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Tips for creative success from Pixar. Randy Nelson is Dean of Pixar University and gives a really nice 9-min talk below with important content for all professionals and students. The talk is called Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age. Pixar is the kind of company that focuses hard on the development of its people, and Nelson is someone who has a lot of experience helping very creative people communicate and collaborate better. I like the way Nelson expresses his ideas on stage and connects with his audience at this Apple Education Leadership Summit, but it's his ideas that are really the takeaway here. Below the video, I summarize some of his key points for your review. Improv and collaboration Pixar uses improv as a mechanism of collaboration.

What should we be looking for? Aptitudes for success in a creative world (1) Mastery of subject (depth). Collaboration and education There are lessons to be learned from Pixar. H/T @SirKenRobinson. The Way We Work Is Changing - Hannah Morgan. 10 Reasons to Stop Apologizing for Your Online Life - Alexandra Samuel - The Conversation. By Alexandra Samuel | 9:30 AM July 15, 2010 [Visit Alexandra Samuel's new blog on HBR.org at #thankyoujesus for irl and online friends. Couldn’t live w/o either. Laptop down. It’s IRL Face Time! It was so cool meeting you irl!

:) IRL: In Real Life. And it’s a lie. If we still refer to the offline world as “real life,” it’s only a sign of deep denial — or unwarranted shame — about what reality looks like in the 21st century. The Internet’s impact on our daily lives, experiences and relationships is real. And yet many of us feel like we don’t have a lot of choices about the role of the Internet in our lives. Still, the fact that life online can occasionally surprise and delight us points us towards the truth: it’s not the Internet itself that leads to pathologies like cyber-bullying, spam and identity theft.

There’s no denying the differences between life online and off. It’s time to start living in 21st century reality: a reality that is both on- and offline. 1. Why Your Customers Don't Want to Talk to You - Matt Dixon and Lara Ponomareff - The Conversation. Higher Education Is Overrated; Skills Aren't - Michael Schrage. By Michael Schrage | 10:38 AM July 29, 2010 With innovation, entrepreneurship and significantly smarter fiscal policies, America should eventually escape its “hireless recovery.”

But what won’t hasten new hiring — and might even dampen job prospects — is the mythical belief that higher education invariably leads to higher employment and better jobs. It doesn’t. Foolish New York Times stories notwithstanding, education is a misleading-to-malignant proxy for economic productivity or performance. Are they right? Eduzealots have done a truly awful thing to serious human capital conversations and analyses around employment. We have a huge branding issue. As Atkinson’s anecdotes affirm, there’s no shortage of “well- educated” college graduates who can’t write intelligible synopses or manage simple spreadsheets.

Higher education institutions do decently with knowledge transmission. This is part of the vast structural shift in the human capital marketplace worldwide. The Creativity Crisis. Back in 1958, Ted Schwarzrock was an 8-year-old third grader when he became one of the “Torrance kids,” a group of nearly 400 Minneapolis children who completed a series of creativity tasks newly designed by professor E. Paul Torrance. Schwarzrock still vividly remembers the moment when a psychologist handed him a fire truck and asked, “How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?” He recalls the psychologist being excited by his answers. In fact, the psychologist’s session notes indicate Schwarzrock rattled off 25 improvements, such as adding a removable ladder and springs to the wheels. That wasn’t the only time he impressed the scholars, who judged Schwarzrock to have “unusual visual perspective” and “an ability to synthesize diverse elements into meaningful products.”

The accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful, and that’s what’s reflected in the tests. There is never one right answer. Is this learnable?