Читать книгу The Million Dollar Parrot: 25 Brief Stories for Big Breakthroughs - Gerald de Jaager - Страница 3

Here you will find twenty-five brief stories that can help you think about your world differently. They’re metaphors; they’re thought-starters—we call them new lenses because they enable you to see familiar things in new ways.

The lenses can be temporary ways of turning on your fullest creativity as you do some especially important thinking, or they may create new perspectives that will permanently affect how you view things. They will lead to positive differences in the way you think and act—as a leader, as an innovator, and perhaps as a person.

Throughout an organization, they elevate the creativity and energy that individuals and teams bring to solving problems and finding opportunities. Moreover, because the titles of the lenses quickly become a shared, easily-recalled shorthand for important concepts, conversations about those concepts flourish more readily and are sustained more easily, embedding the search for better ideas into the everyday life of the organization.

In more than twenty years heading The Masters Forum, we hosted presentations by more than 150 of the world’s preeminent business thinkers.¹ Those exceptional men and women generally offer insightful solutions to organizational issues. We refer to many of their ideas in this book, but we take a different approach that is complementary to theirs, offering these lenses as twenty-five distinctive ways to help you find your own best ideas for any kind of issue you might be facing.

We believe that on your own you’ll see plenty of applications for the lenses, from finding deep insights to simply perking up meetings. The primary benefits from using them arise from insights that are sparked, questions that are asked, constructive new conversations that probably would not have occurred otherwise, and the establishment of a shared vocabulary for new thinking. Openness to where they can take you is the most important quality for gaining the most from them.

Start anywhere. Something is bound to click, and soon you’ll be seeing things in new ways that can yield great returns.

“Insight lasts; theories don’t.”

— Peter Drucker²

“If you get outside your own autobiography, you can learn. Animals learn only from their own experience; human beings can learn from the experiences of others, particularly if they can get outside their own head, their agenda, their background, their motive structure, and into the heads of other people.” —Stephen Covey³

“I’m not yet as much of a learning person as I’d like to be. Like most Americans, I’m driven largely by an urge to perform, accomplish, achieve, and get things done. Yet as I begin to consciously shift to filtering everything through a learning lens, I find both dramatic and subtle differences in the way I do things and how I spend my time.” —Jim Collins⁴