Getting stupid can be a mighty smart thing to do if you want to build an innovative company.Thinking up the dumbest, most ridiculous, and most impractical things you can do is a powerful way to explore your assumptions about the worlds.
It help elicit what you know and believe but may have a hard time articulating, perhaps because it is so obvious you don't even notice.
It also helps you imagine what might happen if your dearest beliefs turn out to be dead wrong. And thinking up the most crazy things you can do-and then thinking about why you might do them
So I enlisted some crazy yet powerful and workable ideas on how to innovate by thinking and doing ridiculous and impractical things
1. brainstorm a list of absurd things to do, reverse the ideas and talk about why you should or shouldn't do these things
2. Use a devil's advocate and dialectal inquiry. Assign people to challenge your groups assumptions and decisions,and to develop an arguments that the opposite assumptions and decisions are actually superior
3. Don't allow even light hearted ridicule and put-downs when people suggest ridiculuos or impractical ideas.
I realized these things through my crazy and wacky insights that I learned and experienced in my years of experience in school, pharmaceutical, forex world and auto-industry, and some may find it CRAZY, but for me it WORKS. If you want people to come up with dumb and impractical ideas that, later on, just might bring joy and riches to your company, praise them or try to come up with even more absurd ideas of your own.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
to be shattered
Anatole France once wrote, “To accomplish great things, we must not only act but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.” It makes you pause, think and wonder.
Anatole France is a great French novelist, poet and writer. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his day, he was considered one of the finest minds in France. But many people did not know that he was diagnosed as having a brain that was two-thirds the normal size.
How does one continue to dream and believe? Many of us lose our capacity for dreams and belief the moment we get introduced into the difficulties of life, the choices we are forced to make, the compromises that seem easy to agree to.
I like to think that as we are faced with decisions and choices, we need to put a picture of ourselves in our mind. What type of businessman or entrepreneur do I want to become? That vision will guide us in making the right call.
Too often, many entrepreneurs lose themselves and their business by losing sight of that vision. We start spending the rewards of the present, trusting that the future will be taken cared of automatically. Or we lose hope in attaining that vision and start making compromises, which ultimately lead us further and further away from that vision.
Losing hope is easy to do because if we set a high enough goal, the road will seem impossible or unattainable. The secret is to set up our own glass ceilings and not to let others place it above us. If we set our own and work within our capacities and realities, we will soon discover that glass ceilings are meant to be shattered. As we break through, we then need to set up another one, in order to see what we need to do to shatter that too.
President Barrack Obama owes his place in history to this great man, and the choices that he made. History was not the by product of one big action, but through many small decisions that were made, all pointing to one vision.
Anatole France is a great French novelist, poet and writer. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his day, he was considered one of the finest minds in France. But many people did not know that he was diagnosed as having a brain that was two-thirds the normal size.
How does one continue to dream and believe? Many of us lose our capacity for dreams and belief the moment we get introduced into the difficulties of life, the choices we are forced to make, the compromises that seem easy to agree to.
I like to think that as we are faced with decisions and choices, we need to put a picture of ourselves in our mind. What type of businessman or entrepreneur do I want to become? That vision will guide us in making the right call.
Too often, many entrepreneurs lose themselves and their business by losing sight of that vision. We start spending the rewards of the present, trusting that the future will be taken cared of automatically. Or we lose hope in attaining that vision and start making compromises, which ultimately lead us further and further away from that vision.
Losing hope is easy to do because if we set a high enough goal, the road will seem impossible or unattainable. The secret is to set up our own glass ceilings and not to let others place it above us. If we set our own and work within our capacities and realities, we will soon discover that glass ceilings are meant to be shattered. As we break through, we then need to set up another one, in order to see what we need to do to shatter that too.
President Barrack Obama owes his place in history to this great man, and the choices that he made. History was not the by product of one big action, but through many small decisions that were made, all pointing to one vision.
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