Methods of the Masters

A blog on the art & science of creative action.

Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Care Deeply

In our quest for breakthrough outcomes, we can often neglect something as simple as care. Yet it’s the problems we actually care about that get the brain’s extra special attention.

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Make Strategic Withdrawals

Ever wonder where Amazon’s famous organizational innovation, the “two pizza team,” came from? The fly-wheel inducing innovation didn’t come from a brainstorm…

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Schedule A Week Unplugged

Innovators ranging from Lin-Manuel Miranda to Jeff Bezos have made good use of down time. For all our connectedness, being unplugged has never been more important.

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Leverage Sick Days

We see sick days as days we can’t work. As a few classic examples of transformation demonstrate, perhaps we should see them as a gift — an opportunity to receive a new vision of the future.

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Preserve Your Perspective

With graduation looming, lots of fresh perspectives are pouring into the job market. I’d like to implore graduates to preserve their “outsider’s perspective,” as they begin their careers.

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Deprive Your Senses

For breakthroughs to happen, we need fresh inputs to drive new connections. These connections aren’t just the function of new input, though; we’ve got to create space to realize new connections.

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Search For Inspiration

Frustrated by what he considered to be inadequate design, Steve Jobs left his desk. He didn’t do it absent-mindedly, but deliberately, looking for something that would unlock the riddle.

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Refine Your Process

In design, HOW you’re working — speed, reflection, iteration, and all — is every bit as important as WHAT you’re working on. Perhaps even more so.

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Kill Ideas

What do you do when you realize the sheer volume of ideas required for a breakthrough? Steve Jobs advocated one unexpected tactic…

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Spark A Movement

The holy grail of venture building is to create “network effects” through “demand-side increasing returns.” You’ll be surprised that some consider a network to be the second-best form…

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Encourage Theft

Innovation is all about recombining existing elements in unexpected ways. Sometimes, that seems like theft. My belief is we need to normalize such acts of recombination by sharing our own!

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Disrupt Bias

How can a leader create an environment that’s hostile to bias, and one that cultivates the emergence of new ideas? Trier Bryant provides a simple framework to answer this very question.

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Permission to be Curious

One of Google’s stratospheric successes might never have reached escape velocity if folks weren’t allowed to indulge pet projects. Here’s the inside scoop.

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Watch the Corners

Jon Beekman, Founder and CEO of ManCrates, shares an enlightened tactic for helping innovators find the breakthroughs they aren’t even looking for.

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Persist

A recurring theme on the road to creative mastery is how we (wrongly) perceive those who are successful as having never struggled. The truth is, they did. But they persisted, nonetheless.

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Welcome Midnight Intrusions

An eccentric habit may shed light on how Harvard’s B.F. Skinner became one of the most influential psychologists of all time. He learned to value his midnight thoughts so much, he set a nightly alarm!

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Squint

What can leaders do to promote creativity and innovation in their organizations? According to bestselling author and innovation guru Tom Kelley, they should squint.

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Play

Innovation is a numbers game, subject to considerable odds. IDEO’s Brendan Boyle says play is a key lever to drive risk taking and the broad experimentation required to ultimately succeed.

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Singletask

Stanford Professor Clifford Nass studied hundreds of students, to explore what distinguished self-proclaimed “multitaskers” from the rest of us. His conclusions, and their implications, won’t surprise you.

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Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Turn Info Into Knowledge

Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Charles Duhigg explains how inefficient-seeming activities can alter how we make sense of information, and turn it into valuable knowledge.

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