Driving and Accelerating Business Growth using Right Brain and Left Brain. Imaginative with your right brain. Intelligent with your left brain. Inspired whole brain thinking.

September 30, 2009 by kutenk · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Business Strategy 

Driving and Accelerating Business Growth using Right Brain and Left Brain.

Imaginative with your right brain. Intelligent with your left brain. Inspired whole brain thinking.

A more intelligent approach to growth that embraces stronger left brain thinking
  • Maximize the economic value creation for stakeholders
  • Focus on best market, customer and product opportunities
  • Add more distinctive value to your products and services
  • Strengthen the purpose and competitive position of your brand
  • Extend into adjacent categories and markets
  • Manage growth as a process and as a diverse portfolio
  • Ensure that your growth is profitable, sustainable and creates value.
A more imaginative approach to growth that embraces stronger right brain thinking
  • Shape the future in your vision, rather than live by somebody else’s
  • Identify and capture new market opportunities first
  • Disrupt the accepted rules, conventions and business models
  • Exploit your intangible business assets in more powerful ways
  • Collaborate with different and interesting partners
  • Accelerate growth through platforms and accelerators
  • Grow your business through ‘The Seven Lives of Business’

Humans are grey

So how does a business, large or small, create and sustain profitable growth?

The answer is already in our heads. As human beings we have an enormous capacity to think, to sense and respond, to innovate and change. We each have 100 trillion brain cells, and probably use about 1% of them at any time. At an incredibly simple level we can categorize our brains into left and right sides – reflecting our ability to think intelligently and imaginatively, analytically and intuitively, sequentially and holistically.

Yet it is the connections between these that really matters. In Einstein’s case, his brain remained the object of fascination and research for many years, scientists concluding that it was in some ways different – not simply bigger, but better connected. The grey matter in our heads is connected by white matter. So it is perhaps this white stuff, the connective tissue, that holds more clues to our own genius, and the best opportunities for personal and business growth.

The successful growth business is firstly an imaginative business. It then intelligently focuses on the best opportunities. Whilst most of today’s businesses are dominated by left-brain thinking, it is the right-brain thoughts that unlocks newness and enables them to start new things, and make the leaps forward.




Growth businesses succeed by thinking more broadly – seeing a bigger picture, a more holistic view of the market challenges and opportunities. They see a broader context, and by doing so they see more opportunities to exploit, more ways to be different, more sources of future profit. And the more you have to choose from, the richer your options, the more likely you are to find the best, and the more sustainable you can be in exploiting them.

This might seem overly ambitious, particularly for a small business struggling to survive. Yet, even a few people with dedicated time can apply enormous brainpower to thinking more broadly, deeply and clearly – new thinking that could deliver extraordinary results.

Large businesses need a mix of people with left- and right-brain preferences, or ideally both. Small businesses must choose their colleagues with even more care. The visionary, creative, intuitive entrepreneur – from Richard Branson to Bill Gates – has always sought a more focused, analytical manager to be their side-kick.

More intuitive, more divergent, more holistic thinking enables us to see things differently, and thereby to think and do different things – to challenge conventions, to explore new possibilities, to hypothesize alternatives. More logical, more convergent, more focused thinking then enables you to choose the best markets, products, customers and approaches to focus your resources to be successful in this wider world.

Today’s high growth business is an inspired business, fusing imaginative stretch and intelligent focus in order to deliver extraordinary results.

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