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| How to think
for great ideas |
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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
Contents Page Preface
Introduction
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