Career Opportunities with Douglas E. Welch

How to harness your emotions to fuel creativity via Fast Company

Creativity is full of emotions—the reputational risk of not knowing how an idea will be received by stakeholders, the frustration of dealing with constraints and obstacles, conflict about directions to take, and elation when you finally develop a product. Successful creativity does not depend on the kinds of emotions experienced. Rather, it depends on your ability to harness the power of emotions and manage them when they get in the way of progress. In my book, The Creativity Choice: The Science of Making Decisions To Turn Ideas Into Action, I write about how to use emotional intelligence to manage the creative process, regardless of industry or job role.

Read this entire article – How to harness your emotions to fuel creativity via Fast Company

What I’m reading: The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen

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The Notebook is a deep dive into the history and usefulness of notebooks over the centuries. The author takes a journey from the days of parliament, vellum, and finally into the world where cheap paper opened up the usefulness of notebooks to nearly everyone. He has us meet Leonardo da Vinci, whose notebooks are famous to this day, or Aminto Manucci and Luca Piacioli, the creators and philosophers of double-entry bookkeeping, who changed life in many ways beyond that. He discusses authors, thinkers, scientists, and artists, and what the notebook meant/means to them.

Most of us are familiar with notebooks and notetaking — usually from our school days or perhaps our college classes. For the most part, we understood the importance of taking notes as an aide memoir for the papers we needed to write and those dreaded exams of the end of the year. How could we possibly remember everything we needed at this time of our life where our brains were being stuffed with new information?

I find my own use of notes and notebooks continuing to the current day. Early on in my career as a technologist, taking notes was an important, if not critical, part of any job. In days before the Internet and the host of information at our fingertips, notebooks were how I retained all the information I gathered during my reading and my workday. If I developed a solution one day, I would likely need to refer to that solution weeks, months or years into the future. Without a notebook, I would’ve been lost. There was no Google Search, sub-Reddits, or ChatGPT. My peers and I, had to create our own, day by day, year by year. 

Even now, with all the technological tools that our fingertips, I still find myself keeping a notebook sometimes it might contain random thoughts, like diary, entries, or quick notes about a particular topic like events that I used to run columns I used to write and information about my many clients and their computers.

I found that using a paper notebook could be one of the most useful ways to establish your credibility in front of a client or in a meeting. There is something about opening your notebook, placing it in front of you, and starting to take notes, clients, peers, and bosses seem to sense as an important marker that I am getting down to business and I am taking it all seriously. Even knowing its usefulness, I am amazed at what an outsized effect it has on how people perceive you and your work.

Now that my days have slowed down with fewer clients and less work, I still find myself still maintaining a notebook, if not several. They usually contain thoughts on life and upcoming events with occasional notes that I’ll find useful in the yearly events which mark out our lives.

Even as a lover of technology and someone surrounded by it, I don’t have the same affinity for Digital notetaking that I have for the pleasure of writing with Pen and ink on a nice sheet of paper. Sometimes it is simply easier to open up my notebook and jot down a thought or a piece of information rather than take the time to pull out my phone and jot it into Notes or another application, even the short delay of firing up the app rankles me and sends me back to my notebook with a shrug.

If you are not already writing in your notebook regularly, The Notebook might just send you out to find your favorite notebook, pen, or pencil and start your journey through your thoughts and memories.

If you are useful, it doesn’t mean you are valued via Better Than Random

As you progress in your career, understanding the difference between being useful and being valued is very important. At first glance, they might look similar because the signals you get are more or less the same: a promotion, a higher than expected bonus, a special stock award. This is why it’s important to dig deeper and try to detect subtler signals.

Read this entire article – If you are useful, it doesn’t mean you are valued via Better Than Random

Accountability sinks via A Working Library

Buy The Unaccountability Machine via Bookshop.org

In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it. Here’s an example: a higher up at a hospitality company decides to reduce the size of its cleaning staff, because it improves the numbers on a balance sheet somewhere. Later, you are trying to check into a room, but it’s not ready and the clerk can’t tell you when it will be; they can offer a voucher, but what you need is a room. There’s no one to call to complain, no way to communicate back to that distant leader that they’ve scotched your plans. The accountability is swallowed up into a void, lost forever.

Davies proposes that:

For an accountability sink to function, it has to break a link; it has to prevent the feedback of the person affected by the decision from affecting the operation of the system.

Read this entire article – Accountability Sinks via A Working Library

Repair and Remain: How to do the slow, hard, good work of staying put by Kurt Armstrong

Let’s say time comes to gut and renovate your bathroom: I can help you with that—demolition, framing, reworking the plumbing, moving some electrical, installing some mould-resistant drywall, maybe some nice tile for the floor and some classic glazed ceramic three-by-six subway tile for the tub surround. Should take a month or two, depending on what all’s involved. And as for you, hey, for the sake of your wife and kids, I think you better quit the flurry of furtive late-night texts to the sexy young co-worker and cut back a bit on your recreational drinking because wine is a mocker, so goes the proverb, as if those Facebook posts of you at the bar last week weren’t proof enough.

Repair and remain. Work with what you’ve got. Sit still for a moment, take stock, make some changes. Big changes, if necessary.

Read this entire article – Repair and Remain: How to do the slow, hard, good work of staying put by Kurt Armstrong