The Smartest Growth Strategy I Learned Didn’t Come From an MBA — It Came From an Advertising Creative

Entrepreneurs spend countless hours searching for the next strategy that will help their business grow. They read case studies, attend conferences, hire consultants and analyze competitors. Those methods have their place, but they all share one limitation. They often begin with someone else’s answer.

Real innovation begins with a question no one else has asked.

That is becoming more important than ever. Artificial intelligence can now summarize markets, generate marketing campaigns and produce business plans in minutes. It can process enormous amounts of information far faster than any human. Yet there is one area where people still have the advantage. We can connect unrelated ideas, draw from lived experience and imagine possibilities that do not yet exist.

That realization did not come to me from reading a business book. It came from watching an advertising creative director work.

A remarkable lesson

Years ago, I had the opportunity to work closely with professionals in the advertising industry. I expected brainstorming sessions filled with loud discussions, sticky notes and endless debates. Instead, I witnessed something remarkably simple.

The creative director walked into the room with nothing more than a blank sheet of paper. He wrote the product’s name in the center of the page and remained silent. For nearly ten minutes, he simply stared at the paper with his eyes closed — thinking.

At first, the silence felt uncomfortable. As someone used to fast-moving meetings and immediate decisions, I wondered whether anything productive was happening.

It turned out that everything important was happening.

When he finally picked up his pen again, he drew a large circle around the product name. Around that circle, he added several smaller circles, each containing a word connected to the product.
If the product happened to be a cheese slice, the surrounding words included cow, pizza, family, mild, sandwich and comfort. There was no attempt to judge whether the associations were brilliant or ordinary. The goal was simply to capture every connection that came to mind.
Then the exercise became even more interesting.

Each of those smaller circles became the center of another set of circles. Around cow appeared words like grass, farm, morning, barn and milking. Around pizza emerged ideas connected to sharing, celebrations, weekends and gatherings.

The process continued several more layers deep until the paper looked less like notes and more like a map of interconnected thoughts. Only then did the creative director begin looking for patterns.

He started drawing lines between circles that initially seemed unrelated. One unexpected connection led to another. Slowly, fragments of ideas evolved into campaign concepts that nobody in the room could have predicted at the beginning.

I remember watching this happen in real time and realizing that creativity was not random inspiration. It was a structured exploration.

That lesson fundamentally changed how I think about business development. Entrepreneurs often approach growth by asking predictable questions.
• How can we increase sales?
• How can we lower costs?
• How can we outperform competitors?

These are necessary questions, but they rarely produce original answers because they begin within existing boundaries.

Advertising creatives start somewhere entirely different. They ask what else the product could represent. They explore emotions before features. They search for unexpected associations instead of familiar solutions.

That shift changes everything.

Humans must become valuable

Research increasingly supports this way of thinking. The 2023 Future of Jobs Report from the World Economic Forum identified creative thinking as one of the fastest-growing workplace skills as businesses adapt to AI-driven transformation.

Likewise, a 2024 report by the IBM Institute for Business Value found that organizations combining AI with human creativity outperform those relying on automation alone because people remain significantly better at generating novel ideas, reframing problems and making intuitive connections across disciplines.

The message from both reports is remarkably consistent. As technology becomes better at producing answers, humans become more valuable for asking better questions.

That is precisely what I observed in that creative session. The blank page mattered because it forced original thinking instead of recycled thinking.

Original ideas rarely emerge from consuming more of what already exists. They emerge from making unexpected connections. This mindset extends well beyond marketing.

A startup developing software can map customer frustrations rather than product features.
A restaurant owner can explore memories, traditions and rituals associated with dining instead of focusing only on menu items.

A consultant can map client fears before designing new services.

The exercise is less about creating circles on paper and more about training the mind to wander without immediately searching for the “correct” answer.

That freedom is becoming increasingly rare in modern business. We live in a culture obsessed with speed. We celebrate quick decisions, instant responses and rapid execution. Yet the strongest ideas often require something entrepreneurs struggle to give themselves. Time to think.

Artificial intelligence will continue transforming entrepreneurship. It will automate repetitive work, accelerate research and simplify countless business tasks. Entrepreneurs should embrace those capabilities rather than resist them.

But they should also protect the one advantage machines still cannot replicate. The ability to imagine something that has never existed before.

The next breakthrough for your business may not come from another productivity tool or another trend report. It may begin exactly where that creative director started years ago, with a blank sheet of paper, a quiet room and the willingness to let your mind explore places no algorithm would think to visit.