The Top 5 Qualities of Productive Creatives (And How to Identify Them!) A recent BusinessWeek article reported that, “According to a new survey of 1,500 chief executives conducted by IBM’s Institute for Business Value, CEOs identify ‘creativity’ as the most important leadership competency for the successful enterprise of the future.” While the study’s results will come as no surprise to hard-working creative professionals, they do raise an important question: How do we identify – and hire for – the qualities that add up to creativity? By our lights, the notion of “creativity” can’t be separated from the skills required for creative execution. So our analysis of the characteristics crucial to creativity focuses particularly on the skills that facilitate putting ideas into action. Below, we outline five key qualities of particularly productive creatives, followed by some recommendations for how to uncover them in potential hires, co-workers, and collaborators. 1. As Albert Einstein said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
The other school of economics. Aide-Memoire blog. Life as a JenY… MaverickWoman. Think It’s Hard Being a Woman in Tech? Try It in the 1940s. There may be no topic high-profile women in the Valley tire of more than the question of why there aren’t more high-profile women in the Valley. I’ve written about it for nearly every publication for which I’ve worked. No matter who I talk to, the upshot always seems the same: Most people wish there were more women CEOs in the Valley, the few that do exist hate talking about the topic because they’d rather just be recognized as good CEOs or founders, and people tend to blame the problem on a lack of women in science and math and the lack of a work-life balance when starting a company. I don’t mean to sound insensitive. There are definitely times my life has been harder as a woman just writing about this scene. But wake me when there’s something new to say.
Still want to obsess about it? You may have seen this older Hopper on 60 Minutes or Late Night with David Letterman, but Beyer tells the story of Hopper’s younger years—demons, challenges, triumphs and all. PEG · With cloud computing, the world is not flat. Does location matter? Or, put another way, is the world no longer flat? Many cloud and SaaS providers work under the assumption that where we store data where it is most efficient from an application performance point of view, ignoring political considerations. This runs counter to many company and governments who care greatly where their data is stored. Have we entered a time where location does matter, not for technical reasons, but for political reasons? Is globalisation (as a political thing) finally starting to impact IT architecture and strategy? Just who is taking your order? Thomas Friedman‘s book, The World is Flat, contained a number of stories which where real eye openers. Telecommunications made the world flat, as cheap telecommunications allows us to locate work wherever it is cheapest.
In the background, whilst this was happening, enterprise applications went from common to ubiquitous. The growth of the U.S. enterprise application market (via INPUT) Like this: Like Loading... LET IT DIE: Rushkoff on the economy - ARTHUR MAGAZINE – WE FOUND. “Final Bell” by Arik Roper (UPDATE: “Hack Money, Hack Banking” by Douglas Rushkoff, the March 20 follow-up to “Let It Die,” is available here.) LET IT DIE by Douglas Rushkoff March 15, 2009 With any luck, the economy will never recover. In a perfect world, the stock market would decline another 70 or 80 percent along with the shuttering of about that fraction of our nation’s banks. Yes, unemployment would rise as hundreds of thousands of formerly well-paid brokers and bankers lost their jobs; but at least they would no longer be extracting wealth at our expense. They would need to be fed, but that would be a lot cheaper than keeping them in the luxurious conditions they’re enjoying now.
Alas, I’m not being sarcastic. Now that the scheme we have mistaken for the real economy is collapsing under its own weight, however, it’s a whole lot easier to make these arguments. Chartered Corporations They invented the corporate charter. But this changed the shape of business fundamentally. Like this: The power of personal brands in strategy and attracting talent - A few months ago I wrote about The shift from corporate brands to personal brands, referencing Jeremiah Owyang’s move from Forrester to the newly-founded Altimeter Group with former colleagues. This is a long-term secular trend – in fact last week when I spoke at the Online Marketing by Design event I pointed to it as one of the three most important trends for this year.
I was discussing it in the context of marketing, where companies must recognize that trust resides in individuals not institutions, and use this to shape their external engagement. However it is just as important in the context of attracting and retaining talented people. I wrote: Now, as personal brands grow in relative strength, corporations need to consider how they can best reflect and tap the influence of the individuals working for them.
In this context, I find it striking that Forrester Group has decided to ban personally-branded research blogs by its staff, as reported by analyst-watchers SageCircle.