Oliver Sacks speaks on power of creativity

[20 October 2005 - The Dartmouth] Oliver Sacks, the acclaimed author of "Awakenings" and "The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat," spoke to an enthusiastic crowd in Moore Theater Wednesday. The speech, entitled "Creativity and the Brain," was sponsored by the Montgomery Endowment. "There are innumerable sorts of creativity," Sacks said as he listed perceptual, natural, individual and communal creativity, along with "creative driving" and "creative cooking," as examples. Sacks emphasized that creativity provides inspiration to all people. "Creativity is universal," Sacks said. "We all dream, and in dreams we have fantastic adventures unrestrained by reality." More

Creativity Key to Better Retirement

[14 October 2005 - The Korea Times] Retirement is so often defined negatively and individualistically, as the end of a career and the cessation of work. However, an American specialist on the subject said that retirement can also be a creative time - a period of renewal and rejuvenation. "Most people never fully prepare for this abrupt change. Organizations do not help them. Employees and employers generally do not consider retirement life-planning as an extension of career development," Steve Dahlberg, general manager for the Creative Education Foundation in the United States, said in an interview with The Korea Times. More

Mary Catherine Bateson comments on creativity, life and improv

[26 June 2005 - Creative Education Foundation's Creative Problem Solving Institute] Anthropologist and author Mary Catherine Bateson wove a rich tapestry of themes about life as an improvisatory art. Her message included:

Practicing improvisation is not an oxymoron. Improvisation -- creativity of many kinds -- is something you learn to do. And it's a kind of coming full circles.

The world is changing so fast that we are all on stage without a script. And it isn't going to help to memorize a script. We're going to have to learn the skills of making it up as we go along.

If you view your life as continuities, you are likely to seek continuities and avoid change. If you look at the discontinuities, you may be likely to move on too quickly.

About fear and the failure of imagination ... you can't prevent something which you can't think about.

It's only when you move to multiple narratives that you begin to see possibilities and get away from thinking things are just going to go on the way they are. That's an essential element of creativity ... alternative ways of understanding; alternative ways of seeing.

Creativity is sparked when cultures meet -- when they meet with open imaginations and full curiosity.

With the demographic changes and the aging population ... there is a group of people who have not yet discovered in the changing currents of time the range of their possibilities.

Education is about making people think for themselves. ... What we tell our children while their minds are open and impressionable ought to be the key for the changes that need to be brought about, and I think at the moment we are moving in the wrong direction.

We all need to work very hard to reinforce those aspects of the educational system that make people open to differences, to alternatives that stretch their imagination.

What thoughts do these quotes spark for you? Or did you hear Bateson's keynote yourself at CPSI 2005? Click the "Post a comment" link below and share your reflections.

Read more reports online about Bateson's keynote and CPSI 2005 in general. Plus, if you missed CPSI 2005 and want to check out materials from some of the programs and sessions, you can do that on the CPSI Web site. Also, you can purchase books by CPSI keynoters and presenters - including Bateson's latest, Willing to Learn - in the online bookstore. Your purchases help support CEF.

Trend-watcher sees moral transformation of capitalism

[3 October 2005 - The Christian Science Monitor] ... People no longer want that spiritual part of themselves to be abandoned when they work and are searching for meaning and morals in the workplace. And corporate leaders now recognize that we live in a technologically based society where, in order to be consistently innovative, a corporation has to draw on the creativity of its employees. Even the old-fashioned business types have to grudgingly agree that we find creativity, inspiration, and innovation within, from that deep spiritual part of ourselves. More

Creative economy: New England's future success may depend on the arts

[2 October 2005 - Foster's Online - New Hampshire] Can New England's creative arts help to sculpt the region's economy for the century? Five years ago, the business-led New England Council, executives from such fields as manufacturing and banking, took a bold step. In a special report, they celebrated the region's growing "creative economy"" They saw that the region's fine arts, music and drama fields were not only growing, but inspiring such other fields of imaginative design as architecture, photography, film and Web design. The resulting 245,000-job sector, they reported, was growing twice as fast as New England's overall economy. More

The Power of Dumb Ideas: The solution to marketing’s current ills is not more creativity. It’s less.

[30 September 2005 - strategy+business - Booz Allen Hamilton] Forget what the advertising gurus say about big ideas and differentiation. The solution to marketing's ills is not more creativity, it's less. A study of 1,300 U.S. companies by Chuck Lucier, senior vice president emeritus at Booz Allen Hamilton, reveals that only four broad ideas, copied again and again across sectors, accounted for 80 percent of the breakout businesses created between 1985 and 1995: power retailing, megabranding, focus/simplify/standardize, and the value chain bypass. The big idea doesn't have to be brand new. In a world overwhelmed by complexity, it's the context that gives dumb ideas their power to galvanize a team, create faith, and build the world's greatest marketing department. More

Nurturing creativity and innovation - Leaders must show the way

[29 September 2005 - TODAY - Singapore] Recent speeches by Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew and other ministers have put innovation back into the spotlight. While the research and development emphasis is understandable, innovation cannot be confined to the laboratory or limited to technological advances. In fact, just as important is the ability to turn innovations into viable reality - in other words, commercialisation. That takes creativity too. More

Curiosity and the pleasures of learning: Wanting and liking new information

[September 2005 - Cognition & Emotion] This paper proposes a new theoretical model of curiosity that incorporates the neuroscience of “wanting” and “liking”, which are two systems hypothesised to underlie motivation and affective experience for a broad class of appetites. In developing the new model, the paper discusses empirical and theoretical limitations inherent to drive and optimal arousal theories of curiosity, and evaluates these models in relation to Litman and Jimerson's (2004) recently developed interest/deprivation (I/D) theory of curiosity. A detailed discussion of the I/D model and its relationship to the neuroscience of wanting and liking is provided, and an integrative I/D/wanting/liking model is proposed, with the aim of clarifying the complex nature of curiosity as an emotional‐motivational state, and to shed light on the different ways in which acquiring knowledge can be pleasurable. More

‘Creatives’ are our leaders of the future

[29 September 2005 - Business Day - South Africa] The information age has come — and stayed. Those with the skills for the age have prospered. The last growth curve was driven by business services. Now research points towards a shift to the creatives — the leaders and builders of the future. More