Cake Boss”

7 Extreme Creativity Lessons from “Cake Boss”: "

In the midst of a dreary day, we watched the Cake Boss marathon on TLC last Sunday. The show was fun and illustrated all kinds of extreme creativity ideas:

Shatter conventional definitions – The show is about cakes. But until Sunday, it never occurred to me a cake could be made from rice crispie treats, wood, screws, and PVC pipe. But look inside “star” Buddy Valestro’s “cakes,” and you may find any of those and more. If he stuck with traditional cake recipes, he’d never be the “Cake Boss.”

Get a team that’s better than you – Buddy appears to have command of many skills critical to making incredible cakes. Yet it’s clear he surrounds himself with specialized people who have stronger talents than he does in focused areas equally essential to creating the kinds of outlandish cakes he’s known for.

Your distinctive talents work all over the place – Why be just a baker? Carpentry, painting, and pottery skills were all used to create innovative cakes shaped like teapots, motorcycles, boats, and mannequins.

The impossible = amazing creativity – In one special episode, the challenge was to create a full-size NASCAR race car shaped cake. Two separate locations were used to make all the cakes for the more than 12,000 pound final creation. 12,000 pounds? That’s nearly 4 times how much a real race car weighs! That’s amazing!

Creativity doesn’t mean glossing over details – For an apple farm, the bakery had to make its first ever apple cake. While the apple grower appreciated the cake’s taste, what really excited him was the cake’s appearance – edible mini-pumpkins, apples, and a “working” tree swing.

Yell, laugh, and cry – Buddy’s family bakery is an emotional place. They wear their emotions on their sleeves; it’s all part of the intensively creative, deadline-driven process.

Shut up and fix disasters - Since it’s a reality show, disasters are a must. The front end of the NASCAR cake fell-off. A cake for a drag queen’s holiday show was too big to fit through any door to the theater. So what do you do? Throw more rice crispie treats at the NASCAR and get the holiday show audience to come outside to get their cake. No harm, no foul.

Put these lessons to work, and cook up some creativity for yourself! – Mike Brown

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Idea Connection - CEN Navarra - 2009

It was a great session in CEN Navarra. We were presenting ideaCONNECTION services. I think the spanish market will start to see Colaborative Problem Solving as a real cheap investment for the return it presents. Innovation paradigm is on top of today's business news. Internal R&D departments have a great battle in front to prove and stop external and efficient tools, knowledge and processes to step in.
Let's see what happens.

Cristiano Ronaldo, Team Building and Results

Hello Top Strategists,

I am really surprised... 90,000 people in and outside a soccer stadium to present the new Portuguese player that was hired for Real Madrid, Spain. In this event he was not playing, just being presented.

I am a proudly Portuguese citizen that met Cristiano in the year 98, maybe 99, when we were both playing for Sporting in Lisbon. I must say that he is one of the best competitors I ever met. Their team mates were loosing with him in everything, not just in soccer. I played with him table tennis, and... I lost. And I was practicing with professional players almost everyday... Or I was really bad. That can be true too... He prepares himself to compete like few others. You can judge him in every field you want but I saw him practicing, and his focus on his professional goals is something to be commented. However the goal of this post is not running away from my field (Business Strategy and Organizational Development).

My question is:

• Do you agree that Media, as well as the sport industry is giving more importance to individual performance than team (brand) performance?

The result is that one team mate, without playing for this club, alone is able to bring 90,000 supporters to the stadium. I am not sure of what I say but I believe that last season the whole team of Real Madrid didn't had in every match they played in Santiago Barnabéu 80,000 supporters (the full capacity). In this specific case Cristiano Ronaldo won alone (in number of supporters) against Real Madrid, and without playing. And I don't really know if this is good or really bad in Real Madrid team building process. It's not my problem too, which is good.

I could talk about this issue several hours, however I can't loose focus and I don't want to be miss understood.

• Is it possible to build a Team to produce results when some members without producing any result for that company, are seen as "Gods" while others are "Nobody"? (I am being here too extremist, however today's leaders are facing these scenarios.)

Please feed us back about this article.
Best regards,
Ricardo Andorinho
MBUintelligence