Don't Forget Your Creativity Sources - Part 2

This is part 2 of highlighting some of the creative inspirations behind my presentation on "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation." As the first reference below suggests, improving your creativity is linked to your ability to change, adapt, and customize various inspirations to address your opportunities.

• The Remix Planet – My wife Cyndi wanted to go to Wired Magazine’s NextFest in Chicago in 2005. The admission included a free one-year subscription; one of the first issues featured the “Remix Planet.” This provided a nice way to talk about borrowing & morphing ideas for your own use!
• Steve Farber – Steve is a great speaker that we’ve had for several executive management programs. He talked about reading magazines on the cutting edge (i.e. gaming, technology) to spot emerging trends headed for the general culture. We morphed the idea into taking any graphics-intensive magazine outside your field of expertise and looking through it page-by-page with a marker, writing down new ideas to address your challenges.
• IDEO –A well-known design & innovation firm. One of the companies I work with did some brief exploration with IDEO. One of their approaches is prototyping – quickly doing something with an idea to make it more tangible and to be able to experience it. That’s been helpful in moving us beyond simply generating a bunch of ideas for a marketing manager and instead prioritizing them quickly and taking the first few steps with them.
• "Made to Stick" – I’ve written about “Made to Stick” previously. Its six principles for making ideas take hold and flourish can benefit anyone trying to create change and implement new approaches.
• Benjamin Zander – I’ve also written about Benjamin Zander earlier. Specific to “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation,” his discussion about simply replying “How Fascinating” to things that go wrong in life had a major impact. My natural personality is to become frustrated and complain when things don’t work. Zander’s challenge to identify what you’re learning from a bad situation has helped me to be calmer when things are frustrating and to genuinely look for the lessons God is trying to teach me when nothing seems to be going right. Click here for a blog post from PresentationZen with a quick overview of Zander’s key messages.
• Serving Others & Helping to Make Them Successful – I’m an ardent believer in servant leadership. While the Bible is certainly the chief inspiration for that approach to life, the idea of improving your successfulness by figuring out how to make other people successful comes from Ziz Ziglar, an incredible speaker.

Which leads to a big thank you to Jessica Myers, a senior media relations specialist at Garmin, for the inspiration to start a blog. I saw her present at an IABC Communications Summit in October 2007 on how easy it is to get a blog started. I thought I’d check it out, and was launched into the blogosphere.

That’s how a presentation comes together, with a tremendous number of great inputs & ideas that get molded (ideally) into a cohesive message. Enjoy checking out the links as potential departure points for your own new inspirations. And realize - it’s actually more creative to REMEMBER your sources. That way you can go back and borrow from them again and again!