You do not need to be a creative genius to innovate effectively, and you do not need to be a comedian to win the The New Yorker cartoon caption contest. In both cases, what you need is a lot of ideas, and a technique to tip the odds a bit in your direction. Admittedly, the odds of both are daunting. Historical evidence shows that only .2% of the some 183,000 patents granted annually by the …
Read More
The Folklore of Management
Cleaning out my garage this past weekend I ran across a box of old books that my mother had sent me a while back. They had belonged to my father, and she thought I might like to have them. I remember having given them a glance, but this time I took a closer look. Lo and behold, I found a little treasure. Tucked behind a larger book in one corner was a tattered little book …
Read More
Banish Judgement, Boost Creativity
One of my favorite books of all time is Creativity in Business, written by Stanford Business School professors Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers, who taught one of the most popular courses by the same name. In the book the introduce the “Voice of Judgment” (VOJ). Steven Pressfield, in his books The War of Art and Do The Work, refers to it as “Resistance.” Your VOJ will stop your creativity cold. It comes in two basic …
Read More
Stellar Performance, The American Idol Way
This column appeared first on OPEN Forum Idea Hub. A few weeks ago 17-year-old Scotty McCreery was crowned the tenth American Idol. This year I decided to watch the entire series, something I hadn’t done in six years–the show had become uninteresting to me due to what I found to be rather lackluster contestant pools and mostly unhelpful judging. This year, with new judges that happened to be superstar performers in their own right, and …
Read More
How To Simplify Decision-Making
This column originally appeared here on American Express OPEN Forum Idea Hub. A few days as I was sitting in the airport waiting area before boarding a plane, I happened to glance at the book a young Marine was reading. It was called History’s Worst Decisions. It had a serpent on the cover and I thought it might be required reading, so I asked him as much. “No,” he replied. “Just a recommendation from a …
Read More