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Tackle your thorniest problems using the Wise Fool’s savvy Strategies! The Wise Fool is the archetypal contrarian known for his creativity, irreverence, and humor. He looks at life in unorthodox ways and pushes back against the status quo. Throughout history, powerful decision-makers (Egyptian pharaohs, Chinese emperors, Persian sultans, and European kings) consulted Wise Fools to question the assumptions that kept them mired in stale and obsolete solutions. In The Creative Contrarian, best-selling author (A Whack on the Side of the Head), speaker, and toy designer (Ball of Whacks) Dr. Roger von Oech provides readers with a fully-illustrated “Wise Fool Guide” to challenge established procedures and engage in creative thinking. Roger shows how to gain the confidence to speak up in “groupthink” situations — and boldly present a different perspective. From laughing at your most beloved ideas to test their validity to adding constraints to problems to reveal new solutions, he offers a framework for creativity that works in business, design, education, and anywhere new ideas are required — and appreciated! Employing a wealth of stories and examples, The Creative Contrarian presents 20 Wise Fool Strategies: Some offer ideas to enhance your creativity (“Reverse Your Perspective,” “Look for Ambiguity,” and “Kiss a Favorite Idea Goodbye”) Some provide tips on how to break away from the herd (“Buck the Crowd,” “Flex Your Risk Muscle,” and “Seek Other Right Answers”) And still others convey prudent warnings in an unpredictable world (“Exercise Humility,” “Imagine Unintended Outcomes,” and “Develop a Thick Skin”) Together, these jewels of insight will help you see things from the Wise Fool’s perspective! As the Wise Fool puts it: “Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it’s the only one you have”; and “Every ‘right’ idea eventually becomes the ‘wrong’ one.” The Creative Contrarian: 20 “Wise Fool” Strategies to Boost Creativity and Curb Group think is an indispensable resource for anyone seeking fresh solutions to common problems at the office, in the classroom, or at home.
A biography of venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the enigmatic, controversial and hugely influential power broker who sits at the dynamic intersection of tech, business and politics Since the days of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, no industry has made a greater global impact than Silicon Valley. And few individuals have done more to shape Silicon Valley than billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel. From the technologies we use every day to the delicate power balance between Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington, Thiel has been a behind-the-scenes operator influencing countless aspects of contemporary life. But despite his power and the ubiquity of his projects, no public figure is quite so mysterious. In the first major biography of Thiel, Max Chafkin traces the trajectory of the innovator's singular life and worldview, from his upbringing as the child of immigrant parents and years at Stanford as a burgeoning conservative thought leader to his founding of PayPal and Palantir, early investment in Facebook and SpaceX, and relationships with fellow tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Eric Schmidt. The Contrarian illuminates the extent to which Thiel has sought to export his values to the corridors of power beyond Silicon Valley, such as funding the lawsuit that bankrupted the blog Gawker to strenuously backing far-right political candidates, including Donald Trump for president. Eye-opening and deeply reported, The Contrarian is a revelatory biography of a one-of-a-kind leader and an incisive portrait of a tech industry whose explosive growth and power is both thrilling and fraught with controversy.
Catching the eye by creating polarity is a sophisticated technique to set brands apart from all other competitors in a radical way. This book shows how to create brand associations that radically split a competitive field into absolute opposites and how to reconcile these brands in unexpected ways.
Using dozens of case studies from well-known companies such as General Electric, FedEx, Procter & Gamble, Merck, Boeing, and Intel, Delahaye president and public relations scientist Mark Weiner offers a research-based model for creating and implementing public relations programs that will generate desired results and improve an organization’s ROI. Written as a highly accessible hands-on guide, Unleashing the Power of PR explains how to use market research methods to plan and evaluate public relations programs scientifically. The author explores the benefit of learning to speak to senior executives in a way that will improve communications and ultimately help strengthen PR performance and results. In addition, the book debunks common myths—such as “PR is impossible to measure!”—that undercut the effectiveness of PR and obscure its real value.
In this offbeat approach to leadership, college president Steven B. Sample-the man who turned the University of Southern California into one of the most respected and highly rated universities in the country-challenges many conventional teachings on the subject. Here, Sample outlines an iconoclastic style of leadership that flies in the face of current leadership thought, but a style that unquestionably works, nevertheless. Sample urges leaders and aspiring leaders to focus on some key counterintuitive truths. He offers his own down-to-earth, homespun, and often provocative advice on some complex and thoughtful issues. And he provides many practical, if controversial, tactics for successful leadership, suggesting, among other things, that leaders should sometimes compromise their principles, not read everything that comes across their desks, and always put off decisions.
The bestselling author of ""A Whack on the Side of the Head"" now interprets the aphorisms of Heraclitus as springboards to creativity.
An irreverent book of radically honest advice by renowned fashion arbiter and legendary window dresser Simon Doonan
Does a market economy encourage or discourage music, literature, and the visual arts? Do economic forces of supply and demand help or harm the pursuit of creativity? This book seeks to redress the current intellectual and popular balance and to encourage a more favorable attitude toward the commercialization of culture that we associate with modernity. Economist Tyler Cowen argues that the capitalist market economy is a vital but underappreciated institutional framework for supporting a plurality of co-existing artistic visions, providing a steady stream of new and satisfying creations, supporting both high and low culture, helping consumers and artists refine their tastes, and paying homage to the past by capturing, reproducing, and disseminating it. Contemporary culture, Cowen argues, is flourishing in its various manifestations, including the visual arts, literature, music, architecture, and the cinema. Successful high culture usually comes out of a healthy and prosperous popular culture. Shakespeare and Mozart were highly popular in their own time. Beethoven's later, less accessible music was made possible in part by his early popularity. Today, consumer demand ensures that archival blues recordings, a wide array of past and current symphonies, and this week's Top 40 hit sit side by side in the music megastore. High and low culture indeed complement each other. Cowen's philosophy of cultural optimism stands in opposition to the many varieties of cultural pessimism found among conservatives, neo-conservatives, the Frankfurt School, and some versions of the political correctness and multiculturalist movements, as well as historical figures, including Rousseau and Plato. He shows that even when contemporary culture is thriving, it appears degenerate, as evidenced by the widespread acceptance of pessimism. He ends by considering the reasons why cultural pessimism has such a powerful hold on intellectuals and opinion-makers.
Twenty-first-century private detective Conrad Metcalf has a dead doctor on his hands, a monkey on his back, and a kangaroo in his waiting room in a first novel with a sharp-edged, funny vision of the future.
Making the case for the working man