Chapter 5 - How to think for great ideas

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How to think for great ideas	205

  We suspect that overwhelmingly it is because of the way schools and curricula are structured. From the very moment of starting school, most children are taught that the answers have already been found. Even more: they are taught that success is learning a limited range of those answers - absorbed from a teacher - and feeding them back correctly at exam time. Yet that is not the way the real world innovates. The simple questions on the past three pages are typical of the queries posed in businesses every day as they strive to do things "better, faster, cheaper".
  Don Koberg and Jim Bagnall, in their book The Universal Traveller, have suggested other words to encourage innovation: multiply, divide, eliminate, subdue, invert, separate, transpose, unify, distort, rotate, flatten, squeeze, complement, submerge, freeze, soften, fluff-up, bypass, add, subtract, lighten, repeat, thicken, stretch, extrude, repel, protect, segregate, integrate, symbolize, abstract and dissect.
  Stanford University engineer James Adams14 suggests thinking up your own favorite "bug list" - the things that irritate you - to start you thinking. And he lists among his own: corks that break off in wine bottles, vending machines that take your money with no return, bumper stickers that cannot be removed, crooked billiard cue sticks, paperless toilets, dripping faucets and "one sock". "If you run out of bugs before ten minutes," says Adams, "you are either suffering from a perceptual or emotional block or have life unusually under control."
  Another technique is to focus on 1,000 percent breakthroughs. What can you do ten times faster, better, cheaper? What is the "killer application" in your field: the big "Aha!" that can take your company, your school or your industry to new peaks of excellence? That's what Microsoft has achieved in computer software; what Netscape has done in Internet browsers; what Canon has achieved in color copiers.
  Given the tremendous increase in technology, in almost any field 1,000 per cent improvements are possible: in some operations. Learning to typeset magazine advertisements and newspapers, for instance, once took a six-year apprenticeship. To "makeup" pages took five years of training. Today, with desktop computerized publishing, any competent typist can compress much of that 11-year training into a week. What would it take to achieve similar breakthroughs in your field?
  At the other extreme, if you learn only one word of Japanese in your life, make it Kaizen. It means continuous improvement. But it means much more than that. It means a philosophy that encourages every

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