Creating value is fundamental to the healthy functioning of human beings. Like the natural law of gravity, creating value is the natural Law of Increase. People have instinctively sought “an increase” to their lives — an inner desire to be a greater, a fuller expression of themselves. We want to have all our wishes come true.
Most of us remember the classic story of Aladdin and his magic lamp. How a poor boy stumbled upon an old dusty lamp. As the boy rubbed the dust from the engraved surface, a Genie appeared from a cloud to fulfill his greatest wishes. All the little boy had to do was ask and the Genie would provide him great riches.
The Genie and the lamp is a stand in for an equivalent creative principle, that in rubbing it, we stimulate our desire for something greater. To create value (use the Law of Increase) more clearly and too our advantage, the methodology will be based in Praise–our blessing and appreciation for the very act of our creative thought.
Praise is a stimulant of the mind. It’s the door that opens our creativity and innovation. Through praise we magnetize all the good (value) around us, and transform that good into usable visible form. In other words, into the things and experiences we value.
Cooperation is the ideology of value creation; praise is the methodology for bringing it into form. In our businesses and in affairs of state, this ideology must overtake our learned behaviors of competition and be replaced with new behaviors of cooperation, creativity and innovation.
With 7+ billion souls on our planet, the world is getting smaller at an accelerated pace. Our consumer-driven-social-media obsessed cultures are driving the speed and trajectory of the effects of the wicked problems facing humanity right now.
We will choose to increase our desire for greater good through cooperation, or will nature step in and determine our fate?
If your business or brand is to thrive in an economy driven by ideas, you’ll have to choose between operating from the competitive plane or the creative plane.
When your business operates on the competitive plane:
It can only win when somebody else loses. You will only bring products to market that are based in incremental user needs, and abundantly available from other sources. You’ll be forced to compete at the lowest price. Crazy ideas that are without form and are unproven will be discounted in favor of known concepts and the status quo . Your culture will be motivated by control, competition and survival.
When your business operates on the creative plane:
There will be no shortage in the supply of opportunity. You’ll innovate and design products that redefine the category, delighting customers with the unexpected, making competition irrelevant. Your customers will experience more use value than they pay in cash value–making price irrelevant. Your culture will be focused on turning possibilities into realities. You will not count transactions but create experiences people love and build trust marketing and advertising money can’t buy.
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