The worlds of motorbiking, auto mechanics and stunt acting lost a giant this past weekend when Indian Larry, popular figure on Discovery Channel's Great Bike Build-Off, died while performing a stunt at a bike show in Cabarrus.

Indian Larry takes his inspiration from Ed “Big Daddy” Roth (creator of Rat Fink and assorted tricked out roadster designs) and, everyone’s current favourite name on a hipster T-shirt, Von Dutch. Under these masters, it should come as no surprise that Indian Larry takes the classic design of a chopper and tricks it out to cartoonish proportions and yet holds the design together with sheer craftsmanship. This is a guy who gives a shit about spokes, basically.

 
Nice wheels. Nine countries from all five continents are represented by leading lights of their respective art scenes in the BMW Art Car Collection.

(via adtothebone)

 
Consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, the publisher of Strategy + Business magazine, presents the results of their Leading Innovations Competition.

Voters rated the candidates in three areas: originality, value, and impact. When the 8,237 votes had been tabulated, the top-scoring entry, by a narrow margin, was “Org DNA: Building the Four Bases of an Execution Culture.” It’s clear to most in business that a superior strategy, if poorly executed, can lose to an inferior but better-executed strategy. The Organizational DNA approach looks at the unique way decision rights, motivators, structure, and information combine in an organization. Once that is clear, it is possible to identify and address the causes of execution problems. Thus Organizational DNA embeds execution in the company’s genetic code.

The theme of effectiveness ran through all of the winning ideas. Innovation spending, for example, suffers from a steep diminishing-return curve. Companies cannot improve their innovation performance by simply investing more in innovation. A more effective approach is to find ways to wring a higher innovation return from each dollar currently spent. Thus, voters strongly endorsed “ROI2: Raising the Return on Innovation Investment.” ROI2 improves an organization’s ability to tap new ideas, make the right development bets, improve new-product development, and commercialize innovations. “Great stuff indeed!” one voter commented, a judgment shared widely enough to put the ROI2 framework in the Leading Innovations winner's circle.

 
Thousands of Olympic athletes are championing childrens' Right to Play.

Sport has a natural and universal power to attract, inspire, motivate and engage. Sport is everywhere. And everywhere that it is, sport demonstrates its capacity to move people emotionally and physically. Right To Play's programs were developed around the simple premise that we could translate this love of sport into an opportunity to promote health and well-being throughout the world.

Right To Play is a humanitarian organization using sport and play programs to encourage the healthy physical, social and emotional development of the worldís most disadvantaged children. Right To Play is committed to improving the lives of these children and to strengthening their communities by translating the best values of sport into opportunities to promote development, health and peace.

 
Mothers (and Fathers) of Invention. How do new products happen? Fast Company asked some inventive folks about coming up with ideas and seeing them through to the marketplace.

In the past, we pretty much had a "do it ourselves" culture. But to really innovate better, faster, cheaper, we had to move toward a more open model of innovation. It's my job--along with 50 or so other employees with the same position--to find ideas. - Suna Polat

To invent anything, you have to be removed from the world. In order to have the capacity, the liberty, to imagine something better, you need to step outside of it for a while. My advice is to encourage invention and ideas, and then edit. It's about proliferation and promiscuity on the one hand--and then later, rigorous, tough-minded editing. Dean Kamen, the inventor, calls the process "kissing frogs." You might make 100 things and turn one of them into a prince. - Bruce Mau

What not to do: Fill a room with people from a single discipline. Or get a bunch of people from many different disciplines, and throw them all together. Either everyone has the same background, so it's hard to come up with big, surprising ideas, or people are so different they can't understand one another.

Something magical happens when you bring together a group of people from different disciplines with a common purpose. It's a middle zone, the breakthrough zone. The idea is to start a team on a problem--a hard problem, to keep people motivated. When there's an obstacle, instead of dodging it, bring in another point of view: an electrical engineer, a user interface expert, a sociologist, whatever spin on the market is needed. Give people new eyeglasses to cross-pollinate ideas. - Mark Stefik

 
eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's 2002 commencement speech to the graduating class at Tufts University offers some practical wisdom relating to systems thinking, diversity and self-sustaining communities.

To a large degree, life - like a software program -- is a linear thing. We all face the temptation to freeze-frame the past, and project it into the future. As Pam said, the future doesn't always follow a straight line. So as a software engineer, you learn to strive for a certain flexibility in design: You learn to avoid being locked in to a single solution - to build a platform that can be used for a number of purposes.

As a result, to the outside observer, a well-written program might look a little bit wasteful… Cluttered when it should be clean… With dots that defy connection... …Kind of like an education in the liberal arts. You know what I mean: When you design your course of study, you build in some lines of code the purpose of which is not immediately evident - a course in poetry to go with a course in physics, Aristotle's Ethics along with algorithms… …And then, later, life takes a non-linear turn, and you draw on a different part of the platform for the new perspective you need. ...

Which leads me to the last lesson I want to share today from my eBay experience. When you're looking at the way a collection of isolated individuals coalesces into a community… When you're trying to understand what makes a network work - what I've learned is that it comes down to this: Can the system embrace diversity? And not just accept diversity - but embrace diversity - as the value of difference.

To understand that what today seems odd, unnecessary, off-beat -- maybe even outrageous - may prove integral to solving tomorrow's problems. It's a matter of finding the connections that make community - not just forging them, but finding them, because I think they already exist -- and encouraging each individual to think from self to society to service.

 
A man is not old until his regrets take the place of dreams. -Yiddish proverb

 
Ranking up there on the peculiarity scale would have to be the clever phenomenon of the cuddleparty. A cuddle party is exactly that - a gathering of mostly strangers who pay cover to dress up in pyjamas and cuddle one another non-sexually (there are 16 rules - including no sex, no means no, and no dry humping!). Started by Reid Mihalko in New York the parties - with the purpose of re-exposing people to the healthy (and often socially unaccepted) benefits of real human touch - are becoming more and more popular.

 
The 2004 International ideaFestival in Lexington Kentucky:

The ideaFestival is a process, “space” and network for the exploration of ideas and innovation across and at the intersections of different fields (science, business, arts, technology, education, design, philosophy, etc.). Based on the understanding that all knowledge is part of an unbroken web, the ideaFestival promotes the synthesis and convergence of ideas as a means toward developing new innovations in products, services and creative endeavors.

 
Let's Hear it for the Overworked Brain Surgeon. Anita Sharpe at Worthwhile asks...

"...why do many companies entrust their creative and strategic thinking to people who not only must be very, very tired -- but also have no time to travel for new perspectives, or to read a book or magazine that introduces fresh ideas, or to think about much of anything but the piles of work before them?"

(via Focused Performance)

 
A couple very interesting insights in this blog post, The Limits of Generalism, by Swarthmore College assistant professor Timothy Burke upon his return from a too-specialized conference.

I repeatedly extoll the virtues of generalism, but it cannot do everything. The sinking feeling I repeatedly had during the conference was knowing that to even get to the point where I grasped the substantive difference between different algorithms or formalisms proposed by many of the researchers at this conference, where I could meaningfully evaluate which were innovative and important, and which were less attractive, would take me years of basic study: study in mathematics, study in computer science, study in economics, areas where I’ve never been particularly gifted or competent at any point in my life. To get from understanding to actually doing or teaching would be years more from there, if ever.

The reverse movement often seems easier, from the sciences to the social sciences or humanities, and in truth, it is. There’s an important asymmetry that I think is a big part of the social purpose of the humanities, that intellectual work in that domain returns, or should return, broadly comprehensible and communicative insights rather than highly technical ones, and thus, that the barriers to entry are lower.

***

That debate is an important reminder, however, of what a kind of disciplined drift towards generalism can bring. The intensely fertile contemporary practice of cognitive science draws from all those areas and more besides. It almost seems to me that a good generalist ought to combine an overall curiosity and fluency in the generality of knowledge with a structured search of the possibility space of the intellectual neighborhoods which are just far away enough from their specializations to return novel possibilities and angles of attack but just close enough that those neighborhoods are potentially accessible with a reasonable amount of scholarly labor. To think about generalism in this way is to realize that different generalists are not going to end up in the same place. Their mutual engagements or conversations will have to happen in places of accidental overlap, because the concentric circles of one's own generalist competency are going to differ because they originate out of different initial specializations.

 
Many months ago CG posted a link to a fairly new cartoon site called Gaping Void. Well, founder Hugh McLeod has continued to expand his portfolio (and clever idea) of scratchy, sharp-edged "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards" to a grand scale. Now, add to this, a great inspirational list on how to be creative.

1. Ignore everybody.
2. The idea doesn't have to be big. It just has to change the world.
3. Put the hours in.
4. If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being "discovered" by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.
5. You are responsible for your own experience.
6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.
7. Keep your day job.
8. Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.
9. Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.
10. The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props.
11. Don't try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.
12. If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.
13. Never compare your inside with somebody else's outside.

 
A rave Architecture Magazine review of the new Rem Koolhaus designed public library in Seattle. Criticisms from the design and construction phases of the audacious new building are raised and presented against current praise for the space now that it has opened. The Seattle Public Library was designed with several new innovations: only one-third of the space set out for book stacks (to offset obsolesence, if it happens), a 3% grade spiral instead of separate floors, hundreds of computer stations, a reinterpretation of the traditional reference desk (it contains: the "Mixing Chamber," a trading floor of information where reference librarians roam freely and work one-on-one with patrons, communicating with colleagues by wireless devicesa), and topped with a cozy reading treehouse.

 
Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of the car is separate from the way the car is driven. -Edward De Bono, consultant, writer, and speaker (1933- )

 
Guidelines from The Book of Bezos:

Hire very carefully -- you're creating an enduring culture.
Be stubborn and flexible.
Obsess about customers, not colleagues.
Know when to throw away the org chart.
Get good advice -- and ignore it.
Don't chase the quick buck.
Communication is terrible.
Take leaps of faith.
Be simpleminded.
Add up lots of little advantages.

 
Another new business magazine grounded deeply in the economy of ideas has launched. Innovation@Work is actually a monthly audio magazine and it purports to focuses on coaching executives in the art and science of dynamic, successful innovation. You can sample their first issue in audio here or receive a PDF by signing up for their book summaries. The lead interview with John Seely Brown, former Chief Scientist at the legendary Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), is very good. Here's a taste of what he had to say:

There tends to be fairly massive denial that markets can change, customer requirements can radically change, and the technologies that provided a winning strategy five years ago may no longer be the things that the market really wants. Often your own success keeps you from wanting to see that the market may be turning. The more successful you have been, the less likely you are to be able to see fundamentally new patterns or want to see fundamentally new patterns.

The more successful you have been, the less likely you are to be able to see fundamentally new patterns or wantto see fundamentally new patterns.

[To] me the key was to create a context where we had multiple disciplines, always rubbing shoulders with each other to create a huge amount of physical space that was really dedicated to serendipitous types of conversations. We had white boards from wall to ceiling — I mean, wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling — and often situatedaround coffee pots. People would gather and then conversations would start. Those conversations would migrate from casual conversations to these beautiful white boards and then other people would walk by and join in. They could join in effectively because the context of the conversation now had been laid out on the white board so you could move relatively effortlessly from the periphery of a conversation to the center and back out again. And so you think a lot about the structuring of the physical space to facilitate social interactions. wantto see fundamentally new patterns.”

(via augustdiva)