Julie Taymor and other creative minds share how they start their incredibly unique works

Julie Taymor and other creative minds share how they start their incredibly unique works

Posted by: Kate Torgovnick
July 31, 2013 at 1:32 pm EDT

Julie Taymor, the director behind Frida, Across the Universe and the Broadway reimagining of The Lion King, creates productions that tickle the senses. Filled with saturated colors, offbeat imagery, stacatto movement and big sound — each of her productions shares her unique style, yet manages to be completely distinct. In today’s talk, Taymor shares with raw honesty the creative struggle that goes into each of her works, including the super-sized Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Given just before Taymor split from the production over creative direction, she reveals what she was hoping to achieve with the play — a “comic book coming alive” in three dimensions all around the audience. But perhaps even more interestingly for any creative person, Taymordescribes in this talk how she begins each project. “I start with the notion of the ideograph,” she explains. “An ideograph is a Japanese brush painting — three strokes and you get the whole bamboo forest,” she says. “I go to the concept of The Lion King and say, ‘What is the essence of it? What is the abstraction? If I were to reduce this entire story into one image, what would it be?’ The circle. It’s so obvious.” For The Tempest, her big screen adaptation began with the image of a sandcastle, the thing we build that always fades. So much is made in the creative world of “finding your voice.” But just as hard is figuring out your process — how you work, and the way you like to begin a project. Below, read illuminating quotes from some filmmakers, writers, artists, musicians and designers who, like Taymor, have given insight into the way that they like to work. Read more of this post

Berthold Beitz, who has died at the age of 99, was one of Germany’s most influential industrialists for nearly three decades after the second world war.

July 31, 2013 8:19 pm

Influential industrialist personified Germany’s postwar recovery

By Chris Bryant and Peter Norman

Berthold Beitz, who has died at the age of 99, was one of Germany’s most influential industrialists for nearly three decades after the second world war. He was prominent again late in life, when in 1997 and 1998 he helped initiate and guide negotiations on the merger of the Essen-based Krupp industrial group with its larger rival, Thyssen, to form Germany’s largest heavy engineering concern. Beitz was instrumental in rebuilding the Krupp industrial group from the ruins of war. He was later to survive serious financial difficulties at Krupp that were partly of his own making. He also played a key role in reopening trade and political links between the young west German republic and its deeply suspicious communist neighbours to the east.

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Mandela’s lessons in how to negotiate; You don’t need to be friends with the other side but you do need to keep talking

July 31, 2013 3:22 pm

Mandela’s lessons in how to negotiate

By Michael Skapinker

You don’t need to be friends with the other side but you do need to keep talking

Assessments of Nelson Mandela’s achievements rightly focus on his talent for the conciliatory gesture and South Africa’s relative post-apartheid peace and institutional stability. (If you contest the last two, compare the country with Syria,Egypt or even Russia.) Less often discussed are the long negotiations that produced a political settlement. They are worth recalling as Israelis and Palestinians return to tentative talks. And, although similarities between politics and business should not be overdone, anyone involved in negotiations, whether between unions and management, or over a corporate merger, or even an office desk reshuffle, should consider the lessons ofSouth Africa’s transition. What are they?  Read more of this post

Tocqueville’s Francois Sicart: Chinese entrepreneurs asked why, when we hold large cash balances and effect few transactions, they should still pay us. I answered that periods like this are when we work the hardest to uncover the next winning idea.

What is the Contrary of Tepid? Investing in a Market that Lacks Conviction

François Sicart

The problem with the contrarian approach to investing is that it works best when investor sentiment reaches extreme levels, such as panic or euphoria.  It is not as useful when the majority of investors are somewhat worried or complacent, as they are today. This is why, to fine-tune our discipline, we try to use both a contrarian and a value approach, a combination that we have creatively labeled “contrarian value.”  Most of the time the two approaches should go pretty well hand-in hand:  The nature of a market is that when investors become excessively pessimistic, the price of assets like stocks should become excessively cheap.  When investors become excessively optimistic, asset prices should become excessively expensive.  The problem lies in defining “excessively.” Read more of this post

Got a New Strategy? Don’t Forget the Execution Part

Got a New Strategy? Don’t Forget the Execution Part

Published: July 31, 2013 in Knowledge@Wharton

When it comes to executing strategy, the old saying “the devil is in the details” holds true for many companies, according to Wharton emeritus management professor Lawrence G. Hrebiniak. While executives may readily participate in the development of new strategies, execution tends to get short shrift, because it is often viewed as a lower-level task or concern, he notes. In the following interview, Hrebiniak — who just published the second edition of his book, Making Strategy Work: Leading Effective Execution and Change — explains why it’s critical for firms to create a “culture of execution” in order to succeed. Read more of this post

Seven dirty, gritty, real startup lessons that cost me $2 million

Seven dirty, gritty, real startup lessons that cost me $2 million

BY PABLO FUENTES 
ON JULY 31, 2013

As CEO and founder of a company that makes an app that helps people apply to jobs from their mobile phones, I am happy to report that we’ve sucked a lot since launching in 2009. We’ve pivoted four times, a fact the press won’t let me forget. I’ll spare you the details, but it involved multiple layoffs, a founder split, brief homelessness, extended brokenness, multiple bridge rounds, a broken engagement, and other personal and professional obstacles. Along the way, we iterated our way to product-market fit, have solid growth in both users and engagement, and recently raised more funding. But getting here has been brutal. Read more of this post

How powerful were caught by own cover-up

How powerful were caught by own cover-up

PUBLISHED: 16 HOURS 30 MINUTES AGO | UPDATE: 2 HOURS 14 MINUTES AGO

Businessman and BRW Rich List member Travers Duncan of White Energy is one of five men who ICAC has found lied and misled to cover up former NSW Labor minister Eddie’s Obeid’s actions. All have been referred to the NSW prosecutor. Photo: Nic Walker

NEIL CHENOWETH

Independent Commission Against Corruption commissioner David Ipp QC has handed down the most important corruption report in nearly three decades. Some of the richest men in the country face possible criminal charges for a cover-up. Ipp found they lied and misled in order to hide the corrupt involvement of Labor powerbroker Eddie Obeid in a coal deal, to protect their own payout of more than $500 million. Read more of this post

A team of Chinese scientists have discovered that urine can be used to grow new teeth

Extracting the urine: Chinese scientists find new way to grow teeth

Staff Reporter

2013-07-31

A team of Chinese scientists have discovered that urine can be used to grow new teeth. The results published in the Cell Regeneration Journal revealed that urine may be used as a source of stem cells that could in turn be grown into tiny tooth-like tissue. The scientists at the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health hope that the technique could be developed into a way of replacing lost teeth. The research team said they used urine as a starting point and harvested cells that are normally passed from the body before coaxing the collected cells into stem cells. A mix of these stem cells and other cells from a mouse was then implanted into test animals and after three weeks the bundle of cells began resembling a tooth. Read more of this post

People like Facebook because it’s like gambling; “It’s Not About Winning, It’s About Getting Into the Zone. A sense of monetary value, time, space, even a sense of self is annihilated in the extreme form of this zone that you enter.”

People like Facebook because it’s like gambling

By Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic 10 hours ago

“People love Facebook. They really love it,” Biz Stone wrote earlier this month. “My mother-in-law looks hypnotized when she decides to put in some Facebook time.” She is not the only one. ComScore estimates Facebook eats up 11 percent of all the time spent online in the United States. Its users have been known to spend an average of 400 minutes a month on the site. I know the hypnosis, as I’m sure you do, too. You start clicking through photos of your friends of friends and next thing you know an hour has gone by. It’s oddly soothing, but unsatisfying. Once the spell is broken, I feel like I’ve just wasted a bunch of time. But while it’s happening, I’m caught inside the machine, a human animated GIF: I. Just. Cannot. Stop. Or maybe it’ll come on when I’m scrolling through tweets at night before bed. I’m not even clicking the links or responding to people. I’m just scrolling down, or worse, pulling down with my thumb, reloading, reloading. Read more of this post

A Dog’s Facial Expression Shows Its Mood

A Dog’s Facial Expression Shows Its Mood

Dogs use specific facial expressions to show how happy they are to see their owners, scientists have found.

By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent

3:39PM BST 30 Jul 2013

While most dog owners will recognise their pet’s wagging tail as a sign of joy, they may also want to pay more attention to their animal’s face the next time they walk in through the front door. Animal behaviour experts have found the animals’ emotions are betrayed by specific facial movements that can reveal whether your dog really is pleased to see you. Using high-speed cameras, the researchers tracked the changes in the faces of dogs in the moments they were reunited with their owners or when meeting a stranger for the first time. They found that the dogs tended to move their left eyebrow upwards around half a second after seeing their owner. Read more of this post

This One Tweet Reveals What’s Wrong With American Business Culture And The Economy

This One Tweet Reveals What’s Wrong With American Business Culture And The Economy

HENRY BLODGET JUL. 31, 2013, 12:18 PM 23,960 175

If you watch TV, you’ll be led to believe that the problem with the U.S. economy is that one political team or the other is ruining the country. A sharp drop in government spending this year is, in fact, temporarily hurting economic growth, but that’s not the real problem. The real problem is that American corporations, which are richer and more profitable than they have ever been in history, have become so obsessed with “maximizing short-term profits” that they are no longer investing in their future, their people, and the country.

This short-term corporate greed can be seen in many aspects of corporate behavior, from scrimping on investment to obsessing about quarterly earnings to fretting about daily fluctuations in stock prices. But it is most visible in the general cultural attitude toward average employees. Employees are human beings. They are people who devote their days to creating value for two other groups of people: customers and shareholders.  And, in return, at least in theory, they are people who share in the rewards of the value created by their team. In theory. In practice, American business culture has become so obsessed with maximizing short-term profits that employees aren’t regarded as people who are members of a team.  Rather, they are regarded as “costs.” Read more of this post

Steve Sinofsky, Microsoft’s former Windows chief, was one of the people who warned Bill Gates in the 1990s about the potential impact of the internet on Microsoft’s software-based business

Microsoft Is Paying Steven Sinofsky $10 Million Not To Work For Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Or Google

CHARLES ARTHUR, THE GUARDIAN JUL. 31, 2013, 7:57 AM 3,642 5

Steve Sinofsky, Microsoft’s former Windows chief who was dramatically ousted last November, is banned from joining former rivals including Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, database giant Oracle, storage company EMC or virtualisation company VMWare before 2014, new documents reveal. Sinofsky is in line for a payoff that will earn him more than $10m (£6.6m) according to calculations by the Guardian, covering 418,000 share options that were due to vest through to mid-2016. The agreement also bans him from trying to persuade a list of companies including IBM, Dell, Intel and Nokia from ceasing to be Microsoft customers. Read more of this post