KNOWLEDGE VERSUS NEW IDEAS

You go to school, you gain knowledge. You join the workforce, you
learn more. As you claw your way up the corporate ladder, you keep
filling your mind with information—facts, data, understanding.


“Knowledge is power,” you’re told. Daily you strive to know as
much about your field as possible to be competitive, to have an edge, to
gain success.
But who gains the greatest success in business? Those who cram
existing knowledge into their brains? Or those who generate the new
ideas, the fresh thinking, the creative sparks that ignite new areas of
business growth?
At a point in most every highachieving
professional’s
career he or she makes a
profound discovery. The
greatest success comes not
from memorizing and processing
other people’s ideas, but in conceiving, giving
birth to, and bringing to maturity their own ideas.
For many people, finding truly new ideas is not nearly as easy as it
seems. Most people in business, while seeing the value of original
thinking, find it extremely difficult to achieve. As a professional creative
thinking coach, I understand this problem better than most people
in business. I work with thousands of businesspeople annually:
professionals in all corners of the corporate world and beyond, in Fortune
500 companies, in ad agencies of all sizes, in small firms, in professional
organizations, one-on-one, and everywhere in between. I see
that, in spite of their sincere intentions, most people are prisoners of
what they know and are virtually helpless when it comes to generating
new ideas. Their minds have become enslaved by traditional thinking:
“the way it’s done,” “the tried and true,” “the known.” Their grooves of
thought lead them to the same place time and again. The world around
them is changing at breakneck speed, but they are stuck in the traps of
old thinking patterns, being run over by those few players who are
unattached to the old and are creating the new.