twanless

Love Is Blind: Is Your Business Idea Really That Good?

You’ve been slav­ing away on the work­bench at your prod­uct, your ser­vice, and your busi­ness plan. You’ve laboured late into the night, putting all your rela­tion­ships on hold, and try­ing to ignore the no-nothings who freely offer advice on how you should do it. That’s because you have a GREAT IDEA for a business. You have this fan­tas­tic, whizz-bang, prod­uct or ser­vice that’s...

twanless

Grow A Service Business Creatively

I have just received an advance copy of Michael Michalko’s new book Cre­ative Thinker­ing and, not sur­pris­ingly, it got me thinking. Not just in a cre­ative way, but about cre­ativ­ity and its place in busi­ness generally. Now, most pro­fes­sional ser­vice providers don’t think a lot about cre­ativ­ity, unless their busi­ness demands it (in adver­tis­ing, for exam­ple). They tend to...

twanless

Creative Free Falling

Have a prob­lem to solve, a strat­egy to cre­ate, a mar­ket to deci­pher, or a prod­uct or ser­vice to design? But you just can’t seem to get going on it? It’s prob­a­bly because your log­i­cal brain is restrict­ing the part that’s cre­ative. We all need to use both sides of our brains today, but it’s a nat­ural haz­ard in our task-oriented world for the log­i­cal and lin­ear to...

wanless

Make Me Mess Up

Many years ago, while liv­ing in Ams­ter­dam, I had the mis­for­tune to work in an egg fac­tory. Yes, that’s right. An egg factory. In this place, a pro­duc­tion line mechan­i­cally sep­a­rated the yokes from the whites for fur­ther use in bak­ing, cos­met­ics man­u­fac­ture and who knows what else. But the mechan­ics didn’t always work, and some­times the eggs and whites mixed. My...

wanless

Intelligent Innovation

As orga­ni­za­tions rec­og­nize the need to be more inno­v­a­tive in the cre­ative econ­omy of the 21st cen­tury, an ide­o­log­i­cal debate over method­ol­ogy con­tin­ues to rage. Most cre­ativ­ity and inno­va­tion train­ing falls into two camps – the sys­tem­atic  “thinker” approach, and the right-brain-first approach of the “intuitives”. Despite the grow­ing...