Young and Brilliant

Readings of the week from a while ago… Story of my life.

1. I found a couple good blogs about brainstorming and idea generation. I find these two particularly useful offerings of brainstorming ideas (wow, so meta). Creativity for Left-Brained People by Alexa Andrzejewski of Adaptive Path is useful especially for those of you who think you can’t be creative. David Sherwin wrote some Tips for Better Group Brainstorms, which is useful, especially for those of you who may not be as familiar with brainstorming.
2. In a similar vein, Scientific American published “An Easy Way to Increase Creativity,” by Oren Shapira and Nira Liberman. Specifically, the article talks about how actually creating distance between yourself and a problem is the best way to come up with a creative way of soliving it. I think this is interesting, because in working with a variety of start ups, I have been noticing that some people have the innate ability to zoom in and out consistently. In a start up, you’ve got to be both dealing with the minutae, while painting a strong vision for the fledgling company and encountering problems on this entire spectrum. If you cannot do this, and/or you cannot translate those thoughts to the other side of the spectrum (i.e., cannot transfer your broader company goals to the actual development of your product or service), then you’re pretty screwed. I’d love to see how this research and thinking aids people in that situation.
3. Techdirt is implementing an interesting strategy for monetization. What’s notable about this for me is two things: 1) That they’re building out and trying to create services that capitalize on the allure of their brand, not just on the information and things they produce. From a societal point of view, when “newspapers” begin to do this, the allure of their brand relies on their producing good content and journalism, which is, a societal good. 2) Secondly, there’s something about that ultra package - there, they end up acting more like consultants than journalists, offering their opinions and thoughts on your business. I don’t know how I feel about this, but it’s an interesting model to follow, for sure. In a similar vein, apparently, The New York Times’ top lawyer told all the whiney media brats to shut up about content linking - they’re just upset because they can’t figure out how to monetize [quote here].
4. Richard Bernstein wrote an interesting opinion piece for the Financial Times - “America is for now still blowing bubbles.” In it, he argues that after bubbles, there is an overabundance of resources in an economy, that need to be consolidated and backed down to normal levels. He argues that by stymying this consolidation, the Government is doing more harm than good. It’s interesting to think about, I have an interest in the importance of bubbles in creating new sources of growth (through experimentation) for economies.
5. Tom Friedman wrote about “The Next Really Cool Thing,” which is about laser-powered fusion. I don’t know much about fusion, and the article certainly gets me excited. However, the article sounds very hopeful about a lot of possibilities, and a lot of things that seem doubtful to be possible, let alone economically sound, anytime soon. Oh well, it was a good shot.
6. Andrew Hargadon wrote about the challenges of creating a smart grid in “Fight global wrinking now (or later).” Specifically, he points out that if you want to reduce load at peak consumption, people won’t do it unless it becomes convenient for them. They don’t want to be told when they can use their products, and they certainly don’t want their clothes sitting around in the drier getting wrinkled. This is a great example of how we’ve got to mix technology and human behavior together to produce viable solutions.
7. Ambidextrous is Stanford’s beloved student-run design magazine. They published “Organizational Pressures within NASA Run High,” by Susannah Paletz. This reminds me of a particularly cutting example of the problems between the maker’s schedule and the manager’s schedule… And an example of why you you should pay attention to lots of opinions, especially dissenting ones in organizations.
8. That week, Payscale also released data on which college majors led to the most and least pay. It caused quite a stir, to say the least, but is hardly surprising.
9. Lastly, fellow Tumblr user Spaceships pointed me to this fascinating article on Super-noticing. I won’t say much about it here, other than to say that it did inspire me, and I’ll be hoping to post more “noticings” here. So keep your eye out for that in the future. It’ll be fun for me, but maybe painful for you guys, as you have to watch me adjust to a whole new brain-training skillset.