Corporate Creativity

Posted on March 18, 2012 by bazzoc

Yesterday Business Creativity was something management did when the team went on a retreat or when shooting the breeze over a cold beer at the end of a grueling day, the shape, feel and form of creativity, while taken seriously, not always easy to achieve seeing its dynamics were too often placed in the basket of soft management, in other words, a touchy feely thing that real managers did when they had the time, which usually meant it stayed at the bottom of the filing basket.

Fast forward to today! Businesses struggling with 21st century reality are finding that without the ability to be creative, they are up the creek without a paddle. And the reason is simple. The world is changing so fast that traditional ways of managing are increasingly out-of-step in a world where flexibility and adaptability are the drivers in creating and sustaining a competitive advantage.

Put simply; the ability to innovate is now a premium business skill, Corporate Creativity not something that can necessarily be taught, despite the many claims to the contrary, but rather a state-of-business-mind that relies heavily on the ‘will’ to be creative … and that means shifting creativity out of the shadows and into the mainstream of business functioning … and for many management teams this is a scary thought.

Yet it doesn’t have to be seeing Corporate Creativity is the difference between teams that can compete and those that can’t. In fact in every business team there is a great deal of creative potential that can be readily tapped once the team gives itself permission to be creative, rather than worrying about stepping out-of-line from the accepted way of doing things.

Corporate Creativity nothing more than the ability to successfully shape the future through innovation, strategy and forward thinking so that smart ideas can positively impact on business performance.

And when you start thinking about it this way, you don’t need a guru, all you need is the same thinking tools you use in any other business situation. Discipline, hard work, logic and the willingness to push the boundaries beyond best practice. The only difference being you are working in an experiential as opposed to an academic mindscape.

Any management team prepared to use its collective life experience (see earlier Blog) quickly turns creativity from something to be feared into something that becomes the basis for meeting and beating the competition. State sector, private sector, the challenge is the same. The courage to step outside the boundaries of your known mindset in order to create something that truly defines your business.

The Dynamically Evolving State Sector

Posted on March 12, 2012 by bazzoc

While the broken global economy is placing major pressures on businesses caught between the push of the future and the pull of the past. Another dynamic area of change is that taking place in the public sector worldwide.

The impact of economic reality and political will resulting in a melting pot of structural adjustment that in the short term will change the face of the public service as we have traditionally known it.

A phase that when it draws to a close will create a vacuum as to how the state sector will evolve into the future. A challenge certainly; but also a one-off opportunity for senior executives to not only define the public service model of tomorrow, but how ministries will interconnect in a way that produces dynamic results.

The misleading caricature of public servants as a grey army of faceless bureaucrats, giving way to a new understanding that the state sector is at the cutting edge of a change that demands circuit breaker thinking in building the efficiency model that governments are seeking.

The blueprint of flexibility, evolution, innovation and organization, resulting in teams that are faster, sharper and smarter in the way they do business. The ability to blend technology, people and politics into a service that works, fully taking into account the demographics and demands of what can be achieved within budgetary limits.

The opportunity is extraordinary i.e. to not establish an ersatz future that papers over the cracks, but rather a 21st century model that is purpose-suited to the needs of government because it has been developed by forward thinkers who understand the unique pressures present in a dynamically evolving public service.

Future Solutions Management

Posted on March 6, 2012 by bazzoc

Let’s face it, we all know the global economy is broken, but the big question is what can we do about it?

What can the individual business team do to position their company in a permanently unstable business environment.

State sector, public sector, the challenge is the same. How can we manage our organization when there is nothing firm on which to base our thinking and strategy?

A fair question seeing how traditional thinking is becoming increasingly irrelevant in a global economy travelling at the speed of light, and which demands another set of thought processes that will allow your organization to gain the flexibility it needs in today’s liquid environment.

Fortunately there is a system I call Future Solutions Management that has the right mix of creativity, strategy and forward thinking to position your business in dynamically difficult markets, but first it requires you to unhook your mind from the past.

It doesn’t matter what other businesses are doing; what’s important is what your business wants to do and then putting in place the building blocks of creativity, strategy and forward thinking to achieve it. Think about it this way.

Instead of focusing on best practice, Future Solutions Management challenges business teams to use their life experience (the combination of academic and personal knowledge) to build solutions that are specific to their business alone.

Following a disciplined process it identifies what is needed to be faster, sharper and smarter than the competition. You would be amazed, when you remove traditional thinking inhibitors, how a management team can turn from ‘I don’t know how to do this’ to ‘I know we can make this company insanely great and this is the way to do it.’

When you think smart, you start thinking smarter, the aim to manage a business that is lightning quick in its decision-making processes and capable of turning on a dime as the situation changes, and believe me today, no business can survive unless it can adjust and readjust in quick time.

So let your competitors worry about the Greek economy, or whether the Germans and French will bail out the rest of the EU, because while everyone’s fretting about the past, you and your team will be creating the future.

Managing creativity

Posted on February 26, 2012 by bazzoc

You are busy, up to your neck in the swamp, and the piranhas are nibbling at your toes. The board wants fresh thinking, but your team is flat-out keeping the ship-of-state on a steady course, and when you suggest taking time out to shoot the breeze, they look at you as if you’ve gone stark raving mad.

This is a challenge facing every management team in every part of the world, but also a challenge that has faced every management team for the past two millennium. Nothing changes except today time is becoming so compressed that the pressure of managing is sucking away the ability to forward think. So what do you do?

The answer beguilingly simple. Encourage each member of your team to think as an individual, then encourage your whole team to accept each individual’s thinking as a crucial part of being in the team. There is no longer time for the politics of yesterday. In today’s overheated market every second counts, so each ‘moment of awareness’ (see earlier post) is as precious as gold.

A team that can ‘think-on-the-fly’ has a tremendous advantage over competitors whose teams are buried in fear; fear of change, fear of looking silly, fear of being unable to cope. The ability of a team to trust in the other members of the team an absolute necessity in fast-moving environments.

It’s not rocket science. All it takes is an understanding that the weakest link is not the weakest team member, but rather the person most determined to ensure any change only benefits them. Once your team moves past this the steps are relatively simple in building an entirely different dynamic. How is this done?

1. Draft a creativity protocol. 2. Lead your team in accepting the protocol. 3. Resolve misunderstandings within the team (rather than with the individual), and finally build the protocol to the stage it becomes irrelevant, because you have a team that is fluid and flexible because everyone thinks.

Success in a broken global economy

Posted on February 10, 2012 by bazzoc

It has been interesting to observe the reaction of the financial community subsequent to the train wreck that drove the global economy over the cliff.

The futile efforts to return to the days when profit was not the goal, but rather the consequence of a money-go-round of commercial sleight-of-hand that placed impossible pressures on managers to perform.

But in every storm cloud there is a silver lining for those who see what their competitors are doing and then doing exactly the opposite, meaning instead of trying to re-establish the impossible, quietly salvaging the best of what exists, while adding creative possibilities that will maximize their flexibility in a melt down market.

Today flexibility rules; the ability of a company to adjust and readjust to the pressures the key to creative adaptation. Compare this with competitors that slavishly rely on a twelve monthly planning cycle and the advantages become clear. If your company can turn on a dime in reacting to the unexpected, then it has a distinct advantage in an unstable environment.

But you need to be competitively creative. Not just in the how you motivate your people or engage with your customers, but in managing a business that is highly original in such seemingly familiar things as structure, communication, teamwork, responsiveness, service, technology in other words rather than doing what is expected; think about what is not expected.

In broken economies where the customer is king there is the opportunity to redefine performance by thinking beyond best practice. The capacity for management to question its own thinking, the key to building an organization that stands out from the crowd, not because it has the best advertisements, but because it does what is says it can do.

The Creative Continuum

Posted on February 10, 2012 by bazzoc

When we think of human creativity our mind usually pictures brilliant examples like Albert Einstein, Maria Montessori, Leonardo da Vinci, Pablo Picasso, Sigmund Freud. Outstanding men and women whom we place on a pedestal and stand back and admire. But what about Annie Francis, Peter Arnold, Josephine Chan, and Akil Warner. Who are they? Every man and every woman in every corner of the planet who daily tap into their creative potential in order to survive.

The point being creativity runs along a continuum at one end of which we find the unfathomable depths of genius and at the other the small creative acts that each of us engage in as part of our daily lives. Extrapolate this across a business and what you have is something very powerful indeed.

No matter what your business; once your mind roves past the qualifications, what is present is a melting pot of raw potential that few managers actively engage with. Meaning they don’t do a stock take of the mind talent up and down the organizational chain and as a result fail to ignite creative potential that is there for the taking.

Relate this to the incredible shrinking business and the picture becomes clear. The more a business downsizes the greater the pressure on managers to compensate for the lack of minds available. Smart businesses don’t do this. Rather than subjecting executives to an impossible creative load; they actively seek to spread the responsibility for thinking across the organization.

Redefining what it means to manage; they engage the entire working mind up and down the organizational chain so that in large and small ways staff are actively contributing to the future; managing the creative continuum a sure way of growing a business that is faster, sharper and smarter than the competition.

Life-experience

Posted on February 3, 2012 by bazzoc

Two blogs back I touched on the vital issue of life experience so I thought it would be helpful if I filled out the vacant space that exists between the words ‘life’ and ‘experience.’

Think of it this way. Every time a meeting takes place two things are present; technical experience i.e. the career the individual has chosen to follow, and life experience, the insights he or she has soaked up as his or her career has unfolded.

To put this in perspective; as we trawl through life each of us establishes a unique world view that then has to be shoehorned into the organisational model to make it work. Which is not a problem so long as the business is not so tightly managed that life experience becomes a pale background noise in the workings of the machine.

Interesting point: take two people out of our meeting and replace them with two others and you have tumbled the creative potential present meaning you now have a different mix of life experience. The fact we don’t stop to think about this largely because life experience often exists as a subterranean factor until such time as it openly speaks its mind. Think about it!

Creativity feeds off life experience; the ability to tap deep into the experiential emotion a key factor in unlocking the power that lies in every company. The choice whether to work within a safe business model that lacks the spontaneity of combustion or to inject the life experience that leads to serious competitive advantage. So pedal to the metal and gun your business.

Thinking inside the circle

Posted on February 1, 2012 by bazzoc

For the last several decades the gurus have been advising us to think outside the circle; but there is a flaw in this logic for the simple reason when we think outside the circle, we’re still sitting inside the circle with all the politics, pressures, and passions waiting to chew up any creativity that dares to come in.

So what we do is reverse the logic by throwing all the politics, pressures and passions outside the circle, so they orbit harmlessly, while we use our creative mind to innovate in a mind space no longer contaminated by business as usual.

And when we have the right combination of creativity what do we do? We bring back into the circle only those existing elements that make sense, in other words, those things that will help connect the building blocks of creativity into patterns that show what your business can truly be once the mind chains are shattered.

What about all those discarded elements still orbiting outside our circle? You mean the things that have been hobbling your business to an unacceptable level of mediocrity! Well have fun; go on a turkey shoot and blast them from the sky. Sound crazy? Well my suggestion is try it … because it really works. Thinking inside the circle is a powerful management discipline that can do wonders for your organization.

Moments-of-awareness

Posted on January 27, 2012 by bazzoc

Every one of us, in every business, everywhere, no exceptions, have moments-of-awareness i.e. a sudden flash there is a better way of doing something that bubble away up and down the organizational chain yet seldom are captured and recognized for what they are; life-experience.

All organizations have extraordinary levels of life experience flowing through them yet few take the time to recognise and manage this potential owing to the twin pressures of time and willpower, both of which are needed in order to tap into what is there for the taking. Putting it more simply; you are paying for this life experience so why not use it?

Whether your business is an airline, a government department, a courier company, a hospital, a retail company, no matter what your company does; life experience is what silently impacts on success or failure, excellence or mediocrity.

As organizations become leaner, it is the way you encourage your people to respond to their moments-of-awareness that becomes the critical difference between a thinking organism and a mindless machine. It takes little effort to establish and manage the principle. When people know their company wants them to think; you will be inspired when they start to perform.

Moments of Awareness is now available as an e-book from my ‘Ten Minute Master Manager Reads’ on Amazon at this link Moments of Awareness Price $US2.99

Competitive Creativity

Posted on January 27, 2012 by bazzoc

The reality in today’s bruising global market is without creativity your organization is at a real disadvantage. So what’s new? Everything in terms of the fact that the window of business opportunity is now so small that catching and holding the attention of your target market requires a genuine commitment to creative thinking.

The late Steve Jobs used to talk about something being ‘Insanely great’ and he certainly knew a thing or to about developing products and services that were integrated in a way that influenced the consumer to want to be part of the Apple dream, to want to be part of the future.

Is that how your company thinks? To want to provide a product or service of such high quality that it stands out from a market saturated with clones? It’s not magic. What it takes is a creative competitiveness that understand the linkages between the key components of your business and then sets about polishing those linkages so wherever the customer touches in they find enthusiasm, class, and a product and/or service that does what it says.

It doesn’t matter whether you a government department, a corporate, or a start-up company the principle runs true. First know your business. Second understand the components that drive your business. Third immerse those components in the process of creative competitiveness. And fourth bring those building blocks together in a way that makes your strategy ‘Insanely great.’

Competitive Creativity is now available as an e-book from my ‘Ten Minute Master Manager Reads’ on Amazon at this link Competitive Creativity Price $US2.99

Crazy Creativity

Posted on December 11, 2011 by bazzoc

I have seen the ‘Crazy Creativity’ phenomenon many times when facilitating management retreats; the individuals march into the room with fixed looks and three hours later, having thrown off the burden of responsibility, unleash their creative energy on a whiteboard that is soon covered with ideas ranging from the weird to the truly excellent.

Then having exhausted the creative rush comes the fatal words ‘Ok good people lets turn these ideas into something that will change the business’ and instantly the bright shiny eyes turn sheepish; ‘What; you mean implement this stuff; change the way we do things … upset the delicate balance between the divisions … when is lunch?’

And that’s the heavy-duty problem; so long as creativity remains safely on the whiteboard it’s a fantastic thing to play with, but turn it into something that will give your business a serious edge, then you must have the business skills that will make things simple.

Managing creativity is no different to managing any other business discipline; once you know how, it’s not just fun, you can see your business changing before your eyes.

Finding time to think

Posted on December 11, 2011 by bazzoc

How much time do you ever have to do what you need to do? A very important question seeing in today’s business world time is the one thing none of us really have; no sooner do we get to to work we’re on the treadmill trying to stay one step ahead of the avalanche of phone calls, emails, meetings, complaints, company crises and other things that make being a manager so tough; and where does business creativity sit in all this? Most times precisely nowhere too often being seen as a nice thing to do when we have time.

Only problem is who’s got the time? So we have to start thinking smarter because creativity is the one dynamic that can position your business ahead of the pack, so rather than ignoring it, or wasting time thinking about it, what you need to do is carve out a space that will allow you the time to think, without getting in the way of all the other things you have to do.

Sound impossible? Well start thinking about your desktop as a place where you can port your creative mind not matter where you are. Office, home, or travelling, your desktop can become the one place where the madness of the world can be kept at bay, while you use your life experience to build a better business.

Beyond Best Practice

Posted on December 2, 2011 by bazzoc

I’ll never forget the day I was working with an electricity utility who had signed up to a best practice regime with utilities from Spain, Britain, the United States, and Australia. The theory being a set of best practice standards would allow each utility to shoot for the stars in achieving success.

Right? Wrong! As I sat with the group, (and just so you know I wasn’t part of this strategy merely an invitee) I watched their minds implode as each representative tried to explain why their organization had not achieved nirvana. The individual managers becoming so concerned at their lack of success that I could visibly see the energy being sucked from them.

Best practice is a great idea; if you want to run a company based on the principles of yesterday. But in today’s environment where a day is a long time, and a month a millennium; tying your business to a best practice ideal is not the greatest way of responding to the twists and turns of a rebuilding economy.

See what everyone else is doing and then do it differently. If everyone else is sitting in the lifeboat of conformity; strike out on your own. Create the best practice that is right for your business and your business alone, because the better you get at it, the harder it’s going to be for your competitors to copy you!

www.helpbyte.com

Customers Customers

Posted on December 2, 2011 by bazzoc

A couple years back I was in Jinhua City, China and was asked to talk to a group of Chinese manufacturers. When I had finished my presentation someone asked me how many people lived in New Zealand to which I replied about four million. His response; ‘that’s not many.’ His reasoning such a small market was not worth getting out of bed for. I wonder if he thinks the same today with the global economy in free fall.

To me any customer who is happy with the service I provide is one customer the competition hasn’t got and that means thinking past the ‘boy have we got a deal for you’ mentality in setting in place a relationship the customer will be happy to experience again and again.

Time, pressure, politics and fear are the great destroyers of creativity, the ability to step past these in encouraging the mind of your business to willingly contribute to success the great secret of 21st century management. It’s not rocket science, its about being aware that the mind of your business is your most precious asset.

While your competitors are busy caging their employees into smaller and smaller boxes of applied reasoning, you will be opening those boxes and allowing your people, at every level, to help build a business that can respond at multiple levels of possibility.

www.helpbyte.com

Faster Sharper Smarter

Posted on December 1, 2011 by bazzoc

Today the world is moving so fast there is no time to wait for a management consultant to pedal over to your office; I mean by the time he or she has travelled to the airport, parked their car, jumped on the plane, caught a taxi, then finally knocks on your door an hour and half late because the plane had operational problems, the world has moved on. This is yesterday’s thinking when the world was a slower, safer, place to work in.

When you need fresh ideas you need them now; not tomorrow, not next week, not next month, the pace of competition so brutal that the only way to level the playing field is to use technology; not dumb technology that spits out canned answers, but technology behind which is a real human who can relate to your challenge in a very human way.

Today your office is where you are; at home or hanging off the end of a mobile phone, competing for mind space on the internet, inside a tablet winging its way to Bangkok, crowding its face onto a video link or floating free in the rapidly expanding wireless environment.

Mobility demands portability and that means taking your support with you. Need help? It’s there at the click of a mouse; while the competition is waiting in its office for a consultant to travel to the airport, park their car … I think you get my drift.

Albert Einstein once said ‘the secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources’ I think he was onto something?

www.helpbyte.com

Business creativity

Posted on December 1, 2011 by bazzoc

Ok we’ve all experienced it … the business day has barely begun when you get a ring from home saying your two year old has fallen off the garden wall and no sooner have you put the phone down your daughter’s on the line asking you to pick her up from her friend’s house after work, meantime the emails are piling up, the business plan is half written, customers are screaming and the boss is asking you to attend a management meeting that will likely go until 7pm.

Sound familiar? Well this is the challenge managers are facing in a meltdown economy; state sector, public sector, the demands of survival are forcing everyone to run just to stand still, while not forgetting the Chairman wants the company to be more creative and has asked you to come up with fresh thinking and new ideas that will position the organization ahead of its competitors. Phew!

It’s not that you and your team aren’t creative; the problem is creativity takes time and time is the one thing you don’t have as you juggle the load while trying to throw in the coloured balls that will help your business build a serious competitive advantage.

So that’s what this Blog is about; thinking that is faster, sharper, and smarter not just because creativity is a nice thing to do, but because it’s fun to break out of the box and build the future rather than waiting for it to happen.