Idea-Wise

This iconoclastic, but tremendously down-to-earth book has this for a tag line - “How to transform your ideas into tomorrow’s innovations”, but this should probably read “How to transform your company into an innovative, creative powerhouse”.

The authors rubbish the claims of “idea gurus” and creativity sessions … “No matter how much companies fork over for mind pumping, mood morphing, Nerf ball battles and meditative chanting, the cold truth is that the Idea Industry’s emperors have no clothes.”

They argue that creativity is inherent in all human beings and all that is required to tap into this fount of creativity is to encourage creativity within the company. “If you are in the business of encouraging new ideas, keep encouraging the people around you with a positive environment and avoid presenting worst-case scenarios.”

Some of the comments that kill creativity are unfortunately all too common with companies:

• Our customers would never go for that
• Our employees would never go for that
• We’ve tried that
• That would cost too much
• Why don’t you flesh that out in a memo?
• Those people don’t count
  And the completely soul-killing
• That’s not how we do things

Rivkin and Seitel list several ways of creatively looking at situations by asking questions like:
What could you substitute?
What could you magnify or minimise?
What else could it be?
What could you eliminate?
What else could it be?

But in the final analysis, creativity only succeeds if there is the will to carry ideas through, over the many people who think new ideas are a bother, because of the effort involved in carrying it out.

A thought-provoking book, written in a conversational, easy style. Well worth the read.

— K C Meera

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