Methods
of the Masters

Join our Community

A blog on the art & science of creative action.

Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Spark A Movement

Peter Sims, author of Little Bets and founder of BLKSHP suggests that a movement is superior to a network in a few distinct ways.

Read More
Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Steal And Let Steal

Innovation is all about unexpected recombinations. Sometimes, it seems like theft. My belief is we need to normalize such acts of recombination by sharing our own!

Read More
Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Attack 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 equip leaders with a plan of attack.

Read More
Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Cultivate Curiosity

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

Read More
Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Watch the Corners

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

Read More
Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Endure Rejection

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, many endured rejection.

Read More
Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Cherish Wake Up Calls

How did Harvard’s B.F. Skinner became one of the most influential psychologists of all time? An eccentric nightly habit may shed fresh light on the answer.

Read More
Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Squint At New Ideas

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

Read More
Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Allow Folks to Play

If innovation is a numbers game, subject to considerable odds, then how can a leader bend the odds? IDEO’s Brendan Boyle says play is a key lever to drive the breadth of experimentation required to succeed.

Read More
Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Don’t Multi-Task

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.

Read More
Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Crystallize Your Knowledge

Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Charles Duhigg explains how we can turbo-charge sense-making, and turn information into valuable knowledge.

Read More
Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Say, “I Don’t Know”

“I don’t know,” might be three of the hardest words to say, especially for a professor. A leader is often conceived as the one who knows. And yet, not knowing creates space for the unexpected to emerge…

Read More
Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Be Willing To Be Bad

The best creators are constantly learning. There’s immense value in doing something you’re not good at, specifically for the sake of seeing an old thing from a fresh angle.

Read More
Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Keep A Bug List

Great leaders know that every innovation begins with a problem. Instead of telling their people to “bring me solutions,” they encourage folks to be on the lookout for problems worth solving.

Read More
Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Make An Imperfect Attempt

It’s a grave mistake to assume that a spectacular outcome started out spectacularly. As Ed Catmull, Founder and CEO of Pixar says, “Our job is to take movies from suck to not suck.”

Read More
Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Push Past Obvious

Paraphrasing Google X CEO Astro Teller, sparking group innovation can be as simple asking a team to “Gimme five.” Those two words contain a remarkable depth of wisdom.

Read More
Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Reach Beyond Yourself

The most popular post in my Stanford Slack channel illustrates a profound source of creative wisdom: “Would anyone be interested in staying after class tomorrow to brainstorm experiments?”

Read More
Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Meander

We crave innovation that’s buttoned up nice and neat. But the creative process rarely is. It is “non-linear.” But we often eliminate the variability which drives unexpected outcomes.

Read More
Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Subtract

There’s a critical flaw with our default approach problem solving: we tend to look for things to add, even when subtraction yields better solutions.

Read More
Jeremy Utley Jeremy Utley

Magnify Your Problem

What do you do when your work is under public attack? Few have grappled with the question as deeply as Becky Margiotta, co-founder and champion of the 100,000 Homes campaign.

Read More