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Author Archives: Fred H. Schlegel

The Creative Drumbeat

  By Fred H. Schlegel | March 14, 2011 - 8:41 pm |
14 Comments

Warning – I’m tying together a few loose ends here. Things may get tangled. The application of scientific process to business practice has been one of the critical drivers in the success of modern enterprise. Observe, hypothesize, measure, analyze, apply, repeat. It drives efficiency and progress. Unfortunately things get dicey at the edges. There is an art to being a breakthrough business, in being able to observe the unobservable. Sometimes our ability to envision surpasses our ability to measure. Sometimes you just have to leap. “Leave space for things to come to you,” says Janice Cartier in her discussion of artistic process. In a way, creativity’s feeling of random discovery is a scientific process we have not yet come to terms with. Robin Dickenson commented that for him the creative and scientific processes were modes of thinking that can be switched between. Kay Plantes commented that both the scientific and … Continue reading →

I’m One of Many Seeds, and Happy To Be…

  By Fred H. Schlegel | March 7, 2011 - 12:35 pm |
7 Comments

“My positioning statement is two words: “Empower people.” What’s your’s?” Guy Kawasaki, Enchantment Bringing about change is a lot like swimming upstream.  Everything and everyone pushes you to run fast with them promising safer, faster, easier waters via alternative compass headings. But changemakers in the world not only swim against the current, they pull thousands upstream with them. Motivating movement with the force of an idea. Guy Kawasaki takes on this force in his latest book Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. I’ve long enjoyed reading Kawasaki for his ability to present ideas that can help you move mountains in ways that are both motivating and realistically grounded.  So I was delighted to receive a pre-release copy from his publisher last month to review if I felt so inclined. You have to enjoy a book that wraps up with a chapter on how to avoid being wrongly … Continue reading →

Sustainable Business: Wake Up and Smell the Coffee

  By Fred H. Schlegel | February 24, 2011 - 7:00 am | ,
8 Comments

I just clicked ‘checkout’ for a few pounds of Dean’s Beans. Haven’t tried them before, but wanted to after hearing Dean Cycon, CEO of Dean’s Beans and author of Javatrekker: Dispatches From the World of Fair Trade Coffee, speak tonight at Indiana University. “I don’t believe social justice is a formula, I believe it is a process.” Passionate and positive, he shared his ideas on how socially responsible business practice and respect for quality of life can help change the world. Sustainable business is all the rage, but efforts at many companies seem to get holed up in the marketing department or as purely charitable exercises. I asked Dean if he thought large organizations could change over to the sustainable thinking his company emulates: “For a pre-existing large scale organization it’s hard because people are already in there looking for profit. […] However, when a corporation starts out and says these are … Continue reading →

Are You An Artist Or A Scientist?

  By Fred H. Schlegel | February 20, 2011 - 8:00 am |
10 Comments

Brad Shorr recently asked his readers if they considered themselves more marketing scientist or marketing artist. This idea of ‘artist vs scientist’ runs deep today and has implications for  education and innovation regardless of what profession we are discussing.  The first note I have of this cultural divide being discussed as a critical issue to be dealt with is by C.P. Snow, Cambridge: “Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all a lack of understanding.  They have a curious distorted image of each other. Their attitudes are so different that, even on the level of emotion, they can’t find much common ground.”  (The Two Cultures and The Scientific Revolution, The Rede Lecture, 1959 by C.P. Snow) To me, the difference between artist and … Continue reading →

Think Can-Do In The New Year

  By Fred H. Schlegel | January 1, 2011 - 1:31 pm | ,
14 Comments

I’m sitting here New Year’s morning eyeing the Rose Bowl Parade, still chuckling from a traditional evening of Marx Brothers and thinking on the year to come. It’s been a year of change for the Schlegel household, change that has been absorbed, embraced and adapted to establish our next launchpad. Thanks to all who have taken part, helped and encouraged. I grew up in the sixties on a healthy mix of impossible plans, building models of Apollo Saturn V’s and experimenting with solar cells. While I didn’t pursue a life in space, the mindset that practically anything is within the reach of a determined group never left me. Call me a product of Chicago where Birnham’s charge still sets the tone: “Make no small plans: they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” Double negative aside, it’s a neat way to live. Is there hope in the new year? I … Continue reading →