Leading Creatively

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An article in Knowledge@Wharton highlighted an apparent paradox: organisations want greater creativity, but regard people who demonstrate creative thinking as being less suitable for leadership than their more “normal” colleagues.

The article - why creative people lose out on leadership positions - has generated a lot of discussion. And, it has been strongly argued (see Gerard Puccio’s comment) that it has been stretched beyond its original meaning. However, leaving the hype to one side, the article highlights a fundamental problem that society has with creativity. People cannot agree what we mean by the term. And because of this definitional ambiguity, we end up talking at cross purposes. Keep reading »

Hacker Attitude

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Hacker is a word that gets hijacked too often, casually tossed out as an adjective – not always but usually pejorative – to describe someone capable of cracking the code of a computer system and having their way with it. Editor of the Jargon File, Eric Steve Raymond, would substitute the label “cracker” for that subset of the code-literate community. “Hackers build things,” he says, “crackers break them.” Keep reading »

Don’t Tell, Ask

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Succeeding in the current business climate may have little to do with what you know, and much more to do with your ability to find out what you don’t know. In other words, asking questions may be one of the best tools for innovation.

The Harvard Business Review posed the question, “how do innovators think?” to two business school professors, Jeff Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregerson of INSEAD, who together conducted a 6-year survey of over 3000 creative executives to try to explain how the “innovator’s DNA” works. Keep reading »

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