The Red Rubber Ball at Work: Elevate Your Game Through the Hidden Power of Play

By Kevin Carroll

Put play in your work as you improve on:

• Innovation: Create better products and services
• Problem-Solving: Tag-team responsibility and collaborate on solutions
• Motivation: Build creative excitement at every level
• Risk-Taking: Push new ideas to their limits
• Ingenuity: Reward the “a-ha!” ideas and drive progress forward
• Team-Building: Find new ways to share solutions and forge new ones

• Language: English
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
• Release date: Nov 9, 2008
• ISBN: 9780071641807

Kevin Carroll

KEVIN CARROLL is a native of San Francisco. He is a graduate of both Santa Clara University and the University of San Francisco. He has lived in the Santa Clara Valley for more than fifty years. Carroll is the author of A Moment’s Pause for Gratitude (Balboa Press, 2017)

Book preview

SECTION 1

INNOVATION

SANDLOT SCIENCE

Our childhood curiosity about objects influences our ability as adults to be proficient problem solvers. Early on, our skills in manipulating objects develop—we bang on pans and skip rocks—causing the circuits in our brain to become increasingly rich as we acquire more than strictly manipulative skills.

The correlation between effective problem solving in adult life and manipulation of objects early in life has been established. Perhaps it’s not a far-fetched notion that a company’s top research engineer, whose chief duty is to function as an innovative problem solver, may have actually honed his or her expertise and acquired his or her bottom-line value to the organization while in high school tinkering with an old beater car or building model airplanes and not while getting an advanced degree.

In the twenty-first-century business environment, we are constantly being challenged to be creative in ways that add bottom-line value to the company while using fewer resources. Ingenuity is at a premium, yet many adults have allowed their creative ability to atrophy, especially when compared to how strong it was in their youth. Reawakening our creative abilities is a must. Ideas are BIG business! The ability to deliver ideas that have purpose, that can be measured, and that add value to the organization’s goals is what businesses are seeking.

In this increasingly complex business environment, an ingredient that boosts an adult’s ability to deliver amazing ideas and solutions is having a business culture that promotes and encourages risk-taking. Not reckless risk-taking that could put your organization’s success in peril, but purposeful risk-taking that allows team members to know they have permission to make bold attempts or to take a nonsensical approach to solving a problem.

In conducting the interviews for the stories in the INNOVATION section, it became apparent that the people interviewed had been very playful in childhood where they were encouraged in their youthful creative pursuits by family, friends, and teachers. Each profile reveals the significance of being allowed to skin your knees in an attempt to stretch beyond the imagined boundaries of an idea. That encouragement had an impact on developing each person’s ability as an adult to take an idea, create multiple iterations of solutions, and ultimately deliver an idea that solved a business problem.

SETH GODIN’S playful pursuits in his youth and early recognition of his gift of being direct with others assisted him in developing his ability to strategically look at situations with a discerning and enlightening eye.

TOM KELLEY’S youthful notion that, We didn’t know what we didn’t know, meant that he and his brother, David, had no boundaries to what was possible, and they liked it that way (they still do!).

EMILY CRUMPACKER’S education in the value of receiving nonjudgmental feedback came at an early, formative age and had a lasting impact on her life pursuits. The adage about making lemonade when life gives you lemons could be viewed as her brand slogan throughout her youth.

MAJORA CARTER’S desire to reclaim the days of playing outside her row home and to foster a familial, community experience like the one she enjoyed on her block comes across clearly in her story. Play and encouragement influenced her adult love of being outdoors. Now, she makes certain that everyone in the community where she grew up can enjoy the health benefits that being active and outdoors can provide regardless of the socioeconomic situation.

JAMES McLURKIN’S realization that making things is pure magic can be traced back to the practicality of his youth and a single mother who had limited resources and an endless supply of encouragement and belief in her son’s gift for constructing things.

ANDREW ZOLLI’S reveling in making new rules with basic computer code and getting support from his parents to study programming with a friend at MIT ultimately garnered him early membership into the deep geek society. He quickly learned that being a member of this virtual club had its privileges and that it created opportunities to be on the cutting edge of the latest games, programming, and computer technology. He understood the value of future trends in technology and the influence of one’s social circle well before he could get a driving