65 Posts Found

We can”t be creative if we refuse to be confused

Content: Quotation | Author: Margaret J. Wheatley | Source: think Cranfield | Subject: Creativity

[how can one tell if an idea is any good?] Here’s the simple litmus test: Does your community care? Everyone has a “community” of constituents—customers, users, readers, clients, etc. Share your ideas liberally. If your community engages with them (either for or against them), then you know you’re onto something. If they don’t look twice you know that you either need to reconsider the idea … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Scott Belsky | Source: OPEN Forum (American Express) | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

In most organizations, there’s an incredible amount of talent everywhere, and often that talent is more connected to the marketplace and the world. There’s a clear and real role for senior leadership, but it’s not to have the ideas—it’s to create the framework for the ideas to exist.

Content: Quotation | Author: Tim Brown | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

One way to stimulate a creative mindset is to avoid the typical focus of organizations on what is and to ask, instead, what if questions. Doing this regularly tests your ability to see things anew.

Content: Quotation | Author: Patrick Harris | Source: Global Focus | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

Ideas invite others to respond with imaginative gusto. Big imaginative ideas succeed by building on two principles. They are democratic (shared by everybody) and demotic (like art, they convince by being suggestive, not merely by making rational sense). By being evocative rather than explicit, they invite participation.

Content: Quotation | Author: Harriet Rubin | Source: Leader to Leader | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

Facts do not have control of you; your imagination does, and it need have no limits.

Content: Quotation | Author: Harriet Rubin | Source: Leader to Leader | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.

Content: Quotation | Author: Frank Capra | Subject: Creativity

The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas.

Content: Quotation | Author: Linus Pauling | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

Models and concepts and frameworks are—to use another phrase—mental boxes within which we comprehend the real world. And ever since the 1960s, we have been taught to be creative by “thinking outside the box.”

The trouble is this: once you have mentally stepped outside the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Alan Iny, Luc de Brabandere | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation, Thought

People often take the view that standardization is the enemy of creativity. But I think that standards help make creativity possible – by allowing for the establishment of an infrastructure, which then leads to enormous entrepreneurialism, creativity, and competitiveness.

When it comes to innovation, the question is not how to innovate but how to invite ideas. How do you invite your brain to encounter thoughts that … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Vinton Cerf | Source: Fast Company | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

The great enemy of creativity is fear. When we’re fearful, we freeze up — like a nine-year-old who won’t draw pictures, for fear that everybody will laugh. Creativity has a lot to do with a willingness to take risks.

Content: Quotation | Author: Faith Ringgold | Source: Fast Company | Subject: Creativity

Jim March, professor emeritus at Stanford University…pointed out that our understanding of how to manage creativity is impeded by the lack of a theory of novelty, and proposed the beginnings of one. Three conditions seemed to him to be necessary for novelty—slack, hubris, and optimism—which suggest mechanisms that organizations could employ. Slack in an organizational setting means sufficient time and resources for exploration. Increasing hubris … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Jim March, Mukti Khaire, Teresa M. Amabile | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation, Organizational Behavior

If we…create pictures [by] breaking down any problem and its corresponding picture into distinct “who,” “what,” “how much,” “where,” and “when” elements, we can convey the “how” and “why” to anyone in a way they will understand.

Content: Quotation | Author: Dan Roam | Source: Sun Microsystems | Subjects: Communication, Creativity

Design legend Paul Rand once said that design is the method of putting form and content together. This implies that content is as important as form. Design is not a purely visual exercise. The results are visual, but the entire process of design is not.

Some would argue that creativity is a sudden flash of insight, something which just happens magically while one, perhaps, takes their … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Stephen Hay | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Creativity, Design

For somebody with a valuable skill, it is possible to completely ignore the idea people strewn like beggars around the landscape, and have a good life just working on validated, low-risk mature ideas. The demand for good, big ideas isn’t as high as people think, because of the simple constraint of execution bandwidth. One Einstein (a classic idea person) can occupy a couple of generations … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Venkatesh Rao | Source: ribbonfarm | Subjects: Career, Creativity, Innovation

Opportunists are humble enough to realize that the random forces of nature are more powerful than themselves. That these random forces often conspire to make things ridiculously easy just as often as they conspire to create hurricanes and earthquakes. Most people realize that a lot depends on being in the right place at the right time. Very few realize that this situation is not the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Venkatesh Rao | Source: ribbonfarm | Subjects: Achievement, Creativity, Opportunity

My mantra is “Look for the Second Right Answer.” This has been my guiding principle for over thirty years. Much of our educational system tries to teach us to look for the “one right answer.”

I find that looking for the second right answer is an incredibly easy way to open my mind. For example, when I’m looking for information, this mantra tells me to go … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Guy Kawasaki, Roger Von Oech | Source: Sun Microsystems | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

Don’t fall in love with ideas. By ideas I mean: systems, marketing approaches, technologies, partnerships, whatever. Because as soon as you as you fall in love with one approach, you lose sight of other possibilities. …Every right idea eventually becomes the wrong idea.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Guy Kawasaki, Roger Von Oech | Source: Sun Microsystems | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation, Thought

Kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they will have a go…they are not frightened of being wrong. I don’t mean to say that being wrong is being creative. But what we do know is that if you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. By the time we get to be adults, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Bruce Lynn, Katie Ledger | Subjects: Creativity, Success / Failure

An epiphany is the tip of the creative iceberg, and all epiphanies are grounded in work. If you take any magic moment of discovery from history and wander backwards in time you’ll find dozens of smaller observations, inquiries, mistakes, and comedies that occurred to make the epiphany possible. All the great inventors knew this-and typically they downplayed the magic moments. But we all love exciting … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: How to Change the World | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation