Customer Reviews

What a Great Idea: The Four Key Steps Creative People Take

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Outstanding resource for accessing creativity personally and in the workplace. Chic identifies common "Killer Phrazes" which thwart our actions and gives excellent, fun suggestions for stamping them out. This book is extremely "user friendly". Easy to read, funny - with exercises along the way to drive home the points. He gives practical ways to use mind mapping, metaphors,and analogies to help you get your thinking unstuck and to uncover new solutions. As a creative thinking trainer, I have shared Chic's ideas and strategies to hundreds of individuals across the U.S. The feedback I get is extremely positive. As a matter of fact, his ideas helped me structure my course in a much more innovative, impactful way. Use Chic's ideas and watch the people in your environment become more creative, more open to new ideas, more productive and have one whole heck of a lot of fun.

Ideas are the keys to the future. They are also the foundation of success, whether you are developing a revolutionary e-business or seeking better ways to organize and motivate a team. Chic Thompson's What A Great Idea! is both essential and joyful in its approach, sharing the very best of creativity approaches. Its lessons are practical, clear, and immediate, approaches you want to apply right away. It is also comprehensive in its scope and lasting in its impact, helping readers immediately grasp and remember both the 'why' and 'how' of effective individual and team creativity. And--wow!--it's fun to read! This book belongs on the desk of every manager generating a success vision. It is ideal for those who seek to develop and champion the best of real-world thinking and challenge response.

Even thought this book was written in 1992 it still has ideas that can be useful to people in business today. A quote that I found to be very good is this, "Find and hang a picture of your vision on your wall. NASA has lots of pictures of space stations and the moon."

I recently heard Charles "Chic" Thompson at a leadership seminar and picked up a copy of this book. This book is full of great ideas/methods to help you think creatively and outside the box. He covers overcoming assumptions- big idea killer and moves on to expression and questioning of ideas - which begins to shape new ideas. The fredom to cultivate creatively is a step that transcends linear thinking. It removes the blinders of assumptions to allow organizations to idea map forward. Taking action is the next step. This is where the process of creativity meets the various organizational stages like sales, marketing, distribution, etc. Prior to reading this book I thought - as the leadership world teaches, creativity was 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Now I realize that I should be inspired to think creatively and I will perspire less! If you want to learn how to think act, plan creatively - buy this book - It really is inspiring!

I am certainly very impressed that this wonderful book, first published in the early nineties, is still around, with its 16th printing. I am glad to note from the amazon website that the author will release version 2 of his book in early 2007.

Although it is not ground-breaking, it has a few notable features:

- it introduces readers to a set of 'Killer Phrases' & 'Fight Back Phrases', which eventually led me to procure the author's second book, 'Yes, But...The Top 40 Killer Phrases & How You Can Fight Them';

For the uninitiated:

a Killer Phrase: n. 1. A knee-jerk response that squelches new ideas; most commonly said by bosses, parents, and government officials. 2. A threat to innovation.

Fight Back Phrase: n. 1. words that launch ideas into reality; usually said by achievers, leaders, and entrepreneurs. 2. the self talk of champions.

- it has a captivating interview with the world's greatest inventor, Dr Yoshiro Nakamatsu of Japan.

Dr Nakamatsu holds more than 3,000 patents & he is acknowledged as the inventor of the floppy disk (for which he sold the license to IBM), the digital watch & the compact disk. (He has apparently invented a safer viable alternative to Viagra, for which he calls 'The Love Jet'. It's a spray!) This revelation led me to purchase two of Dr Nakamatsu's books on creativity. For the benefit of readers, Dr Nakamatsu is a fan of Dr Win Wenger. In fact, he practised an underwater brainstorming technique originally formulated by Dr Wenger in his book, 'How to Increase Your Intelligence'. Dr Nakamatsu even invented a water proof note pad plus a writing instrument to facilitate the seemingly crazy process;

- it introduces the Idea Mapping process, a free form method beyond the traditional mind mapping process as originally postulated by Tony Buzan i.e. it does not have to start from the centre, as distinct from Buzan's;

I want to say this: "What a Great Idea! is an extremely valuable contribution to creativity & innovation. It's worth your reading, exploration & assimilation.

Some of the methods suggested by Chic and his categorization of creative people are good. I agree that we can all become more creative and can practice it. But how many ideas are really creative? Somehow I get the feeling that creation is still a foggy concept...