Expert Financial & Business Insights for South Africa
Strategic analysis from Idea Accelerator and ready-to-publish content from Financial News Daily.
Have you had a look around in your local neighbourhood and seen what’s happening? Look around. In your local neighbourhood the pet shop closes after six months and becomes a pool shop. A clothing store runs for little less than a year and closes down. A gift shop fills the same retail space and it too disappears after a few months.
What worked a year ago isn’t working anymore. Continue reading “New solutions needed for new problems as economy opens its jaws”
California landowners are planting orchards of truffles in the hopes of harvesting them because world demand is rising. Black truffles which come from Europe or Australia cost anything between $800 to $1 200 for 0.5kg but supplies are shrinking while appetites are expanding worldwide, according to AP report.
Black truffle hunting dogs such as the Italian Lagotto Romagnolo are some of the best to sniff out the “diamonds” of the culinary world. They sniff for signs of Perigord and burgundy truffles on the roots of oak and hazelnut trees planted next to vineyards. Winemakers started planting truffle orchards five years ago and want to harvest their truffles next year. Continue reading “Are you as good in sniffing for opportunities as these dogs are?”
If you want to be more creative, you become so by being more creative.
You may have got here because you feel you’ve lost that creative spark.
You feel you deserve more out of life.
You could be facing personal and business challenges in this depressed economy.
What can you do about it?
Please do me a small favour and read on. It could prove valuable to you.
Listen up. You will find out how you can increase your creativity and come up with new approaches, new ideas and possibilities.
You can immediately apply the techniques and ideas to your personal, working and business life. With enough motivation, you can use the tools and techniques and without anyone knowing you are using them.
New ideas can lead to personal or business breakthroughs. People need to come up with new ideas to respond to challenges, problems and difficulties they are facing. But often they just can’t make a personal breakthrough. They rack their brains but still nothing comes.
Other people come up with “brilliant” ideas but they are just too impractical or improbable. Others may have great ideas but they don’t know how to develop and implement them and worse they go about it in the wrong way.
How do you come up with new approaches, new ideas and increase your creativity? How can you accelerate your ideas to get more of what you want in life?
My book, “Breakthrough Ideas” shows you simple and practical ways to come up with new ideas. It is based on research into creativity, proven methods, ideas that have succeeded and grounded in real-world experience. By the end of the first chapter, which will only take a few minutes to read, you will be producing new ideas that could spark your personal breakthrough.
Here are a few “golden rules” that will help you become more creative and speed your creativity:
– Use simple techniques that are proven and which you enjoy
– Personal breakthroughs come when you are prepared – practice, practice, practice
– See your world through fresh eyes
– You become more creative by using creative tools more often
– Linking unrelated objects often leads to unexpected new combinations
– Letting ideas “cool” before evaluating them leads you select the most promising one
– Commercialising ideas follows a definite process and framework that is easy to understand and simple to apply
Are you ready to learn to accelerate your idea generation? By investing a few hours in yourself you’ll find solutions faster, come up with more viable ideas and increase possibilities in your life. Go here to find “Breakthrough Ideas”.
I heard about an estate agent who hasn’t sold a house in this market for a year.
It’s unbelievable how we get into a rut and just can’t find our way out.
Let’s wind back for a second. With all his experience you would think that he would come up with new ideas, new approaches even new opportunities. But he remains stuck in a terrible position of misfortune.
Why is it that people don’t use their inborn creative mechanism when faced with a crisis? Why when they could use their creativity and come up with a fresh plan, a new way out? Continue reading “Thousands have this priceless gift – but how many discover its potential?”
A trend in retail in the US about six years or so back involved unearthing century-old heritage brands that survived outsourcing to Asia. Two brothers wanted to start a backpack brand that looked as though it was a heritage brand. Solution? They came up with Herschel in 2009 with a square label logo with the word “Herschel” in hand-drawn script. Their goal was for people to look at the brand and think that they had seen it before. Today more than 4,000 stores carry the Herschel range, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.
New ideas can lead to personal or business breakthroughs. People need to come up with new ideas to respond to challenges, problems and difficulties they are facing. But often they just can’t make a personal breakthrough. They rack their brains but still nothing comes. Continue reading “Unlock your creative self – speed thinking for faster idea generation”
What are the key traits of successful entrepreneurs? If you had to boil it down, what would you consider to be the top few characteristics of outstanding entrepreneurs? From your own behaviour and that of other entrepreneurs what do you think makes one entrepreneur more successful than another?
Are the characteristics or strengths of entrepreneurs different from other business people? Most business people need to think creatively, identify opportunities, be outstanding implementers, sell their ideas and concepts and possess a mindset where they take failure in their stride and persist against the odds. Often it’s important to look at the whole, the Gestalt, rather than just one or two traits because successful individuals have a combination of strengths, talents and skills. Continue reading “5 key traits of entrepreneurs”
When you mention the word creativity in conservative circles you may feel ashamed like it’s some sort of dirty word. Creativity is smothered or kept safely under lock and key in command and control organisations and institutions. Why? Perhaps because the new, the novel and different is scary to the traditionalists. Like oil and water creativity and business aren’t supposed to mix.
Yet is this true? Is it really the case? Is creativity so far removed from business? Continue reading “Wake-up your creativity”
A student completing her law degree and her fellow student studying Spanish and finance have started a venture to sell dance shoes.
There is a new trend among the generation of millennials who say they don’t want to limit themselves and aren’t afraid to take risks as they start their own businesses different from their formal studies, according to a recent report.
Many have watched their parents lose their jobs during economic downturns and don’t dream of climbing the one-track corporate path. They have discovered the reality that job security is a lie, said a coach who helps students to start up their own businesses. “Millennials are really looking for meaning and purpose,” she said.
How did these two graduates find their idea for dancing shoes? Continue reading “How do you find your best ideas for a start-up?”
When we used to visit my grandparents in Witsands, Western Cape, during the September holidays my grandmother Thomasina would take out a carving knife on Sunday mornings and go down to the chicken run. In those days Witsands was a small traditional fishing village on the Breede River. The chicken run had a huge open space in front of it that looked across to an old “BP” double-decker bus that someone had converted into a holiday home. Anyway, my grandmother would select a chicken from the chicken “hok”, tuck it under her arm and cut its head off. She would place the wildly fluttering bird on the ground and it would run with its head off, blood spurting through its neck around the open piece of gravel yard until it keeled over and died. My grandmother had beautiful blue eyes and when she was in this mischievous mood to scare us “city boys” she would chuckle loudly at our horror of seeing the whole gruesome episode. Continue reading “Do we need all these “box” metaphors for the creative process?”
An investment banker, 47, was so upset about an ongoing battle with the board of his luxury Manhattan apartment that he jumped out of the window of the seventh floor. His problems relate to his job and he and his wife’s three French poodles. Neighbours had complained about the dogs’ barking and “rambunctious, ” play in the lobby, the New York Post reported.
The jumper survived the fall when he hit a second-floor awning which broke his fall. Paramedics rushed him to the local hospital.
I bring the sleeping banker incident up as it reminds me of how often many of us end up in what we perceive as a cul de sac. In the tunnel of our own personal darkness and despair it seems that there is no end in sight. Continue reading “Fun and smart ways to feel creative at no cost”
