Before you embark upon it, life as a thoughtleader might sound like a huge commitment of added time and energy.  There’s the time involved in researching relevant business topics, drawing conclusions and conceptualizing insights, clarifying your ideas for articles and books, preparing for presentations, finding time for the media. It would be natural to wonder: How in the world can I manage all that? I'm already running flat-out as it is.

The answer is this: It ain’t about time, it’s about perception. And about your ongoing attitude, mindset and literally the way you choose to think. True thoughtleading weaves itself into one’s moment-to-moment thinking. New ideas arise all of an instant, in the blink of an eye. Yes, a BLINK!  You don’t necessarily set aside time to think and reflect—although you could. Instead, you develop a new mode of thinking that replaces your old way and now serves your thoughtleading objectives, all without any added burden of making more time or distracting you from your daily chores..

Suzanne Lowe, author of Marketplace Masters: How Professional Services Firms Compete to Win, puts it this way: “Does thoughtleading take too much time? Well, it shouldn’t. It’s not about time at all. Rather than being time-consuming, thoughtleading should be a constant process… small steps, great gains. It’s more about an approach to thinking critically. If you simply focus your thinking within a framework of wondering why or how did this or that happen, then you will fix on the substance of a situation and ask critical questions. You’ll want to discover why this or that is, and so you will think in a way in which you will. Thoughtleaders possess an investigator’s mind, thinking like a detective moment to moment. It does not have to take any particular extra time at all. . In fact, I thought up many of my ideas for my book while walking my dog! Thoughtleading is about employing a different thought process, not just taking more time to think differently at specified times.”

Maria Thomson, author of Insurance Coverage for All… and How Businesses Can Afford to Provide It (Actex Publications), sees thoughtleading thinking as allowing oneself to simply be curious and wonder abut things. To develop forward-thinking ideas for the insurance industry which she eventually published in her book, she continually focused on  the why of things, asking question after question of others as well as herself.

“It’s the analytical side of me that kept me asking things,” she explains, “questions like: What is the nature of the problem? What is the solution? It wasn't a chore, it was stimulating. I saw it as a challenge. It did not take more time, it just caused me to use my time in a particular way.”

Jim Masciarelli, author of PowerSkills: Building Top-Level Relationships for Bottom-Line Results, considers thoughtleading thinking as a powerful mindset. He was inspired initially to become a thoughtleader by a success poster brandishing this line: “Become the most positive and enthusiastic person you know.” He translated that to mean the best thing any of us could do is attempt to “improve our souls on this earth by living, loving and learning.”

“To me that’s what it’s all about,” he says. “The more you learn, the more you can offer other people.  Learning is the ultimate elixir.  No matter how old you are, learning is what makes you feel alive.  Life as a thoughtleader is an antidote for aging.”

Can we doubt this when we watch lifetime thoughtleaders, in business and elsewhere, grow older and older yet never lose their zest? Think Peter Drucker who questioned, researched, wrote and reflected until his death in 2005 at the age of 96. Or John Kenneth Galbraith, who was still publishing, speaking and musing until his death in 2006 at the age of 97.

Or Norman Mailer, Studs Terkel, Jack Lalanne, Duke Ellington, Julia Childs. No matter the age, the thoughtleading mind keeps on cranking out new thoughts, imagining, reflecting, wondering, questioning… all without missing a beat.

You Literally Have to Lead

Despite all the positive glories of thinking like a thoughtleader, however, there are nonetheless cautions to consider. Maria recalls for example that “thoughtleading thinking” can leave you standing all alone, possibly too far ahead of your time.

“The original areas that I tried to take a stance on failed to gain acceptance,” she recalls. “My thinking on the new directions I was advocating for the insurance industry was too far ahead of where the market was, too far into the future.” As a result, Maria’s attempts to win business were often rebuffed, her prospects paying lip service to her progressive ideas but not willing to back it up with cold hard cash. Only years later did her ideas about streamlining insurance underwriting via technology begin winning favor. Now, five years later, many of her pioneering ideas are mainstays of the insurance industry, even though during her earlier advocacy the prevailing wisdom of of the industry doubted they would ever work.

Courage is thus a prerequisite for thoughtleading thinking. Not only will you develop new ideas on an ongoing basis but you’ll need to communicate them too, put them up for debate, invite disagreement and denunciation and even derision.

“You literally have to lead,” explains Alan Weiss, author of Million Dollar Consulting and self-proclaimed “contrarian,  “and not necessarily because you invent an alternative to gravity or alternative to teamwork or whatever but because you help people look at something in a new way. You have to contribute to the state of the art, and to do that you always have to be able and willing to stand out and be recognized in a crowd.”

Weiss adds, “It’s not enough for a true thoughtleader to just ‘think’ real thoughtleading is more than that. I’ve met lot of people who are good thinkers, and who I have learned from… but thoughtleadership in any discipline literally means being willing to stand out in a crowd and say “Here is the right way to do it, now take your best shot.”  You’ve got to manifest your thoughtleadership, and you can never use non-original work. It takes chutzpah to put your own ideas across but that’s what thoughtleaders do.“

Failure is Desirable

Accepting this notion that thoughtleading means standing up on a platform all by yourself and inviting a roomful of scrutinizers to take pot shots at you may require a re-definition of failure. Experts, like any human, want to do their best and do things right and do things well and get recognized for excellence. Succinctly put, they want to win.

Yet sometimes failure is winning, paradoxical as that must sound. There are actually many benefits to failing, so the trick is not to feel as if failing is the worst thing ever. In fact, failure is desirable.

Consider these three potential benefits of failure:

1. Failure can teach you how not to do something.
2. Failure can suggest an opposite or alternative way to do something is the path to success. It may provide an “aha!” for something that had not been previously considered. Such inventions as Post-Its and Plexiglas came about because experiments that created them had originally been intended with other product inventions in mind.
3. Failure can sometimes represent a step along the way to success. No better example comes to mind that Thomas Edison. While searching for the secret to electric light, he failed over 3000 different times as he tried out materials for the light bulb’s filament until he inserted tungsten and… poof… there was light! When asked later by reports how it is that he had achieved this miracle when so many others had not, he replied, “Well, I was willing to do what the others would not. Keep failing but refuse to give up.”

Failing is an inevitable component of life, impossible to completely avoid. By worrying about it, and fearing it, and trying to keep it completely out of your life, you make it more difficult for new ideas or successful outcomes to find their way in. And that’s the part that’s the real mistake: wanting so badly to never make one.

Weiss likes to say, “If I’m not failing, I’m not trying.” Thoughtleaders do fail and often times that’s the very thing that leads to their success.

Tenets of Creativity

As most of my program participants sketched furiously, swirling brightly-colored markers across large white sheets of poster paper, my eyes locked on Rhonda who was kneeling on the floor, motionless, in the middle of the seminar room. Her eyes stared distantly beyond the sheet of paper spread out on the floor in front of her. She looked like she was refusing to participate.  As she’d been somewhat resistant to the creativity process I’d been teaching all day, I worried that she might be refusing to do what I’d asked.

In my seminar called “Unlocking Your Creativity,” Rhonda would in fact have appeared to be the last person to resist.  She was, after all, a talented fine artist skilled in many mediums, unlike most of the more logical, “left-brained” management professionals who were attending this program. Why was she unwilling to give the exercise a chance?

When everyone had finished, I asked for volunteers to share their “vision of the future.’” An accountant named George raised his hand.

“Here’s a boat on the ocean,” George said, standing and holding up his “vision poster” in which a crude sketch of a boat filled up the paper with himself, a stick figure, as the boat’s captain.

“I’d love to retire one day and just sail away!” he said. “I love sailing.  A dream life for me would be to get out every day on the water and just feel the breeze.”

We asked a few questions, offered encouraging comments, then gave George a round of applause.  Marcie got up next, announcing she’d love to spend more time with her kids.  Her self-portrait showed her standing with three small children, next to a house, snow-capped mountains, the beach, a general store. “It would be just lovely to spend more time with them than I can right now,” she said.  “Maybe I could work toward that.”

Again, we asked questions, offered encouragement, and acknowledged Marcie with applause.  The intent of this exercise was to get everyone thinking about what they wanted to do, not what they felt they had to do. So often we get bogged down trying to solve problems with our logical minds, searching for “realistic” solutions. In  the process we shut  down our creative thinking. Then good ideas for solving our problems and changing our lives stop coming up and we table our hopes and dreams, mistakenly believing they had no solution.

So the idea here was to express hopes and dreams in unfamiliar media, illustrating them in bright colors, revving up lesser-used creative segments of the brain in the hope of stimulating “breakthrough” ideas. Many incidents in history, especially business history, have become legendary for demonstrating that this theory works. Velcro, , for example, came about when a Swiss engineer named George de Mestral perceived a connection between the burrs that stuck on his pants when he hiked through the woods and a new way to fasten things. He got to work on making a burr-like material that would catch and fasten in the same way and Velcro was born.

Similarly, the plate glass industry was revolutionized after Albert Pilkington observed grease forming in the dishwater as he was doing dishes.  Something about the image led him to invent a process for making glass, for the first time, perfectly smooth, which he called Plexiglas.

By now, four or five participants had shared their posters.  To my surprise, Rhonda raised a hand to go next, despite the untouched poster paper still stretched out before her on the floor.

“Here’s a vision of my life,” she said, picking up the blank sheet of paper.  “It’s a clean slate.  By leaving the paper blank I give myself freedom.  I want to live my life spontaneously from now on, no more worrying and being ‘practical’ all the time.  I’ll draw on the poster and insert things as I go along.”

Creative thinking is often referred to as thinking “outside the box,” thinking beyond the conditioned boundaries of mental preconceptions.  By drawing absolutely nothing on her poster paper, Rhonda, a skilled artist who could have dazzled us all with sorts of brilliant images, drove the lesson home. Ignoring both “shoulds” and “spozed-to’s,” she’d reached a completely different place, stimulating her thinking dramatically and locating for her the right answer.

Innovations Equals Success

Rick Harriman, President of Synectics Inc., based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the world’s leading creativity consulting firms, warns that managers who believe their company can survive in today’s climate without ongoing, abundant creative thinking in its ranks are kidding themselves.  “It’s a very dangerous thing for companies to feel they’re sitting pretty the way things are happening today,” he explains. “Our clients’ perspective is that when you’re faced with the kind of continual market and product changes we see today, you’ve got to get ahead of the curve.  That demands utilizing creativity.”

Harriman’s firm reaches out all over the world to train managers in the art of innovative thinking, and was in fact the first such firm to do so, some 60 years ago.  He says that to stay ahead of the competition today, you must seek out opportunities not previously available, which you do by “keeping your mind open and recognizing that, since factors are constantly changing, so must you.” He adds, “View change as opportunity, not crisis.”

Research conducted by Synectics in which senior hundreds of managers were surveyed identified a correlation between a company’s commitment to innovation and its success in the marketplace. The high-performing companies are labeled “Stars” vs. two other categories:  “Seekers” and “Spectators.” 

With success defined as increases in such categories as revenues and profits, employee retention, maintaining high morale, and consistent introduction of high-quality products and services, Stars lead in all categories.  The  Seekers come next, owing to a modicum of innovation in their cultures, while the steadfastly traditional Spectators trail far behind.

It seems a wise move, then, for a company to inject innovative thinking into its organizational mix.  To do this right, creativity experts agree, whether organization or an individual, requires four “creativity tenets”:

1. Let ideas fly.  

Managers and even colleagues must learn to resist the temptation to blurt out, “No, no, that would never work!” during a meeting or especially a brainstorming session. The essence of creativity is to let all ideas fly, no matter how wild, impractical or outrageous.  Even putting totally wacky ideas on a white board for all to see could end up opening up the discussion to an ultimately practical solution. No idea should be considered unworthy. Remember Rhonda.

2. Failure is desirable. Yes, here it comes again. Many companies pay lip service to the idea that it’s OK to fail, that making mistakes and getting things wrong is par for the course.  But then look out if you really do mess up!

Instead, managers committed to innovation will invite open discussion of mistakes and failures on the theory there’s always a lesson to be learned from them.  Risk-taking after all, by definition, means sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.  Failure must be understood as only one possible outcome in the overall game.

3. Color, music and quiet are vital.  The first things to go when budgets get tight in our schools, it seems, are such “non-essentials” as art and music.  Yet many brain studies indicate that creativity is amplified when such traditionally “peripheral” educational activities are included in the curriculum. 

Thus, creative companies find ways to allow music in the work environment, , maintain a colorful decor, give employees downtime and space to think, and reimburse employees for programs that allow them to (as Steven Covey puts it) “sharpen their saw.”

4. Travel roads untraveled. If a company intends to truly transform itself into one that routinely practices innovation, it must take risks as a culture. That means choosing unknown directions, attempting grand experiments… leaping off cliffs! Step out your traditional business practices when they seem not to be working and try something unusual, even wacky.

 A salesman I once knew named Jed, for example, had terrible time getting a prospect to look at his marketing materials.  Each time he made a follow-up call to this prospect, the prospect insisted he just wasn’t interested in Jed’s product. So why should he bother to look at Jed’s materials?

One day, out of total frustration, Jed decided to try the exact opposite of what he’d learned back in sales training. He stuffed  up all his marketing materials into a big cardboard box and wrote all over it in crayon warnings like, “Do NOT open this box!” and “Do NOT look inside!” and “Whatever you do, keep this sealed!”  Then he mailed the box to his prospect, with no return address.

As this was before September 11, you can imagine what happened:  The prospect couldn’t help himself, he just had to look inside. Once he caught a glimpse of Jed’s lively marketing materials, he began to change his mind about Jed’s product. Before long he was ringing Jed up and giving him his business.  By taking a road rarely traveled—never in fact!--–Jed won new business that without his innovative attempt would never have happened.

Words that Kill Creativity

And now a few utterances you will not hear emanating from a thoughtleader's mouth any time soon:

• “We tried that before”
• “It’s a good idea, but we really don’t have time to implement it”
• “You’re joking, of course”
• “That’s all very well in theory but practically speaking…”
• “Top management will never go for it”
• “But we’ve never it done it that way before”
• “I’m afraid you’re ahead of your time”
• “Has anyone else ever tried it?”
• “We should form a committee and study this idea further”

Words That Spark Creativity

And finally, a few words that thoughtleaders do like to say:

• “Imagination is more important than knowledge” --Albert Einstein
• “In the long history of humankind (and animal kind too), those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed”  --Charles Darwin
• “There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only those with unexpected outcomes” --Buckminster Fuller
• “If you can dream it, you can do it”  --Walt Disney
• “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be.  Now put the foundations under them.” --Henry David Thoreau
• “Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think, creation’s’” --E.M. Forster
• “Think wrongly if you please, but in all cases think for yourself” --Doris Lessing
• “A problem is a chance for you to do your best” --Duke Ellington
• “You see things and say ‘Why?’ but I see things that never were and say ‘Why not?’” --George Bernard Shaw

 Thought Notes

When groupthink begins

When my daughter Chloe was about 3, I used to take her to a local kid fitness program called “Toddler Gym.” We had tried to give Chloe a fair amount of freedom at home to roam and discover and enjoy and this program seemed set up the same way. The little balance beams and flouncey giant parachute to hide under and the colorful balls of all sizes stimulated her not only physically but creatively.

But one day, the instructor called all the little kids into a circle for some kind of group game.  Chloe however was still exploring off to the side, so the instructor called (nicely), “Come on Chloe, come over and join the circle.” At that moment, I thought, “Uh-oh, here it comes. Regimentation. Groupthink. Her days of totally free-reign, unencumbered, independent exploration have come to an end.”

Sending your book to college

Thoughtleading gets down to metaphysics. We start thinking about ourselves, about what is driving us. Is it our background, our parents? Is it how we envision ourselves? Is it who we are in the present?

Some people practice thoughtleading because they don’t want to have another kid. So they mold their thoughts. Thanks to thoughtleadership, they can control their own universe… You look at the big players, they might have 15 children or 15 books…

But then you gotta send your book to ‘college,’ i.e., to corporations, to professional groups, to business leaders… get it in the hands of other people. It’s your baby, your offspring… your child!

Lou Carter, President, Best Practices Institute, and author of Best Practices in Leadership Development and Organization Change: How the Best Companies Ensure Meaningful Change and Sustainable Leadership (Essential Knowledge Resource Publishers)

Break it and remake it

I don’t actually like that term “thoughtleader,” because to many people, it’s simply a way of becoming more visible. But what we really should be talking about is breaking the mold of what has been accepted up until now, of shaping old ways and assumptions into things new and innovative. … You break it and remake it. Thoughtleading is much deeper than merely gaining more visibility and spreading around your thoughts in broader circles. It’s actually about forcing yourself and others to push the envelope.

Suzanne Lowe, author, Marketplace Masters

First thought, best thought

The Beat poet Allen Ginsburg used to advocate a decision-making process he labeled, “First thought, best thought.” Believing his best poetry efforts invariably came about when he stuck to his initial thoughts and the way he expressed them, he worked hard to nix inner, nagging self-doubt in favor of re-writing first drafts only occasionally. Rather than agonizing over the merit of his first concepts for a poem, he just went with it, taking his chances that his readers would react to the work favorably. His trust of his inner gut reigned supreme.