After a course I followed given by MoTiv (http://www.motiv.tudelft.nl/) by Ton Meijknecht and Hans van Drongelen for IBM, I would like to share some concepts and reflexions on Creativity.

The creative class
The work of Richard Florida and his book 'The rise of the creative class' (note I haven't read it yet) aimed at demonstrating that a new class has emerged in today's society. "The creative class is a group of people that social scientist Dr. Richard Florida, a professor and head of the Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, believes are a key driving force for economic development of post-industrial cities in the USA." (See Wikipedia)
The people of the creative class have special demands against their work environment : soft control, more independence, personal growth and development, freedom to shape the content of their own work, control of their schedules (flexibility), expression of their identities through work, able to trade job security for own autonomy.
The creative class is also looking for another kind of lifestyle : individuality, self-statement, acceptance of difference, desire for rich multi-dimensional experience, pack every second - at work or leisure- full of creative stimuli and a morphing conception of time - (mixture of work and play).
The creative class asks questions about what really matters in life.

The thesis of Mr Florida is that the creative class is the main driver of economic growth.

Do I belong to the creative class ?
I have the feeling I belong to the creative class : I think I have the above characteristics.
Another argument that makes me think I'm a member of the creative class is that I feel the tension that would exist between members of the creative class and the corporations. A tension starts to emerge between large corporation and the creative class. Their motivations are not compatible anymore. However the corporations need the creative class for their innovations. The result is a war for talent and a lot of talent retention programmes. But it doesn't prevent that creative people step out of the companies and create a new startup or even make management buy-outs.
In one of my previous posts (Allergic to Superficiality ), I was criticized by some anonymous comment and today I understand why. The person who criticized me is certainly not someone of the Creative class. It's someone who is a Coporation's soldier and who has a lot of respect for the traditional way large companies can sometimes operate. He is attracted by the dark side of the organization's power game and has respect for people who are able to climb the matrix to the top by stepping on the other's dead bodies.

Who is creative ?
Everybody can be creative. Being creative requires however some conditions : you need some talent and this talent needs to be put in the right context. Talent has three different levels : skills, mastering and tolerance. We are used to identify our skills and define how well we master them (beginner, advanced, expert, master...).

How to be even more creative ? By knowing why.
In addition to skills and mastering, tolerance is required for the most creative ones.
Firstly, If you are not able to make use of the diversity of our world by being more tolerant, you will be less creative.
Secondly, tolerance also means compassion and the possibility to solve problems for others.
This tolerance aspect also touches the deepest motivations of our creativity. Why do we want to be creative ? What drives us to create solutions ? Why did Einstein want to find out new rules like the relativity rule ?

Creativity and Spirituality
It seems that a fundamental drive (some beliefs, some spirituality) is a necessary condition for superior creativity and innovation, meaning that you will be most creative if you align your entrepreneurship with your own spirituality.
I can link this to one of my previous posts around Happiness defined by Axel Khan : All creatures on this earth will be happy if they can express their true nature. "Connais-toi toi même"... You can only be a superior creator in the fields that match your true nature.

Being creative, just as being happy requires freedom. Freedom allows to move in order to be the right man at the right place at the right moment. This is why creative people want to be independent and travel the world : they don't want to be blocked in their vision of how they can improve what matters to them. They don't want to miss the chance to maximize the impact of their creativity.

This weekend (May 31st 2008) we did quiet some biking. On saturday we did 50 Km in the region of Terneuzen.

The Westerschelde between Terneuzen and Hoofdplaat





The nature around Terneuzen



On Sunday, we did the tour of the Veerse Meer, starting from Veere (70 Km).

The Veerse Meer


Veere




The windmill of Veere

I had been a while since I had visited my MyBlogLog account. I'm quiet impressed by the improvements : you can now link all your web accounts into MyBlogLog and it makes a kind of summary. Excellent.

It continues to be a question for me: why maintain a website while all of the programming that I do (php, mySQL, Wiki...) is now available for free (Yahoo! Pipes, Mashing up my content in Netvibes or MyBlogLog...) ?

Don't you think this MyBlogLog page ressembles my start page ?

I must really like mySQL and php to keep my own developments...

You may have noticed a new green column on my start page. It aims at showing you which articles I found interesting in my daily Netvibes reading.



Technically it's again a Yahoo! Pipe (see the pipe here). They are just too easy to use.



I should re-publish a new picture on how I make my website because it has changed a lot these last months.

This weekend we went to Oostende for "Oostende voor Anker".

You can have a look at some pictures here : 20080524TallShipsOstende.

J'ai posté un commentaire sur cet article : Et si Microsoft devenait le numéro 1 du Web ?

Pour moi c'est pas évident que Microsoft va en en coup devenir quelqu'un sur le web en rachetant Yahoo et Facebook....

Le laptop de mes rêves...

I just created a friendfeed. Long live content aggregation ! Note that I already aggregate on my website. Plaxo also does it verywell...

Assumptions can be the cause of a lot of misunderstandings in everyday life (private and work):

"With ASSUME we make an ASS of U and ME..."

Think about it...

A list of restaurants I like. I just added La Serenata and Café de l'Opéra.

Last week I had a course on Business Architecture and it was fascinating.

As IT Architect, it's quiet easy to jump from IT Architecture to Business Architecture. The Service Oriented Entreprise (SOE) concepts are very close to the SOA concepts, except that instead of organizing systems and functions, it's about organizing businesses (services, products, people, processes and technology). The methodology proposed by Niels Klinkenberg results in Business Architectures which look like those of IBM's Component Business Modeling (CBM).

During the course, I liked how the Growth Phases Model of Larry Greiner was used to explain that the agile business architectures of tomorrow are a network of highly entrepreneurial Business Units (called Domains) which are specialized, higly efficient (benchmarked), have to obey the corporate "Playing Rules" and have to add value to the company. This makes of Governance (Corporate, IT, HR, Financial...) a central success factor. How to govern a large company that needs to be agile ? To answer this question, you'd better first have a good idea of its Business Architecture...

This Sunday, we took the chance to ride our bikes on the Highway (E411) and on the largest roads of Brussels (petite ceinture, De Brouckère...) during the BicyCity. Very pleasant. Good atmosphere. We'll do it again. Note that our target this year is to complete "De Gordel" (100 Km around Brussels).

This Saturday we went to the Belgian Lesbian & Gay Pride and we had a lot of fun. We went to the Pride Party because we tought the music would be good and it was... excellent.



The DJs were great and there were two concerts : Milk Inc and Kate Ryan. These two top artists are linked to each others with the tunes of DJ Richie 4Fingers (Phenomena, Apéro - Leuven; Cockpit XS/XL - Cologne).

Around 20:00, Milk Inc was super as last time we say them at the DruivenFeesten in Overijse. Unfortunately for them the Ancienne Belgique was not very crowded at that time. Not bad for us : we had a kind of private concert :-)

Around 22:00, Kate Ryan was good (but not as good as Milk Inc). The tracks of her new album sounded good : promissing ? We will see.

Yesterday, Nick Donofrio gave a session on innovation at IBM Belgium.

I really had the feeling to be in front of a legend. For 44 years he has been working on the most innovative IBM projects : the transition to CMOS, the System/360, the RS6000... He has surfed all the important IT waves with style.



Mr Donofrio will retire in October this year and he mainly emphasized on what makes IBM a great company :

• IBM values
• IBM's strenght : the combination of Systems, Software and Services which allow to create value
• IBM's strategy
• Focus on open technologies and high value solutions
• Deliver innovation and integration to our clients
• Become the premier globally integrated company

Being global is an important topic for IBM, according to Nick Donofrio. And indeed IBM has lauched many initiatives around globalization:

• the global innovation outlook with global topics on the agenda like Water, Security and the society in a global world...
• the global citizenship portfolio which will provide IBMers with valuable tools to enhance their expertise and careers within a globally integrating economy.

To start and to finish his speech Mr Donofrio encouraged the IBMers to anticipate change and to use change as an opportunity. Or even better : create the change. He explained how his father created change for his family. He wanted the best for Nick and created the change by setting hard work as a mean to reach a better education level. (Was it a success ? Apparently yes.) The only explanation for this move was : "If nothing changes, nothing changes". Be an actor of change.

And for IBM one of the current changes is... globalization.


About Nick Donofrio

• Nick Donofrio's bio on ibm.com:
• Nick Donofrio on Wikipedia

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions

J'ai commenté cet article sur le blog de Lorenzo Socclavo.

And you what famous leader are you like ?

Photos de notre weekend en famille a La Reid - Ardennes Belges

I really enjoy playing with the web and all the social tools. There is something that is quiet well advanced called Yahoo! Pipes. With Yahoo!Pipes you can reuse contents on the web and republish it in another form without programming.

Look at the following. The following Pipe allows me to collect 4 feeds (different places where you can comment my posts) and republish it as once.

To do that you drag & drop :
- 4 "Fetch Feed" Sources : you have to give the URL of the rss feed
- the "Union" Operator it merges the 4 feeds into 1
- the "Sort" Operator which allows to sort the new feed - by date descending for instance.

You can see the result of this Pipe here : Comments

There are much more drag&drops you can do. Check it out on Yahoo! Pipes by creating a new pipe.

After that what you want to exploit your new feed, you can burn it or obtain it as a bagde...

I personnaly use the PHP feature. The result can be streamed as a php array.

Here is the code I use to exploit my Yahoo! Pipe (download it here):

1 <!-- get comments via Yahoo Pipes -->

2

3 <?php

4

5 // Pipes Request

6 $req = 'http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=YEJ5xyMG3RGadogljknRlg&_render=php';

7

8 // Make the request

9 $phpserialized = file_get_contents($req);

10

11 // Parse the serialized response

12 $phparray = unserialize($phpserialized);

13

14

15 echo "<table width=120 border=1>";

16 //Loop through all items of the feed

17 foreach ($phparray['value']['items'] as $item) {

18 //For all items :

19

20 //create a new table row

21 echo "<tr><td><div style=\"width:100%; overflow:hidden\"><small>";

22 echo "On ";

23

24 //print the day it was published

25 print_r($item['y:published']['day']);

26 echo "/";

27

28 //print the month it was published

29 print_r($item['y:published']['month']);

30 echo "/";

31

32 //print the year it was published

33 print_r($item['y:published']['year']);

34 echo ", ";

35

36 //print who wrote the item (it's a comment in my case

37 $name = $item['author']['name'];

38 echo "<b>";

39 //some more checks because sometimes the author is in its own tag

40 if (strlen($name)==1) print_r($item['author']);

41 else print_r($item['author']['name']);

42

43 echo "</b>";

44

45 echo " commented: ";

46 //write the description ofthe item within its link

47 echo "<a href=\"".$link."\">".$item['title']."</a>";

48 echo ":<br/>";

49

50

51 echo "</small></div></td></tr>";

52 //end of the row for this item

53

54 }//end of for each items

55

56 echo "</table>";