Ebook Sample Content Preview:
These are not revolutionary ideas and not even completely original ones. That is important. You have to start small, but once you put those relatively small ideas into circulation, you'll find you have more ideas and then still more. As they are adopted, you will double your confidence in presenting ideas. You will develop the habit of having ideas and doing something about them. You will build a backlog of laboratory experience in having ideas and selling them. All this increases what I call your CIQ, your creative initiative quotient.
Once you dare to be creative you will learn how much bigger your world has grown. C. Willard Bryant of General Electric, for example, has discovered, "We spend too much time endeavoring to remove 5 or 10 per cent of cost. It has been found that it is actually easier to remove 50 per cent of cost in many cases. This statement probably sounds like the most ridiculous one of the year. However, it is true, because while attempting to remove 50 per cent of the cost, we push out into the areas where no one else has thought improvement possible."
One of the best ways to keep ourselves moving ahead is to make a deadline. This is a basic working condition of newspapermen, and we should all understand just why and how it works.
Reporters and editors, just like all of us, procrastinate. The job of reporting never ends. There is always more information to get, more people to interview, more clippings to read, more phone calls to make. But there is always the deadline. At that time copy has to be on its way through the editing process and on its way to be set in type. Because of the deadline the reporter has to stop and start writing.
When he writes he again can find plenty of reasons to delay the final version. He needs to clean his typewriter, get uncreased copy paper, new carbons. He has to try a new lead again and again, sharpen up a sentence, check a quote. But once more the deadline stares him in the face. There is a time when he has to do a job, not just get ready to do it. It might have been a better job if he had longer, but for better or for worse, he has to do his job—and many times the most brilliant jobs of writing have been done under the most difficult deadlines.
As the reporter moves into other fields, he may find his daily deadline changed, but he will find he still has a deadline. It may be a weekly magazine deadline or a monthly one; it may become an hourly one if he works for a radio news broadcast, or it may stretch to a yearly one or a three-yearly one if he writes books. But eventually will come the moment of truth when he must sit down before some blank paper and produce a product. There is always that deadline saying, "Ready or not, here I come."
We can all learn a lesson from the newspaper deadline, and we should set one for ourselves. It shouldn't be so tight we can't keep it and become depressed by the impossible goal, but it should be tight enough to keep us moving, to keep us stretching our faculties. Once we have established this deadline—for example, in a month I'm going to have that shipping problem licked, by the end of the year I'm going to have a promotion—then we should make it impossible for ourselves to forget it.
There are a number of ways to do this. We can mark up a desk calendar or a wall calendar—better still: both. We should not only mark down the deadline but steps along the way. For example, a notation might read, "Are you halfway finished on that marketing report?" We should always keep reminding ourselves in the manner of the advertisements which say, "Only thirty-five shopping days to Christmas," that we have only thirty-five more working days until we promised ourselves we'd come up with a new idea for the boss.
Often we can prod ourselves by making our secretaries remind us. Some men tape a card with the deadline date on the sun visor in their car so they will see it when they least expect it—when they turn the visor down. There are even men who leave a note to themselves in their hat or give their wives a letter to be mailed to them in three weeks or three months when they may have forgotten all about their deadline.
Frank Tibolt, a pioneer teacher in Philadelphia of creativity, tells this story: Ivy Lee used to operate an efficiency firm in New York. His regular clients were Rockefeller, Morgan, the Du Ponts, Pennsylvania Railroad, and other giant corporations.
One day, Lee called on Schwab of the Bethlehem Steel Company. Lee outlined briefly his firm's services, ending with the statement: "With our service, you'll know how to manage better." "Hell," said Schwab. "I'm not managing as well now as I know how. What we need around here is not more 'knowing' but more 'doing'; not knowledge but action. If you can give us something to pep us up to do the things we already know we ought to do, I'll gladly listen to you and pay you anything you ask."
