Stanford Executive Briefings: Creativity in Business

Creativity in Business
Michael Ray, Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, condenses the lessons of his popular class, Personal Creativity in Business, for a business audience. He describes how to use four tools—faith, absence of judgment, observation, and questions—that can release creativity in your enterprise, sidestepping potential pitfalls and opening up opportunities.

Creative Thinking
Lynda Curtin gives you the tools to generate fresh ideas quickly and systematically. Using the proven techniques of lateral thinking, provocative operations, concept extraction, and random entry, she engages you in a powerful ideas-generating process that will give you something useful to take back to your job.

The Entrepreneurial Process
Investors today are once again looking very closely before putting money into new ventures. Entrepreneurs have to be more prepared to make their case for getting a new idea off the ground. Using her own experiences as an entrepreneur, angel investor, and venture capitalist, Magdelena Yesil walks you through the steps necessary to achieve a liquidity event, including identifying a winning idea, recruiting a team, choosing financial partners, and establishing the right business development relationships.

What Drives Phenomenal Success?
According to Colleen Barrett, success comes from an idea that is so simple, nobody quite believes it: customers return because they like the experience and they like the way they are treated. Her guiding rule is to hire on attitude and then train for skills, seeking individuals who will take the business—but not themselves—seriously.