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7 Ways to Deal With a Negative Boss

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If you are bursting with good ideas, but your boss always rejects suggestions out of hand, it’s very hard to stay positive and continue to think creatively. What can you do to keep your own creative spirit alive, and try to bring about positive changes in spite of the negative atmosphere?[wcm_restrict]

  1. Brainstorm strategies for making change. You and your coworkers have probably witnessed some improvements and changes. Even the most negative boss can’t stop all forward progress. So, ask yourself how those changes came about. What process is most acceptable to your boss? Who does he feel he has to listen to? Then recreate the successful strategies when you decide to propose something new.
  2. Avoid too much interaction with a negative boss. Try to keep the face-time to the minimum required, and to keep it civil and polite. Spend as much time as you can interacting with people who are more positive and have a healthy can-do attitude, so your own attitude doesn’t turn negative too.
  3. Innovate outside of work. Find ways to engage in creative, forward-thinking activities in volunteer work or a part-time extra job, internship or hobby, so you can stay fresh and get to strengthen your innovation muscles. A bad boss is no excuse to let your creativity atrophy!
  4. Make suggestions on paper, not in person or by email, to give your boss time to digest them. The longer you can delay her response to a suggestion, the more likely he’ll get over her initial knee-jerk resistance to change and actually look at the idea on its merit.
  5. Allow your boss to revise your idea and propose it as his own. I know, it’s so irritating when your boss rejects your suggestion, then proposes it himself a month later. But look at the bright side-at least this means there’s a way to make progress, even if it does involve accommodating an over-inflated ego.
  6. Build your own coalition for innovation. Sometimes it’s possible to reach out to others in power in a workplace and build a strong personal network, based on your bright ideas and enthusiasm for positive change. If you can do so, do so! You may be able to work with your coalition to bring about innovation. Let them pull your boss’s strings and force him to bring your unit in line with the new direction you helped create.
  7. Watch the bottom line and jump ship if your boss seems determined to run you up on the rocks. The biggest problem with change-resistant bosses is they don’t lead very well. Often, their department, division or business does poorly for lack of innovation. If that’s the story at your workplace, you probably should begin to look for another job with a better boss and more momentum. It’s hard to be a rising star when you’re working on a sinking ship.

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About the Author

Alex Hiam (www.alexhiam.com) is the author of more than 20 popular books on business, including Business Innovation For Dummies, Marketing For Dummies, and Marketing Kit for Dummies. A lecturer at the business school at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he has consulted with many Fortune 500 firms and large U.S. government agencies.

Improving Your Creative Coordination

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The brain has a unique approach to creativity. Several areas of the right hemisphere become highly active, while the visual processing area of the brain experiences diffuse, rather than focused, activity, according to a study by John Kounios, professor of psychology at Drexel University and Mark Jung-Beeman of Northwestern University, who monitored brain activity during creative problem-solving. Another recent study, by Kalina Christoff of the University of British Columbia and colleagues, found that the portion of your mind that wanders can sometimes cooperate with more focused regions of thought to help bring in fresh ideas and insights.

There are a lot of exciting new findings in brain research that suggest creativity involves complex coordination of many areas of the brain in particular, unique ways. Whereas we once might have described creativity as a sort of mental muscle that simply needed to be kept strong, now it appears that creative thought is a higher-level process involving the coordinated efforts of many mental muscles. Pumping a few ions every now and then in a brainstorming session won’t get you into peak creative shape, any more than lifting leg weights will prepare you to walk across Niagara Falls on a tightrope. So, what can we do to be in peak creative condition?

Since creativity requires complex coordination of multiple brain areas and functions, from daydreaming to connecting distant thoughts, it’s important to exercise your creative coordination through a variety of complex creative challenges. Here is a great set of exercises you can use, alone or in a team or staff meeting, to increase creative strength and coordination within the brain:[wcm_restrict]

  • Think of ten ways for human beings to fly, aside from the obvious ones involving airplanes or helicopters (this exercise requires the group to think imaginatively and gets them in touch with their sense of fun and fantasy)
  • Come up with ten ways to open a jar of jam whose lid is stuck (this exercise brings the group’s imagination into the practical realm and demonstrates that it can come up with useful insights)
  • Design three options for “drops” in which one spy could hand off secret papers to another in a public place without any possibility of being seen or caught (this exercise engages the group in process brainstorming, which can be more difficult than product brainstorming)
  • Invent a completely new kind of footwear that solves some major problem (this exercise requires people to brainstorm problems as well as solutions, which orients them toward opportunity-finding)

Exercises such as these, performed in sequence, can do a great deal to increase the power of your creative mental functions and prepare you to tackle important challenges at work. It may sometimes feel like play to do creative exercises, but as recent research into brain function shows, creative play uses the same highly-complex mental activities that you need to solve important problems or come up with new designs and inventions.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

Alex Hiam (www.alexhiam.com) is the author of more than 20 popular books on business, including Business Innovation For Dummies, Marketing For Dummies, and Marketing Kit for Dummies. A lecturer at the business school at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he has consulted with many Fortune 500 firms and large U.S. government agencies.

How To Jump-Start Your Innovation Engine

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Short on ideas? In need of a big breakthrough, or even a small one? Feeling overwhelmed by a million projects, none of them creating the progress you’d hoped for?

I recommend the following steps to clear your head and get fresh ideas growing and break the vicious cycle of busy-work that doesn’t seem to move you ahead:[wcm_restrict]

1. Clear some time and space. A cluttered desk or calendar will keep good ideas from developing. There’s a good reason why farmers plough and weed their fields. You need to cultivate your imagination in much the same way. Block out some chunks of time and give yourself a neutral space to sit and think – or if it suits you better, to walk and think. DON’T sit amidst your piles of files of unfinished business.

2. Expand your viewpoint. Gather new information that is both broad in scope, and detailed in depth. Seek multiple ways of looking at or understanding the current challenge, problem, project or goal. Fresh information is the fertile soil in which fresh ideas grow.

3. Nurture multiple ideas. Come up with at least three – hopefully a dozen or more – possible ideas, designs, solutions or strategies before you try to narrow it down to a single solution. If you don’t see enough innovative approaches yourself, then enlist help by holding a group brainstorming session. Expanding your options is like sowing many seeds – it maximizes the chances of a strong one gaining momentum.

4. Narrow it down to the single most promising idea. Weed out those other approaches or designs now, only after you’ve enriched your viewpoint and allowed your imagination to show you many new possibilities.

5. Run with it! Having opened up your calendar, gathered a rich variety of information, and generated lots of options, you are finally in a position to pick a winner and focus on it. Make a plan, enlist the support and resources you’ll need, and champion it all the way through to implementation.

Most people start at Step 5, trying to execute a solution or implement a plan long before they’ve given themselves enough time to generate any fresh insights or good ideas. As a result, people often feel like they are struggling to get things done. A mediocre or poorly thought through plan is a lot harder to implement than an innovative one!

Thinking of innovation as mental gardening can be helpful, since it reminds us that imagination needs to be given fertile ground, and then nurtured until the best idea reaches maturity.

Innovation is not like growing a field of wheat. We don’t need a million identical small ideas, we already have that in most workplaces. What we need is one big whopper of a breakthrough. So think like the farmer who’s trying to raise a prize-winning pumpkin. Start with lots of good seeds and fertilize them well. Then narrow it down to the strongest plant. Finally, pinch off all but the largest pumpkin on that healthy vine, and give it all your resources until it’s ready to load up on the truck and bring to the fair.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

Alex Hiam (www.alexhiam.com) is the author of more than 20 popular books on business, including Business Innovation For Dummies, Marketing For Dummies, and Marketing Kit for Dummies. A lecturer at the business school at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he has consulted with many Fortune 500 firms and large U.S. government agencies.

Don’t Fail Like Edison Did

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Tales of successful innovation are told – as good stories ought to be – in linear fashion, with the focus on a single triumphant hero. For example: Edison realized the potential for creating light with electricity, tested a wide variety of light-bulb filaments, and finally came up with one that worked well.

The implication is that innovation proceeds in a neat, orderly progression, from our hero recognizing the need, to testing solutions, and finally, rolling out the best one and smiling all the way to the bank.

Not so fast! The reality of innovation is very different from the historical depiction of it. Innovation is messy and wasteful, and it rarely moves in a straight line from problem to solution. The history of the light-bulb illustrates the gap between how we like to recall innovation, and how it really happens.

While Edison and his lab played an important role by contributing a design that made it into commercial use for a time, the fact is that Edison did not invent either the modern incandescent or fluorescent bulbs. Edison’s light bulb design, a thin piece of carbon in a vacuum, is not in use today. Our bulbs are either based on the tungsten filament patented by Willis R. Whitney in 1903, or the mercury vapor light patented by Peter Cooper Hewitt in 1901. Edison is not the father of modern light-bulbs, he is more like a first cousin twice removed.

[wcm_restrict]Edison and his contemporaries were inspired by the work of Humphry Davy, an English scientist who, in 1800, showed that a piece of carbon would glow when electricity was sent through it. If anyone was truly at the beginning of the invention of the light-bulb, it was Humphry, but history does not remember it that way – probably because his invention just happened to be called the ‘electric arc,’ which does not have anything in common with our modern names for electric lights.

If we don’t use Edison’s light bulb design, did we even need Thomas Edison? Yes and no. We needed lots of inventors, creating choices and giving society opportunities to gain experience through real-world applications over a long period of time. And we needed the cross-pollination of ideas between these many inventors.

Edison is, of course, also credited with electrifying our modern world. This is as much of a myth as the light-bulb story. Yes, Edison’s firm did win early contracts to set up electric grids in various cities, but his direct current (DC) system proved far less efficient than Nicola Tesla’s alternating current (AC). Westinghouse and other contractors relied on Tesla’s AC patents to displace Edison’s system and electrify the nation. Edison found himself on a side branch of both the light-bulb and the electric grid.

Perhaps the smartest thing Edison did was to help build General Electric – which incorporated Edison’s initial firm along with others through mergers. General Electric was a great investment because it took a plural approach to light bulbs, using any and all good designs and patents to produce successful bulbs for commercial use. It hardly mattered that it did not commercialize Edison’s filament. The point was to produce something that would sell well.

Edison is a brilliantly famous inventor. However, often the less-luminary innovators are more likely to collaborate and cross-pollinate, and therefore to find their way to the central stream of innovation as it evolves in its messy, multi-faceted way.

For my money, I’d rather model my efforts on inventors nobody recalls today, but whose patents proved to be the ones society built upon. They got to see their royalties grow exponentially. I’d rather bet on growing royalties than a growing reputation. However, it might just be possible to get the credit and the profits by remembering that everything you learned about famous inventors is a myth, and by following three simple rules of real-world innovation:

1. Don’t stop after your first design is done. Develop (and if possible, patent) multiple designs. There is always a pack of candidates, so no single approach is all that likely to emerge as the hands-down winner. Improve your odds by taking more than one approach. When it comes to innovation, the old adage about eggs definitely applies: Don’t put them all in one basket. A plural strategy works best.

2. Coin a catchy name or term. Branding is really the key to getting credit in most cases. If you insist on giving your invention a complex or technical name, know this: History is not all that likely to give you the credit you may feel you deserve. So talk to a branding or naming expert if you can’t come up with something catchy yourself. The person whose name sticks to an innovation is almost always the one who gets the credit.

3. Collaborate. Don’t fall prey to the myth that innovations arise from the lone genius working in isolation. In fact, it takes many creative people, approaching from different directions, to break through all the mental and practical barriers and bring something new to its full fruition. If you reach out to share ideas and learn from others, you are more likely to find and work on the main trunk, rather than be relegated to a side branch as the innovation grows and develops.

In reality, innovation is a messy process with redundancy and variations on themes. It’s impossible to predict which design will emerge as the main commercial success. Even recognition is not enough to insure ultimate success. Model your approach on the reality of how innovation occurs, not the neat, heroic version in our history books.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

Alex Hiam (www.alexhiam.com) is the author of more than 20 popular books on business, including Business Innovation For Dummies, Marketing For Dummies, and Marketing Kit for Dummies. A lecturer at the business school at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he has consulted with many Fortune 500 firms and large U.S. government agencies.