My wife recently bought tickets to Kid Rock. “They were only $20 each,” she said. Twenty bucks? Has he fallen that far? I wondered. As it turns out, the five-time Grammy nominee is doing just fine. In fact he announced the low ticket price to make a statement and to give something back to his fans. While some musicians are charging $225 and up for concert seats this summer, Kid Rock teamed up with Live Nation to offer all seats at his summer concerts at $20 per ticket. Rock will have to take a pay cut to do it, but as he told Piers Morgan on CNN, his working-class friends have seen their paychecks cut substantially over the past few years. “I make a lot of money… I’m proud I can look someone in the eye, knowing I haven’t taken a dishonest dollar from a working man,” said Rock.
While I watched the CNN interview, I heard one sentence that I believe explains how Kid Rock came to this creative and innovative pricing strategy. Rock told Piers Morgan that he has two homes, one in Malibu and the other in eastern Michigan. He explained that if he only lived in Malibu and didn’t see the struggle that many middle class Americans experience, the $20 a concert idea would never have happened. “If I lived there [Malibu] full time, I wouldn’t be thinking the way I’m thinking.”
Creative ideas rarely happen in insular environments. They happen when people get out from behind the desk or leave their cubicle and experience the world. Kid Rock is getting out of the office, literally.
Gregory Berns is a professor of neuroeconomics at Emory University. In his book, Iconoclast, he writes, “epiphanies rarely occur in familiar surroundings…sometimes a simple change of environment is enough to jog the perceptual system out of its familiar categories.” Berns says great innovations typically occur when the person experiences a drastic change of environment, such as travel. “When confronted with places never seen before, the brain must create new categories.”
Sadly, too many leaders fail to create new categories because they lock themselves in their offices and demand that their employees do the same. By doing so, they stifle creativity. I stumbled upon this lesson years ago when I left a global PR firm to start my own company. I was the senior vice president for media-training and the firm worked on a billable structure, so anything that could not be billed to a client was off-limits. I sat in an office all day, as did the CEO who the employees rarely saw. Today, when I travel for keynote speeches, I often spend extra time in the city, at the conference, or visiting with companies associated with the event. This past Monday I spent the day with a famous entrepreneur for no other reason than to learn something new and to share it with my readers and my audiences. As a result of this freedom to experience new things, my creative output (books and columns) has soared.
Most bosses I know want more creative ideas from their teams and they schedule a “team building” offsite once a year to jump-start the process. There’s nothing wrong with it, but if your team members are chained to their desks for the rest of the year, your effort might have been wasted. The simple fact is that people who think differently do so because they experience the world differently. Kid Rock travels 2,000 miles to get a fresh perspective. You don’t have to go that far, but “leaving the office” mentally and physically from time to time— and giving your team the freedom to do the same—will kick-start everyone’s creative energy.