McKinsey’s “Sparking Creativity in Teams: An Executive’s Guide”, addresses how to spark new ideas in non-traditional ways. Gray Suit Marketing provides a synopsis and commentary.

Immerse yourself

• To spark creativity, throw your employees into situations different than what they encounter at the office everyday.
• Often this means sending them to an office or retail store that is in direct opposition to how your company operates.
• See what ideas come out of the experience and how they can be implemented in your company’s operation and culture.

Use Analogies

• Compare your company to a seemingly unrelated company in brainstorming sessions and see what comes out.
• Start by creating questions based on how a different company would conduct your operations and let the conversation evolve.
• A question like, “How might Disney engage with our customers” might spark a creative idea about customer service.

Create Constraints

• Impose artificial constraints on employees to start this outside the box thinking.
• Questions such as “ what if we can only interact with customers online” might spur ideas about online customer service and feedback from online sources.

Gray Suit Marketing frequently conducts workshops for a variety of San Diego businesses. Through these workshops, companies can turn their marketing departments around and truly make them profit centers.

While Bain & Co’s insights are generally spot-on, their generality in recent articles has become excruciatingly tedious. They seem to have built so many PowerPoints that they’ve forgotten what actually matters to business executives. Their article entitled “Getting Ahead of the Game-Changing Trends” is so bland and obvious that an undergraduate 300-level management course might actually dig deeper on syllabus day.

Here’s their main points about organizational behaviors:

• Be consistent
• Keep it simple
• Stay fast and nimble
• Focus on the customer

Really? My company needs to be consistent, simple, and first to market? Thanks, Bain & Co.

A reminder now and again about basic management material is nice, but that shouldn’t be the end of Bain’s insight. Reading an article that is supposed to push the reader to hire Bain’s expert consultants but lacks so much depth reflects poorly on a great company.

Perhaps Bain is trying to get on Malcolm Gladwell’s gravy train of writing children’s books for executives. With executives still digging themselves out of the trenches, the last thing they need is for a historical thought leader like Bain & Co to turn into the Jessica Simpson of the consulting world.

Next time lets hope they deliver a little less Kool Aid and a little more killer instinct.

Gray Suit Marketing’s founding partner David Warren spoke to undergraduates at the University of San Diego on February 22nd, providing them with a “Top Ten Pieces of Unsolicited Advice for Business Students”. The event was a huge success.  Here is the list that Gray Suit  came up with:

10. If you are a first semester Junior or below and want to be taken seriously, it’s not too late to change to a degree in Marketing

9. Debt will make decisions for you; drive a crappy car

8. If you are a senior and have been dating someone for 6 months or less, break up with them

7. Travel now. You won’t have another month off until your knees hurt from old age

6. Wait five years to go to grad school, and then go somewhere the opposite of your undergrad

5. Don’t bash America; it made your boss rich

4. For the first year of work, shut up and produce

3. Learn to write thank you notes, not thank you email

2. Learn how to detail a car, wire home audio, or fix pipes. Actual skills ensure survival

1. Here are the three criteria for picking your job or career path: Will you make money; will you sound cool when you tell people what you do; is what you do all day in line with what God created you to do.

David has been receiving more requests for speaking engagements at San Diego area universities. We’d love your help with any items that you feel we should add to our “Top 10 List.” Continue commenting below on what you think should be included.

The movie adaptation of the book is set for release on April 15th. Bring Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 to a theater near you by voting on their website.

Vote to bring Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 to San Diego

Your employees work a typical 40-60 hour workweek and they’re the ones that make the company tick. They knowledgeably take the ideas and make them reality. You want them to pound out the grunt-work quickly to translate work into revenue. There are two schools of thought to provide employees the means to production: free information and assigned tasks. It’s a matter of how long you want the leash to be in order to get an assigned task completed. Automated systems can bring the desired result, but often alienate workers by giving them a task to complete without collaboration. It’s just man and machine. So how can you merge technologically advanced automation with classic free information to maximize output and therefore revenue? McKinsey’s “Rethinking Knowledge work: A Strategic Approach” provides a solid foundation for these “knowledge workers”, who act and communicate with specified knowledge to make your company what it is.

• Executives who don’t look for opportunities to harness the power of structure probably won’t get the most from knowledge workers.
• The presumption is that knowledge workers, as experts, know what information is available and can search for and manage it themselves without using these information tools for things other than work. Of course, these assumptions may sometimes be incorrect.
• Systems to organize this knowledge can help productivity.
• The downside of these technologies is negative reactions by the workers who use them, but workers can feel they are “chained to their desks”
• The key issue here is to decide which aspects of the relevant process could benefit from more structured technologies and processes and which should be left largely untouched by them.
• Another way of smoothing the path to structure is letting knowledge workers use familiar, typically free-access tools when they interact with a structured system.
• It’s time to think about how to make them more productive by imposing a bit more structure. This combination of technology and structure, along with a bit of managerial discretion in applying them to knowledge work, may well produce a revolution in the jobs that cost and matter the most to contemporary organizations.

Great leaders know how to get the most out of their workers while making them feel like their work is vitally important and their input is being heard. If you need to automate processes, make sure it’s done in a way that doesn’t make workers feel obsolete, but rather that their input within the automation is key to success.