By their very nature generalists tend not to congregate. Our interests are so many and so varied that it's almost counter-intuitive to try to gather us around a common theme. But it is indeed possible and this site will prove it.

When I started this blog, Creative Generalist, in April 2002 I did so really just to bookmark websites and quotes that I found to be personally interesting. It was just my own solo link list, and having just quit my job and moved to Montreal (on a whim) I had a little free time to wander around - literally and digitally - and post such dispatches.

At the time I was a couple of years out of university and the web was becoming a really exciting place for exchanging ideas. I felt quite strongly that the world was over-specializing - partly because of a relentless bureaucratic push towards efficiency and partly because of the rapidly deepening technology-fueled push of innovation - and that a generalist perspective was not only valuable as a counter-balance but essential in understanding and maximizing such new ideas. So I posted about it - insights from others and my own opinions. (And by day I took up a job at Maisonneuve, a startup general-interest magazine.)

Over time I started to notice that other people were reading my blog posts (an audience?!) and some of them even took the time to email me - to challenge, to compliment, to share. In 2005 I wrote a ChangeThis manifesto called How Broad Thinking Leads to Big Ideas, from '06 to '08 I published the eclectic curiosity interviews, and in 2008 I presented my essay What Specifically Do Generalists Do? to Russell Davies' Interesting conference in London. All along the way the feedback I received was amazing and the best part was that it always came from incredibly bright, passionate, curious people with fascinating projects and stories. And these people identified themselves as creative generalists!

They're out there. You're not alone. You really should meet each other.

Over the past couple of years my career and life have gotten very busy and I gradually fell out of the routine of regularly feeding the blog beast. Besides that though I also felt that there were many more people championing the generalist mantra - including incredible minds like Dan Pink, Frans Johansson, Bruce Nussbaum, Tim Brown, Roger Martin, and many others. The whole big idea of T-shaped people and versatilists and holistic approaches and design/systems thinking really caught on. Meanwhile, this blog is mostly dormant and I've occasionally pondered if and how I might renew it.

A few conversations I've had with generalists over the past several months - in with particular Arnold Beekes - have inspired me to evolve Creative Generalist from personal soapbox to shared community. That's really the best part of it. And so I've established a niche social network, The Society of Creative Generalists, for generalists to introduce themselves, share a bit about what interests them, and converse with each other if so moved.

Why a standalone social network? Well, there are a few reason:

1. Facebook is too personal. SoCG is more than just a vanity badge to show friends.
2. LinkedIn is too professional. SoCG goes beyond work projects and job posts.
3. The Ning platform I'm using seems to be pretty versatile for the wide range of things a motley crew of generalists might use it for.

Some of you may know of the Creative Generalist group I formed on Facebook years ago. It has a few hundred members but is also fairly inactive. That's my fault. A good community needs active managers and moderators and fortunately Arnold (and soon others) has agreed to take on that role and ensure that this Society of Creative Generalists maintains its vibrancy - perhaps including some collective assignments around which to collaborate.

The community's goal is simply to define what it is to be a creative generalist and build a directory of sorts for all the people out there that specialize in everything. See you there!

 

A truly impressive project. Eric Whitacre and his forming of a choir around hundreds and then thousands of virtual voices. Via TED.

 

My friend Aron is up to some mischief with his latest project: My After Sex Buddy doll. Be sure to check out the video.

 
Tiffany Shlain's UC Berkeley keynote commencement speech...

 
Well, it's certainly been a while since my last post. Yikes.

I used to hold to a pretty steady and disciplined regimen of about three posts a week - even long after that new blog smell faded away. But I've slowed over the last year - obviously - for, I suppose, a variety of fairly typical reasons: blog fatigue, Twitter distraction (@shardy12), info overload, very busy and engaging day job, little time to tap out anything worth reading (like now), and even some (happy) recognition that the generalist mantra which I felt was so under-represented several years ago is alive, well, and thriving widely these days.

Cheers to that, Creative Generalists!

Still, I miss the blog (and especially those of you I've met through it) and intend to keep with it - even if it means a bit more of a quiet period while I re-imagine it and carve out the right time to post. (How I admire those who blog often, thoughtfully, and thoroughly.) So, basically, all this is is really just the equivalent of a radar ping - to show that I'm still swimming around this big digital ocean even if I haven't called in for a while. Back soon.

 
How to overcome the challenges inherent to cross-disciplinary collaboration: Creating a boundary matrix.



(Illustration: Dave Gray)

 
Some remarkable slow-motion footage:

(Thanks Ask)

 
The three paragraphs on this page at gigaom offer a variety of links leading to some great posts touching on various aspects of generalism and work. As the intro lines state: "'Big-picture thinking and inventiveness are going to be the key to professional success in a new “conceptual age.' In a series of posts over at WebWorkerDaily, Imran Ali has been musing on the type of work that we might be doing in the future, the skills that will be required, and the type of teams we might be working in." (Hat tip to augustdiva!)

Separate but related - work in the conceptual age - is this TED Talk by Dan Pink. He speaks about how to motivate workers and how rewards for task-oriented people need to be one thing and rewards for creative people needs to be another.

 

The Cove. It's a remarkably restrained film in that most of it describes the teamwork, planning, and logistics involved with covertly documenting one of the grisliest activities on earth: Japan's slaughter of dolphins. Not much of the brutal footage is actually shown, and it's obvious that the producers spared us the especially gory bits, but what is seen quite vividly shows the ugliest and cruelest of what humanity can unleash upon another sentient, self-aware mammal.

The Cove centres on an Oceans 11 type team of photographers, ex-military, free divers, props designers, and others assembled by Director Louie Psihoyos and OPS (Oceanic Preservation Society) and their efforts to expose the brutal round-up of dolphins each year in a tiny cove in Taiji, Japan. Its lead character is Ric O'Barry, whose life's mission is to reverse the captivity, trade, and killing of dolphins that came about largely by the popularization of the creatures in his 60s TV series Flipper. Along the way, we see Taiji's and Japan's bureaucratic political shadiness and even self-destruction (they mislabel toxic mercury-soaked dolphin meat as whale meat and distribute it to school lunch programs).

A very powerful and disturbing movie.

 
Apparently NetFlix has a rather enlightened approach to HR and company culture. Exhibit A: this internal 128-slide presentation.

 
An excellent Ad Age article by Al Reis on the often misunderstood key difference between marketing and advertising, and why GM doesn't get it.

I think he's wrong. Advertising at GM is not broken. Marketing is.

Marketing's job is to coordinate all the various disciplines inside a corporation in order to develop the right product, the right price, the right position, the right distribution strategy and the right brand name.

Advertising's job is to position that brand name in the minds of consumers.

Good marketing makes advertising relatively easy. Bad marketing makes advertising difficult, if not impossible.

(Thanks Dave)

 
From the display tables to the "Guru Bar", it's hard not to page through the leaked Powerpoint describing design plans for Microsoft's retail stores as highly imitative of Apple Stores.

Now, check out this excellent Adult Education ("a useless lecture series") talk by Gaylord Fields called "Yeah Yeah ... Uh, No: Exploring the Audiovisual Phenomenon of Beatles-Lookalike Long Playing Albums".