Ideas – The Lifeblood of Business

Einstein had it right….

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” 

But this is exactly what many businesses do – they carry on with the ‘same old’, expecting something different to come out at the other end – it doesn’t.

Yet the willingness and desire to accept new thoughts, new ideas and to find ways of building them into your business is crucial to your future. Every market is changing quickly in this digital age, this means that some businesses in those markets will recognise the infinite nature of business in that you are never ‘done’ and that change is really a constant. They will forge ahead and ‘they’ could be your business.

Of course, this prevents challenges for the leader. You may have a number of people who have been around a long while, whose mindset is ‘we have always done it like this, why should we change?’ The job of the leader is to help those with great experience to understand the need to accept new ideas and to use their ‘know how’ to determine how some of these might just ‘gel’ with the business with a few tweaks.

One of the UK’s greatest innovators, James Dyson, describes inventing things not as a ‘light bulb moment’ but more a process of trying, adapting and then finalising something that ‘could well work’ in the business. There are no guarantees but the more people, with know-how, you involve in initiating, investigating, developing and adapting ideas to fit your business, the better your business will progress.

These ideas don’t necessarily need to come from within either. The Internet provides a rich source of market and company information that can show you what other businesses in other non-competing markets are doing to change their futures. Can any of these ideas be adapted into your business? What would happen if they could be? Could this be a game changing market move for you?

Henry Ford didn’t get the transformational idea of the assembly line from another car maker – he went into a completely different environment (a Chicago Meat Packing factory) and saw how efficiently the line process worked and thought ‘what if I could create this sort of efficiency in my factories?’ Result – huge labour savings through efficiencies, facilitating a much lower cost price and consumer price and cars being sold in their hundreds of thousands for the first time – truly transformative.

Open you minds and the minds of your people – encourage creativity and home-grown ideas, research other markets and see what’s going on rather than remaining parochial and simply finding out ‘exactly what our competition are doing’. That way you will always be a follower.

Finally encourage those with know how to expand their thinking and help you adapt ideas for successful implementation within your business.

The above is part of our successful Triangular Thinking programme that has helped transform hundreds of businesses – to find out more about Triangular Thinking and how it can help your business, get in touch with us at ignite@tinderboxbusinessdevelopment.co.uk. or call us on 01162325231.

The Tinderbox Team