Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire Hardcover

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire Hardcover

by Bruce Nussbaum  (Author)

Offering insights from the spheres of anthropology, psychology, education, design, and business,Creative Intelligence by Bruce Nussbaum, a leading thinker, commentator, and curator on the subjects of design, creativity, and innovation, is first book to identify and explore creative intelligence as a new form of cultural literacy and as a powerful method for problem-solving, driving innovation, and sparking start-up capitalism. Read more of this post

Innovation–The Missing Dimension

Innovation–The Missing Dimension [Hardcover]

Richard K. Lester (Author), Michael J. Piore (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 29, 2004 | ISBN-10: 0674015819 | ISBN-13: 978-0674015814 | Edition: 1

Amid mounting concern over the loss of jobs to low-wage economies, one fact is clear: America’s prosperity hinges on the ability of its businesses to continually introduce new products and services. But what makes for a creative economy? How can the remarkable surge of innovation that fueled the boom of the 1990s be sustained? Read more of this post

Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day Hardcover

by Todd Henry  (Author)

“Embrace the importance of now, and refuse to allow the lull of comfort, fear, familiarity, and ego to prevent you from taking action on your ambitions…The cost of inaction is vast. Don’t go to your grave with your best work inside of you. Choose to die empty.” Read more of this post

How to Get People to Do Stuff: Master the art and science of persuasion and motivation Paperback

How to Get People to Do Stuff: Master the art and science of persuasion and motivation Paperback

by Susan Weinschenk (Author)

We all want people to do stuff. Whether you want your customers to buy from you, vendors to give you a good deal, your employees to take more initiative, or your spouse to make dinner—a large amount of everyday is about getting the people around you to do stuff. Instead of using your usual tactics that sometimes work and sometimes don’t, what if you could harness the power of psychology and brain science to motivate people to do the stuff you want them to do – even getting people to want to do the stuff you want them to do. Read more of this post

Shaping Serendipity for Learning: Conversations with John Seely Brown

Shaping Serendipity for Learning: Conversations with John Seely Brown

July 31, 2013 12:40 AM

“Conventional wisdom holds that different people learn in different ways.  Something is missing from that idea, however, so we offer a corollary: 

Different People, 
when presented with exactly the same information in exactly the same way, 
will learn different things.  
Most models of education and learning have almost no tolerance for this kind of thing.   
As a result, teaching tends to focus on eliminating the source of the problem:  
the student’s imagination.”
-John Seely Brown Read more of this post

Why John Seely Brown Says We Should Look Beyond Creativity to Cultivate Imagination

Why John Seely Brown Says We Should Look Beyond Creativity to Cultivate Imagination

By Heather Chaplin

1.8.14 | John Seely Brown is a visiting scholar and advisor to the provost at University of Southern California and independent co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge. He was chief scientist at Xerox Corporation and director of the Palo Alto Research Center. He cofounded the Institute for Research on Learning and was a trustee of the MacArthur Foundation until 2012.

This post is part of a series of conversations with thought leaders on digital media and learning, then and now. In conversation with journalist Heather Chaplin, leaders reflect on how the field of digital media and learning (DML) has changed over time, and where it’s headed.

Spotlight: Do I understand correctly that you started professional life as a bookie? Read more of this post

Why Imagination and Curiosity Matter More Than Ever

January 31, 2014, 1:04 PM ET

Why Imagination and Curiosity Matter More Than Ever

By Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Guest Contributor

A few weeks ago I read a very interesting online article: Why John Seely Brown Says We Should Look Beyond Creativity to Cultivate Imagination. John Seely Brown, aka JSB, was chief scientist at Xerox Corp. Ltd. and director of its Palo Alto Research Center. He is now the independent co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge and a visiting scholar at USC.  We’ve been friends for over 20 years. We both serve on the Advisory Board of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab. Read more of this post

The Human Search for Meaning: “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.”- Nietzsche

The Human Search for Meaning

January 28, 2014 by Shane Parrish

“He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.”— Nietzsche

Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, is best known for his 1946 memoir Man’s Search for Meaning. The book sheds light on the horrible experiences of Auschwitz and what they taught him about life, love, and our search for meaning. When all seems hopeless, why is it that some people push forward while others subside. Read more of this post

Laws of Character and Personality: “One of the most valuable personal traits is the ability to get along with all kinds of people.”

Laws of Character and Personality

January 27, 2014 by Shane Parrish

“One of the most valuable personal traits is the ability to get along with all kinds of people.”

The Unwritten Laws of Engineering is a book for those engineers who have more obstacles of a personal nature in organizations than technical. First published as a series of three articles in Mechanical Engineering, the “laws” were written and formulated as a professional code of conduct so to speak circa 1944. Although fragmentary and incomplete, they are still used by engineers, young and old, to guide their behavior. Read more of this post

The Ego and the Universe: Alan Watts on Becoming Who You Really Are; The cause and cure of the illusion of separateness that keeps us from embracing the richness of life

The Ego and the Universe: Alan Watts on Becoming Who You Really Are

by Maria Popova

The cause and cure of the illusion of separateness that keeps us from embracing the richness of life.

During the 1950s and 1960s, British philosopher and writer Alan Watts began popularizing Eastern philosophy in the West, offering a wholly different perspective oninner wholeness in the age of anxiety andwhat it really means to live a life of purpose. We owe much of today’s mainstream adoption of practices like yoga and meditation to Watts’s influence. In The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (public library), originally published in 1966 and building upon his indispensable earlier work, Watts argues with equal parts conviction and compassion that “the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East,” exploring the cause and cure of that illusion in a way that flows from profound unease as we confront our cultural conditioning into a deep sense of lightness as we surrender to the comforting mystery and interconnectedness of the universe. Envisioned as a packet of essential advice a parent might hand down to his child on the brink of adulthood as initiation into the central mystery of life, this existential manual is rooted in what Watts calls “a cross-fertilization of Western science with an Eastern intuition. Read more of this post

Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives; How to fine-tune the internal monologue that scores every aspect of our lives, from leadership to love

Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives

by Maria Popova

How to fine-tune the internal monologue that scores every aspect of our lives, from leadership to love.

“If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve,” Debbie Millman counseled in one of the best commencement speeches ever given, urging: “Do what you love, and don’t stop until you get what you love. Work as hard as you can, imagine immensities…” Far from Pollyanna platitude, this advice actually reflects what modern psychology knows about how belief systems about our own abilities and potential fuel our behavior and predict our success. Much of that understanding stems from the work of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, synthesized in her remarkably insightful Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (public library), which explores the power of our beliefs, both conscious and unconscious, and how changing even the simplest of them can have profound impact on nearly every aspect of our lives. Read more of this post

Invest like a legend: Charles Brandes

Invest like a legend: Charles Brandes

BRIAN MILNER

The Globe and Mail

Published Thursday, Jan. 30 2014, 5:44 PM EST

Brandes, 70, has been spreading the gospel of disciplined investing in sound but undervalued companies since 1974. Like Warren Buffett, the San Diego billionaire counts Ben Graham as his mentor. The author of the widely read Value Investing Today, first published in 1989, regards investing as a long-term proposition. Anything else is just speculating. Read more of this post

Relax, Being Anxious Makes You A Good Leader

RELAX, BEING ANXIOUS MAKES YOU A GOOD LEADER

A NEW BODY OF RESEARCH PAINTS ANXIOUS BEHAVIOR IN A DIFFERENT LIGHT THAN YOU’D EXPECT. BUT WHEN IT COMES TO THE WORKPLACE, IT’S A FINE LINE TO TREAD.

BY JANE PORTER

Freedom of choice is a beautiful thing, but it also breeds anxiety. What if you choose wrong? What if you screw up? Often it’s the case that there isn’t such a thing as choosing “right” or “wrong,” so much as choosing what feels best given your circumstances. That doesn’t make decision making any easier. Read more of this post

A Height Gene? One for Smarts? Don’t Bet On It; Any given gene is likely to be unimportant, large-scale studies have found

A Height Gene? One for Smarts? Don’t Bet On It

Jan. 31, 2014 9:19 p.m. ET

As I skimmed my emails one morning—mostly Viagra ads and news of the three lotteries that I had won during the night—one stopped me in my tracks. “Is overeating in your genes? Take an online test.” I was curious—not about whether my genes prompted me to pig out, but about how the company’s test was supposed to determine that. Read more of this post