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176 Power Up Your Mind

“That sounds great.”
“I am really excited to hear that.”
“How could we try it out?”
“Let’s explore how that would look.”

What else can you think of? Make the longest list you possibly can. Then try the list activity
out on a team of people you work with. Make a group list and create posters with some of the
most powerful statements. You could also illustrate them.

Finding fun and funkiness at work

It was Carl Jung who said, “Without this playing with fantasy, no
creative work has ever come to birth.” Organizations ignore his wise
remark at their peril. Eric Hoffer goes further: “The compulsion to
take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative
capacity.”
John Grant has always played with fantasy and tried not to
take himself too seriously to get the best for his many clients. This
is how he describes the story of how IKEA came to tell the British
people to “chuck out your chintz” and even made the British Prime
Minister smile!

Back in late 1995, I was a co-founder of a new ad agency called St Luke’s.
We had just set the company up and were pitching for our first new
client—IKEA.We were about a week away from the final presentation and
the pressure was mounting.
I went off one wet Wednesday evening to research some rough
ideas about “How does IKEA manage to make such great furniture so
cheap?” or something like that.This kind of research is called “focus
groups.” Although that’s a bit of a misnomer because they are ideally quite
defocused! That way you can hope to learn something new.
In the course of a series of these focus groups, I had come to
realize that something was holding us back. Everybody quite liked the ads
we were suggesting. (They were very funny.) But they didn’t exactly seem
to be about to change the world. Something was missing and I just
couldn’t quite put my finger on what.