Unleashing Creativity and Innovation E-Book

Madan Birla

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 148

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Creativity and innovation are the keys to both organizational growth and successful careers. People understand this, but they do not know how to unleash their natural creative potential. Drawing upon his twenty-two years of first-hand experience helping FedEx grow into a global icon and the last ten years consulting around the world, Madan Birla provides proven and practical answers. Readers will learn * How to build a reputation as a creative thinker and become management's go-to person for innovative business solutions * Four steps for unleashing their creative potential and generating creative ideas * Four communication skills to gain acceptance of your ideas * Two words that guarantee promotions * How to minimize internal and external negative influences that obstruct creative energy flow * How to stop self-censoring and how to confidently express their ideas * How to trust that all the resources for germinating creative ideas are within them

Leseprobe

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Part I: Creativity and Innovation

“What If” Thinking: The Driver Behind FedEx’s Launch and Growth into a Global Icon

A What If Suggestion: The Reason behind my First Big Promotion

Enterprise Needs Innovation from Everyone

“I Like the Way You Think” Started Ram on a Very Successful and Fulfilling Career Journey

Creativity Is Using Imagination to Ask What If?

Your Simple Ideas Are Valuable and Much Needed

Are Companies Facing New Competitive Challenges in the Current Business Environment?

Is the Rate of Change Going to Slow Down?

Part II: The Four Requirements for the Mind to Generate Creative Ideas

Creativity in the Business World

What if We Typed Using Only Our Thumbs? The Birth of the BlackBerry

Ongoing Creativity and Innovation: A Must for Sustaining Market Leadership

Innovation: Connecting Dots from Disparate Fields

Generating (MINTing) Ideas

M Stands for More Dots: Expanded Knowledge Base

Leonardo da Vinci: A Classic Example of Expanded Knowledge Base

I Stands for Imagination

From NASCAR Pit to Scalloped Potato Production

N Stands for Nominal Stress (Creative Tension)

T Stands for Time

Part III: Seven Unleashing Creativity Lessons from Nature for Creating the Requirements

Nature: A Rich Resource for Understanding Ourselves

Nature: A Fertile Environment for Creative Thinking

Design in Nature

Biomimicry: Learning and Imitating Nature’s Designs

Behold the Birth of Velcro

Similarities between Fruits/Flowers and Creative Ideas: The Natural By-products of the Various Living Systems

More Dots (Expanded Knowledge Base)

Creativity Lesson 1: Grow Knowledge

Creativity Lesson 1: Grow Knowledge

Creativity Lesson 1: Grow Knowledge

Creativity Lesson 2: Be Persistent

Creativity Lesson 2: Be Persistent

Creativity Lesson

Creativity Lesson 2: Be Persistent

Imagination (To Connect Dots)

Creativity Lesson 3: Trust Yourself

Creativity Lesson 3: Trust Yourself

Creativity Lesson

Creativity Lesson 3: Trust Yourself

Creativity Lesson 4: Stay Calm

Creativity Lesson 4: Stay Calm

Creativity Lesson

Creativity Lesson 4: Stay Calm

Nominal Stress (Creative Tension)

Creativity Lesson 5: Take Risks

Creativity Lesson

Creativity Lesson 5: Take Risks

Creativity Lesson 6: Minimize Negativity

Creativity Lesson 6: Minimize Negativity

Creativity Lesson

Creativity Lesson 6: Minimize Negativity

Time (To Think and Nurture Ideas)

Creativity Lesson 7: Unplug Your Devices

Creativity Lesson 7: Unplug Your Devices

Creativity Lesson

Creativity Lesson 7: Unplug Your Devices

Part IV: The Tested and Proven Three-Step Innovation Process

Innovation: A Three-Step People Process

Leading for Innovation: Engaging the Team in the Innovation Process

Gaining Acceptance of Creative Ideas

A Proven Communication Model for Gaining Acceptance

Successful Implementation

Review in Advance the Idea/Proposal One-on-One with Key People

Looking out the Window and Taking Action to Stay One Step ahead of the Competition

Part V: Two Leading for Innovation Lessons from Nature for Engaging Your Team in the Innovation Process

Leading for Innovation

Leading for Innovation Lesson 8: Tap into Strengths

Leading for Innovation Lesson 8: Tap into Strengths

Creativity Lesson

Leading for Innovation Lesson 8: Tap into Strengths

Leading for Innovation Lesson 9: Promote Diversity of Thought

Leading for Innovation Lesson 9: Promote Diversity of Thought

Teaches Us

Leading for Innovation Lesson 9: Promote Diversity and Adaptability

Closing Thoughts: MINT in Action

References

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Products and Services Available

Index

Praise for Unleashing Creativity and Innovation

“In a world of talk about innovation, Birla shows us exactly how it’s done. He demystifies ingenuity itself with simple anecdotes and a tried, true, tangible process for entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, and business leaders.”

—Chris “Kiff” Gallagher, Jr., CEO and Founder, Musiciancorps.org

“I pondered over the contents of this book and realized that Madan is so right in pointing out that creativity is natural and essential to personal and organizational success. Organizations just need to create the four (MINT) conditions to tap into this natural resource and unleash their competitive edge.”

—Rajiv Grover, Ph.D., Dean, Fogelman College of Business & Economics, University of Memphis

“Madan’s insight into nature’s lessons on business and life was both practical and thought-provoking. This book got my creative juices flowing and reminded me of the importance of what I can learn from nature’s teaching . . . if I will simply stop and pay attention.”

—Ben Buffington, Chairman of the Board, Hi-Speed Industrial Service

“Relating creativity to nature is a lovely way of inspiring us to let go of control and allow our creative juices to just flow.”

—Sandy Patterson, Executive Director, Wings Cancer Foundation

“Unleashing Creativity and Innovation connects the wonderful inspirational gifts from nature with our creative thinking process.”

—David Cottrell, Author, Monday Morning Leadership

“Emerging entrepreneurs and seasoned executives alike can stay in the game and succeed by making a practice of Birla’s nine lessons.”

—Debra Kaye, Innovator and Culture Strategist, Author, Red Thread Thinking

Cover image: beach leaves @ iStockphoto.com/borchee

Cover design: Wiley

Copyright © 2014 by Madan Birla. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

All images are from iStockphoto.com. Used with permission.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Birla, Madan.

Unleashing creativity and innovation: nine lessons from nature for enterprise growth and career success / Madan Birla.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978–1–118–76811–2 (cloth); ISBN 978–1–118–79478–4 (ebk); ISBN 978–1–118–79477–7 (ebk)

1. Creative ability in business. 2. Creative thinking. 3. New products. 4. Technological innovations. I. Title.

HD53.B554 2014

658.4'063—dc23

For Shayli, Shaan, Kayan, and Rohin

Watching you grow and blossom is thebiggest joy in my life.

Preface

Your Organization’s Top Needs: Creativity and Innovation

I spend a lot of time travelling the world, speaking to leaders of organizations about leading for innovation and growth. As I prepare for these engagements, I request a meeting with the chief executive officers (CEOs) to understand the challenges they are facing. This allows me to tailor my remarks to address their specific concerns. A question I always ask is, “What keeps you awake at night?”

The most common response: “To continue to grow in today’s economy, we have to outthink and outperform the competition. To have a competitive edge, we must have an innovation edge. How do we do that?”

Want to Move Up? Meet Your Boss’s and Organization’s Top Needs

If you work in an organization, large or small, you’re probably looking for ways to increase your contribution and enhance your career prospects. That’s what I was searching for continually during my 30-year career at RCA and FedEx. Thinking back about all the promotions and awards I received at both companies, they were the result of focusing on my boss’s biggest problems; conceptualizing novel solutions by asking, “What if [we did this or that]”; and then leading teams to produce the innovation we needed. My goal for this book is to share proven insights and strategies to help you unleash your potential for creativity and innovation.

Most of us go to work and fulfill job responsibilities to the best of our abilities. We do the same thing day after day. This is routine and nothing extraordinary. But when I reflect on my 22 years at FedEx, I realize that both I and the teams I led played an important part in FedEx becoming the global icon it is today. The following personal incident illustrates two important points, directly related to the subject of the book.

Several years after I left FedEx, I visited the FedEx headquarters to cash in some options to buy more FedEx stock. I was in the elevator when Fred Smith, founder and CEO of FedEx, stepped in.

He asked, “Madan, how are you doing?”

“Fine, sir,” I responded.

Wanting to make small talk I said, “Fred, I saw you at the Tigers (University of Memphis’ basketball team) game last week.”

“Yes, I go to some games,” he replied.

“Fred, I need to thank you.”

“For what?” he asked.

“The only thing doing well in my portfolio is FedEx stock. Everything else has been going down.”

“Madan, you need to have confidence in FedEx stock. You helped design the system.”

As member of the Long Range Planning Committee (LRPC) I attended four-hour meetings, chaired by Fred, every third Tuesday of the month for nine years. In these meetings we discussed innovative strategic options (what ifs) for designing the global package movement systems and operations.

“I absolutely do and that’s why I’m holding on to the FedEx stock.” The elevator reached the ground floor; we shook hands and walked to our respective cars in the parking lot.

Point 1: Management notices our creative contributions.

Point 2: Although I’d been gone from FedEx for several years, Fred still made it a point to recognize my contributions, exhibiting a key leadership behavior for tapping into employees’ creativity and commitment. Leading by example, Fred inspired all FedEx managers to lead for innovation and growth.

Why I Started Studying Nature

Looking to resolve work-life balance conflicts when my kids were very young, I asked the question, “Why do we make the life choices we do?” This search to understand human nature expanded over time to studying humans, nature, and organizations—three related living systems.

I discovered that:

All living systems are guided by some common principles and processes. For example, each living system has a need to grow. If it is not growing, it withers and dies.

Nature is the oldest living system and is constantly and successfully adapting to an ever-changing environment. It has been solving problems for millenniums. To study and take advantage of nature’s solutions there is a growing field called biomimicry. The principles and processes from nature, the oldest living system, can help other living systems—people and organizations—adapt to the changing environment and thrive.

“What Ifs” Meet the Psychological Needs of “Making a Difference” and “Experiencing Growth”

The nature of all living things is to grow. If a tree is not growing, it’s dead. Why do we get bored doing the same things repeatedly? Because the work has become routine and we are not being challenged and experiencing growth. We feel most alive when we are being creative, being productive, making a difference, in love, and at play.

Certainly, the paycheck (that is, the monetary rewards) allow us to make the mortgage payment, pay the car note, send our kids to college, take a vacation, and cover other living expenses. But it is the opportunity for expression and application of our creative ideas that satisfies the psychological needs of making a difference and experiencing growth.

It goes against the human spirit to spend our waking hours doing tasks with no intellectual creativity. We are meant to create, discover, understand, explore, and inquire. Machines cannot create art, will not create the next Facebook or plot the course to explore the universe, nor increase our understanding of the human experience—only humanity can achieve those ends.

—BEN, Long Island, NY, March 6, 2011, commenting online on Paul Krugman’s column in the New York Times

Introduction

In this book I answer three questions I am asked regularly during my conversations with executives and professionals around the world:

How do I unleash my creativity and innovation potential to enhance my chances for promotion?

How can I add the most value now that I’ve moved into management?

How can my business sustain enterprise growth in today’s highly competitive global economy?

The book is organized in five parts to answer these questions.

Part I discusses in detail the creative thinking process and emphasizes the critical role of creativity and innovation, both in enterprise growth and career success.

Part II presents the four requirements for the mind to generate creative ideas. Real-world examples are used to illustrate the practical role of each requirement in creative problem solving.

Part III discusses the seven lessons from nature to be applied in creating the four requirements. Application of each lesson is supported by in-depth conversations with innovative and successful individuals.

Part IV presents the proven process that innovation is generation, acceptance, and implementation of creative ideas that enhance a company’s value to the customer, differentiating the company from the competition. It is a three-step people process.

Part V suggests the important role the managers’ day-to-day behaviors play in facilitating the innovation process. It presents two important lessons from nature, the keys to managers successfully fulfilling their leadership roles to encourage active participation in the innovation process. Here also are in-depth conversations with innovative leaders that illustrate the real-world application of these lessons.

Part I

Creativity and Innovation

The Keys to Enterprise Growth and Career Success in the Twenty-First Century

Creativity is to the marketplace what water is to life: You can have one without the other, but not for very long.

—Jim Blasingame, The Commercial Appeal, May 21, 2012

A recent poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future.

—Newsweek, July 19, 2010

“What If” Thinking: The Driver Behind FedEx’s Launch and Growth into a Global Icon

Since my book FedEx Delivers has been translated into Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, and other languages, I often am speaking to business groups around the world. The most common question I’m asked is, “How did Fred Smith build such a great company?”

After realizing that there was a growing demand for a time-definite express mode of transportation for shipping high-priority, time-sensitive cargo such as computer parts, critical documents, medicines, and electronics, Fred Smith thought, “What if there was an airline dedicated to providing overnight express service to meet this growing need?” This was the subject of a term paper he wrote while in school at Yale University.

This what if thinking gave birth to FedEx. But what helped it become a global business success story is the what if culture; that is, people across the organization continually asking what if questions.

In my first 10 years at FedEx, I led the Materials and Resource Planning function. That allowed my group to be involved in all new marketing initiatives. One simple example: Someone in marketing thought out loud, “What if we introduce a flat rate envelope, called the Overnight Letter, to make it easier for customers to ship documents?” Within six months of its introduction, FedEx was handling more than 100,000 Overnight Letters every night.

For my next nine years at FedEx, I served as a member of the Long Range Planning Committee. My group at any point in time was evaluating at least 8 to 10 strategic what ifs. Some examples included:

What if we automate the package and document sorting in the Memphis hub to speed up processing and launch the planes earlier to ensure on-time delivery?

What if we open up a hub in Paris, Dubai, and Greensboro to better serve our customers around the world?

What if we change the package pickup cutoff time in a certain zip code from 4 pm to 5 pm to improve our competitive position?

A What If Suggestion: The Reason behind my First Big Promotion

After completing my graduate work at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, I joined RCA Records’ Planning and Engineering group in Indianapolis as an industrial engineer. While speaking to undergraduate students at the University of Miami I asked, “Let me see shows of hands. Who knows what an LP is?” Not a single student raised a hand. Yes, there was a time in the distant past when music came on physical products—vinyl Long Play records called LPs, as well as on 8-track tapes and cassettes.

After enrolling in RCA’s record club, RCA Music Service, members received eight records or tapes for one penny. Thereafter, every month members received a catalog containing more than 400 selections and were obligated to buy eight records or tapes over the next 12 months. RCA Music Service hired consultants to automate the manual process of picking and packing the individual orders.