Making Ideas Happen summary

Imagine that a new market has suddenly opened up and your company wants to jump in. The trouble is, you have no product.

So you organize a brainstorming session. You bring together the best and brightest minds in your company, and they voice and develop some seemingly excellent ideas. Yet when you get back to your desks, you realize that while the ideas are grand, none of them are actually achievable.

Spectators at sporting events can often tell which team has the upper hand by asking a simple question: Who is acting – developing offensive moves and strategies – and who is simply reacting by trying to counter what the other team does, while being unable to act positively themselves?

Now, think about your job: Are you winning or losing?

People think that great innovations such as Edison’s light bulb resulted from a stroke of genius. They think great minds miraculously come up with revolutionary ideas and – ta da! – the world suddenly changes.

These people could use a reality check.

We’ve all heard the names Holmes and Watson, Starsky and Hutch, or Pinky and the Brain. Fiction is full of partnerships between people with little or nothing in common, who are nonetheless remarkably successful.

These odd couples aren’t just the work of fiction. In fact, there are good reasons why people with different personalities can become extraordinarily successful when they put their minds together, and this is no less true in the creative industry.

When you have great ideas that seem to have huge potential, do you hug them to you or share them freely? Often, we’re too afraid that someone might steal our breakthroughs, so don’t share them with anyone outside our intimate circle.

However, this is totally backward! As you’ve seen, people have a hard time making their own great idea a reality, much less other people’s.

In our previous blinks, we discussed several ways to deal with the project plateau. It starts early – when you’re assembling your project team.

When hiring people for a creative team, it’s best to choose initiative over experience.

The majority of people who land jobs in the creative industry will go out of their way to create something different. However, they’ll need a good leader in order to use this power most effectively.

The creation of something extraordinary requires a leader who can help foster the right consensus.