English man of letters Samuel Taylor Coleridge crafted the phrase “willing suspension of disbelief” to describe what it takes for us to be able to take a fresh look at something. When we settle into our seats in a theater and gaze up at the proscenium, that framed and draped window where a play or movie or opera is about to come alive, we are prepared to be, for a moment, less skeptical. We look up at the frame, and wait. We are in an extremely unusual frame of mind.

The first proscenium arch is generally agreed to be the one in Parma, Italy, in the Teatro Farnese, built in 1618. What is quite spectacular about the Teatro is that the space on the stage side of the proscenium is almost as large as the space on the audience side, indicating that the theatre was built to be able to present a complete alternate universe to an audience. (The designers were so committed to the possibilities of the theatrical experience that they also built a huge floodable area in front of the stage, so miniature naval battles could also be staged.)

Four hundred years after that first brilliant concept of a frame was created in Parma, the need for framing is greater than ever. The world is ever noisier. We are less naive. To introduce new ideas, valuable innovations, new ways of seeing and thinking, is an ever-greater challenge.

One of the first things we need to do is see whether our ideas, just like a great painting in a ratty frame, is suffering from its existing frame. Have we allowed someone else to put a frame around our innovation? If so, maybe we need to rip our ideas out of its old tired frame and find a new way to create some space around it.

Have you ever been in a meeting with a number of people, each one trying really hard to be heard? Some people will raise their voices, others will use colorful but misleading metaphors to make their points (Look, we’re in the end zone here and it’s not the right time to punt). And sometimes, not always, there will be one person who sits back and listens. After the right amount of time, there will be a little lull in the storm, and everyone will turn to that quiet person who took their time before speaking. That person has already succeeded in creating a frame for themselves: a frame of silence. Whatever they are about to say, brilliant or not, will be heard.

In the last few days, Senator Chris Dodd opened his committee hearings on health care legislation by saying, in effect, “What we’re about to do will be probably be the most important work we do in our public lives.” That was his way of framing those hearings, of making them separate from all the others of thousands of hearings that would be a customary part of a Senator’s work. This one was different. More important. And we’d better keep an eye on how history might judge us. Dodd had accomplished the near-impossible: making something said in a Senate committee hearing freshly framed.

Back to that audience member waiting expectantly for the curtain to go up. The proscenium has provided a frame for whatever is about to happen. We have temporarily suspended our skepticism and our world-weariness. We are, in this frame of mind, open to new ideas, to being surprised and delighted. The proscenium has framed more than just what is about to take place upon the stage. The proscenium has also framed us.

The Genius Machine has gotten more than its fair share of great reviews. I don’t post them since they can be found easily. But one came in today, written by Wayne Hurlbert, that is the very model of conciseness.

“This book is about a third kind of thinking, one that is directed toward improving an existing idea, thinking through a complete issue, or creating something new,” writes Thought Leaders International founder Gerald Sindell, in his powerful guide to creative thinking and idea development The Genius Machine: The 11 Steps That Turn Raw Ideas into Brilliance. The author presents a brilliant eleven step system that creates, develops, and completes the idea building process with simplicity and elegance.

Read more…

I remember many happy times in First Class. I remember when they used to print your name on matchbooks and they’d be miraculously waiting at your seat when you sat down. I remember First Class on Air Canada when they rolled a huge slab of gravlax down the aisle and sliced you off a little, accompanied by a shot of cold vodka. And I remember when the FAA was the real cop of airline safety. They didn’t let anybody get away with anything.

Everyone who cares about zero tolerance for error pays extremely close attention when an airliner goes down. Read more…

Good morning Mr. Henderson —

Big day for you, no question. My best wishes go out to you on Day One running the new General Motors. Clean slate, pretty much, except for those legacy issues that might hold you back. A culture of poor vision, poor design, poor assembly, poor service. That’s a lot to change all at once, but you’ll need to do it. At your press conference you said the new GM would be bringing to the market, among other things, great design. That really struck me. I wondered what your process would be for inspiring, creating and recognizing great design. And how could a passion for great design be inculcated into the culture on a permanent basis? Read more…

A few years ago, my son Max and I were at the Guggenheim in New York, spiraling our way down through a show of Very Important Paintings. It was one of those shows that just wasn’t working for either of us. But we like to discuss what we’re looking at, just for the pleasure of comparing perceptions. I suggested we talk about the framing and ignore the art. An added bonus would be that anyone overhearing us would be hard pressed to connect our insights to anything we appeared to be looking at.

Within a few paintings, we had it down. “There’s a beauty. Great sense of mass, and it really works on the wall.” “You think? Seems a little over the top to me, and the felt’s fighting the forest.”

It was so much fun that whenever we happen to end up in a museum together, we just naturally fall into our discussion of the framing. The art has taken a secondary position. Read more…

We get letters. So far, and it’s only been a few weeks that my book has been out, the letters have been pretty nice. No one, yet, has told me they took my advice and bankrupted their company, disinherited their kids, or run off with the circus. But it’s only Thursday. There’s still time.

A letter arrived last weekend (okay, officially it was an ‘email’ but it was so carefully composed it seemed like an old-fashioned handwritten note from a previous era) that thanked me for having helped the letter-writer achieve an epiphany regarding a thorny problem her consulting company had been working through for a year. It seems that, among other things, what made it possible for my book to be genuinely helpful was that I had taken care to get myself out of the way of the message.

I have helped a lot of smart people become successful authors and leaders, and one of my first rules for my clients is: you must tell your audience as quickly as possible who you are. Say it on the flap. Say it on the back cover. Say it in the intro. Because, if an author tries to keep themselves in the background, the reader will be unable to hear your message until they feel that they know where you’re coming from. Read more…

Dear friends and family, Rascal passed away last night.

Something in her balance
Made her different
from all the other
jackrabbits on the top of her
mountain.

She had given a short burst of speed, running
with a severe list.
She quit and lay there
waiting to see
what would be her fate. Read more…

Delighted as I was to be greeted Friday morning by David Brooks’s book reviewish column headlined Genius: The Modern View, and as much as I admire Mr. Brooks, I was surprised to discover that he wasn’t writing satirically when he described the path to genius. According to the two new books he was discussing, The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle and Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin, you can develop your children into geniuses. All it takes is 10,000 hours of focused practice at an early age, plus a dash of family tragedy and toss in some neighborhood inspiration. Get the ingredients right and, ta—dah! Instant Mozart.

I must beg to disagree. I was privileged to have grown up alongside thousands of “geniuses” of the 10,000 hour class. I went to the Interlochen summer camp for the arts as a youth (Slogan — Home of the Gifted Youth of America — weren’t we special!) and two of my children went to the year round arts academy there. By now almost a hundred thousand gifted youth from all over the world have gone through Interlochen, and they provide some 10% of the personnel of all the leading American orchestras. Interlochen alumni are prominent in all fields, including Larry Page founder of Google, the composer George Crumb, opera stars Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Jessye Norman. Many of these young people were the bright and often brilliant ones who put in their 10,000 hours. But only a very, very few of them have a certain level of gift that is completely beyond anything 10,000 or even a million hours of focused work can give you. These are the geniuses. And their gift came from inside, not from a parent dying at 12. Not from the good fortune of having a novelist living down the street. Read more…

This year is the 50th anniversary of one of the two essential resource books for anyone who wants to write well — E.B.White and William Strunk’s Manual of Style. The other is William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. Zinsser was a student of White’s and later taught thousands of students using The Manual of Style as a guide. When Zinsser began to write his own book, he was careful to make sure what he wanted to create was distinct from his mentors’, and it is. Read more…

Ever regret finding a book in a used book store, think about buying it, and then a long time later regretting that you had decided not to?

Many years ago I was visiting my hometown, Cleveland, and found a wonderful old bookstore. Suddenly I came across a twenty-some volume set of a complete transcript of the War Crimes Trials at Nuremberg. It was a massive set, and expensive. But it stood for me as the actual first-hand document of one of the ultimate moments in the history of humankind when the rule of law had taken the necessary first steps to restoring civilization after the world had gone mad at the hands of the barbarians.

I wanted those books today.

Two stories on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer last night offered a vivid contrast, especially had they been presented as one story. But they weren’t. Read more…