Ad agency president, Stacie Boney, knew she wanted to make a big improvement in her team’s approach to annual and quarterly strategic planning sessions. Boney heads up Hanson Dodge, a full-service ad agency based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that serves clients like the Utah Office of Tourism, KEEN Utility and Stanley PMI.  The agency had been generating momentum, expanding business with current clients and earning new ones, and was poised for greater growth. Boney, however, knew there was room for improvement in their approach to strategic planning.

Developers are the rarest of the four profiles. Only 6% of people in our database are single-preference Developers.

Patricia Flanagan is an innovation consultant, helping students and community members in Northern Ireland develop a common language and framework for solving big, complex problems.

It was six hours before the big workshop in Las Vegas. 88 people were signed up, and less than half had done their FourSight assessment. The group activity I planned to facilitate hinged on knowing people’s profiles. It wasn’t going to work with half the results.

Global prestige beauty leaders The Estée Lauder Companies prides itself on having a worldwide reputation for quality and excellence, and has always been held up as a leader for best practice in collaboration.

Ideas fuel innovation. No ideas? No innovation! But what are ideas exactly? In this interview we ask Gerard Puccio PhD, author of “Creative Leadership” and the “FourSight® Thinking Profile” and chair of the oldest Master of Science program in Creative Studies, to illuminate what ideas are and where they come from.

A few years ago, I backpacked through Southeast Asia with my best friend, Lauren. We started in Kuala Lumpur, and by time we parted ways in Ho Chi Minh City, we were in the throws of violent food poisoning and barely on speaking terms. I was exasperated that Lauren had no interest in decision making, and Lauren was stressed by my tendency to get an idea and spontaneously alter our plans. Our frustrations climaxed with a fuming argument on a public train over 35 Thai baht (roughly one U.S. dollar). Thankfully, we both see the humor in this now.

#1. Creativity fuels innovation. Today, it’s hard to find an organization that doesn’t have “innovation” in its mission statement. Professor Felix Janszen stated, “After the age of efficiency in the 1950s and 1960s, quality in the 1970s and 1980s, and flexibility in the 1980s and 1990s, we now live in the age of innovation.” And for good reason: “Researchers tested whether innovation translated into bottom-line value for organizations. They compared more than 300 firms in their study and found that the most innovative firms enjoyed more than 30% greater market share, compared to the least innovative companies.” The most innovative firms were the most active in applying creativity to develop new knowledge. The researchers concluded that, “creativity in problem solving is the main driver of new knowledge creation and innovation.”

A recent study on health and wellbeing reported a surprising discovery: People with the longest commutes have the lowest life satisfaction.

A decade into the 21st century,educational leaders at Sheridan College in Ontario, Canada saw the writing on the wall. Technology was eating up routine jobs. The traditional curriculum couldn’t guarantee work. They knew that to make students employable, they would need to teach creative thinking and creative problem solving skills. So they embraced a radical, new academic strategic plan to put creativity at the heart of the institution’s mission, marketing and curriculum. The goal was to create what Sheridan calls “the Creative Campus”—a place where “creativity is what makes us different.”