I’ve been a huge fan of Behance and its founder Scott Belsky ever since I met him and his team a few years ago in New York. It’s why I asked him to contribute to my book. Their think tank, 99U, is terrific. The 99 refers to Edison’s notion that genius is 99% perspiration. When they said they’d like a post on the interplay of simple rules, constraints, and creativity, I was more than happy to …
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Have you heard any of the following lately? “I’m OK with how things are.” “The timing for this isn’t quite right.” “Seems like a lot of pain for such little gain.” “We need more buy-in to do this.” “That may work elsewhere, but not here.” “We tried something like this before, and it didn’t work.” These are early warning signs that your once high-spirited startup is vulnerable to what might best be termed “big company …
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The setup for this was perfect, because Stanford’s creativity guru Tina Seelig had spoken just before on how she had given her students nothing but a pad of Post-It notes with which to create value.
Henry Ford once said famously: “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.” As Tina Seelig, executive director of Stanford University’s Technology Ventures points out in her new book inGenius, this simple quote illustrates the difference between two kinds of fear, only one which drives the the entrepreneurial spirit. “There are two distinct mindsets related to taking on challenges,” she says. “Some people are driven by their strong fear of failure and therefore …
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“I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.” – Orson Welles So you’ve got a vision, a s.u.p.e.r. one. Even the most compelling vision may get sidetracked without some means to keep us on track. Marking our mission with stretch goals provides the impetus needed to catalyze movement, while meeting and re-setting them keeps us advancing confidently. Goals comprise the first …
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The Hunger Games, part 1 of a planned four-movie portfolio based on Suzanne Collins’s trilogy of books, opens Friday. By all estimations, it should break box office records. And according to The New York Times report How ‘Hunger Games’ Built Up Must-See Fever, the marketing strategy was meticulous, calculated, over a year long, and employed a clever use of subtraction. Lionsgate, the studio behind The Hunger Games, did all the traditional things like buying …
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“An artist’s creative intelligence can truly express itself only when prompted by his intellect and when he is in a state of inspired rapture; it is then that he abundantly demonstrates his God-given powers and sublime ideas.” –Georgio Vasari Every artist seeks those precious moments that have the power to transform simple activity and busyness into an exhilarating experience in which the heart, head, and hands are unified in action. This is flow, the holy …
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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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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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