CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE

When people ask me for the one thing they can do to increase their creative capacity, I always tell them to find a creative friend. Being around—and learning from—creative people is the single most important thing you can do to quickly raise your own creative capacities. This is what Marissa Mayer is doing at Yahoo by buying Tumblr. She is bringing  26-year old Tumblr founder David Karp into Yahoo culture, as well as Tumblr’s great young Gen Y staff of social media experts.

Mayer is also buying the NYC innovation magic. There is something great going on in the New York startup scene that is different from the West Coast. Technology continues to dominate the California scene, but culture plays the biggest role in New York. New York focuses on what is meaningful to people, then goes out and finds the technology. It’s about emotion, engagement, connection, happiness. Not geeky technology. Tumblr gets that. It’s in Tumblr’s own culture. 

Tumblr also has something else that Mayer should embrace—a new kind of health care system for its employees. Sherpaa was developed by Dr. Jay Parkinson. General Assembly is using it too. https://sherpaa.com

Mayer can use Yahoo’s enormous platform to scale Tumblr. But that’s the easy part. Absorbing its creative culture, giving power to it creative founders are more important. Mayer just went out and found a new creative friend. Now she has to learn to play with him. 

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&

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f65828a6-c0c9-11e2-aa8e-00144feab7de.html#axzz2TpjBJhLX

In reading the Financial Times’ coverage of the teen entrepreneur Nick D’Aloisio, you can see how he used many Creative Competencies to create his Summly App which Yahoo just bought for $30 million.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7755d5be-956b-11e2-a4fa-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Oea4EQIm

D’Aloisio used Knowledge Mining to connect three key dots of knowledge that he embodied as a 15 year-old living in London circa 2013. They are  information (access to knowledge is a changing world is critical ); brevity (we like long-form writing but want it in short-form summaries); mobility (we want it anywhere, all the time). These are the same elements that go into Twitter and Vine. 

He scaled his creativity into creation by getting his idea into TechCrunch, a platform that angel investors observe for possible new startups. His first investor was Li-Kashing, a Chinese billionaire. His venture capital firm, Horizons Venture saw his early work in TechCrunch. Li, or the people who worked for him, was a “wanderer” who cruised different sites looking for potential startups. Ashton Kutcher, Stephen Fry and Spotify;s Shakil Khan wandered into D’Aloisio’s world and back him as well. 

Finally, Marissa Mayer, the ex-Google, now CEO of Yahoo, really scaled D’Aloisio by giving him a huge platform. Just as Google really scaled the startup YouTube, so too is Yahoo scaling Summly.

I’d like to learn more about the creative process of D’Aloisio. He learned code as a kid, according to the press. But who did he play with? Who did he bounce ideas off? Most creative people have a trusted friend, or two, where they mess around with ideas. Who is Nick’s creative buddy?

I did a cover story on Marissa Mayer in 2006 for IN: Inside Innovation and spent time with her. She was many things at Google, but her most important role was as a designer. There was pressure from Google’s engineers to put all the functions they could dream up on that page but Mayer kept Google’s engagement with its audience simple, clean and clear. It beckoned us to use it. Google’s search page had aura and still does.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/toc/06_25/B39890625innovation.htm

Mayer’s other big role was innovation. She did much of the hiring and shaped much of the way innovation happened at Google. Mayer knows that creativity is social. Creativity comes out of the interplay of people and ideas. Which is why, as head of Yahoo, she wants everyone to be physically present. 

But  simply “being there” may not be the kind of social interaction that generates the creativity Mayer seeks. I write in Creative Intelligence that “As much as we love stories about serendipity,” seeking out the right people may be as important, if not more so, than accidentally bumping into them. It’s very hard to play with strangers that you can’t trust.”

Creativity tends to flow out of small teams of people who trust each other and  know how to play with one another to puzzle out  new challenges. They also tend  share deep knowledge of specific fields. I believe that this is the “magic circle” that generates the best creativity.

And if that is true, then it just might be possible to use the great new videoconferencing technologies like HALO and Telepresence  to bring these small teams together wherever they are, including home. I’ve personally used them and you can talk to people anywhere and its like chatting across the table. They are emotionally powerful.

Cisco is putting Telepresence into apartments in Korea. Yahoo should consider putting them into the apartments and houses of those potential creators who are now working at home. If serendipity isn’t all that its cracked up to be and sociability is the key to creativity, then you just might be able to build those magic circles with people tending to their kids at home.

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&