Mother Goose and Wynken, Blynken and Nod in the corporate boardroom? Stuart Little and Curious George the new fast-track gurus in business and in life? When business strategist Alan Gregerman says that to succeed today, you need to make child's play of it all, he means it literally.
Gregerman believes that classic children's stories and books contain a wealth of untapped inspirational messages and meaningful lessons that poignantly apply to the working world.
"We actually get teams of people at companies to read children's books," says the founder and president of Silver Spring-based Venture Works Inc. and the author of "Lessons From the Sandbox," published last month. "I get executives to sit around a table and read them out loud to each other. And we talk about what they learned from the book."
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Among his favorite children's books and their lessons:
* "Where the Wild Things Are," Maurice Sendak's award-winning kids' book about a boy who drifts off into a dreamscape of huge and rowdy monsters, often accompanies Gregerman to senior-level corporate meetings and workshops.
"I use it to get [participants] to talk about what it takes to be a leader," he says. "The boy gets transported to this world of monsters . . . but he wins these monsters over by really taking charge and creating a sense of excitement about what is possible."
Most business leaders have their own monsters--from unwieldy companies to new technologies, says Gregerman. "As a leader, I've got to figure out how to take charge and create magic and excitement around that."
* Curious George, title character of the children's book series by Margret and H.A. Rey, is "really all about the notion of curiosity," Gregerman says, stating the obvious. What isn't obvious is how a nosy monkey is applicable to the working world.
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"How do we look at the simple and basic things around us and be willing to challenge ourselves to be better at them? How do we motivate all of our employees to be the entrepreneurs or Curious Georges of what they are responsible for?" he asks.
Share this articleShare"Curious George gets into an awful lot of trouble because he won't leave anything alone. . . . But the books always have positive endings. George learns a lesson or helps somebody in the end."
* Norton Juster's "The Phantom Tollbooth" contain one of Gregerman's favorite lessons for corporate clients. "It's about a boy named Milo who is in a total funk," he says. "Milo can't get excited about anything. And then he gets a package in the mail, which is a tollbooth and small car."
Milo drives through the tollbooth and is transported into worlds that are filled with wonder. "What I like folks to think about when they read this book is, how do we transport people into a wonderful world where everything is possible and where their imagination is one of the most important skills they have?"
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* The lesson from "Make Way for Ducklings," Robert McCloskey's classic tale of a family of ducks looking for a place to live, is about getting comfortable, says Gregerman. "You go into almost every company, and you see people in their offices or cubicles. Other than maybe a poster or pictures of their family or kids, everybody has the same furniture, their desks are arranged the same way."
What does it take to be comfortable? Kids will often make themselves comfortable by getting a blanket or a pillow when they need to try something new or face a challenge, explains Gregerman, whose book includes a chapter on cozy places.
"Last year while giving lectures, I asked maybe 8,000 or 9,000 people, 'Where are you most creative and innovative?' . . . Uniformly, across all these audiences, less than 2 percent of people were most creative in the world of work. . . . We don't give adults the opportunity in most workplaces to create an environment in which they could be at their best."
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* "Pippi Longstocking," Astrid Lindgren's 1950s tale of a little girl with no family, teaches creativity and resourcefulness, says Gregerman. He describes the time Pippi had to wash a kitchen floor. She strapped scrub brushes to her feet and skated the floor clean. The Pippi stories, he says, raise the question, "How do you figure out creative ways to make life interesting and solve problems?
"We can do that in companies, but we have to be creative about why it is fun and why it is worth doing. . . . Instead, we let people believe their work is just a job."
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