I'll take ideas for a thousand, Alex.

Here is a great blog post from Alex Bogusky, one of the founders of Crispin Porter & Bogusky. These are the guys responsible for The King commercials for Burger King and for the Volkswagen crash videos. They seem to always be pushing the limits of creative ideas and getting them produced. With this brings a lot of criticism. They recently "Crowdsourced" a logo for a new client of theirs, Brammo, who makes electric motorcycles. They received a lot of flack from the advertising/design industry for doing this because they didn’t do the work themselves even though they were hired by this company to do it and it threatens the credibility of hundreds of agencies because if some freelancer in his home office can submit a winning logo via crowdsourcing, then why hire an agency.

The reason for posting this link and the content is because I think his thoughts on creativity and ideas and how those can push us all to continue raising the bar on progress and problem solving are fantastic. They relate to my feelings and how great ideas can really push NeighborLink forward in finding solutions for helping the people we serve.

Here is an excerpt from that post that I want to share:

I have always been and always will be a student of creativity and ideas. My belief holds that everybody is creative. The fact that in our industry we have a department called “creative" has always bugged me a bit, and I’m sure it bugs other people. But it still isn’t uncommon to hear from people, “I’m not creative.”

Bullshit.

We’re all creative. Maybe some of us are out of practice or maybe we’ve been beaten down by a misguided education system. NASA did a long-term study decades ago where they tested a group of Kindergartners on creative problem solving. 95% scored in the highest quadrant. Then they came back and did the same test every year with the same kids all the way through high school. By the time these kids graduated only roughly 5 percent still scored as highly-creative problem solvers. So the ability to be creative is naturally in us all somewhere, and it can be unlocked again.

If you feel like you don’t have creative ideas, then you’ve shut down and not tried. It’s in all of us to find solutions for problems.

I hope that NeighborLink can be a place for your creativity and ideas come to fruition. We’re creating an environment where your ideas are needed to help us serve more and more people. So, start contributing your ideas. How can we do more projects? Solve more issues? Help people become sustainable? and on and on.

Read the full article and get inspired to be great.

Andrew Hoffman
I believe that social innovation & the power of a healthy neighborhood can transform communities. I'm the husband of Michelle, father to Avery and the soon to be twin Hoffman Boys. We're the H-Train. We live in a historic neighborhood in South Central Fort Wayne. My day job is the Executive Director of NeighborLink Fort Wayne. Photography has quickly become my go to creative outlet that allows me to capture the moments of life that we hold onto dearly for my family and for others.
andrew-hoffman.com
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