Creativity

How do you usually prefer to solve problems?

How important is creativity in problem-solving?

Work in groups. Each group reads a different piece of advice on how to solve problems creatively.

How to solve problems

1 Change your perspective

A lot of problems can be solved simply by looking at them in a different way. Try problem reversal. Don’t ask how you can sell more of your products. Ask how you could sell fewer and see where that idea takes you. Perhaps you could create a totally new market where exclusivity was more important than sales volume. As marketing and communications specialist Ros Jay points out: ‘Many companies have done well out of problem reversal. Businesses like Apple Computers have looked at the market and, instead of saying “how can we compete with all these big players”, have asked themselves “what can we do that all these other companies aren’t doing?” In the late 1990s the mighty IBM’s slogan was ‘Think.’ Apple’s was ‘Think different.’

2 Be playful

Must work always feel like work? John Quelch, Dean of the London School of Business, asks: ‘How many times a day does the average five-year-old laugh? Answer: 150. How many times a day does the average 45-year-old executive laugh? Answer: five. Who is having more fun? Who is, therefore, likely to be more creative? Need we ask?’ At ?What if!, a London-based innovation consultancy, they’ve worked out that most people get their best ideas away from the office, so they’ve made the office look like home, complete with armchairs, kitchen and even table football. ?What if! is now a £3 million company whose clients include Pepsi Co, ICI and British Airways, so they must be doing something right.

3 Make connections

I n their bestseller, Funky business, Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordström discuss the idea that ‘as everything that ever will be invented has been invented, the only way forward is to combine what is already there’. So we get ‘e-mail’, ‘edu-tainment’, ‘TV dinners’, ‘distance-learning’ and ‘bio-tech’. Sometimes the combinations are impossible. Yamaha, for example, hasn’t yet worked out a way to combine motorbikes with musical instruments – perhaps it will. But Jake Burton had more success when he gave up his job on Wall Street in 1977 to pioneer a new sport. Bringing together two quite separate things – snow and surfboards he developed a modern snowboard. Today there are nearly four million snowboarders breaking their necks in the name of fun!

Case studies

Work in groups. Choose a chairperson. Hold a meeting to solve the problem in either Case study 1 or Case study 2 below.

• Read paragraph one. What else do you know about this business?

• Read paragraph two. What's your immediate response to the problem?

• Read paragraph three. It should give you some extra ideas on how to solve the problem.

• Conduct a problem-solving meeting with your group.

• Summarise the problem and your solutions for the other group or groups. Find out if they agree with you.

Case study 1 A quality problem at Harley-Davidson The company H arley-Davidson is more than just a motorcycle company. It's a legend. The firm's website says it all: 'It's one thing for customers to buy your product. It's another for them to tattoo your name on their bodies.' Featured in cult movies like Easy Rider and brandstretched to include everything from cowboy hats to deodorant, the Harley is an American icon to stand alongside Coke, Levis and Marlboro. The challenge But in the mid 80s the company was in big trouble. Faced with strong competition from Japan and unable to keep costs down without affecting quality, Harley was steadily losing market share to copycat models manufactured by Honda, Yamaha and Kawasaki. Thanks to just-in-time production methods and a simpler management structure, it seemed that everything the Americans could do the Japanese could do better and more cheaply. A flood of Japanese imports was even starting to worry the Reagan administration in Washington. New Harley-Davidson CEO Richard Teerlink had to come up with a rescue plan - and fast! The opportunity One thing Teerlink knew was that the average age of the Harley rider was increasing. It was no longer a young blue-collar worker's bike. High prices had seen to that. Now middle-aged bankers, accountants and lawyers wanted to swap their business suits for biker leathers at the weekend and go in search of freedom. These people weren't in a hurry to take delivery of their bikes, as long as it was worth the wait, and 75% of them made repeat purchases. They admired the superior engineering of the Japanese bikes, but they really didn't want to buy Japanese - they just needed a good reason not to.

C ase study 2 An image problem at Hennessy Cognac The company Hennessy Cognac has a long and colourful history going back to 1765 when Irishman and war hero, Richard Hennessy, left the army and started the company in France. Today it is one of the premium brands owned by food and drinks giant, Diageo, whose other famous names include Guinness, Gordon's gin, Dom Perignon champagne and Johnnie Walker's whisky. The challenge But in America in the mid 90s Hennessy had a serious image problem. Perhaps because of its great tradition, Hennessy was regarded as an after-dinner drink for old men, bores, snobs - everything the young ambitious American professional definitely did not want to become. Compared with the ever-popular gin and tonic and other more exotic cocktails, sales of Hennessy looked positively horizontal. Conventional advertising and point-of-sale promotions seemed to have little effect. The marketing team at Diageo needed to devise a truly original campaign if they were going to reverse a slow decline in sales. The opportunity You're not paying attention. Nobody is. These days there's so much marketing hype it's impossible to take it all in. It's estimated that we all see around 3,000 advertising messages every day from billboards to T-shirts, bumper stickers to webpage banners, and the net result is that we take no notice at all. Particularly in sophisticated luxury goods markets, straight advertising just doesn't work anymore. What does seem to work is peer pressure - seeing what our friends and colleagues are doing and doing the same. Busy people, especially, don't like their lives being interrupted by stupid commercials. But that doesn't mean they can't be persuaded, as Diageo discovered.

Read the text below to find out what the companies actually did. Were your suggestions similar? Is there anything in the case studies which is relevant to your own line of business?

Case study 1: Harley-Davidson

Harley chief, Richard Teerlink, was quick to realise that the company's greatest asset was its customers. So the first thing he did was build up the Harley Owners' Club which now has nearly half a million members. He also recognised the trend towards higher-income customers, for whom a Harley was a status symbol. These yuppies, rich urban bikers or Rolex riders, as they were sometimes called, were clearly the key to the company's survival. By creating an extended family of Harley enthusiasts fighting to save a great American legend from Japanese attack, Teerlink was able to work effectively on the emotions of his target market.

But Teerlink was a practical businessman, too. He knew that he couldn't ignore the technical side. So Harley executives were sent to Japan to learn some of the Japanese quality assurance techniques. More significantly, Harley-Davidson immediately got rid of all of its executive vice-presidents and replaced them with three self-directed teams: one to create demand; one to manufacture the products; and one to provide customer support. The next step was to set up the Harley Institute which offers every employee up to eighty hours of training a year. In a final masterstroke, Teerlink persuaded the International Trade Commission to increase the tax on imported Japanese motorbikes over 700ccs from 4.4% to an enormous 49.4% for a fixed period of time to give American manufacturers time to recover.

And recover they did. By 1988, when Harley-Davidson threw its 85th birthday party in Milwaukee, 40,000 Harley lovers had come from all parts of the United States to attend with Harley executives riding at the head of each convoy. By 1989, Harley was again the number one heavyweight bike company in the US with 59% of the market. Today it's still growing by 8 to 10% a year and enjoying record sales of around $2 billion.

Case study 2: Hennessy Cognac

It's close to midnight and you're relaxing after a long, hard day at the office. The barman's waiting to take your order. You don't know what to have. You look at a table in the corner where an attractive group in their early twenties seem to be having fun. 'What are they drinking?' you ask the barman. 'Hennessy martinis, madam. They're the latest thing. Would you like to try one?' You've never heard of it. 'Sure,' you reply. The barman pours the dark golden drink into a cocktail glass. 'Hey, this isn't at all bad!' you say. You order a couple more and can't wait to tell your friends about your new discovery. What you don't know is that those rich kids in the corner are getting paid to drink this stuff. They're part of an ingenious campaign dreamt up by the Hennessy marketing department to influence people's choice of drinks in bars all over the States. 'Stealth marketing' they call it. Over the past six months Hennessy have been interviewing and recruiting young, good-looking people to go into bars in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, LA and Miami and order Hennessy cocktails, tell bar staff how to make them if they don't know and buy drinks for anyone they like. Hennessy pays for their drinks and they get $50 a night for the job.

Clever. But does it work? Yes, brilliantly! Hennessy sales have increased ever since the campaign. In 1997, Hennessy finally broke the one-million-case-a-year barrier in the US. And today Hennessy sponsors party nights all over the world from Paris to Kuala Lumpur. Of course, the secret is out now. But that hasn't stopped other companies copying the strategy to influence those customers who believe they cannot be influenced.