The secret to great work is great play from Presentation Zen

Garr Reynolds Presentation Zen Blog is without doubt consistently the world's leading blog on creativity in presentation and design and here is his latest offering in full. The secret to great work is great play We were born to play. Play is how we learn and develop our minds and our bodies, and it's also how we express ourselves. Play comes naturally to us. I was reminded of this while listening to a cool little jazz gig near the beach in Maui a couple of months ago. I snapped this photo below of a little girl enjoying the simple beauty of that musical moment by dancing happily all by herself.I love this picture above because it shows both adults and a child at play. The adult musicians are expressing themselves through jazz, a complex form of play with rules and constraints but also great freedom, freedom that leads to tremendous creativity and enjoyment for the players and the listeners.

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Can truly great design be done the open source way? | opensource.com

This is a blog worth posting in full as it addresses the issue of open source, crowdsourcing and the concept of how ideas evolve in practice in organisations.

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Cultivating Innovation And Creativity, Not Managing It - Nussbaum on Design, BusinessWeek

Bruce Nussbaum gets my award as the most consistently correct journalist on the topic of creativity and innovation and although the design principles he outlines below are not new, he is one journalist who is well informed, good at information gathering and sharing his knowledge simply and articulately around this topic.. Here is his latest post. There is a big movement in B-Schools and Design Schools to generate a new liberal arts paradigm that goes beyond learning how to think critically about an individual’s role in society to learning how to build critically based on people’s connection to cultural context. Call it Pragmatic Liberal Arts or Practical Liberal Arts. I call it Innovation Arts or Design Arts because it focusses on the “as if…” prototyping and creating that goes on in serious play (and which our schools succeed in stamping out by grade 2). I’ll be discussing the idea of a new Innovation Arts paradigm at The Future of Design confab in Stanford next week.

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Design Leads Us Where Exactly - Is 2009 The Year Service Design Emerges

Lucy Kimbell is the Clark Fellow in Design Leadership at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford with a background in interaction design and visual/live arts. Her interest has been in the field of design thinking. This piece is from her recent blog and is an excellent summary of this emerging field. A Google search for “service design” is one way of indexing what is a growing field of practice and scholarly enquiry. On the basis of a search today (December 16, 2009), the term is resonant enough to have a long-ish entry in wikipedia (although it “provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject”). What comes next are links to two consultancies: Engine (based in London) and live|work (ditto). Practice leads theory, then. But although they are leading the field, they are extremely small – 20 people at the former, 13 people at the latter, according to their websites today. This was a year in which service design began to move away from being the province of designers educated and practicing in the art school tradition to an activity in which designers have something important to contribute, but which is not necessarily owned by Design.

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Executive Education is Dead As We Know It, Where to from Here?

This is no idle statement. Read the opening statement from the Harvard Business Centenary Global Business Summit "Business Education in 21st Century. ...On the whole, MBA programs are in decline. Their value is being questioned, and they are seen as overly emphasizing analytics rather than skill development and experiences. Deans, executives, and recruiters identified four main areas where current MBA programs are falling short: leadership; globalization; communication/presentation skills; and problem identification in ambiguous environments... It came as a shock to The Creative Leadership Forum to see our own research so strongly validated on the failure of business school education to provide practical business skills by the most famous business school brand globally. And the trend is not just in America. Since the global financial crisis in November 2008, Australia's leading business schools have had dramatic drops in attendance of up to 70%

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