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Outside The Box

by: Phillip A. Ross
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Thinking "outside the box" or as it is sometimes called, "coloring outside the lines" is a popular idea in the business world today. People and organizations are told to think outside the box or color outside the lines as a way to stimulate creativity when they need to solve problems like streamlining production, establishing a new product, or developing a new process. And it's true that creativity and innovation often arise from unexpected and unconventional thinking.

But there is a serious problem with trying to apply such thinking too broadly.

For instance, creativity is valued in art and advertising, but not in banking and accounting. An accounting firm recently ran an ad suggesting that it could think "outside the box." Do you really want your business to be associated with creative accounting? Aren't accountants supposed to put the numbers in the right box? Wasn't creative accounting a serious problem for Enron?

In reality, clear thinking and the creativity that it produces are rarely a matter of thinking outside the box. And coloring outside the lines is for the most part just sloppy workmanship. The art of clear thinking is a matter of putting thoughts in to the right boxes or categories. Clear thinking is a matter of mental organization. Conversely, sloppy thinking involves the confusion of categories, of putting ideas into the wrong boxes or not putting them in order at all. Is a child who will not straighten his or her room creative or just sloppy? There is a significant difference. While creativity sometimes looks sloppy to an outside observer, it does not issue from sloppiness.

Picasso was a creative artist.

But his creativity was not a matter of the art he produced. In reality his abstract work is technically sloppy. It looks like the work of a child. Picasso could sell his abstract art only because he had previously established himself as an artist who could color inside the lines very well. Had he not first proven his artistic talent in the traditional way, his abstract art would have been worth much less. He used his reputation as a traditional artist to establish a new direction in art. He didn't so much color outside the box, as he expanded the boundaries and definition of the box. But the point is that his abstract creations were valuable only because of his proven abilities in the traditional arts.
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Contrast my own efforts to establish myself as an abstract artist. My art has gone unnoticed because I have not been able to prove myself as a traditional artist. Not that I actually tried to do so, but I am using myself as an example to make the point. The creativity of a novel idea requires the discipline of order and structure to be valuable. Picasso's art is valuable because he was an accomplished painter who intentionally colored outside the lines. My art is not valuable because I am not an accomplished painter and I accidentally color outside the lines. While the two products may look similar, the difference is critical.

Creativity is more than breaking the rules.

Similarly, Joseph Heller was able to break the rules of English grammar in his book, Something Happened (Scribner, 1974), only because he was intimately familiar with them. Having taught English at the University of South Carolina, he was a master of grammar. And only out of his expertise could he creatively exploit, expand and redefine the boundaries of grammar. And so it is with regard to thinking outside the box.

Thinking outside the box apart from being able to think inside the box is worthless.

Such thought is just plain sloppy. Thus, the suggestion that creativity lies in the ability to think outside the box is mostly nonsense. Creativity issues from talent, ability and discipline. Talent must be forged and shaped on the anvil of discipline in order to develop ability. Great ability is always the result of study, discipline and practice.

Creativity is more a matter of seeing that the boxes themselves are inadequate and suggesting a better arrangement or a better definition. Creativity doesn't simply discard the boxes, it redefines and/or rearranges them after becoming intimately familiar with them. Real creativity is always the fruit of discipline and order. Creativity, in order to be genuinely creative and not simply sloppy disorganization, must emerge out of discipline and order as an intentional effort.

While a creative idea often comes unbidden out of unexpected places, it requires discipline, study and order to make something of it. Apart from discipline and order, what passes for creativity is nonsense, and to suggest otherwise actually undermines and/or weakens the creative process.

What does this mean for our industry? Distributors and suppliers should apply themselves to mastering the basics before attempting to break the rules in the name of creativity. Don't start outside the box. First, establish your ability to think within the box. Master the rules before you suggest breaking them. For example, before a distributorship presents a wild, innovative concept to a client for a campaign, it should first establish its expertise with campaigns and/or ideas that have a track record of yielding good ROI. Designers, artists, and copy writers should establish their mastery of basics before experimenting outside the box. For the most part the important stuff is inside the box.

©2002 Phillip A. Ross





 
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Offshore Assistants

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We are a team of virtual assistants with over 10 years of real-world, practical experience and a growing list of very satisfied clientele. We have a comprehensive and rich professional experience in both the public and private sector, serving in different types of organizations such as law enforcement, legal departments, the judiciary, non-profit organizations, educational institutions, and multinational corporations. Our status as a team signifies that we have a wide range of available skills and backgrounds. Whatever your business or company needs, we will deliver.

Our core values have always been complete customer satisfaction, job efficiency, painstaking attention to detail, and prompt performance. We stand by our belief that our clients deserve the best we have to offer, and we commit to excellence and quality in terms of skills and services rendered. We believe that your business is your labor of love, and we treat your business as it were our own. Constantly driven to excel by these beliefs, we strive to provide the best value for your money.

We also expect our clientele to be equally dedicated to their business. We find that we work best with clients who are dynamic, energetic, expressive, and creative. We’ve come to realize that the best clients are those with excellent business sense: they know that placing too much emphasis on the performance of mundane tasks will seriously detract from the more pressing issues of actually running the business. Hence, they recognize the value of hiring virtual assistants to streamline company operations and relieve them of minor responsibilities, thus giving them complete freedom to run the business.

If you would like to avail of our services, we would be happy to provide you with a complimentary consultation meeting or call, completely free of charge or obligation. Please look to our Contact Us page to find our complete contact information.

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What we can do for you

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We specialize in virtual assistant services for taking care of your administrative, secretarial, clerical, and legal tasks. These tasks are, without a doubt, vital and necessary for your business, and we present a way for you to efficiently manage them and, simultaneously, manage the more critical aspects of your business’ or company’s operations. We can also work with you to identify what your special or specialized needs are.

General Office Support Services
Word processing
Business correspondence writing
Data entry
Desktop publishing and design:  flyers, brochures,  newsletters,  and other printed material
Document proofreading and      editing
Spreadsheets, graphs,  and charts
Marketing assistance, including telemarketing
Multimedia presentations and slideshows
Database management and  maintenance
Research
Bookkeeping and accounting payroll and billing

Specialized Business Support Services
Business start-up assistance
Corporate identity packages
Screening, interviewing,  and hiring of new employees
Insurance quotes
Marketing assistance and support
Feasibility studies and marketing research

Legal Support Services
legal transcriptions
drafting pleadings, briefs, and other legal documents and correspondence
investigative reports
legal research
proofreading and editing of legal documents
client interviews
witness interviews
private investigation

Our expertise is based on years of top-level administrative experience and training. We carefully evaluate and subject our virtual assistants to a rigorous screening process. When you avail of our virtual assistants’ services, you can expect the services of a fully-qualified expert. You don’t have to go through the tedious process of hiring and screening new employees.If your company’s or business’ workload and/or budget doesn’t allow for full-time permanent administrative staff, or if your workload periodically piles up and cases a backlog in your operations, you need our virtual assistants.

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Availing of Our Services

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As an entrepreneur or small- or medium-scale business owner, you realize the value of your time. Running a business is a dynamic activity: it is imperative to be on top of the situation 24/7/365. Unfortunately, the little details of running a business tend to eat up your precious little time and detract from the more important concerns of running the business.

As a manager of a medium- to large-scale corporation, you are probably familiar with the periodic build-up in the overall company workload: peak seasons bring in torrents of drowning paperwork that, if not properly managed, will take up a lot of your time and energy, both of which are better off spent on actually managing the company. The fact that this phenomenon is seasonal in nature makes it infeasible to hire full-time permanent employees, and hiring part-time employees will further take up a lot of time and resources.

Before we begin a job with your business or company, we will schedule a free consultation meeting or call with you. This is a cursory call and we discuss our services in even greater detail. We aim to establish a degree of rapport with you, our prospective customer, and we mean to show you that we are serious about doing business with you. During this first discussion, we will try to identify your business’ or company’s specific needs; the needs of businesses are unique and they have to be carefully addressed for our virtual assistant services to be fully effective.

After we have identified your company’s needs with you, we will draft a formal detailed job specification along with highly specific recommendations for your company. We submit this specification to you for your approval and revisions. If our proposed specification is to your satisfaction, we can then begin to work with you and your company or business. Otherwise, we will revise the specification until it meets your demands, thereupon we begin our work with you.

Our complete contact details can be found on our Contact Us page on this website. We look forward to a productive working relationship with you and your company or business.

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Pros and Cons of Having an Offshore Bank Account

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Offshore banking has been infamously associated with corrupt executives, drug dealers or other unlawful people avoiding taxation and keeping discreet accounts to hide their criminal deeds. However, this is not generally true. In fact, 80 – 90% of offshore bank accounts are used to protect businesses from lawsuits, scams or other threats.

An offshore bank is typically located in a place with low or no tax jurisdiction. People mostly open an offshore bank account for this reason, for it has legal and financial benefits. However, while there are advantages in offshore banking, there are disadvantages as well.

Pros:

1. Offshore banks can provide stable jurisdictions and regulated banking systems. This is beneficial for people living in politically troubled areas where their assets may freeze, or worse, disappear.

2. There’s not much government interference in offshore banks, so sometimes they offer higher interest rates and lower cost bases than in home countries.

3. Offshore banks sometimes offer services that domestic banks may not be able to provide. Examples of these services are anonymous bank accounts, investment opportunities that cannot be offered anywhere else, and lower of higher rate loans.

4. Offshore banking can provide developing countries opportunities to prosper because offshore finance is an industry that could make remote islands be engaged in source investment, thus creating economical growth.

5. Offshore banks mostly pay interest without having to deduct tax.

Cons:

1. Offshore finance, although a legitimate financial establishment, has been linked with unlawful acts like terrorism, underground economy and money laundering. Along with the events that followed the September 11 attacks, offshore banks were accused of helping terrorist groups and organized crime groups.

2. Offshore bank accounts are mostly available to those who have higher incomes, as the cost of establishing an account is quite high. This leaves the tax burden to the middle-income group in developed countries.

3. Offshore banking has been referred to as the solution to all the financial and legal asset protection issues. However, this is not always the case.

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