U.S. Faces 'Reverse Brain Drain' from Immigration Woes, Study Warns

[22 August 2007 - WRAL] Foreign entrepreneurs, scientists, skilled workers and students are growingly increasingly frustrated with U.S. immigration laws, and many are returning home, a new study shows. The result: The United States is facing what the researchers call a “reverse brain drain.” That’s the bottom line in a new report written in part by Triangle entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa and other researchers at the Kauffman Foundation and other universities. “For the first time in its history, the United States faces the prospect of a reverse brain-drain,” Wadhwa said in a letter that addressed highlights of the study. “So far, the U.S. has the benefit of attracting the worlds best and brightest. They have typically come here for the freedom and economic opportunities that America offers. More

See also: Harvard: 'Reverse Brain Drain' To Hurt Silicon Valley ... Researchers: Massive Increase In Permanent Visas Needed More

Play, Spirit + Character

[23 August 2007 - Speaking of Faith - American Public Media] Stuart Brown, a physician and director of the National Institute for Play, says that pleasurable, purposeless activity prevents violence and promotes trust, empathy, and adaptability to life's complication. He promotes cutting-edge science on human play, and draws on a rich universe of study of intelligent social animals. More

A longer day, but less time for play: New kindergarten is more rigorous

[26 August 2007 - Baltimore Sun] ... All-day kindergarten has also come under fire from some researchers who warn that when a regimented kindergarten curriculum squeezes out imaginative play, learning and knowledge retention are stunted. "Kindergarten has become the new first grade. We're so afraid that if we don't shove facts in, the children will fall forever behind, [and] schools have whipped themselves into an academic frenzy to push students to learn faster and earlier," said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a Temple University psychology professor and author of Einstein Never Used Flashcards. Her work highlights a philosophical split between those who say the best learning occurs when a child explores concepts through play, and policymakers who push for a structured approach with more testing to see who is and isn't learning. More

Two Infusions of Vision to Bolster New Orleans

[28 August 2007 - New York Times] In the two years since Hurricane Katrina, what has the rebuilding effort produced? No grand designs. No inspired vision for the future of New Orleans. There have been only a handful of earnest, grass-roots proposals to preserve what’s left of the historic fabric. Amid this atmosphere of malaise, two recently announced projects for downtown New Orleans stand out as the first truly creative attempts to foster the city’s resurrection. The first, an extravagant proposal for a new New Orleans National Jazz Center and park by Morphosis, is the most significant work of architecture proposed in the city since the Superdome. The second, a six-mile-long park and mixed-use development along the Mississippi, designed by TEN Arquitectos, Hargreaves Associates and Chan Krieger Sieniewicz, would undo decades of misguided building on the riverfront. More

Bloomberg Announces Plan to Shore Up Arts in Schools

[24 July 2007 - New York Times] Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced yesterday that the city’s Department of Education will require all schools to maintain arts programs, and that principals will be rated in their annual reviews on how well they run those programs. The announcement came just months after the department infuriated arts groups by eliminating a multimillion-dollar program to finance arts education. Under a new set of city standards, the arts curriculums will be judged for comprehensiveness, and potential pay bonuses for principals could be affected. More

Richard Florida to Head Centre in Toronto: Reverse brain drain brings urban expert to U of T

[11 July 2007 - Toronto Star] Writing about America's "looming creativity crisis," renowned urban thinker Richard Florida nearly three years ago warned that religious intolerance and tightening security might chase away its best and brightest. "Terrorism is less a threat to the United States than the possibility that creative and talented people will stop wanting to live within its borders," Florida wrote in the Harvard Business Review in October 2004. "The nation must act in concrete ways to reassure both people – both Americans and global citizens – that it values openness, diversity and tolerance." Now, the best-selling author is proving his own prediction. Florida, 49, a public policy professor at George Mason University in Virginia, is coming to the University of Toronto as a professor of business economics in the Rotman School of Management. Florida will head the school's new $120 million Centre for Jurisdictional Advantage and Prosperity. It will study how cities, regions and provinces can attract individuals to study, live and work, and companies to start up, locate and grow. More

Innovation a key theme at NECC 2007

[3 July 2007 - eSchool News Online] Futurist Andrew Zolli challenges educators to help students find their ‘creative center.’ ...  From new standards that describe what students should be able to demonstrate with technology, to a keynote speech by futurist and author Andrew Zolli, creativity and innovation were central ideas at this year's National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in Atlanta. ... The need to produce a generation of students who are creative thinkers and innovators was a key theme at this year’s National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in Atlanta. More

The Arts Mean Business

[26 June 2007 - Arts & Business Council of Rhode Island] Having a rich tradition in the arts isn't old fashioned, it's cutting edge. American cities are finally realizing the economic impact that the arts have on the economy and quality of life and Providence has proven itself to be the leader of the pack. Mayor Ciccillini recently hosted a breakfast to announce the findings of a study conducted by Americans for the Arts. More (PDF)

National Religious Gathering Explores Faith, Science, Creativity and Society

[24 June 2007 - By Steven Dahlberg - From the United Church of Christ General Synod, Hartford, Connecticut] Yesterday, I attended the "Synod in the City" as part of the United Church of Christ's General Synod. The Synod is taking place in Hartford, Connecticut, for several days and has drawn more than 10,000 people from around the country. The UCC is celebrating is fiftieth anniversary during this General Synod.

The "Synod in the City" was designed to engage the broader community with the UCC members and delegates in learning, playing and worshiping together throughout downtown Hartford. Several keynote presenters spoke throughout the day and I offer some brief summaries below (with more to come). The themes from these presentations not only touched on faith, religion and theology, but on creativity, purposeful life, science, culture, society and politics. The day opened with a presentation by journalist Bill Moyers (video), followed in the afternoon with a keynote from Senator Barack Obama (video) -- both UCC members.

Many of the presentations will eventually be available online. Monday will feature a keynote (2:30 p.m. EDT) by Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund.

FROM SATURDAY, JUNE 23, 2007:

Walter Brueggemann: An Old Testament scholar and writer who has authored more than 58 books, hundreds of articles, and several commentaries on books of the Bible. His most recent book is Theology of the Old Testament.

• Biblical stories help us explore "what is valued and who is valued."
• It is the poets who help us imagine "that the world can be organized differently."
• "The poets notice" -- not the ideologues, the moralists.
• Talking about 9/11 -- "the poets go to the depth of crisis and reach into God's conflicted heart."
• Jeremiah offers two triads for the church and society: one is the trajectory of death (wealth, might and wisdom) and the other is a trajectory of life (love, justice and righteousness). The latter adheres with the divine purpose for life -- and it's something "all of the church needs to be talking about."
• Talking about differences in the church, he said, we need to "learn to care with dignity and respect" for those who do not sign on to this particular agenda.
• "Anxiety is the main pathology in our society to which pastors must respond." This anxiety is generated by our focus on wealth, might and wisdom, as well as our focus on never being good enough. He said there is a "deliberate program of inadequate productivity that leaves everyone" ineffective and unproductive.
  

Ray Kurzweil: This author, inventor and futurist explores the relationship between humans and the machines we've created.
He began his remarks by sharing his faith background as a Unitarian, in which he developed a life-long desire to keep learning about truth, a thirst for knowledge, and a way of living informed by the Golden Rule.

• He said fashioned himself an inventor at five years old, though he doesn't know exactly why. However, "the key to invention is timing." He said many inventors get their products to work, but the timing to bring them to market or to have an impact in society is sometimes off.
  
• For many years, he has worked on predictions about technology and its impact. He said specifics are not predictable, but the overall impact of technology is. Yet people often don't pay attention to such predictions: "Exponential growth is seductive and surprising."
• He demonstrated one of his inventions: a hand-held device that blind people can use on the move to read signs, books and other printed material. The device has camera imaging technology, software and a voice reader.
• For Kurzweil, the connection between technology and faith has to do with our "quest for deeper meaning and to understand more of the world."

NCPR News Forum explores aging and creativity

[20 June 2007 - North Country Public Radio] Mercy Care of the Adirondacks and Paul Smiths College will host a forum on Tuesday, June 26th, on creativity and creating elder-friendly communities. The guest speaker will be Dr. Gene Cohen, Director of the Center for Aging, Health and Humanities at George Washington University. Mercy Care of the Adirondacks Executive Director Donna Beal says many communities in the region are seeing changes in health and long-term care, and people are living longer. She spoke with Todd Moe. More (includes audio)

Saudi Students Showcase Innovation at National Final of Software Design Tournament

[19 June 2007 - Al Bawaba - Saudi Arabia] The best and brightest young minds of the Kingdom were on show today as Microsoft Saudi Arabia proudly announced the winning team to represent the country at their international Imagine Cup finals due to take place in Seoul, South Korea in August. The Imagine Cup is one way in which Microsoft is encouraging young people to apply their imagination, passion, and creativity to develop technological innovations that can make a difference in the world today. Now in its fifth year, the Imagine Cup has grown to be a truly global competition, with close to 100,000 registered entrants from all around the world, striving for the unique opportunity to present their ideas to an international audience of millions. More

What Else Is New?

[14 May 2007 - The New Yorker - by Steven Shapin] How uses, not innovations, drive human technology. ... The way we think about technology tends to elide the older things, even though the texture of our lives would be unrecognizable without them. And when we do consider technology in historical terms we customarily see it as a driving force of progress: every so often, it seems, an innovation—the steam engine, electricity, computers—brings a new age into being. In “The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900” (Oxford; $26), David Edgerton, a well-known British historian of modern military and industrial technology, offers a vigorous assault on this narrative. He thinks that traditional ways of understanding technology, technological change, and the role of technology in our lives, have been severely distorted by what he calls “the innovation-centric account” of technology. The book is a provocative, concise, and elegant exercise in intellectual Protestantism, enthusiastically nailing its iconoclastic theses on the door of the Church of Technological Hype: no one is very good at predicting technological futures; new and old technologies coexist; and technological significance and technological novelty are rarely the same—indeed, a given technology’s grip on our awareness is often in inverse relationship to its significance in our lives. Above all, Edgerton says that we are wrong to associate technology solely with invention, and that we should think of it, rather, as evolving through use. A “history of technology-in-use,” he writes, yields “a radically different picture of technology, and indeed of invention and innovation.” More

Report: NCLB has changed teaching, not always for better

[15 June 2007 - Education Week] Educators are adjusting their teaching practices in response to No Child Left Behind, but not always in ways policymakers might want, according to a three-year RAND study. Sizable percentages of teachers in California, Georgia and Pennsylvania say they spend more time on test-taking strategies, focus more narrowly on tested topics and tailor teaching to students just below the proficiency cutoffs. More

The Value of Openness in Scientific Problem Solving

[11 June 2007 Harvard Business School Working Knowledge - by Karim R. Lakhani, Lars Bo Jeppesen, Peter A. Lohse, and Jill A. Panetta] Scientists are generally rewarded for discoveries they make as individuals or in small teams. While the sharing of information in science is an ideal, it is seldom practiced. In this research, Lakhani et al. used an approach common to open source software communities -- which rely intensely on collaboration -- and opened up a set of 166 scientific problems from the research laboratories of twenty-six firms to over 80,000 independent scientists. The outside scientists were able to solve one-third of the problems that the research laboratories were unable to solve internally. More

The Biology of the Imagination

[Summer/Fall 2007 - Entelechy - By Simon Baron-Cohen] In what sense might something as intrinsically human as the imagination be biological? How could the products of the imagination -- a novel, a painting, a sonata, a theory -- be thought of as the result of biological matter? After all, such artifacts are what culture is made of. So why invoke biology? In this essay, I will argue that the content of the imagination is of course determined more by culture than biology. But the capacity to imagine owes more to biology than culture. More

Local view: Now could be creative turning point for Duluth

[2 June 2007 - Duluth News Tribune - Opinion by Steven Dahlberg] There is a common perception that creativity is simply about art and artists. Yet it was an artist, Joseph Beuys, who said: “Everyone is an artist.”

As the Duluth-Superior area proceeds into the Knight Creative Communities Initiative, it’s important to consider how to engage everyone’s creativity — not just that of artists or the creative class — in community and economic development.

Creativity matters in business, education, nonprofits, government, arts and neighborhoods. It matters for children in school, for professionals in the workplace and for retirees in the community.

For more than 15 years, I’ve been working internationally in the field of creativity, advocating for the importance of creative thinking and helping people unleash and harness more of their inherent creative abilities.

Yet my creative endeavors began in Duluth as a teenage entrepreneur, a freelance writer and photographer and a political junkie. I am delighted to know that the Duluth-Superior area was among just three cities chosen by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to work with economist Richard Florida.

In my work, I’ve repeatedly seen people discover through creativity what gives them purpose and meaning and then begin to translate those desires into concrete realities. As a result of this insight, I’ve been exploring how we might be more intentional about helping people become better creative thinkers and do more of what gives them a sense of purpose.

This is engagement — doing what we love, what we are good at, what gives us meaning, what makes us happy and what uses our strengths. Tapping into this is what the KCCI is all about.

The Duluth-Superior area, like many regions, faces the challenge of engaging as many people as possible in creating a positive community. The risk of not doing this is creating a community with stagnant job growth, environmental losses, schools that resemble factories and people who flee the decay or stay because they don’t care.

Creativity is key to engaging people and can be pursued in many areas.

We can deliberately teach for creativity — helping students learn how to think in new ways, develop their strengths, imagine alternatives and generate ideas.

We can develop cultures of creativity in organizations, where everyone’s creativity is encouraged and valued and leads to transformational innovations in products and services.

We can link entrepreneurship, research and creativity so that people know how to translate great ideas into real businesses, producing more jobs and a flourishing community.

We can help pre-retirees and seniors use creativity to identify their purpose and ways in which to express this in their community. Many are living longer and healthier than ever before. “Checking out” of the community after full-time work isn’t an option.

We can get citizens involved in the democratic process by applying their creative thinking and problem-solving. Creativity provides a process for dialogue, better understanding and integrating diverse viewpoints.

We can shape economic development opportunities that are based on explicit creativity goals, along with traditional objectives. We need to learn to consciously talk about development in a creativity context.

We can use public art to beautify public space, and to involve community members in conceptualizing and creating the art itself.

We can engage nonprofits and faith communities not only in serving their communities, but actively imagining and creating them as well.

Any community in America can pursue these opportunities. Whether it’s cities like Duluth, the inner city of North Minneapolis or the former New England mill town where I live now, the challenge remains the same: How might we deliberately apply our creativity, engage in personally meaningful activities and improve the quality of life in our city or neighborhood?

My experience growing up in Duluth in the 1980s incorporated three of the “Ts” that Richard Florida describes: talent, tolerance and territory.

My talents of today were seeded in Duluth — in schools, at the public library, in small businesses, in political involvement and in volunteering. Plus, I benefited from mentors, teachers and parents who recognized and encouraged my strengths and talents.

In Duluth, I first learned to appreciate the value of immigrants and the importance of social justice. I became open to diverse ideas, arts, creativity and politics.

Duluth instills an authentic sense of place, blending its unmatched natural assets with built amenities — from hiking, skiing, picnics and the lake to more recently added amenities such as the Lakewalk, coffee shops and cool entrepreneurial businesses.

Hopefully, May 2007 will be a turning point for the Duluth Superior Area — where the creative capacity of each individual is recognized, the future is imagined together and the common good is enhanced through collective creative expression. The time is now to transform the raw materials of the past 20 years into the vibrant creative community waiting to be born.

Steven Dahlberg is a native of Duluth, a writer and principal of the International Centre for Creativity and Imagination, a creativity consulting firm based in Willimantic, Conn.

Make Your Company a Talent Factory

[June 2007 - Harvard Business Review - by Douglas A. Ready and Jay A. Conger] Stop losing out on lucrative business opportunities because you don’t have the talent to develop them. ... Despite the great sums of money companies dedicate to talent management systems, many still struggle to fill key positions--limiting their potential for growth in the process. Virtually all the human resource executives in the authors' 2005 survey of 40 companies around the world said that their pipeline of high-potential employees was insufficient to fill strategic management roles. The survey revealed two primary reasons for this. First, the formal procedures for identifying and developing next-generation leaders have fallen out of sync with what companies need to grow or expand into new markets. To save money, for example, some firms have eliminated positions that would expose high-potential employees to a broad range of problems, thus sacrificing future development opportunities that would far outweigh any initial savings from the job cuts. Second, HR executives often have trouble keeping top leaders' attention on talent issues, despite those leaders' vigorous assertions that obtaining and keeping the best people is a major priority. If passion for that objective doesn't start at the top and infuse the culture, say the authors, talent management can easily deteriorate into the management of bureaucratic routines. Yet there are companies that can face the future with confidence. These firms don't just manage talent, they build talent factories. The authors describe the experiences of two such corporations--consumer products icon Procter & Gamble and financial services giant HSBC Group--that figured out how to develop and retain key employees and fill positions quickly to meet evolving business needs. Though each company approached talent management from a different direction, they both maintained a twin focus on functionality (rigorous talent processes that support strategic and cultural objectives) and vitality (management's emotional commitment, which is reflected in daily actions). More

At 3M, A Struggle Between Efficiency And Creativity: How CEO George Buckley is managing the yin and yang of discipline and imagination

[11 June 2007 - Business Week] Not too many years ago, the temple of management was General Electric (GE ). Former CEO Jack Welch was the high priest, and his disciples spread the word to executive suites throughout the land. One of his most highly regarded followers, James McNerney, was quickly snatched up by 3M after falling short in the closely watched race to succeed Welch. 3M's board considered McNerney a huge prize, and the company's stock jumped nearly 20% in the days after Dec. 5, 2000, when his selection as CEO was announced. The mere mention of his name made everyone richer. McNerney was the first outsider to lead the insular St. Paul (Minn.) company in its 100-year history. He had barely stepped off the plane before he announced he would change the DNA of the place. His playbook was vintage GE. McNerney axed 8,000 workers (about 11% of the workforce), intensified the performance-review process, and tightened the purse strings at a company that had become a profligate spender. He also imported GE's vaunted Six Sigma program—a series of management techniques designed to decrease production defects and increase efficiency. Thousands of staffers became trained as Six Sigma "black belts." The plan appeared to work: McNerney jolted 3M's moribund stock back to life and won accolades for bringing discipline to an organization that had become unwieldy, erratic, and sluggish. Then, four and a half years after arriving, McNerney abruptly left for a bigger opportunity, the top job at Boeing (BA ). Now his successors face a challenging question: whether the relentless emphasis on efficiency had made 3M a less creative company. That's a vitally important issue for a company whose very identity is built on innovation. More

3M's Battle Between Efficiency and Creativity: Inside Innovation Issue #5

[May 31, 2007- Business Week's NussbaumOnDesign - Bruce Nussbaum] You see it again and again: Six Sigma versus Innovation. The latest issue of IN tackles that issue with an indepth look by Brian Hindo at how 3M lost much of its creativity in search of process efficiency and how it got it back. Some companies--Bank of America, Starwood and others--appear to have found that balance between efficiency and creativity but it's rare and difficult to achieve. Sometimes they have to double-track the two processes and then link them up somewhere in the organization. More

Two New 'Harvard Business Review' Articles About Creativity ...

[May 2007 - Harvard Business Review]

Picking Winners: A Conversation with MacArthur Fellows Program Director Daniel J. Socolow
What can business leaders learn from the organization that confers the storied "genius grants"? For one thing, that exceptional creativity is very hard to find. If you're looking for a way to pack your staff with outstanding talent, you're probably on the wrong track. ... In the business world, "creativity" has become the latest buzzword. How to attract, nurture, and direct the extraordinarily talented people who will come up with the next Lipitor, Sony Walkman, or iPod is an enduring topic among businesspeople. As the director of the MacArthur Fellows Program, Daniel J. Socolow has considerable experience with the process of rooting out creativity. In this conversation with HBR senior editor Diane Coutu, he describes how recipients of the "genius grant"--half a million dollars with no strings attached--are chosen. As significant as the money is, the recognition that comes with a fellowship may be more so. MacArthur grants provide powerful validation of the fellows' work, Socolow says, and that validation opens doors for people, whatever the field. Although the program keeps a lookout for entrepreneurs who are on the brink of major new advances, he believes that the market does a good job of rewarding the best ideas in the business. Replicating the MacArthur model in a company would entail giving some employees unlimited time and lots of money to follow their own inclinations--not very feasible in most contexts. Nevertheless, the program has learned a lesson that may be valuable for business: The kind of creativity that leads to important breakthroughs is extremely hard to find. And, says Socolow, exceptionally creative people aren't always the obvious suspects, who may simply be good at promoting themselves: "Listen to others and look in the least likely places ... Extend your networks and try to get information from as many people as possible, just as we do." More

Inner Work Life: Understanding the Subtext of Business Performance
New research shows how business performance is driven by workers' state of mind--and how managers, if they're not careful, can drive both down. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer's new stream of research, based on more than 12,000 diary entries logged by knowledge workers over three years, reveals the dramatic impact of employees' inner work lives—their perceptions, emotions, and motivation levels—on several dimensions of performance. ... Anyone in management knows that employees have their good days and their bad days--and that, for the most part, the reasons for their ups and downs are unknown. Most managers simply shrug their shoulders at this fact of work life. But does it matter, in terms of performance, if people have more good days than bad days? Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer's new stream of research, based on more than 12,000 diary entries logged by knowledge workers over three years, reveals the dramatic impact of employees' inner work lives--their perceptions, emotions, and motivation levels--on several dimensions of performance. People perform better when their workday experiences include more positive emotions, stronger intrinsic motivation (passion for the work), and more favorable perceptions of their work, their team, their leaders, and their organization. What the authors also found was that managers' behavior dramatically affects the tenor of employees' inner work lives. So what makes a difference to inner work life? When the authors compared the study participants' best days to their worst days, they found that the single most important differentiator was their sense of being able to make progress in their work. The authors also observed interpersonal events working in tandem with progress events. Praise without real work progress, or at least solid efforts toward progress, had little positive impact on people's inner work lives and could even arouse cynicism. On the other hand, good work progress without any recognition--or, worse, with criticism about trivial issues--could engender anger and sadness. Far and away, the best boosts to inner work life were episodes in which people knew they had done good work and their managers appropriately recognized that work. More

New Book from Harvard Business School: Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas

[8 May 2007 - Harvard Business Online] Since ancient times, people have believed that breakthrough ideas come from the brains of geniuses with awesome rational powers. In recent years, however, the paradigm has begun to shift toward the notion that the source of creativity lies "out there," in the network of connections between people and ideas. In this provocative book, Richard Ogle crystallizes the nature of this shift, and boldly outlines "a new science of ideas." The key resides in what he calls "idea-spaces," a set of nodes in a network of people (and their ideas) that cohere and take on a distinctive set of characteristics leading to the generation of breakthrough ideas. These spaces are governed by nine laws--illuminated in individual chapters with fascinating stories of dramatic breakthroughs in science, business, and art. "Smart World" will change forever the way we think about creativity and innovation. More

Q&A: Rediscovering Schumpeter: The Power of Capitalism

[7 May 2007 - Harvard Business School Working Knowledge] Economist Joseph Schumpeter was perhaps the most powerful thinker ever on innovation, entrepreneurship, and capitalism. He was also one of the most unusual personalities of the 20th century, as Harvard Business School professor emeritus Thomas K. McCraw shows in a new biography. Read our interview and book excerpt. More

Are Entrepreneurs Down in the Dumps?

[27 April 2007 - BusinessWeek] Three recent surveys showed that small-business owners are more pessimistic about the economy and the future than they have been in years. ... A first-of-its-kind generational study conducted by American Express (AEXP) showed that a majority of Generation Y and Baby Boomer entrepreneurs are optimistic about the state of the U.S. economy. And large majorities—76% and 90%, respectively—of Gen Yers and Boomers described opening their own companies as "a good idea." More

Oops, I Did It Again: New brain research may help explain why some people don't seem to learn from their mistakes.

[24 April 2007 - Newsweek] Benjamin Franklin was no brain scientist. He was a keen observer of human behavior, and of the natural world, but he was a couple centuries too early to explore the intricate neuronal interplay of physics and biochemistry that makes us the people we are: healthy, wise, quirky, self-destructive. So, when he famously defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results," this 18th-century polymath was really being more intuitive than rigorously scientific. Yet it looks like he got it right. New neuropsychological research is now suggesting that the inability to learn from one's mistakes may indeed be at the root of a broad range of human problems, ranging from childhood bullying and truancy to aggressive acts like road rage to all manner of substance abuse. And this cognitive aberration, deep-wired into the neurons and genes, may even underlie the vagaries of normal human behavior and personality. (It's important in the wake of the tragic events at Virginia Tech to emphasize that this column is not about such deeply disturbed psychology.) More

Leadership Forum: What is to be done?

[April 2007 - CIO Asia - By Teng Fang Yih & Christopher Koch] Now’s the time for CIOs to seize opportunities to reinvent the innovation process at their organisations. ... At the IBM-sponsored CIO Leadership Summit immediately preceding the annual CIO Awards & Conference 2007 at Raffles Hotel on 23 March 2007, more than 50 of the nation’s and region’s senior information executives packed a room to hear some bad news, and some good news. They were welcomed by newly anointed managing director of IBM Singapore, Teresa Lim. The editor of this magazine then set the tone for the rest of the session, aligning it with the theme and purpose of the entire CIO Awards & Conference 2007 programme: technology deployment and its role, as well as that of its leaders, in driving innovation in today’s global economy.  More specifically, it was about why the CIO and his IS division is often not involved in innovation, and how that must be changed, considering their special place within every large organisation today: at its core as the enablers and collectively the lifeblood of every single process. The top executives on the day were reminded of the fact that their mission was driving innovation.  Innovation. Not merely supporting and enabling the business, but about enhancing, then generating, creating and transforming their businesses, industries and economies. This is an important imperative for delegates at the forum to move after. As companies all over the world seek more and better ideas, their top executives in IT should seize the opportunity now to reinvent the innovation process by enabling their business people to collaborate, and by making IT an engine for business growth. More

Bringing Einstein back down to earth: Walter Isaacson delves into the private life of a genius

[13 April 13 2007- Houston Chronicle - Book Review by Steve Weinberg of "EINSTEIN: His Life and Universe," by Walter Isaacson] Words like "relativity" and "quantum theory" are part of the everyday lexicon, but for nonscientists they can be baffling as well as familiar. That means a biography of Albert Einstein may seem daunting to many readers. Walter Isaacson gives you one that isn't. Isaacson is a journalist, not a scientist. He undertook the challenge of explaining Einstein's physics for a nonspecialist readership because it is challenging. Tautology intended. ... As Isaacson recounts the growth and maturity of a genius, he fills the biography with psychological insights that grow organically from his intense study of the man. He tells us, for example, that "as a young student [Einstein] never did well with rote learning. And later, as a theorist, his success came not from the brute strength of his mental processing power but from his imagination and creativity. He could construct complex equations, but, more important, he knew that math was the language nature uses to describe her wonders." More

Engaging Creativity in the Classroom ... and the Community

[29 March 2007 - The Chronicle, Willimantic, Connecticut - Opinion by Steven Dahlberg, International Centre for Creativity and Imagination] Last Wednesday, I was awed to be sitting among the Windham High School Young Poets Group at The Bushnell in Hartford. Erin Gruwell – the real-life teacher upon whom the "Freedom Writers" movie is based – recognized these young artists in her very first comments on stage.

Windham teacher Lynn Frazier wrote to Gruwell, telling her about the impassioned work of her young poets. She told Gruwell about what a difference writing makes for these students, about the impact Gruwell's story had on them, and about how these students had fundraisers and a
pancake breakfast to go hear Gruwell tell her story.

Before going on stage, Gruwell read that letter and was moved to tears. She then entered a nearly packed auditorium and singled out the 30 Windham High School students – telling them to stand up, thanking them for their work and for being there, and acknowledging them several more times during her speech.

As a Willimantic resident, I am proud to know that these students are in my neighborhood everyday, learning through writing and creative expression how to discover their potential and uniqueness.

I am also aware that the opportunities for such learning do not happen frequently enough, especially for high school students. Some argue that it's too late to provide "extra" activities, such as arts and creative thinking, that it won't make a difference in these teenagers' lives.

Yet, as the "Freedom Writers" movie and the Windham Young Poets demonstrate, sometimes expressing oneself with pen and paper is the ONLY thing keeping some students engaged in school.

Our challenge as a community is how to provide more learning opportunities like this, which focus on students' strengths and talents, on what's working and connecting, and on the hope and possibilities of these individuals.

Our community grows and thrives when people's creative capital is expressed in positive ways. These young people provide one example of how each of us might contribute in unique ways to developing our community. What next …?

Creativity is ...

[12 March 2007 – Steve Dahlberg, International Centre for Creativity and Imagination] Participants at the "Creative Wisdom Workshop: Composing a Creative Life" at the Hartford Public Library (Hartford, Connecticut) generated the following definitions of creativity last month.

CREATIVITY IS …

* Looking at the ordinary and seeing what others don't see
* Passion – being own voice
* Responding to conflict
* Coming out from under
* Inspiration
* Energy
* Perseverance
* Universal
* Sharing
* Spontaneous
* Intuitive
* Your own way of interpreting of things around you
* Coming with your own ideas
* Drawing, dancing, walking, singing
* Unique, genuine, given easily, capable, reliable
* Freedom to think of new ideas and ways of doing things
* Sense of bringing to well-being
* New interest, focus, happiness, fulfillment
* Thinking out of the box
* Ideas practically formulated into reality
* Imagination acting on life
* Spiritual – from God
* Co-creator with the divine
* Being able to visualize
* Bring unrelated resources together to make something new
* Making something from nothing
* Tapping into the great unconscious

Anna Freud on Creative Minds ...

“Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.”

Develop creative neighbourhoods using 'inner artist': New approach sought in building future urban developments

[21 February 2006 - Daily Commercial News] Developers need to embrace their inner artist to help build communities where creativity can flourish. That was the message to delegates at the recent Canadian Urban Institute conference, The Path to Culture-led Regeneration: Who’s Leading the Way? While new condominium and commercial developments often trade on the creativity of the neighbourhoods in which they’re built, they can also destroy the creative character of those communities. More

Diversity Goals Help Kids in School -- and Later in Life

[16 February 2007 - The Press-Enterprise - Hugh B. Price, Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution] ... Looking to the future, the U.S. economy will rely increasingly on minority workers, entrepreneurs and taxpayers who represent a growing segment of the population. Yet black and Latino pupils in particular are concentrated in the nation's lowest-performing schools, with the least able teachers and the most inadequate facilities. Surely, student assignment policies that enable them to attend good schools where they can maximize their talent and potential easily meet the test for a compelling state interest. ... More

Hartford Explores the Role of Creativity and Arts in Education, Business and Community

[22 March 2007 - A report by Steven Dahlberg, International Centre for Creativity and Imagination - From the Greater Hartford Art Council's "Community Conversations: The State of Arts Education in Greater Hartford"] The Greater Hartford Arts Council (GHAC) brought together educators, artists, business people and government officials to explore the state of arts education in the Hartford area. This dialogue was the first of two parts in the 2007 MetLife Foundation National Arts Forum Series on "Arts and Workforce Development" (watch for part two in May).

Moderator and GHAC's Executive Director Ken Kahn started off by asking The Stanley Works' Vice President Tim LeBeau about the importance of creativity in the workplace. LeBeau said that creativity is at the heart of what they do: "We are paid for brand and innovation." He said that because innovation comes from people, they need to be critical thinkers. Creativity also comes into play in designing products for function AND fashion.

Jonathan Gillman, chair of theater department at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, explored ideas about developing creativity in arts students. He said that many first-year students at his school are out of touch with their own creativity. However, being at an arts-based school, each department teaches creativity through a variety of art forms. In response to LeBeau's call for critical thinking, Gillman agreed and was quick to add that creative thinking goes side by side with critical thinking.

Ultimately, Gillman said the aim of the Academy of the Arts is to educate creative, engaged citizens who contribute to the world. This doesn't end at the school's front door. Rather, he said that arts education is a lifelong process, as it has to do with ways of thinking in general and of perceiving the world. More

INNOVATION: How to Implement New Ideas

[1 March 2007 - CIO] This Forum is a follow-up to our Jan. 1 column, which focused on how CIOs can create innovative cultures. Here, we explore how to create processes for innovation. On the surface, putting “innovation” and “process” together seems oxymoronic. Process conjures boundaries; innovation, some say, is best fostered in unfettered environments. But smart CIOs understand the need for both in pursuit of the new. More

Celebrate Windham Kids and Creativity

PUBLIC ART EXHIBIT TO OPEN SATURDAY, MARCH 17, IN WILLIMANTIC; 1300 WINDHAM ELEMENTARY SCHOOL STUDENTS DESIGN AND PAINT BANNERS TO BE HUNG ON MAIN STREET

[8 March 2007 - By Steve Dahlberg - Willimantic, Connecticut] The Windham Arts Center (WAC) will host the opening exhibition of "Creativity: The Heart of Community" Windham Banner Project on Saturday, March 17, from 1 to 4 p.m., with a special presentation at 3 p.m. The event is free and open to the public and will take place in The Annex at WAC, 866 Main Street, Willimantic, Conn.

The Windham community will celebrate public art designed and created by 1300 students from Windham's four elementary schools, including Natchaug, North Windham, Sweeney, and Windham Center. Sixty-four unique banner designs will be hung on Main Street lampposts in Willimantic as public art -- created BY the community FOR the community.

Artist JoAnn Moran of rePublicArt worked with students and teachers for three weeks as part of the Windham Schools Artist-in-Residence Program, which is supported by a $50,000 gift from the Ossen Fund for Arts Education. Through the use of recycled vinyl billboards as the banner material, Moran helped students learn about the importance of sustainability, public art and creative communities.

The Windham Banner Project is part of an ongoing creative community project, working to promote the value of creativity, arts and culture in community and economic development. The 3 p.m. program will represent members of this broader community, including performance artists from the Windham High School Young Poets group, advocate and organizer LaResse Harvey, artist JoAnn Moran, Willimantic resident Steven Dahlberg, and others. Plus, meet the young artists, view an exhibition of their design process, see the banners on Main Street, and share your ideas for future creative community projects.

The City of Toronto Poet Laureate Pier Giorgio Di Cicco says of community creativity: "Creativity is that celebration where people re-invent the world ... where they can be themselves and think imaginatively. ... People want to be accepted and acknowledged in their creative skills as citizens. What they are is already creative. The project is to have them recognize it."

In this spirit, the Willimantic creative community projects include several goals and benefits:

• Using creativity and arts to engage the public in their community.
• Providing visual beautification elements through public art to the downtown district.
• Showcasing the creation of sustainable art and green communities.
• Celebrating the diversity of the community -- including male and female, multi-generational, multi-ethnic, and multi-organizational.
• Building on and complementing current arts and cultural initiatives, such as Third Thursday Willimantic Street Fest, the Cinema Project, the Willimantic Victorian Home Tour, the Windham Theatre Guild, the Romantic Willimantic Chocolate Festival,
  among many others.
• Offering educational programs that help Windham students and adults develop and apply their creative thinking skills.

Two of the young banner artists expressed some benefits of creativity and public art: "Public art will help everyone in town imagine wonderful things," and "Our lamppost banners will make our
city feel creative. Our public art will also make our creativity shine to our town."

Additional supporters of the Windham Banner Project include Willimantic Waste/The DeVivo Family, Town of Windham, Windham Arts Center, The Home Depot, rePublicArt, and the International Centre for Creativity and Imagination.

More

How can U.S. stay on top of the world?

[7 March 2007 - USA Today - Opinion] We’re no longer the economic center of the universe, as the global landscape has shifted to former Third World countries. What to do? Remain competitive through innovation, not protectionism. ... Many more corporations should develop a clear emerging-markets strategy, embed their young managers with local families (as Procter & Gamble already does), build crucial local relationships, establish international focus groups to tailor products to local tastes, and form business alliances with this new breed of companies. And our universities should focus more on creative problem solving and integrate study and work experience abroad if we want students to be comfortable with foreign languages and cultures. More

Intelligent Design

[4 March 2007 - Star Tribune - Minneapolis] On the heels of the information age, which seems to have just arrived, come suggestions that we've entered a new era, one in which creativity, design, aesthetics and the ability to forge emotional links will drive the American economy. Editorial writer Steve Berg recently discussed the trend with Thomas Fisher, dean of the University of Minnesota's newly formed College of Design, which incorporates architecture, landscape, cities, interiors, fashions and graphics into a singular effort. ... The information economy is still with us. But the paradoxical effect of the Internet is that it has made information so widely available that it holds no real economic value. Everybody can get incredible amounts of information, so there's no competitive advantage of having it. The idea of the design economy is that, for developed countries like ours, which cannot compete in a global marketplace on price or even quite often on the quality of a product, we have to compete on the basis of innovation, creativity and imagination, which takes you to design. By design, I don't mean just aesthetics but function and cultural adaptability. More

Needing more innovation

[2 March 2007 - Times of Malta - Lawrence Zammit] One of the areas that seems to require a great deal of attention in Malta is the issue of innovation. In fact this is an area where we are being told that we are lagging behind other members of the European Union, in particular within the framework of the Lisbon Agenda (the EU strategy that is meant to increase the competitiveness of firms operating within the EU with a view to achieving sustained economic growth and employment). Within the context of the Lisbon Agenda, reference is made to research and development that takes place within the EU member states. All this may sound very strange, as I have always felt that it is more than legitimate to ask whether it is true that so little R&D takes place in this country, as is being reported. Is there really such little creativity in firms operating here? And the consequence of little R&D and little creativity leads to little innovation. Yet we pride ourselves that the father of creative thinking is Maltese. More

Toward an A+ in creativity

[20 February 2007 - Boston Globe] Judging a school by its test scores isn't a bad idea, it's just a limited one. A bill in the state Legislature would create a new measuring stick -- one that charts the chances students have to engage in creative activities. That might mean acting in the school play or being in the science fair. And as this century dawns, it should also mean engaging in multidisciplinary activities that may combine math and art or science and economics. Filed by Representative Daniel Bosley, a North Adams Democrat, the bill would set up a commission of cultural and business people as well as educators and legislative representatives to devise an index of creative and innovative education. More

innovation: from corporate buzzword to business imperative in 2007

[20 February 2007 - Weber Shandwick] According to a recently released survey by Weber Shandwick and KRC Research, the bedrock of the new "Creativity Economy" in 2007 will continue to be innovation, with 76 percent of senior executives agreeing that innovation will become more important over the next five years. The survey, titled "The Changing Face of Marketing and Communications in Today's Creativity Economy," also reveals that 78 percent of senior executives agree that innovation is important to their CEO, with most CEOs similarly responding that innovation is important to the company. More

Universities Urged to Link Up with Business

[16 February 2007 - TrainingZone - UK] British universities can do for the UK's creative economy what America's leading colleges have done for the US technology sector, according to the chief executive of Creative & Cultural Skills. Speaking at the Guardian Higher Education Summit, Tom Bewick urged universities to strengthen their links with creative businesses and assist in the development of enterprise clusters with high levels of specialised entrepreneurial skills. More

Diversity Powers Innovation

[26 January 2007 - Center for American Progress - By Scott Page] Most people believe that innovation requires smarter people, better ideas. That premise, though intuitive, omits what may be the most powerful but least understood force for innovation: Diversity. Diversity usually calls to mind differences in race, gender, ethnicity, physical capabilities, and sexual orientation—social or political differences that at first glance have little to do with innovation. Yet the key to innovation, in economic terms, resides inside the heads of people, the more diverse the better. That link may not be immediately apparent, yet any understanding of innovation's role in economic growth must focus on diversity as well as ability. More

Martin Luther Al-King?

[25 January 2007 - New York Times - Opinion by Thomas Friedman] The brutally honest Syrian-born poet Ali Ahmad Said, known as Adonis, gave an interview from Paris on March 11, 2006, with Dubai TV, and warned of what's at stake (translation by Memri): ''The Arab individual is no less smart, no less a genius, than anyone else in the world. He can excel -- but only outside his society. If I look at the Arabs, with all their resources and great capacities, and I compare what they have achieved over the past century with what others have achieved in that period, I would have to say that we Arabs are in a phase of extinction, in the sense that we have no creative presence in the world. We have the quantity. We have the masses of people, but a people becomes extinct when it no longer has a creative capacity, and the capacity to change its world.''

WHY KM INITIATIVES FAIL!

[21 January 2007 - Gurteen Knowledge-Letter - UK] I recently spent an hour or so with several senior managers of a large organization talking about their new KM initiative. After the session I e-mailed the knowledge manager some advise. Its quite generic but sums up my thoughts on why so many KM initiatives fail and so I thought I'd share them on my blog. Since then I have also seen someone asking in a forum "how do you get people to collaborate?" and "how do you change the mindset of people?". As I explain in my blog posting such questions are poor questions in that they are not specific enough! Jason Bates in my Forum commenting on the question "how should worker productivity be better managed?" answers in a similar vein by effectively saying "well it all depends" and goes on to say: "It's a personal bug bear of mine that some KM'ers persist in abstracting problems to conceptual levels that make business people groan and roll their eyes." More

A Kindred Spirit - Science, Education and Creativity

[21 January 2007 - Science- and Fooducation blog - Norway] My first experience with the annual ASE (The Association for Science Education) conference was at The University of Birmingham 3.-6. January. A paradox was that I had to go all the way to England to find that one of the most interesting experiences was to be a Swedish lecturer. A packed programme with hoards of parallel sessions, spanning most thinkable and unthinkable science education issues; from the highly inspiring/enthusing to the one that give you the feeling "I never thought it was possible to completely ruin something so inherently fascinating". However, one experience left all of the other sessions in the shadows: Hans Persson at the Swedish National Centre for Education in Physics (and Stockholm University, Institute of Education) had two sessions: "Creativity in the Science Classroom" and "Curious About Science?". His approach to science teaching was so fresh, vital and inspiring that the session ended in the audience giving standing ovations (the first time I've experienced such after a conference lecture). More

Meaningful learning keeps students engaged by teachers

[17 January 2007 - Huntsville Times] Speaker: Don't let kids get bored, or they'll be difficult ... Dealing with difficult students means not having them and the best way to do this is to encourage collaborative, meaningful learning, Dr. Charles Beaman told Madison teachers at the school system's in-service activities on Jan. 9. "Students must have therapeutic teachers in their lives," said Beaman, a national private consultant with his company, Therapeutic Discipline and Other Solutions based in Nashville, Tenn. "Classroom management must be therapeutic with teachers being friendly and inviting students to participate and come along." Beaman said a teacher's No. 1 goal should be to be proactive by motivating students to learn so they don't get bored and become difficult. More

Sowing the seeds of knowledge

[14 January 2007 - Times-Tribune] In the case of Howard Gardner, school "was never problematic." Of course, that’s not true for everyone, and the Scranton native has spent the better part of his life doing his best to ease the burden. It would not be off-base to use the term visionary to describe the Harvard University professor, considered by many to be a heavyweight in the field of educational psychology. Dr. Gardner’s claim to fame is his theory of multiple intelligences, which challenges the long-held notion that there is a single human intelligence that can be assessed via standard methods such as IQ tests. In Dr. Gardner's world, it’s not a question of how smart a person is, but, in what way are they smart? More

Workers Crave 'Meaning'

[10 January 2007 - TrainingZone - UK] Interviews with over 10,000 workers in the last five years show that companies who fail to create meaning for employees risk business failure, according to corporate psychologists YSC. The consultancy says that its results show that people do not want to just work in a business that is successful, but want to feel engaged in something worthwhile and that they can make a difference. “People spend up to one third of their waking lives in the workplace, so asking the fundamental question of what they get out of that time is important,” said Gurnek Bains, CEO of YSC. More

This raises the issue of how to engage employees in meaningful activity -- which both gives the individual employee the opportunity to do purposeful work, as well contributes to the organization's bottom-line results. The topic of "meaningful work" is also relevant for older workers who are nearing retirement, as well as for those who have left their full-time work but want to stay engaged in some kind of meaningful activity. -- Steve Dahlberg

Like other aspects of modern life, schools must change

[10 January 2007 - Half Moon Bay Review - Opinion] ... One of CASA's guiding principles, which specifically addresses individual needs, is Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences. In our society, we often think of people who are "good at" math or language as "smart," yet we don't offer that same mark of respect to gifted artists or musicians. Why is that? When I was young, my mom would say things like "So-and-so is smart at cutting hair" or "smart at fixing cars," and it wasn't until recently that I realized how true her words were: It's all brain power. It's all intelligence. The holistic approach adopted by CASA acknowledges and nurtures this belief, allowing the students to access the curriculum through their strengths, develop in many different areas, and recognize intelligence in others as well as in themselves. More

Research: Laughter is contagious

[13 December 2006 - Wellcome Trust] Laughter is truly contagious, and now, scientists studying how our brain responds to emotive sounds believe they understand why. Researchers at University College London (UCL) and Imperial College London have shown that positive sounds such as laughter or a triumphant "woo hoo!" trigger a response in the listener's brain. This response occurs in the area of the brain that is activated when we smile, as though preparing our facial muscles to laugh. The research, funded by the Wellcome Trust, Action Medical Research and the Barnwood House Trust, is published today in the Journal of Neuroscience. Led by Dr Sophie Scott, a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL, the research team played a series of sounds to volunteers while measuring their brain's response using an fMRI scanner. Some of the sounds were positive, such as laughter or triumph, while others were unpleasant, such as screaming or retching. All of the sounds triggered a response in the volunteer's brain in the premotor cortical region, which prepares the muscles in the face to respond accordingly, though the response was greater for positive sounds, suggesting that these were more contagious than negative sounds. The researchers believe this explains why we respond to laughter or cheering with an involuntary smile. More

Happiness, Happiness, Happiness

[8 January 2007 - Steve Dahlberg] It looks like 2007 is going to be the year of happiness, well-being and positive psychology -- or at least the popular exploration of these topics. Scientists and academics are studying the impact of positive emotions and happiness on our personal lives and our surroundings. Economists are looking at how to measure the happiness and well-being of a community, in addition to traditional measures of financial outcomes and impacts. All of these areas promise a balance to our typical focus on "fixing" what's wrong or broken with our lives, our organizations and our communities. The time is here for also focusing on what's good, what works and what we are best at.

Teaching Happiness
[8 January 2007 - WBUR - On Point] If doing for others is the road to happiness, New York's Wesley Autry, who jumped on to subway tracks to save a man's life last week, ought to be the happiest guy on the planet these days. But what about the rest of us? A new science of happiness is attempting to pin down what really lifts the spirit -- to measure it, and to teach it. Happier people live longer. They get fewer colds. They have better relationships and do more for others. Since the time of the ancients, we've had advice on the good life. Now, after a century of measuring well-being by the march of economic indicators, psychologists are saying let's measure and teach well-being itself. More

Happiness 101
[7 Janurary 2007 - New York Times Magazine] More than 200 colleges and graduate schools in the United States offer classes like the one at George Mason. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Barbara Fredrickson passes out notebooks with clouds on a powdery blue cover for each student. At the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, students pass out chocolates and handwritten notes to school custodians and secretaries. The introductory positive-psychology class at Harvard attracted 855 students last spring, making it the most popular class at the school. “I teach my class on two levels,” says Tal Ben-Shahar, the instructor. “It’s like a regular academic course. The second level is where they ask the question, How can I apply this to my life?” True, the course is known as a gut, but it is also significant that 23 percent of the students who commented on it in the undergraduate evaluation guide said that it had improved their lives. ... Positive psychology brings the same attention to positive emotions (happiness, pleasure, well-being) that clinical psychology has always paid to the negative ones (depression, anger, resentment). Psychoanalysis once promised to turn acute human misery into ordinary suffering; positive psychology promises to take mild human pleasure and turn it into a profound state of well-being. “Under certain circumstances, people — they’re not desperate or in misery — they start to wonder what’s the best thing life can offer,” says Martin Seligman, one of the field’s founders, who heads the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Thus positive psychology is not only about maximizing personal happiness but also about embracing civic engagement and spiritual connectedness, hope and charity. “Aristotle taught us virtue isn’t virtue unless you choose it,” Seligman says. More

The Science of Happiness
[January-February 2007 - Harvard Magazine] For much of its history, psychology has seemed obsessed with human failings and pathology. The very idea of psychotherapy, first formalized by Freud, rests on a view of human beings as troubled creatures in need of repair. Freud himself was profoundly pessimistic about human nature, which he felt was governed by deep, dark drives that we could only tenuously control. The behaviorists who followed developed a model of human life that seemed to many mechanistic if not robotic: humans were passive beings mercilessly shaped by the stimuli and the contingent rewards and punishments that surrounded them. After World War II, psychologists tried to explain how so many ordinary citizens could have acquiesced in fascism, and did work epitomized in the 1950 classic The Authoritarian Personality by T.W. Adorno, et al. Social psychologists followed on, demonstrating in laboratories how malleable people are. Some of the most famous experiments proved that normal folk could become coldly insensitive to suffering when obeying “legitimate” orders or cruelly sadistic when playing the role of prison guard. Research funders invested in subjects like conformity, neurosis, and depression. A watershed moment arrived in 1998, when University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman, in his presidential address to the American Psychological Association, urged psychology to “turn toward understanding and building the human strengths to complement our emphasis on healing damage.” That speech launched today’s positive psychology movement. “When I met Marty Seligman [in 1977], he was the world’s leading scholar on ‘learned helplessness’ and depression,” says Vaillant. “He became the world’s leading scholar on optimism.” Though not denying humanity’s flaws, the new tack of positive psychologists recommends focusing on people’s strengths and virtues as a point of departure. Rather than analyze the psychopathology underlying alcoholism, for example, positive psychologists might study the resilience of those who have managed a successful recovery—for example, through Alcoholics Anonymous. Instead of viewing religion as a delusion and a crutch, as did Freud, they might identify the mechanisms through which a spiritual practice like meditation enhances mental and physical health. Their lab experiments might seek to define not the conditions that induce depraved behavior, but those that foster generosity, courage, creativity, and laughter. More

Happiness (and how to measure it)
[December 23, 2006-January 5, 2007 - The Economist]

• Affluence: Capitalism can make a soceity rich and keep it free. Don't ask it to make you happy as well. More
• Happiness and Economics: Economics discovers its feelings. Not quite as dismal as it was. More