What these HR Managers mean when they fashionably advertise we need someone with ability to think out of the box?

Answer 1

this means will u notice other things around you besides your own duties and try and change or fix them for the better. it means will u stare at your PC all day every day and do what is told of you, or find other things you can do. can u think further than your collegue regarding new ideas and creativeness. An example of thinking out of the box: You are the buyer for a chain of stores. We have thirty stores in ten states--three stores per state. I am your boss. One day I call you into my office and hand you a stack of papers. You notice they're bills of lading. "Mr. Smith," I say to you, "we spend $90,000 per year transporting bottled water to our stores. I think that's too much. Please figure out how we can reduce this by the maximum amount possible, and tell me how you did it." You go back to your office and learn that all 30 of our stores sell "drinking water" in 20-ounce bottles. There's nothing special about drinking water, so you go into your computer and learn that (1) all of our stores are being serviced by interstate less-than-load carriers; (2) interstate LTL is the most expensive kind of freight; and (3) each store sells a third of a trailer of water every week. With this in mind, you find a store in each state to serve as a "drop site." You change to interstate truckload carriers to pull full trailers of water to one store in each state and leave them there. A cheaper intrastate carrier in each state then picks up the water in a smaller truck and takes it to the other two stores. I look at what you've done and tell you that's good, but is there any way you can do better? Well, of course there is! Drinking water is drinking water, right? How about we find a food wholesaler with a warehouse in each state and hire them to bring a third of a truckload of water to each store every week? We've completely cut out the interstate carrier. We've still got the problem of having to haul water all over the state, though. Now let's really think out of the box: Water's water, right? Water from Nestle tastes basically the same as water from Acme, from Deer Park, from Kroger, from whoever. Why don't we just find the beverage distributor in each city our stores are in, and buy his cheapest bottled water?