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Kansas City Star - Creative thinking can pay off if ideas are shared

Creative thinking can pay off if ideas are shared

By DIANE STAFFORD
Columnist
July 30, 2002

Ideas need to be shared. A half-baked daydream can blossom into a business success story if the right people learn about it.

Unfortunately, says Charles Thompson, president of the Creative Management Group, many organizations aren't set up so that workers feel welcome to share ideas. At too many work sites, the suggestion box is effectively padlocked.

Thompson, a product developer or creative consultant to such major corporations as Johnson & Johnson, Gore-Tex, Walt Disney, DuPont, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard and Coca-Cola, encourages time out for daydreaming and dream sharing.

In fact, he says, GE, which often sets workplace trends, has begun advocating "Take Five" -- five minutes a day set aside specifically to think about GE's future.

In recent remarks at an Institute for Management Studies session in Prairie Village, the widely traveled Thompson cited examples of global business leaders who have their own idea-generating disciplines.

He told of Yoshiro Nakamatsu, a Japanese inventor who holds more patents than anyone, including some for the floppy diskette, the CD player and the digital watch.

"I swim underwater every morning holding my breath. Then I write my ideas down on a Plexiglas tablet," Nakamatsu said.

Nakamatsu's ideas might have washed away on the pool deck, except that every day he shared them with several dozen members of his management team, who sent them rippling throughout his organization.

The most successful business leaders, Thompson said, encourage creative thinking and sharing. They lead organizations where workers are encouraged to offer suggestions and innovations.

The fast pace of daily business is robbing time to think, Thompson said, seeing irony in this quote from author Gary Hamel: "In this new world of Knowledge Workers, there is no time left to think."

Thompson also likes the observation of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr: "Innovation comes when the wrong things are used in the wrong way at the wrong time by the right people."

The "right people," Thompson said, are curious. They want to know why things are the way they are and how they could be different. They see solutions in opposites, they perceive business competition from new players in the field, they keep asking questions when more complacent people quietly accept current answers.

Thompson is a fan of idea-sharing software offered by a British company. The "Idea Central" product offered at www.imaginatik.com allows corporate users to post ideas and share them internally with co-workers.

Any organization that isn't aggressively sharing ideas will lose out to competitors that are, Thompson warned. According to Hamel's "law of innovation," it takes 1,000 ideas to generate 100 experiments that create 10 funded projects that end in one business success.

Thompson's suggestion for creativity-starved organizations: Ask all workers to take five minutes a day to project five years into the future and share their thoughts with five other persons.