The strongest advocates of multicultural creativity are themselves worldly expats

Evidence

Indeed, the champion cheerleaders of the link between multicultural experiences and creativity tend to be expats themselves, such as Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Renault of France and Nissan of Japan. (Ghosn was born to Lebanese parents in Brazil, educated in France, speaks five languages fluently, and has worked on four continents.) Speaking at a conference at my current home institution of INSEAD, a business school with campuses in France and Singapore, he said, “I am of the belief, by experience, that when you have a very diverse team, from different backgrounds, from different cultures, different genders, different ages, you’re going to get a more creative team. Probably getting better solutions, and enforcing them in very innovative ways and with a very limited number of preconceived ideas. So I’m totally convinced that the more diverse the team is, the better you understand the situation, and the more you are creative about the solutions” (Pallister, 2009). — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2220

Categorization

• XREF: Raises the confirmation-bias angle: those who benefit from diversity evangelize it, an echo of how believers in any self-validating experience recruit others.
• SEED: Possible essay angle: the self-selection problem in the ‘travel makes you creative’ belief — those who return transformed are precisely those disposed to transform, and the ones who aren’t don’t write the books.