Think Yourself Rich
Thursday, July 31st, 2008If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Most people think of a business person as either some kind of poker-faced accountant or some hyped-up extroverted salesman/woman. You rarely read about about an imaginative business person and less often hear of one who is highly creative, artistic, and visionary.
The popular concept of a business person, as publicized by the media, is someone who is rather dull and linear in their thinking. They are more often referred to as “hard-nosed” and “practical”. In fact, many business people themselves buy into this mistaken stereotype.
Imagination and creativity is at the heart of all business success. While corporations themselves may appear to be based on stringent rules and regulations, the entrepreneurs who started these companies have all, without exception, been highly creative and imaginative individuals. The corporations that remain innovative and progressive continue to encourage freedom of imaginative expression within their corporate structure… Apple being a prime example.
Napoleon Hill, in his famous book “Think And Grow Rich” goes into great detail about the influential role of imagination in business success.
He talks about two types of imaginative faculties: “synthetic” imagination and “creative” imagination. Through “synthetic” imagination, a person arranges old concepts, ideas, plans, and business models into new combinations. Technically, whilst nothing new is created, the fresh, new approach can yield amazing results.
For example, the self-help grocery store where customers do all the work of shopping is now very familiar to us, in fact we would be hard pushed to remember when things were any different. However, the original business model was to have people come up to the counter of a shop and present their list to the sales assistant who would then run around the store and fetch items for them. Now, with the use of aisles, clear directional signing and shopping carts, the job of a store is to keep stocked and check people out.
In fact, even this idea of checking people out is becoming obsolete, with many stores now offering people the option to check themselves out. Thus, the customer does all the work. Pulling out and wheeling the shopping cart, selecting products and checking themselves out. The result of this arrangement is that the store is more profitable as it can accommodate many more customers and the customer is happier as they are in total control of their shopping experience.
The “creative” imagination borders on the mystical… Here is how Napoleon Hill describes it:
“Through the faculty of creative imagination, the finite mind of man has direct communication with Infinite Intelligence. It is the faculty through which ‘hunches’ and ‘inspirations’ are received. It is by this faculty that all basic, or new ideas are handed over to man. It is through this faculty that individuals may ‘tune in’ or communicate with the subconscious minds of other men.
Business is far from being a game of conservative rule-playing. It is alive with imaginative ideas of how to best serve customers and the marketplace, an aspect of doing business which is seldom mentioned in the media.
As an entrepreneur, start to exercise your imagination, be more creative in how you structure your services and products, put a new spin on how you serve customers. The more you apply creative thinking to your business, not only will you stand apart from your competitors, you will see many more ways to make money, create new channels of supply and demand in your marketplace and ultimately become more profitable.
All the best,
Dave.
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