I am now getting deeper and deeper into my M.Sc. thesis (which I am writing together with Marie Jensen).

The thesis about capital structure (for non-finance people: the way you finance your assets, i.e., with the bank’s (debt) or your own money (equity)) and strategy, specifically innovation strategies. I will get deeper into what the thesis is about in another post at a later time.

What this post really is about is when the going gets tough — and it does happen when you’re writing a thesis. When it does, Marie tells a joke, starts to gossip, or pulls me to the kitchen for a cup of tea to get our spirit back to the max.

What she did the other day, however, was to buy the new volume of Hôtel Costes (vol. 9) and put it on. And WOW, that album is just great! As is the case with most of the Hôtel Costes volumes, this is a balanced album that covers a great deal of the musical spectrum — and you can keep on listening to it for hours on.

The first song on the album is called The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti. What you would have never thought, when you listen to this song, which is such a great song, is that it is actually about two American-Italians, Nicola Sacco (1891-1927) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1888-1927), who were executed in the United States in 1927 for a murder. Much controversy exist around their guilt and many believe they did not commit the crime.

So this is how far back in history a Hôtel Costes album can take you. I bet you that the hipsters in Paris, who listen to this song, don’t know that :-). Read more about the Sacco-Vanzetti case on Wikipedia.

If you want to get ideas, don’t kill them:

“An idea is delicate,” said Charles Brower, the head of an advertising agency. “It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow.”

Then, aside not killing ideas, how do you get (more of) them? I thought that I’d share with you some of the thoughts I had during my latest read, Jack Foster’s How to Get Ideas. Jack is a former creative director in the advertising industry (in which he has worked for 35 years), and the people in that business are among some of the most creative on the planet.
Don’t you know these people who seem to be able to come up with ideas one after another—they could put them onto an assembly line if they wanted to. How on earth do they do it? Jack has a very good story:

When I was a kid I hung around with a guy named Johnny-Boy Boyd. JB was a klutz. Accidents just seemed to happen to him; if one didn’t run into him, he ran into it. Nowadays psychologists would say that subconsciously JB made accidents happen, that it was his way of getting attention. Back then we just called him “accident prone” and let it go at that. As an adult I hung around with people who were “idea prone.” Ideas just seemed to happen to them the way accidents happened to JB.

So how do we get ideas to “happen to us”? I think one of the most important things is putting your mind, both your conscious and sub-conscious, to it. If you think you can’t (or don’t want to) get new ideas, then you won’t get them.

After that, I think the most important thing is to feed your mind with raw material. The reason for this is that “an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.” (James Webb Young). So, if an idea is a combination of something you know, then you better know a lot.

What’s frustrating, however, is you don’t know what you need know. Again, looking at the very idea-prone people you know, notice how they know crazy details about crazy stuff. They suck information out of everything, because what if they need it?

One way of going about this is to do new and different things all the time. Read new books, different books, do different things, meet new people—and—ask a lot of questions; obvious questions, stupid questions, questions that have already been asked, questions that have never been asked. In this way, you’ll position yourself better to get new ideas, I’m sure… or that’s what Jack Foster says in his book anyway, and I think he is on to something.

Another thing that I think he is on to, is the paradox of creativity within limits. Sometimes, posing limitations on your creative process can help idea generation. He offers a story from his teaching, where he tells his students over-night to produce a poster for a Swiss Army knife. The next day, students complain that it was so difficult—and some were not able to do it at all. In another class, he gives the students the same task, however, they need to come up with 10 proposals for the poster—not for the next day, but for after the lunch break. The result was dramatically different, and the students were much better at producing ideas.

It is a paradox. In The Courage to Create, Rollo May calls it a “phenomenon.” But he explains “that creativity itself requires limits, for the creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.”

This post is already too long, so let me just finish with yet another quotation from the book:

Man can live without air for a few minutes, without water for about two weeks, without food for about two months—and without a new thought for year on end.
–Kent Ruth

Let it better not be us that do not get a new thought for years on end :-).

The book is extremely well written has countless anecdotes, which you will want to read if you like well-placed stories that illustrate important points (about the process of getting ideas).
Read more:

• Jack Foster: How to Get Ideas
• James Webb Young: A Technique for Producing Ideas (a classic, which Foster references numerous times)
• Wikipedia on Ideas

(All quotes in this post are from Jack Foster’s book, if you had not figured it out already :-) ).

One of my good friends, Bo Damgaard, which is also my colleagaue on the board of a large foundation, is now blogging.

He is off to a great start with great posts titled “Passion” and “If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an MBA. Study philosophy instead!” Go read them.

Here, a quote from the purpose statement of Bo’s blog:

It is not my business here to inquire whether or not the interpretations I give are faithful to the thought they seek to render. Clearly they betray it, but perhaps this betrayal is only a way of highlighting the ‘not-thought’ inherent in that thought.

The Purpose: To transcend the given!

Crazy by Gnarls Barkley was without any doubt one of the super hits this summer. But, hearing it over and over again (although I still like it) can make it a little worn out.

That’s why I was jumping out of happiness when my good friend Trine sent me a link to Nelly Furtado’s cover of Crazy, which has a nice jazzy, singer/songwriter feel to it. You can listen to it online here.

And — if you haven’t bought it already, you need to go get Nelly’s latest album Loose.

PS: The headline for this post is, of course, from the lyrics of Crazy — the song — and has nothing to do whatsoever with the beautiful photograph of Nelly. Really. :-)

The best case competition in the world — at least I think so :-) — is now blogging about everything from organising the competition itself over the life of the organisers to competition tips and tricks… you name it. The entire organising committee will be blogging.

CBS Case Competition is the first on the planet to blog — we define case competitions :-). It is the work of the PR/Marketing and IT groups of the organising committee, and I am really impressed with the speed and professionalism with which they have carried it out.

I hope you’ll go pay the blog a visit — I will be blogging both here and there — and participate via comments. Also have a look at my blog profile at the CBS Case Competition blog.