Author Archives: Mike Brown
Here’s my rationale for getting all the rules down upfront. Obviously somebody spent a lot of time coming up with them and is very invested in others following the rules. When you blatantly challenge rules or break them outright, you tend to wind up in a back-and-forth confrontation and discussion about why the rules are or aren’t right. When you reach that conversation, you typically face a fairly low probability of changing the mind of the authority figure protecting the rules. Continue reading
The past year seems to have yielded various waves of content celebrating making mistakes. Advancing the “failure at the heart of innovation” theme seems to have become a cause célèbre for the creativity and innovation set. Celebrating mistakes as part of innovation was the topic of a July Innochat on Twitter on innovation failure and, most recently, a Wall Street Journal article on “Better Ideas through Failure.” Continue reading
One of my most popular blog posts ever here on Innovation Excellence was on extreme creativity lessons from the TLC reality TV series “Cake Boss” starring Buddy Valastro and his cake baking family at Carlo’s Bakery. New “Cake Boss” episodes started last week on TLC, so it is time to share five more extreme creativity lessons… Continue reading
Maybe it has been a tough week. Maybe it has been a tough you don’t even remember how long. This weekend, give yourself a break, and remember these things: Continue reading
If only people weren’t beholden to a planned obsolescence mind-set. Only if diverse resources collaborate to be collectively smarter, wiser, and richer. In the shortest 2011 TEDxKC talk of the evening, TED fellow and Polish-born fusion physicist Marcin Jakubowski shared an overview of his work just an hour north of Kansas City directing Open Source Ecology in developing the Global Village Construction Set. Its objective is a set of 50 open-sourced blueprints for the most important machines that allow life to exist. These construction and farming tools can be created from scratch and form what has been called a “civilization starter kit.” Essentially all the knowledge to build the machines can be captured on one DVD. Jakubowski and the others onsite at his farm are in the midst of rapidly building prototypes for the low-cost machines (the tractor was built in 6 days). The prototype building may have been the … Continue reading
The Wall Street Journal ran a profile this past weekend on Soleio Cuervo, a product designer and member of the team that created the Facebook “Like” button. Since I always appreciate a profile that looks behind the scenes at how someone who creates does the creating, I recommend you check the article out if you haven’t seen it already. In the meantime, here are 5 creativity lessons from Soleio Cuervo and his Facebook experience that stood out in the Wall Street Journal article: Before you start creating, push yourself to look for intriguing analogous situations to what you’re working on. Learn from how others address comparable situations to yours. Plan in a different creative medium than you’ll ultimately implement in. Draw the document you’re creating. Write prose about the design you’ll be doing. Test what you’re working on with real-life situations/data/elements, etc. Real users don’t use things in clean elegant … Continue reading
