Six Fundamental Shifts in the Way We Work - John Hagel III, John Seely Brown - Harvard Business Review

It's been a while since we posted here because of all the craziness surrounding the launch of our book, The Power of Pull, but we are happy to announce that we're going to be resuming a regular schedule of postings to build on the themes in our book. We thought we would kick off our new postings by summarizing some of the ideas from Pull that resonated the most in our many conversations from the last few months. from The Power of Pull. The Red Queen was optimistic. Nearly everybody in management is familiar with the Red Queen effect, taken from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass: this is the notion that "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."

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How Anger Inspires Creativity For Some | Tom Jacobs

Countless ideas have been offered to help stimulate one’s creativity. Daydream. Brainstorm with others. Follow your intuition. Or simply sit passively as someone speaks to you in an angry tone of voice. Oddly enough, the latter approach appears to work, at least for certain people. That’s the conclusion of a new study from the Netherlands. Writing in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, a research team led by University of Amsterdam psychologist Gerben Van Kleef describes an experiment involving 63 undergraduates. To begin, each filled out an 11-item “personal need for structure scale,” in which they rate the degree to which they agreed with such statements as “I become uncomfortable when the rules in a situation are not clear.”

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Evolution and Creativity: Why Humans Triumphed - Matt Ridley, WSJ.com

How did one ape 45,000 years ago happen to turn into a planet dominator? The answer lies in an epochal collision of creativity writes Matt Ridley [EVOLUTION] Masterfile Human evolution presents a puzzle. Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000 years—the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a planet dominator with rapidly progressing technologies. Once "progress" started to produce new tools, different ways of life and burgeoning populations, it accelerated all over the world, culminating in agriculture, cities, literacy and all the rest. Yet all the ingredients of human success—tool making, big brains, culture, fire, even language—seem to have been in place half a million years before and nothing happened. Tools were made to the same monotonous design for hundreds of thousands of years and the ecological impact of people was minimal. Then suddenly—bang!—culture exploded, starting in Africa. Why then, why there?

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Exploring the Brain’s Role in Creativity - Neuropsychiatry Review, Fred Balzac

Being one of the true geniuses of the modern era, Albert Einstein recognized that a useful method for understanding the brain’s role in creativity was to study the brains of highly creative people. He also realized that there would be a great deal of interest in examining his own brain after his death, so he willed that his brain be removed before cremation. However, nearly all of the 240 blocks into which Einstein’s brain was dissected were lost and never analyzed. Thirty years later, the Brodmann’s area 39 portion of Einstein’s brain was analyzed histologically by Marian C. Diamond, PhD, and colleagues. They reported that this area of Einstein’s brain contained a higher proportion of glial cells versus neurons, compared with the brains of control subjects. Assuming that the paucity of cortical neurons was not the result of aging (the control subjects were significantly younger than Einstein at the time of his death), how did the loss of neurons relate to Einstein’s creative genius?

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Reading: Is It Being Changed by Technology? - Steven Johnson, NYTimes.com

THE point of books is to combat loneliness,” David Foster Wallace observes near the beginning of “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” David Lipsky’s recently published, book-length interview with him. If you happen to be reading the book on the Kindle from Amazon, Mr. Wallace’s observation has an extra emphasis: a dotted underline running below the phrase. Not because Mr. Wallace or Mr. Lipsky felt that the point was worth stressing, but because a dozen or so other readers have highlighted the passage on their Kindles, making it one of the more “popular” passages in the book. Amazon calls this new feature “popular highlights.” It may sound innocuous enough, but it augurs even bigger changes to come.

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