Daydream Believers
Don't enter Walter Mitty land just yet--read this article first, and find out how some entrepreneurs are using reverie to shape reality.
While Lonny Kocina's body jogs around a track, his mind runs
free. The 43-year-old founder and president of public relations
firm Media Relations Inc. couples his daily workout with an
exercise in daydreaming that helps him solve problems, identify
opportunities and boost his creativity.
Dictating daydreams into a tape recorder as he jogs, Kocina
returns with ideas for projects that have ranged from an alliance
with an ad agency to bedtime stories about a fictional Camp Wacki
Kooki for his children. These dreams aren't ephemeral, Kocina
stresses. The ad agency alliance is generating referrals, and a
series of recorded tales about Camp Wacki Kooki is now sold in
retail stores nationwide.
Corporations such as AT&T and advertising firm J. Walter
Thompson also use daydreaming and the related technique of guided
imagery to create new products, research consumer attitudes and
suggest answers to knotty problems. It's not as crazy as it
sounds, says Harry Barrett, a consultant with Synectics Inc., a
Cambridge, Massachusetts, management consulting firm that
specializes in innovations and creativity. "Guided imagery or
daydreaming is simply giving permission to the mind to wander and
come up with some new connections," Barrett says.
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Fans say daydreaming is simple, inexpensive, powerful and
flexible enough to use for a broad spectrum of business challenges.
Kocina has grown his company to 50 employees, making it one of the
largest media relations firms in Minneapolis. According to him,
"It was the result of doing all this daydreaming."
Mark Henricks is an Austin, Texas, writer who specializes in
business topics and has written for Entrepreneur for nine
years.
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