Imagine starting a business with the intent to fail. That sounds ludicrous but yet that’s what many entrepreneurs end up doing and it’s due to poor planning. There’s the old expression, if you fail to plan you plan to fail.
A business is meant to grow and thrive not merely to survive. In this way a business is like a living entity the same as a human being. Yes the first order of business is survival, but survival is not the ultimate goal. Once we’ve reached a certain stable phase in our life and business, survival should no longer be a concern.
Beyond Survival
After survival the leader and the business must grow, innovate and create in order to reach their full potential. The workplace provides a great platform for personal growth and development because we’re able to use all our capacities every day.
For the leader this means transformation from being in control and a doer of many things, to a strategic planner and developer of people and resources. Without going through this transformation the leader and the organization is doomed to be stuck in routine and lack risk-taking, which ultimately leads to regression rather than progression.
The Importance of Vision
The business leader who fails to create a vision for the future and for himself risks to create an organization of mindless people who act like machines and ultimately become resistant to change and are demotivated. In the present world of fierce global competition this is a recipe for disaster.
Use the Three Intelligences
It is important for leaders to evolve in their way of thinking and not just in their technical knowledge related to their field, but also in the way they plan and make decisions. This means developing their intellectual or thinking intelligence, their heart of emotional intelligence and also their instinctive intelligence. The key is to use all three in balance. The head likes to think and plan, the heart likes to feel and the instinct likes to act. By becoming balanced, the leader uses his head to strategize, his heart to be effective with people and his instincts to take focused action.
Succession Plan
Government officials and business consultants have for many years now been predicting a crisis in business succession due to the baby boomers business owners who were nearing or have surpassed retirement age.
However, I just read that most entrepreneurs are not concerned about having a succession plan. It’s only when illness strikes that they are forced to take action and make decisions on who will succeed. This may turn out to be too late for many businesses. The saving grace may be that there are currently many buyers looking for business opportunities and selling the business due to illness might be the way out. This does not mean that the business owner will get the right price for their business, since lacking a plan for succession could mean that there’s a poor management system in place and that the business is highly dependent on the business owner. This would lower the perceived value of the business.
I have a friend whose father is well into his 90s and still running his business even though his capacities are deteriorating. He can no longer make proper decisions in a timely manner and has become a detriment to the business. The problem is he cannot let go and never learned to delegate. The fear of giving up control and developing others through delegation could have been addressed years ago through personal and leadership development and a change of perception and attitude. This would have ensured the health of the business.
Business growth and success can be defined in many ways. Each business owner must express that for themselves but one thing is clear, just like a human being a business or organization needs to evolve. This means the development and growth of people and the transformation of the leader’s role to one of mentor and coach.
Interview with Fred Rosenzveig, president of Mindrange, the Institute for Thinking Development and an instructor at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University.
Stephen Goldberg: What do you teach at the John Molson School of Business?
Fred Rosenzveig: I teach in the area of creative thinking and innovation as it relates to strategy, product development, and process improvement.
Stephen Goldberg: What is lateral thinking?
Fred Rosenzveig: Lateral thinking actually made its appearance in the Oxford dictionary in the 1980s, and it was defined there as coming up with unusual solutions or ideas using a process that would normally be ignored by the logical mind. Also approaching things differently from a logical perspective through using various techniques. And it leads to those ideas, which are obvious only after they’ve been thought of.
Stephen Goldberg: Is there a difference between lateral and creative thinking?
Fred Rosenzveig: It’s basically one type of creative thinking or another major thinking process, which is to get away from whatever your usual thought pattern is and develop a brand-new one.
Stephen Goldberg: What are the steps to becoming a creative thinking company?
Fred Rosenzveig: To start you have to look at three basic things that makes a company creative. First is expertise in the area you’re working in. So if you’re working for a Google or an Apple or a Microsoft, you have a lot of people who are expert at computing, engineering, programming and all that kind of stuff. Whatever you bring to the table is that expertise, so obviously the more expertise you have in an area the more depth you can go in your creative thinking.
The second thing you need is an attitude and a motivation. If the attitude isn’t there of encouraging creativity, removing bureaucracy that gets in the way where you need multiple sign offs and there’s multiple layers, or getting permission to work on things that seem promising.
The last thing is creative thinking skills. You see the problem with expertise is it trains creative thinking out of you. By the time you’re a PhD in chemistry or engineering or computer science or something, you’re hired for that skill, but believe me the creative thinking is trained out of you. You’re trained to build something that is going to work, that won’t fall down, so creative thinking skills has to be brought back in.
Stephen Goldberg: What are the creative thinking skills or processes that you teach?
Fred Rosenzveig: I focus on a conceptual toolset that I call software for the mind that is very simple, very easy to use that helps people enlarge what they take in so they’re not in dreaded tunnel vision and they think more broadly. And also change the way they think, which is the creative side of things. So it’s taking more in and thinking more broadly and looking beyond your field, your company and whatever area you’re in. And then there’s thinking differently and there’s techniques and training that will help you do that. If you think of creativity as a funnel, you need the widest possible input to get the best outputs. So thinking more creatively more broadly we train people to develop the ability to generate as many ideas as possible and then there’s a process of harvesting those ideas.
I believe in targeted and focus brainstorming, which brings the rigour of the logical mind together with the creative. I teach brainstorming from a whole variety of angles so you’re going from one perspective of the situation to another and then another so you get almost a three dimensional view of the situation rather than just a single view with a whole bunch of ideas. I have something I call the ABCDE process. I call it that because it’s fairly easy to remember the first five letters of the alphabet. You start with the aim, you then go broad and that’s where the creative thinking is, where you take in all the information data and perspectives you can. And then you go to the C stage which is to contract, which is basically to boil things down to a plan, an idea, and an initial concept, something you want to take further. Then you go to the D stage, which is to take action or develop it further. The E stage is to evaluate how what you developed matches your aim from the A stage. If it doesn’t match that well, like the Montréal Olympic stadium where they aimed to have a modern classic world class monument for the ages, but they found out the roof didn’t pass the first winter despite a cost of $1 billion. So they had to go back to the B stage again and figure out what factors did were left out; oh yes winter, and rethink that and take it through the process.
Stephen Goldberg: That’s what’s nice, you could always go back and rework it if the result doesn’t meet your aim rather than abandoning it.
Fred Rosenzveig: Yes, it’s a continuously cycling process. So you could take any element and go broader with it and then contract and boil it down and develop that idea further and just do it if you decide it’ll work.
Stephen Goldberg: What are the benefits of becoming a more creative organization and of applying some of the techniques of creative thinking?
Fred Rosenzveig: There is huge ROI for creativity and I measure that with organizations I work with in three ways. One way is that you’re able to do things better, more quickly, and more profitably than the way you’ve always done. The second thing is doing things completely differently, something totally new. That can be called disruptive creativity.
I worked with one major confectionery company, Mars, and I worked with the Senior Plant manager at a totally modern completely upgraded plant. They were meeting using these Mindrange tools for creative thinking for 15 minutes every morning before the plant opened. They found all kinds of ways to reuse and redo things like reducing scrap and looking at every single process. This saved them over $2 million in the first quarter that they started those meetings. So that really paid off for them.
In terms of brand-new ideas I worked with one of the major lottery companies in Canada, Atlantic lottery company serving the four Maritime provinces and they had some problems. They were afraid one of their biggest provinces would defect with 60% of the revenues and go off on their own. They looked at new ideas and one of the things they developed using these Mindrange tools and a team from IBM as well to do the tech part was the first absolutely online provincial lottery where you could buy every single product including lotto 649 and the big jackpot products with a lot of social controls. So the problem gamblers, people who gamble too much and minors couldn’t play. And the dealers and concessions for this could still get their cut and so forth. Also they could sell that idea or system to any other province or state because they don’t compete geographically. So instead of just developing a new lottery game for their own market they have something that they can sell around the world.
Stephen Goldberg: Anything else you’d like to add about creative thinking that would be of value to our listeners?
Fred Rosenzveig: I think it’s important that once you allow creativity in an organization I think it is very empowering to people. They like working in those kind of organizations and you’re going to attract like Google does, like Apple does, like some of these tech start-ups do, very engaged and highly motivated people, particularly younger people who don’t want to do things the old way. Also creativity is fun and you can be very humorous and lighthearted. When we do programs for three or four days people come out more energized rather than drained and that’s terrific. Einstein said something very interesting about creativity. He said creativity is catchy or infectious, pass it on. So indeed it’s a good bug to catch.
Imagine starting a business with the intent to fail. That sounds ludicrous but yet that’s what many entrepreneurs end up doing and it’s due to poor planning. There’s the old expression, if you fail to plan you plan to fail.
The business leader who fails to create a vision for the future and for himself risks to create an organization of mindless people who act like machines and ultimately become resistant to change and are demotivated. In the present world of fierce global competition this is a recipe for disaster.
It is important for leaders to evolve in their way of thinking and not just in their technical knowledge related to their field, but also in the way they plan and make decisions. This means developing their intellectual or thinking intelligence, their heart of emotional intelligence and also their instinctive intelligence. The key is to use all three in balance. The head likes to think and plan, the heart likes to feel and the instinct likes to act. By becoming balanced, the leader uses his head to strategize, his heart to be effective with people and his instincts to take focused action.
However, I just read that most entrepreneurs are not concerned about having a succession plan. It’s only when illness strikes that they are forced to take action and make decisions on who will succeed. This may turn out to be too late for many businesses. The saving grace may be that there are currently many buyers looking for business opportunities and selling the business due to illness might be the way out. This does not mean that the business owner will get the right price for their business, since lacking a plan for succession could mean that there’s a poor management system in place and that the business is highly dependent on the business owner. This would lower the perceived value of the business.