Jolt!, Phil Cooke [reading women txt] 📗

guy when it comes to answers and ideas. Be the person who knows how to find new information and who can provide innovative insights and perspectives.

How do you find those ideas?

First, learn where the best ideas in your business come from and spend more time there. I’m not talking about glancing at your monthly trade magazine— it’s much more than that. Start with cross-pollinating. Bees spend their lives moving from flower to flower, taking the pollen from one source to another.

What happens?

Growth! Because bees are spreading the pollen around the garden, more flowers start growing, and it becomes a more beautiful place. In life, cross-pollinating means finding information from multiple sources and spreading it out in different ways to different people.

In other words—start looking for answers in unexpected places.

For instance, finding answers to the challenges my media clients face often takes me to history books, computer manuals, magazines on acting, or leadership studies. When faced with a management challenge, I’ll often study the lives of military generals and learn about the decisions they made on the battlefield.

Station M

In learning about change, one of the first places I looked was the life of British stage magician Jasper Maskelyne. In 1983, I read David Fisher’s remarkable book on Maskelyne’s life—The War Magician. Maskelyne came from a long line of stage magicians in Britain. When World War II began, his career was at its peak. As he thought about the war effort from a magician’s perspective, he realized there were areas he could contribute. Although he was past the normal age for soldiers, he closed up his show and signed up as a private in the British army.

His first personal battle was to convince the military leadership that his ideas would work. Most of the generals were great students of war and had studied it all their lives, so for a magician, of all people, to tell them how to approach war from a new perspective was bold, but Maskelyne persisted and managed to get himself and his team into the camouflage department.

The rest is history. Fisher tells the amazing story of how the magician was sent to North Africa, where he used his skills against the Germans to conduct one of the strangest and most bizarre campaigns in the history of warfare.

Using his unusual magical skills, he made the Suez Canal disappear, moved Alexandria Harbor, turned tanks into broken-down trucks, created a shadow army, launched a phantom fleet of submarines, and made the enemy think they were facing a seven-hundred-foot battleship. His team used their inventiveness to create escape kits for prisoners of war, build a mini-submarine that sank a cargo ship, and perfect a special fire-retardant paste that saved the lives of hundreds of fliers.

Jasper Maskelyne spent his whole life trying to change the thinking of people who were hopelessly stuck with an old paradigm. As a master of illusion, his job was to convince people of the impossible and to make the visible, invisible. He had to change the thinking of the public, military generals, and finally, the Nazi army in North Africa.

Keep in mind, he wasn’t a military man. When the war started, he had no experience in military affairs and didn’t know the first thing about life in the army. But he understood the power of growth and was willing to learn. He established the legendary Station “M”—with the “M” standing for “magic”— where he created a top-secret department building illusions that were used in the global war effort. His work was so important that Hitler’s Gestapo added his name to their infamous “Black List,” where a price was put on his head. He was so inventive that the Allies kept his illusions in a secret file until nearly forty years after the war.

As a result, after the war he retired at the rank of major and served in sixteen countries, including India, Burma, Malaya, and the Balkans.

Maskelyne understood the power of change—especially the importance of personal growth. He spent his entire life learning, and when he finally died in Kenya in 1973, he had played a significant part in the Allied victory in World War II, created devices that would continue to be used for decades to come, worked for the Kenyan police during the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s, and managed the Kenyan National Theater. From stage magic to military victory, inventions, police work, and drama, Jasper Maskelyne’s life was the story of creativity and personal growth.

I have probably applied more insights from his life to areas like personal change and what I call “crisis creativity” than from any other person.

2. You are not being promoted.

The second indicator of the need to explore personal growth is that you are not being promoted. In corporate culture, the higher the position, the less “doing” happens and the more “thinking” comes into play. Look at a typical corporate conference room during major meetings. The foot soldiers of the company bring in their laptops, briefcases, and sometimes boxes of files, but the president rarely comes into the room holding anything at all.

Why? The president isn’t hired to run a computer, keep a schedule, or manage files. He’s hired because of the power of his ideas.

Promotions generally go to the men and women who exhibit extraordinary growth, because companies want people in leadership who simply have the best ideas.

Start generating new ideas, and see how quickly you get noticed.

3. You have lost interest in your job.

The third indicator of the need for growth is that you have lost interest in your job or career. Most people think this comes from being in one job too long, going through a midlife crisis, or even the need for some other type of major life change.

» MOST PEOPLE LOSE INTEREST IN THEIR JOBS BECAUSE THEY LOSE INTEREST IN GROWING.

Look at the people who have the highest levels of intensity and creativity. Generally they are people who are the most passionate about their chosen industry or field. They don’t care about