15 July, 2015, by Georgia Ames

Drive Your Business Forward With Disruptive Thinking

This week’s breakfast presentation, delivered by Jonathan Tallant (Head of Philosophy at The University of Nottingham) with guest speaker of Tony Brooks (The Leadership Training Workshop), was based on how philosophy and positive thinking could help your business.

Jonathan Tallant started off the morning stating that creativity is hard, but it is essential if a business is to succeed, as it allows the products produced to be further ahead than the competitors. Jonathan outlined to the group why they should think about philosophy; data suggests that philosophy helps people perform better on tasks involving numeracy and literacy and philosophy students are in the top 10 most employable graduates.

The philosopher’s approach is to analyse and question everything, allowing you to look at things from a different perspective. With a different perspective come different ideas, resulting in business products or plans that can only become better and more innovative. Jonathan went on to explain that life naturally has a purpose; Aristotle thought it was living a eudaimonic (flourishing) life. Taking on new skills, new hobbies etc mean we flourish as a person.

The Department of Philosophy at The University of Nottingham offers businesses the opportunity to explore these principals in greater depth via Ingenuity workshops, bespoke challenge sessions and individual consultancy. These are just 3 of the ways you could get involved and potentially change your business frame of mind.

Jonathan then handed over to Tony Brooks, who took to the floor to talk about the power of a positive mind-set for business leaders. Tony outlined 3 key things which affect your positive mind-set: the way you view yourself, others, and your circumstances, and we have a tendency to view these in a negative way.

In people who tend to view things in a negative way, depression is 10 times more common and 66% of this is due to work-related stress. This is because we are continually chasing success and don’t notice the smaller successes we achieve on a day to day basis. So changing our mind-set to view the smaller things as a positive can change the way you work.

Tony shared an example with us about GP’s. When GP’s were working with a more positive mind-set, they were 3 times more effective and 20% faster. This showed that doing things differently will get you different and better results.

To bring the session to a close, Tony shared a piece of advice. To view things in a more positive way, all we have to do is shift our filters. A small way to begin to do this is to write down 5 positive things at the end of each day, to allow you to appreciate the small positives or successes from your day, rather than focusing on the big yearly achievements.

As we are now taking a short break for summer, our next breakfast event is on the 29^th September, where Chris Barnatt Associate Professor of Strategy & Future Studies will be talking about “The Next Big Thing”. For more information, please visit the Ingenuity website.

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