The book gets right to the point of advertising by stressing key principles and practical information students and working professionals can use to communicate effectively in this postdigital age. The Innovation Tools Handbook, Volume 3. This book focuses on the creative tools and techniques, decisions, activities, and practices that move ideas to realization generate business value. At its most basic level, creative thinking is Read more. Reviews There are no reviews yet.
Already subscribed? Those who cram existing knowledge into their brains? Or those who generate the new ideas, the fresh thinking, the creative sparks that ignite new areas of business growth? For many people, finding truly new ideas is not nearly as easy as it seems. Most people in business, while seeing the value of original thinking, find it extremely difficult to achieve.
As a professional creative thinking coach, I understand this problem better than most people in business. I work with thousands of businesspeople annually: professionals in all corners of the corporate world and beyond, in Fortune companies, in ad agencies of all sizes, in small firms, in professional organizations, one-on-one, and everywhere in between.
I see that, in spite of their sincere intentions, most people are prisoners of what they know and are virtually helpless when it comes to generating new ideas. The world around them is changing at breakneck speed, but they are stuck in the traps of old thinking patterns, being run over by those few players who are unattached to the old and are creating the new.
We cover some of the. We can either let problems be barriers or use them as springboards to be at our creative best when solving problems see page At best, most people go with the flow of change; at worst, they resist it. The high achievers effect change. Creativity versus talent. These are very different notions. Not everyone is talented artistically. But everyone has the ability to have new ideas see pag Next we help you isolate the basic creative thinking tools, the methods and techniques used by the greatest thinkers since the beginning of time.
Finally, we help you gain deeper perspectives on other aspects of creativity to help you apply your new lessons to your job and life, to help you produce big ideas to fuel your success and that of your company.
In my corporate work, in both training and the applied-creativity world of brainstorm facilitation, I have worked with professionals in hundreds of companies, including Virgin Atlantic Airways, Hasbro, Frito-Lay, Texas Instruments, Benjamin Moore, and Capital One, as well as a large percentage of the top advertising agencies in the world. Through this work I have developed and refined ways to enable people to let go of what they know and to free their minds to discover new and better ways of doing their jobs, fueling their companies, and boosting their careers.
The Known Conventional thinking and problem solving is like white light. By the very nature of logical, linear thinking, you illuminate only what you aim at. The Do-It-Yourself Lobotomy tools help refract linear thinking to give you a full spectrum of possibilities and much more colorful ideas pun painfully noted.
The sharp edge of creativity cuts both ways. It means putting yourself out there on the frontier. It means you could be wrong. You could fail. Creative thinking is the only way to make anything better, but its potential pitfalls make it a place where few people have the courage to go as far as they can go. I worked in advertising for 20 years before I became a creative thinking coach.
I won many awards of which I am very proud. For 15 years I led a small ad agency in Providence, Rhode Island, to the pinnacle of this idea-rich business. In the s I taught at the university level as well as for advertising professional organizations.
In the s I lectured on creative thinking for the two principal trade publications, Adweek and AdAge, as well as for the Wall Street Journal and over 50 local and. And I wrote on the topic of creativity for one of the leading publications in the field, Communication Arts. In the early s I made a career shift into an emerging field in which I foresaw a great need—creative coaching.
My workshops have taken me from Hong Kong to Iceland and many points in between. One thing that has become very clear to me is that creativity, both the term and the concept, has come out of the corporate closet. ADS BACKWARD Originally, I set out to bring the secrets of creativity on demand from the ad business to the general business world, and I did just that, working with major companies in non-advertising-related areas right out of the gate.
Lately, it seems that the advertising business is being pressed to be more creative two basic ways, one from within the industry and one from outside. Inside, this historically competitive business has become even more competitive. The industry is undergoing greater change than at any time since the advent of the TV era. The beliefs and skills that carried the most successful people for years are being replaced by the ability to embrace new media options,. David Lubars, president of Fallon McElligott, says that one of his top priorities is helping his people recognize the new challenges of the ad business to bring greater understanding and value to their clients.
The forces outside the advertising business are just as dramatic. The business planning horizon is no longer measured year to year, and in many companies even quarter to quarter planning is too long term. Technology is allowing the leading companies to be more nimble and helping the followers to keep pace. To those reading this book who are not in the advertising business, know that you will benefit greatly from my in-depth experience in this blisteringly fast-paced business sector whose principal product is ideas.
For those reading this book who are in the heat of the advertising industry, know that my forays into literally dozens of other business sectors over the past decade have given me insights into the creative process that can be leveraged in your idea-intensive business in a big way every day. Through years of exploration and experimentation I have developed a number of creative thinking processes—Do-It-Yourself Lobotomy tools—that over , people have found to be extremely effective in helping them short-circuit their default mode of traditional thinking.
These tools enable people to quickly and easily come up with fresh, exciting ideas whenever they need to. High technology is taking away so. Are you as ready as you need to be for this revolution?
Over the centuries, selling ideas as a livelihood was the domain of only a very few. The currency of our great-grandparents and the generations that preceded them was sweat. The industrial revolution took away most of the heavy physical labor. It was a dramatic shift in how people earned a living—their professional worth measured in brain power.
Fast-forward to the twenty-first century: Knowledge alone is simply not the edge it used to be in business. The most valuable currency. Left Brain The dramatic shift in how we have earned our livelihoods. The Information Age is now the Imagination Age. The premium for quick, original thinking has never been greater. The human mind is capable of infinite imaginary thought, as proven daily by our children. The secret to getting your mind to embrace a totally fresh, totally precept-shattering idea is to let go of what you know.
Because when you know, well. End of story. The best thinkers of all time have been great wonderers. The greatest strides in the corporate world have come not from willing a new idea, but from wondering about something better.
When you wonder—when you truly let your imagination flow into a state of all possibilities—that is when wonderful things happen. Wonder leads to wonderful things. The problem is that as we know more and more, we need to imagine less, and the center of wonder between our ears gets less and less of a workout. For many people, that part of the brain becomes virtually atrophied. Add to that the incredible fear that is gripping people in business today, the fear of doing or saying something wrong and being passed over or even let go, and there is very little incentive for even trying to think of new ideas.
Because certainly the incentive for having new ideas is accomplishment, even greatness. Since the beginning of time the highest achievers have been willing to stick their necks out, along with their minds, to push toward forward-thinking ideas. The great irony is that, although the rate of change and the need for a constant flow of new ideas has never been greater, no generation before us has ever been so reluctant to change.
Because no previous generation has been so well educated, had their heads filled with so much knowledge, been so attached to what they know, and yet needed so badly to let go of what they know.
So sit back and enjoy the process of opening up your mind. Embrace your Do-It-Yourself Lobotomy with open arms and an even more open mind. Challenge it. Train it. Use it to propel your career and the fortunes of the companies you work for. Now is your opportunity. Seize it with vigor. And prosper. In other words, perform a Do-It-Yourself Lobotomy.
Or skip this chapter and prove my point. I believe there is a fair amount of method to coming up with original ideas on demand. That is the heart and soul of this book, right? In fact, that is how the creative process works on a great many days. The good days. The easy days. And on those days we can thank the gods of creativity for their generosity. I mean, how can anything related to creativity ever be perfect? I have done this in order to take in the information as I needed it at the various times I picked up the book, with all due respect to how the author intended it to be read.
And guess what? Whether in books, periodicals, theater, film, songs, TV, advertising, even spoken language, we have all been taught that to communicate clearly we need to state our case in a basic order. Our communications typically have a beginning, a middle, and an end. A case is often presented in brief, the details are given, an analysis or argument is presented based on the facts, and then a conclusion is reached.
At least, that was what was practiced for centuries. They want access to all of the elements, to be sure, but they want to navigate the data their way. Witness channel surfing, web browsing, and radio button pushing as evidence of this information consumption behavior. What does that tell you? But it is not one of my seminars, either, where I have no choice but to bring everyone through the material in the same order and at the same pace.
So they have vowed to keep their minds active. When not doing their educational work or worshiping, many of the good sisters play games, do puzzles, follow current events and such. A study was begun to monitor their living habits, and upon their deaths many have been donating their brains to science. Some very interesting discoveries have been made.
But because of their diverse and dynamic mental activity, it is believed, they have greater healthy resources in other areas of the brain to often take over for some of the performance when the weakened portions lose functionality with age. As of this writing, Sisters are participating. The conclusion for the context of this book is that diverse mental activity is not just a way to come up with ideas and solve the problem du jour.
It is also a good strategy to ensure that your brain maintains peak performance in general. It started with the Creative IQ test you probably just took. After taking this quick little quiz, the order of the chapters in this book has already changed—from a priority perspective, at least. You already may have read half of this book. See what I mean? Even a broken clock is right twice a day. See more on the law of large numbers in Chapter 7, page Following are some of the features that will allow you, even encourage you, to break the rules of thinking even as you 1 read, 2 peruse, 3 scan this book taking in call outs, sidebars and illustrations.
These Wooo elements provide some balance to the running text by addressing the other side of your brain—the less structured, more free-flowing part that this book is helping you master. Although it is my objective and my private, perverted pleasure to surprise you quite often with these free-style elements, there is sometimes some structure to help you take advantage of the lack of structure. Here are some of the elements to watch for.
Some of these Wooo elements direct you to specific pages where the topic is covered in more detail. The Lobotomy Files Blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blahblah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Then again, it may have almost nothing to do with the matter at hand or even contradict it.
These cheat notes have a few purposes: 1. If you choose to skim some or all of the book in advance of reading, you can use them to take a quick peek into the content of each chapter. The Lobotomy Files Sprinkled throughout the book are statements from real people who have undergone our Do-It-Yourself Lobotomy mini—case histories, if.
Many have experienced this psychic operation some time ago and have been reaping the benefits for years.
Some of these people have chosen to remain anonymous, but I can assure you the statements are theirs. This takes effort and discipline.
And, similar to testimonials in diet or fitness books laden with real-world transformations, actual statements from happy DIYL victims give you encouragement in your changeover to a more original, prolific idea generator.
In the spirit of Wooo, many of these Lobotomy files are totally random and may have little to do with the chapter in which they appear, but they might steer you toward related reading elsewhere.
When you have a great idea you have something that has tremendous potential. Like an asteroid crashing into the ocean, it can cause monumental initial impact and can effect a tidal wave of repercussions for amazing distances for a very long time.
Someone had the idea of the wheel. That tidal wave is still cresting and causing impact today. Of course, not all ideas are quite so magnificent or recognized as world-changing events. Take that simple little fastener device called the button.
Who had that idea? I bet that if I counted the wheels and buttons in my life I would find that the button plays as important a role keeping my pants up as the wheel getting me to the airport. When you come up with a new idea, big or small, think about its potential long-term effect. How good is that idea? Will it have a positive, lasting impact? Will it blast through the atmosphere and fizzle before splashdown? Will it change things affirmatively and irrevocably?
A great idea can make a company—Xerox, 3M, Volkswagen. It can make an industry—computers, automobiles, aerospace. It can. A second? Maybe two? At least not that long compared to the ongoing life of an idea. This is a whole different story. And then there are the subsequent generations of the idea that might look and feel quite different from the granddaddy, but would not be in existence without it. Of course, some careers spawn companies and industries.
Or is it the other way around? All because of an idea? A store that sells virtually the same things everyone else sells, but is defined by customer service. Of course, not all great ideas live forever. Actually, a good many of them enjoy an even greater afterlife when they finally do die. Although in some cases the idea is long since deceased, its spirit may live on and inspire others to come up with equally grand ideas totally unrelated to this now dead but revered concept.
Even the lasting ideas are not all huge, industry-breeding, direction-changing concepts. One idea that comes to mind from a project I was involved with early on in my marketing career is the universal orthotic insert we see in so many shoes these days.
This idea emerged from the mind of a very creative podiatrist, Dr. Rob Roy McGregor, who designed the first running shoe developed under the Etonic brand during the s running boom.
A big idea that changed things, possibly forever, if only in a narrow, underappreciated area, Dr. Even if immortality is not your goal, you must be mindful that an idea has a life and an afterlife.
A great idea can continue to deliver value for years beyond its initial inception. Whether or not you personally reap all of the rewards of this idea, you must know that you have created a living thing that will have an impact, help others, maybe generate income and livelihoods for generations to come. That is a great reward. And a great responsibility. Timeline of a great idea continued Energizer Bunny used with permission and acknowledgment that this is a great, enduring advertising idea.
The Consequences of a Bad Idea It has often been said that a bad idea is like a virus. It lives. It grows. It sustains. It spreads. Bad ideas can spread even faster than good ideas. Their ramifications to the people involved can spread even faster in the ultracompetitive corporate world, where the grapevine often makes the news services look like the pony express. A bad idea can derail the best-laid plans of any group.
It can put a good company out of business. In the grand scheme of things, that magical flash of brilliance? At least not that long compared to the ongoing life of any kind of idea. The questions. The second-guessing. The echoes of ghosts past. With truly bad ideas the public can have a very long and vivid memory. Of course, a good idea, poorly executed, can also do a lot of damage.
Basically, if we can have both good ideas and good execution, why would we ever settle for bad ideas or bad execution? The good thing about bad ideas is that they so often put themselves out of their own misery. Die, bad idea. So, no harm done, right? Exhibit A: the Edsel. Yes, the product died and perhaps not soon enough. But the idea of the Edsel lives on. Similarly to the timeline of a great idea, a bad idea, while taking relatively little time to conceive and execute, can have ramifications for years and years and years.
The First Real Chapter Finally! Yes, you are creative! Have you ever had an idea? Sure you have. Have you ever solved a problem? Probably a few today. So you have the ability to come up with ideas and solve problems. Do you get the solution to your problem every time?
When you need it? With little effort or pain? I mean, just remember when you were a kid. This book will help you become a more conscious, therefore more consistent, creative thinker.
We all have good days; we all have bad days. The good days feel so good. And then there are the bad days. Why the inconsistency? Only perfect practice makes perfect. Did you learn the right way to think when you were about four months old?
No wonder so many of your ideas wind up in the rough. Well, guess what? Recognizing, not learning. Have you ever practiced Intergalactic Thinking? Have you ever engaged in that type of thinking?
Guess what? Probably hundreds of times. Have you ever tried MPH Thinking? Again, sure you have. They have been used by high-achieving people for centuries. I just made up the names—handles, if you will—to help people better grasp these valuable tools and to make them easier to use. I help people improve their creative thinking abilities in a general sense through corporate training and skills development sessions.
I also facilitate high-output brainstorming sessions geared to specific issues, challenges, and opportunities new product ideas, promotional ideas, naming products, etc.
I understand creative thinking in a way that can help you become more conscious, consistent thinkers. But you could be better if you were more conscious. Let me explain with an illustration in an entirely different area. Are you a conscious sitter? Maybe you have the right posture quite often. Maybe not. But do you know how to do it right? A number of years ago I had a problem with my back. I went to see a chiropractor and he told me I was sitting wrong.
I was having pain and he helped me make a few minor adjustments in my posture and the pain went away. And, for the most part, the pain is gone. Oh sure, on occasion I forget and I slip back into my old habits. But because I am now more conscious, I can remind myself and I can relieve the pain. This book is designed to make you a more conscious thinker so you can make minor adjustments to improve your game substantially.
These little adjustments will improve your ability to come up with big ideas, improve your ability to solve problems, and do it all with great consistency. Virtually all of the thoughts that you process daily are conspiring to make you a boring, uninspired thinker. Scientists tell us that we have billions of thoughts running through our minds every day. Then there are the subconscious and superconscious levels. Literally billions of bits of data on or near the surface of our minds.
Think of your first-grade teacher. How long did it take to access that data? We each possess a veritable supercomputer between our ears. In Howard's father and stepmother delivered him into the hands of the man who. Teenage lobotomy. Il avait attendu qu'ils enclenchent le jacuzzi, que le remous de l'eau se transforme. Lobotomy is a lurid and unlikely temperance tract from the underbelly of rock 'n' roll.
Taking readers on a wild rollercoaster ride from his crazy childhood in Berlin and Munich to his lonely methadone-soaked stay at a cheap hotel in Earl's Court and newfound peace on the straight and narrow,. American Lobotomy.
0コメント