Creative Technologist – Division of labor vs the return of the generalist? - Anders Wahlquist - CATScan - Creativity Online

What happens to roles as a small technology organisation evolves and grows from B-Reel co-founder Anders Wahlquist Starting B-Reel 11 years ago, we three founders had clear roles. Petter [Westlund, left]: designer, programmer, motion artist; swiss army knife in all things digital production. Pelle [Nilsson, center]: producer, director. Swiss army knife in all things TV and TVC production. Anders [Wahlquist, right]: business / key account. Swiss army knife all things Sales / HR / Business / legal / admin. Like a cell structure B-Reel has since developed organically looking for people beeing very allroundish. Generalists. Basically we have been happy with that. People overlap. Starting projects, we brought the whole team to the brief and collected ideas from all angles. Team effort.

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Creating Passion with Managed Emotions - Dan Rockwell

Passionate leaders are intensely focused on clear targets. Emotional leaders express unmanaged feelings that typically hinder progress and hamper relationships. Leaders need passion. On the other hand, unmanaged emotion is counterproductive. John Maxwell expresses the benefit of focused intensity when he says, “A great leader’s courage to fulfill his vision comes from passion…” Effective leaders embrace their passion. At the same time they manage their emotions. How can leaders who lean toward the emotional side manage their emotions? I suggest, turning your emotions inward rather than releasing them like an avalanche on others. I know I’m breaking with established thinking. Everyone seems to say, “Express don’t suppress your emotions.” However, turning emotion inward isn’t suppression. It’s embracing, internally managing, and intentionally focusing emotional energy.

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The Future of Decision Making: Less Intuition, More Evidence - Andrew McAfee - Harvard Business Review

Human intuition can be astonishingly good, especially after it's improved by experience. Savvy poker players are so good at reading their opponents' cards and bluffs that they seem to have x-ray vision. Firefighters can, under extreme duress, anticipate how flames will spread through a building. And nurses in neonatal ICUs can tell if a baby has a dangerous infection even before blood test results come back from the lab. The lexicon to describe this phenomenon is mostly mystical in nature. Poker players have a sixth sense; firefighters feel the blaze's intentions; Nurses just know what seems like an infection. They can't even tell us what data and cues they use to make their excellent judgments; their intuition springs from a deep place that can't be easily examined. . Examples like these give many people the impression that human intuition is generally reliable, and that we should rely more on the decisions and predictions that come to us in the blink of an eye.

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Narcissism and the Importance of Partnership and Strategy - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

As the great Nebraskan Fred Astaire (born Frederick Austerlitz, Omaha, 1899) used to sing, "There may be trouble ahead..." An article in the latest issue of Academy of Management Learning and Education reports that over the past 25 years college students in the U.S. have scored steadily higher on tests for narcissism. Professors Bergman, Westerman and Daly note that "the mean narcissism score of 2006 college students on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) approached that of a celebrity sample of movie stars, reality TV winners and famous musicians." Fabulous. If that weren't bad news enough, "Narcissism in Management Education" (Academy of Management Learning and Education, 2010, Vol. 9, No. 1, 119-131) also cites research indicating that "narcissistic tendencies such as materialistic values and money importance tend to be particularly evident in business students." Most studies of narcissists in business focus on their usually awful eventual effect on co-workers.

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Using rivalry to spur innovation - McKinsey Quarterly - Strategy - Innovation

Business leaders tend to raise their eyebrows when they read about parallels between history and modern management—and for good reason. There are undoubtedly many people who offer better leadership lessons than Attila the Hun, and it is unclear whether Alexander the Great can tell us much about business strategy. So it’s with some trepidation that we set forth the premise of this article: that the Italian Renaissance was such an extraordinary period of creativity it can shed light on how to stimulate business innovation.

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