Creativity thrives under intelligent constraints. That’s Law #4, and the maestro may just be Dr. Paul Polak, a psychiatrist by training who’s purpose in life is to change the world for the 2.6 billion people on the planet who subsist on less than $2 a day. I repeat: $2 a day. His focus is on creating elegant solutions–devices that are so dirt cheap yet incredibly effective that the poor will actually part with some of …
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The Atlas of Economic Complexity
I probably owe my livelihood to complexity. Let’s face it, without complexity in excess, you really don’t need to think about subtraction or elegance. Well, as the Economist reports here, Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann and César Hidalgo, an MIT physicist who applies his knowledge of networks to economics, have just released The Atlas of Complexity, which is likely to go viral (even though the free sample download is 364 pages and 86 megs). According to …
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The Power of Acceptance
A few months ago I read and reviewed Too Many Bosses, Too Few Leaders, by Rajeev Peshawaria. Rajeev blogs for Forbes.com, is the CEO of the ICLIF Leadership & Governance Centre, and was formerly the Global Director of Leadership Development at American Express. I was rereading a part of the book that talked about the quality of ideas and decisions in relation to their effectiveness. Rajeev maintains that, in business, we worry to much about …
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Why Simple Health Solutions Are Complicated
Dr. Abigail Zuger has a wonderful essay in a special New York Times section called Small Fixes (which contains a number of great stories of simplicity and subtraction), entitled The Simplest Health Solutions? It’s Complicated. She begins: It’s not that the American health system is completely deficient in small, clever, inexpensive fixes. It’s just that sometimes they’re awfully hard to find. The whole system tilts heavily in the other direction. We specialize in giant, cumbersome, …
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What About Followership?
Search on Amazon for books on leadership, and you’ll have over 71,000 to choose from. Search for books on followership, and a mere 180 show up. Thinking in a purely rational way, that doesn’t seem to make balanced sense. After all, leaders and followers are two sides of the same coin. They require each other, in much the same way the concept of light requires the concept of dark, or trust requires risk and vulnerability. …
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I’ll Take Good Over Great
(Note: This is a repub in an attempt to correct corrupted video links in the email version. If the YouTube videos don’t play in the email edition, please click here to view. I’ve notified WordPress of the issue. Thanks to all for bringing it to my attention.) Recently I had the opportunity to revisit my old stomping ground, Toyota Motor Sales, USA, Inc. Ironically, the specific site of my visit was the theater of the …
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Less Stuff…
The typical TED talk limit is 18 minutes. Maybe that’s too much. Writer/designer Graham Hill on “Less Stuff, More Happiness” makes his point in under 6 minutes. Edit your life! Enjoy.
No New Ideas Under The Sun
Jonathan Mak, a design student at Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design, thought he was being original when he posted this modified Apple logo after Steve Jobs passed away. He actually crafted and posted the negative space silhouette design when Steve Jobs announced that he was stepping down from the CEO role back in August. Mak scoured the web to see if anyone else had done anything similar, and asked his subscribers to alert …
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The United States of Excess
Jeremi Suri, a professor of history and political affairs at U. Texas in Austin, has a great editorial in the NYT, entitled “America the Overcommitted.” It’s short, powerful, and cuts to the heart of a serious matter: our country’s lack of clearly focused world agenda. “American foreign policy today is reactive, unfocused and ineffective,” he writes. “We are trying to accomplish too many things in too many places…Consequently, we are not doing anything very well. …
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