Bringing creative thinking to your organization provides you with a focused thinking framework to generate solutions. An investment in creative thinking allows your company to reduce costs, increase your team’s productivity, and increase revenue.

Creative thinking requires a mind shift on your part. First, you must understand the nature of creativity. Creativity means maximizing the potential of your brain. By deliberately using structured creative thinking systems, processes, and techniques, you can learn to generate many, many ideas in just a few minutes and hundreds of ideas in a few hours.

Our focus is on business creativity for the corporation. You must come up with a new idea before you can innovate. Innovation then is the implementation of a good idea that is successfully brought to the market and creates economic value.

Reverse Your Thinking – Reduce Costs by Spending More

How can you reduce costs and still justify your investment in creativity development for your organization? Perhaps we should listen to a creating thinking champion who has real world corporate experience.

David Tanner, former Director of the DuPont Center for Creativity and Innovation, gives examples in his book, Igniting Innovation, Through the Power of Creative Thinking, of how to reduce costs through the use of creative thinking techniques.

An information technology team posed the question, “How can we reduce costs in the information systems function?” They used a lateral creativity thinking technique and specifically applied “reversal.” This required thinking differently with a resulting provocation. “Reduce costs by spending more money.” Spending more money on fewer vendors allowed them to obtain larger discounts with each supplier. They were also able to negotiate better prices on their high volume orders.

They saved over $300,000 annually. This concept saved a similar amount when it was applied to maintenance. Now think about this accomplishment. They spent money but at the same time they reduced their corporate costs significantly. By their investment in a two-hour lateral creative thinking session, they positioned themselves to save more than $5,000,000 over a ten-year period.

For most corporations the entire focus seems to be on cost cutting. We have already demonstrated you can cut costs and still make money by investing in creativity development for your organization.

Increase Revenue Stimulation by Increasing Team Productivity

However, imagine shifting your focus to revenue stimulation. How does creativity development support increasing your revenue?

One way to increase revenue is to increase your team’s productivity by identifying your employee’s thinking styles. By a better understanding of how our brain works, you can align teams to enhance their collaboration and therefore increase their productivity. By taking specific and deliberate steps to increase productivity through the diversity of thinking preferences, it has been scientifically proven that a team’s productivity can increase from 20% to 80%. (Source: The Whole Brain Business Book, Unlocking the Power of Whole Brain Thinking in Organizations and Individuals by Ned Hermann)

You can also increase revenue by developing a focused thinking framework for your sales department. As your sale’s team draws up their strategic account plans and strategies for the coming year, do they wait and hope a good idea will come to them on how they will reach their sales objectives? If you use deliberate creative thinking techniques to generate ideas, you will discover that the ideas come quickly and much more easily. You now have a creative process to generate ideas when you need them.

Creating New Markets and Business Models

Perhaps you want to develop new markets for existing products. Have you considered developing new markets where there is currently no competition? How about new processes or new applications? Creativity development can help your company discover these new markets and new sources of revenue.

Invest in Developing Your Organization’s Creative Thinking

It is now time to bring creative thinking into the corporation to maximize your organization’s ability to thrive. It is a time to design new business models, to develop new markets, and enhance your competitive advantage.

You are currently faced with important business and functional problems with no easy or obvious solutions. The solution is to invest in creativity development. Creative thinking generates the ideas for strategic corporate success by developing the thinking infrastructure needed to spark bottom-line innovations for thriving in today’s new environment.

Are you planning on investing in developing your organization’s creative competence this year?

Solve the puzzle on how to move your innovation forward!

Have you ever wondered why it is that some people are persuasive and are able to move their innovation projects forward?  Why is it that some of us are able to persuade others to understand and accept new concepts?  Some innovators are able to inspire and influence a team to accomplish a common goal. 

Some of us have had the benefit of a significant investment in training to learn how to be persuasive.  However, even though we were taught the techniques, we never understood why some of these techniques worked.

I recently read the book, Influence, by Robert B. Cialdini.  As I read, I finally understood why these persuasive techniques are so influential on others.   Why does our brain instinctually react to certain situations?  Why are we then persuaded to do things we ordinarily would not do?

You will find some practical tips here on how you can immediately create influence and become more persuasive in your efforts to move your innovation projects forward. 

1.)    Ask for a ten minute appointment instead of a longer appointment with executives.  It is far more likely they will grant you a small request for time.  Ten minutes is sufficient time to convey your concept at a strategic level.

 2.)    Quantify and present your idea or initiative in terms of how much money the company “will lose” if it is not adopted instead of how much it will save.

 3.)    To successfully implement your innovation be aware that others need social proof from their respected peers before so they will know how to react to your innovation.  The best way to accomplish acceptance is to identify the most respected individuals within your peer group and persuade them first.  Acceptance of innovation comes from the side not from the top.

 4.)    Explain the benefits of your innovation to team members.  Ask them if they support your initiative.  When they respond in the affirmative, ask them to describe to you why they support your innovation.  You must gain a voluntary commitment, they must be actively engaged, and they must declare their support.  Now you have significantly increased the likelihood they will support your innovation within the organization. 

 5.)    Customize your presentation to each unique receiver.  Use the first letter of that executive’s name or a phrase that sounds similar in the title.  For example:  If their last name is Smith, then begin with an “S.”  To increase the likelihood you will gain their mind share, you might name your presentation, “Sailing into the Future or “Smile on your way to the Bank.”

 6.)    Name your innovation or initiative with a word that is simple and easy to pronounce.  Think of Apple or Google.  If it is hard to pronounce, you have immediately lost your audience before you even began your presentation.  Keep your language simple and straightforward during the rest of your presentation.  Many of us use polysyllabic words in an effort to impress.  The end result is confusion and a loss of persuasiveness.  Remember to keep it simple.

I know these persuasive techniques are effective in moving projects forward.  I have used them many times with superb results.  Try them and let me know if they work for you. 

What other ideas have you used to be persuasive and influential?

Connie Harryman is President of the American Creativity Association-Austin Global.  She is the CEO of Applied Concepts Creativity and identifies herself as a Creativity Developer.  You are invited to connect with Creative Connie on LinkedIn, facebook, and Twitter.

Women in senior executive positions enhance ROI.

How do you retain your most valuable employees?  How do you recruit top talent?  How do you increase (ROI) return on investment when there is a talent shortage?   What impact is gender diversity having on the bottom line?

I just finished reading, Womenomics, Write You Own Rules for Success by Claire Shipman and Katty Kay.  They had some fascinating insights into the value of female leaders and their contributions to ROI.

If you want your organization to increase its ROI, then you might want to know about recent research done in France. The findings show that companies with more women in management positions did better during 2008 than those with fewer women.  For example, the share price of Hermes rose by 16.8%.  Keep in mind that 55% of the firm’s executives are women.

At Pepperdine University, a nineteen year survey of 215 Fortune 500 companies and took three different measures of profitability:  equity, revenue, and assets.   The companies that had the best records for promoting women outperformed the competition.  These companies beat the industry average by 116% in terms of equity, 46% in terms of revenue, and 41% in terms of assets.  It concludes women are good for profits.

What is the link between gender diversity in the top leadership and U.S. corporate financial performance?  In the late 1990s, Catalyst, an independent research organization, completed a study of 353 of the Fortune 500.  A higher number of women in senior management results in a higher return on equity and a higher total return to shareholders by more than one third. 

In an effort to make their firms more competitive in the global economy, the minister of trade in Norway demanded that 40% of women be on the board of each company.  

If your company wants to make more money, then one solution is to employ more women in senior leadership positions.  It seems women are now the hot commodity in today’s workplace.

What can you do to attract and retain top female talent?   Women place a high value on flexibility because it allows them to more effectively live their dual lives as professional women and as mothers.  To retain these employees, companies are offering alternative work schedules, furloughs, unpaid vacation time, and reduced schedules. 

Flexibility is viewed as a way to keep up morale and avoid mass layoffs.  During harsh economic times, this is a way to cut labor costs.  Yet at the same time, companies are able to accommodate the wishes for flexibility desired by many women.

What will the future bring?  Women earn 57% of bachelor’s degrees in the United States and 58% of all graduate degrees.  In business, women comprise over one third of all graduates.  From 1996 to 2002, the senior ranks of women in Fortune 500 companies grew from 10% to 16%.  This is more than a 50% increase in just six years.  The feminization of leadership is a trend worth watching.

Do you think seeking out women for senior executive positions is a good business strategy?

Since 1990, U.S. creativity has been in a downward spiral!Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Have you ever thought about whether creativity could be measured?  It seems that in 1958 E. Paul Torrance designed a series of creativity tasks to measure creativity.  He administered his test to 400 children in Minneapolis. 

I would question how accurate this creativity index would be in predicting creativity for adults.  I read a recent Newsweek article, The Creativity Crisis, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman.   Apparently, Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University, validated a more than three times correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment with Torrance’s creativity index as contrasted to childhood IQ.

This year, Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary did a follow up study where he analyzed almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults.  It appears that creativity scores steadily rose, just like IQ scores until 1990 and then creativity scores nosedived.  The decline is most significant from kindergarten through sixth grade.

In my prior blog post, I wrote about the CEO Survey of 1,500 CEOs who unequivocally identified creativity as the most important leadership competency for success in the future.  

What does this mean for the United States in terms of maintaining our leadership position in the world?  Our leaders understand that creativity is essential; yet at the same time our creativity scores are plummeting!

Stop and think about where we currently need creative solutions.  We are crying out for new ideas to solve our ongoing economic crisis.  We need new ideas to solve the issues of sustainability.  We need new ideas to support our changing demographics.

Creativity includes not only generating great ideas, but it also means being open to the ideas of others.  Through creative thinking we can generate solutions for a health care system as well as new thinking for moving towards a more peaceful world. We need new ideas to make our country more competitive and to identify new ways to measure success. 

Do you think creativity is important?

I listened to a webinar sponsored by Harvard Business Review.  IBM’s Saul Berman and Peter J. Korsten shared some insights on standout companies in today’s ambiguous environment. 

As we come out of the worst recession in 50 years, the new economic environment is viewed as structurally different, with more complexity, more uncertainty, and more volatility.  However, standout companies (the top 25% ) are turning complexity to their advantage with creative leadership.

There are three different ways that standout companies achieve success and capitalize on complexity.  They embody creative leadership, they reinvent customer relationships, and they build operating dexterity. 

A speedy decision is valued over a correct decision.   There is a philosophy of correcting things as they move forward.

Creativity is the leading indicator of leadership quality.  Creative leadership drives the change needed in the organization to stay ahead of the market.  Creative leaders use different communication styles and tools.  

They are more open to experimentation with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media.  Standout companies break with the status quo of industry, enterprise, and revenue models.

Chief executives believe that to navigate an increasingly complex world will require creativity.  They will co-create with their clients.  They will globalize what is possible due to standardization and localize what is necessary and whatever needs local tuning.  Think “glocal.”

When creativity is implemented within an organization, then it is better prepared to deal with some of the massive shifts taking place such as new government regulations, changes in global economic power centers, accelerated industry transformation, growing volumes of data, and rapidly evolving customer preferences.

Clearly creativity is the new leadership differentiator for standout companies.   You must ask yourself, what tools are you providing to your organization to unleash the creativity of your employees?

Permission to use graphic granted by IBM.

Bala Kanayson, Whole Mind Success

How often have you wished you could silence the constant talking that is going on in your head? You are trying to be an effective leader and grow your business, yet all of this chatter is interfering with your productivity. I recently heard Bala Kanayson address this issue. His solution includes developing your inner creativity.

How would you like to be able to learn proven methods to increase your creativity and productivity? Imagine being able to use your left and right brain, your conscious mind, and your subconscious mind in a deliberate manner.

Bala Kanayson uses Whole Mind Success as a unique method of using the whole mind in both our business and personal lives. He uses recent developments in neuroscience and psychology, combined with methods of silencing the mind to reduce the constant “noise” in our heads.

Extensive neurological research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) demonstrates how you can actually change the internal structure of your brain. Bala Kanayson uses proven scientific techniques to build new neuronal circuits that enhance creativity and develop new skills.

I asked Bala, “Now what kinds of skills do you mean?” He outlined some of the crucial skills we all need to be exceptional performers in our lives such as:

• Becoming a more effective leader.
• Reducing stress in your life.
• Finding new ways to solve difficult problems.
• Using both sides of the brain for maximum productivity and creativity.
• Mastering the art of silencing your mind.
• Setting goals and empowering yourself to achieve them.
• Communicating effectively with others.
• Defining your path for success and achieving it.

I was astounded. It seems you can overcome decades of social conditioning and preconceptions. The outcome results in a more complete transformation of each individual’s thinking and behavior.

I asked Bala, “Do you mean I can have increased self-esteem, improved study skills, and become more effective with my business decision making ability?

“Absolutely, you are correct!” Bala responded.

Now think about the significance of the impact upon your life if you decide to develop your creative thinking by using both sides of the brain for maximum productivity and creativity! If you are an engineer you could create new engineering designs. If you are an artist you could develop more creative artwork. If you are an athlete you could improve your performance in sports.

Now, you must go to to listen to Paul Lawrence Vann’s interview of Bala Kanayson on The Wealthy Speaker Show on blogtalkradio.  You will be pleased you followed my recommendation.