John Kao learned a lot about creativity and innovation during his years teaching at the Harvard Business School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab but also as a serial entrepreneur, psychiatrist, movie producer, and jazz pianist. He wrote about the topic in Jamming--The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity, a BusinessWeek bestseller that has been published in more than a dozen languages. Now, he’s distilling what he knows into a series of brief, practical guides. The topic of this one is how to clear the mind to make way for creativity and the great ideas that follow. Come with me to Harvard. My classroom is like many others at the business school. The setting is casual and comfortable, yet conducive to drama. I lower the lights and ask my students to shut their eyes. “Picture yourself in five years,” I tell them. “Are you alone or with another person? Where do you live? Where do you work? What are you doing right now? What do you smell? What do you taste? Touch the object nearest you. What do you feel?” My students smile. I know what they are experiencing. They are playing parts in a mental performance. Initially, they are surprised by what they are imagining, but soon they are engrossed. One is walking through Washington’s corridors of power. Another is climbing an Alpine rock face. Another is standing in the Shanghai Stock Exchange. After five minutes or so, I turn up the lights and ask how they feel. They are energized, emotional, inspired....
John Kao, a master of innovation, shows how you can put your life and business on a trajectory to uncommon success. The journey begins with a conceptual prototype of your own making and ends with you realizing your ambition. Representatives of our newest client, a pharmaceutical maker, arrived this morning at 7:45--six executives, all eager to get started. They stared at the emptiness of our white walls but said nothing. I asked them to explain what brought them to us. "It’s simple," one of them said, knowing it wasn’t simple at all. "We’re a $40 billion-a-year corporation, and we want to keep growing at 7 percent annually. In other words, we need another $2.8 billion in sales every year." I tapped the calculator on my iPhone. "That’s about $54 million a week," I said. "We don’t care about some $100 million opportunity," the man went on. "Only mega-ideas will do." "What you need," I said, "is the equivalent of two dozen blockbuster movies a year.
Every era has its model of business practice. In the 1950s, it was the organization man. In the 1970s, it was the gamesman. Going forward, the model is the producer. The reason is simple: The world is nothing if not unstable. In this absurdist jungle, trust was a quaint anachronism. Contracts for millions of dollars were actually written on the back of a napkin, notwithstanding Samuel Goldwyn’s famous observation that verbal agreements aren’t worth the paper they are written on. Sometimes, just a handshake sufficed. When doors opened, it was not because of the quality of your ideas or the strength of your talent, but on the basis of your relationships. Your most valuable asset was your Rolodex, and ours wasn’t full of the right numbers.
In today's competitive environment, creativity is no longer an option. Companies that understand how to manage creativity in their people, organize for creative results and willingly implement good new ideas will triumph. In Jamming, John Kao also offers an approach that demystifies a topic traditionally confounding to businesspeople everywhere. He begins by showing how creativity, like the musical discipline of jazz, has a vocabulary and a grammar. It is a process, and because of that it can be observed, analyzed, understood, replicated, taught and managed. He explains how creativity needs a particular environment in which to blossom and grow. Like musicians in a jam session, a group of businesspeople can take an idea, challenge one another's imagination and produce an entirely new set of possibilities. Kao reveals how managers can stimulate creativity in their employees, explores the impact of information technology on creativity, looks at the globalization of creativity and shows how to ensure the loyalty of people who design, build and deliver today's vital products and services.
In today's competitive environment, creativity is no longer an option. Companies that understand how to manage creativity in their people, organize for creative results and willingly implement good new ideas will triumph. In Jamming, John Kao also offers an approach that demystifies a topic traditionally confounding to businesspeople everywhere. He begins by showing how creativity, like the musical discipline of jazz, has a vocabulary and a grammar. It is a process, and because of that it can be observed, analyzed, understood, replicated, taught and managed. He explains how creativity needs a particular environment in which to blossom and grow. Like musicians in a jam session, a group of businesspeople can take an idea, challenge one another's imagination and produce an entirely new set of possibilities. Kao reveals how managers can stimulate creativity in their employees, explores the impact of information technology on creativity, looks at the globalization of creativity and shows how to ensure the loyalty of people who design, build and deliver today's vital products and services.
In terms of ambition and organization, producing a complex movie in 2010--something at the level of Where the Wild Things Are--is, in some ways, similar to producing the first conquest of the South Pole, as Amundsen did in 1911. Each venture required a magnetic producer able to envision an alluring goal, raise money, recruit talent, set rigorous standards, and lead an elite team through enormous physical and emotional hardship to a glorious finale. John Kao embodies the qualities that make that possible. Every era has its archetype of the successful business practitioner, the figure who steps forward in answer to the attitudes and issues of the times. In the fifties, the organization man (and it was always a man) with his orderly and structured regimen, symbolized the large corporation, which itself was modeled after the industrial factory. As an acolyte of the mechanical age in which the organization man lived, he drove the top-down organization hard to achieve peak performance. In the seventies, the organization man was replaced by the gamesman. He was adept at guerrilla warfare and could make his way through the corporate jungle largely unscathed. The rigid architecture so prized by the organization man no longer worked in the more flexible and decentralized environment of that era. The end of the twentieth century was dominated by what novelist Tom Wolfe dubbed the masters of the universe--near-infallible leaders who lived and led in larger-than-life style.
Not long ago, Americans could rightfully feel confident in our preeminence in the world economy. The United States set the pace as the world's leading innovator: from the personal computer to the internet, from Wall Street to Hollywood, from the decoding of the genome to the emergence of Web 2.0, we led the way and the future was ours. So how is it, bestselling author and leading expert on innovation John Kao asks, that today Finland is the world's most competitive economy? That U.S. students rank twenty-fourth in the world in math literacy and twenty-sixth in problem-solving ability? That in 2005 and 2006 combined, in a reverse brain drain, 30,000 highly trained professionals left the United States to return to their native India? Even as the United States has lost standing in the world community because of the war in Iraq, Kao warns, the country is losing its edge in economic leadership as well. The future of our prosperity, and of our national security, is at serious risk. But it doesn't have to be this way. Based on his in-depth experience advising many of the world's leading companies and studying cutting-edge innovation "best practices" in the most dynamic hot spots of innovation both in the United States and around the world, Kao argues that the United States still has the capability not only to regain our competitive edge, but to take a bold step out ahead of the global community and secure a leadership role in the twenty-first century. We must, though, take serious and concerted action fast. First offering a stunning, troubling portrait of just how serious is the erosion in recent years of U.S. competitiveness in innovation, Kao then takes readers on a fascinating tour of the leading innovation centers, such as those in Singapore, Denmark, and Finland, which are trumping us in their more focused and creative approaches to fueling innovation. He then lays out a groundbreaking plan for a national innovation strategy that would empower the United States to actually innovate the process of innovation: to marshal our vast resources of talent and infrastructure in the particular ways that his studies of innovation have shown lead to transformative results. Innovation Nation is vital reading for all those Americans who are troubled by the great challenges the United States faces in the ever-more-competitive economy of our twenty-first-century world.
This study argues that companies who understand how to manage creativity, organize for creative results and implement ideas will triumph in today's competetive environment. It shows managers how to stimulate creativity in their employees, free them of preconceptions and guide them towards a chosen goal. Using specific examples from a range of companies - including Coca-Cola, American Express and Sony - it demonstrates why some companies fail by not making full use of creative resources while others transform imagination into hard profit.
The aim of this book is to present the modern design principles and analysis of lens antennas. It gives graduates and RF/Microwave professionals the design insights in order to make full use of lens antennas. Why do we want to write a book in lens antennas? Because this topic has not been thoroughly publicized, its importance is underestimated. As antennas play a key role in communication systems, recent development in wireless communications would indeed benefit from the characteristics of lens antennas: low profile, and low cost etc. The major advantages of lens antennas are narrow beamwidth, high gain, low sidelobes and low noise temperature. Their structures can be more compact and weigh less than horn antennas and parabolic antennas. Lens antennas with their quasi-optical characteristics, also have low loss, particularly at near millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths where they have particular advantages. This book systematically conducts advanced and up-to-date treatment of lens antennas.
This advanced textbook for business statistics teaches, statistical analyses and research methods utilizing business case studies and financial data with the applications of Excel VBA, Python and R. Each chapter engages the reader with sample data drawn from individual stocks, stock indices, options, and futures. Now in its second edition, it has been expanded into two volumes, each of which is devoted to specific parts of the business analytics curriculum. To reflect the current age of data science and machine learning, the used applications have been updated from Minitab and SAS to Python and R, so that readers will be better prepared for the current industry. This second volume is designed for advanced courses in financial derivatives, risk management, and machine learning and financial management. In this volume we extensively use Excel, Python, and R to analyze the above-mentioned topics. It is also a comprehensive reference for active statistical finance scholars and business analysts who are looking to upgrade their toolkits. Readers can look to the first volume for dedicated content on financial statistics, and portfolio analysis.
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