Hello, there! How’ve you all been?

Hoje nosso post de business é sobre o autor inglês Paul Sloane que trabalha com técnicas de pensamento lateral e, além de ter escrito vários livros com puzzles, também dá workshops em empresas no mundo inteiro sobre inovação do mundo do trabalho.

Conversei com o Paul pelo Skype há um tempo e ele contou um pouco sobre sua história pessoal, como começou com a ideia dos livros sobre puzzles de pensamento lateral e o que está fazendo atualmente. A entrevista está transcrita abaixo e o vocabulário não é muito complicado e ele fala num ritmo bem interessante e com um lindo sotaque britânico. Você pode encontrar os livros de Paul Sloane (em inglês, altamente recomendável para leitura) nas melhores livrarias do Brasil.

Enjoy!

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Hey, that’s a long story but I’ve been, I was in business, I was in sales and marketing with IBM. I was marketing director and managing director in high tech. And I got very interested in lateral thinking and particularly lateral thinking puzzles and I wrote a number of books on lateral thinking puzzles which did very well and I asked myself, “Are any of the techniques you use in solving these puzzles applicable in business?” and I thought they were so I started to…, I developed a talk on that topic and a workshop on how to use lateral thinking puzzle methods and that went well but then I realized what I was really talking about what that people understood better was innovation, how to do new things and be creative and find better ways to do things so I switched my focus to lateral thinking in business, which not everybody understands, to innovation in business, which everyone understands and needs.

Well, I started about 20 years ago. I collected a bunch of lateral thinking puzzles that I enjoyed and I couldn’t find a book of them so I wrote some of my own and I got a publisher to publish it and that was Sterling Publisher in New York and the first book, Lateral Thinking Puzzles sold over 300,000 copies and has been translated into about twelve languages, so that’s done really well and since then I’ve followed up with a number of other books on lateral thinking puzzles. I run a forum called The Lateral Puzzles.com, a lateral puzzles forum.

When I started my own business, Destination Innovation, I wrote a book, The Leader’s Guide to Lateral Thinking Skills, which has done very well. It’s a business book published by Kogan Page, and I focused on the techniques and methods that a leader needed to encourage creative thinking in the business. And then I followed that up with another book called the Innovative Leader which was packed with advice and tips and guidance to people wanting to lead a creative organization and be more effective with innovation. And I wrote my most recent book with Kogan Page, which came out this year, it’s called How to be a Brilliant Thinker.

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Well, I was born in Scotland and then my parents moved to England when I was just one. I was brought up in the north of England, in a little town called Blackpool and I was fortunate to go to a good school and then I went to Cambridge University and I studied Engineering and I met my wife the first week of university and we’ve been married for forty years, not forty, we’ve known each other for forty years, sorry. And we’ve been married for thirty-seven years and then I, after I left university I did some engineering and I worked for IBM in sales and marketing. I was part of the team that launched the IBM PC in the UK and then I left IBM and I joined  Ashton-Tate Database Company, a leading PC database parlor, D-base, D-base 2, D-base 3, D-base 4 and I was marketing director and then managing director there and then I ran international operations for a US software company called Math Soft who did Mathcad, mathematic  software tool and then I was CEO of a small software company in the UK and then for the last six years or so I’ve been running my own business, Destination Innovation and I help organizations improve innovation. I’ve just come back from a four-day innovation camp, I got back yesterday. It was in northern Israel. And the four days, in the first two days we did really crazy things, all sorts of mad creative things and then some really focused brainstorms and then the final day we developed some business cases for the very best ideas and presented those to the senior management of the company and they approved, um, the proof of concept projects for some of the best innovation ideas. So it was a very intensive innovation camp and that’s the sort of thing I do with customers. I run workshops, I give talks and I generally help people to become better creative thinking and lateral thinking.

Na próxima semana teremos 03 puzzles do Paul Sloane para você tentar resolver e ver suas habilidades de pensamento lateral. Aguarde!

See y’all next time!