The Pursuit of Flow and Why It is Important To Work and Personal Satisfaction

There is a scene in the movie “The Hustler” where Fast Eddie, played by Paul Newman, says: “It’s a great feeling, boy, it’s a real great feeling when you’re right and you KNOW you’re right. It’s like all of a sudden I got oil in my arm. The pool cue is a part of me… you don’t have to look, you just KNOW. You make shots that nobody’s ever made before.” What the character is describing is being in a state of flow—that enthralled state, when your level of skill matches the level of the challenge. You become so engrossed in what you do that you forget to eat. You escape time. We’ve all been there. It’s what athletes call “being in the zone” and what musicians refer to as “being in the groove.” The concept of flow is the brainchild of psychologist Mihali Csikszentmihalyi. In an interesting talk a few years ago, Csikszentmihalyi talks about the concept of flow and about his more recent book, Good Business: Flow and the Making of Meaning. In it he writes that success is being involved in an endeavor that helps others and, at the same time, makes you feel happy.

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Anybody Can Learn to Become A Better Idea Generator

Everybody can make himself better at creating ideas. People can increase their creativity by improving their knowledge about the topic ideas should be generated about, practising a range of idea-generation methods, making efforts to create a lot of ideas and having the right attitude, says Lassi Liikkanen, a researcher from Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT. Liikkanen has just finished his PhD on creating ideas in conceptual design. In his thesis, Liikkanen modelled the idea-generation process. For him creating ideas means that a person processes memorized information and combines it in new ways. According to Liikkanen, results improve if the person obtains more background information on the topic. The more a person knows about the topic and can learn from others, the more chances he has to make novel combinations of knowledge.

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Creativity: How to Love and not Fear the “C” Word Behind Innovation

In a recent Silicon Valley Watcher post, Founder/Publisher Tom Foremski blogged about “10 Reasons Why This is a Great Time to Invest in Innovation.” At the end of his post, which listed many excellent reasons why now, in an economic downturn, it is an excellent time to innovate, Tom concluded with: “The next upturn will be led by what I call New Rules Enterprises, these are organizations that are highly efficient and have made the most of the economies of Internet 2.0.” I agree with the ideas in Tom’s post, but I feel the need to add a few important thoughts to his last statement. Being highly efficient is often desirable, but only when accompanied by an allowance for creativity and free thinking that cannot always be timed precisely to the minute and packed neatly into a box.

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Break Group Think, Outsiders Can Help You to See Things - Paul Sloane

How can you break out of the group-think that affects most large organizations? How can you escape from the corporate frameworks that shape discussions and ideas? Philips is moving from a high-volume electronics manufacturere to a design-led, lifestyle technology company. It needs help to get there so it set up a 'simplicity board'. Philips reckoned it needed a fresh perspective from creative types with no ties to the company. So it formed the simplicity board, a group of external specialists in health care, fashion, design, and architecture. "Philips was too inward-looking," says Andrea Ragnetti, Chief Marketing Offier. "To really embed simplicity into the company's DNA, we needed an element of vision."

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OKGo shows true creative leadership and innovation

The story behind our featured video of the month is the perfect example of generational change. A perfect case study in what happens when organisations fail to recognise the changing nature of the market and fail to adapt their business models to suot the market. It is OKGo that has shown creative leadership here, not EMI. It is worth reading their blog to see how well they handled this.

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