Creativity and Innovation: Selling Your Value Proposition

Ideation in industries is challenging but the bigger challenge is converting ideas into actions, executing those ideas and also convincing peers and investors to buy into your ideas. Our ideas remain worth a sneeze if they can't be converted into value propositions and tangible, measurable products, processes or projects.

Yesterday, at a workshop I was asked..."How'd you get peers and investors to buy in?"

Here are three, really, quick tips.

Step 1:
Sneak the idea, subtly, into their mind-environment like fragrance, like mist, like a dainty little butterfly. CEOs, CIOs, Investors, like all of us, probably a bit more, are busy and pre-occupied. Sneaking in an idea into their environment makes them feel they thought about it, they came up with it, thus, they will want to own and invest into it.

Do this through a press leak, a tweet, a hand-written note. Or, speak to your companion, in an elevator, in hushed tones within their earshot. Essentially, let the idea seep into their system without having to work through natural human resistances.

Step 2:
Assuming this gets you into their boardroom for a "little" chat about a new idea, go prepared to go for the jugular and make major impact.

Carry, a less than 3 minute presentation/chat/proposal which...
Describes the proposition in crystal clear terms. Edit it a thousand times for impact and clarity.

Keeps your proposition irrefutable and backed up by proof or testimonials from valid or respectable sources.
Has an underlying agenda and a visible agenda that is ethical and delivers a greater good...in alignment with corporate vision and values.

Step 3:
Offer to participate and drive the execution of the idea and stay with it till its launch and, inevitable, success. Rarely do people want to buy into and invest in an idea until it seems to them that the person proposing is committed to it and will stand behind its execution.

Think of innovation as new action and a put in conscious effort to sell and execute your ideas.

HeART SmART™ Creativity & Innovation
Raju Mandhyan

CSR: Learn not Teach

One of my sons has come of the age when he has to make the choice to study further or plunge into the world of business. So far he has been a good son, an outstanding student and a very responsible citizen of the world. His teachers at the Ateneo de Manila University do take note of his performances and they have rewarded him with the right accolades and scholarships too. In life, he seems poised correctly to take off from being a good boy to a man to be respected. I take pride in this fact but claim no credit. As far as I am concerned, he is a self-made man already.

While driving about town, sometimes, we have healthy conversations about business, politics, social issues, life and about living gracefully. I must confess that I, more often than not, pick up more lessons than I think I give out.

One particular Sunday morning, just a week after I made a presentation at the Asian Forum on Corporate Social Responsibility [CSR] in Manila, I was telling him about how people across the world are waking up to the realities of the rampage we have created, in the guise of development and growth, we have created on earth. I was also telling him how happy I was that thousand of individuals and organizations in the know are now doing the right thing by healing the earth, nurturing the needy and educating the ones not in the know. “People,” I said, “are essentially good, and when given the freedom and the resources will most likely do the right and the noble thing.” I was happy, I said, that many large business groups do not regard the concept of CSR just as marketing and a business strategy but more as a way of life. On other occasions most of our conversations had been, of course, about developmental work and study opportunities in the USA or Europe for him. His city of choice, to live, work and or study, he’d mentioned many a times to me, was San Francisco. Today, he just sat and heard me out quietly.

A few days after that one-sided chat, we were back in the car again.

“Pa,” he said “there’s this professor at school who was telling us about this developmental assignment in one of the remote provinces in the Philippines.”

“What about it?”

“It’s an eighteen month teaching assignment for high-school level kids in a village where there is no electricity and potable water.”

“And?”

“Well, I am seriously considering taking it up.”

Without thinking and very carelessly, I blurted out, “Why?”

Allowing no pause and with a quick frown on his good-looking face, he exploded, “What do you mean, why?”

That shut me up good for the rest of the drive. Again, instead of teaching, I’d learned. Likewise for CSR, I realized I need to learn not teach, do and not talk, live it and not just employ it as a business strategy.

Original Knowledge and Intellectual Property

The idea of original knowledge tied in with the concept of intellectual property does raise a lot of issues. The growth of knowledge has been like a raging fire and futurists claim that in the next decade or so everything we already will double. At the same there are others who want to, with good reason, like to protect the work they put out. I am off the bias that we should be careful and yet take failure to control things lightly. After all we still haven’t given credit to the person who put together the 26 letters of the alphabet and the person who came up with numbers.

Two of my speaker friends put out a query on Linked In and many others responded to their ponderings. I share here the questions and my thoughts on the subject.

Question from Karen Peña / Meeting Professional / Professional Speaker / Trainer / Motivator:

“Is it bad etiquette to reference and quote another speaker in your presentation? We all admire our peers in the industry. At times I would like to reference key points from their presentations, and give them the credit of course! Is that a big faux pas? “

Answer:

"The unexamined life is not worth living. " Socrates, Apology.

Now how many times has this been repeated, in variations, by writers and speakers over the centuries? Add to this the possibility that this quote, in itself, may have been a variation of something someone must have said before Socrates.
There is an inherent fallacy in the belief that something is totally original. Most everything I know I have learned from someone, somewhere and the process, prior to that, has been continuous. I, Ladies and Gentlemen, am nothing but a dung-heap of perceptions, which I claim to be my own! [Uh, wait! Didn't someone say something just like that before?]

The knowledge and the wisdom in one good book have similarities to the knowledge and the wisdom in another good book, even as these books may have been written thousands of years ago.

My stand is use words, ideas and suggestions by others. Give credit to the author everywhere you can and yet claim nothing to be your own unless the world credits it to you.

“To thine own-self be true; And it must follow, as the night the day. Thou can'st not then be false to any man.” Shakespeare-- Hamlet. Act I. Sc. 3


Question from Nishant Kasilbahtla, Speaker, Trainer and Memory Champ.

“How do you deal when one of your participants (in a talk) posts what all you taught in his / her blog? I was searching the internet and found a blog where almost all key ideas I discuss in my talk are posted by one enthusiastic blogger (in some cases verbatim). The funny thing is, he didn’t even bother to mention my name in the post. How do you deal with people like this? Your ideas,please?”

Answer:

Nishant, you might consider celebrating.

We are in the business of human development. We are in the business of helping others. We are in the business of learning, morphing and distributing knowledge and actionable knowledge. Knowledge that will eventually turn to wisdom. Wisdom to spirituality.

We are in the business of contribution to society and the world. We are out there speading the good word and then someone grabs it from you and runs.

What's he going to do? Spread it as his own? He, thus, has helped you spread the goodies. He is doing your job. Seek no retribution.

His intentions and his actions create his destiny. They do not change yours. That as you already know, is no secret, dude!

Epilogue:

The second query ended with a happy ending. Nishant, upon suggestion from Heather Hansen, emailed the blogger who went online and rewrote the blog and gave credit to the speaker/author.

Raju Mandhyan
www.mandhyan.com
A World of Clear, Creative and Conscientious Thinkers!

Insights On Insights

The world does move at a maddening pace and I'd like to adhere to the adage that life is not just about adding speed to it. So when the rest of the word is up and tweetering, I decided to get on the blogging bandwagon. Here's my first song, hope you like it.

It is kinda' strange that nowadays everyone is out putting out something onto the cyberworld. Everyone is out there, busy, making a guru-of-sorts of himself. And, yes, of course, that list does include me. So, to set the pace and to get you all, hopefully, on my page I wanna' tell you what Insights is going to all about.

I am of the belief that everything changes all the time, consistently and constantly. We create the change, we are created by the change and we are affected by the change. It is a, forgive me, but a crazy, riotious, almost incomprehensible cycle of madness and mayhem. A cycle of time, space, elements, energy and emotions that is unstopping, unforgiving and has been around for for eons and eons. What each eon, each age and every individual does is to take an ever-so-tiny snapshot of this humongous change and present it all those around like a proud Dad showing off pictures of his newborn to his friends. What the Dad does forget it that world has seen ziliions of babies like his own before. And, that is quite alright given our limited worldview which is clamped between our perspectives of time and space.

So, that is what Insights is going to be all about_a tiny little snapshot through my personal camera. The lenses of my camera are named Clear Communication Skills, Creative Thinking and Conscientious Leadership. Compound all these together and measure the size of my worldview and you have the words "Change" and "Insights."