Mike Brown - Idea Magnets: 7 Strategies for Cultivating & Attracting Creative Business Leaders

Idea Magnets

7 Strategies for Cultivating & Attracting Creative Business Leaders

Mike Brown

Copyright 2018 Mike Brown

All right reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or otherwise be copied for public or private useother than for "fair use" as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews without prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-7320386-2-2

Consulting Editor: Tara Baukus Mello

Critique Partner: Emma Alvarez Gibson

Cover & Interior Design: Be Mello Media, Inc.

Illustrations: John D. Chinn

Back Cover Photo: Henry Behrens

For wholesale orders or to order copies in bulk for your conference, company or organization, contact

The Brainzooming Group

info@brainzooming.com

816-509-5320

To all the Idea Magnets in my life whose stories will be told beyond this book.

For any of you who are still waiting to meet the first Idea Magnet in your life, how about becoming one yourself, starting today?

What is an Idea Magnet?

T hink about a time when you and your team, your organization, or even your family needed to generate incredibly creative ideas and turn them into reality. Were you able to effectively share an inspiring vision for what you needed to accomplish together? Could everyone find some way to contribute productively? Did the group imaginatively identify resources and innovative ideas to accomplish amazing opportunities?

And if all that happened, was it easy? Or was it a challenge? Was it one of those moments where everything seemed to magically click, but its never happened again? Or did you collectively fall short in realizing the possibilities you had hoped to accomplish? If you ended up being disappointed, you are far from alone. In fact, it's well within the norm in today's workplaces, schools, and families.

But achieving tremendous creative success as an individual or as a group doesnt have to be rare or depend on some magical combination of things you cant ever recreate.

Idea Magnets, and those around them, experience these types of moments all the time. And there is no magic involved.

What is an Idea Magnet?

Idea Magnets inspire creative ideas and encourage extreme creativity in those around them. Idea Magnets make life more exciting, fulfilling, and successful in everything they touchfrom their work, to their personal lives to chance encountersby applying surprising connections to deliver intriguingly powerful results. They do it all with amazing ease. Idea Magnets serve and lead with boldness and humility. They imagine bold visions and attract other Idea Magnets to help implement them. They make BIG things happen while providing their teams abundant opportunities to grow and recharge their own creative imaginations.

11 Signs you're with an Idea Magnet

How do you spot an Idea Magnet? Based on my experiences, Idea Magnets:

As you read these characteristics, I'll bet that certain people you know came to mind. Maybe you even thought of yourself, a company or a group you have some experience with. (Idea Magnets can be individuals, groups, teams, departments, or organizations.)

While you may have also thought of some famous people, theres one thing you should know about the people mentioned here. They arent big names you see in the press. You wont see stories of the billionaire tech visionaries; the music industry and Hollywood geniuses or the wunderkinds that put in a couple of years at consulting firms and then started their own companies with tons of venture capital.

No, most of the people you will read about here dont make headlines. They are currently Idea Magnets beyond the worlds spotlight. While the world might think what they are doing doesnt generate the interest that justifies attention, the world is, quite honestly, missing the point.

The Idea Magnets youll read about here are creating tremendous impactsthe kinds of impacts we can all aspire to create for those around us.

The Science of Magnetism

My mission with this book is to help you cultivate your own Idea Magnetism and attract more Idea Magnets to you by increasing your "magnetic field" of creativity. To start, let's spend a moment to refresh how magnetism works to demonstrate how its characteristics and behaviors provide a powerful analogy to attracting smart, creative people.

These days, we think of a magnet as a man-made object we can use to attract certain metals. In reality, a magnet is any object that contains a magnetic field. The earliest magnets recorded were stones that attracted ironthese were called lodestones by the Greeks.

A magnetic field is an invisible force that attracts ferrous metals such as steel, iron, nickel, and even cobalt. This force is an electric field drawing the objects to it and making them "stick." Move that invisible electric field and the object will move along with it.

The result can be as simple as picking up a handful of dropped nails with ease or a stunning artistic dance, such as the dancing iron filings at the Arizona Science Center made by TechnoFrolics.

Strengthening Your Magnetic Field

In this book, you'll discover seven strategies to help you strengthen your own field of magnetism to cultivate and attract other Idea Magnets. Put these strategies into action to increase your own creativity and the creativity of those around you.

I know these strategies work. Throughout much of my career in the corporate world, my role was to bring to life the big visions of Idea Magnets. I always paired well with them. (You might say that we were naturally attracted to each other.) They generated amazing ideas, and I figured out how to make those ideas happen.

When I left my corporate job to start The Brainzooming Group, I found myself thrust into a new leadership role. Realizing I'd now have to be more of a creative leader for our team and clients inspired me to study what the Idea Magnets I knew did to develop and sustain such creative impact. I was surprised to find their characteristics had rubbed off on me! That's when the concept of Idea Magnets was born.

In those early days of exploring Idea Magnets, it became clear that there was an entire globe of them out there. That's why building a network of Idea Magnets is even easier today, since you can make connections virtually all over the world.

To start tapping into your creative forces, join our Idea Magnet community, share your experiences, and attract more creativity to your life by following us on Facebook , Twitter , and Instagram .

To give yourself a boost, download The Idea Magnets Creative Recharge . It shares strategies that build on the ideas here and offer fun approaches to recharging creative energy. You can download it by visiting IdeaMagnets.com/recharge .