Page 22 - THE DO-IT-YOURSELF LOBOTOMY Open Your Mind to Greater Creative Thinking

The Creative Director for the Rest of Us 13

I worked in advertising for 20 years before I became a creative
thinking coach. I won many awards of which I am very proud.
However, the honor that made my parents most proud came in 1990
when I became the youngest person featured in the Wall Street
Journal's long-running creative leaders campaign.

rest of us,” to paraphrase the introduction of the Apple Macintosh as
“the computer for the rest of us.”
Having worked with some very smart people in corporate America,
in companies such as Colgate-Palmolive, IBM, Gerber, Lotus, Keds,
Polaroid, and Hewlett-Packard among many others, I noticed how
paralyzed even the brightest people often were when it came to coming
up with new ideas on demand. In the ad business I was used to main-
taining an environment that helped my people generate hundreds of
new ideas by next Thursday’s deadline, but I saw the people in the cor-
porate trenches too often struggle to find a few new ideas by next
November. That’s when I first got the notion to go into the business of
helping corporate types open their minds. I’ve since found the methods
in this book not only help stifled businesspeople but are effective
thought stimulants for anyone looking for new ideas.
I’d made a career of studying what it takes to get people to come up
with fresh, original ideas on demand. For 15 years I led a small ad
agency in Providence, Rhode Island, to the pinnacle of this idea-rich
business. In the 1980s I taught at the university level as well as for
advertising professional organizations. In the 1990s I lectured on cre-
ative thinking for the two principal trade publications, Adweek and
AdAge, as well as for the Wall Street Journal and over 50 local and