Creative Thinking

Richard Wiseman is Britain’s only professor for the Public Understanding of Psychology and is the author of the bestselling 59 Seconds and he has an interesting take on how creativity can work in business, here are 10 of his ideas:

1) Ditch group brainstorming because it often causes people to simply follow the most dominant member of the group.  Instead have people come up with ideas on their own and then meet to discuss them.

2) Try feeding your mind with new ideas by doing something completely different such as, visiting a museum or art gallery, flicking through a magazine, going on a journey, or randomly searching the internet.

3) Try imagining how a child, friend, artist, or accountant would approach the problem.  Or think about doing the exact opposite of every solution you have created so far. Changing perspective helps produce novel solutions.

4) Watch a funny film, incorporate the words ‘cheese’ and ‘pie’ into your next meeting or telephone call, or digitally alter a photograph of your friend so that he or she looks more like an owl.  People are more creative when they are having fun.

5) Become more curious about the world.  Ask yourself an interesting question each week. How do elephants communicate over hundreds of miles?  Why do people laugh?  Why are bananas yellow?

6) To inspire creative thoughts, embrace nature.  Place a potted plant on your desk and, if possible, work in a room that looks out on trees and grass.  Or head for the nearest green spot and walk around.

 7) Listen to classical music.  People are at their most creative when they are relaxed and in a good mood.  Slow moving classical music induces both of these feelings in most people within minutes.

 8) Carry a small notebook and pencil around with you and scribble down an idea the moment it comes into your head.  Good thoughts strike at any time and it is important to record them before they are forgotten.

 9) Randomly select a word from a dictionary and then create an ideas based around this word.  The random combination of elements helps people become more creative by constraining their thinking.

10) Go for a walk, get to the gym or even just stroll around your office or home.  Movement relaxes the body and people tend to have better ideas when they are moving than when they are static.

How To Survive The Storm

I have been following the writing of Nancy Koehn a professor at Harvard Business School.  She has turned her thoughts to how leaders of nations and companies cope with recession, downturn and the loss of business.  She says "Stepping out of the chaos is difficult. Especially now as companies are imploding, entire sectors of the economy are dying, and demands for time and energy are intense."

I agree with her, today you are always at work, the Blackberry humming every time an email comes in.  The work colleagues who think it is perfectly OK to call you early Saturday morning about a trivial matter that could have easily waited till Monday.

So how do our current leaders deal with the chaos?  President Obama spends 90 minutes every day in the gym.  Marty Nesbitt one of his close friends says. "Those ninety minutes in the gym each morning put the outside world on hold."

When Bill Gates was running Microsoft he took biannual "reading weeks" and spent time alone in a log cabin reading, thinking and considering the larger landscape.

So one of the ways to weather the storm is to build a shelter away from it and spend some time on how you can better cope with the new challenges that now lay ahead.

To read Nancy's full article in Fortune Magazine click here

Happy Families

How to get your staff to work together as a team?  I have always believed that our tribal gene has followed us all the way to the 21st century.  As humans we like to belong and physical and geographic dividing lines are often used to define this.  For example: Packaging hate the people in Accounts who won't talk to three people in Human Resources because - well they don't like them.  Is this a familiar problem in your company?

Some years ago (1992)  I was Producing a show featuring Archie Norman he had been a very successful Director of Kingfisher and had just jumped ship to become Chief Exec of Asda which was a business in dire straits facing bankruptcy.

He identified the tribalism I have mentioned.  Realising that it would take time to change the mind-set of the staff he set about forcing them together, by taking down office partitions and dressing-down the Execs.

An interesting idea, to begin with it caused resentment but after a few months people started making working and social relationships with staff from 'other' departments.  There was a slow realisation that they were all in this together.  They also discovered how the different parts of the company worked.

They also benefited from a strong boss.  When I met Archie he was full of enthusiasm truly inspirational.  At Asda he had an office but much preferred to be part of the team acknowledging the staff who worked for him.

It still takes a brave boss to do what Archie did but the results were impressive he turned Asda's fortunes around.

Just what do your staff think of you?

An open and honest dialogue between you and your staff is something most business strive to achieve.  But it can be difficult to persuade your staff to be candid.  Frankly there are times when you don't want to hear what they have to say and decisions have to be made without their approval.  But one device that I found worked quite well was an anonymous internet survey that staff can fill in about how they truly feel about the place they work in.

Here is a link to a company that provides such a service click here

Now you have to be pragmatic about the responses you get back.  Some people will use such a survey as an instrument of revenge.  But I think you can spot trends and repeated remarks about certain employees or managers are always worth following up.  Look upon a staff survey as a 21st century version of the 'comments box'

Why we love Apple

A substantial number of consumers love Apple, I love Apple - I am writing this on an iMac and it's a joy compared to my clunky laptop but what is the secret of their success? Well all their products look sexy - is that the reason?  Not so says Jonathan Ive he's the boy from Chingford, Essex who is credited as the designer of the iconic look of the  iPod the iMac and the iPhone.

Apple's success is that it isn't looking for success. 'Apple's goal isn't to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products," Ive says.

The mantra of Apple isn't let's make new and more but let's make better. I think making a better product is a lot harder work than churning out 30 variants of the same thing.

If you look at the Apple products each one is carefully designed and chosen to fill a particular market, they all work beautifully and have coherent hardware.

My iMac came with a mains cord you plug in - that's it.  It booted up with a hello and welcome asked for my iTunes details and from that knew who I was found my wireless network and connected itself up to the web. Job done.

Now here is the sting in the tail, could you copy Apple's success?  Here's what Jonathan Ive says: 'Don't. Instead, I've said forcefully and repeatedly, companies need to define their own clear, high-minded raison d’être. That should drive the actions and decisions of every employee.

Jonathan also talks about belief, passion and a commitment to strive for perfection. So the challenge is to get ALL your staff to believe in the company and product have a passion and commitment to it.  Identify your raison d’être. Which should not be about making money but making things better.

Here are some links the first to the original Jonathan Ive article by Helen Walters
: click here The second to a suite101.com article (with one glaring error in) click here