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Author: Carl Nordgren

Jan 30, 2017
in Creative populism, The Generative Blog
by Carl Nordgren
1
1 Comment

Millennials and their Destiny

I have a deep and rich relationship with the Millennial Generation and I’m the better for it. After 25 years as an entrepreneur I began teaching at Duke University in 2001, just as the oldest of the Millennial Generation were becoming juniors and seniors. I taught there until last year, courses I designed to help Millennial students grow their creative capacities and develop their entrepreneurial instincts. To be successful in these classes we needed to operate at a very personal level, exploring ambitions and fears and exercising young creative and entrepreneurial muscles while they trusted me enough to share their best creative expressions. I engaged in that exploration and guided the creative practice and shared that trust with over 3,000 Millennials. I...

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Jan 17, 2017
in Creative Genius, The Generative Blog
by Carl Nordgren
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Accelerating the Front End of your Innovation process

The folks at Innovate Carolina have been putting on great conferences on innovation for a few years now, and they have another coming up in RTP in April. http://www.innovatecarolina.org/2017-conference-1/ The theme for this one is “Accelerating Ideas to Market” which sounds like something we’d all be interested in, and I was especially intrigued by this supporting concept they promise to explore: “How do we do a better job speeding up innovation in the "front end", generating and evaluating more ideas more quickly, without narrowing the scope of the ideas or simply making innovation processes more efficient but less disruptive?” Since considering this question from the perspectiveS of a serial entrepreneur and a student of creative work—and after I took it for a walk...

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Jan 02, 2017
in Creative Genius, The Generative Blog
by Carl Nordgren
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6 Creative Types

A few years ago IBM asked 1,600 CEO’s—from 30 industries and 60 countries—what employee traits they most valued going forward in these fast paced and highly complex times? The number one answer was they were looking for employees who were creative and entrepreneurial. When I participated in IBMs follow on work—they interviewed a couple dozen creative leaders to get their responses to the research—I learned that IBM had developed a four-part taxonomy of creative types. They were offering it to their own employees to help them think about their creative and entrepreneurial qualities; they were trying to cultivate a more creative culture and understood that self-reflection is useful at the beginning of a personal development program. As soon as I learned of the...

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Dec 18, 2016
in Creative Genius, Creative populism, The Generative Blog
by Carl Nordgren
0
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Take a walk to Creativity

Don’t you feel good when academic research validates something you’ve always known to be true because your gut told you so? It happened to me again when a couple of years ago researchers out of Stanford determined what a highly effective boost it is to your creative capacity and to your entrepreneurial mindset to simply take a walk. I’ve walked in the woods with my dogs almost every day and the more actively engaged in a creative challenge I happen to be the more likely I am hiking for a couple of miles, on a path to get started, off the path when that feels right, wondering while wandering and then sitting under a tree to write down what I have been...

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Nov 20, 2016
in Creative populism
by Carl Nordgren
3
0 Comments

Creative Populism

Was there any point in the political discussion when you were excited about the stories of our future that your political party was telling you? Did the parties near simultaneous implosions prove they were hollow at their cores? Seems to me all of the campaigning communications and policy strategies of our political parties are missing the most important thing. I don’t come at this from a political policy perspective but from a creative and entrepreneurial one. (To help you calibrate my views: I was a socialist as a boy; I took part in the counterculture and anti-war movement in college and as a young adult, though the part I took was mostly the parties; I spent nearly 3 decades of my adult...

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Nov 18, 2016
in Creative Genius
by Carl Nordgren
0
1 Comment

Being Generous is Being Generative

Right? And so what do we do about that? I found that being generous was generative in my entrepreneurial gigs--perhaps not 100% of the time, but much more often than not, so I tried to lean into generosity whenever I could. When we started Cellular One of the Triangle in 1985, introducing cellular telephone service to Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill for the first time, we decided we would be on the lookout always for places where we could be generous with our market and our customers. We took the time and expense to educate them about this new technology as we were building our network, so they would be more likely to make the best decision for them. And in every operations decision we made we’d look...

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Nov 13, 2016
in Creative Genius, The Generative Blog, Uncategorized
by Carl Nordgren
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Restoring your creative genius is simple

Restoring, rebuilding, retrieving, renewing your creative genius is really quite simple. I'm not saying it's easy, but it is simple. All it takes is for you to be intentional and I’m guessing you’re pretty good at being intentional—working at what is important to you. Since 98% of us were born informed with a creative genius—read about NASA’s role in the research that made this determination elsewhere on the site—many folks enjoy immediate success when they intentionally set out to become more creatively entrepreneurial, and most of the nearly 4000 students I’ve been fortunate to work with show significant growth. Successful creatively entrepreneurial folks tend to see problems as opportunities and have the ability to look at what others are looking at, and see what...

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Nov 06, 2016
in Creative Genius, The Generative Blog
by Carl Nordgren
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Please allow me to introduce myself…

…as a man with a calling. Finally. What’s your understanding of a calling? I consider it a calling when someone’s deep delight serves the world’s great need. My deep delight is to help folks become the most creative and entrepreneurial versions of themselves they can be. The world’s great need is, well, we ain’t going to make it otherwise, not in any fashion that appeals to me, unless we commit to being the most creatively entrepreneurial people the world has ever known. For the past 14 years I have been designing and teaching courses on these topics for Duke undergrads. It was near the midpoint that the Great Recession knocked us on our asses and from there it was easy to see what the housing bubble...

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Oct 28, 2016
in Creative Genius
by Carl Nordgren
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How to Get Ready for 2030

A couple of nights ago I assisted Tom Triumph in a workshop for CUBE, UNC’s Social Innovation Incubator. Tom spoke of Mastery as he has masterfully to my students when I was still teaching courses in creativity and entrepreneurship at Duke. He told stories that distilled the lessons found in the lives and achievements of Nelson Mandela and Manny Pacquiao and Richard Branson, among others. I began my discussion on the fundamental importance of intentionally growing your creative capacity and developing your entrepreneurial instincts by asking the workshop participants to imagine the year 2030. After giving them a few quick moments to ponder what life might be like 14 years from now I named the growing realization I could see in...

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Oct 18, 2016
in The Generative Blog
by Carl Nordgren
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The Creative Boost of the Color Green

I have found few research projects with more immediate value than the one out of the University of Munich, conducted in 2012, when it was discovered that staring at the color green for 30 seconds had a 25% improvement on creative performance.  The researchers designed a series of creative exercises that would require participants apply a full range of creative cognitive processes. After establishing a baseline score the researchers had subsequent participants stare at blocks of color for 30 seconds and then complete the exercises. The folks who stared at red and the folks who started at blue showed no change in their scores; no other color they tested had any impact, except green. The folks who stared at the color...

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