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Smarts
: Books
A Work of Art
Creating a business masterpiece takes a palette of
different ideas.
Want the next great idea in business to be yours? Put together
a team of people with differing ideas, viewpoints and experiences.
Consultant Frans Johansson studied successful idea-generators
from business, science, the arts and elsewhere and found that
cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary combinations were far
more effective at producing revolutionary insights than lone
inventors or groups of people with like backgrounds.
In The Medici Effect (HBS Press, $24.95) Johansson
expands on this observation by showing how to overcome problems
and improve the results of idea-generating campaigns. To expand
the range of your ideas, for example, try assumption reversal:
Start with a fact about a business, and reverse it. Do all
restaurants have menus? Assume that your restaurant has no
menus, and see where it leads you. The book's title is inspired
by the Renaissance-era Italian family that sponsored Leonardo
da Vinci. If you can't read it and come up with at least a
minor Mona Lisa or two, you're not trying.
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