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Yet, we all know that creativity and innovation are the keys to business (and personal) growth.
The question then is: what can we do about it?
Luis Derechin, CEO of JackBe (client), and I were talking about this back in July.
Originally, our plan was to have a crazy day at Six Flags, but that fell apart since they close after Labor Day and our schedules didn’t permit it.
Sometime around then, I saw Dan Pink’s (client) latest presentation on his forthcoming book “Drive” from the TED UK conference and I harkened back to his earlier work of “A Whole New Mind.” (You can pre-order—and should--Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Given my location in the Nation’s Capital, I proposed an outing to the National Gallery of Art.
As a bonus, we’d invite Venkatesh, one of my favorite thinkers on marketing, innovation, and technology to join us for lunch (and whom I’d met as a result of working with Dan on “The Adventures of Johnny Bunko”)
In sharing my plans with a friend, she said, “hey, I’d love to come!” so the first-ever “Never Stop Marketing Field Seminar” was born.
Three others joined us (Rasul Sha’ir, CEO of Vosica), Catherine Reed of Creative Read, and Alfred Toussaint, CEO of Nova Technology Partners)
Our morning was broken up into three parts
- Spend 45 minutes investigating a piece of art and use the guidelines of the Harvard Artful Thinking Palette (a big thank you to my friend, Liz Diament, Museum Educator at NGA for that suggestion)
- Reconvene with the rest of the group to share your photos of the work you selected and what you learned/observed
- Get some lunch and have a free flowing discussion about fostering and driving innovation with Venkatesh, who leads one of the Innovation groups at Xerox (and has received MANY mentions on this blog…here’s just one)
I’ll say this…it wasn’t easy.
But it was worth it.
Luis and I were in one group and we spent the whole time staring at a picture called “Cold Mountain #5” A few times, we both wanted to give up, but we persevered.
And, you know what?
We had a breakthrough…a few actually.
I felt my right brain getting some exercised as we took some of what we learned about perspective, pondering, looking for reason and extracted from the painting only to reapply it to our businesses.
I daresay the others had a similar experience. You can watch some of the videos (and see pics on the NSM fan page)
Lesson: The paradigm of staying in your office the whole day is a remnant of the left-brain, industrial age. You MUST get to places that will change your perspective, engage your right brain, and challenge you to think creatively.
That is the core that will lead you to REMARKABLE.
