Are you middle-aged? Or wonder what you will be like when you are? Then I have great news for you. Creativity and thinking skills—new brain studies show that middle-aged brains are excellent, making new connections and perking along at their prime in lots of areas.

Inductive reasoning and problem solving — the logical use of your brain and actually getting to solutions. We get the gist of an argument better. We’re better at sizing up a situation and reaching a creative solution.

Creativity is a subject that has always fascinated. Why could Rembrandt create magic with a brush while others produced nothing? Many people write, but how many Shakespears has the world produced? What is the difference between them? Perhaps new research will offer some insight.

“Creativity is kind of like pornography — you know it when you see it,” said Rex Jung, a research scientist at the Mind Research Network in Albuquerque. Dr. Jung, an assistant research professor in the department of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico, said his team was doing the first systematic research on the neurology of the creative process, including its relationship to personality and intelligence.

Creativity often leads to some kind of innovation, but it doesn’t lend itself to groupthink. As I’ve frequently written, creativity happens in those long, silent times when your mind is free to roam. New research shows that this is true.

To come up with the next iPad, Amazon or Facebook, the last thing potential innovators need is a group brainstorm session. What the pacesetters of the future really require, according to new Wharton research, is some time alone. …a hybrid process — in which people are given time to brainstorm on their own before discussing ideas with their peers — resulted in more and better quality ideas than a purely team-oriented process.

It was so-called financial innovation that brought down the global economy. Five years before it happened Warren Buffett called derivatives “financial weapons of mass destruction,” but four years before that Peter Drucker condemned that kind of financial innovation.

In a piece he penned in 1999, “Financial Services: Innovate or Die,” he frowned on the kind of transactions that have done such terrible damage to Goldman’s reputation and, more important, to the world economy. Since the 1970s, he wrote, “the only innovations” among banks “have been any number of allegedly ‘scientific’ derivatives.

“But these financial instruments are not designed to provide a service to customers,” Drucker continued. “They are designed to make the trader’s speculations more profitable and at the same time less risky—surely a violation of the basic laws of risk and unlikely to work. In fact, they are unlikely to work better than the inveterate gambler’s equally scientific system for beating the odds at Monte Carlo or Las Vegas.”

Finally, a public service announcement from me to you. No matter how openly you live your life in these days of social networking, I doubt you would post your tax returns of medical records online, let alone send them directly to the bad guys.

But that is exactly what happens when you use a public copier or return a leased one. A decade ago I learned that digital copiers are essentially computers, complete with hard drive, and every document copied is saved on that drive and readable with software that can be downloaded free on the Net. If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe CBS News.

Flickr photo credit to: pedroCarvalho on flickr

CEOs move markets. A look, a gesture, a word.

And what the experts recommend for them will work for you.

Forbes has an article how to control CEO rage, but the best part is the accompanying slideshow highlighting the anger of a few of the most famous and infamous—those who lied, cheated and stole their way into history.

The Washington Post calls it the “Silent Language of Leadership,” but ignore the ‘leadership’. What is described is the silent language of influencing people, whether you are a CEO, Bernie Madoff or parents struggling to get through to your teenager.

Sometimes the boss decides it’s time to leave, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it—Sarah Palin did it the wrong way. See how it should be done; this is good information no matter what level you’re on.

Finally, how much disclosure should be required of the CEO of a publicly traded company? It’s a hot topic since Steve Jobs surgery was announced as a done deal.

Your comments—priceless

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Image credit: nono farahshila on flickr

How much longer do you think it will take corporate Earth to get off their terrified, or comfortable, collective asses and embrace a real, live, authentic, proven solution to most of their problems?

Jaideep C Prabhu, Jawaharlal Nehru Professor of Indian Business and Enterprise at Judge Business School, Cambridge University, and innovation fellow at the Advanced Institute of Management (AIM) Research, is the latest to write passionately about the need for a culture of innovation.

“But businesses bold enough to develop a forward-looking, risk-taking corporate culture and brave enough to cannibalise existing successful products, in order to commercialise radically new ones, are more likely to dominate world markets and increase the competitiveness of their national economies.”

Bold and forward-looking, aren’t those the traits that every over-paid CEO on the planet claims to be their expertise along with how they will ‘lead’ their company into a bright new world…blah, blah, blah.

Are you as tired of hearing them as I am? They talk and talk…and talk.

Or they’re replaced by an impatient Board running from Wall Street’s demand for short-term profits.

Prabhu, along with a host of other experts, says his research shows that “Innovative companies appear to have a similar corporate culture, wherever they may be located in the world.”

“We have identified three specific attitudes and three practices within innovative firms that make them special and drive radical innovation. These are

• risk tolerance,
  
• a willingness to cannibalise existing products,
  
• future market orientation,
  
• empowering product champions,
  
• fostering internal competition and
  
• providing incentives for enterprise.”

Attention Wall Street, this stuff is not implemented overnight—or in a quarter.

Whoa. Do you think it’s possible that the silver lining in the current mess that was started and facilitated by Wall Street denizens might be a return to long(er) term thinking?

That CEOs will get canned for embracing quarterly numbers a la Jack Welch in place of radical innovation.

That investors will actually take Warren Buffet’s philosophy to heart and quit putting their faith in hedge funds, day trading and fast profits?

Whee, wanna share the stuff I found?

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Image credit: flickr

In 1992 the SEC investigated a Madoff feeder fund.

In May, 1999 and again in 2005, Harry Markopolos, money manager and investment investigator, presented his research on the Madoff Hedge Fund to the SEC in which he concluded that the fund was a giant Ponzi scheme…

“I used the Mosaic Theory to assemble my set of observations. My observations were collected first-hand by listening to fund of fund investors talk about their investments in a hedge fund run by Madoff Investment Securities, LLC, a SEC registered firm. I have also spoken to the heads of various Wall Street equity derivative trading desks and every single one of the senior managers I spoke with told me that Bernie Madoff was a fraud.”

Nothing happened.

In Warren Buffet’s 2002 letter to his stockholders he said,

“We try to be alert to any sort of mega-catastrophe risk, and that posture may make us unduly appreciative about the burgeoning quantities of long-term derivatives contracts and the massive amount of uncollateralized receivables that are growing alongside. In our view, however, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.”

Nothing happened.

But you know all this; you’ve been reading and hearing about it for weeks, so why am I bringing it up yet again?

Because the lesson we all need to learn from this is not to ignore the stuff that makes us uncomfortable; the information that doesn’t fit with our world view; the messy stuff; the unhappy stuff. Large, small or miniscule, it needs to be dealt with, not left alone to grow larger and larger until it overpowers everything around it.

Because when stuff is ignored it doesn’t go away, it gets worse.

Because that’s what leaders do, they deal.

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