I just received the January, 2022 issue of the academic journal Psychology of Music. I’m on the editorial board so I always pay close attention to what’s going on in this field. The 22 articles are technical and hard to read if you don’t work in the field, so I thought I would summarize a… Read More Music and the Mind: New Research
One of the most solid findings in innovation research is that creativity happens in social networks–what I call group genius. When it comes to innovation, a social network doesn’t mean Facebook or Snapchat. It means the connections you have with other people in real life. People in your profession, of course, but it helps even… Read More Why You Should Attend This Year’s Conference in Person
Corporate retreats: Remember them? Off-site meetings where the entire company flies or drives to a cool location for a few days of team-building, networking, and fostering corporate culture. There might be costumed characters, escape rooms, water balloon battles, yacht cruises around the harbor, open bars, famous musicians on stage. Sometimes, real work actually gets done–brainstorming… Read More Fun! Off-Site Retreats Are Back
On this unpredictable, zigzagging path, the science slowly built upon itself, squeezing knowledge from failure.… Read More How the Vaccines Were Created
The creation of Christmas, the secular holiday, is a story of collaborative creativity. Christmas trees, giving gifts, Santa–all emerged from a distributed social process. It’s a story about history and culture; about the industrial revolution and the family; and about how our conceptions of childhood have changed. It’s a story of social innovation. Some older… Read More The Collaborative Creation of Christmas
The research is pretty strong: People have better ideas when they interact with others. When people get together they often have collectively-owned ideas that no one person would have alone. This research is widely accepted by both psychologists, sociologists, and organization scholars. But there’s been a backlash, perhaps starting with Susan Cain’s 2013 book Quiet:… Read More The Serbian Hermit Who Prefers to Be Alone
The Drucker Institute, named after legendary management scholar Peter Drucker, has released its 2021 rankings for The Best-Managed Companies of 2021, published in today’s Wall Street Journal. Take a look at the Innovation Top Ten: Amazon Microsoft IBM Apple Equinix Capital One Johnson & Johnson Walmart Uber Intel How did they calculate a single number… Read More The Most Innovative Companies: The WSJ/Drucker Institute Ranking
The singer-songwriter is stereotyped as the classic lone genius. Holding a guitar, meditating on life, an idea for a song emerges from the unconscious spirit. In our mythical view, the songwriter can’t tell us how they did it–the song just came to them, an inspiration. But this isn’t how songwriting works, according to a new… Read More Paul Simon: Songwriting as Improvisation
I’m re-reading Steven Poole’s 2016 book Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas. He goes far back into history to find the distant roots of today’s inventions, and here’s what he found: The story of human understanding is not a gradual, stately accumulation of facts…[instead it’s] a wild roller-coaster ride full of loops and switchbacks. Some… Read More The Roller-Coaster Ride of Innovation
A team of researchers analyzed 201 articles in three business magazines and found 17 major claims about creativity.… Read More Can you trust what you read in business magazines?
The Creativity Guru 