Idea generation under pressure

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For those of you still struggling to come up with a great idea for the Idea sketch, here follows a few tips from author and writing coach Michael Levin who over the years has developed several tricks to stimulate his creative muscle which has helped him come up with great ideas for whatever challenge he may face.

  1. Ask yourself, “What’s the most dangerous, expensive, and illegal way to solve this problem?” Imagine that you have no limits – legal, moral, financial, whatever. This may lead you to new ways of thinking. (And then you can find a non-life-threatening, legal way to solve it!)
  2. Hide. Slow down and get your brain back. It’s impossible to generate ideas when responding to endless external stimuli.
  3. Count to 20. Go somewhere where you can be undisturbed, bring a yellow pad and a pen, turn off your phone, and sit there until you come up with 20 ideas for solving your problem. This requires discipline, and not every idea you invent will be a great one, but as long as one idea is brilliant, it will be worth it.
  4. Give up. Take a major step away, even for a couple of hours, from whatever battles you’re facing, contemplate the greatness of the human spirit or the wonder of nature, and reawaken the creative energy that our fight-minded world suppresses.

I hope this can help someone. The full article can be found at http://www.franchising.com/articles/creativity_under_pressure_4_ways_to_come_up_with_brilliant_ideas_when_the_p.html

The Triple Crown

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For everybody who missed today’s lecture. It was held by entrepreneur, teacher, author (and I am sure more 🙂 ) Gregg Vanourek. First of all, it was a great lecture and the style of presenting was very inspiring and made you really pay attention.

The first part of the lecture dealt with “entrepreneurship” and “start-ups” in general which was followed by a case study. Groups of 4-6 students had to decide what a start-up should do when confronted with the problem that an investor is about to sign a contract for a huge investment when at the last minute the CEO decides that the revenue model of the start-up has to be changed. The options were:

  1. to tell the truth and put the survival of the Company in jeopardy
  2. to tell the investor later after the new model has proved to produce results
  3. to not tell him/her at all and hope that it will remain a secret and the investor will not care as long as results are produced.

Surprisingly enough most groups came up with the same answer, opting for alternative 1 because they did not want to hurt the reputation of the firm, were sure the investor would find out, which would be followed by legal punishments and/or  argued that since the investor decided to invest in a start-up he/she would know the difficulties involved and therefore understand the necessary change.

Afterwards we were given a framework to tackle such difficult questions that revolve around leadership. In his book Gregg Vanourek introduces the principle of the Triple Crown, which, actually, is a horse race metaphor for the most elusive trophy in the world. According to the principle all businesses or decisions should strive to fulfill the criteria of being efficient, ethical, and enduring. Additionally we were provided with 5 principles of leadership being: Head & Heart, The Colors, Steel and Velvet, Steward, Alignment.

According to the framework the previous business decision was simple, since the one characteristic that comes before all others when there arises a problem of trade-off between the three criteria is that your decisions have to be ethical, thus only allowing for telling the truth to the investor. However there seems to be , like for so many business decisions, no absolutely correct answer to that problem. What do you think about that situation?

Returning to the book about the Triple Crown I will definetely read it as soon as I am put into a situation that requires leadership qualities, since I have never taken any courses related to the subject.

At the end I would like to invite everybody to post thoughts, additions or different views on today’s lecture and leadership in general.

#L.Boldin  #Dreamgineering