Creative director Hugh MacLeod -- famous for the cartoons he draws on the back of business cards -- offers a primer on how to be creative.
Why being creative is important is summed up in his eighth point:
8. Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.Nor can you bully a subordinate into becoming a genius.
What's often missing from discussions about creativity (but isn't from this one) is how much hard work is required to be creative. Oftentimes we act as though some people are just naturally creative and others not; more realistically, I think, creativity is like any other skill that must be honed and practiced.
We know thatyou love your job. (Hey, you're probably reading this at work, and we wouldn't want to give your boss the wrong impression.)
But maybe you have a, em, "friend" who's constantly dreaming of something different, the type of job that doesn't feel like work, a job that you'd almost pay someone to let you do.
Kiplinger's takes a look at people who have real dream jobs, like being a Lego artist, personal major league pitching coach or jewler to the stars.
Of course, most of us don’t actually expect to spend our work lives pitching to major leaguers, draping Gwyneth Paltrow with diamonds or living year-round in a national park. But we can all learn a thing or two about how the people who do these and other to-die-for jobs find themselves in such enviable positions.
The most important things to do: Hone your skills, show initiative and have a bit of luck.
Hey, Steve Denning has a blog!
Denning is the author of Squirrel Inc., one of the books we reviewed in our "quirky business books" package a couple of weeks ago.
In his blog, Denning is laying out excerpts of his next book, A Leaders Guide to Storytelling, which looks like it deals with the same ideas as Squirrel, but perhaps in a more academic sense compared to the former fable approach.
Management literature typically deals with the overt narratives of an organization, given their lack of access or interest in to the covert stories. The management of organizations also like to dwell on the stories that are overt and agreed. Other chapters of this book deal how to affect changes in the overt story, either with springboard stories (Chapter Three) or future stories (Chapter Nine).
I mentioned CareerJournal in one of the first posts for this site, but thought an article they had today was worth mentioning on its own:
As important as it is to learn the language when you travel in a different country, it's even more important when you try to make the leap from the military to the civilian workforce. But it's not limited to just people in uniform -- this can also be a challenge for people leaving government service or the nonprofit world. And because turnabout is fair play, it's often a problem for corporate types who want to go into jobs in the public sector.
Some of the tips are similar to a piece I did for Getting Ahead on military transitions a few months ago, but the CareerJournal column is especially nice in broadening that advice for anyone who is moving from one sector of the workforce to another.
Not to make this outsourcing day, but this story was too odd to pass up:
Pull off Interstate 55 near Cape Girardeau, Mo., and into the drive-through lane of a McDonald's next to the highway and you'll get fast, friendly service, even though the person taking your order is not in the restaurant - or even in Missouri.The order taker is in a call center in Colorado Springs, more than 900 miles away, connected to the customer and to the workers preparing the food by high-speed data lines. Even some restaurant jobs, it seems, are not immune to outsourcing.
To be sure, we're talking about outsourcing, not offshoring here ... but with medical transcription and call center jobs already going overseas, why not drivethrus?
Everytime we write about a Jacksonville company laying off technology workers, we hear from plenty of employees concerned about outsourcing, the new tendency of many companies to ship jobs to other countries.
This, however, is the first time we've heard of someone shipping themselves to another country because the jobs are there.
At one table, five friends from Singapore sat with a 6-foot-3, 23-year-old anomaly: Joshua Bornstein, perhaps the only American among the Bangalore-based employees of Infosys Technologies and one of the few Americans of his generation in Bangalore.For all the complaints about American jobs migrating here through outsourcing, few Americans have thought to follow them. Eight months ago, Josh Bornstein did.
In today's First Business section, we pointed you to CareerJournal, the Wall Street Journal's compendium of job-related articles in advice. A recent article the site had on career assessment tests reminded us of come of our favorite free tests:
Of course, these are all business-related quizzes, ones that could perhaps actually help you in your career. Since this isn't a Livejournal, we'll refrain from telling you figure out which Buffy character you are or anything of that sort.