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Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Sell Your Art at Fountain Square Art Festival

36th annual event set for Sat/Sun, June 27-28
Evanston's Fountain Square Art Festival 
Again Offering Booth Discount to Local Artists 
To help promote Evanston, Skokie, Lincolnwood and Wilmette artisans 

The Evanston Chamber of Commerce, organizer of the 36th annual Fountain Square Art Festival, is again offering a special $100 discount for local artists for this year's event in downtown Evanston. Fest dates are Saturday and Sunday, June 27-28.

The sprawling art extravaganza is held at the intersections of Sherman and Church Streets, just steps from the eponymous Fountain Square. It's the North Shore's oldest juried fine arts fair. Over the weekend it attracts more than 40,000 visitors.

To help promote local artists, organizers are giving artists who reside in Evanston and neighboring Skokie, Lincolnwood and Wilmette a special 25 percent discount for a 10 x 10 foot booth for the weekend. The discounted cost is $300 versus the regular $400.

The fest features works in several mediums. These include paintings, sculptures, metalwork, jewelry, glasswork, woodwork, photography and mixed media.
The weekend also features art activities for kids, music and snack/beverage vendors.
Fest hours are 10:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m. A suggested donation of $5 benefits the Evanston Chamber of Commerce.

Interested local artists can find and download an application from the Fountain Square Art Festival general information website located at or by calling Joe Persfull at 773.584.6642. 

April 30: Fundraiser for Nepal Earthquake Victims

Nepali venue, Mt. Everest Restaurant, located at 630 Church Street, will host a buffet lunch fundraiser this Thursday, April 30 between 11 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. The price for a full lunch is $15.00 (plus tax and gratuity).10% of all sales that day are going to Nepal American Center.

Hagerty Consulting of Evanston is supporting AmeriCares with a cash gift and will match all donations collected that day, collected at the door.

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

April 30: Tulips for Art

MFA Thesis Exhibition Opening at Block Museum
Thursday, April 30, 5pm

Join Northwestern’s Art Theory & Practice graduates as they celebrate the opening of their MFA thesis exhibition, Age of Consent. This exhibition features the work of Angela Lopez, Laura McGinn, Emily Cruz Nowell, William Schweigert, and Rambod Vala. It is the culmination of the course of study leading to the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree at Northwestern. The students will be on hand to discuss their work and artistic practice. 

Visitors are invited to bring a bouquet of flowers (ideally tulips) in exchange for an artwork by William Schweigert.

Friday, April 24, 2015

TED Talk Transcript: How to Manage for Collective Creativity

Linda Hill is my new hero, read all about her here

This is such an imperative read for anyone working on making their leadership style better in ever way, regardless of the team you are leading.

Watch her TED talk on How to Manage for Collective Creativity or read the transcript below. 

How many of you recognize this man? Put your hands up. Keep your hands up, if you know who this is. How about these familiar faces? (Laughter) From your show of hands, it looks like many of you have seen a Pixar movie, but very few of you recognized Ed Catmull, the founder and CEO of Pixar -- one of the companies I had the privilege of studying. 
When many of us think about innovation, though, we think about an Einstein having an 'Aha!' moment.But we all know that's a myth. Innovation is not about solo genius, it's about collective genius. Let's think for a minute about what it takes to make a Pixar movie: No solo genius, no flash of inspiration produces one of those movies. On the contrary, it takes about 250 people four to five years, to make one of those movies. 
To help us understand the process, an individual in the studio drew a version of this picture. He did so reluctantly, because it suggested that the process was a neat series of steps done by discreet groups.Even with all those arrows, he thought it failed to really tell you just how iterative, interrelated and, frankly, messy their process was. 
The other thing about a Pixar movie is that no part of the movie is considered finished until the entire movie wraps. Partway through one production, an animator drew a character with an arched eyebrow that suggested a mischievous side. When the director saw that drawing, he thought it was great. It was beautiful, but he said, "You've got to lose it; it doesn't fit the character." Two weeks later, the director came back and said, "Let's put in those few seconds of film." Because that animator was allowed to share what we referred to as his slice of genius, he was able to help that director reconceive the character in a subtle but important way that really improved the story.
Innovations rarely get created full-blown. As many of you know, they're the result, usually, of trial and error. Lots of false starts, missteps and mistakes. Innovative work can be very exhilarating, but it also can be really downright scary. So when we look at why it is that Pixar is able to do what it does, we have to ask ourselves, what's going on here? 
Experiments are usually about learning. When you get a negative outcome, you're still really learning something that you need to know. Pilots are often about being right. When they don't work, someone or something is to blame. The final capability is creative resolution. This is about doing decision making in a way that you can actually combine even opposing ideas to reconfigure them in new combinations to produce a solution that is new and useful. When you look at innovative organizations, they never go along to get along. They don't compromise. They don't let one group or one individual dominate, even if it's the boss, even if it's the expert. Instead, they have developed a rather patient and more inclusive decision making process that allows for both/and solutions to arise and not simply either/or solutions. These three capabilities are why we see that Pixar is able to do what it does. 
Let me give you another example, and that example is the infrastructure group of Google. The infrastructure group of Google is the group that has to keep the website up and running 24/7. So when Google was about to introduce Gmail and YouTube, they knew that their data storage system wasn't adequate. The head of the engineering group and the infrastructure group at that time was a man named Bill Coughran. Bill and his leadership team, who he referred to as his brain trust, had to figure out what to do about this situation. They thought about it for a while. Instead of creating a group to tackle this task, they decided to allow groups to emerge spontaneously around different alternatives.
Two groups coalesced. One became known as Big Table, the other became known as Build It From Scratch. Big Table proposed that they build on the current system. Build It From Scratch proposed that it was time for a whole new system. Separately, these two teams were allowed to work full-timeon their particular approach. In engineering reviews, Bill described his role as, "Injecting honesty into the process by driving debate." 
But to make sure that they did not lose the learning of the Build it From Scratch team, Bill asked two members of that team to join a new team that was emerging to work on the next-generation system.This whole process took nearly two years, but I was told that they were all working at breakneck speed. 
Early in that process, one of the engineers had gone to Bill and said, "We're all too busy for this inefficient system of running parallel experiments." But as the process unfolded, he began to understand the wisdom of allowing talented people to play out their passions. He admitted, "If you had forced us to all be on one team, we might have focused on proving who was right, and winning, and not on learning and discovering what was the best answer for Google." 
Why is it that Pixar and Google are able to innovate time and again? It's because they've mastered the capabilities required for that. They know how to do collaborative problem solving, they know how to do discovery-driven learning and they know how to do integrated decision making.
Some of you may be sitting there and saying to yourselves right now, "We don't know how to do those things in my organization. So why do they know how to do those things at Pixar, and why do they know how to do those things at Google?" When many of the people that worked for Bill told us, in their opinion, that Bill was one of the finest leaders in Silicon Valley, we completely agreed; the man is a genius. 
Leadership is the secret sauce. But it's a different kind of leadership, not the kind many of us think about when we think about great leadership. One of the leaders I met with early on said to me, "Linda, I don't read books on leadership. All they do is make me feel bad." (Laughter) "In the first chapter they say I'm supposed to create a vision. But if I'm trying to do something that's truly new, I have no answers. I don't know what direction we're going in and I'm not even sure I know how to figure out how to get there." For sure, there are times when visionary leadership is exactly what is needed. 
At this point, some of you may be wondering, "What does that leadership really look like?" At Pixar, they understand that innovation takes a village. The leaders focus on building a sense of communityand building those three capabilities. How do they define leadership? They say leadership is about creating a world to which people want to belong. What kind of world do people want to belong in at Pixar? A world where you're living at the frontier. What do they focus their time on? Not on creating a vision. Instead they spend their time thinking about, "How do we design a studio that has the sensibility of a public square so that people will interact? Let's put in a policy that anyone, no matter what their level or role, is allowed to give notes to the director about how they feel about a particular film. What can we do to make sure that all the disruptors, all the minority voices in this organization,speak up and are heard? And, finally, let's bestow credit in a very generous way." I don't know if you've ever looked at the credits of a Pixar movie, but the babies born during a production are listed there. (Laughter) 
How did Bill think about what his role was? Bill said, "I lead a volunteer organization. Talented people don't want to follow me anywhere. They want to cocreate with me the future. My job is to nurture the bottom-up and not let it degenerate into chaos." How did he see his role? "I'm a role model, I'm a human glue, I'm a connector, I'm an aggregator of viewpoints. I'm never a dictator of viewpoints."Advice about how you exercise the role? Hire people who argue with you. And, guess what?Sometimes it's best to be deliberately fuzzy and vague. 
Some of you may be wondering now, what are these people thinking? They're thinking, "I'm not the visionary, I'm the social architect. I'm creating the space where people are willing and able to share and combine their talents and passions." If some of you are worrying now that you don't work at a Pixar, or you don't work at a Google, I want to tell you there's still hope. We've studied many organizations that were really not organizations you'd think of as ones where a lot of innovation happens. 
For sure, Vineet and all the other leaders that we studied were in fact visionaries. For sure, they understood that that was not their role. So I don't think it is accidental that many of you did not recognize Ed. Because Ed, like Vineet, understands that our role as leaders is to set the stage, not perform on it. If we want to invent a better future, and I suspect that's why many of us are here, then we need to reimagine our task. Our task is to create the space where everybody's slices of genius can be unleashed and harnessed, and turned into works of collective genius.
Thank you.