Charles Schwab wrote a nice piece in The Wall Street Journal this week, entitled “Every Job Requires an Entrepreneur.” I liked what he had to say, and I think he has the right ideas. I pulled a few favorite quotes: We cannot spend our way out of this. We cannot tax our way out of this. We cannot artificially stimulate our way out of this. We cannot regulate our way out of this. Shaming the …
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What Isn’t There
I just received a copy of the Mandarin translation of my first book, The Elegant Solution: Toyota’s Formula for Mastering Innovation. I was blown away by the cover, shown here. They got it! They got that the pursuit of elegance and perfection is achieved through subtraction! It’s a fantastic treatment, and one of the best, most intriguing and beautifully minimal book covers I’ve ever seen. I love it. No offense to the designers at Simon …
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Thank You Rotman Magazine & Wall Street Journal!
I’m always elated when a highly regarded publication opts to publish my brain droppings. I’m pleased and honored that, thanks to the efforts of the great team at The Rotman Magazine, The Wall Street Journal posted an excerpted piece from the longer article on their international blog The Source. You can read it here. (You don’t need to be a subscriber.)
The Best Exercise? Less Exercise.
The September issue of Details is running a piece by Ryan Halvorson called “Is Your Workout Making You Fat? Why You Should Rethink The Traditional Gym Routine.” It’s a fairly compelling underscore of one the key laws of subtraction: doing something isn’t always better than doing nothing. Citing a number of recent studies, the article makes a case for “rest-based training”–exercising less…less in terms of long aerobic workouts and endless repetitions. In other words, bail the …
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6 Must-Read Manifestos To Get You Unstuck
There’s nothing like a short but eloquent manifesto to inspire and move us, especially if we’re stuck in our tracks and in need of a little grease to get us moving again. And there is only one place you need to go to find the most compelling manifestos on the planet, free for all to download and share at will: ChangeThis.com. If you’ve never been to ChangeThis.com, here are a half dozen of the most …
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Zen & The Art of Simplicity
There are a handful of publications on my “stretch goals” list: Harvard Business Review, The Rotman Magazine, Wired, Fast Company, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Atlantic. These are the publications in which I’d like to one day get published. (I should probably called this my article bucket list!) I’m proud to say that the current issue the Rotman Magazine (the magazine of University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, deaned by Roger Martin) has published …
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Brainwrite Your Way To Your Next Big Idea
Last week I introduced readers to brainpainting, a neurofeedback technique to subconsciously open up new neural pathways. The question now is: how do you channel those new connections into breakthrough ideas? Introducing brainwriting, a brainstorming and ideation method technique I’ve used with great success in working with creative individuals and teams. The idea is simple and straightforward: write on an idea for five minutes without stopping – stream-of-consciousness style – and no pauses to analyze …
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How To Paint Your Brain With Neurofeedback Training
The year is 2009, and I am sitting in a comfortable recliner in a darkened room, listening to strange, oddly soothing sounds of some New Age kind of music being played at varying rhythms. There are electrodes wired to my scalp and earlobes. It’s the signals being emitted from the goings-on in my head that are responsible for the undulations in the music and their corresponding images on the computer screen before me. A psychedelic …
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How To Get Started With Meditation
Following my column Boost Your Brain And Give It A Break–At The Same Time, I received a number of comments and email requests from readers wanting to know how to get started with meditation. I thought I’d share with you how I got started, my routine, and what the effect has been on my thinking and creativity. I got involved in meditation by accident. I was researching my 2009 book In Pursuit of Elegance, and …
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