Creativity Unlimited: Thinking Inside the Box for Business Innovation

3

Are you creative?

A successful business executive is the same as a creative business innovator – he or she promotes the company by increased sales and market share won, creates value for the owners and partners through bigger profits and also strengthens customer satisfaction

Take a minute and score yourself on the basis of the statements in Table 3.1. Give yourself a mark from 1 to 10 according to how well you think you match every statement, where 10 means that you always act 100% according to the statement. Add up your points at the bottom. If you scored 73 or more, you are in all probability a highly successful business innovator. If your score was around 45, you should still not be worried as you are average. And when you have finished reading this book, you will hopefully have approached the magic limit of 73 points.

Why just 45 and 73? The numbers are taken from a wide-ranging study, where 73 points was the limit for the upper third that were regarded as really successful and 45 was the average. Researchers studied business executives in 578 American companies, which together covered widely differing products such as cars, hotdogs, mobile phones and syrup. It was found that the really successful leaders in trade and industry differ from the rest insofar as they display the qualities on which you have just assessed yourself to a much higher degree than other people.