Fast Company’s Most Creative in Business Lists: Compulsive Clicking

If you like lists as much as I do, you’ll be kept busy for a long time perusing the 100 Most Creative People in Business on FastCompany.com. It’s an intriguing mix of executives, designers, writers, directors, academics, artists, musicians and more. Although a number of names were familiar to me, many were not. The thumbnail descriptions are to-the-point and informative. Beyond a quick education about people who are doing cool, useful things at a high level, it provides many role models who demonstrate what’s possible by stretching our knowledge, imagination and abilities. When you see the list, you’ll recognize names, companies, products and services that have enriched your life in one way or the other. Obviously such a list is quite subjective, and bound to be confounding to some people. But it provides tremendous food for thought and makes for compulsive clicking and reading. A sampling of people and their rank: #1 Jonathan Ive, #4 Reed Hastings, #13 Stella McCartney, #22 Damien Hirst, #35 Peter Senge, #40 Neil Gaiman, #49 Tyra Banks, #68 Zaha Hadid, #83 Brian Eno…you get the picture.  A neat value-added feature is a page of links for top ten creative people by industry, e.g., Movies and Television (#3, JJ Abrams), Sports (#5, Shaun White), Health Care (#1 Melinda Gates), Architecture (#4, Rem Koolhaas), the Web Business (#5 Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter), Music Business, (#2, Tim Westergren of Pandora) and so on. Fast Company knows it can’t please everyone. Their suggestion is to “Enjoy. Quibble. Complain.”