Best Guide to Creativity and Success Ever!

I've been searching since the late 1970s for a better brainstorming guru or resource...Still haven't found anything better!


The Universal Traveler: A Soft-Systems Guide to Creativity, Problem-Solving and the Process of Reaching Goals by Don Koberg and Jim Bagnall is easily in my Lifetime Top Ten Resources!



The intro says it all: The Universal Traveler is more than a guide to creative problem-solving and clear thinking: it is your passport to success. It is! Just about every great idea I've had or implemented since college was somehow rooted in its teaches. And most every failure I've encountered was when I forgot what it had taught me.



The back cover also summarizes the best definition of design since my first Design 101 course: Design is a process of making dreams come true.



What I love best about it is its humble simplicity and clarity. Aside from the occasional trip into academic-ese — soft-systems, synectics — it uses very plain language to explain every idea and the structure of being a traveler's guide to pull all the ideas together.





One of my all-time favorites is "Forced Connections," where attributes from one thing are randomly "forced" together to great something new. This is one of the ways I've been able to think so far ahead in the fields of employee engagement, culture and workplace design. I simply create a list of early-adoption consumer issues — privacy, app empowerment, workarounds, etc — and ask "What will that look like when consumers start realizing they want the same things at work?" Seeing those connections sooner than others is the basis for all of my books and consulting.



If you work or learn or play, this life-resource should be your best friend! Get it! Internalize it. Live it. You'll be very glad you did.