Ideas about Ideas

Managers in companies are mole-hill men. A molehill man is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 am and finds a molehill on his desk. He has until 5 pm to make this molehill into a mountain. An accomplished molehill man will have his mountain finished even before lunch – Fre Allen.

Man can live withour air for a few minutes, without water for about two weeks, without food for about two months – and without a new thought for years on end. – Anoynmous

Many people would die rather than think. In fact they do – Bertand Russell.

A conclusion is a place where you get tired thinking – Martin Fischer.

The formulation of the problem, is more important than the solution – Albert Einstein.

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers – Picasso.

Small rooms discipline the mind. Large rooms distract it – Leonardo da Vinci

The biggest sin is sitting on your ass – Florynce Kennedy.

When there is no wind, row – Latin proverb.

Even if you are on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there – Will Rogers There are three things I always forget: faces, names –the third I can’t remember – Italo Svevo.

How do you define an idea?

Of all the definitions possible, one that strikes the most – A new combination of old elements.

The coin punch and the wine press were around and in constant use for centuries before Gutenberg saw the relationship between them and invented the printing press.

One of the most important elements for creative people is a sense of humour. He who laughs, lasts!

There is an interesting cause and effect relationship – the fun comes first; the better work, second. How can we make it fun to come to work? Here are a few ideas:

Put up dart boards

Get your office colleagues to get along their childhood photos. Make a game out of it..

Play cricket – but with balls of paper.

Have a dress-up day, where everyone comes in formals.

Children don’t have blockages because they don’t know about ‘before’. They only know about now. So when searching for a solution to a problem they look and see freshly for themselves. Every time. They break rules because they do not know the rules exist. They constantly see the new relationships among seemingly unrelated things. They study ordinary things intently and have a sense of wonder about the things that most of us take for granted. They ask and ask and ask.

Why is the moon round?

What’s a dream?

Why do we have toes?

By the time they get into high school they hardly ever ask questions like these. They enter school as question marks and leave as periods. If they had continued with their childhood curiosity, here are the questions they would be asking today:

Why does a receptionist sit behind a desk?

Why do you?

Why don’t kitchen taps have foot pedals to operate them?

Why are all fridge compartments not pull-out drawers?

Airports have their customers form one long line for security checks so that no customer ever gets stuck in a slow line. Why don’t retail stores do that?

Why don’t they put fuel caps on both sides of your car to make it easier to fill in fuel at petrol pumps?

If a person with curiosity faces a problem he asks these questions:

What if the problem were twice as bad? Ten times as bad? Half as bad?

What if everybody had this problem?

What if your biggest competitor had it?

What if we turned this problem upside down, what would it look like? What would it look like backwards?

What if this problem still exists next year? How about ten years from now?

What if this problem suddenly didn’t bother anybody anymore, what would you do?

How would an architect solve this problem? A plumber? A surgeon? A poet?

What if someone gave you a million bucks to solve this problem, how would you spend the money?

How would you solve this problem if you could fire anybody you wanted? Or hire anybody you wanted?

What if you were the problem, how would you change?

What if you were a child, how would you solve the problem?

‘How can I do all this work in time?’

‘How can I get all this work done on time?’

The first question will result in all sorts of labor saving techniques; the second in dividing the work load up amongst others.

Henry Ford invented the assembly line by changing the question from – ‘How do we get people to work?’ to ‘How do we get the work to people?’ Supermarkets changed the game by changing the question from what grocers had always been asking – ‘How do I get the groceries faster for my customer?’ to ‘How can the customers get the groceries for me?’

The answer for any question pre-exists. We need to ask the right questions to reveal the answer.

If you want to be creative go where your questions lead you. Do things. Have a wide variety of experiences. A friend of mine never takes the straight road to work. Every day morning he drove to work a different way. There are times when he has to do some pretty crazy things to keep from taking the same route – at times going in the opposite direction from office. But he has never repeated himself. He’s seen more of his city in ten years than most people will see in their lifetimes..

Ideas in Application – the Paper Plane Case

A great teacher used to line up his students against a wall in her classroom and ask them to make paper planes and toss them actoss the room to the opposite wall – about 20 feet away. Students would make all sorts of planes but they were never able to get one to go that the distance.

Then he would say, “Ok guys, now watch the world champion long-distance paper airplane builder in action.” Whereupon he’d wad up a piece of note paper into the size of a golf ball and pitch it underhand. Bingo. Who said paper airplanes have to look like paper airplanes?

Ideas in Application – the IT company

During the middle of the IT boom years, there was an IT company that had developed a great training program for freshers. People who went through the program were absolutely top-notch and went on to win prizes and commendations in the industry. They were so good that as soon as their training got over, most of them were poached away by other companies.

The company tried everything to retain them – money, fancy titles, sending flowers to their spouses on anniversaries, extra vacation time – all to no avail.

During one of the meetings to discuss this huge problem of attrition, the HR manager suggested in jest that the only way to keep the trainees from leaving – was to chop off their legs!

And that is exactly what this company did. They started only hiring handicapped people in wheel chairs for the program. Not only that they redid the entrances, the toilets etc to take special care of these people. And the competitors no longer wanted to hire these guys – because they would have to re-do all their entrances and toilets. Lateral thinking!

Practice Brain-storming problem

What is half of thirteen? List at least 25 answers to this question.

Practice Case – Ping Pong ball

Imagine a piece of pipe about 18 inches long and slightly larger in diameter than a ping-pong ball. One end of the pipe is welded tight to the floor. The ping-pong ball is dropped into the pipe and the following things are given to you to get the ping-pong ball out of the pipe.

Last Sunday’s newspapers, a pair of leather gloves, a match box full of matches, an eight inch screwdriver, a fourteen inch screwdriver, four toothpicks, a packet of chewing gum and a razor blade.

How would you do it?

Practice Case – Building Owner

Assume that you are the owner of a 10 storey building that was built back in the days when everyone had big spacious offices. Back then two elevators were enough to handle the number of people working in the building. But over the years, large offices were converted into smaller ones, and now it’s obvious that the building’s two elevators cannot handle the number of workers.

What would you do?

Practice Case – Police Chief

Assume that you are the police chief in the 1960’s of a town by the ocean. The town is one of the meccas for vacationing college students during spring break. The business people in town love the money the students bring in every year, but the students are getting more and more unruly.

Worse, putting them in jail overnight for being drunk and disorderly or for disturbing the peace isn’t helping. Indeed it only seems to exacerbate the problem, for jail time is becoming a badge of honor. If a student hasn’t been in jail he isn’t part of what’s happening, he isn’t a man.

So you decide to get tough: You put them on bread and water.

Wrong.

Now guys who don’t even drink start feigning drunkenness so that they can get arrested, just so when they get out of jail the next day they can brag about being in jail on bread and water. Suddenly students who haven’t been in jail are sissies.

What would you do?