Don't Insist On English - The Creative Problem with Ideas Always Being Considered in English - TED Video

At TEDxDubai, longtime English teacher Patricia Ryan asks a provocative question: Is the world's focus on English preventing the spread of great ideas in other languages? (For instance: what if Einstein had to pass the TOEFL?) It's a passionate defense of translating and sharing ideas.

The Art of Choosing - Sheena Iyengar, Columbia Business School

Another great TED presentation. We all think we're good at making choices; many of us even enjoy making them. Sheena Iyengar looks deeply at choosing and has discovered many surprising things about it. For instance, her famous "jam study," done while she was a grad student, quantified a counterintuitive truth about decisionmaking -- that when we're presented with too many choices, like 24 varieties of jam, we tend not to choose anything at all. (This and subsequent, equally ingenious experiments have provided rich material for Malcolm Gladwell and other pop chroniclers of business and the human psyche.)

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The Creativity Based Resource Centre at the International Center for Studies in Creativity.

I stumbled across this wonderful resource The Creativity Based Resource Centre at the International Center for Studies in Creativity at State University of New York, Buffalo accidentally and came across a treasure trove on finely researched and written theses on creative problem solving, creative leadership and cross-cultural creativity from the only Masters programme globally to my knowledge that specialises in this topic.

This site is highly recommended and well worth visiting.

Think Like Chinese!!

The difficulty Westerners have doing business in China is in the cultural differences that affect the commercial realities. Westerners identify an opportunity; thinking revolves around making that opportunity work financially in order to do the deal. If the figures stack up the game then becomes getting the customer, regardless of who she/he is, to sign on the dotted line. A new book Think Like Chinese written by husband and wife team, Chinese born and educated Zhang Haihua (Helen Zhang) and Australian born and educated lawyer, Geoff Baker quickly exposes the folly of this thinking. Haihua and Geoff, a former investment banker, have their own management consultant business China Time Inc based in Shanghai and their purpose for writing this book is to offer a practical perspective on the vexed issue of business dealings from the Chinese perspective. Their proposition is that it is important to understand the cultural thinking of the Chinese in order to understand how a business negotiation plays out. They identify 5 core elements that drive Chinese cultural thinking and

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