XI. The lateral thinker

Read and translate the text:

In his book on creative problem-solving, 'Breaking Through', Tom Logsdon tells the story of a bright young executive hired to manage a San Francisco hotel. One of the first problems the young executive has to face is a flood of complaints about the hotel lifts, which are infuriatingly slow. Guests are actually starting to demand rooms on lower floors. But an upgrade of the lift system is ruled out when the lowest estimate for reconstruction comes to $200,000. Clearly something else has to be done, and pretty quickly, before people start checking out.

Finally, a creative solution occurs to the young executive. The key to the problem, he decides, is boredom. With only the lift doors and a blank wall to stare at, guests are understandably getting bored, and when people are bored they tend to complain. So instead of speeding up the lifts, full-length mirrors are installed both inside and directly outside the lifts on each floor - at a cost of just $4,000. Now, with their reflections to look at when they use the lift, people stop complaining, thereby saving the hotel $196,000.

This is what Edward De Bono calls lateral thinking, and it's the result of looking at the problem in a different and unusual way. Indeed, reformulating and redefining a problem is just one of the ways in which you can create a climate for creativity in business. And an increasing number of companies now see such creative strategies as vital to their survival.

At 3M, for example, employees spend as much as 15% of their time on new ideas and 25% of every manager's product portfolio consists of products that are less than five years old. At Hewlett-Packard more than half their orders in 1992 were for products introduced in the previous two years. It's a similar story at Glaxo, ICL and SmithKline Beecham. For it's no coincidence that in research-driven industries, like computers and pharmaceuticals, an innovative lead creates the market leaders. Management guru, Tom Peters, talks nowadays of a company's whole culture being creative. But creativity would be useless without innovation, and the two terms should not be confused.

According to the team running creativity courses at the Cranfield School of Management, creativity is essentially about generating, not judging, ideas. Innovation, on the other hand, is the successful implementation of those ideas on a commercial basis. In a brainstorming session, you don't criticize ideas before they're fully formed. That would be counter­productive. Evaluation comes in at the innovation stage, where you're turning good ideas into a commercial proposition. It follows that you cannot be both creative and innovative at the same time.

For making a discovery is one thing; exploiting it quite another, as the Xerox Research Centre found out to its cost when its system for making personal computers easier to use was copied by Apple Macintosh. Apple led the market for almost ten years with the enormously successful desktop system it 'borrowed' from Xerox. But Apple had the foresight to copyright the system. Xerox didn't. Originality, it seems, is the art of concealing your source, and too many companies fail to see an opportunity until it ceases to be one.

Assignments:

1) Find the words and expressions which mean:

1. a creative environment

2. it's not by chance that

3. management experts

4. viable-generating meeting

5. not telling people where you got the idea

2) Retell the text in a met-shell.

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