The psychology of change management - McKinsey Quarterly - Organization - Change Management

Companies can transform the attitudes and behavior of their employees by applying psychological breakthroughs that explain why people think and act as they do. Over the past 15 or so years, programs to improve corporate organizational performance have become increasingly common. Yet they are notoriously difficult to carry out. Success depends on persuading hundreds or thousands of groups and individuals to change the way they work, a transformation people will accept only if they can be persuaded to think differently about their jobs. In effect, CEOs must alter the mind-sets of their employees—no easy task.

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The Link Between Ownership and Creativity: Wray Herbert - The Huffington Post

Americans like to own their homes, and the rules and conventions for ownership are generally well understood. So it's easy to forget that in many corners of the globe the rules are more ambiguous--and more open to challenge. Indeed, there are an estimated one billion squatters in the world today--people who, mostly out of necessity, are living on property they do not own and cannot afford. Squatters rarely have a voice, but in a few industrialized cities where they do, their claims are usually founded on the idea of improvement. If an owner abandons or neglects a property, shouldn't another human being be allowed to take shelter, invest sweat equity in making it a home, and lay some claim to it? In other words, does hard work improving a property convey some right to occupancy, even ownership?

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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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How Creative Flow is Like Sex | Psychology Today

"Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process." That useful advice, credited to author Isabel Allende, seems like a good introduction to the idea that how you make love has commonalities with your journey toward creative expression. Consider... 1. In both creative flow and sexual activity, you surrender control. "When I write, I feel out of control in a lovely way," a writer told me. "The analogy that comes to mind is sex: a heightening of senses, a rush, no concept of time, a dimming of the external world, an altered state in which creation is the unconscious though central intent." A popular novelist (Carolyn See) said it this way: "When I create, I'm not thinking. In a sense, you're better off not thinking about it. Like sex, you don't want to think, oh now we're in foreplay.

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R.D Laing on the Nonsense of Categorisation, Homogeneity and Modernity

Famous Scottish psychiatrist, Dr R.D Laing offers prophetic insights given this video was originally recorded in the 1980's. The implications of categorization and homogeneity, in a modern world dominated by IT infrastructure, for creative leadership means it has become harder and harder for an individual to express and have accepted unique views if they cannot be categorized for later tagging on the world wide web. This video beautifully captures the nonsense of this prevailing ideology and suddenly we begin to see the cultural damage of homogeneity forced on the world by the IT industry.