Before & After : Creative thinking in business

If you missed our enlightening 20-minute conference call on August 8th with creative organization expert Paul Deslauriers, click here for a complete recording of the call, edited for easy navigation. This call was primarily with ad agency principals, but it will be extremely valuable to any managers who look to maximize creativity in their organizations.

Paul Deslauriers is president of B&A sister company, NRG Consulting, an organizational development firm that specializes in creatively driven companies such as ad agencies and media outlets to help them maintain their edge, not just creatively, but also in overall performance, efficiency, productivity and profitability.

It’s easy to think that your best bet for coming up with creative ideas is full bore, lobes-to-the-wall thinking. You’re right. And you’re wrong.

Throwing megawatts of creative energy at a problem or opportunity is certainly a great way of solving it, or at least making a lot of progress against. But to do this for long periods of time is hardly the most efficient way of finding huge ideas, and often not the most effective way either.

I believe the best method of coming up with fresh ideas is on again, off again thinking, where the off time is as important as the on time. And any of the things you think about when you’re away from the problem can actually help you solve it, as they act like bumper posts on a pinball machine, diverting the direction of your thoughts, setting up all kinds creative possibilities against the problem you’re, ahem, “not” working on at that moment.

Yeah, it sounds kind of wacky, but here’s how it works. (more…)

There are three types of appetites for professional growth in the business world; the forever hungry, the binge eaters and the starved.

The forever hungry are always growing. The binge eaters grow only when they absolutely have to. And the starved are emaciated, barely functional, if not already dead, professionally, that is.

Those in the latter group are not only professionally deceased, but they are dead weight to a company. It’s not even that they don’t pull their own load, they actually hold the entire organization back.

These starving masses have no thirst for professional growth, never nourishing their minds. They know what they know. They aren’t interested in improvement. They spend an inordinate amount of energy trying to keep an ever-changing world from evolving, so they can maintain some semblance of relevance. Their careers, of course, don’t go anywhere fast and they complain about everyone passing them by. I kinda find it hard to feel sorry for these people.

At the other end of the spectrum, the forever hungry group are the leaders. They don’t just survive, they thrive. Oh, they hit bumps in the professional road occasionally, but their perpetual momentum carries them through it.

From a creative vitality standpoint the ever-hungry peeps know what they don’t know and they are always looking to fill that void. They are the risk takers. They fail more than average people, but, hey, in business where does average get you?

So what about the middle group? The binge feeders. Those who grow only when it’s truly necessary? Where do they fit into this professional growth food chain, as it were? If you’re at this site you are likely in the leader group and are probably quite interested in how to move these middle-of-the-appetite-road types to the fast lane of the professional growth feast. (more…)

You wouldn’t be one of the 62% of companies who don’t see their performance deficiencies, would you? BTW, the other 38% aren’t without dysfunction, they’re just oblivious to it. All companies have issues in how well they perform.

Let me tell you about NRG, the premier organizational development consultant for creative organizations.

Before & After has formed a partnership with NRG (New Resources for Growth) a company that helps creative organizations like ad agencies, TV stations and others achieve peak performance. NRG achieves this level of high functionality the way a master mechanic tunes an engine for greater power and efficiency. B&A has been recommending NRG to help our clients since we were formed 15 years ago. We now have a more formal relationship.

NRG’s founder, Paul Deslauriers and his team are expert at helping their clients identify whatever is impeding performance and growth, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Then they dig in and help effect real change. I find what NRG does absolutely amazing. The shifts that occur include surges in new business, sales, teamwork, process flow, all kinds of improvements.

If you’d like to know more about how NRG helps companies reach peak performance check out the NRG site or email Lisa DiMonte or call 401 861-6489, Ex. * 3.

Or assess for yourself if your group needs the kind of help NRG provides.

New blood means new energy, new ideas. And what company couldn’t benefit from fresh ideas? Fresh ideas for your company and maybe more importantly, fresh ideas for your clients.

New blood has historically meant new people. But new people means discontinuity, inexperience, unproven factors and, well, losing older blood to make room for the new.

If you’re on the old blood side of this equation, that’s not a very exciting prospect. If you’re on the management side of the equation there are alternatives to bringing fresh thinking to the party that don’t involve discontinuity and other disruption.

Give your people a transfusion.

One way is with musical office chairs. Switch experienced people around to give them new scenery while giving their old positions new blood, all without a major corporate blood letting.

There’s this old school point of view that clients want continuity. Yeah, I suppose, some do. But how does that explain why you’re so scared of getting fired? More than continuity, clients want fresh thinking. New blood can’t help but think fresh. And, beyond keeping clients happy, it reenergizes people (even if some do grumble a little at first). And energized, motivated people are the best way to keep clients happy long term.

New ideas are at the heart of most all companies’ undertakings these days. According to a recently conducted B&A poll, with business experience comes attachment to old ways of doing things and therefore more stale thinking and less openness to new ideas.

So, beyond musical office chairs, it’s easier than you might think for experienced people to separate themselves from how things have been done in order to maintain a fresh perspective and bring genuinely new ideas to the group’s efforts. (more…)

Did you ever get an idea seemingly out of nowhere? Of course you have. It happens to us all the time. Usually when we least expect it.

You’re riding in the car or on a plane or train. You’re playing with your dog. You’re out for a morning jog. Bam! A great idea strikes you for that project you’re working on. You write it down on a scrap of paper. Or, if you’re a flake like me, you don’t have a pen, so you call your own voice mail.

Of course, the idea didn’t come totally out of the blue. You can’t come up with a solution to a problem you are unaware of. You must have planted a seed at some point; five days ago, this morning, 30 minutes ago,… In Do-it-yourself Lobotomy workshop* terms we call it “ask the question early.” Everyone does it. But do you do it consciously? Do you do it consistently? It’s an amazing way to jump start the creative process and a great means of time management, too.

(* The Do-it-yourself Lobotomy is a professional development workshop we’ve conducted for over a quarter of a million people. “Ask the question early” is one of many “creative thinking “tools” covered in the workshop.)

(more…)

Important for all of us. Critical for managers.

When we speak of creativity we usually refer to it as an active thing. “Coming up with new ideas.” “Having fresh ideas.” “Conjuring up something different.” All descriptions of how we actively use the imagination to entertain something that has never been considered before.

Well, how about using your imagination in a less concerted manner? How about just being open to new ideas that might present themselves? Doesn’t that take just as much open-mindedness? Maybe more.

And for people in management, which usually means senior people, with more experience to leverage, and often more attachment to how things “should” be, this openness to ideas you didn’t expect is usually the difference between being a great leader and a, well, less-than-great leader. ( I’ll speak to more on this later.) (more…)

There’s a cat written up in a recent edition of The New England Journal of Medicine that can foreshadow death. The feline, Oscar, hangs around the halls of the advanced dementia unit in a nursing home in Rhode Island. If Oscar camps outside a patient’s door, well, that patient isn’t long for this world.

How accurate is this cat at predicting death? According to the nursing home’s staff, he’s never wrong. Never.

When I first read this, not to make light of the fate of these patients, nor this animal’s gift, but I thought, “wouldn’t it serve many of us if we got a strong signal that one of our ideas were doomed before we proceeded to put a lot of effort or money into it?”

That was my first thought. My second thoughts were, “don’t we already have too many death cats?” and, “aren’t they wrong a lot.” (more…)

What do you do all day long?

You’re in meetings. You’re at the computer. You’re traveling. You’re in more meetings. You’re doing your job. You’re executing stuff.

Now, what exactly is it that you are executing?

Ideas.

We all do, do, do. But it starts with an idea.

We come up with ideas. We are handed other’s ideas. We sell ideas. We execute ideas. Too, often we clean up after ideas gone wrong.

How long does it take to come up with that idea? A nano second, right?

Then we put in the hours, weeks, often months, sometimes years executing that idea. It better be a good idea. Because that’s a lot of time, energy and money going into that idea. It better be a very good one. Heck, it better be great. (more…)

Look around you. Look at all the good ideas. All the good stuff. Products. Services. Art. Entertainment. Try to find great stuff.

Voltaire said, “Good is the enemy of great.”

When it comes to creative thinking in business, I believe the reason most people don’t come up with great ideas is because they come up with a good idea, and then they stop.

In all fields, we see too many people, even pretty creative people, stop at their first good idea too often. Is it because they are too busy? Too lazy? Their standard is too low?

Take advertising, the business where I made a living for 20 years as a player and the past dozen or so as a coach; by today’s standards, most work that was done 20, 30 years ago was pretty bad. Back when the average American was exposed to fewer than 1200 messages a day, the best advertising stood out, as much as anything, because most of the work was not very good.

Today, the average work that appears in the media is much better. I’ll even say it’s good. But what good is good? When the average American is exposed to over 3,000 messages, how many are making an impact? Even if you say 10% (which I think is a high estimate at 300), still 90% of the work is invisible or forgettable.

“But it’s pretty good!” you might protest. And I say, “it doesn’t matter. If it isn’t great, it’s not worth much in the ad sweepstakes.”

Good is seductive. Good is too often good enough to feel like you’re finished thinking, but not good enough to win big in the marketplace. (more…)