CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE
Month
Jan Chipchase is one of my big heroes. In my book, Creative Intelligence, I talk about the need to “mine the existential” in cultures to understand the deeper meaning of people’s lives. Jan has been a pioneer in mining the existential, from China to America and beyond for Frog Design. He has an insightful comment about Google Glass we should all read.
Jan is one of the growing number of “thought leaders” being offered Google Glass to wear and comment on, building knowledge–and political support. Jan turned Google down. He’s worried about Google’s privacy problem–that it continuously violates peoples’ privacy. Here’s the comment.
https://medium.com/hidden-in-plain-sight/5e4089a9a3ac
I presented at Google recently on the five Creative Competencies of Creative Intelligence and began by thanking Google for saving my life. I’ve never been able to tell direction–left and right–and felt that i lived in a constant state of lost. Google Maps changed my life. It had deep existential meaning for me. I was no longer lost.
But, like Jan, I also questioned Google Glass. I put up a slide of a pretty woman wearing the glasses (all the pictures are of good-looking young people), and said it embodied the values of Googles’ Gen Y engineering founders. Great technology that could do cool stuff. They used the “Gift” model of innovation–use tech to invent new things and throw it over the wall to society.
But in this case, society is wary of Google’s intentions and worried about the impact of Google Glass on privacy.Taking data without asking appears to be baked into the deep DNA of Google–from taking content, to taking books to taking emails and other data when taking pictures for Google Maps. All put on Search.
What would Google Glass “take?” I don’t know. And neither does Jan. and neither do you.
Jan has a new book out–Hidden in Plain Site.
http://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Plain-Sight-Extraordinary-ebook/dp/B008B0ULDW
It’s really good.
I’m starting to keep a list of colleges and universities requiring undergrads to take at least one course in creativity. So far here is my tentative list:
Stanford
City University of New York (CUNY)
Carnegie Mellon University
Illinois Institutes of Technology (IIT)
Others?
I just came back from an incredible week in Norway, talking to about 400 Nordic designers and business people on my book, Creative Intelligence. The wonderful Norwegian Design Council puts on an annual Design Day presenting awards to the best Norwegian designers and I was lucky enough to be invited to speak.
Here is the full presentation that shows why I think Knowledge Mining (for cultural meaning), Framing, Playing, Making and Pivoting (Scaling) are the most important Creative Competencies of our day. I begin the presentation in Oslo with a discussion about love–and how love represents the kind of dynamic engagement we have today that is meaningful to people. User Engagement or UE is more important that UX, user experience.
The video also has a clip of Dream:In, a conference in India where students interviewed people about their dreams (not their wants), a bit of a runway show and a weird 30 seconds of Harry West, CEO of Continuum, playing at drinking water to redesign the Tetra Pak. Serious Play is key to creativity.
My talk goes from 2:17 to 38:00. Then I lead a terrific panel discussion with leading designers from Norway and the US that you shouldn’t miss. Watch for Anna Kirah, of the Oslo-based design and innovation consultancy Making Waves, talking about redesigning the travel experience of people at the Oslo airport.
Here goes:
http://www.norskdesign.no/video/the-magic-formula-of-design-article24365-9048.html
Check it out. A fantastic gathering of designers and business people to talk about key issues of innovation and creativity. I’ll be signing Creative Intelligence books–200 of them!
Amy Smedinghoff was killed yesterday in Afghanistan delivering books to children in their school. She joined the US Foreign Service three years ago right after Johns Hopkins. Her convoy was hit by a suicide bomber. The Foreign Service was “a calling” to her, according to Amy Smedinghoff’s parents in the NYT’s article. I expect that the three US soldiers and other civilian who died with her also believed they had a calling to serve.
Frank Knight, the Chicago School economist said that “the chief thing which the common-sense individual actually wants is not the satisfaction for the wants which he has, but more, and better wants.” In an era of racing to meet our “needs,” of hundreds of transactions and exchanges a day on social media, it would serve us well to stop and think about the power of the “calling.”
A calling is a higher order “want,” more like a dream or aspiration than need. It motivates people across many realms of life. A calling is what motivates teachers, religious leaders, foreign service people and soldiers but it is also the driving force for entrepreneurs in starting up new companies. A calling is a primary economic force that drives growth.
We are called to a mission. It beckons us. It beckoned this wonderful woman.
Very few Social innovation organizations do anything in America. Despite horrendous stats showing many rural areas, urban neighborhoods and Native American reservations having food, housing, education, safety, water, infant mortality and drug problems as bad as many of the worst areas in Africa and Asia, hardly any of the new Social Innovation organizations or the older philanthropic foundations operate on US soil. Project H does, in Bertie County, North Carolina.
Emily has been working there with local people for years and there is a new documentary out showing what is being done. Check it out
The work isn’t glamorous. It isn’t exotic. It is important.
http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=b359a93f0f55fe47d363e6fd8&id=5991844906&e=90a66115b0
Check out The Business & Leadership category on Amazon.
Corporations are racing to build up their creative capacities to deal with the cascading changes disrupting all of us today. Creative Intelligence provides strategic advice on how to generate, manage and scale creativity. And it reminds all of us that creativity is the core of economic value and serious profit.
I just learned that the Book 21 in Korea will pick up the translation rights and publish Creative Intelligence. That’s wonderful. Korea has spent tens of billions of dollars making itself more creative and innovative over the past decade. Samsung is poised to make the shift from Fast Follower to Creative Leader in consumer electronics. And Korea is home to the largest alumni of Parsons School of Design. Many of the concepts in the book were developed in my classes at Parsons which are filled with terrific students from Korea. It’s a good day.
Apple’s CEO Tim Cook was forced by the Chinese Communist Party to apologize for bad consumer warranty service but the microblogs in China are full of people defending the company—and blaming the government. They are asking why the government is not going after domestic companies who are making…
Apple’s CEO Tim Cook was forced by the Chinese Communist Party to apologize for bad consumer warranty service but the microblogs in China are full of people defending the company–and blaming the government. They are asking why the government is not going after domestic companies who are making fraudulent and sometimes dangerous goods. So what’s going on?
An insightful piece in my favorite business newspaper, the Financial Times, suggested that forces within the government singled Apple out to send a message to other Western companies that they had to “kowtow” and pay tribute to the government and cooperate. The CCTV, the China Central Television station, run by the government has an annual show on March 15, timed for the world consumer rights day, which focusses on foreign companies in China. Foreign companies spend a lot of money on advertising on the show, according to the FT piece, and those that do not are often the target of investigation.
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c24711f8-9ba3-11e2-a820-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2PP0Earxe
Apple made many mistakes during this warranty crisis in not addressing the issue early and loudly. After it was highlighted on March 15 on the CCTV show (along with Volkswagen), Apple failed to issue a big public apology. VW did. The deeper problem for Apple is not understanding the political culture it is operating in. China is Apple’s second biggest market and could grow to its largest, but not if the company angers the powers in Beijing. Apple has been under criticism for poor labor practices in the factories that make its iPads and iPhones. They are owned and run by Foxconn, a Taiwanese assembly company, but Apple is held responsible. The warranty episode follows several years of suicides at the plants.
There is a certain irony to the Apple incident. More than any single company, it was Apple that taught China how to build and export high-quality electronic goods to the world. Before Apple came on the scene, China was known for poor-quality goods (and still is in many market areas). But the demands of Steve Jobs and Apple for perfection, pushed China to raise the bar on quality-control. No good deed goes unpunished.
On Wednesday, I’m giving a talk about Creative Intelligence at Frog Design in NYC. These are tumultuous times in the Design/Innovation consultancy business and it will be exciting to talk with these great people about Knowledge Mining, Framing, Playing, Making and Pivoting, the key competencies of my book
Frog is one of the largest innovation consultancies in the world. I put its founder, the brilliant Harmut Esslinger on the cover of Business Week when I first began covering design for business. The early Apple design language of clean, white and small was Esslinger’s and Frog’s. Esslinger and Frog have always understood the power of aura and the notion of a calling. In his book, A Fine Line, Esslinger writes that “Every product promotes an identity and a clear idea of the consumer experience it provides as part of the bigger Apple "ecosystem.” When consumers buy a product that has been “Designed in California,” as the Apple label proudly proclaims, they are buying into a way of life. “
Now read that last sentence again and you get the notions of aura, charisma and calling–critical to deeply understanding what is meaningful to people. People join a social movement when they buy into an "ecosystem” that gives them identity and purpose.
I prefer the idea of social movement to ecosystem and UE–User Engagement–to UX, Use Experience. UE reflects the true dynamic participation of people in their products and services these days. Hartmut gets it. So does Frog.
Oh, Hartmut is sitting astride a huge motorcycle on the cover. Ha,