Personal Blogs

Wozniak and Steve Jobs, their pranks and phone hacks. They learnt how to work together and get the intrinsic reward thatclmes from pulling it off. Wozniak the innventor, while Steve Jobs would make it user-friendly, package and sell it and make a few bucks. isaacson describes Jobs as 'Sensitive, insensitive, bristly and detached. Showing the traits at junior school that he kept later in life'. How can 'useful' pranks and boisterou inventivesness be fostered, rather than killed off? Should they be confined to Secondary School (High School) and university? What examples can you think of, from personal experience or from the press, where a bond has been formed by a 'young people' that has gone on to bare fruit? Beyond the Fringe Monty Python Many rock bands Directors and actors

I'm just about through the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson and I'm inclined to give it one more pass so that I can blog-along and make some of the insights stick. This second reading has got me quite tearful; i want to say was it worth it? Could he have been a little less intense and so not theinsensitive sh1t that so often manufested itself. 'Intense' is Steve Jobs in one word and largely how the biographer wraps it up. Go read then come join the 'Steve Jobs Walter Isaacson discussion group on Linkedin.

Re-reading the Steve Jobs biography with four months in hand before another MAODE module I am struck by what it tells you about Gates and Jobs and how self-evidently one is an adaptor 'doing things better' while the other is an innovator 'doing things differently'.

This drawn from doing a KAI personality inventory and all the reading around these tests for B822.

I came out at 144 on a scale of 160; I'd envisage Jobs as somewhere on the outer edges of 150 while Gates gets a 20 or 30, neither would be in the 60-130 zone for two thirds of respondents.

If they ever did one of these are the results known?

As most managers do observation and experience of a person's behaviour and responses must suffice.

I feel a desire to revisit H807 'Innovations in E-learning' while mixing it up with B822 'Creativity, Innovation and Change'.

I can do this through the 1000+ entries I have here and by refreshing my mind from the current and archived blogs of others blogging here currently (though few if any blog there way through the MBA programme and I am yet to find anyone blogging about B822).

There's a warning on this activity, that the techniques may draw up uncomfortable events from your past.

This also highlights a major problem with such techniques:they can throw up the unexpected.

I like to think I have ample experience 'working with dreams' ; I have used them to develop story-lines and ideas, even to some degree for personal cognisance so it felt like an obvious one to give a try.

Context is vital, picking the right activity or game for the people you are working with.

How well do you know them?

It also makes me realise that I'd like to be in a working environment with the kind of colleagues and friends where I could employ such techniques.

I feel like a big fail; there are two activities suggested for problem solving, or creativity, innovation and change: keeping a dream diary and this, which offers ways to explore a dream's meanings and to re-enter and work with this environment created by your subconscious.

There's plenty troubling me at the moment but I find repeatedly that holding onto a dream is like chasing autumn leaves in a stiff breeze.

Take this morning; just a few moments awake I recall I had been dreaming and that it had been a 'good one': vivid but apparently not memorable enough. I tried all the tips in the book to recover or return to the dream: you have to place yourself exactly as you were as you had the dream. I still can't get it; I feel like MacBeth clutching at the dagger; it is always just out of reach.

By way of example I have a snippet of a dream from a few days ago: returning to the campsite after some kind of trip or activity in the woods I find my tent has gone: everything has been removed, as if I had never been there. The plot is bare. Why should I be thinking this as I return to work after a two week break?

The 'activity' is then to work with and develop your feelings about this moment, been to re-enter the dream, not simply to see what happens next but to change or influence the outcome. This then MAY offer a solution or at least an understanding of your feelings so that you can deal with them.

How to work with a dream or metaphorical image:

• Entering the dream
• Studying the dream
• Becoming the images
• Integrating the viewpoints
• Reworking the dream

Appreciating, reflecting, looking forward and emerging

P.S. I just returned to work and couldn't have entered a more friendly environment, my desk as I'd left it.

P.P.S. I realise why I am 'losing' my dreams: stress. I'm waking up with a jolt, some unpleasant thought in the back of my mind.

Steve Jobs was hugely influenced by Zen Buddhism; this I understand would play to the importance of intuition. Intuition alone is not enough; this for Jobs was also the product of intense effort to get his head around an issue; he immersed himself in it until, to paraphrase the historian E.H.Carr he could 'hear it speak'.

20 LIFE LESSONS FROM STEVE JOBS

http://mashable.com/2011/12/18/steve-jobs-20-life-lessons/

REFERENCE

Glouberman, D. (1989) Life Choices and Life Changes Through Imagework, London, Unwin, pp. 232-6

Isaacson, W. (2011) Steve Jobs. Little Brown.

Come and join the discussion in the 'Steve Jobs: Water Isaacson Biography' group. The idea is to bring together everyone who got the book for Christmas. I'm about to stand my second read. http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Steve-Jobs-Walter-Isaacson-discussion-4236153?trk=myg_ugrp_ovr

 

Getting to the end of the 600 page biography I struggle to draw a conclusion. Perhaps he was Janus like, always looking in two directions, impish, black and white, loved it or hated it. Able to bend. Loyal (at least to his wife), even to certain friends. Selective then. He was in love with the way his mind worked.

He has been instrumental in changing the world and I feel better for having followed his products, if not his crede.

My iBook died in 2011; I have to replace it. Do I need a laptop if I have an iPad though? My inclination is to have something large and powerful enough to cut movies. The 'Full Monty' a 90 minute piece, to translate scripts I've written even developed as photo journals and start bringing some of the scenes to life.

The Steve Jobs Discussion Group on LinkedIn

http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Steve-Jobs-Walter-Isaacson-discussion-4236153?trk=myg_ugrp_ovr

 

 

"There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That's crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random disucussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you say 'Wow,' and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas". Steve Jobs after Walter Isaacson (2011:431) on the design of the Pixar building.

I'll be quoting from the Steve jobs biography often as I apply what I have learnt to B822 'Creativity, Innovation and Change', and share what he did for the world with the Apple, with Pixar, with iTunes and the iPad.

Had he got involved in education I have an idea of how he would have approached something.

Steve Jobs was the idea and for behind releasing on iTunes a box-set of EVERYTHING Bob Dylan had ever recorded; this in the Digital Age is the way forward. Even if I cannot read everything on a subject, I want it aggregated for me nontheless. I want every article or book reference in a book such as this biography, with links to every interview too.

REFERENCE

Isaacson, W. (2011) Steve Jobs. Little, Brown.

Happy 2012 folks!

Reading the Steve Jobs biography, without taking notes (a sin, but it is the holidays), while also studying B822 'Creativity, Innovation and Change' I am increasingly inclined to ditch all techniques in favour of 'being yourself'. This is how Steve Jobs lived; he was himself, often without compromise, therefore difficult, particular and obsessive.

Some advertising creative types are laughable because of the way they go about things yet the simple act of behaving differently over an extended period of time is bound to create in that plastic mind a slightly different mind set. All it takes for an ad to stand out is for it to be different; to be effective it has to have relevance and resonance.

Having taken no notes at all on Steve Jobs I'll be obliged to read it again, notepad or iPad by my side.

If you thought there were rules or ways of doing things then this will throw your mind. Most of us can't be Steve Jobs, to realise his dreams someone has to put the ideas into action.

Had Steve Jobs done a Myers Briggs Type inventory what would he have been?

Though cryptic this means something to me and will jog the memories of my 12 or so fellow OU students on 'Creativity, Innovation and Change'.

The reference to 'Chizsentmehighly' refers to Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi and Chapter 1 of the Course Resource Book ' A Systems Perspective on Creativity'. Henry refers to the course Chair, Professor Jane Henry who also features in the 28 minute audio programme that I have now listened to FOUR times. (In surveys I come out extremely low on my ability with or liking of 'auditory' learning; give me a visual and some words, please).

In a subgroup and then in the form we discussed the meaning of 'creativity' (ostensibly in the buisness context). We found we needed to qualify it, to set parameters and have goals or outcomes. Are you, for example, creative if your ideas are in your head? Or if they are 'random acts of weirdness?'

We were made to think about use of models too, there are a couple in the Block 1 reading. The important thing I have learnt is to recognise that a model is one person's simplification of the complex. You may never get onto their wavelength, and if you do, recognise its failings. Figure 1.1 in the Csikszentmihalyi chapter is an example. Csikszentmihalyi (1999) Having studied Engestrom I prefer his Activity Systems. Tersa Amabaile in 'How to Kill Creativity' has a more easily understood Venn Diagram with 'Creativity' at the centre of Expertise, Creative Thinking Skills and Motivation.  (Amabile, 1998)

Context is important. Although I've put Apollo 13 here, we actually discussed some other example of ingenuity in a moment of crisis. This on the basis that creativity is often forthcoming at times of crisis (indeed one of the 'business guru's Jane Henry interviews charts innovation and creativity and puts in the need for pressure as delivery of a project is reached). The other examples remind me of the eclectic mix of backgrounds of my fellow students from whom some rich examples were given: the Army, Air Traffic Control, Manufacturing electronic lighting systems in Finland, TV, the NHS, Marketing, a County Council and so on.

Gwok Kann, Jackson Pollock, Greyson Perry and Travey Emin got a mention, as did Steve Jobs, James Dyson and Bill Gates. We got into pigeomn-holing people as 'innovative' or 'adaptive' and were warned of a 'two box thinking' (that we can quickly confine oursevels to a limiting debate).

Something similar was achieved by a Game where in groups we were given a set of nine cards: 7 with letters on them, one with a symbol and one blank. We were told to come up with a three letter anagram that would be readily understood by others. We did QE2, KPI and then by tearing the 'Pi' symbol in half and making it into an 'I' 'CIA'. In this instance we got into a conversation about how we set ourselves parameters, that we automatically follow rules and make assumptions even when there is no need to do so. We could have turned the cards over and written any letters we liked. The game had not come with a rule book.

Clearly I'll be adding to this, letting the tutorial act as a catalyst on the books, CDs and other online resources, as well as discussions in our tutor group.

 

 

I'm up for a while in the middle of the night preparing a Steve Jobs inspired presentation - his approach is legendary. I've had a Mac from the start, with the Apple II.