Too much creativity: the Oreo section of a grocery store.

Too little creativity: Monday morning brainstorming meetings.

No judgment here—sometimes we all get in a creativity rut. And bureaucracy, stress, and deadlines only push innovation and imagination further down the priority list.

• But creativity boosts company and individual performance, so your job as a leader (in title or not) is to get the creative juices flowing.

But besides mandatory in-person brainstorms, how do you create the conditions for blue-sky thinking? Here are three ways to get your team to be more creative, without making them more stressed in the process:

Champion the long way to work. There’s nothing drearier than 8am on the M Train, so start taking the scenic commute instead.

• Sure, walking or biking into the office often takes longer, but fresh air inspires fresh thinking.
• While you probably can’t get away with this all week, talk with your boss about a day when you’re good to roll in a bit later.
• And if you’re the one leading the team, try to schedule meetings for midmorning to actually build in time for others to try this out.

Turn your 1:1s into coffee runs. Sometimes getting a new perspective on a problem just means getting out of our own airspace.

• For your next internal meeting, pitch a new venue—like grabbing coffee while you catch up with a colleague or strolling around the block while you discuss next quarter’s big-picture goals.

Team chore time. Like we keep saying, flashes of insight often come when you’re not specifically focused on a task.

• Capitalize on slow afternoons by blocking off time for a “relaxed attention” activity like emptying the office dishwasher or folding laundry at home. You’d be surprised what your brain can come up with while you’re sorting socks.
• Own the process by sending an open invitation to the whole team to participate with their own tasks.

Leading by example is your best bet for fostering creativity on your team. Just remember that there’s a fine line between encouraging innovation and getting too caught up in the process—and nine times out of 10 that line is a polar plunge.—CS

Fight fire with fire, and student loans with…pizza? That’s what Domino’s is thinking, anyway. Last week, the company announced it’s giving away $1 million worth of free pizza to customers who have to resume their student loan payments this month.

Objectively speaking, giving away a million dollars’ worth of product is not good business sense. That’s a pretty significant loss on the P&L, even for a billion-dollar company. So why all the free pepperoni?

• First, it’s a great marketing stunt that brings adults who might otherwise prefer wood-fired pizza with seasonal vegetables back to the co with the “pizza party” vibe. And feeding people for free isn’t too bad, either.
• Second, talk about good press—everyone (including us) is writing about the campaign.

Domino’s isn’t the only org ignoring emails from the accounting team to do something unique. Here are three other examples of conventional business wisdom and the companies that gave a hearty FU to tradition:

Marketing should convince people to buy things. In 2011, Patagonia famously launched a marketing campaign encouraging customers NOT to buy its stuff due to the environmental impact of a new jacket. It also mentioned that the co would repair old jackets instead of encouraging new purchases.

• How it worked out: Counterintuitively, the “Don’t buy this jacket” ad led to a 30% boost in sales, proving that honesty can be the best policy.

Pricing strategy should help maximize profits. For the past few months, Tesla has bucked the trend of inflation-related price increases and reduced the sticker prices of its electric vehicles by thousands, making some of its models cheaper than the US average for gas cars and costing the company an estimated $1.2 billion per year.

• How it worked out: It’s still too early to tell, but investors and customers are torn between calling it a brilliant strategy to bring on new customers, or the strategy that “piss[es] off core demo and kill[s] margins to unload inventory.”

Available supply should try to keep up with demand. Streetwear brand Supreme is known for its limited-edition merch drops that made teens and hypebeasts everywhere spend hours in line for a shot at a branded crowbar.

• How it worked out: Spectacularly. Supreme garnered the attention of the cool kids and the rich nerds alike—it was partially bought by the Carlyle Group in 2017 at a ~$1 billion valuation before then being acquired by VF Corporation, owner of The North Face, for $2.1 billion in 2020.

And the classic example: pouring money into an area completely outside the business, like Michelin starting a restaurant rating system as a way for people to travel around France—and, as a result, buy more Michelin tires.

2024 is a stone’s throw away, which means it’s budget season.

• Have you been asked to build out a 2024 financial forecast for your team?
• Do you want to discover what your boss really means when they say “we don’t have room in the budget for a raise”?
• Did you put accounting as a skill on your resume, and now your work crush wants help on the P&L?

Get the answers you need in Morning Brew Learning’s best-selling course Financial Forecasting. Besides getting to nerd out on spreadsheets, you’ll walk away with a completed business budget for 2024 and the tools to build others down the line.

The course runs from Monday, Nov. 13 to Thursday, Nov. 16.

Sign up here to save your seat.

Reaching for Goobers over Butterfingers isn’t your typical Halloween move. But candy is still candy, and we’re obviously going to eat it by the end of the night.

Which companies are responsible for the Mounds and Dots of the candy world? See if you can guess the parent company for these bottom-of-the-bowl treats:

Company A:

• Maltesers
• Dove chocolate
• Juicy Fruit

Company B:

• Pixy Stix
• Goobers
• Raisinets

Company C:

• Toblerone
• Swedish Fish
• Chiclets