Courtesy: GulfNews Weekend Review http://www.gulfnews.com/, dated 06.07.2007
Article: Krishna Kumar, Dep WEb Editor, Gulf News
A Dubai-based advertising professional demystifies creative thinking.
Dubai, the city of innovation, has inspired a book on innovative thinking. Eightstorm: Eight Step Brainstorming for Innovative Managers, by Dubai-based Kishore Dharmarajan, introduces brainstorming techniques which can improve creative thinking in business. "In today's hyper-competitive world, businesses need ideas to get ahead. And they need them fast. Eightstorm's creative thinking methods can provide new answers," says Dharmarajan, who runs his own advertising agency in Dubai.
"While conventional brainstorming is a random activity of ping-ponging ideas with one another, Eightstorm is the first book which gives a method for it and a framework for idea generation."
Thought revolution
"One of the biggest challenges facing business leaders today is the creation of a highly innovative workforce," he says. "If you can't turn your people into what business guru Tom Peters refers to as ‘innovative machines', you could be severely limiting yourself.
"Eightstorm puts forth a new way of thinking things through that can change the workplace. However, its effectiveness depends on how quickly businesses can adapt to this new approach."
Dharmarajan did his schooling in Dubai in the early 1980s and went to India for his university education. With a post-graduate degree in English literature in hand, he cleared the University Grants Commission exam, which could have given him an easy passage into teaching and academia. Instead, he came back to Dubai in 1996 to try his hand at advertising. Dharmarajan read various books on advertising and marketing "in order to bridge the gap between academics and market practice".
He got his big break with M&C Saatchi where he practiced the concepts he had assiduously mastered by then. "Creating copy... was fun, but after a couple of years it became boring," he says.
For Dharmarajan it was time to move on and he launched his own advertising agency, Eureka, in 2004. Once the agency was running on its own steam, Dharmarajan turned to the ideas that comprise Eightstorm. Writing the book took him a year and a half, he says. The impetus behind writing the book was his realisation that much of the corporate world was struggling for ideas. But there was a definite method which could be used to generate ideas, felt Dharmarajan. The tools they used everyday in advertising agencies, combined with a few other concepts resulted in "INNOVATE" — each letter representing the eight tools that Dharmarajan branded as "Eightstorm" — Dubai's contribution to innovative thinking.
Eightstorm is an easy way for institutions to develop innovative ideas. The eight tools are Innovate, Navigate, Nuptial, Overturn, Visualise, Accelerate, Transcend and Entertain.
Depending on personality traits, some of the tools may perhaps be used more than the others.
"One of the biggest challenges facing business leaders today is the creation of a highly innovative workforce," he says. "If you can't turn your people into what business guru Tom Peters refers to as ‘innovative machines', you could be severely limiting yourself.
"Eightstorm puts forth a new way of thinking things through that can change the workplace. However, its effectiveness depends on how quickly businesses can adapt to this new approach."
Dharmarajan did his schooling in Dubai in the early 1980s and went to India for his university education. With a post-graduate degree in English literature in hand, he cleared the University Grants Commission exam, which could have given him an easy passage into teaching and academia. Instead, he came back to Dubai in 1996 to try his hand at advertising. Dharmarajan read various books on advertising and marketing "in order to bridge the gap between academics and market practice".
He got his big break with M&C Saatchi where he practiced the concepts he had assiduously mastered by then. "Creating copy... was fun, but after a couple of years it became boring," he says.
For Dharmarajan it was time to move on and he launched his own advertising agency, Eureka, in 2004. Once the agency was running on its own steam, Dharmarajan turned to the ideas that comprise Eightstorm. Writing the book took him a year and a half, he says. The impetus behind writing the book was his realisation that much of the corporate world was struggling for ideas. But there was a definite method which could be used to generate ideas, felt Dharmarajan. The tools they used everyday in advertising agencies, combined with a few other concepts resulted in "INNOVATE" — each letter representing the eight tools that Dharmarajan branded as "Eightstorm" — Dubai's contribution to innovative thinking.
Eightstorm is an easy way for institutions to develop innovative ideas. The eight tools are Innovate, Navigate, Nuptial, Overturn, Visualise, Accelerate, Transcend and Entertain.
Depending on personality traits, some of the tools may perhaps be used more than the others.
Avoiding assumptions
The book does a good job of dymystifying the process of creative thinking. Each toll is succinctly explained in the book that tells the story of a manager in search of an innovative thinking process to save his troubled company.
One of the plus points of the book is that it makes no pedantic assumptions and is an easy read.
"I am not comfortable with instructive writing. I am happier using dialogue and that is the format I have chosen, discarding fluffy and verbose prose. Instead of the 100-odd pages, I could have written an 800-page tome dwelling on the eight tools."
Dharmarajan's book puts him in the same category of innovative thinkers as Edward De Bono who pioneered "Lateral Thinking" and "Six Hats". He intends to market his book in the West, especially in the United States. To that end, he is planning a non-conventional method of marketing his book — using both online and offline media — to build up interest in his theory. He is also writing a series of tip sheets as a follow-up to the book along with putting up a website: http://www.eightstorm.com/.
Based on the response, corporate workshops, presentations and lectures will follow.
- Eightstorm: 8-Step Brainstorming for Innovative Managers, is published by Booksurge, amazon.com's publishing wing. The book is available at Magrudy's in Dubai.
The book does a good job of dymystifying the process of creative thinking. Each toll is succinctly explained in the book that tells the story of a manager in search of an innovative thinking process to save his troubled company.
One of the plus points of the book is that it makes no pedantic assumptions and is an easy read.
"I am not comfortable with instructive writing. I am happier using dialogue and that is the format I have chosen, discarding fluffy and verbose prose. Instead of the 100-odd pages, I could have written an 800-page tome dwelling on the eight tools."
Dharmarajan's book puts him in the same category of innovative thinkers as Edward De Bono who pioneered "Lateral Thinking" and "Six Hats". He intends to market his book in the West, especially in the United States. To that end, he is planning a non-conventional method of marketing his book — using both online and offline media — to build up interest in his theory. He is also writing a series of tip sheets as a follow-up to the book along with putting up a website: http://www.eightstorm.com/.
Based on the response, corporate workshops, presentations and lectures will follow.
- Eightstorm: 8-Step Brainstorming for Innovative Managers, is published by Booksurge, amazon.com's publishing wing. The book is available at Magrudy's in Dubai.
1 comment:
Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!
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