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Quantity is the Path to Quality

July 30, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Consistently Not Stupid Happiness is not how much time you spend doing what you love, but how little time you spend doing what you hate.

As in Charlie Munger’s recipe for success: “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.” And “I know I’ll perform better if I run my nose in my own stupid mistakes.”

Idea for Impact: The road less stupid can keep you from silly errors, if not all errors.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. It’s Probably Not as Bad as You Think: The 20-40-60 Rule
  2. If You’re Looking for Bad Luck, You’ll Soon Find It
  3. Don’t Live in a World Ruled by Falsehoods
  4. Question Success More Than Failure
  5. The Truth Can Be Bitterer than a Sweet Illusion

Filed Under: Mental Models Tagged With: Attitudes, Decision-Making, Luck, Meaning, Wisdom

Ideas Evolve While Working on Something Unrelated

March 10, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

In the ’90s, Japanese conglomerate Hitachi, through its subsidy Hitachi-Omron Terminal Solutions, introduced the Clean ATM, which cleaned the bank notes during transactions. The Baltimore Sun (11-Dec-1996) notes,

Hitachi has turned its talents to money-laundering of a literal kind, with an automated teller machine that sterilizes and irons yen notes before dispensing them.

Hitachi did not set out to sanitize the money; its engineers were trying to solve the problem of crumpled bills, which tended to jam machines, a company spokesman says. They solved the problem by running the bills through rollers heated to 392 degrees [Fahrenheit, 200 degrees Celsius]—any hotter would singe paper money—and discovered that the process also killed bacteria.

Idea for Impact: Serendipity is central to the creative process. Many ideas evolve when you’re working on something unrelated. Always be ready to discover what you’re not looking for.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Always Be Ready to Discover What You’re Not Looking For
  2. Constraints Inspire Creativity: How IKEA Started the “Flatpack Revolution”
  3. The #1 Clue to Disruptive Business Opportunity
  4. Creativity & Innovation: The Opportunities in Customer Pain Points
  5. You Can’t Develop Solutions Unless You Realize You Got Problems: Problem Finding is an Undervalued Skill

Filed Under: Business Stories, Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills, The Great Innovators Tagged With: Creativity, Innovation, Luck, Problem Solving, Thinking Tools

How to Bring Your Ideas to Life

October 4, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

No matter how good an idea is, it’ll probably need some work before it can evolve into a helpful innovation. I’ve previously drawn attention to this aspect of the creative process in my 3M Post-it Note case study.

Another notable example of what transforms ideas into innovation is the “discovery” of penicillin and its curative effect on infectious diseases.

Alexander Fleming Late to Penicillin

The Scottish bacteriologist Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. More specifically, Fleming found that a specific mold produced penicillin. This substance was previously known to inhibit the growth of bacteria.

In 1928, Fleming was working on cultures of Staphylococcus, a bacterium that induces blood poisoning. Upon returning from a vacation, he saw a discarded Petri dish that he had left behind without sterilizing. It had a zone around an invading fungus where his bacterium culture didn’t grow. A mold spore from another lab in Fleming’s building had unexpectedly fallen on one of his cultures. The spore had spread over the Petri dish while Fleming was away. Instead of throwing the dirty Petri dish away, he isolated the mold and identified it as Penicillium chrysogenum, which kills bacteria by inhibiting new cell walls.

Fleming suggested his discovery might be used as an antiseptic in wounds. He published an account of this work in 1929. However, he couldn’t find a way of extracting enough penicillin needed to be curative enough without it becoming ineffective.

In itself, Fleming’s discovery was thus not a substantial leap in terms of penicillin’s use as a pharmaceutical. After Fleming’s discovery, penicillin proved unstable and difficult to produce in pure form for almost a decade. It took two Oxford University scientists, Sir Howard Walter Florey and Dr. Ernst Boris Chain, to realize its full potential only in the 1940s. They showed how to prepare penicillin in usable form and demonstrated that it could be favorably applied to the treatment of disease.

How to Bring Your Ideas to Life From the time when its medical application was established, penicillin has saved millions of lives by stopping the growth of the bacteria responsible for poisoning the blood and causing many once-fatal diseases. Fleming, Florey, and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize for Medicine to recognize their complementary achievements.

Idea for Impact: Often, there’s a divergence between an idea and its tangible application that the original creator can’t bridge by himself. The creator will have to expose the concept to others who can evaluate and trial the discovery in new contexts.

In other words, the creative process doesn’t end with an idea or a prototype. A happy accident often undergoes multiple iterations and reinterpretations that can throw light on the concept’s new applications.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Ideas Evolve While Working on Something Unrelated
  2. Constraints Inspire Creativity: How IKEA Started the “Flatpack Revolution”
  3. Always Be Ready to Discover What You’re Not Looking For
  4. 3 Ways to … Manage for Creativity
  5. Creativity & Innovation: The Opportunities in Customer Pain Points

Filed Under: Sharpening Your Skills, The Great Innovators Tagged With: Creativity, Innovation, Luck, Parables, Problem Solving, Teams

If You’re Looking for Bad Luck, You’ll Soon Find It

August 16, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Consider a woman who complained that her neighborhood dry cleaner ruined her expensive slacks. “Last month, he spoiled my wool blazer. Last Christmas, he … . It always happens,” she grumbled.

This woman knew she was taking chances with this dry cleaner. She allowed it to happen.

How to Change Your Luck Luck is sometimes the result of taking appropriate action. And, bad luck is sometimes the result of tempting fate.

Say, you’ve been planning for weeks for your next big trip. You got an incredible deal on the day’s very last flight to your destination. On the day of departure, your late-night flight gets canceled. Sure, you’re a victim of back luck—but you invited it. Think about it. Odds are, you’re more likely to have a flight delay or cancellation later in the day because airlines schedule their rosters tightly to maximize aircraft and flight crew utilization. Delays and disruptions from earlier in the day propagate onward to the late flights.

Often, luck has nothing to do with bad luck. “The fault,” as Shakespeare wrote, “is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

Sometimes you can be your own worst enemy. Don’t self-sabotage yourself by tempting fate.

Idea for Impact: Bad choices beget bad luck

You have to be lucky to get lucky. You have no control over many outcomes in life, but you can always increase the odds of getting lucky by taking appropriate action. More importantly, you can minimize the chance of bad luck by decreasing its odds.

Remember, a good mathematics student never buys a lottery ticket, and if he does, he never grumbles about not winning the jackpot!

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Be Smart by Not Being Stupid
  2. Accidents Can Happen When You Least Expect Them: The Overconfidence Effect
  3. More Data Isn’t Always Better
  4. Five Ways … You Could Avoid Being Wrong
  5. Smart Folks are Most Susceptible to Overanalyzing and Overthinking

Filed Under: Mental Models Tagged With: Biases, Critical Thinking, Decision-Making, Luck, Risk, Wisdom

Always Be Ready to Discover What You’re Not Looking For

July 19, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Corn flakes were born (1894) when the Kellogg brothers inadvertently left a pot of boiled wheat overnight on a stove. They passed the flaky dough through bread rollers and baked the flakes to create a crunchy snack.

Always Be Ready to Discover What You're Not Looking For The Penicillin mold was discovered (1928) by Sir Alexander Fleming, who, upon returning from a vacation, saw a Petri dish that he had left behind without disinfecting. That Petri dish had a zone around an invading fungus where his Staphylococcus bacterium culture had not grown. A mold spore from another lab in the building had accidentally fallen on this culture. The spore had grown while Fleming was away. Rather than throw the dirty Petri dish away, he isolated the mold and identified it as belonging to the Penicillium genus, which kills bacteria by inhibiting new cell walls.

The microwave oven was invented (1945) unintentionally during an experiment by Percy Spencer of Raytheon Corporation. Electromagnetic waves from a new vacuum tube melted a chocolate bar in his pocket while standing next to a magnetron.

Viagra had been developed (1989) as the chemical compound sildenafil citrate to treat hypertension and angina pectoris. Researchers found during the first phase of clinical trials that the compound was good for something else. It was approved for medical use in 1998.

Serendipity is a rich idea that is very central to the creative process. Lots of ideas evolve when you’re working on something unrelated. Physiologist Julius H. Comroe Jr. once said, “Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a farmer’s daughter.”

Idea for Impact: Creativity is a disorderly journey. Much of the time, you may never get where you’re going. You may never find what you hope to find. Yet still, you must stay open to the new and the unexpected.

Explore how to transform serendipitous ‘mistakes’ into breakthroughs.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Constraints Inspire Creativity: How IKEA Started the “Flatpack Revolution”
  2. Ideas Evolve While Working on Something Unrelated
  3. The #1 Clue to Disruptive Business Opportunity
  4. Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution
  5. Creativity & Innovation: The Opportunities in Customer Pain Points

Filed Under: Business Stories, Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Creativity, Entrepreneurs, Innovation, Luck, Problem Solving, Thinking Tools

Question Success More Than Failure

March 5, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Katrina “Kat” Cole, formerly CEO of the American baked goods-chain Cinnabon, in an interview for Adam Bryant’s “Corner Office” column in the New York Times:

I’ve learned to question success a lot more than failure. I’ll ask more questions when sales are up than I do when they’re down. I ask more questions when things seem to be moving smoothly, because I’m thinking: “There’s got to be something I don’t know. There’s always something.” This approach means that people don’t feel beat up for failing, but they should feel very concerned if they don’t understand why they’re successful. I made mistakes over the years that taught me to ask those questions.

People tend to attribute failure to external factors and success to their own abilities and performance (see self-serving bias and Dunning-Kruger effect.) The human brain is indeed riddled with cognitive and memory biases that are conducive to making people feel like they’re good and capable, regardless of reality.

Idea for Impact: Luck is so much more important than we acknowledge. Most successes and failures in life combine both skill and luck. Understanding the relative contributions of skill and luck in failure—and success, as Cole suggests above—can help you judge past and present results and, more significantly, prepare for future results.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. How to Avoid Magical Thinking
  2. Admit When You Don’t Have All the Answers
  3. Accidents Can Happen When You Least Expect Them: The Overconfidence Effect
  4. Be Smart by Not Being Stupid
  5. Gambler’s Fallacy is the Failure to Realize How Randomness Rules Our World

Filed Under: Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Attitudes, Biases, Critical Thinking, Humility, Introspection, Luck, Mindfulness, Questioning, Thinking Tools, Wisdom

The Myth of the First-Mover Advantage

February 20, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If you’re an entrepreneur entering a new market with a product or service that nobody else offers, you’ll seek the first-mover advantage.

  • You’ll move quickly to get established as a market leader. If your business idea has the potential to succeed, other entrepreneurs are possibly working on it at the same time or will be quick to emulate when they see what you’re doing.
  • You’ll validate your concepts quickly by identifying and partnering with a few enthusiastic “guinea pig” customers who can test your product or service early on and give you feedback regarding what customers really want.
  • You’ll create some barriers (“establish an economic moat” in Warren Buffett-speak) to inhibit other aspirants from entering the market—you’ll secure patents on your intellectual property, lock-in key locations, or negotiate longer-term contracts with customers.

Alas, many first-mover advantages are not sustainable, and many first-movers are as successful as what the superstars will have you believe.

First-to-Market is often First-to-Fail

The Myth of the First-Mover Advantage New ventures have higher failure rates than more established businesses.

Creating market awareness, sustaining market acceptance, fending away aggressive competitors are often easier said than done for many new ventures, not to mention lining up suppliers and distributors. Besides, unless you’re well-capitalized by patient investors, you’re likely to face higher-than-foreseen marketing costs on top of lower-than-anticipated sales.

Instead, if you are the second—or later—entrepreneur to market, you’ll stand a better chance of success by learning from the forerunner’s mistakes. You’ll also earn better credence from your customers, suppliers, distributors, employees, and investors to help create a better product or service.

Idea for Impact: There’s an American adage that “many pioneers died with arrows in their backs.” The best time for an entrepreneur to offer a new product or service is after others have already gotten there and laid some groundwork.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Your Product May Be Excellent, But Is There A Market For It?
  2. Many Creative People Think They Can Invent Best Working Solo
  3. Many Businesses Get Started from an Unmet Personal Need
  4. 3 Ways to … Manage for Creativity
  5. Evolution, Not Revolution

Filed Under: Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills, The Great Innovators Tagged With: Creativity, Critical Thinking, Customer Service, Entrepreneurs, Innovation, Luck, Thought Process

Luck is So Much More Important Than We Acknowledge

October 20, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to appreciate how much of life is the product of chance—that invisible hand of life: when and where you were born, the age you live in, people you meet, the problems and opportunities you face, how you meet your spouse, and so forth.

Luck is So Much More Important Than We Acknowledge Much of these are largely outside of your control.

In this context, it’s interesting to think about how some people are born with a pair of aces, never realize it, and squander opportunities handed down to them. As the great philosophers (and Singapore’s Founding Father Lee Kuan Yew) have advised, life is what you make of the cards you’re dealt with—using some talent, courage, and wisdom.

But often, stuff just happens. Some things are simply beyond your control—you can only do your best by focusing on your effort and lowering your expectations of the outcomes of much of what you’ll do in life.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Some Lessons Can Only Be Learned in the School of Life
  2. Five Ways … You Could Elevate Good to Great
  3. Five Signs of Excessive Confidence
  4. Surround Yourself with Smarter People
  5. How to … Know When it’s Time to Quit Your Job

Filed Under: Belief and Spirituality, Career Development Tagged With: Getting Ahead, Luck, Personal Growth, Social Skills

Gambler’s Fallacy is the Failure to Realize How Randomness Rules Our World

September 27, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Gambler's Fallacy is the Failure to Realize How Randomness Rules Our World

The Gambler’s Fallacy is the misleading belief that the probability of a specific occurrence in a random sequence is dependent on preceding events—that its probability will increase with each successive occasion on which it fails to occur.

Suppose that you roll a fair die 14 times and don’t get a six even once. According to the Gambler’s Fallacy, a six is “long overdue.” Thus, it must be a good wager for the 15th roll of the dice. This conjecture is irrational; the probability of a six is the same as for every other roll of the dice: that is, 1/6.

Chance Events Don’t Have Memories

In practical terms, the Gambler’s Fallacy is the hunch that if you play long enough, you will eventually win. For example, if you toss a fair coin and flip heads five times in a row, the Gambler’s Fallacy suggests that the next toss may well flip a tail because it is “due.” In actuality, the results of previous coin flips have no bearing on future coin flips. Therefore, it is poor reasoning to assume that the probability of flipping tails on the next coin-toss is better than one-half.

Gambler's Fallacy: Chance Events Don't Have Memories A classic example of the Gambler’s Fallacy is when parents who’ve had children of the same sex anticipate that their next child ought to be of the opposite sex. The French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) was the first to document the Gambler’s Fallacy. In Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1796,) Laplace identified an instance of expectant fathers trying to predict the probability of having sons. These men assumed that the ratio of boys to girls born must be fifty-fifty. If adjacent villages had high male birth rates in the recent past, they could predict more birth of girls in their own village.

There Isn’t a Lady Luck or an “Invisible Hand” in Charge of Your Game

The Gambler’s Fallacy is what makes gambling so addictive. Gamblers normally think that gambling is an intrinsically fair-minded system in which any losses they’ll incur will eventually be corrected by a winning streak.

In buying lottery tickets, as in gambling, perseverance will not pay. However, human nature is such that gamblers have an irrational hunch that if they keep playing, they will eventually win, even if the odds of winning a lottery are remote. However, the odds of winning the jackpot remain unchanged … every time people buy lottery tickets. Playing week after week doesn’t change their chances. What’s more, the odds remain the same even for people who have previously won the lottery.

Gambler’s Fallacy Coaxed People to Lose Millions in Monte Carlo in 1913

Gambler's Fallacy Coaxed People to Lose Millions in Monte Carlo in 1913 The Gambler’s Fallacy is also called the Monte Carlo Fallacy because of an extraordinary event that happened in the renowned Monte Carlo Casino in the Principality of Monaco.

On 18-August-1913, black fell 26 times in a row at a roulette table. Seeing that that the roulette ball had fallen on black for quite some time, gamblers kept pushing more money onto the table assuming that, after the sequence of blacks, a red was “due” at each subsequent spin of the roulette wheel. The sequence of blacks that occurred that night is an unusual statistical occurrence, but it is still among the possibilities, as is any other sequence of red or black. As you may guess, gamblers at that roulette table lost millions of francs that night.

Gambler’s Fallacy is The False Assumption That Probability is Affected by Past Events

The Gambler’s Fallacy is frequently in force in casual judgments, casinos, sporting events, and, alas, in everyday business and personal decision-making. This common fallacy is manifest by the belief that a random event is more likely to occur because it has not happened for a time (or a random event is less likely to occur because it recently happened.)

  • While growing up in India, I often heard farmers discuss rainwater observing that, if the season’s rainfall was below average, they worry about protecting their crops during imminent protracted rains because the rainfall needs to “catch-up to a seasonal average.”
  • Gambler's Fallacy in soccer / football penalty shootouts In soccer / football, kickers and goalkeepers are frequently prone to the Gambler’s Fallacy during penalty shootouts. For instance, after a series of three kicks in the same direction, goalkeepers are more likely to dive in the opposite direction at the fourth kick.
  • In the episode “Stress Relief” of the fifth season of the American TV series The Office, when the character Jim Halpert learns that his fiancee Pam Beesley’s parents are divorcing, he quotes the common statistic that 50% of marriages wind up in divorce. Halpert then comments that, because his parents are not divorced, it is only reasonable that Pam’s parents are getting divorced.

The Gambler’s Fallacy is a Powerful and Seductive Illusion of Control Over Events That are Not Controllable

Don’t be misled by the Gambler’s Fallacy. Be aware of the certainty of statistical independence. The occurrence of one random event has no statistical bearing upon the occurrence of the other random event. In other words, the probability of the occurrence of a random event is never influenced by a previous, or series of previous, arbitrary events.

Idea for Impact: Be skeptical of most judgments about probabilities. Never rely exclusively on your intuitive sense in evaluating probable events. In general, relying exclusively on your gut feeling or your hunches in assessing probabilities is usually not a reason to trust the assessment, but to distrust it.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Question Success More Than Failure
  2. You Can’t Develop Solutions Unless You Realize You Got Problems: Problem Finding is an Undervalued Skill
  3. The Historian’s Fallacy: People of the Past Had No Knowledge of the Future
  4. Book Summary of Nassim Taleb’s ‘Fooled by Randomness’
  5. Four Ideas for Business Improvement Ideas

Filed Under: Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Biases, Books for Impact, Critical Thinking, Luck, Mental Models, Thinking Tools

You Can’t Develop Solutions Unless You Realize You Got Problems: Problem Finding is an Undervalued Skill

June 21, 2016 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Problem Finding is an Undervalued Skill

Problem finding plays an important role in creative thinking

Problem finding is one of the most significant parts of problem solving. However, it tends to be an underappreciated skill. Many managers naively consider it strange to encourage employees to look for problems at work: “Why look for new problems when we’ve got no resources to work on ones we’ve already identified?”

Many courses and books on problem solving and creativity overlook problem finding. Many educational resources tend to assume that problem solving really begins only after problems have been identified.

Problem-identification lead to the invention of the ballpoint pen

Invention of the Ballpoint Pen by Biro Brothers The story of the invention of the ballpoint pen demonstrates the importance of problem finding. Had the inventors not recognized a problem with the existing writing instruments of their day, they would not have developed their invention.

In the 1920s, Hungarian journalist Laszlo Biro spent much time proofreading and checking for errors in others’ writings. To communicate these errors to the authors, Laszlo could not use pencils because their impressions fade quickly. He tried using a fountain pen, but the ink from the fountain pen dried slowly and often left smudges on paper.

Laszlo observed that the ink used in newspaper printing dried quickly and left the paper smudge-free. When he tried using that ink in his fountain pen, however, the ink was too viscous to flow into the tip of the fountain pen.

Laszlo then collaborated with his chemist-brother Gyorgy Biro to invent a new pen tip consisting of a ball that was enclosed within a socket. As the ball rolled inside the socket, the ball could pick up ink from a reservoir or cartridge and then continue to roll to deposit the ink on the paper. The Biro brothers thus invented the ballpoint pen. The company they created is now part of the BIC Company. The ballpoint pen continues to be called a ‘Biro’ in some countries.

Often, creativity is the outcome of discovered problem solving

Greek Philosopher Plato famously wrote in The Republic, “Let us begin and create in idea a State; and yet a true creator is necessity, which is the mother of our invention.”

One reason we fail to identify problems is that we do not stop to think about improving various situations that we encounter. Very often, these problems are directly in front of us; we need to consciously identify them and convert them into opportunities for problem solving. Instead, we tend to take inconveniences and unpleasant situations for granted and assume they are merely “facts of life.”

  • The grain mill was not invented until somebody in antiquity identified the ineffectiveness of two hours of pounding grain to make a cup of flour.
  • The world’s first traffic lights were installed around the British Houses of Parliament in London only after somebody thought of the problem of traffic congestion. In other words, up until the problems from congestion were identified in the 1860s, no one attempted to systematically consider how the problem might be solved.

James Watt invented his seminal separate-condenser steam engine

  • James Watt invented his seminal separate-condenser steam engine after discovering an interesting problem with the Newcomen steam engine. In 1763, when Watt was working as an instrument maker at the University of Glasgow, he was assigned to repair a model of a Newcomen engine for a lecture-demonstration. Watt initially had difficulty getting the Newcomen engine to work because its parts were poorly constructed. When he finally had it running, he was surprised at its efficiency. Watt observed that the engine was constantly running out of coal because the constant heating and cooling of the cylinder resulted in a large waste of energy. Watt then devised a system whereby the cylinder and the condenser were separate. This led to his invention of the “steam engine” (or, more precisely, the separate-condenser steam engine.)
  • As I mentioned in a previous article on the opportunities in customers’ pain points, crispy potato chips were invented only when Chef George Crum of New York’s Saratoga Springs attempted to appease a cranky customer who frequently sent Crum’s fried potatoes back to the kitchen complaining that they were mushy and not crunchy enough. Decades later, Laura Scudder invented airtight packaging for potato chips only after becoming conscious of customers’ complaints that chips packaged in metal containers quickly go stale and crumble during handling.

Finding and defining a creative problem

If problems are not identified, solutions are unlikely to be proposed

It pays to keep your eyes open and look at inconveniences, difficulties, and troubles as creative problems to be solved. Don’t ignore these merely as facts of life.

Curiosity, intrigue, and motivation influence problem finding (and problem solving.) One of the easiest ways to develop your skills in problem finding is to ponder at anything around you and wonder why those gadgets and contraptions were ever invented. Analyze carefully and you’ll learn that the first step taken by the inventors of these objects was the identification of the problems the objects were designed to solve.

When you look around various objects in your life, think about what life was before these objects were invented. What problems could these inventions have solved? Why was the zipper invented? What problems motivated Bjarne Stroustrup to create C++? What was internet search like before Google? How did commerce transpire before the advent of coins and bills and money?

Some people make a career out of problem finding. Managers who want to know if their organizations are running efficiently frequently hire consultants to look for problems that managers do not know exist in their businesses.

And finally, if you want to become an inventor or an entrepreneur, try to start with problems you already have in your work or in your life. Ideally, identify problems shared by a large number of people to increase the probability that your inventions will be put in widespread use.

Idea for Impact: A creative solution to a problem often depends on first finding and defining a creative problem. Very often, the solution to a problem becomes obvious when the problem has been properly identified, defined, and represented.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Four Ideas for Business Improvement Ideas
  2. Howard Gardner’s Five Minds for the Future // Books in Brief
  3. How to Stimulate Group Creativity // Book Summary of Edward de Bono’s ‘Six Thinking Hats’
  4. How to Solve a Problem By Standing It on Its Head
  5. Creativity by Imitation: How to Steal Others’ Ideas and Innovate

Filed Under: Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Artists, Creativity, Critical Thinking, Luck, Mental Models, Problem Solving, Scientists, Thinking Tools, Thought Process, Winning on the Job

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About: Nagesh Belludi [hire] is a St. Petersburg, Florida-based freethinker, investor, and leadership coach. He specializes in helping executives and companies ensure that the overall quality of their decision-making benefits isn’t compromised by a lack of a big-picture understanding.

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