A few years ago, I led a creative session and I opened with an old Japanese Proverb, “None of us are as smart as all of us.”

I told the group that when I first heard this bromide at an innovation seminar in Chicago, I didn’t have the expected reaction.  I said, have you watched C-span lately?  Have you been ever been on a committee?  Have you listened to talk radio?

Creative collaboration isn’t just a two-edged sword, it’s one of those ...

Richard P. Feynman was a scientist, teacher, teacher, translator of Mayan hieroglyphics, drummer, and raconteur. And in his spare time, he won the Nobel Prize for physics.

He created a great visual moment as part of the Rogers Commission investigating the NASA Challenger tragedy. He famously demonstrated how the O-rings became less resilient and subject to seal failures at ice-cold temperatures.

He simply dipped an O-ring into a glass of ice water, removed it and showed how ...

This summer,  I read a fascinating article by Nick Paumgarten in the New Yorker.  It was titled  “Looking for Someone: Sex, love and loneliness on the Internet.”

What resonated with me was less about dating and more about the curious assortment of algorithms that companies use to determine the dot.com chemistry.

“What you do is more important than what you say,” says Greg Blatt, who is the former C.E.O. of Match.com.

“You may specify that you’d like your date to be blond or ...

Pogo had the business wisdom decades ago.

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Tom Rieger, a Senior Practice Expert for Gallup, once wrote that “The greatest threat to an organization’s success is not always the competition. Often, it is what a company does to itself. “

Image via Wikipedia

Rieger, who has ...

Digital watches were ignored by Swiss watch makers.  Radial tires were not developed by Goodyear or B.F. Goodrich, they were developed by a small French tire company, Michelin.

Overnight package delivery was not innovated by UPS or an airline company, it came from Federal Express, a product of a thesis.  Light beer wasn’t introduced by the King of Beers or Miller, it came from a chemist name Joseph L. Owades and it was originally marketed as Gablinger’s Diet Beer.

Amazon didn’t emerge ...

This week, SeriouslyCreative, Inotivity’s sister company in Puerto Rico is partnering with SHRM (Society of Human Resources Management) to engage attendees on finding innovative ways to help move Puerto Rico forward.

Dana Montenegro and Angiemille Latorre have created an Idea Garden — a gathering area where attendees can place their ideas on a wall.  Attendees can view the wall and expand on ...

My apologies to David Lee Roth.

It will take a few paragraphs to tell you why.  Last year,  Dan  and Chip Heath wrote an article for Fast Company about the  curious connection between eight grade, Google and brown  M&Ms.

They opened with a provocative line.  “Walk into an urban high school and look around at the kids.  Roughly half of them will drop out of school.  How do you spot a ...

Last week, I participated in a great webinar led by Al Pittampalli and Seth Godin called How to Embrace Change with Modern Meetings.

Pittampalli is the author of  Read This Before Our Next Meeting last week’s most popular Kindle eBook in the world. And another compelling volley from The Domino Project.

In his book, Pittampalli uses a wonderfully provocative quotation by Peter Drucker. “Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization. ...