Operating a business in the global arena demands innovative ways of understanding and responding to the needs of people. Business people who know how to listen to their customers rather than just study figures and statistics will have a splendid future, and those who are able to draw on their intuition will emerge as natural leaders in this new business environment.
Many workers are no longer in search of a job that is simply a source of wealth, status, and power, but rather one that—apart from assuring a decent living—offers a sense of meaning and a platform for individual creativity. Production as an end itself satisfies neither of those desires.
But there is a growing gap between what many businesses see as their purpose and what more and more people want in their work. The larger that gap, the more alienated people feel from their work and the less of their creative energy is available. If a business fails to change the environment for its workers, it may find it difficult to get or keep the best people.
Anita Roddick, founder and president of the Body Shop International, puts it this way: "I don't want our success to be measured only by financial yardsticks. What I want to be celebrated for is how good we are to our employees and our community. It's a different bottom line."
From the Creative Spirit, by Daniel Golemen, Paul Kaufman, and Michael Ray, copyright (c) 1992 (Dutton).
So often we go through our days on automatic pilot, but lacking the Zen inner awareness. To a certain degree, we like people and situations to be predictable; we enjoy the habitual and tend to avoid surprises. But there is a downside to routine: We can easily become fixed in our ways of seeing. Our expectation of how things are supposed to be replaces our capacity to perceive. This can range from not seeing the new color or cut of your partner's hair to not seeing a new approach to your work.
Here are two ideas for refocusing your perceptions and deepening your creative capacity:
Each day, do one thing different from your normal routine. You might go to bed at a new time, or take a new route to work or school. Or eat something you would never dream of eating. If you are feeling more adventurous, strike up a conversation with a particularly difficult person—maybe someone you really can't stand—and treat this person in a completely new way. The more pesky the person and entrenched the routine, the more likely you are to shake up your habitual ways of seeing things. The key is not to think about how to change things or to ask, "What is the best way to change them?" but rather to change things for no other reason than just for the sake of it.What we see every day becomes ordinary to us. People, sights, sounds, and smells seem to disappear from our awareness. They lose their distinctiveness. One way of dealing with this is to invent a brand-new pattern, a fresh way of seeing the commonplace.
Begin with something as basic as water. The idea is to notice the number of times a day you come in contact with it and the extraordinary number of ways it appears in your life: from a hot shower or the delicate beads of mist on the leaves outside your window to the ice cubes clinking in your glass.This technique of taking things out of their ordinary context and creating a new pattern for them is a way of making the familiar strange and opening them to a fresh and creative approach.
Brain specialists tell us that the brain-wave pattern of a preadolescent child in the waking state is rich in theta waves. These waves are much rarer in adults, occurring most frequently during the hypnagogic state—a twilight zone bordering on sleep, where dreams and reality mix.
Thus a child's waking consciousness is comparable to a state of mind adults know mainly during these dreamlike moments as they fall asleep. This may be one reason a child's reality naturally embraces the zany and the bizarre, the silly and the terrifying. A child's waking awareness is more open to fresh perceptions and wild ideas.
