Gregg Fraley

I don’t profess to be the foremost expert on all things UK Government budget. Still, I feel like I have to comment on yesterday’s announcements regarding support for higher education tuition in the UK. In a nutshell, tuition for higher education will be allowed to float free, and, loans to students will shift to a longer payback period.  There’s more to it than that. It claims to be “fair” because the loan repayment will be graduated and progressive. That is, if you make a lot you pay more, if you make very little you might not have to pay it back at all. And…if you pay it back early you might incur a penalty! To use an old phrase where

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There is quite a bandwagon rolling right now about Creativity. 5 years ago it seemed that Creativity was a bad word. You could never say it aloud at a corporation because what it meant wasn’t new ideas, it was interpreted as “lack of control” or, even worse, those touchy-feely things that have nothing to do with business. Alright, you could say the word, IF, you coupled it with “…and Innovation.” This is still something you nearly always have to do. When you think about it, it’s kind of silly. Creativity is a bigger concept than innovation, in fact, innovation is a subset. So, saying Creativity AND Innovation is a bit like say, I like Music AND Raggae. Now, every few

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If you are a creativity and innovation freak, you probably have already seen the excellent Newsweek article titled “The Creativity Crisis.” It’s rapidly becoming one of the most shared FaceBook links I’ve seen. If you haven’t read it, by all means do, it’s the best piece I’ve seen in recent years related to creativity, education, and it’s impact on the American economy.  For those of us in the field, it’s somewhat old news, we’ve been screaming this for years, but nothing like a major news publication to get it on the radar. The recent research is a real eye opener, especially the part that says creativity scores are a better indicator of eventual success than IQ. Wow — that’s a

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Simple concept here.  In my view this is how BP turns this oil spill situation around. First, stop the freakin leak.  Second, become the world leader in environmental clean-up and prevention technology. BP has done irreparable harm to the Gulf of Mexico. How irreparable remains to be seen, and, it depends on BP’s commitment to making things as right as they can be.  Now. BP will forever be known as the evil, money-grubbing #¢#∞¡!itches  who befouled the Gulf of Mexico if it doesn’t do the right thing by humanity and invest billions in learning how to prevent and manage disasters like this.  BP, listen!  Hire the scientists, spend the money, partner with governments, other oil companies, NASA, anybody who can

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The UK Foreign Office is currently bending over backwards to apologize like mad to the Pope. It’s an interesting turn of events given the long and twisted history of anti-Catholicism in the UK. The short version of the story: the Pope is coming to the UK soon for the first official state visit by the Vatican since 1982. In a lower level planning meeting at the Foreign Office, a half dozen people brainstormed ideas regarding how to handle the visit. Some of the ideas were clearly Jokes, and should never have been made public. Some of  the ideas were serious as well, which indicates that the purpose of the brainstorm was not to embarass the goverment. There was a sincere attempt

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I really hate to post about politics. I am not a pundit. I am a citizen. And the focus of this blog is creativity and innovation. Still, I’ve got something to say. Glenn Beck is Not Thomas Paine. Nor is he an innovator. Nor is he a conservative. While visiting the holocaust museum in Berlin my big takeaway from the experience was simply that when lies are allowed to stand unchallenged, very bad things happen. Let me state for the record here, Glenn Beck is a dangerous man. He is an insidious liar, and, he is not at all like Thomas Paine. Last evening he claimed to be the Thomas Paine of our time. The fact that he is an

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Meals from the Heartland (@MftH) is a charity with a simple purpose: send meals to people who are starving. Volunteers, mostly from Iowa where the charity is based, packaged up 4 million meals last year.  Even before the recent earthquake disaster in Haiti, that troubled country was a primary destination for the packaged meals.  In fact, two million meals were shipped in 2009 to Haiti, and thankfully about half of that shipment is available to Haitians now.  It wasn’t good luck — it was the result of a generous effort that comes from a desire to change the world. Now, MftH is gearing up for a massive push to send more meals to Haiti in its time of greatest need.

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I try not to watch Fox News. First of all it’s not news, it’s entertainment.  And certainly not my kind of entertainment, so I avoid it.  I tuned back in recently and I’m here to report three new innovation lows at Fox. Fox is proof that doing the wrong thing sometimes gets ratings and money. Clearly, their new innovation initiatives are novel and useful to them, and — harmful to the industry, and harmful to viewers.  That’s crap innovation, sad to say. Readers, this is a political opinion blog piece. And I’m a Progressive/Liberal. However, even if you are on the right side of the political fence you should be concerned about Fox. A propagandized electorate behaves like a swinging

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I watched and read with interest reports of yesterday’s Obama Job Summit. I’ve got a simple point to make here; one day brainstorming sessions are close to useless. Brainstorming gets a bad name because what is really a “discussion” (aka bullshitting) is often labeled as brainstorming. The meeting yesterday was not about serious idea generation.  It was a meeting to discuss things, which is not wrong, but it’s not going to generate breakthrough ideas. Real breakthroughs happen when people do idea generation over a longer period of time.  Getting to the “fresh snow” of truly new ideas, innovative ideas, means a lot of imaginative thinking. This means plowing through all the already-skied-down-to-ice “old snow” ideas. One day is Never enough

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Briefly noted, a comment on the un-creativity on display related to the London Tube Strike. How uncreative can you get? I blame both the government AND the union. There was ample time to work this out. To quote Marlon Brando in the Godfather “how did it ever get this far?” Just like in the Mafia, sometimes people want a war. I can only assume that both sides did actually get what they wanted, a strike.  I’m sure both sides would disagree. Who pays? The British people in hardship and lost opportunity. In creative problem solving one thing must be in place before you begin: actually wanting to solve the problem. This is not the case here, both sides have something

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