Unlocking Creativity

Extract from Patrick’s interview with IdeaConnection.

Author and consultant Patrick Harris provides 46 truths about creativity that provide useful and practical insights. Anyone interested in creativity and innovation should learn about these truths.

Patrick Harris observes "that there is a massive creativity chasm between organisations and their customers. Customers do cool, investigative, socially linked things to find out about goods and services. Organisations tend to adhere to what they have always done." This chasm needs to be bridged. The question is what will each of us do differently tomorrow to do something better, faster, or more innovatively than before?

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Creative thinking

Global Focus - The EFMD Business Magazine,
Volume 3, Issue 3 2009.

We all want and need creativity in our personal lives and at work. But how can we nurture, encourage and use creativity successfully? In this article, Patrick Harris offers some suggestions.

“Creative teams are special. They are groups of people who are not afraid to ask difficult questions and to explore unknowns.”

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Innovation in a Recession

Patrick Harris and Cliff Dennet.

This article was provided to West Midlands Regional Observatory. It is one of ten chapters from invited experts, in the book ‘West Midlands: Fit for the Future?’

Book coverWest Midlands: Fit for the Future? is a book written by ten different authors, with each author giving their personal view on how the West Midlands can best place itself in readiness for the economic recovery.

The focus of the book is on the future prosperity of the West Midlands, rather than on the effects of the recession, and explores the region’s ability to maximise its potential as it moves out of the downturn.

Our aim with the book is to stimulate debate, promote discussion and influence policy on the future growth of the region.

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We the people

Reprinted from The Journal of Brand Management, Volume 15, Number 2, November 2007.

Branding is about people. People build brands. People buy brands. The relationship, at first glance, is a simple one - build a good brand and others will buy it. At the heart of this relationship, however, is another group of people, that of the employees. It is the employees who enact the attributes of the brand and whose actions ultimately foster customer experience - whether good or bad. Staff actions should reinforce the promises a brand makes to its customers. If wisely conducted, this reinforcement breeds more success in terms of sales, awareness and loyalty. Employees have the formidable task of demonstrating the brand by the actions they take. The adage actions speak louder than words is a truth that holds firm in the process of building successful brands.

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Giving strategy
some momentum

Reprinted from Business Voice, the CBI magazine, July/August 2006.

Ask ten people to define strategy, and almost inevitably, you will be presented with eleven answers - each of them different. This is unfortunate, especially in today's fast-paced world where the right strategy, properly executed, may just be the difference between failure and success.

The most succinct description of strategy at a meta-level, is to pose three questions -

• Where are you now?
• Where do you want to go?
• How will you get there?

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Of cows and men

(with apologies to Steinbeck)

This article first appeared in Exhibit: A Quarterly Review of Alternative News, Gamma issue, Summer 2003.

It was while growing up in Louisiana that I was given one of those earthy pearls of wisdom that sticks with you for life, although I can no longer remember the source. 'When cows escape from the farm, you've got two problems. You have to catch the cows and you have to mend the fence'. This may not be as powerful a tool as the BCG matrix, or anything produced by Michael Porter, but it is a simple representation of the duality and multifaceted nature of issues we face in everyday problem solving.

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