The Balance Needed to Lead Change

Kerry A. Bunker and Michael Wakefield shed some light on why leading change is so difficult...

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Books offer advice on harnessing creativity

Richard Pachter from the Miami Herald has recently reviewed a few book releases on harnessing creativity that could be of interst to you, it's looking at things from a USA point of view though has some relevance to Australian's as well... How do we get out of this mess we're in? The United States doesn't manufacture very much any more, nor is agriculture likely to re-emerge as the driving force of our economy. American popular culture is still dominant throughout the world, but many of the movie studios and remaining record companies are foreign-owned. Ditto with industries like brewing (Miller, Anheuser-Busch), pharmaceuticals and many more.

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Launch Speech on The Results of the National Research Survey "Is Australian management creative and innovative?"

Here is the full text of the speech I gave at the Annual General Meeting of the Australian Services Rountable in Sydney on November 5 launching the Creative Leadership Forum National Research Report"Is Australian management creative and innovative?" To-day the word innovation appears almost daily in the media. There are 360 million references to innovation on Google and on the Google Daily RSS feed I receive notice of new books and articles released daily globally on the topic. Every expert offers a different solution! Every job advertisement talks about the applicant having the need to be creative and innovative. It appears this thing called innovation is a common everyday occurrence. One might be able to talk about it as if it is. In practice, the reality is very different.

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The Work of Change This

Seth Godin, marketing guru and writer of the supposedly Number 1 ranked business blog on the web had the original idea for Change This. If you look at his site, you will be overcome by the mundanity and self promotion. Hell, here is another self absorbed obsessively driven over achiever. I try not to be cynical, however I am highly suspicious of books with titles like Small is the New Big, All Marketers are Liars, Free Prize Inside, Survival is Not Enough. So I was shocked to find the idea for Change This was his. Change This is not a blog in the sense of the concept. This site actually offers more than some pithy comments and links. Change This offers erudite and often controversial manifestos written by some of the world's leading thinkers, offered for free. All you have to do is subscribe at the site. The thinking behind Change This

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Creative Leadership and the Water Cube at the Beijing Olympics

I don't ever want to hear another engineer say I am not creative after attending a presentation on innovation and creativity by Tristan Carfrae, Senior Fellow at Arup, the designers and structural engineers in the consortium who constructed the Water Cube for the Olympic Aquatic Centre at the Beijing Olympics. What was particularly interesting about Carfrae's presentation was his proposition innovation in the building industry is very difficult and when you look at the simple physics of his proposition, he has a point. Every building is a prototype that mustn't fail. In structural engineering, you just cannot fail or the building will fall down. Engineering is calculable but it is not the calculations which fail. It is what the engineer chooses to calculate that will bring about the failure and in this sense, engineers' thinking can be compared to the way artists work.

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