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Fun, provocative, and practical! You can use the Creative Whack Pack by yourself, or with colleagues and friends. "The Creative Whack Pack displays business brilliance!" — USA Today "Using the Creative Whack Pack may beat consulting the Ching." — Fortune Magazine
The Ball of Whacks is made up of 30 magnetic design blocks that can be taken apart and rearranged in endless ways. More versatile than a puzzle and lots more fun than a brain teaser, there's no wrong way to play and work with it. It gets your creative juice flowing! Includes a 96-page creativity guidebook. See a fun one-minute video showing the creativity possibility of the Ball of Whacks. Available in Red, Blue, Black, and Multi-Color.
The X-Ball consists of 30 magnetic X-pieces that click together to form a skeletal icosidodecahedron — Leonardo da Vinci's favorite shape. The uniquely angled geometry of the X-shaped pieces allows users to invent their own shapes and designs. The X-Ball comes with an illustrated 96-page creativity guidebook that offers lots of ideas for other fun shapes and creative applications for the X-Ball. For you geometry fans, the X-Ball's shape is the reciprocal of the Ball of Whacks shape. Thus, pieces from the two products can be mixed and played with together!
Over the years, A WHACK ON THE SIDE OF THE HEAD has been praised by business people, educators, scientists, homemakers, artists, youth leaders, and many more. The book has been stimulating creativity in millions of readers, translated into eighteen languages, and used in seminars around the world. This fully illustrated and updated volume is filled with even more provocative puzzles, anecdotes, exercises, metaphors, cartoons, questions, quotations, stories, and tips designed to systematically break through your mental blocks and unlock your mind for creative thinking. This new edition will attract an entire new generation of readers with updated and mind-stretching material.
This million-selling product is a "creativity workshop in a box." It consists of 64 cards, each featuring a different strategy. Some highlight places to find new information. Others provide techniques to generate new ideas. Some lend decision-making advice. And many give you the "kick" you need to get your ideas into action. The Creative Whack Pack is a "gift for your creative gift." Playing with it will make you more creative. The Creative Whack Pack has many, many satisfied users! Give it a try! It will help you boost your creativity.
Each card in the deck packs a two-sided creative punch. One side has a provocative insight about innovation from Heraclitus, the world's first creativity teacher. These 2,500 year old ideas -- such as "You can't step into the same river twice," and "Dogs bark at what they don't understand" -- will give you a fresh perspective. The other side contains a creativity strategy inspired by each insight. Roger von Oech enriches these strategies with amusing anecdotes and intriguing questions that will "whack" you out of your habitual thought patterns.
When was the last time you had a creative idea? This morning? Last month? Last year? Sometimes you need A Kick in the Seat of the Pants to get your thinking going. This book does just that by taking you on a guided tour through the four roles of the creative process: Explorer, Artist, Judge, and Warrior. — When it's time to seek out new information, adopt the mindset of an Explorer. Get off the beaten path, poke around in outside areas, and pay attention to unusual patterns.— When you need to create a new idea, let the Artist in you come out. Ask what-if questions and look for hidden analogies. Break the rules and look at things backwards. Add something and take something away. Ultimately, you'll come up with an original idea.— When it's time to decide if your idea is worth implementing, see yourself as a Judge. Ask what's wrong and if the timing's right. Question your assumptions and make a decision. — And when you carry your idea into action, be a Warrior. Put a fire in your belly, eliminate your excuses, and do what's necessary to reach your objective. Kick provides exercises, stories, tips, and Roger von Oech's proven techniques to help you strengthen each of your own creative roles.
The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus was the first "creativity teacher," says Roger von Oech, whose bestselling book A Whack on the Side of the Head set the standard for out-of-the-box thinking. In Expect the Unexpected, Von Oech uses 30 of Heraclitus's pithy and paradoxical epigrams to approach problems in a fresh manner. He explains his premise: "Creative thinking involves imagining familiar things in a new light, digging below the surface to find previously undetected patterns, and finding connections among unrelated phenomena." Von Oech uses the epigrams as creativity exercises--accompanied by mental puzzles, anecdotes, questions, and punchy footnotes--to demonstrate that Heraclitus's 2,500-year-old creative insights have aged well. With his whimsical wand, von Oech transforms the epigram "A Donkey prefers garbage to gold" into an exploration of values. He uses Heraclitus's observation that "A wonderful harmony is created when we join together the seemingly unconnected" to examine the use of metaphors in understanding problems. When Heraclitus observes that "Dogs bark at what they don't understand," Von Oech crafts a meditation about criticism. Executives, students, teachers, and parents will find an exciting and entertaining map for changing thought patterns, tolerating ambiguity, confounding expectations, and searching for hidden meanings. |
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Expect the Unexpected (or You Won't Find It: A Creativity Tool Based on the Ancient Wisdom of Heraclitus