“Creativity is now considered the most important leadership quality for success in business, outweighing even integrity and global thinking, according to a much-referenced recent study by IBM. ”

Read the rest of this article from Fast Company.

“Back in 1958, Ted Schwarzrock was an 8-year-old third grader when he became one of the “Torrance kids,” a group of nearly 400 Minneapolis children who completed a series of creativity tasks newly designed by professor E. Paul Torrance. Schwarzrock still vividly remembers the moment when a psychologist handed him a fire truck and asked, “How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?” He recalls the psychologist being excited by his answers.

In fact, the psychologist’s session notes indicate Schwarzrock rattled off 25 improvements, such as adding a removable ladder and springs to the wheels. That wasn’t the only time he impressed the scholars, who judged Schwarzrock to have “unusual visual perspective” and “an ability to synthesize diverse elements into meaningful products.”

Read the rest of this article from Newsweek.

“Creativity is like sex. You fumble your way through, you get lost in it, you fall in love. Both are passionate, rhythmic, pleasurable, and flowing. Both can bear fruit. And both can rack your soul with vulnerability, bliss, fear and awkwardness.

I know, I know. Last time I appeared on Write to Done, I was naked so you’re probably thinking, “Is this woman sex-crazed?” Well, I do like to bare my soul once in a while, but what I love even more is exposing other people’s secrets.

The people I speak of are writers. They lust writing. When you’re in lust, you can be desperate to keep that feeling alive. So when creativity goes limp, writers are the ones who know the secrets to keeping it interested. They know how to flirt with it, tease it and arouse it. In fact, they know hundreds of ways to get their creative freak on.”

read the rest of this article from Write to Done.

“At long last, the doodling daydreamer is getting some respect.

In the past, daydreaming was often considered a failure of mental discipline, or worse. Freud labeled it infantile and neurotic. Psychology textbooks warned it could lead to psychosis. Neuroscientists complained that the rogue bursts of activity on brain scans kept interfering with their studies of more important mental functions.

But now that researchers have been analyzing those stray thoughts, they’ve found daydreaming to be remarkably common — and often quite useful. A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals. Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity and helps you solve problems.”

Read the rest of this article from NY Times.

“A kid raised in a blue-collar home in Los Angeles, who got into trouble in school, who managed to scrape his way into an acting and directing career, and then went on to create a world-renowned film festival that changed the fortunes of independent filmmakers . . .

. . . Even a person like that, even a person like Robert Redford, can screw it up.

Redford’s faults: hiring badly, impatience, inability to communicate, ineffective relations with subordinates.

He laid them all out Thursday before an audience of about 300 at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre at a seminar sponsored by the Arts and Business Council of Greater Philadelphia and by Towers Watson & Co., a human resources consulting firm.”

Read the rest of this article from the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“Every year, Cannes produces lively debate surrounding the work entered, the Lions awarded, and any resulting trends from the various categories. And, as they should, the categories have changed to better reflect our industry. Last year a Public Relations category was added and even the highly coveted Titanium Lion has evolved for greater relevance.”

Read the rest of this article from Forbes.

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Watch this video from TED Talks.

Part 2: Technologies are enticing, but it is harder and harder to wean ourselves away from them.

When I e-mailed Gloria Mark to ask if she would be available for an interview, I wasn’t expecting a quick response.

That’s because I knew that as a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and author of The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress and other studies on multi-tasking, she set a schedule to avoid digital distractions by checking her e-mail only twice a day.

That makes her a bit of an anomaly in a relentlessly wired and wireless world, which is starting to weary some to the point that uni-tasking or mono-tasking could come as a welcome relief.

“I can only guess that multi-tasking has increased over the decade because we’ve got a lot more devices and applications available to us,” said Mark. “For example Twitter — it wasn’t around 10 years ago and now it is one of the top applications being used on the Web.

“We’ve got a lot more technologies available that people seem to enjoy, like Twitter, Facebook and social networking sites that didn’t exist 10 years ago. There is a lot more to offer people but at the same time, it is distracting.”

Read this article from The Vancouver Sun.

Part 1: Big ideas: Trending forward, but looking back

“The question is: Will we be able to move beyond this decade of anxiety?

The new millennium looked as if it was off to an edgy start in 2000 with mass paranoia about the Y2K bug infecting the world’s computers.

After that scare fizzled out, an actual disaster struck, driving panic into the hearts of many in the West: The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.

The collective mood of the first decade of this millennium has been, in some ways, coloured by the reactions to this unprecedented attack on U.S. terrain.

Fear has been the decade’s dominant emotion, leading leaders in many countries to use technology to expand their military might, their spy networks and their “security.”

With 2010 arriving next month, many are wondering whether the “war on terror” and all that’s gone with it has accomplished much.”

Read this article from The Vancouver Sun.