Page 59 - THE DO-IT-YOURSELF LOBOTOMY Open Your Mind to Greater Creative Thinking

50 CREATIVITY = PROBLEM SOLVING

Yes, occasionally you have those good days when no major prob-
lems present themselves. Good days? Oh, really? Sorry, but if you
have too many of those days, your company may not need you very
much longer.

YOUR CAREER HIGHLIGHTS FILM

Problems cause you to stretch, to see how good you really are. Your
resume is like an athlete’s highlights film. When baseball greats like
Derek Jeter or Ken Griffey Jr. are renegotiating their contracts, what
do you think their highlights films feature? They put their problem-
solving skills front and center. To demonstrate how good they are, do
you think they are going to feature a segment where they make a routine
play—catching an easy ball hit weakly right at them? I don’t think so.
They’re going to show themselves stretching deep into “the hole,”
as baseball people like to call it, or jumping impossibly high to snare a
nearly hopeless catch. They are problem solvers; they can stretch to

180 Faster Communication
Apple Computer touted the speed of their (then new) G3 chip with this print
ad (and companion TV commercial) that made a very quick, highly effective
statement. A conventional way to communicate "our chip is faster" would
have been to say, or somehow show, that the G3 chip is faster. Apple,
proving that they practice what they preach when they say, "Think different,"
showed the competition's chip as being slow with this 180 approach. (For
more on 180 Thinking, see Chapter 8.)