Category: inspiration
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Input and Outputs
Austin Kleon is unusually good at writing about the creative process. I've been reading his blog for years. He periodically writes about the relationship between ideas, information and inspiration that we take in, and creative output. Like this quote from Brian Eno: 'What I really like doing is what I call Import and Export. I…
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Good Questions
Too often we focus on getting quickly to the answer to challenges and not pausing to think whether we are actually asking the right question. The ability to ask good questions will I think be one of the greatest leadership skills in increasingly complex environments. Which is why I really like this quote from Kevin…
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Bureaucracy
“Bureaucracy is a massive, role-playing game. If you’re an advanced player, you know how to deflect blame, defend turf, manage up, hoard resources, trade favors, negotiate targets and avoid scrutiny. Those who excel at the game, unsurprisingly, are unenthusiastic about changing it.” Source Via Nicole Yershon
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JFK Unsilenced
'On the 22nd of November 1963, on his way to deliver a speech at the Dallas Trade Mart, JFK, the voice of his generation, was silenced. But what if we could unsilence his voice? What if technology had advanced so much to allow JFK to finally, after 55 years, deliver the ‘Trade Mart Speech’ that…
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Reflections on Writing a Book
I can hardly believe it but last week marked the one year anniversary of my book being published. Happily it seems to have done really well since launch, selling a lot more than I'd ever anticipated (it's very difficult to gauge what good looks like in this context of-course but the publisher seems very happy,…
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Learning from Improv
I love this quote from Miles Davies talking about jazz improvisation that Keith Sawyer uses in his post about how creativity is all about what you do afterwards: 'It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note – it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.' Keith describes how improvisation means…
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Google Firestarters – Change and Complexity – The Event
For our recent Google Firestarters (our 26th!), we revisited a successful format that we first did two years ago. In 2015, in one of our most successful Firestarters ever, seven of the best minds in the industry gave a ten minute perspective in answer to a single question: what's the best thing that you've learned in…
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The Purpose of Life
'Ironically enough, when you make peace with the fact that the purpose of life is not happiness, but rather experience and growth, happiness comes as a natural byproduct. When you are not seeking it as the objective, it will find its way to you' I can't find the original source of this quote that Tom…
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The Trust Equation
I was lucky enough to be in New York this week doing a workshop for a big pharma business and took the opportunity to catch up with Mark Raheja, founder of the brilliant August. In our conversation Mark mentioned a formula that he'd come across (which comes originally from this book by Charles H Green) that…
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Jeremy Bullmore on Insight
Thanks to Peter for pointing this out to me. A great thought on insight, numbers and words from the great Jeremy Bullmore: 'The origins of an insight are usually to be found in numbers. That's how we know an insight to be more than airy whim; that's how we know it has substance; that it…