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Creative Genius

Mar 03, 2017
in Creative Genius, The Generative Blog
by Carl Nordgren
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Thinking is better than Knowing…

For years those words from Goethe guided my teaching and challenged my students. As a teaching guide it disciplined me to avoid defining the creative concepts I introduced to students. Instead I tried to surround these new ideas, providing multiple perspectives, and urged students to think about these concepts for themselves, to shape their own understanding of these creative ideas and entrepreneurial strategies, an understanding that was most useful to their purposes. It worked well for them. And as a challenge for my students? Well, these were highly successful young men and women at a world class university who had worked their butts off for pretty much their entire lives in order to know so they could pass the next test, then...

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Feb 27, 2017
in Creative Genius, The Generative Blog, Uncategorized
by Carl Nordgren
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Discovering > Predicting

Many of us are convinced that the crucial early accomplishment in the creatively entrepreneurial process of building something new is producing the Plan. That is the first step in corporations and has been their model for a long time. Rushing to complete the Plan is a practice most other institutions—schools, non-profits, governments—and many individuals have taken up. It seems a necessary practice in corporations, this immediate production of the Plan.  Because they have many creative initiatives and projects underway, of course each needs a Budget; fiscal responsibility demands it.  And to establish a Budget, each project needs a Plan of what is to be built and the resources needed to build it. That means that when the team is most ignorant about what...

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Feb 22, 2017
in Creative Genius, The Generative Blog
by Carl Nordgren
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Why I didn’t allow ‘out of the box thinking’ in my creativity classes

It’s simple. What the heck does "out of the box thinking" mean? Does it mean the same thing to you each time you say it? Are you certain it means the same thing to you as it does to him or to her? If instead you have to find the words that capture the creative dynamic you are considering when you say "out of the box thinking" doesn’t it serve you to do so, and then to say it out loud? Isn’t it a bit of a creative workout to challenge yourself to find a new way to express what you mean? Might that lead to new understanding on your part? If creative and entrepreneurial thinking and behavior busts the status quo, why be restricted by status...

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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
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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 18, 2016
in Creative Genius
by Carl Nordgren
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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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