DIFFERENTIATION BY CREATIVITY

What is differentiation? It is the attribute that makes you stand out from the crowd. It is your uniqueness. Your greatest selling point as an individual is not in how similar you are to other people but rather in how different you are. In your difference lies you power. Now that may come out as strange to a lot of people because most people are desperately trying to belong and as such they will do anything to conform.

Take time to understand your differences. Take another look at your strengths, weakness, opportunities and threat because you will discover that the SWOT analysis is not a static instrument. It is dynamic. What was your weakness this year. The rule of thumb is to build strategies around strengths. If the strength has now become a weakness than you will find yourself in a lot of troubles because it means that your strategy is actually now build around weakness.

Where one hundred people are providing the same item and competing for same thing, the winner will be one that has successfully differentiated themselves from the pack. Virgin Atlantic does not have cheaper prices that they differentiated themselves by service quality. People who are scared to be different as individuals will never lead companies that stand out. Remember companies don’t change. It is people that do.

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Richard Branson are poster boys for uniqueness. They lead companies that set pace but as individuals they were radicals and they simply carried it into their companies. Organizations, departments and units takes their personality from leadership. A confused and directionless department is a reflection of a confused and directionless head.

Sadly thought some people are too structured and too organized to be different. To make a difference you have to be different. It takes something new to make the news.

Creativity

A reference point for bad economic times is the great depression which was precipitated by the stock market crash of September 1929. This was a time when International trade plunged by up to 50% and unemployment in the US rose to 25%. Suicides were at an all-time high, companies filed for bankruptcy and over one thousand banks went bankrupt.

Now as bad as it was (and it was really bad) not everyone saw it in bad light. In fact there are reports to show that more millionaires were made during the great depression years than any other time before it. Some of the global brands that have their roots in the great depression include KFC, Hewlett Packard and Texas Instruments, all multibillion dollars establishments today. How do you explain the fact that while the world was going through tis hardest financial crisis, others were making millions?

Ordinary people see what they were looking at but creativity calls for seeing beyond what you are looking at There must be a difference between what you are looking at and what you are seeing. If what you can see is what you are looking at the differences of grate success are slim.

The Power of Programming

Very often you hear people excuse their behavior by saying ‘that’ just how I am’. My question is,’ were they born like that? The obvious answer is no. No baby was born with a point of view. No champion was born a champion. Usain Bolt was not born running. Neither was Michael Phelps born swimming. Oprah was not born talking neither was Obama born a Democratic. They all had to learn in order to be.

At birth, anyone is born equal. No one was born a Christian, a communist, a Muslim or a Buddhist. You could be born into a Christian family but what would happen if before your first birthday you lost your parents and a Buddhist adopted you? You would grow up learning the ways for Buddha. Everyone had to learn in order to be. For someone to therefore attribute their belief systems to the biological process that gave birth to them is either a lie or a blatant display of ignorance.

You are not who you say you are. You are who you have chosen to be. You were not to be who you are. You evolved into who are through consistent programming.

A lot has been written about personalities and the teaching suggests that we are trapped with certain personalities. However, evidence abounds to the contrary personalities manifest on the basis of demands and supply as seen in the classic Eddie Murphy Movie, Trading Places.

One of the major influences of personalities is the environment. One of the traits of great leaders is their ability to create the kind of environment that will produce the kind of people that they want.

Even your attitude towards money and success is a result of programming. If while you were growing up all you ever heard when you asked your parents for money were things like money doesn’t grow on trees, life is hard, nothing comes easy…………(I’m sure you can think of many more) when you grow up, what would you be your reality. You will never expect things to come easy.

I know this because this is the exact programming I had. I was programmed to believe that money was very difficult to come by and it came in abundance only to a special kind of people. I remember seeing rich people and always remembering the kind of comments I used to hear as a child that you don’t know how they got their money.

The insinuation was that rich people must have cut corners and as I grew up because I did not want to be seen as cutting corners and being dishonest inadvertently locked myself out of wealth for a long time. It took a very serious and deliberately re-programming to be free of order program.

You can never innovate beyond your programming. Every single person on earth is living out a program it is their belief system and until they change their belief system, they will only be creative we need to challenge and confront and ultimately change the mindsets that got us to where we are.

Creative Living

First stage in creativity is the position of ignorance until you accept how little you know, you will forever be trapped in the illusion that you know much. The acceptance of ignorance produces hunger which is the greatest stimulus on earth. Why is this important.

Most people are contained by logic. They are contained by things that appear to make sense. When you hear a sequence of numbers like 2,4,6,8 you automatically know what comes next-10, 12, 14. There is no denying the fact that logic is indeed a powerful force. It is what drives most of humanity. We view events in the context of sequence.

We view each situation within the context if the last one. We view each challenge within the context of the last one. The law of precedent controls a lot of our behavior. However, life is not logical and the people who are able to make the best out of life are people who have understood how to override the logic. It is the motivation of hunger. Hunger gives motive for working hard or stealing. It gives the motivation for action that goes beyond logic.

If your vision of where you can be is not greater than your comfort of where you are, you will forever be a prisoner of where you are and this is why many people are prisoners of status quo.

Another thing that holds people down is their concept of reality. You will not create beyond your concept of reality. What is your definition of reality? This may appear to be a very insignificant question but the truth is what the answer to this question is the determinant of the direction of rest of your life will take.

Most people operates within their definition of reality. Unfortunately if you define reality as an absolute location then you will never move beyond your reality. The illusion of reality is so widespread that it affects people from all walks of life.

A friend of mine who is a doctor once told me of a situation where a woman had been rushed to the hospital because she had been beaten up by a colleague at her place of work. When she got to the hospital a female nurse attending to her was so overcome with emotion and then asked her ‘how could you allow him to beat you when he is not your husband?’ the reality for the nurse was that it was alright for a woman to be beaten by a man as long as the man was her husband.

What are the factors that shape your reality? To answer this consider the following scenarios, two people live in the same country. One says that the country is very poor and it is very difficult to make ends meet in the country and he was so many ease studies to prove his point. Another person living in the same country says that the economy is fantastic and that more millionaires have been created in the country than in all the neighboring countries put together. Now which of these two people is telling the truth?

Both of them have experiences and witness and these have formed their reality. The question I want to put to you today is this, is the reality of your past the reality you want in your future? If no, the very good news is that you can change the reality of your future.

Everything you do to raise the level of you thinking will ultimately raise the level of your life. No one has a fixed status position on earth. You can change your status continuously by investing in your mind. Your life will move in the direction of the dominant images you allow in your mind. You can’t change what’s in your hand until you change what’s in your mind. When things are not working, look at your mind

Trigger Questions

Learn how to ask trigger questions. These are questions that force your mind to think in a new direction. An example of a trigger question is the word why. Whenever you ask the question why, you are forced to think of a motive to remember, motive will override logic.

Another trigger question is the word how. This question always forces you to think of a new method. It triggers the thinking of a new way. If you practice asking this questions with a resolve never to give up finding solutions, you will get your mind to a place where it will become creative by default. Remember, asking why creates are motive while asking ‘how’ opens you up to the methodology.

There are more trigger questions; How can it be combined with something else produce a greater impact? What can be taken away from it to make it easier for the consumer to enjoy. How can we multiply it? How can we re-design it to appeal to gender?

Taking Stock

Another powerful concept for inspiring creativity is the simple art of taking stock. Even if we are successful at the moment we need to take stock and develop ways of moving you from our present state. Remember that success is time bound if we do nothing about it. Un-improved success is the gateway to failure.

Learn to identify an idea that has been developed in the past that did not work. Failures are worth millions. Deliberately engage you mind by asking what you can do with past failures. Examples abound of past failures that were turned into huge success.

For instance, 3m invented glue which was a failure it did not stick but become the basis for the post-it note, which was huge success.

Scientist at Pfizer tested a new drug called Viagra to relieve high blood pressure. Men in the test group reported that it was a failure as regards high blood pressure but it had one beneficial side effect. Pfizer, the manufacturers, investigated the side effect and found that the drug had a dramatic effect on men’s sexual vigor. Viagra became one of the most successful failures of all time!

In 1978 engineers at Sony Corporation tried to develop a small portable stereo tape recorder. They were unable to do so. They could make small but they could make it record, which was on of the design criteria for the tape recorder. The project was written off as a failure. The chairman of Sony was Mr. Ibuka, and he has an idea that this failed project could be linked with another Sony project to develop high headphones.  

He proposed that both products be combined to produce a portable machine that could play tapes through light weight headphones, and so the Sony Walkman was born. Experts in the industry scoffed at the idea of a tape recorder that could not record and had no speakers. But Sony proved them wrong with an innovative product that was huge consumer success.

In the 1950s, the Jacuzzi brothers invented a whirl pool bath to treat people with arthritis. Although the product worked, it was a sale flop. Very few people in the target market, sufferers from arthritis, could afford the expensive bath. So the idea languished until they tried re-launching the same product for a different for a different market- as a luxury item for the wealthy. It became a big success.

Be your own antagonist

Assuming you have been hired by a new company to do exactly what you do today in your current company and you are being paid three times your current salary with amazing bonuses. With your current products, attempt to launch a campaign to take yourself/ your company out of the maze. This will help you discover loophole with your system that needed to be sealed as well as opportunities for new products and strategies.

Conclusion   

Developing a creative mind is not reserved only for those people that we call creative. It is available for every single person on the face of the earth. When the demand on you get to a level where you are ready to defy logic you will be creative.

However, you do not need to wait for that critical moment. You can initiate the process by doing the simple things we have discussed. Deliberately subject your mind to challenges that will force it to think in a different way and you will be surprised at what you can do.