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but domain-specifci creativity depends more on acquired expertise and our inspiration to be creative is both dispositional and situational. In simple terms, if you want to be more creative there's a lot you can do to achieve this - the only difficulty is to achieve the same results with people who don't want to be more creative (once again, it is a case of the rich getting richer and...)

With the help of numerous technology partners, USA plans to incorporate what Shapiro calls “natural user experiences” from mobile devices into its core architecture. To allow viewing on all devices, the network is also moving its digital navigation tools to the bottom viewing screens, while positioning its content front and center.

The new capabilities are slated to go live in early June, as USA’s summer of originals launches with “Burn Notice" and “Graceland.”

Driven by consumer demand, USA’s cross-platform efforts are becoming standard practice for networks, according to Greg Ireland, research manager at research firm IDC. "Television networks increasingly need to make content available to fans no matter where those fans are and what devices they are using, and seamless digital environments enable fan engagement with both content and brands," Ireland said
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1. The empathy dynamic. When evaluating someone else’s actions orpersonality, it is crucial that you understand where they are coming from, their perspective, history, and the experiences that went into the current situation. In the above example of the 15 year-old, at some point it would be crucial to be very clear about her narrative and understanding what she was thinking and feeling when she made that decision.

2. The values-frame dynamic. Related to the empathy dynamic, this dynamic refers to whose values are being used to frame the evaluation and why. Are those value-frames absolute, or idiosyncratic and relative? For example, if you claim that it is wrong to be a homosexual, what value-frame are you enacting? What if that person does not get their values from the same place?

This desire for a more inclusive and flexible leader is a reflection of an increasingly social and transparent economy. When asked of today's challenges, 70% of people feel the world is becoming less fair, while 85% feel there is too much power in institutions.On a personal level, people feel greater skills in engaging others are necessary for career management. 84% say that "today a successful career requires greater collaboration and sharing credit with others." And 77% believe "it’s more important to be practical than stick to one’s ideologies."

The decline in college enrollments appears to be accelerating, with 2.3 percent fewer students enrolled on campuses this spring than there were in spring 2012, according to data published Thursday by the National Student Clearinghouse.
The 2.3 percent dip is steeper than the 1.8 percent decline that the clearinghouse reported in December when it compared fall 2012 numbers to those from fall 2011. These reports represent the clearinghouse's first such twice-yearly analyses of fall and spring enrollments, which the Virginia-based organization says will be annual going forward. The clearinghouse collects data from institutions that represent about 95 percent of all enrollments at colleges that grant degrees and are eligible to award federal financial aid.


Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/05/17/data-show-increasing-pace-college-enrollment-declines#ixzz2TcsZYZDT 
Inside Higher Ed

Although far less fearsome when they wear clothes, plenty of wild animals have the capacity to kill. While likely to be dispatched by razor-sharp claws or rows of bone-shredding teeth, humans who wander into the domain of apex predators can also be victims of their own lack of information. Now, the health and wellness blog Hella Wella is trying to drive that problem into extinction.

The key to keeping bad news constructive, says George Bradt, managing director of the executive consulting firm PrimeGenesis, is preemptive damage control. “There are people who are going to be very emotionally affected by what you’re about to do,” he explains, “and you can’t let them find out about this along with everyone else.” Bradt suggests speaking to those employees in person, no more than 24 hours before any announcement.

We entrepreneurs are often good at one of two things — identifying when something isn't working, or ignoring the risks and suspending disbelief. When you've failed before but now know you have the right idea to succeed, you need to silence your inner skeptic and then work to silence your outer skeptics. You've learned to identify failure. You know what it looks like. Now, you need to focus on identifying success. Once you've done that, you can move on to suspending your critics' disbelief. 

Just because you pursued the wrong idea once (or twice, or even many times) doesn't make you incapable of recognizing the right idea. A calming dose of skepticism can be great, but as an entrepreneur, sometimes you just need to charge ahead, no matter how many times failure knocks you down.

• Ask new hires what it was about the company that sold them.
• Find out from current employees what keeps them coming to work every day.
• Include a question in exit interviews about which benefits and programs the employee enjoyed.

Let’s imagine a world where many people (that other 99%--no, not that group, although they fit in here, too—the 99% who heretofore don’t complete MOOCs) finish their online course and get some sort of degree certification, the equivalent of an online diploma (it may not be a college degree—but it will be some sort of certificate). Do we expect that those certificates will be taken as seriously as a traditional college or university degree, one where students attended physical classes (at least sometimes), had face to face interactions with peers and professors (at least some of the time), experienced some sort of campus life and extracurricular activities (at least on occasion)? Had actual lab experiences, recitals, music lessons, and went to Writing Centers . . . the list goes on. I don’t think so.

‘Different’ is what I have searched for my whole life. In particular, a different way of thinking. I never understood why I was the only one whose hand shot up in history class when the teacher asked a broad question about Africa, but when she asked us to name the 15th century Queen of Spain, hands waved around me like tree branches twisting furiously in the wind. This blindness to everything non-Western continued outside of the classroom. No one ever talked about the things outside of their occidental bubble – the bubble of the comfortable, warm, well-fed Occident. It wasn’t even a bubble; it was an opaque, porcelain snow globe. On the bus ride to school my friends lamented that the city might take away our free student Metrocards, blind to the fact that other kids didn’t have schools to walk to. Were we selfish to demand our Metrocards? No. Were we unaware of our relative global status? Incomprehensibly yes.

Finally, cultures are dynamic. They shift, incrementally and constantly, in response to external and internal changes. So, trying to assess organizational culture is complicated by the reality that you are trying to hit a moving target. But it also opens the possibility that culture change can be managed as a continuous process rather than through big shifts (often in response to crises). Likewise, it highlights the idea that a stable "destination" may never — indeed should never — be reached. The culture of the organization should always be learning and developing.

These perspectives provide the kind of holistic, nuanced view of organizational culture that is needed by leaders in order to truly understand their organizations — and to have any hope of changing them for the better.

Phone calls, for example, lead to less miscommunication than instructions sent by mail. A cycle of clarity is built into the medium. "Huh?" is a perfectly appropriate way to ask someone to refine a message. Conversations are more clear than marching orders, because conversations have built-in error detection and correction.

Organizations that are good at flagging the misunderstood internal messages are far more likely to move quickly, in sync, than the ones that assume that messages from on high are never to be questioned. When in doubt, ask.

And now a team of psychologists has found that a bonus makes us happiest if we’re not allowed to spend it on ourselves. The study (pdf), which is still a working paper, set out to evaluate the effect of what its authors call prosocial bonuses on team performance and happiness. A prosocial bonus is one whose recipient has to spend the money on a single, randomly chosen teammate. The teams in the study were sales teams at a Belgian pharmaceutical company and dodgeball squads at the University of British Columbia, where two of the study’s authors are on the faculty. Why dodgeball? Michael Norton, a professor at Harvard Business School and another of the study’s authors, explains it this way: “Can we strip it down to the silliest activity we can think of? I’m pretty sure dodgeball is pretty much the dumbest, simplest sport humans have ever invented.”

Here's a pencil. Here's a piece of copy paper with nine dots on it. Without lifting the pencil or folding the paper, connect the nine dots using four straight lines.