November 2023
- Pavan Soni
- Apr 29
- 4 min read
Wish you and your family a very happy and prosperous festive season.
In this edition, we understand leadership lessons from Adobe's Shantanu Narayen, how unexpected interruptions can boost creativity, resolving the AI consciousness conundrum, the way leading CEOs adapt themselves while on the job, why distractible people can be more creative, 10 creative insights from Lego employees, and how does an average day for most people look like.
I hope you find this useful
Shantanu Narayen joined Adobe in 1998, after successfully running his startup, Pictra, an online photo sharing company. In 2007, John Warnock and Chuck Geschke, Adobe founders, asked Narayen to head the company. Key lessons from his leadership style: 1) leaders need to look around the corner, especially when things are going good (in 2009 Adobe moved from content creation to content management, measurement, and monetization); 2) engage the customers in new product creations (Creative Cloud is a case in point); and 3) be the chief evangelist while communicating the change imperative and enable people to use their own means. Narayen says that every leader must be a flag planter and a road builder—setting an inspiring vision and clearing a path for teams to take ownership and execute. (Source: HBR)
When a fire at a supplier’s factory forced a temporary shutdown at the plant of a consumer goods manufacturer, the employees became more creative. The 8,500 employees were sent home for four days, and on returning, they produced 58% more ideas than uninterrupted employees and of higher quality. Not all interruptions are of equal effect. For instance, a maintenance activity will still involve the employees, or even an extended weekend will not have a major impact on creativity. The sweet-spot, it seems, is 'attention residue'. It's when our minds continue to mull over something that’s important to us, even after we’ve moved on to another activity. (Source: HBR)
AI consciousness isn’t just a devilishly tricky intellectual puzzle; it’s a morally weighty problem with potentially dire consequences. Consciousness is the ability to experience things. To test for AI consciousness, it’s not enough to identify the structures that give rise to consciousness in the human brain. You need to know why those structures contribute to consciousness, in a way that’s rigorous and general enough to be applicable to any system, human or otherwise. There is a wide agreement among researchers, from philosophers to neuroscientists to computer scientists on the human map of consciousness, resultingly the gray area is shrinking. (Source: MIT Tech Review)
Surveys suggest that between 30% and 50% of CEOs are deemed to be failing during their early tenure. Those who succeed reinvent themselves by rewiring their work habits and mindsets. One shift is from the Golden Rule to the 'Platinum Rule': treat others as they wish to be treated. Another attribute is the 'Service Based Leadership', where you treat transitions as a renewal opportunity not just for yourself but for everyone. Finally, they thrive during uncertainty by: 1) practicing well-being as a foundational skill; 2) making purpose as their North Star; 3) switching from a status quo to an 'adaptive learning' mindset; 4) building deeper and more diverse connections, and 5) making it safe to learn. (Source: McKinsey)
Attention is often considered as the essential ingredient of creative problem solving. But researchers at Harvard have proposed that lower latent inhibitions can increase your creativity, as such people have a much richer mixture of thoughts in working memory. Latent inhibitions refer to the capacity to ignore stimuli that seem irrelevant. In a further refinement, Toronto researchers suggest that low latent inhibition only leads to increased creativity when it’s paired with a willingness to analyze our excess of thoughts, to constantly search for the signal amid the noise. (Source: Wired)
At the Lego’s headquarters in Billund, Denmark, you will find Lego bricks at every gathering point. The employees are encouraged to think with their hands. Here're ten cards to inspire your creativity: 1) Break a creative work down into infinitesimal small pieces; 2) think, remember and reflect to get inspired from within; 3) even if plans fail, it's important to have one; 4) get more sleep, it helps centre you; 5) creative process is seldom linear and without struggle, so learn to kill your darlings; 6) going outdoors will offer fresh perspectives; 7) want to be more creative, then look to children; 8) you will hit your solution if you keep at it; 9) every failure goes into your creative bank; and 10) bring what you have, however crude. (Source: Fast Co.)
What would a map of all of the world's population's time allocation would reveal? It would be interesting, indeed. Sleep takes away 9.1 hours, on average. Of the remaining, organizational outcome comprises 2.1 hrs, external outcome is 3.4 hrs, and direct human outcome is 9.4 hrs. As social animals, we indeed spend a great deal of time on our experience orientation (recreation, social, meals), somatic maintenance and then deliberate neural structuring (schooling and research, religious practices). Human transport takes away 0.9 hrs per day, averaged over the world, and that's where we have a room to go green. Remember, time saved somewhere is time earned elsewhere. (Source: Scientific American)
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