This is going to come as a bit of a shock to the crowd preaching that design and innovation are finally getting the respect they deserve. From a news article over on BusinessWeek comes word that while there’s plenty of hype and lip-service, the people doing the hiring in the U.S. and Canada – Human Resource Managers – rank “Creativity” relatively low. From the article (Link):

The percentage of North American leaders who checked “creativity or innovation” as the most respected quality — just 4% — tied with “technical expertise” for second-to-last place.
…
Perhaps even more startling was the response of HR managers, who could select more than 1 of the 10 choices. Just 39% of the North American HR respondents counted creativity and innovation as highly respected in their organizations, while every other quality besides the aforementioned cross-cultural strength got top marks from more than 50% of HR managers. Since HR managers often design performance-management and compensation systems, those numbers give cause for concern.

I’d suggest reading the whole article since I’m not including the results from polls taken in China. BusinessWeek spins it in a way that I would question. After all, “creativity” means different things to different people. I’m also not commenting on the short interview that follows the news entry (even though I’m tempted to quote the “risk aversion” portion and link back to my earlier post on the advertising world’s inexplicable hesitancy to get into videogames).

I consider this one exhibit in a long list of things I’ve been putting forth (on this blog – sample Link – and on both the Nussbaum blog and in the Core77 design forum). There’s plenty of hype, but in the end it’s all about measurable results.

Sorry fellow IDers, the glass ceiling is Lexan.