Just read Fast Company's interview with David Kelley, co-founder of the design firm, Ideo. This quote from Kelley, which could have come right out of the book, A Whole New Mind, jumped out at me:

"My contribution is to teach as many people as I can to use both sides of the brain, so that for every problem, every decision in their lives, they consider creative as well as analytical solutions."

Actually, I'm pretty sure that Dan Pink, the author of A Whole New Mind interviewed people from Ideo when writing the book, so no surprise that these two are so closely aligned.

Other things I resonated with from the article:

• Creativity: "Children are naturally creative–at least until the educational system beats it out of them." Kelley is working on changing K-12 education with the idea that kids should be as facile with their right brains as with their left.
• Giving fish vs. teaching to fish. Design thinking vs. design. Design thinking is teaching someone to fish–giving the methodology to approach problems differently Design is giving someone fish–providing the end product without any notion of the process of to get there.
• Reinvention = freedom to let go and share. Kelley believes enough in his firm's creativity that he can give clients stuff that other firms would consider proprietary: "I can give our methodology away because I know we can come up with a better idea tomorrow."
• Systems thinking: "…to redesign a customer experience, you also have to redesign organizational structures, culture..or you won't produce the experiences you want."
• Diversity as competitive edge for innovation: "The way Kelley sees it, our polyglot populace gives us an extraordinary advantage in generating truly creative ideas." In Kelley's words, "…what if there are problems that aren't solved by deep, but broad?"
• Passion: "David's legacy is that he spends his life doing things he believes in, with people he believes in, with the abiding faith that it will lead to good things."

Amen.

Photo courtesy of Ideo.

Update: I highly recommend another Fast Company article, "17 Career Lessons from Ideo's David Kelley."  What makes this unique is the lessons come from interviewing Kelley's colleagues, students, friends, and family to get their take on what they have learned from him.