A asks: “What would you say is the biggest flaw at Microsoft?”

Its inability to see small things when those things are still small.

Hello every boss out there. Copy. Open new text document. Paste. Select all. Font size: 300 pts. Print. Put on wall in front of desk. Read loud every morning.

(And the word “Microsoft” is not the important word. You can replace that with almost any company or brand name I can think of – a few excepted).

They found that meditating actually increases the thickness of the cortex in areas involved in attention and sensory processing, such as the prefrontal cortex and the right anterior insula. “You are exercising it while you meditate, and it gets bigger,” she says.

design

Espen Andersen writes about the S-curves of sinks, and technology at ACM Ubiquity.

“It always surprises me how so many people can go through life in delightful ignorance, not only unaware of why their car moves forward or there is sound in the radio, but not even being curious about it. It is not hard to find out how things work.”

And this one:

“People want to press a button and just have it done. And therein lies the problem. If you don’t know how things work, you don’t know what is hard.”

You don’t know what is hard.

Great article, Espen!

Start using this very simple principle today: If you are going to mean something about something, buy something or invest in something – find out how it works first. Google is your friend. Or you could start out right now with the Top 10 page at Howstuffworks. Do you know how to pick a lock? Or how an automatic transmission works?

From the program: “The aim of InnoTown is to move people’s minds, both rationally and emotionally; to inspire and enhance creativity and innovation, to help motivate people to think new thoughts and dare to fail – to succeed.”.

Marketing jargon, right. But the program is impressive!

The InnoTown program has speakers like Robert Sutton, well known for his two books “Weird ideas that work” and “The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action”. Good intervies with Robert at Fast Company and at Tom Peters. I like his honesty – this is how “Weird ideas…” starts: “I ADMIT IT. I call the novel ideas in this book “weird” to get your attention…”. He sure did.

On of his main ideas is that you should hire people that make you uncomfortable. At first this sounds very weird. But if you are going to knock your grey cells out of old habits, nothing beats having a “crazy” person forcing you to think about things, and do things in new ways.

Robert answer a question about this in the Tom Peters article so check that out.

“But the general point for managers is that if you, in your gut feeling, dislike someone, you have to examine what’s causing that. And if it’s because they think differently from you and have a different perspective, it might be good to have them around. Although not too many.”

Further on the program, is (among others) violinist Miha Pogacnik, Helen Greiner of iRobot, Rusty Rueff of EA, Tom Wujec of Alias, Michael Melvill of SpaceShipOne, and finally the brilliant Joyce Wycoff of InnovationNetwork.

Wish I could be there. Aalesund is a nice city too, even if their soccer team is… no, never mind.

Technorati tags: creativity / innovation / leadership