At the Women on Wall Street conference last night, Steven Berlin Johnson gave a keynote on how innovation happens. He has studied the history of breakthrough innovations and found a pattern: They are created not by “Eureka!” moments, but slow hunches that incubate, sometimes for decades, with diverse people collaborating to make unintended consequences. Here [...]

Fred Brooks, computer industry rockstar, regaled 200 geek disciples at Etsy last night with stories about why team design doesn’t work. Brooks wrote a classic book called The Mythical Man-Month about how putting more engineers on a project slows it down paradoxically. In his new book, The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist, [...]

At TEDxEast “Play, Dream, Create” on Friday, Chris Anderson (TED Curator) made a surprise visit to talk on Crowd Accelerated Learning. This is the game-changing theory about social evolution: How we improve when we share with one another. He said people are challenged by watching great people and wanting to do better, and this is [...]

Highlights from Creativity & Technology London from Creativity Online. I want to know what’s your biggest hurdle for creativity & tech? Excerpts below. See full write-up at http://bit.ly/2TU298. “The event brought together designers, creatives and technologists from agencies like Organic and Crispin Porter + Bogusky to discuss work ranging from Fiat Eco: Drive to Poke [...]

In his blog Presentation Zen, Garr Reynolds points to a TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talk by conductor Itay Talgam. He makes a great analogy between a conductor who must control without controlling and leadership. Excerpts below. See the whole talk at http://www.ted.com/talks/itay_talgam_lead_like_the_great_conductors.html I want to know: What leaders inspire you? “As a leader — in [...]

In the November issue of O – The Oprah Magazine, Life Coach Martha Beck talks about creativity and her theory of deep practice. I heard her speak about deep practice – and it sounds very compelling. For the whole article, see http://www.oprah.com/article/omagazine/200911-omag-beck-right-brain. The excerpts I found most interesting are below. I’d like to know if [...]

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of “Eat, Pray, Love” spoke on Nurturing Creativity at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference. See the whole talk at http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html. Below are the excerpts I thought were good food for thought on how you can overcome your demons to nurture your creative self. I want to know: What do you see [...]