Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Creative theorists/pioneers.

Today's post is about people, creative people. More specifically, creative theorists and/or pioneers. Who are these people? 

Here I provide just a little description.. but enough to want to know more, right?!


Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has devoted his life's work to the study of what makes people truly happy, satisfied and fulfilled.  Happiness does not simply happen; it must be prepared for and cultivated by each person, by setting challenges that are neither too demanding nor too simple for ones abilities. He thinks that the idea of having a future human community on Mars would be neat.

Edward De Bono is the father of lateral thinking. He has written 70 books with translations into 34 languages and has been invited to lecture in 52 countries. His main message is: thinking can and should be taught if we are to meet the needs of today's fast-paced and changing world.

Teresa Amabile studies how everyday life inside organizations can influence people and their performance. Currently she is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration and a Director of Research at Harvard Business School. Her last tweet included a link to tips for managing experts in order to stop the need to be the smartest person in the room.

Roger Von Oech is an American speaker, conference organizer, author, and toy-maker whose focus has been on the study of creativity. For him “creativity” is the ability to come up with original and feasible ideas.

Graham Wallas was an English socialist, social psychologist, educationalist, a leader of the Fabian Society and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Wallas outlines four stages of the creative process — preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification — dancing in a delicate osmosis of conscious and unconscious work.

Sigmund Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. He wrote the theory of the interpretation of dreams: during dreams, the preconscious is more lax in this duty than in waking hours, but is still attentive: as such, the unconscious must distort and warp the meaning of its information to make it through the censorship.

E. Paul Torrance was a psychologist. His interest in creativity emerged from his struggles as a teacher with difficult students and his observation that many of the most difficult ones went on to become successful in politics, business, the military, education, the arts, science, and other fields. He created the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking.

J. P. Guilford was an early proponent of the idea that intelligence is not a unitary concept. He first proposed the concept of "divergent thinking" in the 1950s, when he noticed that creative people tend to exhibit this type of thinking more than others.

Alex Osborn was an advertising executive. He is the author of the creative technique named brainstorming. According to him, brainstorm means using the brain to storm a creative problem and to do so "in commando fashion, each stormer audaciously attacking the same objective." 

John Cleese is an English actor, comedian, writer and film producer.  n the late 1960s, he co-founded Monty Python, the comedy troupe responsible for the sketch show Monty Python's Flying Circus and the four Monty Python films. Loosely structured as a sketch show, but with an innovative stream-of-consciousness approach, it pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in style and content.

John Lennon was an English musician, member of the famous band The Beatles. “Creativity is a gift. It doesn't come through if the air is cluttered.”

Steve Jobs was an American entrepreneur, CEO of Apple Inc. According to an authorized biography of the visionary by Walter Isaacson, John Lennon‘s creativity and work ethic didn’t just help ensure the Beatles‘ music was legendary, but also inspired Jobs. “Creativity is just connecting things”.

Marcel Duchamp was a French-American painter, sculptor, chess player and writer. He wanted to put art back in the service of the mind. Although in the 1920s, Duchamp famously renounced artmaking in favor of playing chess for the remainder of his life, he never fully retreated from his quintessential role as artist-provocateur.

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