When creative doesn’t mean anything

Posted on December 17, 2011 by Bill Wren

Creativity is not constrained to activities that are considered artistic. Every one is creative in some way.

I saw a list of words and terms that are considered over-used on LinkedIn and at the top of the list sat the word creative. I’m not surprised by this. These days everybody has to be “creative.”However, over the years I’ve observed that most people haven’t a clue what creative means.

Years ago, a woman I worked with told me how much she envied me because I was “creative.”

She considered me creative because I was a writer. But I gave her a puzzled look and said, “You’re creative.” And then she gave me a puzzled look in return.

She associated the word writer with creativity. In most cases, it would be an obvious association because it’s hard to image someone that writes as not being creative. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that because you write you are creative. Maybe you’re not a particularly good writer. Maybe you just imitate what others do. Maybe you’re an amanuensis.

More to the point, the woman didn’t look at what she did or what she produced in terms of creativity. She didn’t look at herself or her surroundings. As far as hair and attire went, she was the most colour co-ordinated and fashionably dressed people in the office.

Her work area mirrored this. Over time, she had added small plants, pictures and other items so that her environment reflected who she was — co-ordinated, coloured schemed and so on. She was creative on a daily basis.

She just didn’t associate any of that with being creative.

Do you recall the Enron scandal? At the heart of it (other than greed), was creativity. It was creativity used in a cynical and criminal way, but it was creativity with numbers, accounting and loopholes.

Used to describe someone, my dictionary defines creative as, “… having good imagination or original ideas.” It doesn’t constrain the meaning to activities that are considered artistic. It’s worth noting as well that areas considered artistic, like writing, aren’t restricted to the arts. You can be a creative business or technical writer. Writing isn’t all fictional prose and poetry. It’s a craft. It’s a communication tool.

So … don’t pine about being creative. Open your eyes and see what it is you do everyday and see how you do it. Just about everyone is creative and almost every day. They just don’t always see it that way.

But they should. The meaning of the word creative, and what it applies to, is much broader than many people think.

 ikoni

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Are Google+ brand pages single user problems?

Posted on November 8, 2011 by Bill Wren

As soon as I saw that Google+ had finally added pages for business I, like many, wanted to create pages for some businesses I work for.

But I’ve seen muddles come up in the past so before I did anything I wanted to know who owned the pages, how they could be transitioned to another owner should someone leave a company (since it seems a personal Google+ account is required to create a page, like Facebook) and how a team could use the page, meaning how do you create admins.

I couldn’t find anything about these questions. Then I came across Robert Scoble’s post, I wish I had never heard of Google+’s brand pages and had some answers, the big one being it hasn’t been thought through yet.

That’s a problem and why I won’t rush to create a page. When it comes to business, it is a basic requirement. More than one person should be able to access the page if only because people go on vacation. If only one person can manage it, does the page shut down for two weeks, three, a month when they take time off?

And if the owner of the page leaves, what happens then? There may be simple answers to these questions. Maybe they aren’t problems at all. But from the searching I did there was no documentation available, just Scoble’s observations that suggest these are issues that have yet to be addressed.

If that is the case, you risk big problems down the road by creating a page today. So as the character Viktor Navorski says in the movie The Terminal, “I wait.”

In the meantime, if you want to read about a fabulous use of a Facebook page, see Lara Wellman’s post, Fantastic Fanpages: Volkswagen Netherlands. (Be sure you watch the video in the post.)

On another note:

I was asked to write something on the subject of Remembrance Day (November 11). This is what I came up with.

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Hazards of living in Alberta

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Bill Wren

I lived in Alberta for roughly twenty years before moving to New Brunswick about five years ago. Over the last few days, I’ve discovered one of the hazards of having lived there for so long. You are never where you were. (If you’re impatient, just scroll to the end for the capper.)

There was a moisture problem in my basement. It needed to be dealt with, especially with my house currently up for sale.

It appeared the problem was the upstairs bathroom. The area with the moisture was directly below the bathtub. I called a plumber. It cost $70 to discover the bathtub was dry as a bone; no problem there.

It had to be the toilet. So I checked with some handyman friends and online to figure out how to take apart a toilet. I needed to remove the bowl and check the ring. The problem had to be there. Unfortunately, previous owners had caulked the entire toilet so (I figured) I hadn’t realized there was a problem with leakage there.

Surely there was a disaster waiting for me.

However, before I did all that a guy came in and we went downstairs. We cut open the ceiling where the problem was to have a look. We discovered the moisture was more or less in that one area, near the window, but for the most part the same story: dry as a bone.

We tested flushing the upstairs toilet. We tested the bathtub upstairs again, filling and draining it.

Nothing.

We did, however, discover one more very small area in the basement where there was a similar moisture problem. We searched and searched, discovering no apparent cause. So in a Sherlock Holmes’ like process of deduction we arrived at the answer.

Humidity.

I had no dehumidifier downstairs. I lived in Alberta for twenty years! Who thinks humidity?

Having grown up in Ontario, I probably should have thought about humidity and dehumidifiers but twenty years of Alberta had dulled my awareness of such things. It simply never occurred to me to get a dehumidifier.

So now I have one. The problems have been fixed (largely involving cleaning up some mess).

And the lesson? Always be aware. Wherever you were is not where you are. Every place is unique.

Places are like people that way.

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This is my home and it is for sale

Posted on September 21, 2011 by Bill Wren

I’m selling my home. It’s my hope that you will love it the way I love it. To me, this is not a house. It isn’t just one of the best properties in Fredericton — on the Hill, one backyard from Odell Park, close to the university and a 20 minute walk to downtown Freddy.

You can contact me:

This is a home.

Homes are loved; houses are liked. Sometimes they’re liked a lot. But there is a difference between a home and house. A home is like a family member.

It may be a subtle difference. And it may just be fudging with language. But I think there’s a difference. But getting back to my home …

How’s this for ad copy? Lush with trees and flowers in countless varieties and sized to make most other properties appear to be postage stamps, this home at the end of a cul-de-sac, surrounded by maples and evergreens and oaks, redefines privacy and calm. One friend of mine has referred to it as “Bill’s House of Zen.” It is that peaceful.

Designed for a Maritime kitchen party. (Yes, the foreground looks a bit dark here.)

I completely redid the kitchen in 2007 and, without really planning it this way, I managed to design it for the perfect Maritime kitchen party when we knocked out a wall and opened it all up.

If you know Fredericton, you may know where it is located (Hawthorne Terrace, just off Smythe). It’s pretty much a perfect location: close to UNB, close to the city centre and right by Odell Park.

Three bedrooms, semi-finished basement, 1 and 1/2 baths, an attic and a wide open concept kitchen, dining room and living room area, the largest drawback of this place is that, should it become yours, you will never want to leave it. That may make going to work a problem.

And if you like attics, you may want to look at this one.

Price and all the other details can be found with the listing.

If your interest is in a home and a community where you actually know and talk to your neighbours, this home is for you — particularly if you have a family. And if you know the difference between a house and a home, you’ll love it as much as I do.

(Note: The picture at the top is from September, 2011. The picture below is from July 2010.)

If you’re interested in specifics on my home, 5 Hawthorne Terrace in Fredericton, New Brunswick, have a look at the listing. (My real estate agent is Austin Drisdelle.)

In the meantime, in the interests of …

Full Disclosure

Here is my home in winter …

Yikes!
(That picture is from February, 2009.)свети георги

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In praise of the follower

Posted on September 11, 2011 by Bill Wren

For what seems years now, I’m been hearing about leadership. I’ve been in conferences, read books and seen countless posts online about how you have to be a leader. Everyone on a team has to lead. It’s in leadership that success lies.

To that I say, “Horseshit.”

If everyone is leading, who is following? Who does a leader lead when everyone is leading? It’s a recipe for chaos.

When pressed, people will say they don’t really expect everyone to lead. They’re just focused on the people who can and will lead. But there is a problem with this.

When everyone is talking about leadership, no one is talking about following. Guess what? There is an art to following. There is pride to be found in following well. All our dreamed of success is dependent on it.

A good follower executes and executes well. They take pride in it. As with all jobs, which are really roles in an organization, it is how we define ourselves. This is why unemployment is so disintegrating to a person’s soul. They lose self definition and purpose. They feel as if they are meaningless.

Without purpose, we quickly lose ourselves.

Similarly, in a world where everyone is focusing on leading and no one is talking about the importance of following, we find ourselves lost. Our significance diminishes. We execute by rote. We go through the motions of job performance, collect our pay and go home while the products and services we are responsible for slowly lose their value because pride in workmanship and job execution have gone.

They are gone because they go unrecognized.

And let’s be honest about this leadership thing: there are very few leaders. There certainly aren’t very many that do it well. Most of the people caught up in the leadership song and dance are monkeys copying the motions of what they think leadership might be.

Why do we hear so much talk of teams, tribes and communities? Because human beings are animals and like dogs, we are pack animals. Look at any pack of dogs and all but one is a follower. Dogs exist to be followers. When dogs go wrong, it is because they’ve lost their pack or they’ve lost their leader.

I think it is time we recognized the value of the follower and put an end to the sense that it is an inferior position. Leadership is entirely dependent on followers.

It is only through followers that anything gets done. It is followers who build. It is followers that maintain.

Maybe it’s time we got off the leadership bandwagon and start talking about the art of following.иконописikoni

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