Category: Creativity - Innovation


Creativity as a Way of Life and Brainstorming is Only 25% of the Creative Process

Filed under: Creativity - Innovation - 15 Jul 2008

Creating this post is a mixed bag for me as many of you who know me, know that I advocate that Creativity is a Science and not an art or some abstract personality-based thing. And, I even have the mathematical proof to back this creative science which I wrote about in the late 1990s and published in my book, Always Creative, where I presented the math - i.e., Creativity = Infinity minus Pie-R-Squared, where Pie-R-Squared is the area of a defined circle of what’s working.
Dr. Wayne Dyer - How to be a no-limit person
But the science of creativity aside, living creatively is also a mindset and two things recently reminded me of this.

First, I was in the process of digitizing many of the motivational tapes in my library, one of which was a six cassette series by Nightingale-Conant that featured Dr. Wayne Dyer’s “How to be a no-limit person.” Note I had purchased these tapes in the early 1980s long before CDs and MP3 Players hit the scene hence the cassette conversions.

At the end of that series, they gave a free sample lecture from one of Wayne’s other books, “What do you really want for your children” where Dr. Dyer talks about creativity. In this sample lecture, which I’m including here in this post as mp3 audio clip, Dr. Dyer defines creativity as follows: “… You don’t become creative by being like everybody else … Especially if you were raised to fit in and be like others … Creativity is about how you apply your own matchless-self to everything you do …”


And here is the mp3 file as a down load click here

To a great extent I like what he says and concur, but I have some problems in that he is giving a philosophical approach first without providing the scientific basis on which such philosophy can ride. Thus on some level he is promoting the idea of creativity as being merely an approach to life when that is only partially correct, which leads me to the other data point.

Around the time I was digitizing said cassettes, I enjoyed a lively debate with one of our pool attendants during a quiet afternoon when not many others were pool side. She started the conversation with, “I’m just not creative, at least not compared to my brother and this accounting class I’m taking is really soooo uncreative.”

I laughed. As a business school trained accountant, I told her that accounting can be extremely creative, just look at Enron, MCI-WorldCom, forecasts of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, etc. And one can quickly grasp how numbers and the numbering of numbers can get wildly creative.

There is even an old accounting joke to this effect that goes something like this:

An employer is looking to hire a new controller and interviews three people: one young, one middle aged, one older, all CPAs.

The employer asks the first prospect, the younger one, “How much is one plus one?” To which the young accountant says, “Two.” “Are you sure?” “Yes absolutely. One plus one is always two.”

Then the employer interviews the second prospect, the middle aged CPA, and asks the same question, “How much is one plus one?” To which the CPA said, “Well, it’s usually two, but sometimes it can be two and a half or one and three quarters depending on how you value inventory, spoilage, returns, etc., but yes, most of the times one plus one is two.”

Then the employer interviews the third CPA and asks the same question, “How much is one plus one?” To which the older CPA states, “What do you want it to be?”

Guess who got the job and guess why we have so much fuzzy accounting in governments and public companies despite our best efforts to legislate transparency :)

Back to the pool attendant.

Ultimately our conversation got to how creativity-expressed comes in many shapes and styles - e.g., Your creativity might not look like others as she was comparing her creativity level to her brother’s and how he seemingly can riff with new ideas in a given dept and she can’t quite compete in said dept.; We spoke about how creativity comes in many forms and how visual creativity is different from accounting creativity which is different from music and/or painting and/or acting and/or physical creativity, etc…

Which brings me to the final point and that is of brainstorming. It seems like most people think that brainstorming is being creative when in truth, brainstorming and idea generation is only 25% of the creative science.

The other 75% of the creative process is where the rubber really hits the road. This includes selecting one or more of the ideas from the brainstorming process, implementing said ideas, measuring the results of said implementation, then analyzing the results by comparing them to where you were before you had the ideas you just implemented.

I’ve even heard this from the heads of top advertising agencies. In particular, one president was discussing a certain weight-loss food brand and he said, “Chuck, coming up with the new marketing ideas is the smallest part of the process, perhaps less than 10%, and yes it is the fun part. But, the implementation of the marketing campaign is the larger part of the process. Project management of getting all the items printed, out into the stores on time and within budget, without any mistakes in copy, colors, brand messaging, etc.”

This agency executive even went on to say that his team got paid $2 million per year to manage the account. One million was for the creative consultations and the other million was to manage and implement. He confessed that the second million was a royal pain and full of traps and gatchas and that he would gladly give up that second million but also knew that it would only be a matter of time before he would lose the first million if all he did was the creative. Thus while this executive could riff on new marketing ideas in his sleep, he also knew that creativity expressed and implemented is a package and not just brainstorming.

Reinventing Capitalism - An Interview with Howard Bloom

Filed under: Creativity - Innovation, Life in General, zz - Other - 29 Nov 2006


This audio interview is approximately 35 minutes in length and an 8.6 meg mp3 file

Some of the Themes Discussed in This Interview with Howard Include:

  • Why capitalism should be re-invented …
  • The ethical imperative of saving neighbors …
  • Institutional growth in the record industry ala Warner Brothers vs CBS …
  • How to feel great about your work no matter where you are or who you are working for …
  • The cost of ripping people off and Enron reflections …
  • Selling commodities versus selling novelties …
  • Getting to the heart of art, science, and everyday things …
  • Saving Western Civilization and the miracle fabric of kings …
  • The protest industry …
  • And, the truths behind Vision Quest Live that will change your work life forever plus more …

About Howard Bloom
Howard Bloom, a Visiting Scholar at New York University, is founder of the International Paleopsychology Project, executive editor of the New Paradigm book series, a founding board member of the Epic of Evolution Society, and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the National Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, The International Society of Human Ethology, and the Academy of Political Science. He has been featured in every edition of Who’s Who in Science and Engineering since the publication’s inception.

Bloom has taken an unusual approach to the study of mass moods and cultural convolutions. He started out normally enough, building his first Boolean algebra machine at the age of twelve, becoming a dedicated microscopist that same year, codesigning a computer which won a Westinghouse Science Award before he left grade school, and being granted a private brainstorming session with the head of the Graduate Physics Department of The State University of New York, Buffalo, at the age of thirteen. By sixteen he was a lab assistant at the world’s largest cancer research center, the Roswell Park Memorial Research Cancer Institute, where he helped plumb the mysteries of the immune system. And before his freshman year of college he designed and executed research in Skinnerian programmed learning at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education.

Then came an act of academic heresy. After graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from New York University, Bloom turned down four graduate fellowships and embarked on a 20-year-long urban anthropology expedition to penetrate what he calls “society’s myth-making machinery”–the inner sanctums of politics and the media. During his foray into “the dark underbelly of mass emotion” he edited a magazine which won two National Academy of Poets prizes, founded the leading avant-garde art studio on the East Coast, was featured on the cover of Art Direction Magazine, then gave up listening to Beethoven, Bartok, and Mozart to become editor of a rock magazine. Using correlational studies, focus groups, empirical surveys, ethnographic expeditions into suburban teen subcultures, and other scientific techniques, Bloom more than doubled the publication’s sales, and was credited by Rolling Stones’ Chet Flippo with having founded a new genre–the heavy metal magazine. Seeking still further ways to infiltrate modernity’s mass mind, Bloom formed a public relations firm in the music and film industry and won the confidence of those whose territory he’d invaded. The payoff in knowledge proved invaluable.

Bloom worked with Michael Jackson, Prince, John Cougar Mellencamp, Kiss, Queen, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Joan Jett, Diana Ross, Simon & Garfunkel, The Talking Heads, AC/DC, Billy Idol, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Run D.M.C., Simply Red, and the heads of many a media conglomerate. He was adept at spotting new subcultures, entering them, and helping their members achieve their goals…a skill which gave him an inside role in the rise of rap, disco, and punk rock.

ChuckingIt.com with Chuck Scott - Reflecting on Life, Business, Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology

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