creativity

Building brands in the mad men era was a relatively straight forward endeavor... 

A brand needed to effectively communicate its value to the consumer, plainly stating its functional benefits and for the more enduring brands—connecting with consumers at the emotional level typically through a story told via television led advertising campaigns. 

Everyone is looking for a breakthrough. The massive shift in generation differences in consumer behavior and rapid technological shift are causing many companies to fail.... and it will happen fast. Companies that are stuck in their old mental model cannot breakout for many reasons. It is usually a combination of all that causes them to be irrelevant. It includes leadership’s blind sight, organization legacies and lack of foresights and the list goes on and on...

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said that, “talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.” Lots of people are smart, but true genius has always had an element of mystery to it.

It’s not hard to come up with something new. It’s hard to come up with something new that people want.

I think that is kind of the separation point between having lots of ideas or creating lots of stuff, and just having maybe one thing that really resonates with people that they have that Ah-Ha moment when they see it.

~ James Carnes, Global Creative Director, Senior Vice President of Design at Adidas.

The party at Idea Couture London office last week was a fantastic event. Get to meet many young talented people there and looking forward to work with them on projects. My work takes me around the world and it is hard to get to know everyone in different offices. I enjoy talking to creative people from creative engineers to designers. And I have a very different idea of what "creative" people means.

For all those cash-rich companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook, there is a race to hire celebrity architects to design their headquarters. Google headquarters consists of nine angled buildings connected by bridges. Reportedly, the idea was based on data collected from Google employees’ behavior which then translated into some kind of architectural algorithm that should produce “casual collisions” to make innovation happen more often. 

This is becoming the central paradox of the Information Age: the easier it is for humans to create content and information on their digital devices, the more likely it is that robots and online bots will eventually take over the job of creating content and information for those digital devices. In other words, the more we democratize the process of creating content, the more we are planting the seeds for our own future literary demise.

Heidi Grant Halvorson shares on Behance’s 99U that being in a position of power will allow you to be more creative.

Does our new collective creativity introduce pitfalls and potentially limit our creative processes and originality? Should we be more aware of a possible self-inflicted filter bubble when it comes to how new tools affect our creative habits?

The year is 1976, Dieter Rams, who is most renowned for his innovative design work for Braun and Vitsoe, is on stage in New York talking about the importance of design as part of the business strategy: (source)