Slowing the work treadmill; To aid creativity and achieve more, try doing less, HBS professor says

Slowing the work treadmill

To aid creativity and achieve more, try doing less, HBS professor says

August 27, 2013 | Editor’s Pick Popular

By Chuck Leddy, Harvard Correspondent

Teresa Amabile compares much of work life to running on a treadmill. People constantly try to keep up with the demands of meetings, email, interruptions, deadlines, and the never-ending need to be more productive and creative. Yet on many days they seem to make no progress at all, especially in creative endeavors. “Many companies are running much too lean right now in terms of the number of employees,” said Amabile, the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration and a director of research at Harvard Business School. So the treadmill speeds up, compelling time-strapped employees to do ever more with less. Read more of this post

Michael Lewis on Writing, Money, and the Necessary Self-Delusion of Creativity; Lewis remained disinterested in money as a motive – in fact, he recognized the trap of the hedonic treadmill and got out before it was too late

Michael Lewis on Writing, Money, and the Necessary Self-Delusion of Creativity

“When you’re trying to create a career as a writer, a little delusional thinking goes a long way.”

The question of why writers write holds especial mesmerism, both as a piece of psychological voyeurism and as a beacon of self-conscious hope that if we got a glimpse of the innermost drivers of greats, maybe, just maybe, we might be able to replicate the workings of genius in our own work. So why do great writers write? George Orwell itemized four universal motives. Joan Didion saw it as access to her own mind. For David Foster Wallace, it was about fun. Joy Williams found in it a gateway from the darkness to the light. For Charles Bukowski, it sprang from the soul like a rocket. Italo Calvino found in writing the comfort of belonging to a collective enterprise.

In Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Authors on How and Why They Do What They Do (public library) – which also gave us invaluable wisdom from Susan Orlean, Mary Karr and Isabel Allende, and which was among the 10 best books on writing from my recent collaboration with the New York Public Library – Michael Lewis, one of today’s finest nonfiction masters, shares his singular lore. Read more of this post

The Art of Thought: Graham Wallas on the Four Stages of Creativity, 1926; How to master the beautiful osmosis of conscious and unconscious, voluntary and involuntary, deliberate and serendipitous

The Art of Thought: Graham Wallas on the Four Stages of Creativity, 1926

How to master the beautiful osmosis of conscious and unconscious, voluntary and involuntary, deliberate and serendipitous.

In 1926, thirteen years before James Webb Young’s Technique for Producing Ideas and more than three decades before Arthur Koestler’s seminal “bisociation” theory of how creativity works, English social psychologist and London School of Economics co-founder Graham Wallas, sixty-eight at the time, penned The Art of Thought – an insightful theory outlining the four stages of the creative process, based both on his own empirical observations and on the accounts of famous inventors and polymaths. Though, sadly, the book is long out of print, with surviving copies sold for a fortune and available in a few public libraries, the gist of Wallas’s model has been preserved in a chapter of the 1976 treasure The Creativity Question (public library) – an invaluable selection of meditations on and approaches to creativity by some of history’s greatest minds, compiled by psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg and philosopher Carl R. Hausman, reminiscent of the 1942 gem An Anatomy of Inspiration. Wallas outlines four stages of the creative process – preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification – dancing in a delicate osmosis of conscious and unconscious work. These phases, which literary legend Michael Cowley would come to parallel in his 1958 model of the four stages of writing, go as follows: Read more of this post

What Amazing Leaders Do Differently

What Amazing Leaders Do Differently

Shane Snow

In my work as a startup founder over the last few years, I’ve been fortunate enough to find myself surrounded by some incredible young leaders, be mentored by a few wise executives, and spend time with rockstar leadership thinkers like Jack Canfield and Sir Freeman Dyson. It’s been humbling, but awesome. As I’ve attempted to step into the role of leader myself (along with my two fantastic cofounders), and fumbled repeatedly along the way, I’ve come to appreciate great leaders who make what turns out to be a very hard thing look easy. Amazing leaders often do things counter-intuitively. Here are seven patterns I’ve observed in the best leaders in my life, despite the natural pressure for powerful people to do otherwise:

They change their minds.

One of the most courageous things a leader can do is admit when he or she is wrong, and admit it often. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, said that the late Apple founder Steve Jobs was a notorious, but deliberate, flip-flopper. “I saw it daily,” Cook said in an interview with AllThingsD. “This is a gift, because things do change, and it takes courage to change. It takes courage to say, ‘I was wrong.’” Read more of this post

Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change

Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change Hardcover

by Edmund S. Phelps (Author)

In this book, Nobel Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps draws on a lifetime of thinking to make a sweeping new argument about what makes nations prosper–and why the sources of that prosperity are under threat today. Why did prosperity explode in some nations between the 1820s and 1960s, creating not just unprecedented material wealth but “flourishing”–meaningful work, self-expression, and personal growth for more people than ever before? Phelps makes the case that the wellspring of this flourishing was modern values such as the desire to create, explore, and meet challenges. These values fueled the grassroots dynamism that was necessary for widespread, indigenous innovation. Most innovation wasn’t driven by a few isolated visionaries like Henry Ford; rather, it was driven by millions of people empowered to think of, develop, and market innumerable new products and processes, and improvements to existing ones. Mass flourishing–a combination of material well-being and the “good life” in a broader sense–was created by this mass innovation.

Yet indigenous innovation and flourishing weakened decades ago. In America, evidence indicates that innovation and job satisfaction have decreased since the late 1960s, while postwar Europe has never recaptured its former dynamism. The reason, Phelps argues, is that the modern values underlying the modern economy are under threat by a resurgence of traditional, corporatist values that put the community and state over the individual. The ultimate fate of modern values is now the most pressing question for the West: will Western nations recommit themselves to modernity, grassroots dynamism, indigenous innovation, and widespread personal fulfillment, or will we go on with a narrowed innovation that limits flourishing to a few?

A book of immense practical and intellectual importance, Mass Flourishing is essential reading for anyone who cares about the sources of prosperity and the future of the West. Read more of this post

When Work Is Challenging, Economies Thrive

When Work Is Challenging, Economies Thrive

by Justin Fox  |  12:30 PM August 30, 2013

“In economics, consumption is the sole end of production,” the late, great Swedish economist, politician, and social commentator Gunnar Myrdal wrote in 1930. “This is a stock phrase of all the textbooks since Adam Smith: Man works in order to live.” Myrdal, though, didn’t think that was right: [T]here are many people who live in order to work, who consume in order to produce, if we like to use those terms. Most people who are reasonably well off derive more satisfaction in their capacity as producers than as consumers. Indeed, many would define the social ideal as a state in which as many people as possible can live in this way. Read more of this post

Astronomers say they may have solved a cosmic mystery: why gravitational monsters known as black holes are inept at swallowing their prey

August 29, 2013, 10:25 p.m. ET

Scientists Shed New Light on Black Holes

GAUTAM NAIK

A composite image of the region around the black hole at the center ofthe Milky Way, with X-ray emissions shown in the inset.

Astronomers say they may have solved a cosmic mystery: why gravitational monsters known as black holes are inept at swallowing their prey. A black hole can form in space when a large star dies and its matter gets crunched into a much smaller volume. The resulting gravitational pull is so great that even light can’t escape. Given this power, one theory was that black holes indiscriminately consumed everything that passed within their reach. However, scientists recently observed that this scenario isn’t always the case—and they now believe they understand why. Read more of this post

Hulbert on Investing: Beyond the Superstar CEO; Companies with a strong corporate culture are a much better indicator of long-term success

August 30, 2013, 6:10 p.m. ET

Hulbert on Investing: Beyond the Superstar CEO

Companies with a strong corporate culture are a much better indicator of long-term success.

MARK HULBERT

The chief executive Microsoft MSFT -0.45% chooses to succeed Steve Ballmer will most likely fail to transform the company into the cutting-edge high-tech player so many on Wall Street say they want. That is because Microsoft is under enormous pressure to follow a CEO search process that is “irrational,” according to Rakesh Khurana, a professor of leadership development at Harvard Business School. Most companies that have been in Microsoft’s current position—a one-time industry leader whose future prospects appear to be fading—searched for a new CEO “with as much star power as possible,” he said in an interview, in order to restore shareholder confidence and boost its stock price. Read more of this post