Category Archives: Creativity

2 Pictures, 200 Words, Lots of Ideas.

Business Research, Creativity, Technology, Twitter, Web/Tech, , , , , , , ,

Pictures, words, ideas. If one picture equals 1,000 words, how many ideas does it generate? Is there a transitive property there? I had time over the weekend to pick up two unrelated pictures. Each covers something entirely different. Both are full of ideas.

The first, a chart by Seth Godin:

From Seth Godins Blog
From Seth Godin

This is one of those things that must have been hard to come up with, but makes sense when you look at it. A map of communication. On the horizontal axis of the chart, from book on one end to a conversation at the other. With a book, the writer writes it at one point in time and the reader reads it at an entirely different time. With the telephone and coaching, both parties of the communication, sender and receiver, are involved at the same time. On the chart’s vertical axis, how much bandwidth is involved, from mail and graffiti at the low extreme, to movies and coaching at the high extreme.

The Second, from Buzz Networker:

from bizzia.com
From bizzia.com, buzzworker

This one is fascinating to me. As always with this kind of research, accuracy depends on how they sampled, but even if it could be off by a bit, it still gives a big picture of the main social networking sites (which is what I assume the acronym SNS stands for) usage by age. I have no conclusions to draw, but maybe you do.

10 Really Bad, 11 Really Creative Designs

Creativity, Weblogs, , , ,

That’s right: it’s a doggy washing machine, not a faked photo, at least according to the write-up at http://www.davison.com in a hilarious collection called dangerously dumb designs. (Editor’s note: That page has been removed from the Davision Creators’ site, subsequent to the publishing of this  post.)

from www.davison.com

The description says:

Yeah, that’s right, a dog washing machine. Traumatic and automatic. Dumb, dumb, dumb. I would strongly suggest trimming your dog’s nails before placing your loved one in this machine (or taking it out) to avoid becoming both dumb and dangerous.

And that’s not all. It’s a fun collection of 10 of these.

And a lot of other interesting pages, too. I discovered this site thanks to Guy Kawasaki on Twitter. He pointed out 11 Creative Advertising Designs, which is also really good. Here’s one of the highlights from that one (and do you get that it’s a Harley-Davidson ad?):

And, once I was there, I couldn’t resist the dangerously dumb post as well. I don’t know Davison Designs, but hey, great stuff. Pleasant surprises on the Web.

(Photo credits: I found them both on the http://www.davison.com site, and I’m hoping with the link back, they won’t mind. The doggy washer started with craziestgadgets.com, and I’ve linked back to there from the photo. And the Harley-Davidson ad started with http://www.thecoolhunter.net, and I’ve linked back to that site for that one. Both are ads, so I apologize in advance for not getting permission.)

What Does an Imaginary Brick Have to do with Creativity?

Creativity

Try this exercise with a group of people: take out a piece of paper, take three minutes to list uses for a brick. Be creative. List as many as you can.

After the three minutes are up, share your results.

What’s this about? It turns out that most experts agree that creativity is about quantity of ideas, not quality of ideas. Long lists of odd uses for a brick (the more odd, the more bizarre, the better) are better than short lists with very good uses. Quantity, not quality.

What does this mean for running a company? Think about it.

Is Software Management Doomed?

Creativity, Management, Software, Technology, , , , , , ,

Committees don’t make great software. It takes a single person, an author. Maybe he gets some help. Teams don’t do it. Nobody sees the whole elephant.

I’m pretty sure I heard that basic sentiment first in about 1986, from Dave Winer, who was then the author of a Macintosh outlining program named More (now he’s better known as the de-facto father of blogging).

What reminded me of this over the weekend was my son emailing me about Jeff Atwood’s Software Engineering: Dead post on Coding Horror. In his post, Jeff’s looking at this article by Tom DeMarco, author of Controlling Software Projects, a software management classic.

Creative Programming

What DeMarco seems to be saying — and, at least, what I am definitely saying — is that control is ultimately illusory on software development projects. If you want to move your project forward, the only reliable way to do that is to cultivate a deep sense of software craftsmanship and professionalism around it.

The guys and gals who show up every day eager to hone their craft, who are passionate about building stuff that matters to them, and perhaps in some small way, to the rest of the world — those are the people and projects that will ultimately succeed.

That sounds to me a lot like what Dave Winer was getting at about 25 years ago. And if it takes a single user, someone writing code and working the application because he or she wants to use it, then that’s hard to manage.

And if you’re interested in software quality, creativity, and management, you might want to look at an exchange between user interface designerDustin Curtis and an interface designer at American Airlines. It starts here with Justin’s rant about the hostile interface on the AA website; and gets more interesting here with an AA interface designer’s answer.

However, there are large exceptions. For example, our Interactive Marketing group designs and implements fare sales and specials (and doesn’t go through us to do it), and the Publishing group pushes content without much interaction with us… Oh, and don’t forget the AAdvantage team (which for some reason, runs its own little corner of the site) or the international sites (which have a lot of autonomy in how their domains are run)… Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is that AA.com is a huge corporate undertaking with a lot of tentacles that reach into a lot of interests. It’s not small, by any means.

And apparently frustration was had by all.

And it certainly won’t make you wish you had a creative or design oriented position in a large company.

Two guys wrote the original spreadsheet (VisiCalc), one, Paul Brainard, wrote the main part of the first page layout program (Pagemaker). One of the more interesting facets of a lot of Web 2.0 work is that the programs are smaller, written more by authors, less by teams.

Really Good vs. Pretty Good vs. Adequate

Creativity, Entrepreneurship,

One of my favorite quotes,  by Adam Osborne talking about product development, gives way to Seth Godin talking about running your business.

Adam was a writer first, and a personal computer industry pioneer later. I met him when he spoke to my class at business school, then followed his nova-star company, Osborne Computers, as it rose and then fell. During the first high-tech industry boom in the early 1980s, talking about the critical problems of product development, and getting the product out the door, he said that the problem sometimes was that the product people wouldn’t stop developing and ship it:

Adequate is good enough.

That’s not a theme song or a motto for everything in business — not hardly — but it does fit some situations.

Fast Forward to Seth Godin’s post yesterday, Why aren’t you (really) good at graphic design?. He has put together a page of resources to help real-world people to do slides and such better than most of them currently do, with this rationale:

But now, in a world where it is expected that professionals will be able to make beautiful PowerPoint slides, handsome business cards, clever bio photos and a decent website, it’s as important as driving. And easier to learn and do, and requiring less talent.

That suggestion produced some criticism from designers, “upset that I would recommend that anyone do pretty good design.” Which leads to this response:

The fact is, business people do copywriting, simple legal and accounting work and more, on their own, every day. You compose your own email, don’t you? If your legal decisions were as bad as your design, you’d get fired in a minute for libeling people. Getting pretty good at things is merely a first step, but one that you need to take in order to be ready to spend the money to get great.

And I want to emphasize that last sentence, which belongs in the same real-world and practical reality as Obsorne’s wisdom above:

Getting pretty good at things is merely a first step, but one that you need to take in order to be ready to spend the money to get great.

Things in business are rarely simple and obvious. It’s hard, even dangerous, to come up with general rules that always apply. Sure, everything should always be insanely great; but there are times, projects, issues, on which our business is better with pretty good, and sometimes, even, adequate.

What we have to do is figure out which time is which.

Great Talk on Creativity

Creativity

When I saw that Bob Sutton called it "the best talk on creativity I ever saw," I had to see it myself. He's the author of several books I really like, a Stanford University prof, and his Work Matters blog has been on my list — here, in the sidebar — of good blogs for more than a year now.

When I saw it, I couldn't resist; I wanted to share it. Here's just a sample quote from somewhere in the middle of this talk:

…not just writers, but creative people across all genres it seems have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable.

… even the ones those who didn't literally commit suicide seemed to be really undone by their gifts.  Normal Mailer just before he died, in the last interview, said 'every one of my books has killed me more.' An extraordinary statement to make about one's life's work. But we don't even blink when we hear somebody say this because we've heard that kind of stuff for so long and somehow we've collectively internalized and accepted this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow linked, and that artistry, in the end, will somehow always, ultimately, lead to anguish.

And the question I want to ask here today, is: Are you guys all cool with that idea?

Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of Eat, Pray, Love, a beautifully written, thoughtful, biographical travelogue, sort of. I liked that book so much that I was happy to click on Bob's link and see what she had to say. She has a fascinating new — old actually, more than new, but for that you'll want to listen to her — angle on creativity, work involving creativity, the pressure of the last successful work, and the value of showing up. This is really worth watching. And, by the way, if for any reason you don't see the video here, you can click here to go to the source.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Spellchecker and politics

Creativity, Technology, Writing

I found this interesting. It was in David Pogue’s column last week. He’s the New York Times Technology writer:

Q: David: I’ve noticed this for a year, and have not been able to get Microsoft to change it: Type "Obama" or "obama" in Microsoft Word or Outlook, and the spelling checker recommends "Osama" as the corrected spelling. How could this continue month after month, especially now that Mr. Obama is likely to be the Democratic candidate for president? Hope you can connect with appropriate folks at Microsoft and get this changed.

A: Well, it does seem like a silly glitch. But I’m not sure even I could convince Microsoft to release a new version of Microsoft Office software just to correct a single entry in the spelling dictionary. But if it helps, here you go: How about it, Microsoft?

Freedom Cheddar

Creativity, Marketing

I like this label. My wife bought this cheese yesterday at the local farmer’s market that runs on Tuesdays in the summer. I apologize for the quality — not the best scan — and in case you can’t read it, the main text block on the label reads:

"Freedom from hunger & thirst, freedom from discomfort, freedom from fear & distress, freedom from pain, injury & disease, freedom to express normal behavior."

Not bad for a piece of cheese, no?

Sometimes the Best Management is No Management At All

Creativity

Quoting 3M’s William Coyne:

After you plant a seed in the ground, you don’t dig it up every week to see how it is doing.

Robert Sutton, probably best known for his "No A**holes" book, gives a quick three minutes on creativity, starting it with this interesting quote, which I like to relate to the idea (my post the Outriders last week) that creativity is not usually the result of discipline and methodology. He starts:

One of the things that gets very clear if you look at research on what it takes for creative work to happen, there’s a lot of evidence that the things that managers typically do (especially if they have MBAs) — asking a lot of questions, asking what the deliverables are, asking what your value-added is — tend to drive out creativity.

 

So I thought this was a good three-minute reminder. If you can’t see the video for any reason, click here for the source video in YouTube.