Creative Thinking For Effective Management

March 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment

For years I have always written a short note in my management diary. It reads: Effective Management Depends On Creative Thinking.

When a bunch of university students interviewed me for a project they were doing, I had the opportunity to touch on my ideas for creative thinking in the management process. Creative thinking is not to be confused with creative management, which to me means little or nothing. Creative thinking is a means to breakthrough the barriers to your performance levels, it is how you motivate your people, and it is a tenet of leadership.

Recently, I came across this, written by Edward de Bono, in The Thinking Manager. “Everyone should seek to be creative, even though creativity is full of risks and uncertainties”. Edward de Bono is a leading creative thinker in management today, highly critical of  many management practices.

Creative think can work for us. He goes on to point four points of ignorance holding back the creative effort:

  1. Why should anyone seek to be creative? There is the risk of failure. There is the need to persuade others. There is a need for political skills. It is much better to sit quietly and do what you are supposed to do.
  2. If things are going well, who needs creativity? If things are going badly, then there is no time for the uncertainties of creativity.
  3. If you set out to be creative - and even if you use the powerful tools of lateral thinking - you cannot be sure of a result.
  4. There is a further problem. Every valuable creative idea we examine must always be logical in hindsight - otherwise it would have no value. So it is assumed, erroneously, that logic could have reached the idea in the first place. Not so.

Here is how to make creative thinking work. Confidence is a key factor in creative effort. Those who have succeeded in having creative ideas in the past are much more willing to make a creative effort. They know from experience that new ideas are possible. They have experienced the joy and achievement of having a new idea.

The problem is schools does not encourage creative thinking, and workplace does not expect it. Most people do what is expected of them. Creativity then is associated with mavericks, and yet all leading CEOs can be consider mavericks one way or the other. It is how they achieve new breakthroughs and how they continue to deliver performances in the face of adverse economic environment.

To get creativity into an organization you must make it an expectation. The effort to have ideas is key. If new ideas are an expectation, then people will make an effort to have new ideas. Their confidence will grow and eventually there will be a creative organization.


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Management Competes, Not Products

January 1, 2009 | 1 Comment


From time to time, you come across an article that stays with you. This is an article that I have kept with me over the years. My notes indicates that it was published in our local newspaper, Daily Express in February 2002. Written by Gunther Conradi.

At that time, I was in the midst of my marketing module for an MBA program. It just made sense to me because for a retailer to outlast his competition, it is management that is the winning factor. Not products, prices or advertisement. Unfortunately,  many of my colleagues focused solely on the 4 Ps - Product, Price, Promotion, Place. Well, yes but if you don’t manage the 4 Ps, nothing you do will make you stand out from the crowd.

Other than the 30 years he mentioned, this is one of my favorite articles. I have been through the crash of 1997 when Asians economies took a major hit, and forex currency rates doubled. Yet in the years from 1997 to 2002, my retail unit experience sales growth of over 20%. We captured market share and outlasted many competitors. The lesson I learned was that there is no substitute for effective management.

It takes good management to secure that business behavior is in accordance with the changing patterns in the marketplace, including the overall environment.

Managers make or break an enterprise. Just look at the list of bankruptcies, de-listed companies and the hundreds suspended from trading ….. then we see what disastrous consequences bad management has to account for.

In business, a corporation’s life expectancy can be directly traced to the general level of its managerial competence. Managerial incompetence is a frequently over-looked factor when business go down and prices go up.

Management has its problems, challenges, commitment and place, playing the pivotal role ….. more managers are required but many of them have a poor perception on what they are supposed to be. The better management will respond positively when a downturn occurs. They do not accept a downturn as the cause of business failure. If there is a crisis, then there ought to be a crisis management, a contingency plan. The better management will always have and hold the competitive edge.

There must be practical ability and motivation to meet the challenges of the next 30 years. The task for today’s managers is to create conditions for tomorrow, to prepare their organizations to move into the future.

It is management that competes in the marketplace and not the products.

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