5 Innovation Traps in Organization Culture
December 19, 2009 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
“Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.”
- Oscar Wilde
Organizations can be such powerful forces for change. Sometimes they can get in their own way and the value they could bring to life becomes trapped. A little experience of the ways in which an organization’s culture can trap innovation might help others avoid these same mistakes. Do you see yourself or your organization in these five traps?
1. Preparation is everything – Actually, it’s become the only thing. We’re not ready, yet. Or Ever.
The very notion of choosing which innovation to pursue cripples many an organization. One of the primary reasons for this behavior is the chronic lack of clear decision-making criteria against which any of the usually many options may be assessed. And without clear criteria, there is never enough data. Because without a decision making framework all data is open for consideration.
Brache and Bodley-Scott, in their book Implementation make it abundantly clear that the criteria for selecting any portfolio (be it strategic projects or innovation prospects) must be tied directly into your organization’s strategy. These criteria should express how the alternatives might, for example:
- implement the organization strategy,
- increase sales,
- establish or widen a competitive advantage,
- reduce costs, and,
- increase customer satisfaction and lifetime value.
In Good to Great, Collins took this concept even further. His Hedghog Concept said that it is not enough to simply select the priority of investment alternatives you actually need to choose between life and death. You must choose which innovation efforts get funding and live and which do not, and therefore die so as to not draw away from your best efforts.
Getting out of the trap of analysis paralysis means keeping clear parameters for performance and success top of mind. This results in clear objectives driving your decisions. It also is most profoundly demonstrated in the courage of a company like Kimberly Clark to completely transform it’s business from a paper product company to a consumer products company. You don’t make those kinds of choices without being very clear of your intent. Focus first.
2. When we looked there, the cupboard was bare – Not enough stuff – people, resources, systems, data
In the current economic climate everyone is doing more with less. Fewer human resources, fewer capital reserves, fewer supplies. Resource scarcity has become the operational order of the day. This pervasive sense of limitation influences the choices we make about when and how to innovate.
Where this philosophy becomes a trap is when it is synonymous with keeping the lights on. Keeping the lights on as a mindset is the business equivalent of survival mode. No investments are being made. Current expenses are being severely limited. The concept of adding new investments for the purposes of innovation are not only avoided at all costs, they might be completely foreign because resource hoarding is so ingrained.
Cost-cutting procedures are of paramount virtue in this context. The person who saves the penny is a hero. But this organization trap means that we may be being penny wise and dollar (or pound, or euro, or renminbi) foolish.
How do you address this trap? One of my earlier posts focused on the counterpoint to resource scarcity – making do with what you have. Innovation as practiced in many organization does exactly that; the subversive nature of innovation means that it can survive even in the most hostile environments. An organization such as 3M used time as the primary investment of it’s employees in order to break this cycle. They instructed employees to use a percentage of every work week and devote it to exploring new ideas. 3M’s innovation success subsequently relied on long-term, individually directed exploratory research projects rather than large, well-funded, corporate sponsored efforts.
The key is to make do with what you have.
“The greatest thing a man can do in this world is to make the most possible out of the stuff that has been given him. This is success, and there is no other.”
- Orison Swett Marden
3. Sound and fury signifying nothing – we act without thinking and we talk about it (a lot)
“Have you heard about Twitter? What about The Facebook? Or Digg? Or Yelp? Well we are a little like all of them, but with a viral marketing element based on Mafia Wars.”
Stop it. Now.
An idea magically appearing in someone’s head does not mean it must be given voice. Innovation in this organization is trapped like so much debris in a Bowerbird’s nest. It’s bright and shiny and we’re going to collect as much of as we possibly can. Because surely when we collect enough of it we’ll attract more eyeballs and something is bound to happen, right? Please…
To paraphrase a famous Texan this organization is “all hat – no cattle”. They can talk a good game about innovation and probably have a mountain of “innovation” initiatives underway but little to show for it. They lack a cohesive strategy that might link all their efforts. In the absence of critical thinking about what innovation means they are intent on latching on to the next big thing, because if they pick the right one they think they will win. Don’t follow fads.
“Life is a tale told by an idiot — full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
- William Shakespeare (Macbeth: Act 5, scenes 1–11)
4. Perfect is the enemy of good – not ready to release (okay, never ready to release)
This innovation trap is one studiously avoided by most plastic surgeons. It was this field that coined the phrase that, “the enemy of good is perfect.” In this one line they landed the fact that there really can be too much of a good thing. (No link provided for the sake of everyone’s sanity but if you really must know, feel free to Google “plastic surgery disasters” for a sample of the pursuit of perfection) [shudder].
Organizations struggling in this innovation trap are intently focused on refining and polishing their innovations before taking them to market. The internal decision making and approval processes lock the innovation into a perpetual state of design and development, in endless pursuit of a hope for perfection. And where are the customers in this process? Nowhere to be seen. Giving rise to explanation like, “We can’t show them this? If we do, they might not like it and might go to our competitor.”
What’s that sound?
That’s the sound of your customer base being leeched away due to inattention and inactivity. Just because you’re busy innovating doesn’t mean they’ll stick around. This one innovation trap has actually given rise to equally important innovation practices, open innovation and rapid prototyping. Both of which offer ways out of over-reaching for perfection innovation.
“A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.”
- James Joyce
5. It’s business as usual day after day – (Business as usual just grindin’ away) predictability means dinner at home each night
The final trap into which the desire for innovation may fall is that represented by the economics of scarcity. Many organizations sacrifice their need to innovate to their desire to perpetuate BAU (Business As Usual). Which is not to say that a philosophy that reinforces business continuity is a bad thing. Far from it.
That said, a workman-like focus on BAU may actually be a self-deception.
Business as usual is safe. It is a known quantity. It doesn’t demand the unthinkable, the unknowable, or the unbelievable. It means we can get our job done, meet our objectives, and deliver anticipated value. It means we can work nine to five, punch the clock, pay the bills, and make it: home for dinner / to the game / for drinks with friends. It demands little. And people rise to the limited expectations of BAU because to think of being any other way is…just…too…hard.
“A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.”
- William Shedd
And this is perhaps the most appalling trap into which innovation can fall. This represents an organizational failure to embrace the excitement and passion of the creative pursuit of the new, the wild, the different. This trap is created within an organization that has lost its way. The vision has long since dried up. The mission is already accomplished. The path this organization treads is the path of the zombie - a single-minded focus on immediate, simple survival needs and little else.
Unfortunately, often the only hope for the trap in which this organization finds itself is brutal. It either requires new leadership or a stake to the heart. But what if all it requires is something as simple as showing up and making an effort. To not do so would be criminal.
“A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage. Every day sends to their graves obscure men whose timidity prevented them from making a first effort.”
- Sydney Smith
Avoiding the five traps in organization culture means: finding focus; making do; avoiding fads; accepting the acceptable; and having a go. Simple admonishments for powerful gains.
Brand Complacency – Why User Experience (UX) Designers must look to their cultural impact
December 1, 2009 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
If there is a future for designers and marketers in big business, it lies not in brand, nor in “UX”, nor in any colorful way of framing total control over a consumer, such as “brand equity”, “brand loyalty”, the “end to end customer journey”, or “experience ownership”. It lies instead in encouraging behavioral change and explicitly shaping culture in a positive and lasting way…A commodity is something that has no qualitative differentiation. Mass production drives commoditization within a particular product line, while the traditional “bunch and swarm” mentality of the marketplace drives commoditization across product lines. A desire to create a new set of interactions is an urge to escape this push towards sameness. Innovation is a business goal to produce products that have qualitative differentiation, and there are various forms of innovation – such as disruptive innovation – which are intended to produce massive qualitative differentiation. – see more of the Johny Holland Magazine
Measuring Successful Innovation – It’s not about the Benjamins*
November 18, 2009 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
Now we’ve got around seven thousand people working, and that to me is fantastically satisfying.. more than dollars and cents, because I just believe that the greatest thing you can give someone is a job.
- Janet Holmes à Court (one of Australia’s richest business people)
I was having a conversation over lunch recently about ways to attract investment into small businesses and communities with David Kalow (Founding partner of Kalow & Springut, LLP and Founder of the Cleantech Corridor – CTC in NYC) and John Reaves (Founder of the Learning Worlds Institute and creator of the Storycapture.) The topics flowed freely from considering up-and-coming sectors for investment, to the types of people that need to be involved. We were discussing the differences between innovators and the people who invest in them and began to talk about the standard measures of success – ROI, EBITDA, and sundry other acronyms and initials. Then it struck me that while those measures are meaningful, wasn’t it keeping score primarily in that manner that created so much of the current economic turmoil. As one sharp-tongued friend noted, “At least we’ll remember these times as ‘great’ now that the general consensus has landed on an appropriate title for it – ‘The Great Recession.’”
So, I propose that we keep score in the most tangible and ultimately meaningful manner possible – count the number of jobs created by investments. With an unemployment rate North of 10% at this stage and with no signs of it dipping below in the near term doesn’t it make more sense to apply the bragging rights to those investors who create the most jobs? After all, no one is going to catch up to the likes of Bill and Warren any time soon, are they? So, let’s reset and start counting things that are more universally meaningful.
I know that a large part of accounting for the expenditure in the ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – aka. The Stimulus Package) is to account for jobs and that most local government economic development departments use that as a key measure. Certainly we have all seen state government leaders crowing about procuring hundreds of jobs when they attract a new manufacturing facility (usually by offering amazing tax breaks and poaching from other states). But in the world of business job creation is not a measure of any note. In fact, in order to maximize the value of investment “synergies”, job consolidation (read: elimination) is desired.
One recent positive note is that Goldman Sachs is pairing up with Warren Buffett (who, I believe sits on their Advisory Board) to foster small business investment for job creation. In this situation the bank is teaming with the legendary investor to boost financing and lending programs for under-served business owners. The $500M investment in the program called “10,000 Small Businesses” seems huge, but given that Goldman Sachs made $3.2B in the last quarter alone let’s just call it “a start,” shall we?
The key is that the investments being made go to the right area. I’m working on local effort to do exactly that in my community through the Princeton Job Creation Forum. We recognize that investing in million-dollar tax breaks to entice a large corporation to import a few hundred jobs into a state simply doesn’t cut it. Job creation is going to occur in the tens-of-thousands of small enterprises that can add employees in single digits, essentially creating 50% or 75% or even 100% job growth through judicious investments in their enterprises. If we can direct the investment dollars to the smallest innovators and accelerate their growth the economic ramifications are tremendous. Let’s count what matters. Not people counting Benjamins in their bank accounts. Instead let’s count (on) people creating value through their work.
*For those of you not familiar with the term, “Benjamins” – Benjamins are USD $100 dollar bills and the reason people call them Benjamins is because Benjamin Franklin’s face graces one side of the note. He was a publisher, a philosopher, a scientist, and the first major American inventor (read: innovator.)
I Am Just Like You – Bob Sutton on impediments to self-awareness
November 16, 2009 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
Bob Sutton dips into, “David Dunning’s book Self-Insight, which presents a compelling case that there are numerous impediments to self-awareness and that many of these roadblocks are mighty difficult to overcome. I am now on the last chapter, which contains some interesting ideas about how to increase our awareness of how skilled or unskilled we might be at things and our awareness of how others see us.” Bob’s full blog post is here.
Space & Place – Using the physical to influence the psychological
November 2, 2009 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
One of the great challenges in galvanizing a team to achieve new levels of creativity and innovation lies in the intersection between the tangible and the intangible. Missing from the thinking in the realm of innovation and product development is the way in which space not only influences, but directly informs, the quality and productivity of innovation and product development teams. So often the space in which people reside is an afterthought or, if it is considered at all, it reflects organizational hierarchies or norms of behavior defined by functional expertise. In many cases it fosters a silo-based mentality that destroys collaborative solution-seeking activities. Space and place directly prime us to be innovative, or not…
The smell of mystery…and successful innovation
One of the classic uses of space as a way to buoy innovation occurred at the aerospace and defense contractor Lockheed (now Lockheed Martin) with the formation of their Skunk Works®. It was the height of World War II and Lockheed had been asked to work on a new jet fighter. Given the project to develop Clarence L. “ Kelly” Johnson hand-picked engineers and manufacturing people and housed them in a windowless office with hand-me-down furniture in Burbank, California. Each new team member was cautioned that design and production of the new jet fighter was to be carried out in strict secrecy. No one was to discuss the project with anyone outside the four walls of the facility. The physical space essentially became a clubhouse of sorts (not the first time an innovation team would find that moniker applied.)
The Greeks get bent out of shape
Yet, the manipulation of space in order to evoke a mood, feeling or even inspire is nothing new. For as long as humans have altered the landscape with structures we have used that alteration to influence and change behavior. Sometimes this is conducted overtly. Sometimes and perhaps more commonly this is executed covertly. Take the Parthenon for instance. This Ancient Greek structure sitting above the city of Athens was the crowning architectural element of Grecian society at one point (perhaps even today). It inspired awe with its massive perfection. The only problem is that it wasn’t perfect – at least not in any straight-lined geometrical sense. The Parthenon’s architects and builders understood that if they did not employ entasis, a process for curving straight lines into convex in order to give them the appearance they are straight (yes, really), their crowning achievement would appear to be collapsing in on itself. Not such a stellar way to inspire the masses, right? They understood that if their audience was to see perfection the building must not be “perfect”.
The creatives run amok
Even when we attempt to directly address space as a fundamental support to innovation practices we can misstep. Chiat\Day (now TBWA\Chiat\Day) was at the vanguard of the advertising business in the 1990’s – they were the creators of such classic campaigns as, Apple’s “1984” and “Think Different” and the $30 million Reebok campaign, which centered on the rivalry between decathletes Dan O’Brien and Dave Johnson. The founder, Jay Chiat, wanted to unleash creativity in his Venice Beach office (strangely enough, also in California – apparently a hotbed of physical space-related innovation). Key to doing that was Project Chrysalis, a think tank designed to propel the agency away from its current restraints of time and space.
Chrysalis developed the blueprint for the industry’s first “virtual” office, a fully portable, organic workplace that broke with traditional concepts of office use and featured state-of-the-art communications technology. His vision for a virtual office was realized in 1994 as a “clubhouse” (see – back again!) designed by leading architect Frank Gehry to unleash creativity – agency staff were given only portable equipment, cellphones (aka. “bricks”), laptops and the edict to work wherever they wanted as the mood struck them. The intent being to “free” them from the confines of the physical space. Instead of reveling in their new-found un-tethered freedom the staff took to arriving early, commandeering space, and fighting pitched battles over the limited space available. With no personal space to anchor them, everything became a clamor to claim the personal and for some, way too hard. Needless to say the experiment was scrapped.
Today the TBWA\Chiat\Day facility takes a different approach. It is a miniature town with a mix of both “public” and “private spaces” with places to gather and bump-into each other. It even has a Central Park. The opportunity for the “water-cooler” conversation on a wider scale is writ-large across the organization. It is much more conducive to collaboration and creativity, because it is both unlike any office space you might experience, but so familiar in that it draws on very real archetypes. Main Street and the village square are both represented.
The cutting edge of physical systems
One of the most interesting developments in use of physical space to foster and promote specific behaviors and feelings is a marriage of the work of Maturana and Varela, two Chilean biologists, who coined the term “autopoeisis” in 1972, and the work of noted architect Christopher Alexander in the development of what he termed, a “pattern language” in a book he co-wrote with Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein of the Center for Environmental Structure of Berkeley, California, with writing credits also to Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel for describing physical space requirements to meet specific needs. The marriage of these concepts is coming to fruition in the work of a graduate student at MIT by the name of Neri Oxman. She has created a body of work around the concept of materialecology:
“…an interdisciplinary research initiative that undertakes design research in the intersection between architecture, engineering, computation, and ecology. As such, this initiative is concerned with material organization and performance across all scales of design thought and practice. As such, it seeks to promote and define a design research agenda which is ecological in nature, in ideology and in material practice; it aims at embracing the evolving elements of change in both (and indeed related) social constructs and environmental descriptions of the ever changing built environment. materialecology undertakes research in advanced digital applications for architectural practice and pursuits – their contribution to a design paradigm promoting generative design processes.”
In this one area of practice, the implications of an holistic approach to the design and creation of space through a multi-disciplinary approach offers not only a framework for supporting innovation, but a frame of reference for what innovation could and should be in vibrant innovation cultures: open, immersive, divergent, exploratory, collaborative, generative, envelope-pushing, and synergistic.
Key questions anyone seeking to foster an innovation culture through the manipulation of physical space should ask themselves are:
Only after consideration of these questions then, and only then, should we step into the breach and begin our work.
Working Creativity – Blog by Mark Batey, PhD at Psychology Today
October 28, 2009 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
The second of a 12-part series focused on organizational creativity:
OK – a few words on reclaiming creativity from the banal…
We’re lost. We have drifted. The safe shores of lexical precision, descriptive accuracy and the exacting use of words have slipped over the horizon. Etymologists the world over sob silently to sleep each night.
Once, a word like “awesome” would refer to the capacity to render someone struck with overwhelming, soul-smacking reverence. Now it is just as likely to be used to describe a promotion…
Truly Awesome Sale – Prices Slashed!!!
So too, is there a tendency for the advertizing industry or the “mad men” to proclaim any faint product improvement as an innovation or a marvel of creativity. Think of the boxes of soap powder which claim to be “New and Improved” but appear to be remarkably similar to that which went before.
The same charge of imprecision can be leveled as to the way the word “creativity” is used. “Creativity” is employed to refer from literally any artistic product of a child through to the intricacies of the theory of evolution, the poetry of Shakespeare, the music of Bach or the ingenuity of the Apple company.
More of Dr. Batey’s entries may be found here.
The Future of Improved Team Performance Begins With Individual Self-awareness
October 20, 2009 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.
- Lao Tzu
In last Sunday’s New York Times appeared a condensed and edited version of an interview by Adam Bryant with Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo. In response to Bryant’s question, “What should business schools teach more of, or less of?” Bartz replied:
I think there ought to be some classes for people to get more philosophical about who they are and what motivates them, and therefore why they act like they act.
Some of the most fantastic training I’ve had over the years is the tests and the feedback I’ve gotten on what drives me as a person, and to sort of face up to it. What’s important to me and therefore why would I make certain decisions?…Now you could say the dark side of that is maybe that would drive me to make risky decisions that I shouldn’t make. It actually drives me the other way. It drives me to be more conservative, so I’ve had to teach myself to get out of that conservative zone….What motivates you? What are you scared of? Knowing that will help inform how you lead, how you make choices, how you face the day. And I don’t think we do enough of that.
Shortly afterward I was reading Braden Kelley’s review of his day spent with Gary Hamel, the noted strategist and trusted advisor to many executives. In the review Hamel made several comments about the future of organizations:
…the biggest thing that may limit organizational success most going forward is our organization’s ability to evolve their management models. But an even bigger handicap to future success may be the fact that our management models were not built to manage innovation but precision, stability, discipline, and reliability.
The fact is, the future of improved designs for organization structures (including their systems and process models) is fundamentally grounded in the self-awareness of the individuals of which they are comprised. If we don’t know ourselves how can we help others to help us achieve our goals? When this principle is considered in light of an expanded need for innovation, not just in product and service development, but in the way we engage with our customers and markets, it is vital that self-awareness be an anchor tenet of our approach to improving team performance over time and our organizations in the long-term. We need new thinking to help us find a way out of our current economic circumstances and our old models, given that they got us here in the first place, will not apply.
Now this is not intended to devolve all consideration of organization psychology into an ego-centric examination. But the chaos that is wrought in organizations in which leaders don’t know who they are and what they need, demands that this be an early focus. Regardless of our overarching organization’s strategic and performance intent authenticity derived from self-awareness is essential. This focus leads us beyond our obsession with “conscious capacities” (like, IQ) as David Brooks described them, and may “give us a firmer understanding of the motivation, equilibrium, sensitivity and other unconscious capacities.” Which confirms why a CEO like Carol Bartz not only appreciates the insight derived self-examination, she understands that it is vital to her effective leadership of her organization. Without it, she might struggle to frame what she needs to be successful and jeopardize the performance of the company overall
At a lesser scale, in a product development or innovation-focused team, the need is no less important. One of the reasons for the need for self-awareness at this level is the fact that many teams in this space are drawn from a cross the organization. Where a stable team processing accounts in Finance has a common language and common set of established business practices to fall back on in order to smooth the way for effective communication and collaboration, a product development team does not. They may have practices such as project management, but even that approach is driven by the content of the project and its deliverables. To make up for the deficit in communication short cuts an increased degree of authenticity is required in order for the team to perform at a higher level.
Could they achieve success without individual self awareness? Possibly. They might even “fake it ’til they make it.” But they will not have created a foundation for enduring performance
For long-term success the product development team members need to strike a series of mutually beneficial agreements based on trust. That trust will be founded in an exchange of accountability, commitment and expectations and those require that a demonstrated capability and an ongoing credibility be foremost in the interpersonal relationships. Self-awareness, the state of being aware of oneself, including one’s proclivities, thought patterns, traits, feelings, and behaviors underpins all this. Without it, the challenge is twofold – creating something new while wrestling with what is hidden. Which is not a recipe for improved performance but will most likely produce chaos at best and a disaster at worst. So we must ask ourselves:
What can we do to capitalize on who we are so that our organizations can become the best they can be?
Bricolage – Innovating with what you have
September 25, 2009 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
Bricolage, is a term used to refer to the creation of a work (of art, design or construction) from a diverse range of things which happen to be available, or the work created by such a process. This term comes from the French word bricolage, from the verb bricoler – the core meaning in French being, “to fiddle” or “to tinker”; in contemporary French the word is the equivalent of the English do it yourself (or DIY), and may be seen on big box hardware retail outlets all over France. It is the root of the English word “collage”. A person who engages in bricolage is a bricoleur.
So, why this term and how does it relate to innovation?
So much of the current thinking and writing about innovation is concerned with the new. The love affair innovation “specialists” have with ideation, trying to foster the right mindset to “be creative”, seems to make innovation an important and vital part of an enterprise’s success (which it is) but more often than not leaves it to the domain of a select few “creatives”. The allure of innovation living and dying at the point of gestation may be enticing but it attempts to reduce that which requires hard effort, focus and persistence to a simple application of talent. Thinking about innovation needs to be more expansive. Not compartmentalized. Not only focused on the shiny and new. After all…
There is nothing new under the sun.
- Solomon, King, Builder, Prophet
Now, I’m not talking about line extensions, or incremental change. While there may be nothing new under the sun what we do with what we have speaks volumes about our approach to innovation. Innovation is about seeking solutions. It is about reaching beyond how we presently experience our challenges, so that we can respond with freshness and elan. I was reminded of this recently by a TED Talk by William Kamkwamba a man from Malawi who changed his world through innovation.
At age 14, in poverty and famine, William Kamkwamba built a windmill to power his family’s home. At 22, he gave a presentation at TED about this innovation that changed his life. He built a windmill. Now windmills are not new inventions; they have been in use for millenia. But Mr. Kamkwamba’s creation and building of an electricity-producing windmill from spare parts and scrap, working from rough plans he found in a library book called Using Energy and modifying them to fit his needs, makes him a true bricoleur.
Karl Weick identifies the following requirements for successful bricolage in organizations, which I consider an excellent starter-kit for establishing a more comprehensive approach to innovation:
* intimate knowledge of resources,
* careful observation and listening,
* trusting one’s ideas, and,
* self-correcting structures, with feedback.
This has little to do with the new or the flashy. It has everything to do with what we need to have an place to bring something creative into being. It requires an organizational focus, marshaling our resources, that can help us knit together something possible form what is available. A case of many hands make light work.
If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
- Sir Isaac Newton, Physicist, Mathematician, Astronomer, Natural Philosopher, Alchemist, and Theologian
The oft-quoted Newton had it right: when we innovate we are standing on the shoulders of those who came before us. We pull from so many directions. We piece together what is at hand and we cobble it together and we make something fit for purpose. We are bricoleurs and we make what we can with what we have.
There is nothing new under the sun save what we’ve found and put to work to meet our present needs.
Twitter: DrewCM
- If you haven't seen "Exit Through the Gift Shop" I recommend it. Great view of creativity & appropriation. http://ht.ly/2BCzC
- RT @brainpicker: The Mona Lisa Curse – how big money distorted the art world in the past half-century http://is.gd/f1Q0i
- @AndreaMeyer I know - the unbearable cuteness of being. Hope this morning finds you and Dan safe and sound. I worry for you both.
- Don't misbehave in my absence - just going for a walk with a friend. http://is.gd/f1Kyo
- Hey @missamykr Thank you for making me smile with your Money Tree - brilliant! http://is.gd/f1Kuh