A Whack on the Side of the Head: A book review by Bob Morris

A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative

Roger von Oech
Business Plus, 25th Anniversary Edition  (2008)

Note: When preparing for some interviews, I re-read several books on the creative process and remain convinced that all are still among the best. This  one is indeed a business classic.

This book should be read in combination with A Kick in the Seat of the Pants…and preferably read first. Just a suggestion. Von Oech demonstrates in his thinking and in his writing the same principles he advocates so eloquently. In Whack, first published in 1983, he identifies ten “locks” which that (if not preclude) creative thinking:

 

• The Right Answer
• That’s Not Logical
• Follow the Rules
• Be Practical
• Play Is Frivolous
• That’s Not My Area
• Avoid Ambiguity
• Don’t Be Foolish
• To Err Is Wrong
• I’m Not Creative

How does each limit (if not preclude) creative thinking? How can each be “unlocked”? To what extent are these barriers interdependent? Von Oech devotes a separate chapter to each of the ten, answering these and other questions while providing various exercises in support of his explanations.

Whack will be immensely valuable to executives in any organization which needs a culture within which to generate and then nourish fresh ideas and new perspectives. The same is true of all self-employed people (especially independent consultants) whose customers or clients expect them to address the same need. Finally, I think that school, college, and university classroom teachers can devise all manner of appropriate applications of von Oech’s ideas. When you listen to Richard Feyman’s lectures on physics (now available on CDs and videos), you suspect that he has read all of von Oech’s books. He probably didn’t. Nonetheless, he and von Oech are kindred spirits.

In addition to von Oech’s A Kick in the Seat of the Pants, there are other excellent books also worthy of your consideration. They include those written by Edward De Bono, Guy Claxton, Michael Michalko, and Joey Reiman.

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Roger von Oech is the founder and president of Creative Think, a California-based consulting firm that specializes in stimulating creativity and innovation. He has given seminars and presentations to corporations worldwide, including Coca-Cola, GE, Disney, Intel, MTV, Microsoft, NASA, Apple, Citigroup, and the United States Olympic Committee. As indicated, he is the author of A Whack on the Side of the Head and A Kick in the Seat of the Pants, as well as the popular Creative Whack Pack card deck. He lives with his wife and children in Atherton, California.

Decide Quickly; Act Now; Be Fearless – Counsel from Mika Brzezinski

So, here’s the thing.

You will fail.
You will be left behind, forgotten.
You cannot rely on yesterday’s successes.  People will forget them far too quickly.
What are you doing this week – this day – now?  That’s how you will be judged.

But…  the good news is a second (or third, or fourth) act is possible.  But such an act is possible only if you act.

And when you decide to act, you have to make decisions quickly.  Will it work, or not?  If not, then forget it. And move on.  If it might work, give it a shot.  If you sense that that is something that will work, go for it – fully – all of it!

Here’s Mika Brzezinski’s insight/counsel, (Knowing Your Value):

You can tell quickly if something works or not.
Both Joe and I had been beaten up in our respective careers, and that experience – plus the fact that we were both bored by the traditional television news format – made us fearless.
We had big plans and even more determination.

You can tell quickly.  So, decide quickly.  Act on it.  Be fearless.

Good advice.

Five Ways to Increase Your Productivity

Heidi Grant Halvorson

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Heidi Grant Halvorson, first featured by HRM Today and then by her personal blog, The Science of Success. To read the complete article and check out all the other resources, please click here.

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You just have too much on you plate.  Chances are, your employees do as well.

You suspect that you could all be making better use of your time, completing more projects and achieving more goals.  You want to be more productive, and to help your team be more productive, but you aren’t sure where to start.

You are far from alone in your confusion. Even the most successful, highly accomplished people have difficulty pinpointing why they are so productive.  The intuitive answer – that you are born predisposed to having the intelligence, creativity, and willpower to get the job done – is really just one small piece of the puzzle.  In fact, decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people reach more of their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do.   Here are five scientifically-tested strategies that successful people use, proven to help you reach your goals and make the most of your time.

[Here are the first three.]

#1   Get Specific. When setting a goal, try to be as specific as possible.  “Meet with every member of my team once a week” is a better goal than “meet more often with my team,” because it gives you a clear idea of what success looks like.  Knowing exactly what you want to achieve keeps you motivated until you get there.  Also, think about the specific actions that need to be taken to reach your goal.  Just promising you’ll “communicate more” is too vague – be clear and precise.  “At our meeting, I’ll ask about each project they are currently working on” leaves no room for doubt about what you need to do, and whether or not you’ve actually done it.

#2 Seize the Moment to Act on Your Goals. Given how busy most of us are, it’s not surprising that we often miss opportunities to act on a goal because we simply fail to notice those opportunities.  Did you really have no time to work on that assignment today?  No chance at any point to return that phone call?  Achieving your goal means grabbing hold of these opportunities before they slip through your fingers.

To seize the moment, decide when and where you will take each action you want to take, in advance.  Again, be as specific as possible (e.g., “When it’s 3pm today, I’ll stop whatever I’m doing and work on that report.”) Studies show that this kind of planning will help your brain to detect and seize the opportunity when it arises, increasing your productivity by roughly 300%.

#3  Know Exactly How Far You Have Left To Go. Achieving any goal also requires honest and regular monitoring of your progress – if no one else is looking over your shoulder, then you’ll need to monitor yourself.  If you don’t know how well you are doing, you can’t adjust your behavior or your strategies accordingly.  Check your progress frequently – weekly, or even daily, depending on the goal.

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Fortunately, decades of research suggest that the belief in fixed ability is completely wrong – abilities of all kinds are profoundly malleable. Embracing the fact that you can change will allow you to make better choices, and reach your fullest potential.  People whose goals are about getting better, rather than being good, take difficulty in stride, and appreciate the journey as much as the destination.   And telling your employees that you expect them to make a few mistakes as they learn is, ironically, the surest way to elicit their very best performance.

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Heidi Grant Halvorson is a rising star in the field of motivational science.   She is an Expert Blogger for Fast Company, The Huffington Post, and Psychology Today, as well as a regular contributor to the BBC World Service’s Business Daily, the Harvard Business Review, and SmartBrief’s SmartBlog on Leadership. In addition to her work as author and co-editor of the highly-regarded academic book The Psychology of Goals (Guilford, 2009), she has authored papers in her field’s most prestigious journals, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, European Journal of Social Psychology, and Judgment and Decision Making. Her latest book is Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals, published by Hudson Street Press (2010), a member of the Penguin Group. She earned her Ph.D. at Columbia University. You are welcome to  contact her:  heidi.grant.halvorson@gmail.com.

 

Teresa Amabile: Profile of a cutting edge thought leader

Teresa Amabile

Long before almost anyone else, Teresa Amabile began to think about and write about creativity and innovation in business. Perhaps only her associates at Stanford, Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers, staked an earlier claim as pioneers in what has since become one of the most dynamic fields of research.

Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration and a Director of Research at Harvard Business School. Originally educated as a chemist, Teresa received her doctorate in psychology from Stanford University. She studies how everyday life inside organizations can influence people and their performance. Teresa’s research encompasses creativity, productivity, innovation, and inner work life – the confluence of emotions, perceptions, and motivation that people experience as they react to events at work.

Teresa’s most recent discoveries appear in her book, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. The book, based on research into nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from over 200 professionals inside organizations, illuminates how everyday events at work can impact employee engagement and creative productivity. Published in August 2011 by Harvard Business Review Press, the book is co-authored with Teresa’s husband and collaborator,Steven Kramer, a renowned expert on behavioral psychology.

Her other books include Creativity in Context and Growing Up Creative. Teresa has published over 100 scholarly articles and chapters, in outlets including top journals in psychology (such as Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and American Psychologist) and in management (Administrative Science Quarterly and Academy of Management Journal). She is also the author of The Work Preference Inventory and KEYS to Creativity and Innovation. Teresa has used insights from her research in working with various groups in business, government, and education, including Procter & Gamble, Novartis International AG, Motorola, IDEO, and the Creative Education Foundation. She has presented her theories, research results, and practical implications in dozens of forums, including the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Young Presidents’ Organization annual university, and the Front End of Innovation annual conference.

As an educator, Teresa strives to teach leaders and aspiring leaders ways in which they can simultaneously achieve their most passionate career aspirations, further the success of their organizations and employees, and serve the higher aims of the societies in which they work. At Harvard Business School, Teresa has taught MBA and executive courses on managing for creativity, leadership, and ethics. Previously, at Brandeis University, she taught social psychology, organizational psychology, the psychology of creativity, and statistics. She served as the host-instructor of the 26-part series, Against All Odds: Inside Statistics, originally broadcast on PBS.

For more about Teresa or The Progress Principle, please click here.

You can also watch a video (about four minutes in length) offering a portion of a rare interview during which Teresa Amabile discusses her latest book, The Progress Principle.  To watch the video, please click here.

 

 

Do you have the right leaders for your growth strategies?

It takes a mix of leaders and talent to pursue a variety of growth strategies simultaneously. Few executives can do it all. Here is an excerpt from another outstanding article featured online by McKinsey & Company’s Quarterly magazine, co-authored by Katharina Herrmann, Asmus Komm, and Sven Smit. To read the complete article, check out other resources, sign up for free email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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Source: Organization Practice

Is there a link between growth and specific leadership traits? We’ve tried to shed some light on this question by integrating two unique databases: McKinsey’s granular-growth database, with information on the growth performance of more than 700 companies, and a database created by the executive search firm Egon Zehnder International that contains performance appraisals of more than 100,000 senior executives (see sidebar, “Two unique performance databases”). The overlap between the two databases—a group of 5,560 executives¹ at 47 companies across a broad range of industries²—allowed us to examine in detail the relationship between leadership competencies and revenue growth. We found that leadership quality is critical to growth, that most companies don’t have enough high-quality executives, and that certain competencies are more important to some growth strategies than to others. Companies that know how they want to grow can use these insights to cultivate the right skills in top executives.

Great leaders are hard to find but vitally important

Excellent leaders are few and far between. Only 1 percent of the executives in our sample achieved an average competency score of 6 or 7 out of 7 (although excellence in a single competency was more frequent). Just an additional 10 percent had an above-average score of 5.

That’s a challenge for growth-oriented corporations because leaders with high competency scores appear to make a difference: for every competency we reviewed, executives at companies in the top quartile of revenue growth scored higher than their counterparts at companies in the bottom quartile

Similarly, companies where the top teams as a whole had excellent scores (that is, 6 or 7) on the various leadership competencies were also those with strong corporate revenue growth. On the other hand, we found no measurable correlation between revenue growth and teams with solid but unexceptional leadership. [Note: The correlation coefficient for top executive teams rated 6 or 7 and corporate revenue growth is up to 0.74 for individual competencies. For ratings of 5, the correlations are around 0.5; they fall to 0.01 for appraisals at the 3 or 4 levels.]Since such a small percentage of executives had above-average scores across all competencies, trying to jump-start growth by looking for great “all-rounders” is a risky bet. An alternative approach is for companies to cultivate specific competencies correlated with growth in their existing teams or to seek new talent with the needed skills.

Customer focus first

If your company is seeking a launching pad to improve performance, the analysis shows that one competency drives the greatest gains: delivering customer impact (defined as the capacity to understand customers’ evolving needs). Companies that had a critical mass of executives who got excellent (6 or 7) scores in this competency recorded superior growth consistently—both organically and through acquisitions.

What constitutes critical mass? Companies where at least 19 percent of the senior executives excelled at customer impact were also the most likely to achieve above-average revenue growth (in the top half of our database). For a company to be highly likely to have superior growth (the top quartile), 40 percent of its senior executives needed to be highly skilled in that area.⁴ So all of an organization’s leaders don’t need to be top flight at customer impact, but when a substantial number are, the impact on growth can be significant.

Tailor talent strategies to growth priorities

At most large companies, of course, there isn’t just one growth strategy. Rather, companies rely on a diversity of approaches that vary by business segment and by circumstance: at times executives might place more weight on acquisitions, while at others they focus on stealing share from competitors, for example. Our analysis shows that high growth rates for these different strategies are associated with excellence in a range of leadership skills wielded by managers at various levels of the organization.

Consider portfolio momentum growth, which flows from market growth across a company’s existing business segments. To drive this type of growth, senior managers beyond the top team typically need to execute a strategy effectively across often far-flung organizations. Senior managers at companies in the top quartile of this growth category were highly rated in competencies relating to dynamic people and organizational leadership: developing organizational capability, change leadership, and team leadership

By contrast, companies in the top quartile of M&A-driven revenue growth had top-leadership teams that excelled at a broad range of skills. The first is market insight—in other words, looking beyond a company’s current business landscape to discern future growth opportunities. That competency no doubt supports the identification of deals, while another competency crucial for M&A-driven growth—a well-honed orientation toward achieving results—helps in postmerger integration.

If your company pursues multiple growth strategies, the talent bar is even higher. Our study shows that the average skill level of top teams at companies with a dual-growth strategy—defined as top-quartile performance in two of the three strategies (portfolio momentum, stealing share from competitors, or growth through acquisition)—was almost one and a half times that of their single-growth-strategy counterparts on key competencies.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Katharina Herrmann is an associate principal in McKinsey’s Berlin office, Asmus Komm is a principal in the Hamburg office, and Sven Smit is a director in the Amsterdam office.

The authors would like to acknowledge their collaboration with Stephen P. Kelner and Magnus Graf Lambsdorff of Egon Zehnder International on the research and writing of this article, as well as the contributions of Verena Renze-Westendorf, also of Egon Zehnder International.

 

Lessons to be learned from Steve Jobs

Josh Linkner

Everyone seems to have lots of opinions about Steve Jobs. I never met him or worked for him. I’ve seen videos of him, notably his commencement address at Stanford. Also,  I know people who knew him and worked for him. Among my friends are those who have written books and articles about him. It would be presumptuous of me, however, to suggest what lessons can be learned from him. There are others who are well-qualified to do so. Josh Linkner is a case in point. The author of Disciplined Dreaming, he is also the CEO and Managing Partner of Detroit Venture Partners and the Founder, Chairman and former CEO of ePrize.

Here’s what Josh thinks about his friend, Steve Jobs:

He’s been called the modern day Thomas Edison, the Beethoven of business, and the most prolific visionary since Henry Ford.  Yet as Steve Jobs steps down from the helm of Apple, he has left us with so much more than incredible technology.

Jobs completely transformed the industries of personal computing, digital animation (Pixar), music, mobile phones, and now tablets.  He created the most valuable company in the world and impacted the way billions of people live their daily lives.  But beyond his accomplishments, he’s taught us lessons in leadership and life.  The characteristics he embodied can serve as a roadmap for us all to become better in business, community, family, and personal achievement.

For all us kids from 1 to 92, Steve’s guiding principles can help us live our best life and make the biggest difference:

1) Put Passion First – He followed his heart and let the operational details fall into place.  He refused to put a governor on his burning desire to reach new heights.

2) Never Limit Your Imagination – He always imagined the ideal solution or product and never cut corners or watered down his most potent ideas due to setbacks or fear.

3) Pursue Greatness over Money – Steve didn’t chase the mighty dollar.  Rather, he focused on making the biggest possible impact and the money followed.

4) Demand Excellence – Critics complain of his exacting style and “unrealistic” demands.  There’s a natural gravitational force of mediocrity, and sometimes it takes an aggressive stance to rise above the sea of sameness.

5) Put Yourself Out of Business – Steve was never satisfied, and constantly strove to be the force of disruptive change that would make the Steve of six months ago irrelevant.  Never clinging to past successes, he maintained intense urgency around continuous reinvention.

6) Challenge Conventional Wisdom – When there were norms, he lived to shatter them.  Nearly every step of his success can be traced to inspired thinking that stuck his finger in the eye of the complacent incumbents.

7) Simplify – ‘Nuff said.

8) Ignore the Naysayers – If he listened to the “sound advice” of others, we’d never even know his name.  He never let the fear of others interfere with his own trajectory.

9) Persist – While today he sits victorious, there were many times he nearly lost it all.  There were dark days at Apple, Pixar, and even in his personal life.  Where others throw in the towel, Steve stared into the abyss and never accepted defeat.

10) Never Pigeonhole – Steve wasn’t a “computer executive.”  He was a visionary change agent and could not be constrained. He realized his calling was far beyond any categorical label.

11) Push Beyond What You Think is Possible – When Steve heard “that can’t be done”, it only emboldened his resolve.  He constantly drove himself and others to reach new heights.

Whether you’re building a tech startup, raising three kids or running a soup kitchen, these indelible philosophies serve as a roadmap to success.  While you may organize your thoughts on your MacBook, communicate with your team on your iPhone, and later jam some tunes on your iPod, the impact of Steve Jobs is far greater than the devices he’s provided.  Rather, he’s given us a model to reach our full potential.

Steve famously said he wanted to “put a ding in the universe.”  You have done that, my friend, and so much more.  The impact you’ve made is immeasurable, and has inspired a generation to “think different.”  Thank you for taking the path less traveled, for conquering the never-been-done, and for leading with purpose.  Thank you for changing the world.

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Josh Linkner is the New York Times bestselling author of Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity, named one of the top ten business books of 2011. He is the CEO and Managing Partner of Detroit Venture Partners, a venture capital firm helping to rebuild urban areas through technology and entrepreneurship. Josh is the Founder, Chairman and former CEO of ePrize, the largest interactive promotion agency in the world providing digital marketing services for 74 of the top 100 brands. Prior to ePrize, Josh was the founder and CEO of three other successful technology companies.  Josh’s writings are published frequently by Fast Company and Forbes and he’s been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Inc. Magazine, USA Today, and on CNBC. Josh is also a professional-level jazz guitarist performing regularly in jazz clubs throughout the United States.

Most importantly, Josh in on a mission to make the world more creative.

For more information on creativity, please visit his website by clicking here. “In addition to my blog, you’ll find free videos, quizzes, articles, eBooks and more to help fuel your creative fire! “