Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded PayPal and Palantir. He also made the first outside investment in Facebook and was an early investor in companies like SpaceX and LinkedIn. …
Iconic typography designer Paula Scher discusses her creative process, including the famous Citi logo. Interestingly, the idea came to her in seconds and that presented a problem for the client. They …
“Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.” *** There is a view, to which we subscribe that a lot of innovation and creativity comes from the combination of worldly …
The problem with most business books is they present a formula for problems that ultimately have no formula. You’re reading something with no practical value and you’re not really learning …
Here is an interesting excerpt from an interview with Jennifer Mueller and Shankar Vedantam, author of The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and …
In Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain looks at how our lives are shaped by personality. The book explores how where we land on the introvert-extrovert …
In The Power of Why Amanda Lang argues that innovation is simpler than you think. One reason we’re endlessly focused on expert innovation, or as she calls it, innovation window dressing, is our …
In The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, authors Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton Christensen uncover the origins of “innovative-and often …
It’s easy to make your organization more innovative if you stop trying to show everyone how innovative you are. What can you do to add more innovation to your organization? A question, no doubt, …
The first thing we do is try to figure out what went wrong. When people in organizations evaluate poor outcomes, determining what went wrong, and why is one of the first steps. Once we have a cause, …
All of the work I’ve been doing looking at how creativity and insight emerge—from Graham Wallas Stages of Control to a technique for producing ideas and Gary Klein’s triple path—focuses on …
In 1936 Graham Wallas, co-founder of the London School of Economics, published The Art of Thought, outlining the four stages of the creative process. This pre-dates, by at least a decade, James …
In the foreword to James Webb Young’s book, A Technique for Producing Ideas, Keith Reinhard asks, “How can a book first published in the 1940s be important to today’s creative people …
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), for those unfamiliar with him, rocketed from an unknown academic to rockstar with the publication of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man in 1964. The core of the …
“Most innovation comes from combining well-known, well-established, building blocks in new ways.” *** John Holland, a professor of two vastly different fields—psychology and engineering—at …
Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: “The larger a city, the greater the variety of its manufacturing, and also the greater both the number and the proportion of its small …