Five Productivity Lessons from Espresso
I love coffee. It’s delicious, chock full of life-enhancing antioxidants and fosters connections and collaboration, too. After spending a few weeks in Italy last year, I developed a love of espresso. In addition to the concentrated caffeine boost that a…
Work Like Nikola Jokić Plays Basketball
Nikola Jokić is a two time National Basketball Association (NBA) Most Valuable Player (MVP). He loves passing the ball almost as much as he loves horses. In fact, Jokić is probably the best passing big man of all time, one…
Three Creativity Lessons from Kindergarten
I’m learning a lot about kindergarten. A novel part of COVID worklife for my wife (who is her own woman) and I is that we get to teach our oldest son kindergarten. Feeling swells of exhaustion, inspiration and humility each…
Cormac McCarthy and creativity and influence
Cormac McCarthy has passed from this world at the age of 89 and he was an icon of American literature and his real and violent words and stark sentences unabashedly embraced the run-on sentence to paint a real and brutal…
The Business Case for Playing Every Day
Play is a central part of being human. Here is a business case for bringing play to your life and your practice every single day.
Three Ways to Cultivate the Art of Possibility
The art of possibility means imagining what can get done or might be achieved by opening ourselves up to a variety of options in life and, generally, being a hopeful person. From my perspective, it also means inspiring others to…
Stop killing it
Describing how we kill stuff like exams, exercise routines, and/or big meals, reflects a shortcoming of creativity in North America (where such phrases are used most often). I believe that we should stop “killing it”. The casual language and colloquialisms…
Where We Work Should Be Beautiful
When I was in Italy as a member of Vancity’s Co-operative Study Tour we visited a worker co-op called Kilowatt and I fell in love with the space and its people. The organization focuses on consulting, communication and education that…
Three Strategies for Effective Brainstorming
Creating an Awesome Brainstorm I love brainstorming. Whether we’re planning a camping trip, riffing on hilarious “what if?!” scenarios, solving a complex technical problem or strategizing for the upcoming school year, the creative exercise of collecting ideas is one of…
The Definitive Analysis of how Co-operatives Show up in Pop Culture
It’s Co-op Week in Canada. Unfortunately, the co-operative movement has a communication problem. Even though economists, journalists, academics, activists, titans of industry, and communities from around the world laud the traditional, yet disruptive, business model, co-operators often struggle to simplify…