Updated 5/4/08: One of my challenges back in our entrepreneuring days was fostering creativity. While there has been volumes on “how to” written, and lots of consulting fees paid, creativity remains an elusive quantity. So I found this Econtalk dialog very interesting: Russ Roberts interviews William Duggan, professor of management at Columbia Business School at Columbia University, author of the new book Strategic Intuition. The theme of the interview is strategy - how it is incorrectly taught in business schools [and incorrectly executed by expensive consultants]. The strategy discussion is all good, and consistent with my experience.
Prof. William Easterly, a SeekerBlog reliable source, reviewed Strategic Intuition for the WSJ in Nov 2007. Easterly focused primarily on the strategy insights of the book — not surprising given Easterly’s long involvement in development economics, leading to his wonderful book “The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics.” Here’s Easterly on Duggan:
One of the insights of “Strategic Intuition” is that business makes progress by following the opportunistic innovation model, while governments and international-aid agencies aim repetitively at rigid social goals. Such rigidity happens partly for a reason that Mr. Duggan is too polite to mention — bureaucrats, by nature, rarely give off a creative spark. Mr. Duggan prefers to emphasize a structural cause: The public demands solutions to problems of great social importance; thus bureaucrats get stuck with fixed objectives. Yet Mr. Duggan also shows that social progress often happens by emulating the opportunism of business. Among the most powerful of his examples is Muhammad Yunus’s invention of microcredit.
When prof. Duggan moved onto the topic of creativity I found that my knowledge of neuroscience is rather out-dated. Do you still understand brain function along the lines of left/right-brain specialization? Wrong, according to Duggan. The modern neuroscience thesis is “intelligent memory”. For background, let’s take an excerpt from a recent Duggan paper at the Strategic Studies Institute of the Army War College, Coup D’Oeil: Strategic Intuition in Army Planning:
Perhaps the best way to understand this new model of the brain is to think of a giant warehouse. Your brain is the greatest inventory system on earth. It constantly takes in information, breaks it down, and puts in on its warehouse shelves—that’s analysis. Your brain then compares the new information with other items on other shelves. When it finds a match, it pulls those items off the shelves and puts them together in a flash of intuition. The combination of analysis and intuition becomes “creative insight,” which is “the ability to take existing pieces of information and combine them in novel ways that lead to greater understanding and suggest new behaviors and responses.”
More at this UK Financial Times perspective including this tidbit: Prof Duggan’s theories are certainly proving popular. In spring 2007 his course was the highest rated by Columbia students of all 218 courses on the menu that semester.
One of the core researchers in the intelligent memory sphere is Dr. Barry Gordon of Johns Hopkins, who wrote this short summary article for AARP. I have just placed Dr. Gordon’s book on Intelligent Memory on my hold-request list at the Tasmania State Library.
For more background on Easterly you may enjoy my earlier post Foreign aid vs. growth: Robert Lucas and William Easterly
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