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7 Ways to Deal With a Negative Boss

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If you are bursting with good ideas, but your boss always rejects suggestions out of hand, it’s very hard to stay positive and continue to think creatively. What can you do to keep your own creative spirit alive, and try to bring about positive changes in spite of the negative atmosphere?

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About the Author

Alex Hiam (www.alexhiam.com) is the author of more than 20 popular books on business, including Business Innovation For Dummies, Marketing For Dummies, and Marketing Kit for Dummies. A lecturer at the business school at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he has consulted with many Fortune 500 firms and large U.S. government agencies.

Improving Your Creative Coordination

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The brain has a unique approach to creativity. Several areas of the right hemisphere become highly active, while the visual processing area of the brain experiences diffuse, rather than focused, activity, according to a study by John Kounios, professor of psychology at Drexel University and Mark Jung-Beeman of Northwestern University, who monitored brain activity during creative problem-solving. Another recent study, by Kalina Christoff of the University of British Columbia and colleagues, found that the portion of your mind that wanders can sometimes cooperate with more focused regions of thought to help bring in fresh ideas and insights.

There are a lot of exciting new findings in brain research that suggest creativity involves complex coordination of many areas of the brain in particular, unique ways. Whereas we once might have described creativity as a sort of mental muscle that simply needed to be kept strong, now it appears that creative thought is a higher-level process involving the coordinated efforts of many mental muscles. Pumping a few ions every now and then in a brainstorming session won’t get you into peak creative shape, any more than lifting leg weights will prepare you to walk across Niagara Falls on a tightrope. So, what can we do to be in peak creative condition?

Since creativity requires complex coordination of multiple brain areas and functions, from daydreaming to connecting distant thoughts, it’s important to exercise your creative coordination through a variety of complex creative challenges. Here is a great set of exercises you can use, alone or in a team or staff meeting, to increase creative strength and coordination within the brain:

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About the Author

Alex Hiam (www.alexhiam.com) is the author of more than 20 popular books on business, including Business Innovation For Dummies, Marketing For Dummies, and Marketing Kit for Dummies. A lecturer at the business school at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he has consulted with many Fortune 500 firms and large U.S. government agencies.

How To Jump-Start Your Innovation Engine

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Short on ideas? In need of a big breakthrough, or even a small one? Feeling overwhelmed by a million projects, none of them creating the progress you’d hoped for?

I recommend the following steps to clear your head and get fresh ideas growing and break the vicious cycle of busy-work that doesn’t seem to move you ahead:

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About the Author

Alex Hiam (www.alexhiam.com) is the author of more than 20 popular books on business, including Business Innovation For Dummies, Marketing For Dummies, and Marketing Kit for Dummies. A lecturer at the business school at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he has consulted with many Fortune 500 firms and large U.S. government agencies.

Don’t Fail Like Edison Did

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Tales of successful innovation are told – as good stories ought to be – in linear fashion, with the focus on a single triumphant hero. For example: Edison realized the potential for creating light with electricity, tested a wide variety of light-bulb filaments, and finally came up with one that worked well.

The implication is that innovation proceeds in a neat, orderly progression, from our hero recognizing the need, to testing solutions, and finally, rolling out the best one and smiling all the way to the bank.

Not so fast! The reality of innovation is very different from the historical depiction of it. Innovation is messy and wasteful, and it rarely moves in a straight line from problem to solution. The history of the light-bulb illustrates the gap between how we like to recall innovation, and how it really happens.

While Edison and his lab played an important role by contributing a design that made it into commercial use for a time, the fact is that Edison did not invent either the modern incandescent or fluorescent bulbs. Edison’s light bulb design, a thin piece of carbon in a vacuum, is not in use today. Our bulbs are either based on the tungsten filament patented by Willis R. Whitney in 1903, or the mercury vapor light patented by Peter Cooper Hewitt in 1901. Edison is not the father of modern light-bulbs, he is more like a first cousin twice removed.

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About the Author

Alex Hiam (www.alexhiam.com) is the author of more than 20 popular books on business, including Business Innovation For Dummies, Marketing For Dummies, and Marketing Kit for Dummies. A lecturer at the business school at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he has consulted with many Fortune 500 firms and large U.S. government agencies.