The Creative Value Network

Ralph Windle has started a new blog. I'd like to welcome him and to feature his work, because I think he's focused on an important area: creating dialog, innovation, and progress at the intersection of the realms of science and the arts. Both groups (and more; the world doesn't lend itself to being divided into only two such groups, as classic as that grouping is) have much to offer the vital and urgent challenges we face, and the synergy of the two mindsets and the two sets of approaches could be vital for a number of reasons.

In times such as this, we have to work together to figure out our values and our priorities and to work together on the tough problems we face. I learned that over many years of work: you need to know your objectives, your goals, in order to make good decisions, and you need to involve all the people in the system if you want both a robust decision and a decision people will support. Robert Dugger made that same claim yesterday in a panel discussion called the "Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget Forum on Consequences of Federal Intervention in U.S. Markets" as presented on C-SPAN.

How does Ralph Windle figure into this? He and his Creative Value Network are focused on creating dialog among those in the sciences and the arts to foster innovation and creativity. Check it out, and join in the dialog; perhaps together you and the others can be part of making the world a bit (or maybe even a lot) better.

Music, leadership, and effective presentations

I've written about music before, I've written about Benjamin Zander and his presentation style before, and I've written about leadership before.

Now you can see all three topics together in Not aloof and detached, but deeply, deeply human, courtesy of TED and Andrew Taylor's The Artful Manager. It takes about 20 minutes, but stay with it; there are good messages all the way to the end.

Contribution

Yesterday I wrote about the power of narrative, as inspired by Andrew Taylor's posting. In searching for a link for my article, I discovered a powerful message about contribution in the last half of Presentation Zen's Two Questions: Why does it matter? What's your contribution?, the part I had skipped before. It builds on the three questions meme I wrote about previously, but it uses art to do it in a powerful fashion.

Watch the Benjamin Zander video from start to finish. Yes, it's just over six minutes long. Yes, some of it is probably promoting the speaker. Listen to it anyway; the message is important. If, after listening to it, you're not sure of its application to business, check out the "Fields of Interest" part of Hewlett-Packard's 1966 corporate objectives (scroll to the bottom).

But is it art?

Apparently The Diagram thought so. They found my TAFTO article (new URL), liked the graphics, and asked to publish one of its diagrams in their issue 7.2.

Perhaps that's another advantage of working slightly outside the mainstream approach—it gets noticed. Drawing a standard type of diagram with different tools made it stand out a bit and may help it communicate more effectively.

What do you think?

By the way, try their Graphviz interactive diagram.