Another Think Tank story

My Think Tank

Every once in a while I get an email from someone who owned or has come across a Think Tank. Milo Bojicic, one of the creators, even sent me a story about how they were made (certainly one of the best stories I've ever posted here).

So I was happy when Irwin Gray of Flushing, Queens, touched base last week with this tale about using the Think Tank as a management training tool:

I just came across your web site in which you discussed Think Tanks made by Savo Bojicic and the email you posted from Milo Bojicic.

About 30 years ago, I started selling Think Tanks as management training devices here in the U.S. I first saw the tank several months earlier in the office of Edward de Bono in London with whom I had a meeting to discuss my developing and marketing a U.S. based training program based on his writings. He gave me Savo Bojicic's address.

A friend of mine who was going to Canada on other business made the initial contact for me with Savo. Savo invited him to his home and my friend came back all superlatives. He told me the house was a magificent extremely modern sculpture outfitted with all kinds of gadgets like automatic window shades, push button controls over the drapes, doors over the TV sets, and the like. Savo indicated that he wanted to meet me, so my wife and I took a vacation and went to Ontario to meet him at a restaurant in our hotel (his suggestion). He showed up with his wife, a beautiful, charming woman half his age--my wife accused me of having all kinds of bulging eyes all night. For the record, she was wearing a long string of pearls (which Savo assured me were real) that were about a half inch in diameter.

Savo told me that he had made his fortune building store fronts for businesses all over Canada. Then, he semi-retired and turned his talents to inventing things and teaching the principles of creative thinking. He invented the Think Tank. He also gave me a deck of photographs of the major charts he used when giving his lectures on creative thinking in Canadian schools. So, we made a deal--he supplied me with the tanks and I sold them as part of my training courses. They were about $50 each, to the best of my memory; only a few companies ever let me talk them into supplying the tanks for their class participants when I taught my course in Managerial Decision Making. They were also a huge hassle to import and then to transport to wherever I gave a training program. Fees for import brokers and transportation also increased costs for me--even though I did 99 percent of the work of actually clearing them through customs here in the US, I could never get rid of the fees and time involved in processing the papers. So, my contacts with Savo dried up (to my everlasting regret).

The creative thinking with de Bono never got off the ground. He already had a program going with a group that he had sponsored here in the US which made a series of films on creative thinking that were essentially de Bono standing and lecturing to the audience. He put me on to the people running that program and they wanted a fortune from me, up front, to represent them. Since their films were not very impressive, I refused. I think that venture sank into oblivion and I developed my own material that was very successful for me over many years.

I have not given a creative thinking lecture or course for many years now, so I have only a couple of tanks left sitting in my garage. I used to use different colors for teams to rival each other, but subsequently, whites were the only ones I used. The reason that I came across your web site is that I was just asked by a school to give a lecture on creative thinking and I plan to pull the tanks out of storage and use them in the lecture. So, I naturally got curious and turned to the web site to see if I could find out anything about whatever happened to Savo Bojicic and his Think Tank.

I am working on a textbook on Managerial Decision Making and Problem Solving and plan to incorporate principles from Savo Bojicic and de Bono in it.

There are few things I do (on my blog, anyway) that are as satisfying as curating stories about these plastic bubbles filled with tiny words. Thanks, Irwin!