How you choose to read this book is entirely UP! to you:

• If you want to read it from cover to cover, read it from cover to cover.
• If you want to dip in and out, dip in and out.
• If you want to zoom ahead to a specific section, please zoom ahead.

My only suggestion is that, if you really want to get the most out of this book, keep turning your lines of thought into ladders of thought …

Why?

Because this is exactly what Business Geniuses do.

In direct contrast to Non-Business Geniuses – who often think along the lines of, ‘It’s just a sandwich!’ or ‘It’s just a spring!’ or ‘It’s just a sheep!’ – Business Geniuses climb higher to see further. They look at the same sandwich, spring and sheep, and spot something more …

So please bear this in mind as you read on.

If you want more Business Genius moments in the work you do, it’s not the lines of limitation that’ll help you; it’s the ladders of possibility.

And the best way to create these ladders is deceptively simple:

• Ingvar Kamprad, for example, was the Business Genius entrepreneur who questioned the assumption that household furniture had to be pre-assembled and expensive. As a result, his Swedish flat-pack furniture company IKEA (which he named after his initials I. K.) elevated him to become ‘the world’s seventh richest man’!
• Similarly, Louis Gerstner was the Business Genius executive who, during the 1990s, questioned the assumption that IBM was a broken machine, and beyond repair. As a result of his ‘Who says elephants can’t dance?’ defiance, Gerstner managed to reverse the fortunes of the ailing giant, and once more steer them back into profit.
• Or how about the story of the Business Genius secretary Bette Nesmith Graham? She was the Genius administrator from Texas who, in 1951, questioned the assumption that typed letters always needed to be retyped when little mistakes were made. Consequently, she went on to invent correction fluid, and her Liquid Paper Corporation eventually sold to Gillette in 1979 for $47.5 million.

There’s plenty of evidence, therefore, to suggest that Business Genius is built upon assumption-questioning.

So here are a few more:

• Jack Dorsey questioned the assumption that electronic communication needed to be longer than 140 characters, and went on to co-found the SMS for the internet: Twitter.
• Kevin Costner – the Hollywood actor and film director – questioned the assumption that native Americans could only ever be portrayed as savages and villains in cowboy films, giving rise to the acclaimed Dances With Wolves, which won seven Academy Awards at the Oscars at the start of the 1990s.

Or here’s a public sector example for you, if you’d welcome a Business Genius example that isn’t only about profit, fame and fortune:

• J. D. Millar – a Canadian engineer who worked for the Ontario Department of Transport in 1930 – questioned the assumption that unmarked roads (which were the norm back then) were a good idea, especially as so many cars were ending up in nasty head-on collisions. Millar simply suggested that the Department paint dotted white lines in the middle of the roads (to help separate the two-way traffic) and his inspired solution went on to save countless lives in countless countries!   

So, the secret of getting the most out of this book is to keep reminding yourself that line thinking and ladder thinking are worlds apart:

A line thinker, for example, could easily read a book like this (i.e. a book on the psychology-side and creative-thinking side of business) and dismiss it as ‘just common sense’!

Let’s face it, they may be right (in the same way they’re right about the sandwich, right about the spring and right about the sheep).

A ladder thinker, however, might see something more.

Goethe (the famous German poet and perceptive economic adviser to Duke Karl August of Weimar, back in 1906), for example, was an amazing ladder thinker who once wrote:

Likewise, a line thinker could easily read a book like this (i.e. a book that’s full of cartoons rather than complex corporate graphs and charts) and dismiss it as ‘just childish’.

Again, they may be right. As I highlighted in my first book Gen!us: Deceptively simple ways to become instantly smarter, however, it could be argued that ‘childish’ and ‘childlike’ are not the same thing.

If I drew a picture of Iron Man, for example, and put it in a business book just for the fun of it, that would be ‘childish’.

If, however, I use this same image to make a serious business point (i.e. how the world of business and the world of cartoons are more closely inter-connected than we might think) that would be ‘childlike’.

Rather like this …

Yup. Evidently, Stan Lee (the creator of Iron Man) based his character on Howard Hughes, the eccentric aviator and ‘real’ business billionaire.

Similarly, if I drew a picture of Charlie Brown and Snoopy and put it in a book on Business Genius (simply because I couldn’t be bothered to write much text) that would definitely show strands of Business Genius, however, it’d also be rather ‘childish’, too.

But, what if I used the same image to demonstrate how targeted creative thinking can often hold the key to immense riches? Well, that would be ‘childlike’. Rather like this …

Allegedly (according to www.celebritynetworth.com), the creative and Business Genius Charles M. Shultz left a lot more than ‘peanuts’ to his descendants when he died. Staggeringly, it’s estimated that year-on-year his heirs receive more dollars from his doodles (in terms of royalties and merchandise) than the estates of John Lennon, Elizabeth Taylor and Jimi Hendrix combined.

Anyway, I hope you don’t mind me mentioning it. I’m only doing so because I believe the childish/childlike distinction to be of such high importance.

In 1804, for example, line thinkers dismissed British inventor Richard Trevithick’s ‘iron horse’ as little more than a childish fun ride, yet 20 years later it went on to become what we now know as the railways.

Similarly, in 1876, line thinkers at Western Union dismissed Alexander Graham Bell’s ‘idiotic’ invention of a telephone as so childish it was ‘hardly more than a toy’.

So let’s ensure your brilliant Business Genius ideas don’t get flattened in the same way.

Ladder thinking, as we’ve already mentioned, is what will help you to improve yourself, improve the way you get on with others, and improve what you achieve in business.

Here’s one final thought, before we move on to the first chapter, ‘UP! your focus’.

If it wasn’t for ladder thinking there’d be no skyscrapers (invented by William Le Baron Jenney – in Chicago, 1884 – when he came up with an improved way of building tall buildings using steel-girders); also there’d be no safety elevator either (invented by Elisha Otis in 1853, when he came up with an improved device to prevent elevators dropping through the air if a cable accidentally snapped); also there’d be no aviation industry!

This is because, since the time of Ancient Greece, people who wanted to fly like a bird naturally assumed the best way to do so was to look at birds, and copy the movement of their flapping wings.

What they failed to realise, however, was that, according to eagle expert Jemima Parry-Jones, we’d need to have ‘chest muscles 2 m (6 ft) deep’ to do the same thing, and we’re simply not strong enough to copy them and flap ‘wings down and backward like a rowing boat’.

Fortunately, however, along came the Genius thinker Sir George Cayley (1773–1857) who questioned this assumption, and ended up changing everything.

Cayley stopped looking at the movement of birds, and started looking at the movement of kites! As a result, according to author Rowland White in his book The Big Book of Flight: ‘Cayley spotted what so many others had missed … Perhaps flapping like a bird was not the best way to stay airborne.’

And, hopefully, from a Business Genius perspective, this ‘flight nugget’ helps to highlight what a big difference a simple idea can often make …