April 5 and 7, 6-10pm at the New York Academy of Sciences I will be giving my seminar on Leadership and Personal Success — the best seminar you’ll ever attend. It’s similar to the leadership seminar at Columbia Business School in December, but more science-y and less business-y. Here’s the background from the NYAS web page (where you can register): Leadership and personal success through self-awareness and emotional intelligence are[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on creativity. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.] I haven’t gone into any detail about Altshuller’s 40 principles. The main reason is I found that others already have and did a great job, so I’ll just link to them. The other reason[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on creativity. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.] Here are some basics to TRIZ. After the basics, I’ll interpret them. After examining all those patents, Altshuller and his team found that about 1,500 generalized solutions described all the specific solutions. Even simpler,[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on creativity. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.] Altshuller called his ideas the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, or that’s what the Russian gets translated to, which is generally called TRIZ. People pronounce it to rhyme with ease or is. As best[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on creativity. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.] I knew about Jacob’s research and what he consulted. Now I’m reading about the research that led to his — that of Genrich Altshuller, who researched creativity in post-war Russia until he was imprisoned[…] Keep reading →

Class at Parsons today was awesome and inspiring. The project due today — a linear zoetrope for each group, internally lit — was a big challenge. At the beginning of class a couple groups appeared to be having trouble — missed communications, etc. They grouped together, rallied, figured out what they could do during class, and, by the end, nearly every group was nearly finished. I expect each will be[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on creativity. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.] When you have a problem to solve, the problem defines the solution. When the solution solves the problem we say the form followed the function. Such solutions can appear elegant, creative, obvious, or other[…] Keep reading →