Brilliant Business Creativity

With budgets being cut and competition fierce, thinking creatively in business has never been so important. Brilliant Business Creativity is an entertaining guide to one of the most important business topics today. A hands-on skills set book, you’ll discover all the techniques you need to be creative. It highlights how creativity is taking shape in the business world and approaches the topic from both a macro and micro level; how you can get your organisation to be more creative, and how you can be creative yourself. It’s an ideal first step into the world of creativity for all those who thought creativity belonged to a creative elite – the reality is that everyone is creative. BRILLIANT FEATURES: • Lessons in finding inspiration. • The ten most creative things that have ever happened in business. • The ten most creative products in business. • How to think, act and talk creatively. Nominated for CMI Management Book of the Year 2010 in the Innovation & Entrepreneurship category

Discover the powerful techniques that unlocks your creativity and spark new ideas, which will ultimately lead you to continuous business success. Do you label yourself as “just a numbers person”? Do you pigeonhole your capabilities to merely that of an analyst or other “non-artist”? Stop feeding yourself these lies and learn how even you can tap into the creative genius driving Silicon Valley’s success stories and begin brainstorming innovation solutions to your company’s challenges. Using his CreativityWorks framework, creativity and innovation expert Bernhard Schroeder explains how to break out of your self-imposed mental box, reignite natural curiosity, and move step by step through a set of exercises that help individuals and teams. In Simply Brilliant, you will learn how to: Fuel creativity through tight deadlines; Create more ideas in brainstorming sessions; Radically improve products; Find inspired solutions using tools such as IdeaGen, SCAMPER, Tempero, and the Phoenix List; Let go of the “I’m not creative” mindset; And open the door to imagination and limitless opportunity! Even a “numbers person” like you can capture markets with your company’s next innovative idea.

In a book poised to become the bible of innovation, a renowned creativity expert reveals the key to the creative process-"borrowing". As a former aerospace scientist, Fortune 500 executive, chief innovation officer, inventor, and software entrepreneur, David Kord Murray has made a living by coming up with innovative ideas. In Borrowing Brilliance he shows readers how new ideas are merely the combination of existing ones by presenting a simple six-step process that anyone can use to build business innovation: ?Defining-Define the problem you're trying to solve. ?Borrowing-Borrow ideas from places with a similar problem. ?Combining-Connect and combine these borrowed ideas. ?Incubating-Allow the combinations to incubate into a solution. ?Judging-Identify the strength and weakness of the solution. ?Enhancing-Eliminate weak points while enhancing strong ones. Each chapter features real-life examples of brilliant borrowers, including profiles of Larry Page and Sergey Brin (the Google guys), George Lucas, Steve Jobs, and other creative thinkers. Murray used these methods to re-create his own career and he shows readers how to harness them to find creative solutions.

The co-founder and longtime president of Pixar updates and expands his 2014 New York Times bestseller on creative leadership, reflecting on the management principles that built Pixar’s singularly successful culture, and on all he learned during the past nine years that allowed Pixar to retain its creative culture while continuing to evolve. “Might be the most thoughtful management book ever.”—Fast Company For nearly thirty years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such beloved films as the Toy Story trilogy, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner eighteen Academy Awards. The joyous storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Here, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar so widely admired—and so profitable. As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the first computer-animated movie. He nurtured that dream as a Ph.D. student, and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movie’s success—and in the twenty-five movies that followed—was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar, based on philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention, such as: • Give a good idea to a mediocre team and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team and they will either fix it or come up with something better. • It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It’s the manager’s job to make it safe for others to take them. • The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them. • A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody. Creativity, Inc. has been significantly expanded to illuminate the continuing development of the unique culture at Pixar. It features a new introduction, two entirely new chapters, four new chapter postscripts, and changes and updates throughout. Pursuing excellence isn’t a one-off assignment but an ongoing, day-in, day-out, full-time job. And Creativity, Inc. explores how it is done.

When BIC, manufacturer of disposable ballpoint pens, wanted to grow, it looked for an idea beyond introducing new sizes and ink colors. Someone suggested lighters. LIGHTERS? With an idea that seemed crazy at first, that bright executive, instead of seeing BIC as a pen company—a business in the PEN “box”—figured out that there was growth to be found in the DISPOSABLE “box.” And he was right. Now there are disposable BIC lighters, razors, even phones. The company opened its door to a host of opportunities. IT INVENTED A NEW BOX. Your business can, too. And simply thinking “out of the box” is not the answer. True ingenuity needs structure, hard analysis, and bold brainstorming. It needs to start THINKING IN NEW BOXES —a revolutionary process for sustainable creativity from two strategic innovation experts from The Boston Consulting Group (BCG). To make sense of the world, we all rely on assumptions, on models—on what Luc de Brabandere and Alan Iny call “boxes.” If we are unaware of our boxes, they can blind us to risks and opportunities. This innovative book challenges everything you thought you knew about business creativity by breaking creativity down into five steps: • Doubt everything. Challenge your current perspectives. • Probe the possible. Explore options around you. • Diverge. Generate many new and exciting ideas, even if they seem absurd. • Converge. Evaluate and select the ideas that will drive breakthrough results. • Reevaluate. Relentlessly. No idea is a good idea forever. And did we mention Reevaluate? Relentlessly. Creativity is paramount if you are to thrive in a time of accelerating change. Replete with practical and potent creativity tools, and featuring fascinating case studies from BIC to Ford to Trader Joe’s, Thinking in New Boxes will help you and your company overcome missed opportunities and stay ahead of the curve. This book isn’t a simpleminded checklist. This is Thinking in New Boxes. And it will be fun. (We promise.) Praise for Thinking in New Boxes “Excellent . . . While focusing on business creativity, the principles in this book apply anywhere change is needed and will be of interest to anyone seeking to reinvent herself.”—Blogcritics “Thinking in New Boxes is a five-step guide that leverages the authors’ deep understanding of human nature to enable readers to overcome their limitations and both imagine and create their own futures. This book is a must-read for people living and working in today’s competitive environment.”—Ray O. Johnson, Ph.D., chief technology officer, Lockheed Martin “Thinking In New Boxes discusses what I believe to be one of the fundamental shifts all companies/brands need to be thinking about: how to think creatively, in order to innovate and differentiate our brands. We need to thrive and lead in a world of accelerating change and this book challenges us to even greater creativity in our thinking. One of the best business books I’ve read in a long time.”—Jennifer Fox, CEO, Fairmont Hotels & Resorts “As impressive as teaching new tricks to old dogs, Thinking in New Boxes is both inspirational and practical—a comprehensive, step-by-step guide to sharpening one’s wits in order to harness creativity in the workplace.”—Peter Gelb, general manager, Metropolitan Opera

"Brilliant Business Ideas" is a manual for learning extremely powerful techniques that enable readers to come up with new business ideas in minutes and use their newfound creativity to become a better manager or boss.

In an economy that is more competitive than ever, what gives you the edge you need to stand out? You can try to out-spend your competitors, but unless you have the scale and deep pockets of an enormous corporation, that's a game you can't win. What you can do is out-think the competition. Creativity is something that many people mistakenly ascribe only to designers, photographers, writers, etc. This book will help reignite the natural creative, imaginative faculty that we're all born with but which many have not used since they were a preschooler. Coupled with your knowledge and experience, this is the key to developing the innovative ideas and strategies that will allow you to thrive. Knowledge + Experience + Imagination = Big Wins In reality, we are all self-employed regardless of who signs the checks. Written with the small business owner in mind, 101 Freaking Brilliant Business Ideas will also help C-Level Executives, Directors and Managers. It will even help those who are currently only in charge of their own cubicle but aspire to bigger and better.