Inovação e curiosidade

Muitas vezes vejo artigos sobre inovação a confundir variabilidade com variedade.

Inovação tem tudo a ver com variedade, e variedade com curiosidade e criatividade.

"Most of the breakthrough discoveries and remarkable inventions throughout history, from flints for starting a fire to self-driving cars, have something in common: They are the result of curiosity. The impulse to seek new information and experiences and explore novel possibilities is a basic human attribute. New research points to three important insights about curiosity as it relates to business. First, curiosity is much more important to an enterprise’s performance than was previously thought.
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Second, by making small changes to the design of their organizations and the ways they manage their employees, leaders can encourage curiosity—and improve their companies.
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Third, although leaders might say they treasure inquisitive minds, in fact most stifle curiosity, fearing it will increase risk and inefficiency. [Moi ici: Aumentar a eficiência passa por reduzir a variabilidade. É a cozinha do McDonald's, experiências não são permitidas - execução, execução, execução]
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My own research confirms that encouraging people to be curious generates workplace improvements.
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Twice a week for four weeks, half of them received a text message at the start of their workday that read, “What is one topic or activity you are curious about today? What is one thing you usually take for granted that you want to ask about? Please make sure you ask a few ‘Why questions’ as you engage in your work throughout the day. Please set aside a few minutes to identify how you’ll approach your work today with these questions in mind.”"

Trechos retirados de "Why Curiosity Matters"

Uma nova lógica competitiva

Em "The New Logic of Competition" encontrei uma figura muito interessante, muito rica:

"Today, artificial intelligence, sensors, and digital platforms have already increased the opportunity for learning more effectively—but competing on the rate of learning will become a necessity by the 2020s. The dynamic, uncertain business environment will require companies to focus more on discovery and adaptation rather than only on forecasting and planning. [Moi ici: Apostar mais em exploration do que em exploitation, apostar mais em experimentação e novidade do que em seguir o guião]
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Classical models of competition assume that discrete companies make similar products and compete within clearly delineated industries. But technology has dramatically reduced communication and transaction costs, weakening the Coasean logic for combining many activities inside a few vertically integrated firms. At the same time, uncertainty and disruption require individual firms to be more adaptable, and they make business environments increasingly shapeable. Companies now have opportunities to influence the development of the market in their favor, but they can do this only by coordinating with other stakeholders.
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As a result of these forces, new industrial architectures are emerging based on the coordination of ecosystems—complex, semifluid networks of companies that challenge several traditional business assumptions. [Moi ici: Algo que começámos a perceber quando descobrimos o papel dos influenciadores, dos prescritores, dos reguladores, e dos clientes dos clientes]
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New opportunities are likely to come increasingly from digitizing the physical world, enabled by the rapid development and penetration of AI and the Internet of Things. This will increasingly bring tech companies into areas—such as B2B and businesses involving long-lived and specialized assets—that are still dominated by older incumbent firms.
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Companies can no longer expect to succeed by leaning predominantly on their existing business models. Long-run economic growth rates have declined in many economies, and demographics point to a continuation of that pattern. Competitive success has become less permanent over time. And markets are increasingly shapeable, increasing the potential reward for innovation. As a result, the ability to generate new ideas is more important than ever. [Moi ici: Subir na escala de valor depende cada vez mais não do que se produz, mas das experiências que permitimos que o cliente sinta na sua vida ao integrar a nossa oferta na sua actividade]
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Looking ahead to the 2020s, uncertainty is high on many fronts. Technological change is disrupting businesses and bringing new social, political, and ecological questions to the forefront.
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Furthermore, deep-seated structural forces indicate this period of elevated uncertainty is likely to persist: technological progress will not abate; the rise of China as an economic power will continue to challenge international institutions; demographic trends point toward an era of lower global growth, which will further strain societies; and social polarization will continue to challenge governments’ ability to effectively respond to national or global risks.
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Under such conditions, it will become more difficult to rely on forecasts and plans. Business leaders will need to consider the larger picture, including economic, social, political, and ecological dimensions, making sure their companies can endure in the face of unanticipated shocks. In other words, businesses will effectively need to compete on resilience." [Moi ici: Mas a constituição e os partidos socialistas, da direita e da esquerda, consideram a flexibilidade e a resiliência crimes graves! ]

Como é que a sua organização se está a preparar para este mundo muito mais incerteza? O que está a fazer para ser mais criativa? O que está a fazer para conciliar digital e físico? O que está a fazer para construir ou integrar um ecossistema? O que está a fazer para aprender muito mais depressa?

"You see, but you do not observe"

Excelente texto, "To Change the Way You Think, Change the Way You See":

"Great creators, innovators, and entrepreneurs look at the world in ways that are different from how  many of us look at things. This is why they see opportunities that other people miss.

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When we look at the world, we should not just examine, but examine with a deliberately different  perspective.
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Sherlock Holmes famously said once to Watson: “You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear.”
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Our brains are designed to stop us paying too much attention. This is well demonstrated by the optical illusion called Troxler fading (named after the nineteenth-century Swiss physician who discovered the effect). If presented with a steady image in the area of our peripheral vision, we actually stop seeing it after a while. This phenomenon — the general neuroscientific term is habituation — probably points to an efficient way in which the brain operates. Neurons stop firing once they have sufficient information about an unchanging stimulus. But this does not mean that habituating is always our friend.
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We can think of the effort not just to think differently, but also to see differently, as a way of countering our built-in tendency to habituate, to sink in to the familiar way of seeing and experiencing.
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by seeing differently, we can end up seeing what no one else has yet seen. This is how the future is built."

In most organizations, #innovation isn’t hampered by a lack of ideas, but rather a lack of willingness to look at ideas with a different perspective.

Get away from:

“We’ve tried it before”
“That’s not how we do it”

And get going on the future state – what’s possible. #CEO pic.twitter.com/hdbAf3rFGK

— Tiffani Bova (@Tiffani_Bova) April 19, 2019

"lab or a factory"

O quanto eu gostaria de fazer chegar esta mensagem a tantas e tantas PME que ainda não aprenderam o truque e continuam a querer copiar o modelo gasto da "factory" que vêem descrito nos livros anglo-saxónicos, que vêem publicitado e louvado nos jornais económicos e nas revistas de gestão que só têm olhos para as empresas grandes, que vêem defendido pelos académicos de esquerda e pelos fósseis de direita ambos com o pensamento ainda no século XX:

"Businesses need to decide whether they want to be a lab or a factory.
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There are some clues into which one may work best in the new business environment when we review what each one is. The factory believes it already makes something that people want. It can’t handle dramatic changes to the product or the formula because it was built to make specific, predetermined things. The factory’s core focus is on scale, cost reduction and efficiency. It wants what it wanted yesterday, but cheaper and faster. The factory is the biggest investment the company makes. The people who work in and around it serve the factory, not the other way around. There’s very little room for movement, change or creativity. It’s more about the boxes of stuff to sell that come out the other end. The factory took a lot of money to invest in, so we need to churn out lots of stuff from it for a long time to get a payback. We’re in it for the long haul, and it will work out better for the factory if things don’t change too much.
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The lab knows the answer’s in there somewhere; it just doesn’t know what it is yet. Many experiments will be undertaken in order to find something that solves a certain problem, and while there are some ideas around solutions, there’s no answer just yet. The ingredients are flexible and easily changed, as are the methods being undertaken. The thing that really matters isn’t so much the ingredients, but the people mixing them up, the imagination they have and their interpretations of the possibilities. Each experiment they do leads to another idea and provides some real-world feedback as to how things interact. The focus is on human capital as opposed to financial capital, so we can have lots of labs working on different things at the same time and finding answers. If the lab fails it’s okay. It’s part of the learning process. And failures are very low cost. Every failure becomes an idea that can be crossed off the list and gets us closer to the answers we seek.
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In times of change it’s pretty clear that a lab mentality is what’s needed. The lab is an approach that doesn’t pretend to know the answers or believe that the world is stable. It’s an approach where the playbook is in fact to not pretend to know what’s next, but to understand that speed is the asset, creativity is greater than finance and collaboration is more powerful than control. The marketing model of the technology age is a model that must remain in a constant state of flux. What organisations need is a culture and structure that can cope with flux, one that revises how it goes to market based on what it learned today."

É que é mesmo isto. Lançar o equilíbrio para as malvas e abraçar o fluxo permanente. Recordo "A estabilidade é uma ilusão" (2010) e "A estabilidade é mesmo uma ilusão (parte III)".

Trecho retirado de "The Great Fragmentation : why the future of business is small" de Steve Sammartino

Uma questão de criatividade

Subir na escala de valor não é conversa da tanga e quase sempre nem requer tecnologia espacial.

Basta um pouco de criatividade e estar atento à evolução da procura e à evolução da oferta.

Por exemplo, capas para proteger PC ou Mac quem precisa?

Em que prateleiras as pessoas as compram?

E o que é que essas prateleiras disponibilizam?

Após meses de pesquisa não intensiva nas Worten, nas FNAC, nos quiosques e lojas de centros comerciais e até em lojas chinesas. Desistimos, fartos das monótonas capas pretas e monocolores e fartos das promoções. Como se o meu critério fosse escolher a capa mais barata.

Como nasceu a necessidade? Qual a minha luta? Que progresso queria fazer?

Comprei um novo computador com tampa metálica e colocava-o tal e qual na minha pasta de trabalho. Cedo reparei que se não tivesse cuidado o metal começaria a ficar riscado e manchado ao contactar e ser pressionado contra outras peças metálicas na pasta como as argolas de um caderno.

Estava criada a necessidade de progresso, deixar de ter esta preocupação, deixar ter um cuidado especial no arranjo das coisas na pasta. Posso dizer que tudo começou pelo "trabalho funcional por realizar" - arranjar uma protecção para o computador para me libertar da preocupação.

Com base no "trabalho funcional por realizar" começou a minha pesquisa. Só que o "trabalho funcional por realizar" no meu caso, descobri, não me chega. Queria a protecção mas também queria algo de diferente do que via e do que toda a gente tem ... um "trabalho emocional por realizar". Uma outra forma de expressar:

"Socks are the new neckties, the place where a man can, on a pretty risk-free basis, express his individuality. And the socks business is on fire. There is enormous growth in socks because consumers need to stock up to replace their all-black collections with something more thoughtful, interesting and fun. And buyers of companies are paying high multiples for successful sock companies. Will that last? Most likely, it will move like most trends towards something else in three years’ time."

O mesmo padrão que me levou a ser cliente das Happy Socks.

O que impede alguém de se expressar com os objectos que usa no dia a dia?

Um conselho recorrente neste blogue é o de convidar as PME a concentrarem-se nos segmentos underserved.

Clientes overserved são clientes que valorizam o "trabalho funcional por realizar" e pouco mais, para eles o preço é o critério de decisão.

Clientes underserved têm outros critérios além do preço. O preço, como aprendi com Hill naquele produtivo Verão de 2008, pode ser um factor higiénico, pode ser um order qualifyer em vez de um order winner.

Assim, quando falo em subir na escala de valor, penso, por exemplo, em empresas têxteis que em vez de apostar no monótono preto, assumem o desafio da cor e de trabalhar para as tribos de Mongo. Por exemplo, as Happy Socks apostam no design e na cor:

Cobram 9€ por um par de meias.

Como é que uma empresa portuguesa pode concorrer com a Happy Socks? Apostando na qualidade do tecido: as meias da Happy Socks são feitas na Turquia e a qualidade não é grande coisa. Apostando no serviço ao cliente: a última vez que encomendei, há 2 ou 3 anos, a encomenda demorou cerca de 3 meses a chegar, quando reclamei ao fim de um mês, responderam-me como se eu fosse um meridional europeu habituado a esquemas e a querer meias de borla.

Por que escrevo tudo isto agora?

Porque decidi saltar da pesquisa no retalho físico e espreitar na Amazon para ver se havia alguma capa de jeito para computador. E havia e chegou ontem:

Subir na escala de valor passa por fazer esta transição do overserved para o underserved. E, como relato neste exemplo, não é, quase sempre, uma questão de tecnologia. No entanto, é quase sempre uma questão de criatividade.

Produtividade e criatividade

Uma expressão que uso há muitos anos, "não culpar a caneta, quando a culpa é de quem escreve", recordar:

• Tempo de repensar a melhoria contínua (Maio de 2012)
• Recordar o caso da ferramenta (Julho de 2013)

Por isso, saliento este artigo "To Get More Creative, Become Less Productive":

"There is a fundamental tension between productivity and creativity, and managers won’t get more of the latter until they recognize it.
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Creativity needs time and space to grow.
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That means people need to have the time to learn things that are not obviously relevant to their jobs, so that they will have a broad and deep knowledge base to draw from when they need to be creative.
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This difference between productivity and creativity is a central reason why many companies want more creativity from their employees than they get."

Demasiada preocupação com a quantidade de trabalho não conjuga bem com criatividade... trade-offs.

"Too Much Beige"

O mesmo sr. Karikomi daqui e aqui, que citei na passada quinta-feira numa empresa, obrigava os seus colaboradores a mudar a disposição e localização das secretárias de trabalho do open space, para que nos habituássemos a ver o mundo de forma diferente.
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Foi dele que me lembrei ao ler "Productivity Is The Enemy of Creativity":

"Too Much Beige
Everyday you go to the same place to work, in the same environment. You see the same people and you are surrounded by the same sensory inputs (beige). And you usually have to solve the same, or similar, problem over and over again. Your company makes most of its money selling the latest version, of the same product, to the same set of customers. Yet when those same things don’t bring in the same results, you’re expected to come up with new ideas. How are you supposed to come up with new “creative” ideas when you see the same people, in the same buildings, after driving the same route to work, sitting at the same desk, or in the same generic conference rooms? Our brains don’t work that way.
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So how do you fix it? Break your patterns. It’s that easy, and anyone can do it (some easier than others). The simplest way to do this is to change the environment. Go to a different location."

Curiosidade do dia

"The Real Reason Creative Workers Are Good for the Economy"
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"It’s Not ‘Mess.’ It’s Creativity."

"Our findings have practical implications. There is, for instance, a minimalist design trend taking hold in contemporary office spaces: out of favor are private walled-in offices — and even private cubicles. Today’s office environments often involve desk sharing and have minimal “footprints” (smaller office space per worker), which means less room to make a mess.
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At the same time, the working world is abuzz about cultivating innovation and creativity, endeavors that our findings suggest might be hampered by the minimalist movement. While cleaning up certainly has its benefits, clean spaces might be too conventional to let inspiration flow."

Eheheh, espero que quem critica a desarrumação da minha secretária leia estes textos ;-))

"Stressors are information"

"Stressors are information" é uma frase que aprendi com Nassim Taleb e que aprendi a estimar.

"Constraints have a Goldilocks quality: too many and you will indeed suffocate in stale thinking, too few and you risk a rambling vision quest. The key to spurring creativity isn't the removal of all constraints. Ideally you should impose only those constraints (beyond the truly non-negotiable ones) that move you toward clarity of purpose.
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If a constraint enhances your understanding of the problem scope and why you're doing what you're doing, leave it in. Insights into user needs, for example, are great because they provide focus and rationale.
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So don't be afraid of constraints. They can be your friend, your muse even. Thinking outside the box is all well and good, but if the box is the right size and shape it might help, not hinder, your creativity."

Interessante dois artigos semelhantes na mesma altura:

"The traditional view of creativity is that it is unstructured and doesn't follow rules or patterns. Would-be innovators are told to "think outside the box," "start with a problem and then brainstorm ideas for a solution," "go wild making analogies to things that have nothing to do with your product or service."
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We advocate a radically different approach: thinking inside the proverbial box, not outside of it. People are at their most creative when they focus on the internal aspects of a situation or problem—and when they constrain their options rather than broaden them. By defining and then closing the boundaries of a particular creative challenge, most of us can be more consistently creative—and certainly more productive than we are when playing word-association games in front of flip charts or talking about grand abstractions at a company retreat."

Tempos de crise, tempos de falta de dinheiro, são tempos de aplicar a criatividade. Por exemplo, seguindo o caminho menos percorrido.

Trecho inicial retirado de "Boosting Creativity Through Constraints"
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Segundo trecho retirado de "Think Inside the Box"

A seguir com interesse

Ao ler "Change to copyright laws threatens furniture makers and thousands of jobs" não perder de vista tantos e tantos sectores onde o mesmo fenómeno se aplica.

"Some of Britain’s leading furniture makers have claimed more than 6,000 British companies are under threat if the Government pushes ahead with controversial changes to copyright law.
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UK furniture manufacturing – a £7billion industry employing almost 100,000 people – has been put under pressure by Government plans to impose EU rules on the sector.
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Under the current law, furniture designed by famous names such as Charles Eames can be reproduced freely 25 years after being created.
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This allows makers across the UK to produce and sell replicas of well-known table and chair designs at affordable prices, a practice that accounts for a large part of the industry.
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But the Government plans to extend copyright protection for designs deemed ‘artistic’ until 70 years after the death of the creator.
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This will bring UK law into line with EU-wide regulations, and repeals a key part of the 1998 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. The move puts furniture in the same category as musical scores or paintings, and would make selling or producing replicas illegal."

Este tipo de leis é um dos factores que mais contribui para atrasar a chegada de Mongo. Basta recordar o que aprendi com o mundo da moda e a inexistência de patentes em "O que acontece num mundo sem patentes". Um mundo sem patentes acelera a a diferenciação, a novidade, a criatividade.
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E por cá, qual terá sido o custo em postos de trabalho da aplicação desta legislação comunitária?

O que acontece num mundo sem patentes?

Muito, muito interessante:

O que a ausência de patentes no mundo da moda gera... moda, criatividade, inovação, novidade, diferenciação.
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Deixou-me a pensar no assunto.
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BTW, "HOW TO STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST"

O segredo está na criatividade

Qualquer que seja a proposta de valor, qualquer que seja o modelo de negócio, qualquer que seja o sector de actividade, o truque está no aumento do valor acrescentado.
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"A crise deve ser um momento de criatividade"

Inovação e criatividade

Na segunda-feira passada almocei com pessoas que conhecem bem o sector têxtil português.
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Falámos sobre o futuro das empresas têxteis em Portugal com milhares de trabalhadores, sobre as que já "emagreceram", sobre as que já fecharam, sobre as que ainda estão na corda bamba.
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Basta pesquisar neste blogue Terry Hill e o conceito de proposta de valor, para perceber que a proposta de valor das empresas com milhares de trabalhadores passa por um modelo de negócio assente nos preços-baixos (custos-baixos), assente nas grandes séries, assente no baixo valor acrescentado unitário.
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O semanário Expresso do passado sábado inclui um artigo "Têxteis lançam novas amarras" de onde retiro o seguinte extracto:
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"Avaliado em €100 mil milhões, o sector dos têxteis técnicos tem revelado capacidade de resistência à conjuntura, com um crescimento anual de 4% impulsionado pelas áreas da saúde e higiene, indústria automóvel, arquitectura e construção civil. Em Portugal, a fileira conta apenas com 70 empresas que facturam €400 milhões.
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A tecnologia soma, assim, apenas 6% do volume de negócios da indústria têxtil e do vestuário nacional, mas vai ganhando terreno à produção tradicional, como provam os produtos inovadores que as empresas lusas apresentaram em Frankfurt para desafiar a crise e a concorrência, com mais exportações.
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No caso da Fisipe, a aposta é o Sunlast, fibra pigmentada para aplicação exterior em toldos e automóveis que atraiu o maior fabricante europeu de toldos. A Endutex, de Santo Tirso, já no grupo restrito de empresas com capacidade de produzir telas de cinco metros para impressão digital, lançou uma nova tela para fazer tectos falsos que tem vindo a conquistar clientes na Rússia e Europa Central.
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Para a Gulbena, a principal aposta é o desenvolvimento do trabalho com a Schoeller e a Clariant para produzir malhas Cold Black, que garantem um preto tão fresco como o branco, e SxDry, estrutura respirável que repele a água exterior e absorve a transpiração.
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Quanto à Biodevices, continua concentrada no seu Vital Jacket e, apesar desta t-shirt capaz de vigiar os sinais vitais em tempo real estar ainda na fase inicial de comercialização, Luís Meireles adiantou que a sua empresa está "já a pensar em novos desenvolvimentos e aplicações, designadamente na área da ortopedia"."
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Vários exemplos de empresas que estão a optar por modelos de negócio alternativos assentes na inovação: pequenas empresas (como no caso da Leica - que operam em mercados de nicho), empresas rápidas, empresas flexíveis, empresas com elevado valor acrescentado unitário.
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A propósito da inovação, a propósito da subida na escala de valor recomendo a leitura do artigo "Innovation in Turbulent Times" de Darrell Rigby, Kara Gruver e James Allen publicado no número de Junho da Harvard Business Review.
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Este artigo remete para o livro de Daniel Pink "The Whole Brain" sobre a necessidade de trabalhar com os dois lados do cérebro! Por causa de:
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"At the top of virtually every fashion brand is a distinctive kind of partnership. One partner, usually called the creative director, is an imaginative, right-brain individual who spins out new ideas every day and seems able to channel the future wants and needs of the company’s target customers. The other partner, the brand manager or brand CEO, is invariably left-brain and adept at business, someone comfortable with decisions based on hard-nosed analysis. In keeping with this right-brain–left-brain shorthand, we refer to such companies as “both-brain.” They successfully generate and commercialize creative new concepts year in and year out.
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When nonf ashion executives pause and reflect, they often realize that similar partnerships were behind many innovations in their own companies or industries."
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Remete também para as palavras de Guy Kawasaki "10. Don't let the bozos grind you down.
Some bozos are easy to spot. They're grumpy, cynical people who shoot down all your ideas. But beware the "successful bozo" wearing a nice suit." lembrei-me dela por causa deste trecho:
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"Many companies nevertheless give left-brain analytic types an opportunity to approve ideas at various stages of the innovation process. This is a cardinal error. Uncreative people have an annoying tendency to kill good ideas, encourage bad ones, and - if they don't see something they like - demand multiple rounds of "improvements.""
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Alguns trechos retirados de "Innovation in Turbulent Times":
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"No industry has gone further than fashion, however, to incorporate both-brain partnerships in its organizational model."
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"Fashion companies understand one fundamental truth about human beings, a truth overlooked by all the organizations that try to teach their left-brain accountants and analysts to be more creative: Creativity is a distinct personality trait. Many people have very little of it, accomplished though they may be in other areas, and they won’t learn it from corporate creativity programs."
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"The first lesson from fashion is this: If you don’t have highly creative people in positions of real authority, you won’t get innovation. Most companies in other industries ignore this lesson."
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"Conventional companies look at innovation differently, and wrongly. Without creative people in top positions, they typically focus on innovations that can be divided and conquered rather than those that must be integrated and harmonized. They break their innovations into smaller and smaller components and then pass them from function to function to be optimized in sequence. The logic is simple: Improving the most important pieces of the most important processes will create the best results. But breakthrough innovation doesn’t work that way."
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"What is required to harness this kind of creativity and apply it to the needs of a business? Creative people can’t do it alone: They’re likely to fall in love with an idea and never know when to quit. But conventional businesspeople can’t do it alone either; they rarely even know where to start.
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So innovation requires teamwork. Fashion companies have learned to establish and maintain effective partnerships between creative people and numbers-oriented people."

O lado direito do cérebro!

Por que é que a Skynet colocou Marcus Wright nas ruas? Para que um ciborgue com mente humana, pudesse fazer aquilo que nenhum máquina tinha conseguido até então.
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Como é que McGyver saía sempre das embrulhadas onde caía? Usando o lado direito do cérebro!!!
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Ainda ontem recordei as ideias de Pink.
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Pois bem cá vai algo que recebi num e-mail "The Pink Prescription: Facing Tomorrow's Challenges Calls for Right-brain Thinking"
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"Routine is a death sentence for the economy today," said Pink. "Any work that is routine is disappearing from not only this country but from any advanced economy."
Pink classified as routine any "work that can be reduced to a script, to a spreadsheet, to a formula, to a series of steps that has a right answer. If you can write down the steps and it has a right answer, that kind of work isn't valuable. That kind of work just races to wherever it can get done the cheapest."
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If routine work is not off-shored, much of it can be automated. Many Americans turned to cheap accountants in India to process last year's tax return, Pink pointed out. But a far greater number turned to software such as Turbo Tax.
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Finally, the increasing abundance of material goods has created another set of challenges that require big-picture, right-brain thinking.
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"In a world of abundance, in a world saturated with stuff... the economic premium is on giving people something new," Pink said. It is no longer enough to improve an existing product -- the real economic value lies in invention.
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"How many of you have an iPod?" Pink asked the audience, a majority of whom raised their hands. He continued: "How many of you knew eight years ago that you were missing an iPod?"
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His point: In a country where 98% of homes already have a color TV set, for example, coming up with a better color television is not an economic advance. "The real thing is to come up with hulu.com -- to deliver television in a way that nobody knew they were missing. These are big, bold, conceptual sorts of breakthroughs."
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The flip side of abundance is the collateral damage it creates -- such as the environmental impact of the 460,000 mobile phones thrown away in the U.S. every year, Pink added. Coping with such challenges will also require right-brained thinkers. "We need big, bold, inventive thinkers to address those problems, whether it's climate change, dependence on oil or wealth imbalance."
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Pink noted that many right-brain abilities -- such as design, storytelling, synthesis, empathy and pattern recognition -- are difficult to outsource, so people who are strong in these abilities could find their skills in demand.
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Even traditionally left-brain oriented professions are now demanding right-brain skills, Pink said. Companies seeking engineers say they want people with engineering skills who can innovate, communicate, thrive in a multicultural environment and work with a sense of passion, to name a few. "These are not the cognitive skills that you develop through multiple-choice tests. These are not routine things.
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"Doctors have to be able to ask the right questions," said Pink. "That calls for extraordinary observation skills -- the observation skills of a painter, of a sculptor. So, medical schools are taking students to art museums to make them better diagnosticians. And, lo and behold, doctors who receive this type of diagnostic training are better diagnosticians than those who haven't."
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Pink calls the results of these experiments "a great irony" for the educational system as a whole. "We want to prepare kids for science-oriented careers, so we cut out the arts. Meanwhile, people who are preparing for science-oriented careers are bringing in the arts.""
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Continua, com alguns truques que aprendi para aumentar a criatividade.

Bem lembrado

Acerca da produtividade, bem lembrado por Krugman "Reconsidering a miracle"

Para ler e pensar e pensar e pensar e pensar

"Linha bi-bitola?"

Será que faz sentido a criatividade de uma empresa começar na lista telefónica?

Ontem, tive uma reunião numa empresa. Trata-se de uma empresa que procura trabalhar a proposta de valor da inovação, da liderança do produto, logo a criatividade é importante.

Quando cheguei, fui encaminhado para uma sala de reuniões.
Enquanto aguardava pelo meu interlocutor, procurei, junto a um telefone, a lista de telefones da empresa. A lista de telefones costuma dar pistas interessantes sobre o funcionamento de uma empresa: quantos e que departamentos, quantas pessoas…
De repente… ao olhar para aquele lista de telefones, tão bem organizada…

… pensei, tão organizada, tão racional, tão certinha… mas se uma empresa quer apostar na criatividade, por que não aplicar a criatividade a coisas tão simples como a lista telefónica? Seria uma recordação, uma chamada de atenção a todos, mesmo nas coisas mais simples, de que a proposta de valor é a inovação permanente.
Algo do género:
Será que faz sentido uma abordagem deste tipo?