Business

Creativity: Mixing Standard Components in a New Way

Sun Tzu taught a simple formula for creativity. You look at the existing pieces of "best practices." You then take those pieces apart and put them together in a new way. Sun Tzu specifically teaches three views of best practices: how processes look, how they sound, and how they "taste," that is, changing the result they create. As I point out in several of my books, "rearranging" these parts is often a matter of changing their order in time, but those rearrangements are often made possible by advances in other areas usually very remote from the target area.

The Search for Empty Ground

Sun Tzu's strategy is non-intuitive because it is a contrarian philosophy. It teaches people that they must avoid their natural instict to follow the crowd. You cannot be successful if you do what everyone else does. Good strategy rewards creativity. In this sense, it is a constant search for empty ground. The empty ground is the opportunity that everyone always overlooks. We can never know if the empty ground is fertile or not until we explore it. Many empty grounds prove to be empty for a good reason: they are barren.

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