Archives for Creativity

Don't Drink the Woolite

Don’t ask.  I can’t tell.  Her name will stay anonymous. She was on cruise control as she readied herself for the daily grind.  With an aspirin sized headache she looked around for liquid to help down a couple of Tylenol.  She spied the small glass of liquid, threw back the pills and washed them down handily with the glass of “water”. That was when she remembered that she had filled that glass with Woolite a few days before.  This handy dandy cleaning solution – that will do wonders for “your sweaters and unmentionables” – had done a wonder in disguising
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Pearls and NOT shooting yourself in the Foot

Wanna raise? There is an online retailer called The Pearl Outlet.  Now who buys pearls?  Especially on line?  Well that is something that they wanted to know.  If they did a marketing campaign that said, “Say you are sorry with pearls” would that work?  So they commissioned a study of 8,000 customers and a real surprise popped up.  Those customers who were willing to say they were sorry earned more money.  In fact they earned twice as much as those who rarely, or never apologized.  It turns out that those who earned $100,000 a year or more were twice as
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Leadership should smell like Miracle Whip

Kraft Mac & Cheese, pantyhose, and Apple iPods.  When times get tough, we see the emergence of true leadership and vision.  The choice is to wallow in pity, self doubt and second guessing or – to act and charge ahead, WITH COURAGE.  It is during hard times that we most need to look for opportunities, to get creative, to hone our capabilities and look for new ways to succeed.  In the recession of 2001 and 2002, General Electric, with billions of dollars of sales in light bulbs failed to keep up with the inventiveness of rivals who were developing more-efficient
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I stole a souvenier from the Ritz – Kordell's antics are fixed by Nine Professionals

It has been ten years.  That is what the celebration is all about.  Ten years ago Jim Gilmore and Joe Pine wrote the book, the Experience Economy.  If you have not read it . . . you probably ought to consider it.  More about that in a moment. I met Jim for the first time when he was a consultant to our company in Texas.  I had no idea that he would, in the future, co-author a book that would change my life and the way that many Fortune 500 companies did business. I have to say that my first
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What Should YOUR Business Look Like In a Speedo?

Mike Vance is, in my opinion, one of the greatest business speakers in the last 100 years.  His work on developing creativity is cornerstone.  He introduced the three methods to create something.  Those were: Invention Invention (i.e. the light bulb) Invention Extension (i.e. the flashlight) Invention Devention (see below) An old Nike T-shirt had a saying plastered across the front that read, “The older I get the better I was!”  That is me.  Believe it or not, there was a time when I was the captain of the swim team -many, many, many pounds ago with the svelt torso to
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