6 Strategies to Maximize Creative Thinking in Your Business Role

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Extractive summaries and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Since September 2017 | Week 333 | January 26-Feb 1, 2024

Entrepreneurship Section | 1

6 Strategies to Maximize Creative Thinking in Your Business Role

By Martin Zwilling | Inc Magazine | January 25, 2024

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Most aspiring new venture owners believe their initial idea and inspiration require the most important creative thinking. Experienced business professionals will tell you that the initial idea is the easy part, and it’s the later implementation and the competitive business marketing that are the real creative challenges.

There is a tough balance here to achieve, since a large portion of starting and running a business requires analytical, logical thinking. Based on Michael Michalko’s classic book Creative Thinkering, which applies to business as well as personal environments the following 6 recommendations on how to nurture and build your creative business capabilities and results are:

1. Look for familiar patterns in unrelated subjects.  Because of learned habits and routines, new ideas default to be similar to old ones. Creative thinkers get results by combining dissimilar subjects, like investors and competitors. 
2. Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.  Stereotyped notions block clear vision and crowd out imagination. Sometimes it’s helpful to imagine contradictory approaches, or work with opposites. Many businesses have found that raising the price of a product to give it status can win more customers than a price war. 
3. Think the unthinkable.  We all need ways to unstructure our imaginations to explore the outer limits of alternatives so that we can go beyond the typical solutions. In business, this may be as simple as replacing a product line that is still profitable, or a new venture making a takeover bid for a large company. 
4. Intention is the seed of creative thinking. Intention has a way of bringing to our awareness those things that our brains deem important. One way to prime for creativity is to generate an awareness of what you want to accomplish. 
5. Change the way you speak, and you change the way you think.  Many business professionals focus on deficiencies and phrase their thoughts and ideas with negatives, such as no, never, and don’t. Make a conscious decision to become a positive-thinking person by creating positive speaking patterns. Ten customer referrals are better than “no complaints.” 
6. You become what you pretend to be. Attitudes influence behavior, but behavior also influences attitudes. Reality has often been shown to conform to beliefs, whether they be positive or negative. In business on the internet today, it’s easier than ever to pretend to be a large and mature company, and successful new ventures don’t have to pretend for long.

3 key takeaways from the article

1. Most aspiring new venture owners believe their initial idea and inspiration require the most important creative thinking. Experienced business professionals will tell you that the initial idea is the easy part, and it’s the later implementation and the competitive business marketing that are the real creative challenges.
2. There is a tough balance here to achieve, since a large portion of starting and running a business requires analytical, logical thinking. 
3. Based on Michael Michalko’s classic book Creative Thinkering, which applies to business as well as personal environments  6 recommendations on how to nurture and build your creative business capabilities and results are: look for familiar patterns in unrelated subjects, Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change, Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change, Think the unthinkable, Intention is the seed of creative thinking, Change the way you speak, and you change the way you think.  And you become what you pretend to be.

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Topics:  Entrepreneurship, Creative Thinking, Strategy