Book review: Where Good Ideas Come From by Henry Castel
This week we have a book review. I have found an interesting and special book for you. It’s about ideas and how you can cultivate, develop, and promote the spark, the flash of brilliance, the groundbreaking and breakthrough ideas that come from you and your team. These ideas will push forward your career, your life, your culture, and your society. The book gives us techniques, approaches, and methods to bring ideas into the world. The title is "Where Good Ideas Come From" and it is written by Steven Johnson. Let’s dive in.
The author identifies 7 key patterns to have a better understanding of where good ideas are coming from:
-The adjacent possible:
To point out this notion the author uses the example of the French guy who manages to develop and install a lot of hatcheries in hospitals. Indeed, at the beginning of the decade, a lot of newborns died. So, when he went to the zoo and discovered hatcheries, the sight triggered an association in his head. Immediately, he decided to hire the manager of the zoo hatchery. He developed, made research, introduced his medical results on incubation to the French medical establishment in Paris, and managed to decrease the mortality rate of new babies by initiating the generalization of hatcheries in hospitals.
-Liquid network:
Sixty-thousand years ago, humans invented the boat. It was only until 2,000 years ago that we managed to develop the alphabet, candles, aqueducts, currency, rulers, papyrus, sewers, soap, plows, cement, combs, reservoirs, silk, paving, canals, bread, and furnaces. Those discoveries appeared a few years after the first true cities were formed. In a low density and chaotic network, ideas come and go. In a dense network, good ideas have a natural propensity to get into circulation. The author states that high-density liquid networks make it easier for innovation to happen.
-The slow hunch:
Gmail, AdSense, and Orkut (social media) are derived from "Innovations Time Off Hunches." This is a time where employees can work on ideas that are not related to work. It’s an obligation and represents 20% of employee time. The result is huge for Google. This philosophy manages to generate 50% of Google's new products.
-Serendipity:
Serendipity is coined from a Persian fairy tale titled "The Three Princes of Serendip." The protagonists were always making discoveries by accident of things they were not in quest of.
The author also points out the important role of dreams. In general, we associate dream inspiration with the creative arts, but it’s not always reserved for art. The canon of scientific breakthroughs contains many revolutionary ideas that originated in dreams. For Freud: the dream is not somehow unveiling a repressed truth. Instead, it is exploring, trying to find new truths by experimenting with novel combinations of neurons.
-Error:
The author enhances the notion of error. Error often creates a path that leads you out of your comfortable assumptions. Being right keeps you in place but being wrong forces you to explore.
Alexander Fleming discovered the medical virtues of penicillin when the mold accidentally infiltrated a culture of staphylococcus he had left by an open window in his lab.
-Exaptation:
This paragraph advocates an interesting insight and story about Gutenberg. An important part of his genius lay not in conceiving an entirely new technology from scratch but instead from borrowing a mature technology and putting it to work to solve an unrelated problem. Indeed, he used the screw press that was used to make wine combined with key elements like ink and paper that were well developed separately before he printed his first bible. He concocted new uses of older technologies into an engine for mass communication.
-Platforms:
The goal is to create a super environment for inquisitive people. It’s an environment that encourages people to think broadly, where different thoughts could productively collide and recombine.
The book is 100% approved. You can read it if you want to explore new ways of thinking, opinions, or get different points of view. The book goes through a lot of documented and interesting examples, I will let you discover all of them. As a leader or manager, the book will help you to understand the innovative environment needed that encourages the development of sparks, flashes, lightbulb moments, brainstorms, eureka moments, and epiphanies. So, go for a walk, cultivate hunches, write everything down, keep your folders messy, embrace serendipity, make mistakes, take on multiples hobbies, frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks, follow the links, let others build on your ideas, borrow, recycle, and reinvent.
Engineer success, encourage excellence, upsurge leadership by Henry Castel????????
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