Overview: Business

"how can you use ChatGPT to generate ideas and brainstorm within Obsidian?", which is currently my note-taking tool of choice. First, some generic advice for prompting:"be specific about the outcome that you want to achieve... providing a prompt that contains more descriptive language ...give preceding prompts ... [specify the] resp…

Here's a good question: "If we carefully closed the right feedback loops, could we construct a creative flywheel that generates finished works?... knowledge gardening. You collect and plant idea seeds, returning periodically to water and weed... As a kind of self-organizing system, it can’t happen without some kind of feedback loop... …

Great piece on the implications for creators of the shift to algorithmically managed content platforms."Vine was an entirely new cultural platform ... Twitter had unwittingly enabled the creation of a true subculture... [but] didn’t know how to make money from it... in contrast... TikTok has prospered because it generally seems to understa…

What did I learn about learning as I explored using Zettelkasten idea and knowledge management to write five newsletters about disinformation in the 2020 US elections?

I needed to review everything I had ever Hubbed relevant to surveillance capitalism, polarisation, social media and society... As I cast around for something interesting to say, I realised a MyHub.ai Service Page could help organise and clarify my thoughts: I would use it to create a Zettelkasten Permanent Note...While not a blog post, it is defin…

the best skill to teach children is reinvention... the author of Sapiens reveals what 2050 has in store for humankind...once technology enables us to engineer bodies, brains and minds... We don’t know what people will do for a living, we don’t know how armies or bureaucracies will function...too many schools focus on cramming information. In the p…

Luhmann... published more than 70 books and over 400 scholarly articles... one of the most important sociologists of the twentieth century ... “I’m not thinking everything on my own. Much of it happens in my Zettelkasten”...adopt his method and ... learn better, think better, publish more, and be more creative... A Zettelkasten is ... a box of not…

In his new book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, Adam investigates who comes up with great ideas, how, and what we can do to have more of them.... They often procrastinate, and that's how they incubate ideas.... Their parents focus more on values than rules... One of the risks is, you know, you have everybody marching in a different…

innovation is a series of steps, and that innovators possess certain characteristics... Almost everybody [has] innovative traits... the ability to think abstractly, having deep and broad knowledge, curiosity, openness to risk, grit, and dissatisfaction with the status quo... seek out experiences to put those traits to use

Many famous scientists have something in common—they didn’t work long hours... lives were full and memorable, their work was prodigious, and yet their days are also filled with downtime... great students didn’t just practice more than the average, they practiced more deliberately... engaging with full concentration in a special activity to improv…

“agile” describes so many different work systems that it’s become an almost meaningless term... for IBM “the leaders have to be with the squads [his word for small teams] and the squads have to be in a location.”... Research suggests remote workers are more productive and log more hours than employees who work in the office, and for many companie…

Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," ... found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects.... virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings... "Diversity... seems to bring out the turtle in all of …

What determines whether the ideas we generate are truly creative? Recent research of ours finds that one common factor often gets in the way: we tend to undervalue the benefits of persistence.

Huge longform exposé - don't know whether to be impressed, amused or horrified: "... what did it mean for an online retailer with annual sales of more than $1 billion, that fills 280,000 orders per week, to be “self-organized”?... Holacracy is ... just one example of a growing movement... that seeks to apply insights derived from evolutionar…

First, some useful definitions: "Imagination is envisioning things that don’t exist... Creativity is applying imagination to address a challenge. Innovation is applying creativity to generate unique solutions. And entrepreneurship is applying innovations, scaling the ideas, by inspiring others’ imagination... the way to innovate is to look a…

"what people really want is to be treated like individuals and given the tools to help themselves.... Rigour is the cold, hard fact of insight. Magic is the creative talent ... Without great insight, creative may be ill-informed or poorly targeted.... Meanwhile, a data-based body of evidence that isn’t supported by creativity fails to creat…

Distributed intelligence means you need to find a social process, not a data-driven solution... You cannot outsource leadership to your analytics group. - Thinking Small: 3 Ways To Remain Creative In A World Of Big Data | Co.Create | creativity + culture + commerce

"Nice way of bringing creatives in to think (ugh) out of the box - run a science fiction contest: "The Art Of Future Warfare ...is based on the idea that writers, artists and game designers have a lot to offer policy wonks... “Unconventional,imaginative thinking and expression can contribute meaningfully to the study and professional conduc…

While an excellent takedown of 'traditional' (group-focused) brainstorming techniques, this article should mention that individuals applying brainstorming techniques get good results. "In every case, four people working individually generated between 30 to 40 percent more ideas than four people working in a group. Their results were of a higher q…

"Here's what I've come up with for advice to the 20-year-old version of me on being creative." Particularly like Neil Gaiman's advice: " A lot of times ideas will turn up when you're doing something else. And, most of all, ideas come from confluence - they come from two things flowing together. " Which is why I-Labs is all about bringing peo…

Enjoying this excellent guide to ideation by Krysta Curtis. Something for the weekend: admit it, you won't have time for this much fun during the week: - Paint-by-Idea — Medium

Yet another list. My fave: "Geniuses produce a lot of crap before they get to the good stuff. " - 4 Things We Have Wrong About Creativity | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

Easier said than done. It'd be a lot simpler if we could just Kill the Mediocre. "From startups to global enterprises I see two things. One, I've observed the voicing of ideas that immediately vanish into the ether of complacence, politics or blatant disregard. Two, I've witnessed the escape of morale where employees refuse to share ideas to im…

"coming up with creative ideas on demand is only part of the answer. Just as crucial is how ideas link to action. ...we have developed an integrative process for idea generation based on approaches drawn education, consumer research, business model design and emergent strategy... The first three steps are designed to help managers understa…

the company that invented Gore-Tex... “organised in small teams of 8-12 people.... three layers of management, the CEO, a handful of functional heads, and Associates … in a company of 8000!

Worth a read, food for thought: "But while we love reading up on how these leaders turned the tide in their industry or organization, recent research suggests that most creative people aren't given the opportunity to lead. We love stories of creative people; we just don't want to be led by them."