New Business Ideas

Husband and wife team Andrew and Mary Bragg have written an unusual and highly effective guide to ‘Developing New Business Ideas’. As you would hope, the book is full of unusual and effective approaches. For example, the authors, like most writers on cerebration, tell you about the right brain (intuitive) and left (logical) which determine your thought patterns. But you really want to develop ‘whole brain thinking’ - and these exercises will help:

Stretching your right brain

• Use metaphors and analogies to describe things and people in your conversations and writing
• Make eye contact with people you meet in order to help feel their point of view
• Take off your watch when you’re not working
• Suspend your initial judgment of ideas, new acquaintances, movies, TV programmes
• Record your hunches, feelings and intuitions and calculate their accuracy
• Take a stroll to no place in particular
• Surf the net just to see where it takes you
• Indulge in detailed day-dreaming and visualising things and situations in the future
• Do some doodling and draw faces, caricatures and landscapes
• Perceive the bigger picture and float above the details
• Collect junk mail and peruse it for unusual ideas
• Place a deliberate spelling mistake in your next letter or business paper and check whether the world falls in

Stretching your left brain

• Establish a timetable for all your work activities during the coming week and check your progress every hour
• Make a step-by-step plan of your life activities for the next ten years
• Read a book on logic
• When you next buy a piece of electrical apparatus, read the instruction manual from start to finish (before using the apparatus)
• Learn how to use a new computer program
• Complete a crossword puzzle
• Compile a detailed broken-down analysis of the three major issues facing you at work
• Volunteer to make public presentations at every opportunity
• Write out the detailed search strategy which you intend to follow when you next go on to the internet looking for specific information

Provided you don’t succumb to schizophrenia, alternating right and left in your mental exercise should bring fun - and profit from your new business ideas.