Sir Ken Robinson On Creativity

You gotta see this video. It´s funny, it´s involving, it´ll blow your mind. I have found this on David Taylor´s wheresthesausage.com blog. Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it. Robinson is author of "Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative", and a leading expert on innovation and human resources.



With this Robinson guys it looks like I´ve strucked gold.. Never heard of him, but it seems there´s WAY MORE stuff on here as well as on other places on the web. Let me explore it a little bit to see how resourceful the mining shaft is...

TG

More On Ries And Ries Tandem

I realized Al and Laura Ries do deserve a bit more publicity because no matter if you´re a marketing pundit or a marketing ignorant, their impact on today´s marketing world has been significant. And marketing, as I see it, is what fuels the modern capitalism as we know it.

The Ries tandem is known for having their own simple and focused positioning strategy - as marketing consultants to some of the best known and respected US companies (ranked in Fortune 500). They´re not generalists. They just try to do, act, behave the same way they have built their key marketing preachings upon. In other words, they´ve become a perfect example of their own theories. Al got first in the mind of the world´s business public when he published a book called "Positioning - The Battle For Your Mind." The book, co-authored by Jack Trout, landed in the market in 1981 and almost immediately became a huge success. "It shook up the world of marketing with all the force of a 20-megaton bomb", claims the publishing house in the 20th anniversary edition of the book. I´m not an expert in nuclear physics, however, I tend to believe the book must have been a big hit... (later, the book was chosen by Advertising Age as one of the 75 most important moments of the last 75 years).

While the Positioning book was still groundbreaking, it probably didn´t raise so much controversy as some of the latest Al´s books, especially those ones written with his daughter Laura: The Fall Of Advertising And The Rise Of PR (published in 2002) and their latest book The Origin Of Brands (published in 2004). Whereas the former was, from my point of view, deliberate move by the authors who were trying to win some more awareness as marketing consultants duo, the latter was built on a more solid ground and attempted to connect with a title called Focus, published in the ninetees. The Origin Of Brands, however, was a true masterpiece. The book was applying Charles Darwin's concept of divergence to marketing and inevitably led to them becoming marketing kings of FOCUSED branding strategies based on relatively simple and easy-to-understand, yet powerful techniques.

You may meet Al and Laura Ries on their internet pages www.ries.com where you´ll find all the basic teachings of these two including details on their books, articles, papers, speeches etc. Furthermore you can debate with Laura on her personal blog www.originofbrands.com which is a place where Laura is fearlessly pounding every brand or company (inc. Apple and their lastes over-hyped product - the iPhone) that has somehow gone off the right track with the principles of divergence (see my last post). Rieses have exposed themselves even more on www.riesreport.com where you can watch short videos of both gurus. The riesreport web page is a bold and brilliant move by them and you should definitely give it a try if you´re serious about yourself working in marketing these days.

Tip: play the video called Japanese desease and find out why the Japanese companies make everything..except MONEY.

TG