Lucy Bradshaw is a Senior VP at Electronic Arts. Maybe you haven’t heard of Lucy, but you’ve definitely heard of the games she’s behind: The Sims and Spore. Last November, Fast Company ran a great interview with her that is really inspiring. When you listen to her speak, you can feel the love she has for the product she develops and the passion she has for doing it in a playful, collaborative way.

Here are some of the key take-away points from Lucy’s interview:  Read the rest of this post

While laying in bed recovering from an injury last year, I was stumbling around through the myriad of video podcasts I subscribe to and decided to take a look at some of the videos in the The George Lucas Educational Foundation Integrated Studies series. That’s where I came across this gem featuring Pixar’s Randy Nelson who is the Dean of Pixar University. He’s giving a short talk entitled Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age at the Apple Education Leadership Summit in April of 2008:

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“Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Maybe we can learn an awful lot from Emerson’s words. And maybe we can apply these words on a less ethereal level. Let us be silent that we may hear each other. As executives, managers, mentors, and team members our silence can be an incredibly powerful tool. Sure, I like to write a lot about presentations and speaking, but sometimes, allowing silence to fill the room allows for other voices to be heard. Important voices. Those of your staff, your peers, your teammates.  Read the rest of this post

According to Webster’s Dictionary the word improvise means

“to compose, recite, play, or sing extemporaneously; to make, invent, or arrange offhand; to make or fabricate out of what is conveniently on hand”.

I actually prefer the definition of improvisation that Wikipedia provides though. According to Wikipedia, improvisation is

“the practice of acting and reacting, of making and creating, in the moment and in response to the stimulus of ones immediate environment. This can result in the invention of new thought patterns, new practices, new structures or symbols and/or new ways to act. This invention cycle occurs most effectively when the practitioner has a thorough intuitive or technical understanding of the necessary skills and concerns within the improvised domain.”  Read the rest of this post