Before & After : Creative thinking in business

The best golfers use the most advanced clubs. Sure, anyone can still play golf with a 40-year old club, but you won’t find many serious players doing it.

The best carpenters use the most high tech drills and stud finders and table saws. When time is money quick setup tools that help you do it right the first time make the work better and the job more profitable.

My dentist scans the inside of my mouth with leading edge imaging technology, builds a computer model and then carves out a new tooth cap with an automated shaper in the back room of his office, all this before I can finish the cover article in Men’s Health. Remember when you used to wait two weeks as they sent this type of work out to some lab?

Before & After is in the creative training business. Sometimes even I think that sounds strange - “creative training? Oh, really?” But, hey, all we’re really doing is helping people improve their creative tools. And we do it with some pretty savvy companies; industry leaders in many fields, companies with some very bright, extremely creative people. The creatively rich working to get richer. Could this explain some of the success of the clients we serve?

So, what are the creative thinking tools we teach? Read the rest of this entry »

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.)

Read the rest of this entry »

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.) Read the rest of this entry »

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.” Read the rest of this entry »

My little brother Michael was born with a large hole in his head.

It was his mouth.

When brother Mike, 13 months my junior, was drawing at the kitchen table as a kid, you never had to guess what he was drawing. You could always hear what he was putting down to paper.

If Michael was drawing a farm, the rest of the family could tell from two rooms away. “Oink! Oink!” we’d all hear. Or, “Moooo!” Or, “Cluck, cluck, cluck.”

If we heard “Pow!!! Boom!!! Pow!!!” or “bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.” We knew Michael was drawing a war scene.

Then there were the times we’d hear “Oink, oink, POW!” Oh no, Michael’s blowing up pigs.

What was the lesson I got from this innocent (?) little exercise my little brother did daily with his crayons? You have to let it out. You can’t keep it inside you. When you’re creating, you have to risk looking or sounding a little foolish, and you have to let it out.

So often when leading brainstorming sessions or when conducting some in-room exercise at my training programs I can see it in people’s eyes that they’re holding back. I can see the excitement for having a wild idea battling with the self-consciousness of exposing one’s inner whims.

Every great thinker of every great idea has faced the moment when they had to make the decision to go public with their concept or not. (Or they didn’t think at all,..) We should all be grateful that so many people had the guts to let those wonderful ideas out. We can only imagine how many great ideas have been lost on the tip of someone’s mind, pen, paintbrush or keyboard.

Fortunately, I had my brother and his 80 decibel Crayolas® to help me get that important lesson early in life, that if you don’t let ideas out, no one will ever know what’s on your mind.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

There was a time the Speedo logo that you see at the bottom of these swim trunks couldn’t fit on a “Speedo.” For decades a Speedo was the briefest of swim briefs. The very concept of Speedo stood for skimpy, tight, dare I say, “daring.” Its brand essence, its DNA could be rolled up in the palm of your hand.

Well, so much for slavishly adhering to strict DNA. Speedo has changed the fabric of its brand. Or is it that they’ve added to it significantly?

Militantly strict discipline around brand definition has long been one of the foundational principles of brand marketing.

At Speedo USA’s web site, of the 30 best sellers in swim wear only 1, count ‘em 1, item fits snugly to the classic definition of the swim brief that put this brand on the map. Only three products could be called “briefs.”

Today Speedo is the top selling swimsuit marketer in the world. Did they do it by standing still? By resting on their Olympic gold medal-winning laurels, as tight (so to speak) as they were? No, they did it by having the insight, wisdom and, yes, probably swimming pools full of courage to paddle away from what too many companies would call their undeniable essence, their untouchable DNA. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the era of the in-house communications agency.

For those toiling in the trenches of corporate communications departments for years your day has finally come.

Oh, with few exceptions, you still don’t have all the glam and budgets that the outside ad agency gets, but there has been a significant shift. Your stock has risen sharply as the changes in media habits have made your arena more important to your corporation’s marketing success.

Some companies have recognized the importance of world-class communications teams for years; Target and Apple come to mind. I talk to more and more communications pros who have given up the outside to go inside. This is certainly where the growth is. Security, too?

The value of in-house communications has gained in direct proportion to the redistribution of communications vehicles, as articulated by the long tail theory. Below the line is the new above the line, baby!

Here at Before & After we’ve seen the increased investments corporations are making in their in-house pros with heightened activity in training and development. Heck, if companies are putting more faith in their in-house capabilities, they better make sure that team is operating on all cylinders. And nothing revitalizes the in-house machine like tuning up creative thinking.

Creative thinking is behind all aspects of in-house communications; strategy, media, concepting the “creative” work, as well as executing all of the above.

Want further proof? When The In-House Agency Forum (INAF) put together their first professional development conference with a focus on creativity they contact me to keynote the meeting. (Shameless plug, noted.)

Find out more about the INAF event, to be held June 8th outside of Boston, or check out Creative reCharge, Before & After’s custom tailored professional development program for in-house communications agencies.

With the business world game board being reset (see my post The world is not just flat, it’s upside down) there’s a great deal of opportunity for organizations that take the initiative to make serious gains in marketing communications. Go get ‘em!

I had a medical emergency recently. Which is why I haven’t been posting for a while. It could have been a long while, if not for my local hospital’s state-of-the-art equipment, expertise, techniques and chemicals.

But, as impressive and as leading edge as those things might be, there was another concept at work here that was even greater. A concept that made all of the other factors more effective. It is a concept that didn’t manifest as anything tangible; not equipment, not drug nor even as a technique. It’s a concept as old as time, yet for the medical profession, today it’s almost revolutionary in the treatment of heart attacks. The concept is speed.

Speed. Or as they say in the chest pain business “ER-door-to-balloon speed.” Angioplasty balloon, that is.

With all the improvements in the treatment of heart attack victims, at least people with completely blocked arteries, like I had, it turns out that getting the patient to a cold steel table for insertion of a catheter into an artery in a timely manner is now considered to be the greatest single factor in successful intervention and prevention of damage once a major cardiac event has occurred.

Speed. Whoathunk?

So what‘s the lesson here? Don’t overlook the little things, the obvious, the simple concepts that may just leverage all the other smart things you’re doing. Where are those magical points in your industry? What fresh perspective might you bring that can make a grand contribution to the whole?

Insight. Sometimes a simple shift of perspective can make all the difference in the world.

For anyone who might be wondering, that is my cardiogram above. Not the bad boy one. The one I had done yesterday to make sure everything is in working order. It is, thanks.

In the TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, when put on the spot about the graphical user interface for the Macintosh, (the soul of Mac’s operating system) which had been developed by Xerox, the character Steve Jobs uses the Picasso, quote, “A good artist borrows. A great artist steals.”

Apocryphal or not, that philosophy may still be alive at Apple, and in part it’s behind the iPod’s amazing success.

In his book The Perfect Thing, Newsweek writer, Steven Levy, points out that most all of the technology inside the iPod has been developed by companies other than Apple; Toshiba, Sony, Texas Instruments and others. So what exactly did this “innovative” company, Apple, do? Read the rest of this entry »