Creative People Should Think Inside the Box

   I stumbled across this piece a little earlier today. I consider myself to be a pretty creative person, but I’m not really artsy-fartsy. I was considered by some artistic circles to be a musical prodigy when I became a pro at 15, but 1) I was motivated, 2) had some talent, and 3) worked my butt off. My parents also paid for the best teachers, so my talent was a combo of things. I was also into sports and other “non-arty” subjects, too, so the label didn’t quite fit.Well, I still make a living in the arts almost forty years later–writing, this time. I am still motivated, have bit of talent (I’m told), and have devoted teachers. I still have many non-artsy interests. But I had to totally know both of the disciplines before i could improvise at all.The interesting thing (really!) is that I spent most of that time between the creative arts in the staid business world. My niche in it was learning a business inside and out, and then reinventing it. I became creative because of lessons learned in a box.Interesting.similarity. I have also noticed that most of my friends the “out there” creatives are, well. kinda nuts. They usually also lack the focus to keep more than menial jobs out of their field.On the other hand, two gifted poets that I know are doctors,  One of the brilliant artists/sculptors that I’ve ever met had a long career in advertising. A lot of prose writers were journalists before branching out. Hemingway, anyone? To a much lesser extent, my brother–the president of the second-fastest PR firm in the country. The list goes on and on. Google it:  http://www.thelmagazine.com/TheMeasure/archives/2012/11/30/famous-artists-with-day-jobs-part-two

Thought-provoking article from one of my favorite groups; “The Freelancer’s Union”. Check it out.

Why creative people think inside the box

BY: LINDSAY VAN THOEN – JUNE 30, 2014

Several years ago, a man named Drew Boyd walked into the offices of an “innovation consultant.” People were playing with frisbees, wearing sneakers, and using buzz-word-y trademarked terms to describe their methods.Boyd was impressed. It was the kind of office you could imagine creative, out-of-the-box ideas being generated and implemented without a lot of oversight. He hired the firm for close to $1 million to consult for his large business.The project failed miserably. Boyd learned the hard way that free-wheeling “creative” thinking doesn’t necessarily come up with the best ideas, and he set out on a mission to try to understand why he (and most people) think of creativity as open-mindedness, radical thinking, defying the status quo, coming up with something brand new — and why it doesn’t always seem to work.This is the subject of Boyd’s new bestselling book, Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results, which he wrote with Jacob Goldenberg.“Better and quicker innovation happens when you work inside your familiar world using templates,” Boyd and Goldenberg say. “These templates regulate our thinking and channel the creative process in a way that makes us more — not less — creative.”

This is why Agatha Christie wrote 66 books in the same template, each unique but all following the same structure (which made her the bestselling novelist of all time). This is how companies stop looking for original ideas and start getting to the business of innovating by modifying what they know.

Almost every innovative solution, product, or business is the result of one of five templates, according the authors:

Subtraction: Innovation in which something is removed, like subtracting all the complicated buttons off of cellphone to produce the iPhone’s interface (two buttons).

Task Unification: One item with multiple uses, like having a cellphone case that holds your credit cards, or your bookkeeping software that also sends invoices to clients.

Multiplication: A product with a component that has been copied but changed in some way, like a bicycle with training wheels.

Division: Anything where a crucial component of the service is separated out, which generally makes it more convenient; ex. a remote control that operates your DVD player, or a Surface tablet where the keyboard can be attached and detatched.

Attribute Dependency: Two attributes that seem unrelated are made dependent on one another. For instance, your keyboard’s light goes on when it gets darker in your room.

Boyd and Goldenberg suggest that if you’re looking for a creative idea, you should first try to think inside the box — by applying one of these systems to your field of interest. So if you want to start a mug company, instead of trying to reinvent the product, add a simple coffee level reader (multiplication), or make one that is also a french press (task unification), or one that turns on an internal heater when it’s out in the cold (attribute dependency).

Many creative business owners may have an instinctual negative response to this systematic approach. Isn’t creativity supposed to be more…well, fun? More spontaneous? Does the fact that you came up with an idea within this system cheapen it?

Yeah it’s a dichotomy, but much of life is. Speaks to me, though.

Old Communication Meets New for Iconic Bookstore

   Change is inevitable, as everyone well knows. In the cusp of the Technology Revolution, it affects virtually everything. The media industry has undergone a metamorphosis–every facet of it.

Publishing has been especially hard-hit. Its category of book readership alone has drastically altered its form of transport. As I discussed in a post here earlier this year, even traditional libraries are soon to be dinosaurs:  http://cwrite1.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=876&action=edit.  Most people know that mega-chain Borders shut its doors a few ago because of its loss of profitably with the rise in the popularity of electronic reading. Remaining icon Barnes & Noble recently announced major closings and the reformatting of its remaining stores:  http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/06/why-is-barnes-and-noble-getting-out-of-the-bookstore-business.html. Some see this move as an omen of the chain’s demise.

Local bookstores have been devastated, too. A great example of how to succeed in the new environment is  The Strand Bookstore in New York City. Situated in the historic area of “Book Row,” The Strand is the only surviving bookstore there now, and is thriving because of its seemingly seamless embrace of the best of both the old and new media worlds. Great video and observation by Mashable‘s Stephanie Walden: http://mashable.com/2013/11/07/strand-social-video/  Just the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gJBSabR9yI&feature=c4-overview-vl&list=FLHAT-98JSyz7vv0M3nLncYA

The Strand’s survival story is a template for all businesses; merge the two realities or perish. It’s a simple but harsh truth, but it’s sometimes hard to do. To change or to go away, though, are the only possible outcomes for those stubbornly clutching the traditional path instead of the need for updating it.

My First Poem. Sorry.

   In my last couple of posts here I have talked about grant writing. I’m going to do a full 360 and make this one about poetry.

I am a retired businessman that started a second career in writing a decade ago, so writing about grants, content, blogs, press releases, communication, marketing, and all of the other forms of business writing is very natural to me. Yes, creative writers out there, I even find the subjects fun and interesting, believe it or not.

Well, I’ve also been working as a Louisiana Tech summer graduate intern at the West Florida Literary Federation (WFLF)–in fact, in my last two posts I placed a link to our current Kickstarter crowdfunding project, with which I’ve been involved.

As part of my internship with the WFLF, I have attended two of their open mics this summer. Though other literary forms are represented, most of the creative writers that have read their original work there have been poets.

I admit that prior to this exposure, I didn’t know much about the genre. I still don’t;  just a little more than I did. Even though I have a B.A. in Creative Writing and am a published fiction writer myself, I have never taken a course in poetry or written a poem. The closest that I came to doing so in college was a short PowerPoint about Gwendolyn Brooks (still my favorite poet).

All of this recent exposure to the art, though, has aroused my curiosity about poetry. Because I love words (after all, I’m a writer with an English degree), it makes sense. Guess it was only a matter of time before I actually tried it.

Anyway, I’ve been researching the craft of late, and have developed an interest in learning how to write it decently. Before I was a businessman, you see, I was a professional musician. I got into writing as a second career because I feel that all of the arts interconnect. It seems to me that learning how to write poetry passably can only enhance one’s other communication skills. This post from earlier this year says it best: http://lifestyle.iloveindia.com/lounge/importance-of-poetry-10753.html

I have also been experimenting with the different styles of poems this summer. Though I have never written a real poem until this week, I have played with quasi-poems like haikus and limericks before–who hasn’t? Anyway, I tried a writing a diatelle this week. Why? Well, I had never heard of one until reading about them while working with the WFLF. This inspired my curious nature, which is the subject of this little ditty. My first poem attempt:

 

    The Unavoidable

Seems

Often

Next to skin

Simple nature

(Quite common with my kin)

Marches steadily to endure

As a powerful force that’s always sure

To be fed. As its prompt for release rarely teems

from banal places, its power is pure.

Verse reading’s gift strikes again

 As the muse’s cure

Nature‘s win

Amen!

(Beams.)

Next week I’m going to a poetry workshop at which a sestina that I do this week will be critiqued. It will suck, too, but we learn best from our mistakes, they say. It’s hard, but then so are most things at first, at least for me.

 

I promise not to publish it.

 

Poetry Good for Business

  Disclaimer: this post is about poetry. For many people, the mention of poetry has always been a signal  to immediately abort. The medium, if correctly crafted, is complex–and often obscure. Kinda sissy-seeming, too–so emotional. Okay I admit it:  I used to think of the genre in that caveman-like way, too. That feeling gradually disappeared in the process of earning my English degree in mid-life.

Anyway, you may not want to abort just yet. Listen up–turns out that many are discovering that poetry is good business, too. Yesterday I read a great article about that subject in the Harvard Business Review: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/11/the_benefits_of_poetry_for_pro.html.

My rediscovery of the importance of poetry to our everyday lives was brought about by my attending a literature lecture and open mic a couple of nights ago. Though other genres were read, most of the eighteen pieces presented were poems.

Though a few sucked, most were amazingly good. During the break, I had wine and cheese and conversation with the writers. Their intelligence and remarkably perceptive, empathetic, and upbeat personalities were readily apparent. Almost all were published and known in literary circles. Only one, a professor of the genre, writes poetry for a living.

With the exception of a few retired military folks and some in the medical professions, almost all of these poets worked in the business world. Successfully, too. No starving artists here.

A quote from the HBR article sums up the reason best. It comes from the Pulitzer lecture  “The Poet and the World”  by Wislawa Szymborska:

The world — whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence,  is astonishing. Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events”  But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.

This rings especially true to me because I was a prodigal (they say) musician that started playing professionally at fifteen. When I made the move to the business world a decade or so later, I used the knowledge gained in the music discipline to differentiate me in the marketplace.

In music, each note rather than each word is what is carefully examined, but the translation is parallel. The bottom line is that a thorough understanding of the arts allows one both the courage and ability to think outside of the box. To color outside of the lines, if you will.

Okay, no more clichés.

In the business world, though, standardization is highly valued. Differentiation is, too, to a degree–it just needs to be used within the traditional context to make it through the boardroom. Artists have been trained to do that. Hey, I know HTML and how to build a website from scratch. I just happen to view these skills simply as vital communication tools, not as a required task.

Poetry good.

Emotional Word Use Change in Writing Thought-Provoking

I read an interesting story yesterday about a study that examines the change in the use of emotional words in writing over the last century. I am greatly interested in both the field of writing and the study of human behavior, as is evidenced by my English degree with a psychology minor. As this new research encompasses both fields from an anthropological historical perspective, it is right up my alley.

The NPR account? http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/04/01/175584297/mining-books-to-map-emotions-through-a-century?utm_source=NPR&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=20130401

I read and then listened to the broadcast link yesterday, and then turned the information garnered around in my head a few times both last night and this morning. Kinda shows what a nerd that I can be at times. Exposed at last.

Anyway, my take is that it’s interesting, but totally open to individual interpretation. That’s the great thing to me about the arts discipline, anyway: it’s not drawn in black and white–all the colors are represented.

The most compelling thing about this anthropological examination is that it studies words used in books that cover a range of topics. When I first saw the study, I figured it would be focused on literature. Oops.

Because books about auto repair are as much a part of the investigation as traditional literary works, it gains an incredible amount of credibility for me. In traditional literary efforts, of course, many words are carefully chosen for the emotional effect needed to both personalize the work and to move the story forward.

Prolific and highly political author Upton Sinclair (The Jungle, Oil) famously declared that “all art is  propaganda.” George Orwell wrote a masterful essay on the subject before becoming an iconic novelist. Countless others in the field have discussed it, too. The use of words to manipulate, especially in literature, is a given.

Rush Limbaugh, in one of his earliest quotes, famously said “words mean things.” Now, I don’t like Limbaugh myself, but I will admit that this is a sort of mantra for me when I write, which, as I write for a living, is pretty often.

Anyway, words are meant to mean certain things when they are written in the context of technical manuals about plants and animals, for example, or home repair guides. They are largely utilitarian: they are chosen to explain and instruct. The use of emotional words, therefore, though they may well be intended, seem more likely to be chosen subconsciously than those in traditional literary texts.

Reading the comments following this article is interesting, as well. It shows a variety of opinions, as all good debates should. NPR monitors the discussion following stories that they publish better than most, in my view. Only thoughtful comments are allowed: no rhetorical, spam-filled tirades are ever in sight. Other forum monitors could learn something.

I can see both sides equally. Yes, because of technological advances, the importance of traditional literacy has taken a back seat to it. Yes, despite this  change, people as a rule are better educated than they were a hundred years ago.

Despite my openness to opinion about the questions and answers generated by this British study, I do lean a bit toward the view that nothing has really changed in our natures; the use of emotional words result merely from cyclical changes. This cat paw print across a fifteenth century manuscript (yes, I’ve posted it before) accurately ilustrates my view:

15th century cat behavior evidence

Some things never change intrinsically, though the things around us do. For example, I talked at a Christmas eve dinner at length to my ninety-five year old uncle. Except for natural age declines, he has remained essentially the same emotionally over the years. His first job was as an ice man: he would deliver ice so that people could preserve their food before refrigerators went into popular use. I discussed with him the overwhelming change that technology must be to him, especially.

“Well, I’ve certainly seen a lot of change,” he said, laughing softly. Then, with a familiar twinkle in his eye, he said “It’s about what you make of it.”

Indeed. The story presented on NPR is an interesting one, and open to interpretation.

I’ll leave it at that.