"C" for Creativity

When someone tells you to creatively solve a problem what do you do? How do you start? Lateral thinking, out of the box solutions seem to be the jargons that every manager is fed with.
With increasing competition in the economic scenario, companies are forced to employ ‘creative’ strategies. With increasing competition from their peers, managers are compelled to deploy ‘creative’ solutions. But what exactly is being creative like? Is it doing something that no one has ever thought before? Is creativity based on facts?
I remember participating in creative writing competitions during college and even won one of them. I just had to think and write a story for which only the first and last line were given by the panel. Simple, isn’t it?
I worked with a multi national company that was bent upon improving employee satisfaction more so for its call center. Employees were given awards for numerous ‘excuses’. A customer complimenting an employee would automatically fetch a gift coupon for him/her. An idea of the employee that the company feels would be beneficial for it would fetch a reward. One of the managers came up with a practice called “peer-peer’ awards wherein boards with posted sheets were stuck on the wall. Any employee willing to appreciate another employee could go to the board, write on the sheet. The first three employees who had the maximum number of appreciations each month were rewarded. Apart from this, parents of all employees were sent a letter signed by all the mangers stating that their son/daughter was a star. Such small things mattered to the employees.
I remember hosting a debate competition at my college. I had prepared a few topics out of which one of the topics was “1+1 = 1X1”. I did not know why I gave that topic but I had nothing in mind then but just plain curiosity to see how the participants would think in a short span of 2 minutes. And yes, the participant who got this topic did justice to it. She immediately conjured up with the idea that 1+1 represents two individuals in the institution of marriage and after marriage they become one thereby representing 1X1. I think that was a brilliant explanation.
Let us take the success of the book “The Monk Who Sold his Ferrari”. With numerous self-development books flooding the book shelves, this was one book that carved a niche for itself. The recipe of the book was different. It had things that had been told to us before but it was packaged differently. It spoke of a story of a successful lawyer who failed at his personal relationship and who was on the verge of a breakdown until he discovered what life had to offer. This story added spice to the book and enabled it to become a best seller.

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