Appearances Can Be Deceptive!

Analysis. The human mind is very simple. It zeros in on the obvious. The guy whose drawer is in a mess is seen as having a disorganized pattern of thinking too. This is as crude as it can get.

You’ve Been Framed!

Years of conditioning and training can lead to a freezing of frames. These frames help us to simplify the world but the danger lies in oversimplification and holding on to frames after they are no longer relevant. Albert Einstein admonished his colleagues, “Make it as simple as possible but no simpler.”

How to purposefully increase your natural creativity!

There are three different kinds of creative responses. Which is yours?

Time to Change YOUR Leaves?

Fall is one of my favorite times of year—the temp starts dropping, the air gets crisp, the trees put on a glorious display of color—I love it! I also think it’s a great time to drop what’s not working for you. If trees can let go of every leaf, why can’t we let go of what no longer serves us?

Top 10 Tips for Being UNcreative

It’s easy to be creative. Think out of the box! But have you imagined how difficult it must be to be UNcreative?

Paradox: The Heart of Creativity!

One of the most brilliant displays of paradoxical thinking is by scientist Faraday in the 1830’s. He had observed that a current of electricity passingthrough a wire could have the effect of causing the magnetized needle of a compass to deflect, that is, move in a rotational direction when a compass was located close to the wire. This was the basis of his invention of the electric motor.

Avoiding Death by PowerPoint!

I must say that I am equally fed up of the numerous ‘rules for making presentations’ that we stumble across every few days either in a presentation or on the net. When you google ‘rules for making presentations’, you get more than 8 million results! Most of them are standard clichés that irk me no end. So I have created my own set of presentation rules. I follow my rules to the last detail and I have rarely been disappointed. I implore you, urge you and beg you to follow my rules as well.

From Best Practice to Next Practice

What on earth are ‘Business Burps’ you may be asking? It was a phrase I thought of whilst … burping. Can you remember as a child when you first let out a burp after gulping a fizzy drink? Wasn’t it a bit exciting (as well as a little bit rude)? Weren’t your parents just a tiny bit embarrassed?

The bipolar vision

The paradox is at the heart of all things. The opposites necessarily coexist. The back of the hand and the front of the hand are dependent on each other for their existence. You can’t have one without the other.

Serendipity is not an accident.

Let us first see what stops us from making happy discoveries. We have been conditioned to see what we expect. Our preconceptions creep into whatever we come across. We don’t see things as they are but as we expect them to be.

Secondly, we force our preconceptions into whatever we do and want a task to go along predetermined lines. Too obsessed with how things should be, we don’t recognize lucky turns of events and new possibilities.

Reframing a situation for creative ideas

A very old Chinese Taoist story describes a farmer in a poor country village. He owned a horse which he used for plowing and for transportation.

Myths about creativity

Creativity has long been looked upon as an activity behind the closet. No wonder many myths have developed around the creative process. Not to be left behind, there are many myth busters out there as well!

16 habits of highly creative people

Many people believe that creativity is inborn and only a chosen few are creative. While it is true that creativity is inborn, it is not true that only a chosen few are creative.

Thinking Clearly

One of the wonders of the world is that obviously intelligent people make elementary but serious errors in thinking. I happened to meet a friend of mine, a successful banker in California who had migrated from India to the US more than a decade ago. He was talking about violence in India and gave that as one reason for his disappointment with his home country.

15 elephant tethers that stop you from being creative!

As you grow up and gain experience, you absorb assumptions which then drive your life and limit your choices. You can break away from them with a simple tug if you want to but you don’t. As you acquire more and more experience, your repertoire of blind assumptions grows too, correspondingly limiting your choices. Your experience becomes a hindrance in your being creative.

Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity

In this funny, personal and motivating talk, Elizabeth Gilbert shares on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses — and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person “being” a genius, all of us “have” a genius.

If Excellence Is Your Ideal Everything Else Will Fall Into Place

A young man went to Gautama Buddha and sought the Master’s guidance on how to achieve Enlightenment. The conversation, which in my opinion must be required reading for anyone, went roughly as follows:
Young Man (YM): Master, how long will it take for me to achieve enlightenment?
Gautama Buddha (GB): It all depends on you.
YM: [...]

E = MC2? All Einstein Challengers….Welcome Aboard!

For generations great thinkers have been asking us to take the road less traveled. Any and every successful biography will tell us not to be afraid to take a stand, not to walk among the masses, to stick out our heads without the fear of being hit by rotten tomatoes. At the same time, [...]

3 keys to unbranding…and why I changed my twitter name

In my commitment to live bolder, truer, Me’er, I’ve got to be clear that I am not “a brand.” (Yep, that’s rather strange for a “branding expert” to say.) I earn my living by teaching about what I live. And it never fails that the more transparent I am, the more useful I seem to [...]

Creativity: The Secret Weapon of Every Successful Entrepreneur

Your creative powers are infinite. Yup…think about it. You come from the same source as all of nature around you. Look at fruit trees. How do you think those fruit push themselves up the trunk, through the branches and then hang themselves like beautiful ornaments in just the right place? Well [...]

When Does The Idea Fairy Like To Visit You?

Richard Bach, author of the metaphysical classics, Jonathon Livingston Seagull and Bridge Across Forever, noticed that the Idea Fairy came to him when he was gardening, or flying in a plane. That’s when he would get his story line ideas and life solutions.
Call it what you want: the zone, the flow, the magical gap, the [...]

Getting To Know You

I was in awe when my friend Rebeka showed me her work. Abstract shapes were exquisitely worked in untamed patterns and fused with breathtaking hues. Her painting was amazingly beautiful, but absolutely surprising to me. Why, you might ask. Well, it was her first attempt at painting. She started barely three months ago – [...]

Stuck for an idea? Try this.

When was the last time you were stuck for an idea? It happens with everyone, but the trick is not to remain stuck for long. What if you had a magic wand and you could come up with ideas about anything at will? How would it change your life? This article lists down some of [...]

Thinking creatively

Based on an experiment that was carried out in the US, I tried this with my trainees, relatives and friends – all Indians.
Here is the experiment.
Find out the odd one out in the following:
A cow, a stack of hay and a pig.
Most people point out that the pig is the odd one.
Westerners tend to point [...]

AR Rahman and multiple order thinking

I practice a kind of thinking called multiple order thinking. This means that I try to go beyond the obvious and the apparent. At first I try and get into the second order thinking where one can grasp what lies beneath. In the third order I try to get at the underlying concepts of deeper [...]

Solutions? No problem.

Traffic authorities in a city faced a problem typical of any busy city – a street choc-a-bloc with vehicles, bumper-to-bumper in ordinary parlance. It is evening time and harried office goers are returning home. Suddenly a pedestrian darts across the road, a car driver instantly swerves to the adjacent lane upsetting the car in that [...]

Forcing yourself to get up early in the morning is pointless!

So here are 10 points about why you should stay up late and still not feel bad when you come across another article by the self-help gurus who preach getting up early in the morning!

Smoking a cigarette is like talking to your mother-in-law because…

Once upon a time, many years ago, in prehistoric times, at a time when there were no cities, no buildings and perhaps even no villages, there was a hunter. He had had a successful day and was walking through a forest back to his tribe. He had slung a deer across his shoulder with some homemade [...]

I love to fail!

Our attitude towards failure gets formed very early in life. Usually in school…and it never just goes away. All through school, we perhaps take hundreds of tests, exams, assignments etc. And we are in BIG trouble if we fail even ONCE. So we are scared of failure. But real life is different. In real life [...]

Creativity through the metaphor of food

Around two years ago I wrote a manifesto for ‘Change This’ on the topic of slow innovation. This was inspired by the founding of the ‘slow food’ movement by Italian journalist Carlo Petrini. After strolling past a new MacDonald’s franchise in the centre of Rome he paused and said: If this is fast food, why [...]

Raising creativity in 7 easy steps

There are many different ways to come up with creative ideas. Common and yet useful ways include going to your local library to loan out books on creativity or signing up for a creativity workshop where the facilitator would get you to participate in certain activities to get your creative juices working.
Allow me to share [...]

Creativity – selecting the right technique

You, your staff or even your boss have been on a course or bought a self help book that described some creative techniques. You have tried one or two and they sort of worked, but not as you had hoped. Or maybe they did not work at all. Why could this be?
Sometimes Creativity just doesn’t [...]

The Broken Window

The editor of a Delhi based newspaper wrote an article bemoaning the fall in standards of the Indian Foreign Service. It was but natural that this article would be followed by a barrage of letters from readers, some agreeing with him and some not amused. Some of the letters were truly insightful and gave glimpses [...]

Top 10 ideas for how NOT to make a million dollars!

1. Start a cool looking website. Flick some good content from various sites, put it all together and make it look coherent. Optimize your website for google. Add on some google ads on your site and voila! you are ready to make your first million on the net – only it will take approximately 100 [...]

Folding a T-Shirt in 1.5 Seconds!

Here is an example of T-shirt folding that I use when I want to demonstrate the point that “creativity is about making tasks/things faster/better”. The traditional way of folding a T-shirt takes about 15 seconds.
A few years ago I received a video clip showing a Japanese lady folding a T-shirt much faster, taking about 5 [...]

Is curiosity a cousin of creativity?

 
 

 
Curiosity is made up of an open mind, acute sensing abilities and an urge to seek and find. As a child, you had natural curiosity and a sense of wonder. Hungry for novelty, you were always on your toes to welcome the next moment.

A curious mind enabled you to see what most people [...]

Banking for the moving Citi!

 
Citibank has recently opened up branches/sales outlets inside a number of MRT stations. This is a superb example of creativity and innovation. I am sure it is paying off handsome dividends to some smart marketing manager at Citibank!
 
These new outlets take Citibank within 2 metres of 25% of Singapore’s population every day!
 
Imagine the opportunities [...]

Why be creative?

 
Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything. – George Lois

The popular perception is that creativity is just for writers, artists, scientists and advertising people. Nothing could be further from the truth.
 
Being creative is to have fresh perceptions and experience the world in novel and original [...]