Living in More Than One World » problem solving http://brucerosenstein.com/blog The Blog of Bruce Rosenstein Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:02:27 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Sketching for Fun and Profit http://brucerosenstein.com/blog/2009/07/sketching-for-fun-and-profit/ http://brucerosenstein.com/blog/2009/07/sketching-for-fun-and-profit/#comments Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:26:55 +0000 bruce http://brucerosenstein.com/blog/?p=588 If, like me, you are reluctant to show your sketches to other people, be sure to read Art Markman’s new Psychology Today blog post, Tools for Innovation III: Sketches and your brain. Art is a friend and a cognitive scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. The post is one of three recent ones based on ideas (in this case from a chapter by Barbara Tversky and Masaki Suwa) from an Oxford University Press book he and UT engineering professor Kristin Wood co-edited, Tools for Innovation. When you have ideas for innovation, sometimes the best ways to think about, formulate and communicate them are by making some sort of visual representation, even if it is crude, dashed off and open to interpretation. But Art correctly points out that many of us are concerned about what people will think of our less-than-stellar artistic talents, so we either don’t make the sketch, or don’t show it to others. “But it is these very limitations in our ability to sketch perfect what we are thinking,” he writes, “that leaves room for those drawings to be reinterpreted.” If we can get over this limitation, there is a potential for a real breakthrough, because other people may have interpretations we wouldn’t have considered, and that can sharpen our thinking. Another concept he points out is that since so much of the brain is visually-oriented, limiting your ideas to either spoken words, or words on paper, can act as a damper on your creativity. In a similar vein, see Dan Roam’s bestselling book The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures.

]]> http://brucerosenstein.com/blog/2009/07/sketching-for-fun-and-profit/feed/ 0 Problem Solving the Japanese Way http://brucerosenstein.com/blog/2009/03/problem-solving-the-japanese-way/ http://brucerosenstein.com/blog/2009/03/problem-solving-the-japanese-way/#comments Tue, 10 Mar 2009 23:15:22 +0000 admin http://webvideovision.com/~bruce/blog/?p=4 Peter Drucker had a longtime following and strong readership of his books in Japan. The Drucker Society of Japan/The Drucker Workshop is a well-developed organization, and I’ve been privileged to get to know some of its members at recent Drucker Global symposia.

My former USA TODAY colleague Del Jones has a really interesting article about author Ken Watanabe and a new book published by Portfolio, Problem Solving 101, the English language version of a book originally published in Japan by Diamond (which also publishes Drucker’s books in that country.) According to the article, it was Japan’s biggest selling business book in 2007, yet was originally written as a textbook for seventh and eighth grade students in Japan. Del also references Drucker and Ikujiro Nonaka, co-author of The Knowledge-Creating Company, who was, in 2007, the first scholar in residence at the Drucker School in Claremont, California.

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