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    Ideaship: How to Get Ideas Flowing in Your Workplace
    Ideaship: How to Get Ideas Flowing in Your Workplace
    Ideaship: How to Get Ideas Flowing in Your Workplace
    Ebook159 pages1 hour

    Ideaship: How to Get Ideas Flowing in Your Workplace

    By Jack Foster and Larry Corby

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    About this ebook

    Innovative, original ideas are a company's most powerful competitive advantage. Nathan Mhyrvold, former chief technology officer at Microsoft, has said that a great employee is worth 1,000 times more than an average one simply because of his or her ideas. In Ideaship, the sequel to his bestselling book, How to Get Ideas, Jack Foster shifts from how individuals spark their new ideas to how to unleash the creative genius of an entire organization.
    To create an idea-prone workforce, Foster proposes a totally new concept of leadership: "ideaship." Leaders shouldn't be spending their time obsessing over profits or sales or quality or service. Instead, they should devote most of their energies to making the office a place where creative ideas flow, where the workforce truly believes in its ability to brilliantly solve any problem put before it. Above all, where it's fun to work.
    With energy and humor, Foster draws on over thirty-five years as creative director of major advertising agencies-organizations whose only purpose is to constantly generate ideas-to offer dozens of fun, fast, often surprising nuggets of practical advice on how to create an environment where innovation and fresh thinking thrive. He reveals why you should only hire people you like, insist employees take vacations whether they want to or not, why efficiency is sometimes inefficient, and how sometimes you can accomplish more by playing the fool instead of the capital L "Leader."
    Ideaship spells out proven ways to encourage creativity, simply and clearly and cogently, without a lot of charts and graphs and formulas and acronyms and statistics and fillers. It flips traditional leadership on its head and shows how simple acts of compassion, trust, and generosity of spirit, as well as some seemingly zany actions, can unleash unexpected, vital bursts of creativity.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBerrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
    Release dateJan 1, 1995
    ISBN9781609943585
    Ideaship: How to Get Ideas Flowing in Your Workplace
    Author

    Jack Foster

    Jack Foster spent thirty-five years working in creative departments of major advertising agencies; the first ten as a writer, the last 25 as a creative director. He has helped create advertising for scores of companies including Carnation, Mazda, Sunkist, Mattel, Albertson's, Ore-Ida, Suzuki, Universal Studios, Rand McNally, and Smokey Bear. He is a recipient of the Los Angeles Creative Club’s "Creative Person of the Year" award.

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      Book preview

      Ideaship - Jack Foster

      IDEASHIP

      IDEASHIP

      How to Get Ideas Flowing in Your Workplace

      JACK FOSTER

      with illustrations by

      LARRY CORBY

      Ideaship

      Copyright © 2001 by Jack Foster

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

      Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

      235 Montgomery Street, Suite 650

      San Francisco, California 94104-2916

      Tel: (415) 288-0260, Fax: (415) 362-2512

      www.bkconnection.com

      Ordering information for print editions

      Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the Special Sales Department at the Berrett-Koehler address above.

      Individual sales. Berrett-Koehler publications are available through most bookstores. They can also be ordered directly from Berrett-Koehler: Tel: (800) 929-2929; Fax: (802) 864-7626; www.bkconnection.com

      Orders for college textbook/course adoption use. Please contact Berrett-Koehler: Tel: (800) 929-2929; Fax: (802) 864-7626.

      Orders by U.S. trade bookstores and wholesalers. Please contact Ingram Publisher Services, Tel: (800) 509-4887; Fax: (800) 838-1149; E-mail: customer.service@ingrampublisherservices.com; or visit www.ingrampublisherservices.com/ Ordering for details about electronic ordering.

      Berrett-Koehler and the BK logo are registered trademarks of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

      First Edition

      Paperback print edition ISBN 978-1-57675-164-0

      PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-60509-336-9

      IDPF ISBN 978-1-60994-358-5

      2009-1

      Copy Editor: Henrietta Bensussen

      Indexer: Paula C. Durbin-Westby

      Interior design and production: Linda Jupiter, Jupiter Productions

      Illustrations and cover design: Larry Corby

      Jack Foster

      To my wife, Nancy,

      and my sons,

      Mark and Tim

      Larry Corby

      To my daughter,

      Laura Ann

      xi

      PREFACE

      In my previous book — How to Get Ideas — I use James Webb Young’s definition of an idea as nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.

      That definition, it seems to me, is a liberating one, for it says that ideas aren’t some arcane things that only brilliant people come up with. Rather, ordinary people create ideas every day simply by combining things they already know about.

      I also outline a five-step procedure for solving problems and getting ideas, a proven procedure that takes the mystery and anxiety out of the idea-generating process — (1) define the problem, (2) gather the information, (3) search for the idea, (4) forget about it, and (5) put the idea into action.

      But I caution readers that if they want to get the ideas they are capable of getting, they have to first condition their minds by getting more inputs, by visualizing their goals, by trusting their child-like natures, by rethinking their thinking, by screwing up their courage, by learning how to combine, and, perhaps most important, by having fun and by becoming idea-prone.xii

      As with so much in life, these mind-conditioning techniques are mostly things that we all have to do for ourselves.

      But if you own or run a business, if you are a manager or a coordinator or a director or a supervisor or a department head, if you coach or teach or consult — indeed, if you hold any kind of leadership position anywhere — you can use your position to help bring out the creativity in the people you work with. How? Simply by helping them do those two most important mind-conditioning things — have fun and become idea-prone.

      So that’s what this book is about — not what my previous book was about, i.e., how you can get ideas; nor is it about how you can better lead or direct or manage or supervise the people you work with. Rather, Ideaship is about how you can help those people become great employees by unleashing their creativity.

      Why is all this important?

      It’s hard to overstate the importance of creativity in the workplace, of having employees who bubble with ideas and solutions to problems. Indeed, Nathan Mhyrvold, former chief technology officer at Microsoft, says that a great employee is worth 1,000 times more than an average one. The reason? Because of the quality of her ideas.

      That’s because new

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