(Administrative questions)
[1) How to eliminate idiots without stress, and how to easily guide a team to success?
[2) How to manage creativity in order generate more objective innovations?
[3) How to improve risk reduction in operations?
[4) How to convert potential concurrents into partners by tactics and strategy?
[5) How to get freedom in life by eliminating the effects of fear in mind?
[6) How to reduce misunderstandings in marketing?(when to identify yourself with the consumer or not)
[1) How to eliminate idiots without stress, and how to easily guide a team to success?
First Step of Idiot Elimination: Examinating the Members
Although the most dangerous idiots are specialists in self-occulting by speech imitation, eliminating idiots from a team is very easy to do. We only need to remember of the following subtle idiot's characteristics: the idiot cannot perform deep reasoning, and also cannot understand anything without assistance of others; when the idiot is forced to answer anything alone, then there are three possibilities: one, the idiot prefers to imitate opinions than think; two, the idiot always repeats fashion ideas of the “climate of opinion”; and three, the idiot always judges new ideas based on the author's status. If the author is famous, rich, or powerful, then the idiot judges that the idea can be important and it must be selected for “reasoning” with the assistence of a great specialist.
Knowing the above idiot's characteristics it is possible to lay down a strategy to reveal them. So, all that you need to do is: first, make a mixed list of important issues, ideas, and suggestions given by all members of the team, and by other several unskilled people out of the team. Make sure that the author of each proposition is occulted; second, put each member of the team alone, and submit the above mixed list to reasoning.
In the conditions above, it is very hard for an idiot remains occult. Record all reactions, and the obtained answers will reveal the inconsistencies of all idiots in your team without stress.
Second Step of Idiot Elimination: Examinating Ourselves
There are many people who would not even know if anything was wrong with their minds. But what could be wrong with their minds?
The first and most damaging characteristic of an idiot is the emotional barrier. All types of emotions are bad, simply because during emotional time there isn't any reasoning in mind.
Psychological trauma generates complexes and ghosts that remain hidden in the back of our minds, and there they rule our attitudes unconsciously. The most common complex that almost everybody has is the desire to punish all who do not behave in a manner acceptable by the standars of our culture. There are several possible complexes but the complex of the punisher is the worse to intelligent analysis. It is caused basically because of the cultural “incentives” in education done by parents against the ashamed children. This complex remains deep in the mind, and it arises likely when the child feels shame or guilt because of something done. So, in finding the first little error, the punisher stops reasoning, and quickly discards all the ideas given by the other person.
The mind can remain fixed in its own opinions. Colorless people, who go through the routines of life, unwilling to face any new experience that might force them to readjust, can be suffering from a hardening of the brain; rigidly opinionated, dogmatic, unlistening and unyielding.
Mental fixity may easily be a result of too little nourishment taken into the mind; that is, it may be a case of plain ignorance. On the other hand, mental fixity may come from the acceptance of something as a final truth. All periods of human history have their several fashions in ideas. The “climate of opinion” is an intellectual atmosphere that people live in a given period, in which ideas are transmitted by a kind of osmosis.
Sometimes the symptoms of suspended mental activity take the form of a complete rigidity. They may appear in a person of any age. To the young, the first fashion in ideas that one meets does not seem at least to be simply a fashion. It seems to be most likely the sudden revelation of an eternal truth.
It is very difficult to test a mind's efficiency. Nevertheless, by means of watching how minds behave, we can, in a general way, estimate whether a mind is living in a routine of sameness, receiving no new experiences to vitalize its energies, seeing no new people, not going to new places, reading no new books, or old books of the kind that are always new – getting no new ideas.
We can lay down as a rule of mental life that where there is insufficient intake of fresh experience, there will be symptoms of mental sluggishness, dullness, boredom. The mind will be anemic, listless, weak.
A symptom of old age is what might be called “neophobia”, the fear of what is new. The mentally old person is afraid of new ideas, new ways of doing things. He or she insists that the old ways are the better ways.
We cannot be completely surejust what is wrong with such a mind. But it seems reasonable to believe that what happens is something like this: the old mind has lost the energy to adjust itself to new experiences; it is tired, work out. The mentally old person has to cling to the illusion that it is still mentally alive.
Hence, when new experiences, that it cannot adjust itself for, come to it - new ways of life, new ideas, new outlooks - all it can do is to build up defenses against them, defying the new ideas and denouncing them as evil; it seems to itself to be thinking with vigor and effectiveness, when as a matter of fact it is merely pushing off the experiences that it is too worn out to absorb.
This is the pathetic habit of old mental age: to oppose bitterly all that is new because new things cannot be understood and accepted.
The fixity may be grim. It might take the form of persecuting those who hold views that are different, breaking up meetings, or casting people into jail.
All forms of intolerance result from an unwillingness or an inability to let new facts endanger old convictions. To a person who is religiously intolerant all disturbing new discoveries and new insights must be kept out of mind.
To a person who is politically intolerant, all ideas that question his or her own political creed must be instantly suppressed. The intolerant person believes that he has reached a final stage of thinking, something that he calls “the truth” to which nothing can be added. But to feel that one has reached a stage as final as that means that the mind has ceased its work. It has closed up shop and turned out the light.
The mind has to do two essential things if it is to keep its vigor: it has to take in new experiences, and it has to transform this experience into fresh thought, emotions, intentions, plans, and activities. When the mind stops taking in new experiences, it merely lives on the past.
When it fails to turn its experiences smoothly and effectively into new ways of thinking, doing and acting, it suffers a kind of mental poisoning, such as the body suffers poisoning when the intake of food remains undigested. It is under such conditions that the mind becomes suspicious, fearful, opinionated, stubborn, cranky, bitter.
The mind, then, is no exception to the rule of all living things. It must work to keep alive, absorbing its world, transforming that world into its own peculiar energies.
There are other ways for one to die. Many of us are dead, and have been dead many years before we are buried. We do not die of what we eat or what we drink. We die of what we think.
But also there are other ways for one to keep alive. The mind that keeps renewing itself with fresh experience remains flexible and young. It has no clogged up places, no dead areas. It opens its doors to the life stream and turns that stream into its own ever-growing wisdom and power.
[This post is based on two texts of the Freshman English's Collection of Readings, Book Three - Reading, of Harry Shaw's book (1949); Keeping Mentally Alive – from “Let me Think”, (1939) by Harry Allen Overstreet; Fashion in Ideas – From “Philosopher's Holiday”, (1938) by Irwin Edman.]
[2) How to manage creativity in order to generate more objective innovations?
First step: Keeping the mind alive
There are three kinds of wise men: practicians, scholars and initiates. The first kind of wise men didn't study in school; they can only do specific works very well, but have difficulties to create, because they don't understand the causes; the second kind of wise men are only academics; they learn about several facts, but they are doubtful when making things, as they read about the facts, but never experienced them; the third kind of wise men studied in academy, learned to learn and is always acquiring more knowledge; they are very creative because they have long observed the practice of work, and understand the causes.
Second Step: Flowing with mental state
The mental state can change by several causes. The body state is responsible for the mental state. The mind is the product of brain work, and each body state affects the brain. The brain has several differents areas, and a normal brain operation is that in which all parts can work at certain daily periods, woken or sleeping. When the same region of the brain works during a long time, it becomes tired and sluggish, like any body's muscle. In this tired state, the brain's work tends to transfer itself naturally to other demanded areas, thinking in different manners or feeling other emotions.
We must remember that the mental state and its emotions are responsible for the results of mental work. So, do not fight against yourself and wait the most favourable moment to make each task - take it easy.
Third Step: Folowing the creative process
Objective innovations require, first of all, full knowledge of the situation-problem and its requisites.
The brain has two different hemispheres; both are important in the creative process, because one side is critical and is used to analyse the situation-problem, and the other side is creative and is used to make the synthesis of the solution.
The creative process is a cyclical one, alterning long periods of pure synthesis with long periods of pure analysis, but never both at the same time, because the result is null. Several cycles can be done to develop a product.
During the period of synthesis, the brain must be well stimulated. The best to do is to go to locals where the mind is bombarded by most possible external aleatory stimulus, in all senses, of the most varied phenomena; because nobody can know surejust what thing will start the creative mental process.
After keeping one or more ideas, and ending the initial flux of synthesis, then begins the period of analysis, and the best local is a quiet room.
The second period of synthesis is called development period, and this requires resources to the systematic register of each step of the making of prototypes and models.
[3) How to improve risk reduction in operations?
Obviously, by simplifying the number of tasks in an operation, we can reduce the risk of failure. Each one of the remaining essential operations with known risk of failure must be developed in so much parallel ways as the sum of their risk portions, for this sum to become equal or more than the unity. This guarantees that at least one of the operations will be successfully accomplished.
[4) How to convert potential concurrents into partners by tactics and strategy?
Although I know well the main issues of strategy and tactics in political war and in chess, in this point it is better for you to follow Mr. Steve Jobs, because I'm a stupid in emotional intelligence, which is required to well negotiating with sensible people.
[5) How to get freedom in life by eliminating the effects of fear in mind?
Fear leads to a low productive mental state and, like several other negative emotions, can inflict damage to the body, if they become permanent in the mind. Negative emotions and bad thoughts don't result in good things, except in art, were conflicts and suffering can give the greatest results.
Technical creativity, on the other hand, must results in good solutions, because bad solutions are useless. So, the technical creative mind must be positive to find the best solutions in order to create good innovations and beneficial inventions.
The creative mind must be free of fear; on the other hand, it must be prepotent and greedy. Not prepotent in face of other people, which is ridiculous, but internally, feeling that it has the power to do what it wants to do; and greedy, not for money or gold, but to choose only important problems to solve.
Freedom in life can be reached by several ways. The most known is the religious way where St. Francis of Assisi said the same simple words that are used by a full warrior, that one needs to kill the ego to live without fear. But if fear ever exists, another one says, what can I do? You can feel all your fear before the fight, because during the fight, fear does not help in anything. So, you need only to control your brain and your mind, and not destroy your feelings. Be happy while there aren't important real facts to cry, but when you cry, cry all the sadness away.
[6) How to reduce misunderstandings in marketing? (when to identify yourself with the consumer or not)
In this text we will concern marketing and innovation.
The opinion research methods used in marketing have little value when the subject is innovation. The consumer would be needing something that helps him to do what he needs to do in an easier and safer way. But if consumers were asked about something that does not exist for satisfying their needs, the answer couldn't be only one, because thinking about something that doesn't exists requires imagination, and it is practically impossible that all the consulted people would imagine the same inexisting thing.
Opinion research cannot define an innovation, (I. e.) a product that inexists, because the majority of them do not understand of high technology to know if such a product could be constructed. Finally, we could not trust in such a research because the consumers in fact never used the innovation to know if they really like the product.
One must be very clever to feel when his needs and the needs of the others are the same. This is the case of Mr. Steve Jobs' right interpretation of the sound and image Macintosh pack, that is perfectly compatible with all internal devices, that work with excellent quality without needing anything else.
The mistake arises when subjective aspects prevail over objectives aspects, (I. e.) when personal preferences prevail over the reasoning, then we have the illusion that people think and feel about things as well as we think and feel. This is the case of Mr. Steve Jobs' mistake about the Cube computer model, that didn't make success proportional to the care of its design, because obviously it is an individual preference of a rare person with a good personal opinion, that is much over the common people's understanding.
We can conclude stating that in terms of innovation the most important is satisfying the actual needs than the individual subjective preferences. In order to do it, it is needed to observe people's daily troubles to find a way of truly making their life easier.
[1) How to eliminate idiots without stress, and how to easily guide a team to success?
[2) How to manage creativity in order generate more objective innovations?
[3) How to improve risk reduction in operations?
[4) How to convert potential concurrents into partners by tactics and strategy?
[5) How to get freedom in life by eliminating the effects of fear in mind?
[6) How to reduce misunderstandings in marketing?(when to identify yourself with the consumer or not)
[1) How to eliminate idiots without stress, and how to easily guide a team to success?
First Step of Idiot Elimination: Examinating the Members
Although the most dangerous idiots are specialists in self-occulting by speech imitation, eliminating idiots from a team is very easy to do. We only need to remember of the following subtle idiot's characteristics: the idiot cannot perform deep reasoning, and also cannot understand anything without assistance of others; when the idiot is forced to answer anything alone, then there are three possibilities: one, the idiot prefers to imitate opinions than think; two, the idiot always repeats fashion ideas of the “climate of opinion”; and three, the idiot always judges new ideas based on the author's status. If the author is famous, rich, or powerful, then the idiot judges that the idea can be important and it must be selected for “reasoning” with the assistence of a great specialist.
Knowing the above idiot's characteristics it is possible to lay down a strategy to reveal them. So, all that you need to do is: first, make a mixed list of important issues, ideas, and suggestions given by all members of the team, and by other several unskilled people out of the team. Make sure that the author of each proposition is occulted; second, put each member of the team alone, and submit the above mixed list to reasoning.
In the conditions above, it is very hard for an idiot remains occult. Record all reactions, and the obtained answers will reveal the inconsistencies of all idiots in your team without stress.
Second Step of Idiot Elimination: Examinating Ourselves
There are many people who would not even know if anything was wrong with their minds. But what could be wrong with their minds?
The first and most damaging characteristic of an idiot is the emotional barrier. All types of emotions are bad, simply because during emotional time there isn't any reasoning in mind.
Psychological trauma generates complexes and ghosts that remain hidden in the back of our minds, and there they rule our attitudes unconsciously. The most common complex that almost everybody has is the desire to punish all who do not behave in a manner acceptable by the standars of our culture. There are several possible complexes but the complex of the punisher is the worse to intelligent analysis. It is caused basically because of the cultural “incentives” in education done by parents against the ashamed children. This complex remains deep in the mind, and it arises likely when the child feels shame or guilt because of something done. So, in finding the first little error, the punisher stops reasoning, and quickly discards all the ideas given by the other person.
The mind can remain fixed in its own opinions. Colorless people, who go through the routines of life, unwilling to face any new experience that might force them to readjust, can be suffering from a hardening of the brain; rigidly opinionated, dogmatic, unlistening and unyielding.
Mental fixity may easily be a result of too little nourishment taken into the mind; that is, it may be a case of plain ignorance. On the other hand, mental fixity may come from the acceptance of something as a final truth. All periods of human history have their several fashions in ideas. The “climate of opinion” is an intellectual atmosphere that people live in a given period, in which ideas are transmitted by a kind of osmosis.
Sometimes the symptoms of suspended mental activity take the form of a complete rigidity. They may appear in a person of any age. To the young, the first fashion in ideas that one meets does not seem at least to be simply a fashion. It seems to be most likely the sudden revelation of an eternal truth.
It is very difficult to test a mind's efficiency. Nevertheless, by means of watching how minds behave, we can, in a general way, estimate whether a mind is living in a routine of sameness, receiving no new experiences to vitalize its energies, seeing no new people, not going to new places, reading no new books, or old books of the kind that are always new – getting no new ideas.
We can lay down as a rule of mental life that where there is insufficient intake of fresh experience, there will be symptoms of mental sluggishness, dullness, boredom. The mind will be anemic, listless, weak.
A symptom of old age is what might be called “neophobia”, the fear of what is new. The mentally old person is afraid of new ideas, new ways of doing things. He or she insists that the old ways are the better ways.
We cannot be completely surejust what is wrong with such a mind. But it seems reasonable to believe that what happens is something like this: the old mind has lost the energy to adjust itself to new experiences; it is tired, work out. The mentally old person has to cling to the illusion that it is still mentally alive.
Hence, when new experiences, that it cannot adjust itself for, come to it - new ways of life, new ideas, new outlooks - all it can do is to build up defenses against them, defying the new ideas and denouncing them as evil; it seems to itself to be thinking with vigor and effectiveness, when as a matter of fact it is merely pushing off the experiences that it is too worn out to absorb.
This is the pathetic habit of old mental age: to oppose bitterly all that is new because new things cannot be understood and accepted.
The fixity may be grim. It might take the form of persecuting those who hold views that are different, breaking up meetings, or casting people into jail.
All forms of intolerance result from an unwillingness or an inability to let new facts endanger old convictions. To a person who is religiously intolerant all disturbing new discoveries and new insights must be kept out of mind.
To a person who is politically intolerant, all ideas that question his or her own political creed must be instantly suppressed. The intolerant person believes that he has reached a final stage of thinking, something that he calls “the truth” to which nothing can be added. But to feel that one has reached a stage as final as that means that the mind has ceased its work. It has closed up shop and turned out the light.
The mind has to do two essential things if it is to keep its vigor: it has to take in new experiences, and it has to transform this experience into fresh thought, emotions, intentions, plans, and activities. When the mind stops taking in new experiences, it merely lives on the past.
When it fails to turn its experiences smoothly and effectively into new ways of thinking, doing and acting, it suffers a kind of mental poisoning, such as the body suffers poisoning when the intake of food remains undigested. It is under such conditions that the mind becomes suspicious, fearful, opinionated, stubborn, cranky, bitter.
The mind, then, is no exception to the rule of all living things. It must work to keep alive, absorbing its world, transforming that world into its own peculiar energies.
There are other ways for one to die. Many of us are dead, and have been dead many years before we are buried. We do not die of what we eat or what we drink. We die of what we think.
But also there are other ways for one to keep alive. The mind that keeps renewing itself with fresh experience remains flexible and young. It has no clogged up places, no dead areas. It opens its doors to the life stream and turns that stream into its own ever-growing wisdom and power.
[This post is based on two texts of the Freshman English's Collection of Readings, Book Three - Reading, of Harry Shaw's book (1949); Keeping Mentally Alive – from “Let me Think”, (1939) by Harry Allen Overstreet; Fashion in Ideas – From “Philosopher's Holiday”, (1938) by Irwin Edman.]
[2) How to manage creativity in order to generate more objective innovations?
First step: Keeping the mind alive
There are three kinds of wise men: practicians, scholars and initiates. The first kind of wise men didn't study in school; they can only do specific works very well, but have difficulties to create, because they don't understand the causes; the second kind of wise men are only academics; they learn about several facts, but they are doubtful when making things, as they read about the facts, but never experienced them; the third kind of wise men studied in academy, learned to learn and is always acquiring more knowledge; they are very creative because they have long observed the practice of work, and understand the causes.
Second Step: Flowing with mental state
The mental state can change by several causes. The body state is responsible for the mental state. The mind is the product of brain work, and each body state affects the brain. The brain has several differents areas, and a normal brain operation is that in which all parts can work at certain daily periods, woken or sleeping. When the same region of the brain works during a long time, it becomes tired and sluggish, like any body's muscle. In this tired state, the brain's work tends to transfer itself naturally to other demanded areas, thinking in different manners or feeling other emotions.
We must remember that the mental state and its emotions are responsible for the results of mental work. So, do not fight against yourself and wait the most favourable moment to make each task - take it easy.
Third Step: Folowing the creative process
Objective innovations require, first of all, full knowledge of the situation-problem and its requisites.
The brain has two different hemispheres; both are important in the creative process, because one side is critical and is used to analyse the situation-problem, and the other side is creative and is used to make the synthesis of the solution.
The creative process is a cyclical one, alterning long periods of pure synthesis with long periods of pure analysis, but never both at the same time, because the result is null. Several cycles can be done to develop a product.
During the period of synthesis, the brain must be well stimulated. The best to do is to go to locals where the mind is bombarded by most possible external aleatory stimulus, in all senses, of the most varied phenomena; because nobody can know surejust what thing will start the creative mental process.
After keeping one or more ideas, and ending the initial flux of synthesis, then begins the period of analysis, and the best local is a quiet room.
The second period of synthesis is called development period, and this requires resources to the systematic register of each step of the making of prototypes and models.
[3) How to improve risk reduction in operations?
Obviously, by simplifying the number of tasks in an operation, we can reduce the risk of failure. Each one of the remaining essential operations with known risk of failure must be developed in so much parallel ways as the sum of their risk portions, for this sum to become equal or more than the unity. This guarantees that at least one of the operations will be successfully accomplished.
[4) How to convert potential concurrents into partners by tactics and strategy?
Although I know well the main issues of strategy and tactics in political war and in chess, in this point it is better for you to follow Mr. Steve Jobs, because I'm a stupid in emotional intelligence, which is required to well negotiating with sensible people.
[5) How to get freedom in life by eliminating the effects of fear in mind?
Fear leads to a low productive mental state and, like several other negative emotions, can inflict damage to the body, if they become permanent in the mind. Negative emotions and bad thoughts don't result in good things, except in art, were conflicts and suffering can give the greatest results.
Technical creativity, on the other hand, must results in good solutions, because bad solutions are useless. So, the technical creative mind must be positive to find the best solutions in order to create good innovations and beneficial inventions.
The creative mind must be free of fear; on the other hand, it must be prepotent and greedy. Not prepotent in face of other people, which is ridiculous, but internally, feeling that it has the power to do what it wants to do; and greedy, not for money or gold, but to choose only important problems to solve.
Freedom in life can be reached by several ways. The most known is the religious way where St. Francis of Assisi said the same simple words that are used by a full warrior, that one needs to kill the ego to live without fear. But if fear ever exists, another one says, what can I do? You can feel all your fear before the fight, because during the fight, fear does not help in anything. So, you need only to control your brain and your mind, and not destroy your feelings. Be happy while there aren't important real facts to cry, but when you cry, cry all the sadness away.
[6) How to reduce misunderstandings in marketing? (when to identify yourself with the consumer or not)
In this text we will concern marketing and innovation.
The opinion research methods used in marketing have little value when the subject is innovation. The consumer would be needing something that helps him to do what he needs to do in an easier and safer way. But if consumers were asked about something that does not exist for satisfying their needs, the answer couldn't be only one, because thinking about something that doesn't exists requires imagination, and it is practically impossible that all the consulted people would imagine the same inexisting thing.
Opinion research cannot define an innovation, (I. e.) a product that inexists, because the majority of them do not understand of high technology to know if such a product could be constructed. Finally, we could not trust in such a research because the consumers in fact never used the innovation to know if they really like the product.
One must be very clever to feel when his needs and the needs of the others are the same. This is the case of Mr. Steve Jobs' right interpretation of the sound and image Macintosh pack, that is perfectly compatible with all internal devices, that work with excellent quality without needing anything else.
The mistake arises when subjective aspects prevail over objectives aspects, (I. e.) when personal preferences prevail over the reasoning, then we have the illusion that people think and feel about things as well as we think and feel. This is the case of Mr. Steve Jobs' mistake about the Cube computer model, that didn't make success proportional to the care of its design, because obviously it is an individual preference of a rare person with a good personal opinion, that is much over the common people's understanding.
We can conclude stating that in terms of innovation the most important is satisfying the actual needs than the individual subjective preferences. In order to do it, it is needed to observe people's daily troubles to find a way of truly making their life easier.
