Ideaship: How to Get Ideas Flowing in Your Workplace - Couverture souple

Foster, Jack; Corby, Larry

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1576751643 ISBN 13 : 9781576751640

Editeur : Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2001

Synopsis

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.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Jack Foster was 18 years old and working in an insurance company with about 150
other people when he got the idea to raffle off his weekly paycheck. Fifty cents a chance
to win $27.50. The first week he made a profit of six dollars. The next week he had collected $53 for the raffle when
his boss found out what he was doing. He ordered Jack to return the money.
Then he fired him.
Ever since, Jack’s been trying to come up with ideas that wouldn’t get him fired.
Mostly he’s succeeded.
He lucked into the advertising business 45 years ago as a writer and has been coming up with ideas ever since: Ideas for scores of companies including Carnation, Mazda, Sunkist, Mattel, ARCO, First Interstate Bank, Albertson’s, Ore-Ida, Suzuki, Denny’s, Universal Studios, Northrup, Rand McNally, and Smokey Bear.
During the 15 years Jack spent as the executive creative director of Foote, Cone & Belding in Los Angeles, it grew to be the largest advertising agency on the West Coast.
I was born in London, England. It was raining.
After 15 years of studying Latin I decided to go into advertising.
My first job was as an apprentice at an advertising agency called Graham and Gilles. I changed the water pots for the artists (they painted layouts with water colours in those days) and made them tea. This was before magic markers. This was even before rubber cement — I’m that old.
It was raining. It was always raining, and I was watching my favourite programme at the time — 77 Sunset Strip. I said, “Ah, sun, palm trees, women.” My Dad gave me a one-way ticket.
I met Jack Foster 35 years ago at the Erwin Wasey advertising agency in Los Angeles and then again at Foote, Cone & Belding.
We worked together for about 17 years. We had a hell of a good time.
And we had a hell of a good time doing this book.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

WHAT IS IDEASHIP?

2
I spent half my life in advertising. Half of that time I ran creative departments in advertising agencies, half in creative departments run by others.

I was telling a client of mine one day about the difficulties of running such a department, a department that is — by definition and design — a collection of misfits and free spirits, of original thinkers, of people who resist authority and reject dogma; and whose strength is their ability to discover — on command — fresh solutions to a variety of problems.

He thought about it for a while, and then he said: “Running a creative department is not a do-able job. Any attempt to direct or lead or run people who are like that will be counter-productive. They’ll rebel. Or they’ll clam up.”

Perhaps he was right.

But that’s because we were using the wrong words. “Direct” or “lead” or “run” don’t describe what I, and many like me, did.

We didn’t direct or lead or run our departments. We ideaized them.

We weren’t leaders. We were ideaists.

And the art form we practiced was not leadership. It was ideaship.

Henry Miller once wrote: “No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.”3

A leader motivates and directs and runs and guides and leads. An ideaist restores.

A leader leads. An ideaist ideaizes.

In short, ideaship is a step beyond leadership, for an ideaist does more than lead — he or she restores to people their belief in their own guidance.


Another client of mine maintained that creative departments are so atypical that any lessons learned there about leadership (I hadn’t yet coined the word ideaship) are not applicable to other groups of people in other kinds of organizations.

Phooey.

The creative people in advertising agencies don’t have a patent on getting ideas. Everyday, the people you work with probably come up with dozens of ideas, from how to get to work quicker to how to stretch their lunch hours, from how to make deliveries faster to how to write memos better, from how to jazz up a sales meeting to how to speed up a production line.

So we know they can come up with ideas. And if you want them to come up with more and better ideas and with more original thinking and innovative approaches and fresh solutions, then an advertising agency creative department is far from some weird model that only a gull would emulate.

Rather, the reverse is true: It is a paragon for your organization, and the lessons learned there are a guide for you.


* * * * * *


What follows then are some of the things I think I’ve learned and some of the conclusions I’ve drawn about ideaship from thirty-five years experience in advertising agency creative departments.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Date d'édition: 2001
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1576751643
• ISBN 13: 9781576751640
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 160
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
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