CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE

Creativity is a social phenomenon more than an individual event.

Mihaly Csikszmentmihalyi is best know, of course, for his work on individual flow. But he also analyzed Renaissance Italy to explore why Florence, at a certain point in history, was able to produce such an amazing number of brilliant artists.

In my book, Creative Intelligence, I say that he asked, What are the social conditions that lead to creativity? How can we make ourselves part of that social matrix? These are critical questions in our quest in becoming more creative. 

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062088424?ie=UTF8%20&tag=harpercollinsus-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0062088424

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Meg Whitman is trying to save Hewlett-Packard, a once and glorious high-tech company. HP has been in trouble for nearly a decade. So far, the remedies tried have involved improving efficiencies–firing over 30,000 people, outsourcing production, flattening that old pyramid. It’s time to try something different–reigniting HP’s creativity.

In my book, Creative Intelligence, I bring together a panel of former HP engineers who talk about their incredibly creative early years at HP–and how it ended. They describe the labs–which I call “magic circles”–where researchers explored all kinds of things without much restrictions–and the GMs who came by to screen the new ideas, curate them and then provide the resources to scale creativity into creation. I call them the “wanderers.” The founders of HP, Mrs. Hewlett and Packard managed their company by wandering around.

The magic circles of labs (play-grounds really) linked to wanderers who scaled generated organic innovation for HP. The company created new scientific instruments, ink-jet printers, computers–a panoply of new products coming out of the creativity of its engineers and researchers and then scaled by skillful brokers of corporate resources.

It ended when the GMs, who were often engineers themselves, were replaced by the biz dev guys. It ended when deep knowledge about science and experienced intuition about chances of success were replaced by wanderers who were business people using numbers to make decisions. It ended when HP started to fire the bottom 5% of employees every year to “improve” its human capital–destroying the trust among colleagues needed to play, try things out, take risks, fail and go on without repercussions. That ended the creation of exciting new products with fat profit margins for HP (the last was HALO, that wonderful conferencing technology, that HP never developed and sold off). 

Organic innovation is what HP needs now. It has failed to buy innovation in its many purchases of companies. It has failed to turn around by promoting more efficiency. Its time for creativity. The example of HP in its heyday provides the narrative for #5 of my Creative Competencies–Pivoting/Scaling. It’s what Meg Whitman needs to do.

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062088424?ie=UTF8%20&tag=harpercollinsus-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0062088424

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http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/4d531bb8-7c67-11e2-91d2-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2LdPzZWiN

I remember my first ride on the Segway, Dean Kamen’s incredible invention. I got up on the two-wheel thing, pushed forward and I was away, moving quickly, turning, having great fun. The Segway was supposed to change everything–how we moved along in cities, how we left cars behind, how we saved energy, how we went to war, etc. It didn’t.

In the end, it was a wonderful piece of technology in search of human purpose. It became an expensive novelty.If it had been framed differently, if the culture and history of transportation had been mined deeply, if it had been made more cheaply–in short, if Kamen had used a few of the 5 Creative Competencies in Creative Intelligence, his technology might have found traction with a big audience.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/21/technology/google-looks-to-make-its-computer-glasses-stylish.html?hpw&_r=0

Google is doing the same thing with its Google Glasses. It’s new technology is very cool but there is no connection to people. Right now it is a gadget made by gadgeteers for other gadgeteers in search of a broader popular audience. Throwing new invention over the wall to designers is an old way of doing things that sometimes works just fine (hey, Search is great, right?) but often does not (remember the old VCRs with a million useless functions?

There is a better way. Creative Intelligence.

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062088424?ie=UTF8%20&tag=harpercollinsus-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0062088424

B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/creative-intelligence-bruce-nussbaum/1112757030?ean=9780062088420&cm_mmc=AFFILIATES-_-Linkshare-_-MdXm68JZJz8-_-10%3a1&r=1&

Thanks for pushing Creative Intelligence ever higher on Amazon in preorder, even before it officially comes out on March 5. In ebook, it is at   #17 in Amazon’s Creativity & Genius category. And it is #55 in Cognitive Science. In hardcover, Creative Intelligence hit #84 on Monday in the Decision-Making & Problem Solving category. 

Preorders build momentum and can “tip” the book into the fast selling lane once it is released. So please pass the word. 

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062088424?ie=UTF8%20&tag=harpercollinsus-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0062088424

B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/creative-intelligence-bruce-nussbaum/1112757030?ean=9780062088420&cm_mmc=AFFILIATES-_-Linkshare-_-MdXm68JZJz8-_-10%3a1&r=1&

Indiebound: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780062088420

iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/creative-intelligence/id533403255?mt=11

Brian Collins, my advertising/media guru, venture creator, Davos design buddy and Flatiron neighborhood mate just tweeted, saying he finished the second chapter and “So far, perfecto!”

President Obama wants a decade-long program to deepen our understanding of the human brain. It would build a map of brain activity and, quoting the NYT “do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics.” There are three goals–fight diseases, especially Alzheimer’s, increase artificial intelligence, and since DARPA is involved, bolster cyber-security. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/science/project-seeks-to-build-map-of-human-brain.html?hp&_r=0

I have one suggestion–to the array of neuroscientists, nano scientists and representatives from Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm running the brain project, he add cultural anthropologists, sociologists and designers. Combining the social with the scientific will accomplish two things:

1) Make the science relevant. One of the biggest economic and social failures of recent years has, in fact, been the Human Genome Project. There were big promises of huge economic benefits and, despite a federal study showing a “return” of $800 billion over a decade, we can see little of it. There is one project turning algae into energy producing organisms that I can think of. In addition, the Genome Project has not led to big breakthroughs in medicine either, despite promises that it would. It has, in fact, been disappointing.

Adding social scientists early to the program increases the chances that the direction of the research from the start might be more meaningful, both socially and economically. Had social scientists been attached to Monsanto’s genetic modification work, the company might not have had the enormous opposition to its GM seeds in Europe. It might have focussed on health and taste rather than efficiency and yield.

2) Americans fetishize the brain. The brain has become a secular divinity, in which we see everything coming out of it. The result is that the locus of control is seen to be outside ourselves. Just as religious people believe in fate or God’s will, so too the brain. As we focus on the brain “causing” creativity or thinking. we tend to think that exceptional brains will give us more exceptional behavior. And we hope that in the end we’ll be able to stimulate a portion of the brain and that will make us smarter, or better in some way. 

I’m all for understanding more about the brain but I’m wary about how we, as a culture, use the brain to “explain” our lives. Learning and doing  and understanding what is meaningful in context are the keys to making society and our lives better. Brain scans reflect our behaviors as much as the brain “causes” them. In Java, the shadow play shows the shadows of puppets acting out great political and social dramas. The Javanese understand the meaning of the shadows. They don’t confuse reality with reflection.

“Companies should be nurturing their "bandito creatives,” men and women who’ve already demonstrated a willingness to break the conventional rules if that’s wht it takes to do their jobs creatively. Find them and map their networks. Ask them: Who are you talking to inside and outside the company? Who are the most original thinkers you know? Who do you go for inspiration? And, most important of all, how can we help you build out your “off-the-books” network?

I talked about the ritual of the gift in my Creativity and Capitalism course at Parsons this past Monday. In a rare occurrence, Valentines Day and the Chinese New Year fall together so a good chunk of the world is giving gifts over the next few days.

In addition, Charles Adler, co-founder of Kickstarter talked to these students last week–a wonderful presentation–and he framed Kickstarter within the idea of gifting–not investing. A NYT piece came out over the weekend that did the same.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/magazine/why-would-you-ever-give-money-through-kickstarter.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

I asked my students about giving and receiving gifts and it was clear that giving gifts is fraught with tension. The ritual of the gift is actually very complex, very emotional and very powerful. Knowing what the other person REALLY wants requires skills of deep empathy, that men especially apparently lack, according to many of the women in the class. They steal themselves for getting hurt in the act of gift giving. And then pretending not to have been hurt.

Many would just as soon do it the Chinese way–red envelopes filled with money. People can then go out and buy their own gifts. We are moving in that direction with gift certificates and wedding registries. Maybe we need Valentines Day registers–do they already exist? I don’t know. 

How much to give–the value of the gift also came up in class. Should it be equal or unequal? Can it ever really be equal?

Should use wrap necessities inside the ritual of the gift–like giving a vacuum cleaner or a washing machine? Ha. Most thought not but a few didn’t mind. 

When you think about it, the gift is one of the most common of our social rituals. Schwag–free gifts–is given at the end of nearly every big occasion now from weddings to award ceremonies. There isn’t an event on any night in any big city in the US where gifts are not being given out. Much of this schwag is personal–and much is commercial, filled with products donated by companies wanted you to BUY something.

Kickstarter reminds us of the power and importance of the gift. You offer the gift of your money, you participation, your advice and, finally, your consumption, to a maker–an artist, film-maker, book writer and, increasingly a techie type/designer making a cool new product. Usually it is the parents and friends of the person doing the making that gifts first, building the momentum for the rest of us to offer our gifts.

Kickstarter socializes making through the gift–its a very different model than the buying and selling model we are used to.

Hmm.. Come to think of it. If you haven’t already given that Valentines Day gift, you could go on Kickstarter and “gift” your honey by gifting some dough to something she or he is really into. But then again, you’ll have to actually know what kind of music or film or book your honey really likes.

I remember the first time I met a team of designers from Samsung. It was at an annual Industrial Designers Excellence Awards dinner (before they changed “Industrial” to “International”). I remember five middle aged men wearing identical boxy black suits with white shirts and dark ties. Their haircuts were the same too. Samsung began to spend billions on design and for years, boxy-suited design guys would show up. 

Then, one year, the middle-aged guys brought two young men who didn’t wear boxy-suits. They had spiky hair, brightly colored ties and tight, European suits on. Ah, things were changing. This was mid to late 90s.

I can think of no other Asia company that has spent more on design than Samsung and the company has risen high into the ranks of design award winners. But until very recently, Samsung’s design has nearly always been derivative. Samsung uses a Fast-Follower approach to both design and business. It rarely leads and uses vast amounts of research to follow trends in the market. Apple, of course, is much of that market, so Samsung follows Apple very closely. This has made Samsung hugely profitable and hugely huge in size. But it has not made the company a leader.

The New York Times article is a good summary of the design/business culture of Samsung. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/technology/samsung-challenges-apples-cool-factor.html?hpw&_r=0

Not leading has not bothered Samsung much. I consulted for them years ago on a panel in NYC. Of course, the panel of mostly US designers told the Samsung people they should be more creative, more innovative and lead. But the Samsung design and marketing people didn’t think it was that necessary. They were making products that others could use as platforms to create apps and services to engage people. They could build the aura. And that would be sufficient.

Maybe Samsung is right. Last year I was in a movie theatre, being forced to see ads (which I hate unless the ads are really entertaining–just like everyone else, right?). There was this ad for a Samsung Galaxy phone that showed two people taping their cells together to exchange videos. Hmmm… Very cool.  I think there was one about a daughter sharing a tape with her dad. Then there was a racy one between a wife and her husband. 

Talk about engagement. It beckoned, it grabbed you and kept you in a relationship. It made you want more. It was personal and intimate. It was aura. 

So Samsung is beginning to get aura. That’s very exciting indeed.

“Bruce Nussbaum is one of America’s most interesting design minds. His latest work is both a clarion call and a guidebook for moving creativity to the center of our lives.”  Blurb on my new book, Creative Intelligence, by Dan Pink.

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062088424?ie=UTF8%20&tag=harpercollinsus-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0062088424

Indiebound: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780062088420

iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/creative-intelligence/id533403255?mt=11

Dan Pink, of course, is one of my heroes. His book “A Whole New Mind” was a breakthrough in understanding how creativity really works. “Drive” is terrific and his current book, “To Sell is Human” is a best-seller.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_8?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=dan+pink&sprefix=dan+pink%2Caps%2C168

Charles Adler, co-founder of Kickstarter, presented in my Creativity & Capitalism class in Parsons on Monday. He was absolutely great and the 85 undergrads in the auditorium really like him. One of the points he made at the end of his talk was the role of family and friends in financing so many of the Kickstarter projects. They often provide the initial money, get the funding momentum going until “outsiders” start kicking in money.

This is fascinating to me. In a global era of digitalized crowd sourcing and crowd funding, the role of family and friends to startups remains crucial. I thought about it and again and again you hear stories of startups beginning with money from parents and uncles and buddies and classmates betting on someone they know. By far, it seems that angel investors are people we know and trust.

Kickstarter amplifies this social phenomenon by legitimizing people’s startup dreams. If you can make it to actually presenting on Kickstarter–coming up with a great idea, doing that pitch video–your family and friends have even more motivation to help you. “Harry, come look at young Stevie’s camera idea! I always knew he was so smart. Let’s give him some money.”

Family and friends form the core of what I’m calling your Network Radius. That radius is the functional part of your network that provides resources to implement your creativity. It expands out from blood relatives to close friends to buddies to VC strangers to the public stock market. Knowing your Network Radius is critical to being a successful entrepreneur.

In Creative Intelligence I talk about Creativity Circles and Pivot Circles. The book is coming out in just a few days. But Charles has me thinking of the next round of thinking about creativity. That would include the idea of a Network Radius that cuts across both Circles, linking them.

If I were teaching a course in creativity and entrepreneurialism, a course in Indie Capitalism, this is what I would be putting up on the screen.

Richard Florida was kind enough to read my book and offer this blurb–“Creative Intelligence lays out the forces that will drive us toward a prosperous future. Read this book if you want to be inspired and provoked to lead the way.”

Creative Intelligence is now on pre-order and you can get it in print or ebook from various sources, including:

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062088424?ie=UTF8%20&tag=harpercollinsus-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0062088424

B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/creative-intelligence-bruce-nussbaum/1112757030?ean=

9780062088420&cm_mmc=AFFILIATES-_-Linkshare-_-MdXm68JZJz8-_-10%3a1&r=1&

iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/creative-intelligence/id533403255?mt=11

The official book launch date is March 5. I’m a little nervous but it’s all very exciting.

The first class of the new Cornell-Technion school of engineering (which appears to be what is being built in NYC) opened in Google’s NYC headquarters this week. That’s not good news. Goggle is a remarkable company but it is totally male/tech/engineering driven. I guess Technion is that way too. Brilliant guys come up with terrific new tech ideas and then–and only then–try to find a cultural/social need for them. Clearly that tech-driven strategy works but it feels very 20th century.

http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20130122/TECHNOLOGY/130129981#.UQgD61XYrcI.twitter

Most of the hot new startups are founded by designers or people with a big exposure to design. We have the Design Fund and a couple of dozen new companies to prove that. And then there is New York City. This city, my city, runs on culture, not technology. The hottest firms here, RGA, Kickstarter and the media and marketing firms, know this.

The real business of business in New York is mining the existential. It’s excavating the meaning of America’s changing demographics, ethnic shifts, gender changes, class movements.  Its about understanding global cities and urban cultures. 

Creativity is about mining this kind of social and cultural knowledge and connecting it to the appropriate technologies–some of them new, some old. The food truck revolution–a part of the revived Maker Culture–involves OLD technology–trucks.

The real reason I wanted Stanford to win the contest to build a new school in NYC was not that it would bring its world-class engineering to the city. A Stanford win would have brought the D-School to New York. It would have brought design, creativity and innovation to the mix of technology and business. 

Cornell Technion needs a C-School, a Creativity School, to really work in NYC.

There was a good discussion about the design of things and the design of relationships at the opener of the Harvard design conference put on by students at the Harvard B-School. They have put together a great conference for today that includes a wonderful speaker series plus a Design Challenge for teams that i will be judging, along with Harry West of Continuum and others, later in the day. Bringing together people from all over Harvard into teams that include design students to work on a challenge is a terrific way to show how design is powerful.

Off to the conference….

President Obama will speak about the State of the Union soon and he will talk about many things except, perhaps the most important–the state of innovation in America. In my book, Creative Intelligence, I argue that for the past 30 years, there has been lots of innovation but it has been narrowly focussed in Finance, IT and social media.

In fact, only 9% of all public and private companies in the US do any sort of innovation at all. Think about that. Look at the profits of all US corporations over the past few decades and you can see that where innovation has occurred, profits have done particularly well. Finance, surprisingly to many of us in the Design/Creativity/Innovation space, has seen its profits soar from about 10% of the total of all profits to 40% of the total in the past 20 years because of financial innovation. I would argue that this has been a disaster for the economy as a whole but the fact remains. 

What policies do we need out of Washington to spur innovation and creativity?  How do we generate a million-fold increase in startups? How do we push entrepreneurial capitalism over finance capitalism?  These are the key questions that the President should address in his State of the Union.

The RAND Corporation has just come out with a new report on electronic health records and reversed its 2005 prediction that they would help save billions of dollars. Now it says electronic health records might actually cost more than paper. What went wrong?

Framing. One of the most important skills in business and in our own personal lives is how we design our engagements with the world. We have dozens of different kinds of engagements every day and each is different. How we interact with friends, colleagues, children, bosses, doctors, parents varies dramatically. In the past, our engagements were limited in number and predictable. We were born into most of them. Now, thanks to social media technologies, we can actually create thousands of new engagements.  We need to be aware of them and design them to get the outcomes we prefer. We need to frame those engagements to our benefit. 

That has not happened with electronic health records. RAND and the federal government wanted electronic health records to do two things–lower costs and bring better health benefits to individuals by giving them more data. The problem was that the market incentive for the private companies writing the software was to use electronic records to boost the efficiency of billing by hospitals and physicians to raise their profits and income.That led to higher, not lower costs.

The engagement that was framed and designed to improve was the financial one between provider and consumer. The engagement that needed to be framed and improved by electronic files was the flow of medical data among providers and between providers and consumers. This most probably could save big sums of money and certainly help people in their own medical care. 

In creating new forms of relationships and organizations, framing the right engagement is key. We still have time to do that with electronic medical records. 

“Fashion is the recurrence of the new.” Walter Benjamin.

So is Music and Food. 

Walter Benjamin—“The eternal recurrence of the new.” He refers to fashion as a pure form of capitalism. New product lines are produced twice a year, every year. The clothes are commodified, consumed, then replaced and the cycle goes on. It is Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction—but through the prism of fashion.

But Benjamin might as well have been referring to entrepreneurial capitalism or Indie Capitalism. Think about it— “the eternal recurrence of the new.”

The concept of “resilience” is very hot and you can see why in NYC’s reaction to Sandy. The city did not proved resilient in providing electricity for social media to allow people to organize in the days immediately after the storm hit. There are tens of thousands of people going cold today because the city agencies are not agile enough to provide housing. There is gasoline rationing. Organic and inorganic networks rely on resilience to deal with challenges, especially unexpected challenges that cannot be totally planned for. We need to build more resilience into our systems–and our lives.

Gen Y voters went mostly for President Obama on Tuesday for his social policies. But the Republicans could just have easily attracted this rising demographic with new business policies– if they had taken time to learn about Gen Y culture.

Gen Y may be the most entrepreneurial generation in a century but neither party appears to understand that. In this election neither party put forth an economic policy that bolsters economic growth through start-ups, crowd funding, local sourcing, additive manufacturing (3D printing), venture capital or scaling creativity into new creative companies that employ hundreds of people in the US. This is the stuff of an entrepreneurial capitalism, an Indie Capitalism, that Gen Y is trying to build that could replace the disastrous Finance/Shareholder Capitalism that has led to the immiseration of the middle class.

The talk now in Washington is about going over a “fiscal cliff.” We need to talk about more fundamental economic issues–How to promote economic growth through innovation and creativity. The Democrat and Republican parties need to tune more into the rising Gen Y and less into the fading Boomers.

Click here to pre-order CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE by Bruce Nussbaum, available March 5, 2013 from HarperBusiness

The world is quickly changing in ways we find hard to comprehend. Successful methods of dealing with problems have become outmoded. To be successful, you can’t just be good. You also need to be creative. In “Creative Intelligence”, innovation expert Bruce Nussbaum charts the making of a new literacy, “Creative Intelligence”, or CQ. From corporate CEOs trying to parse the confusing matrix of global business to K-12 teachers attempting to reach bored kids in increasingly wired classrooms, creativity is viewed as the antidote to uncertainty and complexity. “Creative Intelligence” embodies a bundle of specific literacies that increase our ability to navigate the unknown. It’s a skill-set that explorers have tacitly used for eons but which, only now, is explicitly revealing its secrets to us. Nussbaum explores how people and organizations are learning to be more creative in work and in life, and investigates the ways in which individuals, corporations, and nations are boosting their CQ-and how that translates into their abilities to make new products and solve new problems. “Creative Intelligence” shows readers how to frame problems in new ways and devise solutions that are original by drawing insight from anthropology and culture rather than psychology and the brain. Smart and eye opening, it introduces us to the next evolutionary step and our future. Ultimately, “Creative Intelligence” will show readers how to boost their creative capacity, build creative confidence, and connect creativity with capitalism in a new form - Indie Capitalism - that could, and should, replace Finance Capitalism.

Bruce Nussbaum is a Professor of Innovation and Design at Parsons The New School of Design in New York City, is a former Managing Editor at BusinessWeek and blogs for Fast Company and Harvard Business Review. He taught third grade science in the Peace Corps in the Philippines and studied anthropology, sociology and political science in grad school at the University of Michigan. At Business Week, he wrote dozens of cover stories but his favorites are “I’m Worried About My Job, I Can’t Get the !X@#! Thing To Work, The World’s Most Innovative Companies, The Power of Design and Get Creative, How to Build Innovative Companies. 

Bruce birds Central Park and the world. He saw a black swan in Singapore but wasn’t surprised. He practices what he call "donut thinking” in his book, training to always look for what doesn’t fit the pattern (the “odd duck”). Bruce is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and used to go to the World Economic Forum in Davos all the time. He’s written two other books, The World After Oil in 1982 where he predicted the breakup of the Soviet Union and Good Intentions, where he analyzed AIDS research at the NIH. I.D. Magazine named Bruce one of the top figures in Design for 2005.

Bruce was asked to spell “polymath” in grade school. He could’t but looked it up and tried to become one when he grew up. He’s still trying.

Bruce + Banana image via Design Thinking Blog