Creative entrepreneurs find niches for their business that are not full of competitors fighting over the last dollar of margin, or niches that are mature and shrinking in size.\u00a0 They search for areas unexplored, or those covered by companies with less of a vision for quality, service or innovation.<\/p>\n
But even creative entrepreneurs are often trapped inside the box of their experience.\u00a0 Recently in a discussion of this very subject in a roundtable of CEO\u2019s, one CEO reminded us of the Titanic tragedy.\u00a0 She stated that those in charge during the last hours aboard had options probably never considered that could have saved many more lives, given the limited number of life boats available.\u00a0 She listed several, including pulling up the teak floorboards and throwing them overboard along with the deck chairs and dining tables, all to be used for floatation.\u00a0 It made us all think that we had never considered such solutions when contemplating that disaster after the fact.<\/p>\n
[Email readers, continue here…]\u00a0<\/em><\/span> With that challenge, we turned as a group to discuss how CEO\u2019s could make a culture of thinking outside of that restrictive box of experience.\u00a0 We considered adding questions to the interview process that could bring surprising answers from a job candidate, pointing to a creative thinker that might complement the team.<\/p>\n We challenged ourselves as a group to think of answers to problems that a writer of fiction might create, unconstrained by conventional thinking.\u00a0 We worried over the fact that we may have hired people in the past that fit our image of the proper addition to our core staffs, people with similar experiences and training, constrained by the same experiential thinking as ourselves.<\/p>\n And we left that meeting each more willing to search for talent to help us and our enterprise find creative alternatives that would challenge us, expand our product, marketing, sales and process abilities beyond the constraints of our present definition of our company and its core.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Creative entrepreneurs find niches for their business that are not full of competitors fighting over the last dollar of margin, or niches that are mature and shrinking in size.\u00a0 They search for areas unexplored, or those covered by companies with … Continue reading