The Play Principle.
Most great ideas are not the result of accidents, nor are they the residue of preparation and discipline. The best and most innovative ideas are achieved with the application of the play principle.

This is not to play ball or to play in the park. This play is like the rapid movement of light across the surface of water, which exposes multiple layers moving under, above and around one another simultaneously. The play principle promotes awareness and brings seemingly unrelated ideas and concepts into a new and unique focus. If you weren’t looking for it, you could miss it.

The play principle is first and foremost personal. Success depends solely on your commitment to the process without the help of others. While there are several productive approaches to creative development through group activities, the focus of the play principle is on individual effort. Second, it’s about getting to a place in your thinking process where you’re using enough brain cells to accomplish a task, but not so many as to require total concentration. Ironing is good, showering, shoveling (dirt or snow), even long-distance driving. In this state of mind, it’s possible to swing from one thought to another as if you were Tarzan moving from one vine to the next. Each thought is free and independent, connected only by a conscious activity that requires little more than muscle memory. The juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated concepts strung together for a single moment creates a conduit between the improbable and the possible.

As you are the conduit for this process, everything is filtered through your knowledge and experience. If you live in a cave on an island you won’t be bringing much to the party. However, if you are a person who is aware and engaged with the world, you'll have a great deal to add to the process.

Innovation thrives where the mind can move freely from random thoughts to conscious knowledge, from disparate concepts to solid ideas, from scattered images to full-blown blueprints. Children live inside the heart of the play principle because they’re always in a discovery mode. Adults hunt for this place as though it were a destination and not an attitude. However, once we stumble into the appropriate state of the mind and enjoy the process without expectations, it’s always easier to find our way back.

Why should anyone want to go someplace where they don’t know what’s going to happen or if the journey will be worth the time and effort? Because it’s fun. Imagination, innovation and ingenuity are attributes to be treasured, valued and nurtured, because they are the carbon of life and the capital of commerce.

Nothing in life or business is ever accomplished without an idea.

The Business of Bubbles.
The Stepan Company is one of the leading producers of chemical ingredients used in cleaning compounds from laundry detergents to shampoos, lotions to toothpastes, cosmetics to herbicides. Many national and international brands would be severely compromised without Stepan’s chemicals.

In an effort to identify the qualities that define the Stepan Company prior to designing their annual report, we asked the president and chairman of the board to describe his business as if he were talking to his grandchildren. On the surface this question could appear to be innocuous, even trivial. But this question and how it was posed represents the fundamental objective of the play principle: to appreciate motivation as well as to gather information.

We posed the question in the most non-confrontational posture available: from a grandchild to loving grandfather. The chairman was being asked to simplify a very complicated subject into language that could be understood by a five-year-old or a novice investor, or a person without a degree in chemistry.

The chairman said, almost without hesitation but not so quick as
to sound rehearsed, “We’re in the bubble business.” His unique and utterly succinct description of his company’s products created an opportunity to establish connections at a human level with virtually every audience Stepan values.

Employees, suppliers, customers, shareholders, as well as the jaded and cynical worldwide financial community now had an opportunity to recognize and appreciate the influence and impact of the Stepan Company and its products.

More on the Stepan Company.

Books worthy of your time:
The Creative Priority by Jerry Hirshberg
..."a management concept outside the confines of the traditional managers’ playbook.” — J.D. Power III, chairman and founder, J.D. Power and Associates

Next month:
Changing Brands