Newsweek’s cover story on “The Creativity Crisis” caused me to reflect on the forces that have shaped my own approach to creativity.

Here’s my top-five list with a touch of psychoanalysis:

1. Self esteem from Mom and Dad: Hate to start on a syrupy note, but my parents stayed on message until I moved out for college: “Anything is possible with hard work.” Understanding that I can’t depend on the peanut butter in my sandwich finding its way to a colleague’s melted chocolate bar for the eureka moment has served me well.
2. Bravery from my high school yearbook advisor: His name was John Hoge. He taught English, but his guidance for our high school yearbook is where he left a lasting impact. Talk about ahead of his time. He had us reflecting the year through current events like the Patty Hearst kidnapping. More importantly, he coached us on bravery; i.e., it’s not enough to come up with a creative idea. You need to express it and do it … which means being brave enough to stand up to ridicule.
3. Interdisciplinary skills from J-school at the University of Arizona: They stressed that creativity comes from learning stuff outside the reporter’s box. Today, I find many ideas can be triggered from simply hanging out at the Barnes & Noble magazine rack and checking out stories and ads that have absolutely nothing to do with technology, consumer electronics and energy. When I’m absorbing a large amount of varied information, I strive for a Zen state that I call zero gravity, allowing the information to push my mind wherever it pleases. Geez, I’m starting to sound like Phil Jackson.
4. Power of the group from teaching: When conducting a workshop or guest lecturing at a university, the best part is always harnessing the collective brainpower of the group. Recognizing creativity is just as powerful as coming up with your own ideas.
5. Decompression from overseas flights: Most people flying to Asia or Europe in United coach experience anxiety or worse. Assuming I’ve been able to avoid the dreaded middle seat, I find nothing says creativity like 10+ hours in the air. There’s something to be said for periodically getting out of the day-to-day fray and liberating creativity. I’ve also learned to throttle my desire “to share,” so my laptop download after arriving at the hotel doesn’t pepper colleagues with a zillion emails.

The Newsweek story makes the point that creativity scores for kids were steadily rising until 1990 at which point the numbers started a consistent downward march.

The story never talks about the element of bravery, but I can’t help wondering if this element alone could make a difference.

If you’re looking for dialogue on this topic, Charlie Rose tackled the Newsweek article and creativity last week.

P.S. Sorry about not breaking up the text with a visual or two, but I found WordPress to be fussy on this fine Sunday evening and opted to publish rather than wait for Monday help. 

Are we really at the midway point of 2010?

In honor of the milestone, I’ve captured my personal eight - lucky in Chinese numerology - favorites from the first half of the year.

1) Communicating with Fresh and Compelling Language

This was my first edition of “Moes Takes,” a vehicle to call out clever quotes in stories and show how they would have looked in dulled-down form. For example, Meir Statman, finance professor at Santa Clara University, offered this ditty in The Wall Street Journal:

“The market may be crazy, but that doesn’t make you a psychiatrist.”

The juxtaposition of crazy and psychiatrist makes for great wit.

Dulled-down version:

“The markets are erratic so it’s extremely difficult for the average person to understand.”

2) Open Letter to Toyota Customers Hits Pothole

It’s amazing how the BP tragedy has put the Toyota recall into the distant memory category.

But Toyota dominated the business headlines for several weeks and could never seem to hit the right communications note to diffuse the crisis.

Its open letter to customers set a tone that I dissected in this post.

The second line can only be described as Clintonesque:

I am truly sorry for the concern our recalls have caused, and want you to know we’re doing everything we can – as fast as we can – to make things right.

Notice that Toyota stays away from apologizing for an accelerator that seems to have a mind of its own. Instead, they’re sorry — no, make that “truly sorry” — that they caused heartburn from implementing the recall.

This type of language gamesmanship causes the customer to check out before getting to the part that matters– that Toyota is going “to make things right.”

3) Storytelling 140 Characters at a Time … Not

Intrigued by the concept of microstorytelling, I conducted an experiment reworking the first graph of Ernest Hemingway’s “Old Man and the Sea” into a tweet stream. Here’s an excerpt:

If it’s pathetic, it’s not functional. If it’s functional, it’s not pathetic. That’s my deep sea thinking for the day

I saw the sail … pathetic #tiger.

I agree with @ernest- saw the boy help carry the gaff and harpoon and even the sail furled around the mast.

Pathetic but functional #rachelray.

“Long seperated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.”

On one hand, you shouldn’t feel like you’re taking the SAT to figure out a love story. On the other hand, the ambiguity pulls you in because you can’t be 100 percent sure when the lovers will actually collide.

5) The Wall Street Journal Prints Lame Name-calling Article

Every once in a while I’m inspired to go down the original reporting path.

The Journal deemed Google poaching a Sun employee who had criticized Apple in his personal blog as worthy of an article.

This prompted my own digging. 

“It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers,” Mr. Bray wrote on his personal Web site. “I hate it.”

Perhaps with Madoff fading into the background, The Journal has a surplus of investigative bandwidth.

Can you imagine?

A company criticizing a competitor.

6) Storytelling in Warren Buffet Shareholder Letter

Among Warren Buffett’s many gifts, he’s a master storytelling.

His latest shareholder letter provided the fodder for this post:  

Long ago, Charlie laid out his strongest ambition: “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” That bit of wisdom was inspired by Jacobi, the great Prussian mathematician, who counseled “Invert, always invert” as an aid to solving difficult problems. (I can report as well that this inversion approach works on a less lofty level: Sing a country song in reverse, and you will quickly recover your car, house and wife.)

I just tried this with a Merle Haggard tune and it works, a sad reminder that no matter how many times I played the Beatles song “I Am The Walrus” backwards, I could never make out “Paul is dead.”

He’s right.

7) Storytelling in Social Media and Traditional Media

If we were playing American Idol, this post won the popular vote.

After speaking at the American Chamber of Commerce in Beijing on storytelling, a Chinese magazine interviewed me on the topic. This post encapsulates my answers.

The vast majority of people have been programmed to think business is serious so their communication must be dry and boring and, yes, serious.

On the positive side, if you can create a personality, it literally becomes a differentiator in this sea of sameness … which is where storytelling comes in.

Storytelling can become a powerful tool in creating a company’s personality.

8) Pogue Wraps Product Review in Allegory

It’s not easy to entertain in product reviews.

David Pogue goes one step further, bringing dry humor to product features and functionality.

I had some fun reverse-engineering this particular review on digital cameras.

The review goes old school with the lead ‘graph:

Centuries ago, a young boy in Japan was preparing for a long journey. “You will need much drinking water,” said his master. “Construct a barrel that will catch the rain.”

You can almost sense David Carradine flashing back to his Grasshopper days, an allusion that keeps as the story unwind.    

This blog dissects, pontificates and discusses storytelling in the context of business.

Which isn’t the same as being an actual storyteller.

But I’m going to deviate from the script and share a story that falls under the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up category.

One of my son’s friends will be attending college out of the area.

Figuring he wasn’t cut out for a long-distance relationship with the girlfriend, he concluded the relationship needed to end.

But the idea of ending things all at once seemed too painful.

Instead, he proposed (probably could have found a better verb) a schedule – which kicked off in late May – to his girlfriend to systematically wean (another poor verb choice) each party from the other.

Specifically, the plan dials down the social media connections over a period of time. You can see the game plan below.

Looks like he didn’t want to go too fast with the Skype calls.

Maybe he had a role model that succeeded with the six-week Slim-Fast system.

I’m no Dr. Phil, but I don’t think this story is going to have a happy ending. 

I noted earlier in the month that we got the SlideShare religion, using the social media site to tell our story through an unconventional credentials deck.

After evangelizing SlideShare as an ideal platform for storytelling, it occurred to me that we should develop a deck on the power of storytelling in business.

So that’s what we’ve done.

Taking a mix of pop culture, levity, science, and our experiences nudging clients out of the corporate-speak box, we’ve created the following as a primer for storytelling in business:

I attended the Innovation Journalism (InJo) conference last week, which was titled “Storytelling in the Time of Creative Destruction.” Between the speakers, workshops and informal dialog in the corridors, I came away with the impression that there’s still a sizable gap between what journalists need and what corporate communicators provide.

Hopefully, this presentation can be a resource.

We’d love to hear your input, including the perspectives of any storytelling disciples if this post reaches beyond the communications community.

The typical product review has a happy ending.

By that, I mean the end of a review usually calls out one product as the best choice.

In spite of the “happily every after” - at least for one company - you don’t associate the product review genre with storytelling.

Instead, these articles strive to clinically attach a value to different features and functions with the objective of helping potential buyers make their decisions.

That’s why a recent review by David Pogue in The New York Times caught my attention.

Anyone who touches the consumer electronics space knows Pogue and his gift for humor. His comparison of Windows Vista to the Mac OS back in 2006 - “I’m going to prove that Microsoft did not steal ideas from Mac OS 10″ - remains a classic and must-watch video:

But it’s interesting to see his quest for levity play out in a print product review called “Big Sensor, Tiny Camera, Nice Results” (don’t think Pogue wrote the headline; perhaps a byproduct of the SEO jockeys).

The review goes old school with the lead ‘graph:

Centuries ago, a young boy in Japan was preparing for a long journey. “You will need much drinking water,” said his master. “Construct a barrel that will catch the rain.”

You can almost sense David Carradine flashing back to his Grasshopper days, an allusion that keeps as the story unwinds:

After a quick run to his local Pagoda Depot for supplies, the boy built a large barrel, open at the top. When it rained, the barrel filled quickly.

“Good,” said the master. “Now pack it up.”

“But master,” the boy protested. “This barrel is much too big and heavy to take on my journey — it might not even qualify as carry-on! I need a much smaller, lighter container!”

Nice turn of a phrase, “Pagoda Depot.”

Sensing that an allegory is taking shape:

“A wise observation,” said the master.

“And yet,” said the boy, “a smaller container means a smaller opening, and it won’t catch nearly as much rain.”

And now, the payoff with Pogue intersecting Grasshopper with today’s digital dilemma:

The master nodded again. “Excellent, my son,” he said. “Now you understand the trade-off between digital S.L.R. cameras and pocket cameras. The S.L.R. is big and heavy, but it has a huge sensor that collects much light; you can get sharp photos even at twilight. The pocket camera has a tiny sensor that’s blurry in low light, but at least you won’t slip a disk trying to carry it around.”

The rest of the review offers the obligatory compare and contrast of several cameras.

Of course, every story must have an end.

Naturally, Pogue ties back to the drinking water quandary:

In the end, the boy began to cross Japan with only a tiny water flask on his back.

The master was aghast. “But you will die of thirst, my son!”

The boy smiled as he continued walking. “I’m not too worried about it, old man. Technology has a way of making all things possible.

Right. There’s no way a Japanese boy is going to call Kwai Chang Caine an “old man.”

But the boy saying “please don’t worry master” doesn’t quite have the same verve.

Like all master storytellers, Pogue expects us to suspend belief.

I’m OK with this for a product review that shakes up the status quo.