This goal is less meaningful to me that it was a few months ago.

There’s some worthwhile ideas in that post but actually hitting a certain target number of subscribers… might not be the best direction for me and Broadcasting Brain for the long term.  I still plan to reach out and spread conversation and ideas amongst lots of people, but chasing traffic, subscriber counts, etc.  is more than a full-time job in itself.  And that’s a full-time job that has almost nothing to do with my real full time job, you know?

And, after awhile, you just can’t scale and have meaningful interaction beyond a certain point.  You know?

I think that Amber has the right idea in this post.  Hat tip to Steven Hodson for also pointing it out to us once again.  (If we were playing hockey, that would be a goal and an assist, I guess.)

Mea culpa for temporarily buying in to some madness.

Hat tip to Ewan McIntosh, who has a great post to accompany this video.

I wrote a post called Where the words come from where I speculated on this topic.

Over at Lateral Action, Mark McGuinness wrote a great piece that looked at the pros and cons of brainstorming.  I thought I’d weigh in with my thoughts on the topic.

Just in case you’re not 100% certain of what brainstorming is, here’s the introduction to the brainstorming entry at Wikipedia.org:

Brainstorming is a group creativity technique designed to generate a large number of ideas for the solution of a problem. The method was first popularized in the late 1930s by Alex Faickney Osborn in a book called Applied Imagination. Osborn proposed that groups could double their creative output with brainstorming.

Although brainstorming has become a popular group technique, researchers have not found evidence of its effectiveness for enhancing either quantity or quality of ideas generated. Because of such problems as distraction, social loafing, evaluation apprehension, and production blocking, brainstorming groups are little more effective than other types of groups, and they are actually less effective than individuals working independently. In the Encyclopedia of Creativity, Tudor Rickards, in his entry on brainstorming, summarizes its controversies and indicates the dangers of conflating productivity in group work with quantity of ideas.

Although traditional brainstorming does not increase the productivity of groups, it may still provide benefits, such as boosting morale, enhancing work enjoyment, and improving team work. Thus, numerous attempts have been made to improve brainstorming or use more effective variations of the basic technique.

The Wikipedia entry seems a bit negative, doesn’t it? Continue reading ‘Does brainstorming really yield good ideas?’ »

In my ongoing quest for knowledge about all things creative, I checked out the Wikipedia.org link for creativity and came across the following:

Creativity is typically used to refer to the act of producing new ideas, approaches or actions, while innovation is the process of both generating and applying such creative ideas in some specific context.

In the context of an organization, therefore, the term innovation is often used to refer to the entire process by which an organization generates creative new ideas and converts them into novel, useful and viable commercial products, services, and business practices, while the term creativity is reserved to apply specifically to the generation of novel ideas by individuals or groups, as a necessary step within the innovation process.

I’m concerned that people are talking about creativity in a context where they should be using the term innovation. Continue reading ‘Is creativity in danger of becoming the new Web 2.0?’ »

This is a book review of Jack’s Notebook, a business novel/parable by Gregg Fraley.

How I got the book:

Review copy (which I’m keeping) sent to me by the author

Background:

Gregg Fraley (@greggfraley on Twitter) has a diverse background which ranges from founding and managing high-flying technology companies to working as a television producer. In addition to writing this book and work with the Creative Problem Solving Institute, he describes himself as a thought leader in how corporate ideation and new product development should be done.

Jack’s Notebook is a business novel written in a style similar to The Goal and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Continue reading ‘Book Review – Jack’s Notebook – Gregg Fraley’ »

Last year I had the privilege of conducting a Q&A with the cosmic Chris Brogan .  He answered ten questions that I had, including:

2) Does the US have a social media capital city? If not, should it?
Social media is actually mostly distributed the way traditional media is (NY, LA, Boston, DC, etc), but then there are these strange new media hubs mixed in (Pittsburgh, Austin, San Francisco). It’s the blend of technology hubs with media hubs that makes this happen.

If you’d like to see the rest of this great Q&A, click here.