......IDEAS FOR BUSINESS.... How to create brilliant, innovative ideas for business growth. We were playing scrabble with my 11-year-old nephew recently. It was his turn to play and he concentrated on his tiles for what seemed to be an eternity before all of a sudden he broke the silence between us. “I have an idea!” he shouted. My attention shifted slightly from the scrabble board to stare at him eagerly as I waited to hear what new idea he had. Ignoring me, he removed three tiles, a D, an E and an A to place them besides the I in HISTORY and spelled the word IDEA using up the up the triple word score to score 18 points and beat me in the process! We both burst into laughter as I realised he had used up the ambiguity of the statement and the game to mislead me into a zombie stare. But the game aside, this whole experience got me thinking, what if generating a new idea was as simple as arranging the tiles I-D-E-A in scrabble? What if there was a formula to follow to come up with not just plain ideas but brilliant innovative ideas that can turn around your company? Earl Nightingale, an American motivational speaker and radio personality said: “Everything begins with an idea.” Napoleon Hill added: “All achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea.” So it may be safe to say that all we have ever been, all we are and all we ever hope to be will always be determined by the power of our ideas. More than half the CEOs and senior management on my Re-Think management programme for instance cite a lack of relevant brilliant ideas as one of the greatest hindrances that face the business today. To quote one of them verbatim, “There too many suggestions but not a single solid feasible idea”. The question is why is this case? Why are brilliant ideas so rare? The answer could be simpler than you think. It is as simple as the fact that process we use to generate ideas is in itself slightly defective. When you think about idea creation in your company, which idea generation process naturally comes to mind? For nine out of 10 people, chances are that that word is ‘brainstorming’. Brainstorming remains one of the most popular mechanisms of idea creation in the workplace today. The term ‘brainstorming’ was popularised by an advertising executive named Alex F. Osborn in his 1953 book Applied Imagination. He was allegedly frustrated by his employees’ inability to develop creative ideas individually for ad campaigns. In response, he began hosting group-thinking sessions and discovered a significant improvement in the quality and quantity of ideas produced by employees. When a group works together, he wrote, the members should engage in a “brainstorm,” which means “using the brain to storm a creative problem. It is at this level that we can begin understanding the sentiments of the CEO earlier quoted. A closer look at the Osborn process of brainstorming reveals four clear suggested route maps in idea generation. 1. Generate as many ideas Linus Paulin said: “The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.” In many ways, Osborn was a firm believer in this statement. It is one of his two sacred rules. He believed that idea creators must concentrate on quantity and that the more ideas were generated, the more likely that a good idea would come up. 2. Defer all judgement Ovid says: “A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow.” Adapted from Business Daily.
Posted on: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 12:48:10 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015