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How Dissonance Creates the Conditions for Innovation

Following my exploration of “systematic creativity,” I was pleased to take up sociologist David Stark’s new book, The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life (2009). You might not get it from the title, but this book is about the conditions that lead to creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship in organizations. According to Stark, the presence of competing notions of value within an organization, or what he calls “dissonance,” is one such fundamental condition.

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WSJ Kindle Edition’s Bad Paperboy

I suffered my first misdelivered Kindle newspaper yesterday. I’m not complaining, really — I’m the last person to expect 100% performance from a brand new distribution system. But I did briefly long for the days of paperboys when I saw this:

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Healthcare Solution: Insurance Company Says Peel Fresh Citrus

When a robot from Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield (HBCBS) left my wife a message Monday, I was provoked first by the cheerful, familiar voice inflection in the greeting:

It’s the second call from the health insurance company in a week, so perhaps a familiar tone is warranted.

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Systematic Creativity: Four Templates for New Product Ideation, Innovation and Invention

“Time to brainstorm.” That’s the signal in most organizations that the real creativity is about to begin. A brainstorm is called upon to rain diverse solutions upon our biggest problems. In the process, our institutional intelligence crackles and evolves, and from out of the murk brilliant new ideas flash — some of them golden, for sure.

But what if brainstorming isn’t always the best way to be creative?

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Use Twitter Anonymously, and Be Someone’s Muse

Today, my company launched a sweet little service that lets anyone post anonymously in the Twitterverse. This service has two flavors: the angelic, heavenly Tweet From Above; and the demonic, hell-raising Tweet From Below. Use either or both as necessary.

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Car Fuel Tank Shape: Actual vs. Deduced

Deduced shape based on long-term study of fuel gauge behavior.

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A Little Trick to Expose More User Data on LinkedIn

Given the enthusiasm with which yesterday’s absurd Onion headline about Internet privacy was circulated, I decided to publish this slightly devious, slightly concerning, slightly useful little trick for circumventing the privacy constraints on LinkedIn’s search utility. In this post, I describe a technique that exposes additional user data about people outside your network whom you find via LinkedIn Search.

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Data on Start-up Success Says: Start Businesses Early and Often

For the entrepreneurs who might be reading this, let me first extend my apologies … to your spouses and families. The data I’m about to share suggests that the key to entrepreneurial success may not be how good your business idea is or how much money you have to launch it, but rather how many times you try.

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Finding: Job Elimination Is More Newsworthy than Job Growth

With the announcement of today’s “jobs numbers” I thought I should publish some data I collected on how the mass media covers this ritual monthly release of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ “Employment Situation” report, one of the most regular and widely consumed sources of information about U.S. jobs.

A couple potentially interesting findings are: