The Fertile Unknown

Zen of Business Administration

With self-knowledge comes clarity of your mission. With a clear mission comes purposeful creativity - creativity that is aligned with the your mission and purpose in the world - and the good of the whole.

Marc Lesser, the founder and president of ZBA Associates, wrote a book called the Z.B.A. Zen of Business Administration: How Zen Practice Can Transform Your Work And Your Life. It's for the business person who seeks self-knowledge, and comes highly recommended. I have not read it yet so I can't speak for the book itself from direct experience, but I did peruse his website can came across his manifesto with which I resonate. I have copied here:

The ZBA Manifesto

1. It’s okay not to know. It’s okay to be vulnerable. No one has all the answers. We value and learn from the questions and the asking. We are learning to appreciate the mystery and sacredness of our lives and the mystery and sacredness of life.

2. Life is short. There is no escape from old age, sickness, and death. Death is a great teacher. Recognizing the shortness of our lives provides motivation to live fully in each day and in each moment.

3. We understand the importance of taking regular quiet time for ourselves. Through reflection and by slowing down we develop an appreciation for life and we increase our capacity for understanding.
4. We are learning to trust our inner wisdom. Our bodies and minds are amazing, unexplainable, and unfathomable.
5. It’s okay to be uneasy, to be uncomfortable, to grieve, to feel pain. Recognizing when something is off, feeling the depth of loss, experiencing pain, is the first step toward change and growth.
6. Practice active listening — listening deeply to yourself and to others. Listen to others without formulating your own ideas. Listen to yourself before speaking.
7. We all seek balance in our lives — balancing work and family, balancing our inner and outer lives, balancing what we want to do and what we must do.
8. We are learning that we can be fully ourselves in all situations — at work, as parents, as children, as friends, as lovers.
9. Being ourselves at work is vital to our health and happiness. Our time is too valuable to sell, at any price.
10. Each moment is precious. In every moment we have an opportunity to discover, to grow, to speak the truth.
11. Each moment is ordinary. In every moment we can realize we are fine, just as we are. Nothing else is needed.
12. We appreciate what is paradoxical. What may at first seem contradictory or beyond our understanding may be true. After all, who is it that is breathing? Who is it that dreams? How is it that these hands effortlessly glide along this keyboard?
13. Age is a state of mind. We have the opportunity to grow to be more like ourselves every day.
14. Developing intimate relationships is a vital part of our lives and our development. Intimacy requires openness, honesty, and vulnerability.
15. Real, honest open communication is highly valued — and takes real skill and effort.
16. When we slow down and learn to trust ourselves, joy arises naturally.
17. When we slow down and learn to trust ourselves, creativity arises naturally.
18. Self-knowledge and understanding require persistence and perseverance. Developing awareness and balance is an ongoing, unending process.
19. Self-knowledge and understanding require discipline. Whatever path we take requires structure, guidelines, and feedback.
20. Self-knowledge and understanding require courage.
21. Diversity is essential. Our differences enrich our lives. There is no “other,” just as our right hand is not a stranger to our left hand.
22. A simple rule to follow is do good, avoid harm. Of course, this is not simple or easy.
23. There are many paths and many practices toward developing awareness and personal growth.
24. Our everyday lives and activities provide fertile ground for developing growth and understanding.
25. We can learn to appreciate the gifts we’ve received from our parents and to forgive them. We understand on a deep level all we have received from the generations that have come before us.
26. We feel a deep responsibility for our children and for the generations that will come after us.
27. We can all act as change agents. We can choose to take action in improving and healing our environment and our society. There is no shortage of issues to address, of healing to take place.
28. We are all change agents on a personal level — we either create healing amongst those we live and work with or we create stress.
29. We can choose to act as change agents in relation to our communities.
30. We can choose to act as change agents in relation to our society or on a global level.
31. Everything we hold as dear will one day change and disappear. Every business that now exists will one day cease. Every person now alive will one day die.
32. At a deep level, we realize that we are neither in control nor not in control. Our task is to paddle the boat, with awareness and integrity. The flow of the river is outside our doing.
33. We all have the power to find peace and happiness in the midst of change and impermanence.
34. We have the power to heal ourselves, our communities, and our planet.

- From Marc Lesser's website: www.zbaassociates.com

Creative Genius Thinking

I came across an article on the Innovation Tools website about a creative thinking technique. It was written by Michael Michalko, author of ThinkerToys and Cracking Creativity, and creator of the ThinkPak. Here are some excerpts on what he had to say about how geniuses think. For the creativity technique and the full article click here. 

"The creative genius will always look for a multiplicity of ways to approach a subject. It is this willingness to entertain different perspectives and alternative approaches that broadens their thinking and opens them up to new information and the new possibilities that the rest of us don’t see. Einstein was once asked what the difference was between him and the average person. He said that if you asked the average person to find a needle in a haystack, the person would stop when he or she found a needle. He, on the other hand, would tear through the entire haystack looking for all possible needles.

"When Charles Darwin first set to solve the problem of evolution, he did not analytically settle on the most promising approach to natural selection and then process the information in a way that would exclude all other approaches. Instead, he initially organized his thinking around significant themes, principally eight, of the problem, which gave his thinking some order but with the themes connected loosely enough so that he could easily alter them singly or in groups. His themes helped him capture his thoughts about evolutionary change by allowing him to reach out in many alternative directions at once and pulling seemingly unrelated information into a coalescent body of thought.

"Darwin used his themes to work through many points that led to his theory of evolution by helping him to comprehend what is known and to guide in the search for what is not yet known.  He used them as a way of classifying the relation of different species to each other, as a way to represent the accident of life, the irregularity of nature, the explosiveness of growth, and of the necessity to keep the number of species constant...By adjusting and altering the number of themes and connections, Darwin was able  to keep his thought fluid and to bring about adaptive shifts in his thinking. He played the critic, surveying his own positions; the inventor, devising new solutions and ideas; and the learner, accumulating new facts not prominent before."

The Creative Source

Inside each of us there is what I call the Creative Source - the source of our creative flow and our inherent order, emerging structures, the creative impulse, inspiration to create and evolve, the place within us that is life always seeking more life. I personally believe it is the true "fountain of youth" - the creative wellspring of total aliveness - every fresh, ever generative, ever originating and ever unfolding. It contains within it an embedded creative intelligence of  pure, raw potential integrated with purpose, motion and trajectory. It is by accessing, cultivating, forming and shaping this universal - and uniquely personal - creative resource into being that positive change happens in our selves, our organizations, our systems and our lives.

I recently read an excerpt of a letter Yasuhiko Genku Kimura, founder of Vision-in-Action, wrote to one of his students. It resonated so much I had share it here:

"The satisfaction or the fulfillment of the visionary's life does not come from public recognition but from the inner joy of envisioning and creating and from the profound reverent connection to the Source whence his visions and ideas originate. Ascend therefore within your own self and reach the inner Source whence all visionaries and creators draw their inspiration. The purpose of your life is the evolution of your soul, and your soul evolves through the inspired act of envisioning and creating and by the spiritual nurture you thus receive from the Source..."

Check out the mission of  Vision-in-Action at  via-visioninaction.org

Indexed - Creative Blog

I was scrolling through the Times.com 20 top rated blogs and came upon Indexed, a completely creative and witty blog by Jessica Hagy. Like the Gaping Void creator, Hugh McLoud, who started out by using the backs of napkins and then moved to the backs of business cards, Jessica keeps it simple as well and uses index cards and simple venn diagrams to "make fun of some things and sense of others." It's worth exploring.

Social Media Landscape

The emerging landscape of social media brings with it exponential creative potential. Fred Cacazza has a wonderful blog, Social Media Landscape, that spells out what exactly is emerging in the field of social media. He created an easy-to-read graphic - the most comprehensive I have seen - that is understandable by people of all levels of tech savvy, or lack thereof. (A great marketing idea as well - he had so many hits on his blog that they literally had to shut it down for a while). A picture really is worth a thousand words (that's why I believe everyone should have only unlined notepads for all of their business notetaking and brainstorming - frees the mind to think "outside the lines"). Below the graphic is his list of what compiles the Social Media Landscape (there is more on his site). Visit his blog at http://socialmedialandscape.com/cms - a fantastic resource!

 

The Social Media Landscape consists of Publication tools, Sharing tools, Discussions tools, Micropublication tools, Social aggregation tools, Platforms for livecast hosting, Virtual worlds, Social gaming platforms and more. The above list is from Fred Cavazza's blog. He actually gives examples of all of these and so much more great information.

Truths About Creativity in Business

• Everyone is creative and simply need the right conditions to access that infinite well.

• Focused creativity is not separate from the bottom line, but a major factor in contributing to it.

• Next-level innovative solutions require new levels of being as well as thinking.

• Comfort with change increases with consistent practice entering unfamiliar territory in non-habitual ways.

• People can transform their experience of uncertainty from one of fear to one of discovery.

• Creative thinking skyrockets motivation and breeds more relevant and successful contribution.

• With safe co-creating, a group collective intelligence takes over and the “whole exceeds the sum of its parts.”