Want More Creativity?

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Business owners often talk about the desire to bring more creativity to their company and their personal life.  Creativity certainly will have different meaning for each person, however, a common denominator in a business context is coming up with creative solutions for your customers or processes.

How does someone unlock creativity?  Is there a way to increase the likelihood of getting your creativity quotient higher?

I recently read an article that quoted Deanna Berg and Chuck Dymer, who have been speakers at various Vistage events, on ways to unlock creativity.  Here are a few tips.

Business Creativity

  • Brainstorm session with your team where the session has the following principles.
    • Defer judgement…criticism derails creativity.
    • Freewheeling…no idea is a bad one.
    • Quantity not quality…get the ideas out there.
    • Speed is important…impose a time limit on the session.

Personal Creativity

  • Consider the following for personal creativity boost.
    • Change a habit…change the time you work out.
    • Experiment with something new…. learn a new hobby.
    • Find a new path…. take a different route to work.
    • Change an attitude…. take something that annoys you and change your attitude about it.

Carve out time on a regular basis to get creative.  It can be the best time spent to build your business.

Here’s how taking time for creativity can propel your business to new levels!

Mike

What Drives Innovation?

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We hear a lot about how companies need to innovate to stay relevant in their market.  Innovation can have a different meaning for each of us, however, it is helpful to understand what is the characteristics that can cause a leader to have the “innovation gene”.  Researchers at the Harvard Business School (Gregersen and Christensen) surveyed over 3,000 executives who had not started a business vs. responses from over 500 people who had created thriving companies.

What are the characteristics of an innovator?

  • They ask a lot of questions and challenge the status quo
  • Spend at least 15 minutes writing down what questions would challenge the current state of the company
  • Study other people and cultures.  Live in another country for a period.
  • Be an observer.  Watching how people do their activities, however mundane can inspire ideas to improve the activity.
  • They network well to connect themselves to resources that will test their ideas and get feedback.

What’s your innovation DNA?  While some of it is hard wired in people and others must work at it intentionally.  However, knowing what concepts could help you down this road can be half the battle to win the war of innovation for your company.

Here’s to innovating!

Mike

How To Avoid “Death By Meeting”

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Have you ever been in a meeting that went on and on and on with no clear action and nothing done differently afterwards? I know I have, and this common experience is the premise of the book Death By Meeting by Patrick Lencioni.

Lencioni suggests that meetings should not last any longer than 30 minutes.  As Parkinson’s Law indicates, work expands to fill the time available, so if you don’t set a limit to the meeting, it can drone on way too long.  And especially these days, now that Zoom meetings are the norm rather than the exception, we need to keep meetings short and to the point so we can all get away from our webcams.

Why 30 minutes?  I have not found a scientific study to explain why; however, for me personally, I see a higher level of intensity by participants because they know 30 minutes is the limit.  It seems people listen more intently when things move faster and we are engaged.  People tend to come prepared and are ready to get started on time.  (And if not, they will the next time!)

Try implementing these three tactics to make your 30-minute meeting more powerful:

  1. Tell everyone to read any materials before the meeting. Ask the important question: “What outcome do we want?”
  2. Decide on the one thing to focus on in the meeting that will make a difference and stay on it for the 30 minutes.
  3. It’s what happens after the meeting that will tell you if the meeting was good or not. Take action with a summary and clarity on the action steps and accountability.

Try some of these tips for your next (30-minute) meeting and let us know how it goes!  We’d love to hear your feedback at mike@trilliumfinancial.com.