Invest in people, not resources; Most workplaces seem diabolically designed to kill creativity, intelligence, and productivity, and thus drive away talent

Invest in people, not resources

BY BOB GOWER 
ON APRIL 26, 2013

There is a supply-and-demand paradox brewing in the software business, and it’s getting worse by the day. Companies are searching for rock-star talent, while at the exact same moment talented people are searching for great work. People on both sides of this issue are frustrated — companies can’t find the right workers, or enough of them and talented workers feel stifled, bored, and in many cases exhausted, and even oppressed, by the work they do find. It’s an easy field for employers to stand out in, and yet so few fail to create the kind of engaging workplaces that attract top talent. Most blame their troubles on the market or a lack of money, but it’s hard to take this argument seriously when Wikipedia attracted an army of volunteers with seemingly little effort, and then produced so much value it drove Microsoft’s well-funded Encarta out of business. How did Wikipedia attract and motivate so much unpaid talent, and how does this hugely popular project keep doing it?

The secret to hiring top talent is simple — but not easy. Most workplaces seem diabolically designed to kill creativity, intelligence, and productivity, and thus drive away talent. If you want to hire well, you need to first engage and inspire the talent you do have, and that’s not about money. It’s about treating people like people. It’s a matter of helping them align toward a compelling common vision, giving them the tools and environments they need, then getting out of their way.

Read more of this post

How IDEO brings design to corporate America

How IDEO brings design to corporate America

By Dinah Eng @FortuneMagazine April 11, 2013: 8:06 AM ET

David Kelley in IDEO’s Palo Alto workshop

You may not know the design firm IDEO (pronounced EYE-dee-oh), but chances are you know its work. If you’ve used an Apple mouse (IDEO fashioned the company’s first, in 1980), swept with a Procter & Gamble (PG, Fortune 500) Swiffer (it collaborated on the hit), or even stood in line at an airport recently (the firm has worked with the Transportation Security Administration to make the process friendlier), you’ve felt the legacy of David Kelley. He founded IDEO in Palo Alto in 1978 and built it into a global operation with 600 employees and $130 million in revenue (he declines to divulge profits). IDEO brings a human-centered approach to products, services, and organizational concepts for the likes of Samsung, Eli Lilly (LLY, Fortune 500), and Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500). Kelley, 62, is also Stanford University’s resident design Yoda. The avowed “variety junkie” is proud that IDEO does everything from designing the ideal home for wounded soldiers to helping Elmo teach kids good behavior via a mobile app. His story:

I grew up in Barberton, Ohio, where my father was an engineer at Goodyear and my mother was a housewife. It was a typical Midwest upbringing, and I wasn’t really into college preparatory stuff. What was exciting to me was taking apart the car or the washing machine.

In 1973, I got a BS in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and went to work forBoeing (BA, Fortune 500) in Seattle, designing things for the interior of the 747. When I found out about the Stanford Product Design Program, I became interested in the human-centered side of technology, but didn’t think I’d get into the program. So I moved to Dayton and worked for National Cash Register (NCR,Fortune 500), designing new banking terminals, until I found out I was admitted.

Going to the Stanford program was a perfect fit. I love trying to understand what people want, what they value, and designing something for them. I graduated in 1977 with my MS in engineering and product design, and discovered that I really liked teaching. In 1978, I went to my mentor, professor Bob McKim, and said I wanted to keep teaching and I wanted to start my own company. He introduced me to Dean Hovey, who was studying at Stanford, and we started a company called Hovey-Kelley Design. A couple of professors who had their own companies in Silicon Valley gave us our first projects — designing a reading machine for blind people and a medical device called a differential [blood] cell counter.

Soon after Dean and I started our company, another Stanford colleague introduced us to Steve Jobs. We ended up doing a lot for Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500). They were technologically focused, and we focused on the human side. We’d ask [with the first Apple mouse], should you use the mouse with your fingertips or slide it like a bar of soap? Once we started doing Apple products, people wanted to know who we were.

Back then, we were paying about $300 a month for three offices. I remember flinching when I signed a 10-year lease because I still owed on student loans and I had a negative net worth. I had no interest in calculating revenue, and still don’t. We charged $25 an hour and had six employees. Half the time we worked, and half the time we didn’t. All I cared about was how much we were paid per hour, and if we had enough to keep everybody busy. Read more of this post

Cal Newport: The Secret To Success Is The “Craftsman’s Mindset”

Interview – Author Cal Newport on how you can become an expert and why you should *not* follow your passion

by eric barker

Cal Newport holds a PhD from MIT and is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University. He runs the popular blog Study Hacks (which I highly recommend) and is the author of four books including, most recently, So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love. Cal and I talked about the secrets to becoming an expert, how deliberate practice works and why following your passion can be a *bad* idea. My conversation with Cal was over 45 minutes, so for brevity’s sake I’m only going to post edited highlights here.

Don’t Follow Your Passion

Cal:

I set out to research a simple question:  How do people end up loving what they do? If you ask people, the most common answer you’ll get is, “They followed their passion.” So I went out and researched: “Is this true?” From what I found, “Follow your passion” is terrible advice. If your goal is to end up passionate about what you do, “Follow your passion” is terrible advice. So the first fundamental misunderstanding is this idea that we all have a pre-existing passion that’s relevant to a career, and if we could just discover it, then we would be fine. Research says actually most people don’t have one. The second problem is that it’s built on this misbelief that matching your work to something you have a very strong interest in is going to lead to a long-term satisfaction and engagement in your career. It sounds obvious that it should be true, but actually the research shows that’s not at all the reality of how people end up really enjoying and gaining great satisfaction and meaning out of their career. If you study people who end up loving what they do, here’s what you find and if you study the research on it, you find the same thing: Long-term career satisfaction requires traits like a real sense of autonomy, a real sense of impact on the world, a sense of mastery that you’re good at what you do, and a sense of connection in relation to other people. Now, the key point is those traits are not matched to a specific piece of work and they have nothing to do with matching your job to some sort of ingrained, pre-existing passion.

The Secret To Success Is The “Craftsman’s Mindset”

Cal:

My advice is to abandon the passion mindset which asks “What does this job offer me? Am I happy with this job? Is it giving me everything I want?” Shift from that mindset to Steve Martin’s mindset, which is “What am I offering the world? How valuable am I? Am I really not that valuable? If I’m not that valuable, then I shouldn’t expect things in my working life. How can I get better?“ Like a craftsman, you find satisfaction in the development of your skill and then you leverage that skill once you have it to take control of your working life and build something that’s more long-term and meaningful… When I talk about the habits of the craftsman mindset, it’s really the habits of deliberate practice. So someone who has the craftsman mindset is trying to systematically build up valuable skills because that’s going to be their leverage, their capital for taking control of their career and they share the same habits you would see with violin players or athletes or chess players.

The craftsmen out there are not the guys checking their social media feeds every five minutes. They’re not looking for the easy win or the flow-state. They’re the guys that are out there three hours, pushing the skill. “This is hard but I’m going to master this new piece of software. I’m going to master this new mathematical framework.” That’s the mindset, the habit of the craftsman.

How To Become An Expert At Something

Cal:

What you need is a clearly identified sort of skill you’re working on. You need some notion of feedback. So you have to have some notion of, “How good am I at this now, and am I any better now that I’ve done this versus not doing it?” So that’s sort of the coaching aspect of things. And then when actually working, you have to work deeply, which means you have to sort of work on the skill with a persistent, unbroken focus, and you have to try to push yourself a little bit beyond where you’re comfortable. So you should not really be able to easily get to the next step in what you’re doing. At the same time, you should, with enough strain, be able to make some progress.

What You’re Doing Wrong When Trying To Become An Expert

Cal:

I think when people want to get better at something the biggest mistake they make is seekingflow. It’s a very enjoyable state. It’s where you’re lost in what you’re doing, you’re applying your skills seamlessly and fluidly, and you feel like you have control.

But we know from research on how people actually gain expert levels of performance that the actual state in which you’re getting better is one of strain, and that’s different than flow. It’s a state where you actually feel like you’re being stretched. It’s uncomfortable. You’re doing things beyond your current abilities. It’s not fluid. You’re not necessarily lost. Your mind might be saying, “This is terrible. This is terrible. Check your e-mail. This is terrible. What if there is something on Facebook?“

We avoid that for the most part, but we know that if you just keep doing what you know how to do already, you’ll hit a plateau almost immediately. So I think the avoidance of strain is the biggest mistake people make in trying to get better. Read more of this post

Forget the long to-do lists and choose one thing to be good at

Forget the long to-do lists and choose one thing to be good at

By Vickie Elmer April 19, 2013

Success doesn’t come from a four-hour workweek or a list of seven steps. People who are extraordinarily successful are known for just one thing, one passion, one amazing skill, says Gary Keller and co-author Jay Papasan in their new book called The One Thing. That is true for Warren Buffett choosing investments or Bill Gates and computers. This notion comes partly from Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto’s principle, which showed that 80% of wealth was held by 20% of the people. This works elsewhere as the 80/20 principle, where a small portion of effort leads to oversized results. “Things don’t matter equally. …The smaller I make my life, the bigger it gets,” says Keller, the co-founder and chairman of Keller Williams Real Estate. Great bosses understand that businesses will succeed when staff are encouraged to excel in one domain. ”I want my phones answered extraordinarily. I want my contracts read extraordinarily. I want software done extraordinarily,” Keller said about his own real estate business. Here are three lessons from The One Thing:

1.  Success is sequential, not simultaneous.  Many people want it all. Yet when Keller coached “a lot of very successful men and women” in the 1990s, he would see them create a list of assignments to tackle. By their next conversation, they hadn’t accomplished the most important ones. Finally, he started making them choose one thing they would concentrate on between sessions. That led to dramatically improved results. He would ask them the focusing question: “What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” That question runs through the book, and can serve to focus on big picture goals as well as daily priorities.

2. Nail your “one thing” by lunch.  Schedule your time block—a minimum of two hours, three or more is better—for the first part of your day when your willpower is highest. “By noon or 1 o’clock at latest, you’ve had an awesome day,” he said. “You’ve done what mattered most. Now you deal with all the other stuff.” For executive meetings, know the one thing that drives your business’ success, and make that the first item on your agenda always.

3. Everyone blows it. Keller wanted his book to be grounded in research, so the first draft came in at 400 pages. His publisher said: “Why don’t you practice what you preach?” The authors ended up cutting it in half.

How a Potter Took Accounting Into the Industrial Age

How a Potter Took Accounting Into the Industrial Age

In the mid 1700s, Josiah Wedgwood built the world’s first industrialized pottery factory. Source: Getty Images

This week, the International Integrated Reporting Council introduced a draft of a new framework for corporate accounting that would require companies to go beyond reporting just financial capital and also encompass environmental, social and governance risks.

The structure — known as “integrated reporting” — is a response to the realization brought on by the 2008 financial crisis and increasing environmental stresses that we need a new accounting paradigm for the 21st century. The limits of current national-accounting practices were acknowledged in 2012 when the United Nations adopted a new international standard to give “natural capital” equal status to gross domestic product as a gage of a nation’s economy.

These aren’t the first such paradigm shifts in the history of accounting. At the end of the 18th century, the double-entry account-keeping practices developed by Italian merchants in the Middle Ages were updated for the new industrial era.

The first signs that double entry could be adapted to the new age of factories, wage labor and large-scale capital investment appeared in the north of England, in the works of the renowned potter Josiah Wedgwood. Read more of this post

Innovator: Ruggero Scorcioni’s App Uses Brain Waves to Block Calls

Innovator: Ruggero Scorcioni’s App Uses Brain Waves to Block Calls

By Caroline Winter on April 18, 2013

Neuroscientist and former software engineer Ruggero Scorcioni found himself consistently distracted by the phone while he was trying to work. “If I’m busy coding or thinking about research and have phone calls coming in, it’s hard to get back into the same mental state,” says Scorcioni, 42. “Maybe you had a great idea, but then it’s gone.” In January, on a whim, he entered an AT&T app-development hackathon, and came up with a solution.

His idea was sparked by a gift to participants: a cat-ear headset built by Neuro-wear with sensors that track the wearer’s brain waves and perk up fluffy motorized ears during periods of high brain activity. Scorcioni, who’d just finished a fellowship at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, Calif., decided to hack the headset to create an app that blocks incoming calls when the receiver is concentrating. With 26 hours to complete the hackathon, he worked until the last minute, pausing only for two hours of sleep and a shower. That labor produced a working prototype of Good Times, which analyzes real-time brain wave data from the headset, then sends commands to AT&T’s telephone network to either permit or block incoming calls. Blocked callers are redirected to an automated message asking them to try again later. Scorcioni describes the app as “a mentally activated ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign.” Read more of this post

The Agility Factor: A few large companies in every industry show consistently superior profitability relative to their peers, and they all have one thing in common: a highly developed capacity to adapt their business to change

April 15, 2013

The Agility Factor

A few large companies in every industry show consistently superior profitability relative to their peers, and they all have one thing in common: a highly developed capacity to adapt their business to change.

by Thomas Williams, Christopher G. Worley, and Edward E. Lawler III

Everybody knows that big corporations, by nature, maneuver like battleships. Held back by their own inertia and current business strategies, they cannot turn quickly when the competitive environment changes. Everybody also knows that high performance, as measured by shareholder returns, is impossible to sustain over the long term; no company consistently beats the market.

But a recent in-depth study of long-term performance suggests an alternative point of view about business strategy. When the measure of performance is profitability, a few large companies in every industry consistently outperform their peers over extended periods. And they maintain this performance edge even in the face of significant business change in their competitive environments. The one factor they seem to have in common is agility. They adapt to business change more quickly and reliably than their competitors; they have found a way to turn as quickly as speedboats when necessary.

Read more of this post

People Are the New Channel; This new world is disorienting because pipes and people work very differently as channels. Pipes flow out; people flow in. Content is pushed out through pipes, but pulled in through people

People Are the New Channel

by Mark Bonchek and Cara France  |  11:00 AM April 15, 2013

In the past, channels delivered messages to audiences. You either owned the pipe or paid to use someone else’s. You controlled the message all the way through that pipe.

In a digital and social age, pipes are less important. People are the channel. You don’t own or rent them. You can’t control them. You can only serve and support them.

This new world is disorienting because pipes and people work very differently as channels. Pipes flow out; people flow in. Content is pushed out through pipes, but pulled in through people. Read more of this post

Givers take all: The hidden dimension of corporate culture; By encouraging employees to both seek and provide help, rewarding givers, and screening out takers, companies can reap significant and lasting benefits.

Givers take all: The hidden dimension of corporate culture

By encouraging employees to both seek and provide help, rewarding givers, and screening out takers, companies can reap significant and lasting benefits.

April 2013 • Adam Grant

After the tragic events of 9/11, a team of Harvard psychologists quietly “invaded” the US intelligence system. The team, led by Richard Hackman, wanted to determine what makes intelligence units effective. By surveying, interviewing, and observing hundreds of analysts across 64 different intelligence groups, the researchers ranked those units from best to worst.

Then they identified what they thought was a comprehensive list of factors that drive a unit’s effectiveness—only to discover, after parsing the data, that the most important factor wasn’t on their list. The critical factor wasn’t having stable team membership and the right number of people. It wasn’t having a vision that is clear, challenging, and meaningful. Nor was it well-defined roles and responsibilities; appropriate rewards, recognition, and resources; or strong leadership.

Rather, the single strongest predictor of group effectiveness was the amount of help that analysts gave to each other. In the highest-performing teams, analysts invested extensive time and energy in coaching, teaching, and consulting with their colleagues. These contributions helped analysts question their own assumptions, fill gaps in their knowledge, gain access to novel perspectives, and recognize patterns in seemingly disconnected threads of information. In the lowest-rated units, analysts exchanged little help and struggled to make sense of tangled webs of data. Just knowing the amount of help-giving that occurred allowed the Harvard researchers to predict the effectiveness rank of nearly every unit accurately.

The importance of helping-behavior for organizational effectiveness stretches far beyond intelligence work. Evidence from studies led by Indiana University’s Philip Podsakoff demonstrates that the frequency with which employees help one another predicts sales revenues in pharmaceutical units and retail stores; profits, costs, and customer service in banks; creativity in consulting and engineering firms; productivity in paper mills; and revenues, operating efficiency, customer satisfaction, and performance quality in restaurants.

Across these diverse contexts, organizations benefit when employees freely contribute their knowledge and skills to others. Podsakoff’s research suggests that this helping-behavior facilitates organizational effectiveness by:

• enabling employees to solve problems and get work done faster
• enhancing team cohesion and coordination
• ensuring that expertise is transferred from experienced to new employees
• reducing variability in performance when some members are overloaded or distracted
• establishing an environment in which customers and suppliers feel that their needs are the organization’s top priority

Yet far too few companies enjoy these benefits. One major barrier is company culture—the norms and values in organizations often don’t support helping. After a decade of studying work performance, I’ve identified different types of reciprocity norms that characterize the interactions between people in organizations. At the extremes, I call them “giver cultures” and “taker cultures.” Read more of this post

Great Scientist ≠ Good at Math; E.O. Wilson shares a secret: Discoveries emerge from ideas, not number-crunching

April 5, 2013, 10:07 p.m. ET

Great Scientist ≠ Good at Math

E.O. Wilson shares a secret: Discoveries emerge from ideas, not number-crunching

By E.O. WILSON

For many young people who aspire to be scientists, the great bugbear is mathematics. Without advanced math, how can you do serious work in the sciences? Well, I have a professional secret to share: Many of the most successful scientists in the world today are mathematically no more than semiliterate.

During my decades of teaching biology at Harvard, I watched sadly as bright undergraduates turned away from the possibility of a scientific career, fearing that, without strong math skills, they would fail. This mistaken assumption has deprived science of an immeasurable amount of sorely needed talent. It has created a hemorrhage of brain power we need to stanch. Read more of this post

Five routes to more innovative problem solving; Tricky problems must be shaped before they can be solved. To start that process, and stimulate novel thinking, leaders should look through multiple lenses.

Five routes to more innovative problem solving

Tricky problems must be shaped before they can be solved. To start that process, and stimulate novel thinking, leaders should look through multiple lenses.

April 2013 • Olivier Leclerc and Mihnea Moldoveanu

Source: Strategy Practice

Rob McEwen had a problem. The chairman and chief executive officer of Canadian mining group Goldcorp knew that its Red Lake site could be a money-spinner—a mine nearby was thriving—but no one could figure out where to find high-grade ore. The terrain was inaccessible, operating costs were high, and the unionized staff had already gone on strike. In short, McEwen was lumbered with a gold mine that wasn’t a gold mine.

Then inspiration struck. Attending a conference about recent developments in IT, McEwen was smitten with the open-source revolution. Bucking fierce internal resistance, he created the Goldcorp Challenge: the company put Red Lake’s closely guarded topographic data online and offered $575,000 in prize money to anyone who could identify rich drill sites. To the astonishment of players in the mining sector, upward of 1,400 technical experts based in 50-plus countries took up the problem. The result? Two Australian teams, working together, found locations that have made Red Lake one of the world’s richest gold mines. “From a remote site, the winners were able to analyze a database and generate targets without ever visiting the property,” McEwen said. “It’s clear that this is part of the future.”¹

McEwen intuitively understood the value of taking a number of different approaches simultaneously to solving difficult problems. A decade later, we find that this mind-set is ever more critical: business leaders are operating in an era when forces such as technological change and the historic rebalancing of global economic activity from developed to emerging markets have made the problems increasingly complex, the tempo faster, the markets more volatile, and the stakes higher. The number of variables at play can be enormous, and free-flowing information encourages competition, placing an ever-greater premium on developing innovative, unique solutions.

This article presents an approach for doing just that. How? By using what we call flexible objects for generating novel solutions, or flexons, which provide a way of shaping difficult problems to reveal innovative solutions that would otherwise remain hidden. This approach can be useful in a wide range of situations and at any level of analysis, from individuals to groups to organizations to industries. To be sure, this is not a silver bullet for solving any problem whatever. But it is a fresh mechanism for representing ambiguous, complex problems in a structured way to generate better and more innovative solutions.

The flexons approach

Finding innovative solutions is hard. Precedent and experience push us toward familiar ways of seeing things, which can be inadequate for the truly tough challenges that confront senior leaders. After all, if a problem can be solved before it escalates to the C-suite, it typically is. Yet we know that teams of smart people from different backgrounds are more likely to come up with fresh ideas more quickly than individuals or like-minded groups do.² When a diverse range of experts—game theorists to economists to psychologists—interact, their approach to problems is different from those that individuals use. The solution space becomes broader, increasing the chance that a more innovative answer will be found.

Obviously, people do not always have think tanks of PhDs trained in various approaches at their disposal. Fortunately, generating diverse solutions to a problem does not require a diverse group of problem solvers. This is where flexons come into play. While traditional problem-solving frameworks address particular problems under particular conditions—creating a compensation system, for instance, or undertaking a value-chain analysis for a vertically integrated business—they have limited applicability. They are, if you like, specialized lenses. Flexons offer languages for shaping problems, and these languages can be adapted to a much broader array of challenges. In essence, flexons substitute for the wisdom and experience of a group of diverse, highly educated experts.

To accommodate the world of business problems, we have identified five flexons, or problem-solving languages. Derived from the social and natural sciences, they help users understand the behavior of individuals, teams, groups, firms, markets, institutions, and whole societies. We arrived at these five through a lengthy process of synthesizing both formal literatures and the private knowledge systems of experts, and trial and error on real problems informed our efforts. We don’t suggest that these five flexons are exhaustive—only that we have found them sufficient, in concert, to tackle very difficult problems. While serious mental work is required to tailor the flexons to a given situation, and each retains blind spots arising from its assumptions, multiple flexons can be applied to the same problem to generate richer insights and more innovative solutions.

Networks flexon

Imagine a map of all of the people you know, ranked by their influence over you. It would show close friends and vague acquaintances, colleagues at work and college roommates, people who could affect your career dramatically and people who have no bearing on it. All of them would be connected by relationships of trust, friendship, influence, and the probabilities that they will meet. Such a map is a network that can represent anything from groups of people to interacting product parts to traffic patterns within a city—and therefore can shape a whole range of business problems.

For example, certain physicians are opinion leaders who can influence colleagues about which drugs to prescribe. To reveal relationships among physicians and help identify those best able to influence drug usage, a pharmaceutical company launching a product could create a network map of doctors who have coauthored scientific articles. By targeting clusters of physicians who share the same ideas and (one presumes) have tight interactions, the company may improve its return on investments compared with what traditional mass-marketing approaches would achieve. The network flexon helps decompose a situation into a series of linked problems of prediction (how will ties evolve?) and optimization (how can we maximize the relational advantage of a given agent?) by presenting relationships among entities. These problems are not simple, to be sure.³But they are well-defined and structured—a fundamental requirement of problem solving. Read more of this post

How P&G Presents Data to Decision-Makers: Over 50,000 P&G employees now have access to a “Decision Cockpit”

How P&G Presents Data to Decision-Makers

by Tom Davenport  |   3:00 PM April 4, 2013

Those of us who believe that managers make better decisions when key data are presented visually tend to get very excited about all the innovation going on in the graphical display of information. (For a sampling of some new and cool tools, see the popular Hans Rosling TED talk.) However, if you work in a large organization and want it to make better use of data visualization, I’d argue thatcommonality is more important than creativity. If you can establish a common visual language for data, you can radically upgrade the use of the data to drive decision-making and action. The best case I can cite for this argument is Procter & Gamble, which has institutionalized data visualization as a primary tool of management. Working with visual analytics software vendor Tibco Spotfire, P&G has put visual displays of key information on desktops — over 50,000 P&G employees now have access to a “Decision Cockpit” (shown below).

Read more of this post

The chemist in the kitchen: Rachel Edwards-Stuart cooked up a career from applying lab techniques to modern cuisine

April 4, 2013 5:16 pm

The chemist in the kitchen

By Emma Jacobs

In her elements: Rachel Edwards-Stuart uses her academic studies to create culinary transformations

Nervy, nerdy Rachel Edwards-Stuart fizzes about the kitchen in her north London higgledy-piggledy flat, pulling out bits of equipment. A water bath, a blow torch, pipettes. Ah, here is the smoking gun. “The tube is over there,” she yanks a foot-long piece of rubber from a shelf. “My cleaning lady hides things in weird places.” She pauses. “I don’t know where you’d normally put a tube from a smoking gun.”

The 30-year-old food scientist is such an enthusiast for the overlapping spheres of science and gastronomy that she interrupts one train of thought with another and another.

Her primary job is to teach the science of cooking and ways of creating gastronomic experiments to chefs – professionals in restaurants as well as amateurs who aspire to make such gourmet confections at home. But she also advises chefs and the food industry. She shares the evangelising passion of a mad professor desperate to communicate their ideas while baffled by their audience’s ignorance. Read more of this post

Tactics to Spark Creativity; To have a good idea, “you have to be able to float through your environment with your antennae up, like a butterfly, and just let things ping your antennae.”

April 2, 2013, 7:20 p.m. ET

Tactics to Spark Creativity

Even People Who Lack Ideas Can Set the Scene for Inspiration; Just Walk Away

By SUE SHELLENBARGER

Why is it that some people rack their brains for new ideas, only to come up empty—while others seem to shake them almost effortlessly out of their sleeves? Whether creativity is an innate gift or a cognitive process that anyone can jump-start is a question so intriguing that researchers keep studying it from different angles and discovering new and surprising techniques. Several recent studies suggest that the best route to an “aha moment” involves stepping away from the grindstone—whether it’s taking a daydream break, belting back a drink or two or simply gazing at something green. Of course, personality can make a difference. People who rate high in openness to new experiences in personality tests also may be more distractible and curious, according to a 2010 study in Creativity Research Journal. Among 158 college students, those who were less inhibited and more receptive to lots of stimuli also were able to generate more ideas than others, says the study by British researchers.

But personality isn’t the only path to inspiration, researchers say. Walking away from a problem to do simple, routine tasks, and letting the mind wander in the process, can spark creative new connections or approaches to solving dilemmas, says a 2012 study in Psychological Science. That helps explain why “a lot of great ideas occur at transition times,” when people are waking up or falling asleep, bathing, showering or jogging, says Jennifer Wiley, a psychology professor at University of Illinois at Chicago and lead author of a 2012 research summary in Current Directions in Psychological Science. Read more of this post

Frank Sherman’s Horizon Coach Lines is one of the largest privately owned of its kind in North America. “You have to know how to handle 5,000 people an hour”; “We are changing the culture of Horizon from the ground up”; “We kept it asset-light”

Value Added: His bus business moves big crowds for big profits

By Thomas Heath, Monday, April 1, 6:05 AM

Frank Sherman runs his sprawling, Sandy Spring-based special-events bus business — with its 1,250 coaches and shuttles — with military precision.

He has to when dealing with the hordes who need to board his buses at events such as technology exhibitions, Republican conventions and Major League Baseball All-Star games.

If the buses aren’t present and the line doesn’t move, people lose faith. A docile crowd can turn unruly, ruining his reputation in an afternoon.

“You have to know how to handle 5,000 people an hour,” said the 52-year-old businessman, who has been riding the bus business since he was a kid, helping his father’s tour service whisk customers to weekend trips in New York and New England. Read more of this post