Overused Business Words
Words like “innovation” and “collaboration”–who could be opposed to that? … Read More Overused Business Words
Category: Uncategorized
Learning In and Through the Arts
Learning how to create looks a lot like effective learning in science and math.… Read More Learning In and Through the Arts
Fun! Off-Site Retreats Are Back
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
The Collaborative Creation of Christmas
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 Serbian Hermit Who Prefers to Be Alone
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 Most Innovative Companies: The WSJ/Drucker Institute Ranking
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
Paul Simon: Songwriting as Improvisation
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
The Roller-Coaster Ride of Innovation
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
What You Do Afterwards
Creativity is all about what you do afterwards. I’m thinking about something that Miles Davis said about jazz improvisation: It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note–it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong. In improvisation, you don’t know what an action means until later. The group creates meaning,… Read More What You Do Afterwards
Plato: The First Educational Software
It was called Plato, and it was created in the 1960s and 1970s, at the University of Illinois. Even though it was used by tens of thousands of students, all over the U.S., most people have never heard of it. That’s why we need Brian Dear’s new book about Plato, called The Friendly Orange Glow.… Read More Plato: The First Educational Software
The Creativity Guru 