Tag Archives: Creativity

Leadership Mints Sampler: CREATING Like a Leader

Creativity.

Inspiring it and sustaining it is a key theme in THINKING Like a Leader, one of three books in The Leadership Mints Series. Here is a quick peek at the 36 Leadership Mints (short stories on leadership principles) that are Creativity oriented. This overview is excerpted from the book that is available at Amazon.com.

CREATING -Part I

In thinking like a leader, you define an overarching purpose (Mint 1). You reframe today’s reality into tomorrow’s possibility because of your current circumstances not in spite of them (Mint 2). You engage your imagination (Mint 3). You rewrite your destiny (Mint 4).

Leaders improvise (Mint 25). Leaders see the opportunity within the perceived obstacle (Mint 5 and Mint 23). Leaders leverage new perspectives (Mint 6) with your YQ, your Yield Questions (Mint 36).

Leaders guard against jumping to conclusions (Mint 7) and rudimentary thinking (Mint 10). Leaders stay alert to new venues (Mint 11) and even leverage off-the-wall thinking (Mint 27).

You try to see yourself the way others see you (Mint 8-9). Leaders listen fully (Mint 12) and patiently (Mint 13).

Leaders embrace paradox (Mint 14) and seek new venues (Mint 15), new horizons (Mint 16) and virtually defy gravity (Mint 17) to continuously improve (Mint 24).

Leaders set the mood (Mints 18-19) and broaden their vision (Mints 20-21). Leaders add pizzazz to their customer service (Mint 22).

Leaders distort and orient, exchange and overstate (Mint 26). Leaders innovate (Mints 28-29). Leaders are resourceful (Mint 30).

Leaders help others understand (Mint 35) by making things simple not simpler (Mint 34). And leaders take the time to think (Mints 32-33) at 250 miles per hour (Mint31)!

Next week we’ll take a quick peek at Part II in THINKING Like a Leader on Concentration. In the meantime, have a creative week full of paradox and pizzazz!

Tuning In to Your Creativity

By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to use music as a strategic thinking tool. Reading time: 3:09

How do you fine tune your creative thinking skills?

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein

With a fine tune.

Albert Einstein chose to play the violin to help him relax and problem solve more readily, according to his son, Hans Albert.

Whenever Albert Einstein felt that he had come to the “end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work, he would take refuge in music. That would usually resolve all his difficulties,” Hans Albert recalled of his dad’s String Theory of a Different Kind.

At any rate, music just may be the oil in the engine of creative and strategic thinking. In fact, some of the world’s most renowned thinkers -leaders -were musically talented:

Galileo, the son of a musician, played a guitar like instrument called the lute.
Thomas Jefferson played the violin.
Ben Franklin, who invented the glass harmonica, played the guitar and harp.
Henry David Thoreau played the flute.
Albert Schweitzer played the organ. Continue reading