At the New Year period many people read books designed to shake up their lives and spur creativity and change. One such is LATERAL THINKING FOR EVERY DAY, which is easy to read and packed with fun facts. The book really livens up with the puzzles which occur in some of the chapters, to stretch our minds into new thought patterns.

If you feel starting a new business is scary, imagine starting a new taxi firm with no taxis, or a hotel firm with no rooms. Lateral thinking enabled the rapid growth of Uber cabs and Airbnb rentals. Another fun example is that of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who used the resources of their college server to send web spiders crawling and indexing the whole of the websites than on the internet. They just intended a research project, and eventually founded Google. These examples are heartening to anyone who has been told that the boss doesn't want to hear new ideas.  

Business meetings are covered, with up-to-date suggestions including Zoom breakout rooms for separate discussions, and wearing different coloured hats to indicate being optimistic, pessimistic, and orderly. We are encouraged to see a problem from the point of view of the customer, the sales staff, and outsiders like a firefighter.   

As for the puzzles, you will recall the puzzle about someone being shot with a vanishing weapon that turns out to be made of ice; this is so well known that the book doesn’t include it, instead asking about bricks, plumbers, rice, luxury cars, and more. I came up with some answers which were equally correct but not the ones printed, so if you do this, pat yourself on the back. Paul Sloane has previously written several lateral thinking puzzle books, and with LATERAL THINKING FOR EVERY DAY, he encourages us to put the habit to good use by resolving problems in unexpected but simple ways. The only downside is that if you have read several self-help, small business or creativity books, you may have covered some of the material, because the best-known examples are, naturally, often-quoted ones. When you have read LATERAL THINKING FOR EVERY DAY, why not suggest some of the ideas in the office, and see what changes arise?