Latest Ideas

This past month delivered an unusual convergence of findings for anyone who thinks seriously about where ideas come from, how they travel, and who gets to own them. A landmark brain imaging study from Paris identified the precise neural geometry that separates more creative minds from less creative ones. A run of AI-and-creativity research (some of it conflicting) sharpened a debate that's now unavoidable for anyone in a knowledge profession. A Supreme Court decision quietly

The four psychological biases that stop ideas before they ever get a real shot, and how to interrupt them. Most ideas don't die because they're bad. They die before anyone ever finds out whether they're good. We tend to blame the market, the timing, the lack of resources, or the wrong connections. But in most cases, the thing that kills an idea is something far closer to home. Something happening inside the person behind it. A bias. A quiet, convincing pattern of thought that

Ideas do not exist in a vacuum. They are born in specific neural conditions, shaped by the tools we reach for, constrained by the organizations we inhabit, and ultimately governed by the legal frameworks society agrees to uphold. For those of us who live at the intersection of cognition and creativity, the "aha!" moment has always occupied a privileged position — that flash of sudden understanding that feels qualitatively different from ordinary problem-solving.

We live in the strangest moment for ideas in a generation. More of them are being produced, shared, remixed, and ignored than at any other point in working history. LinkedIn feeds are thick with them. Podcasts multiply by the week. Large language models can generate a thousand variations of any thought before lunch. And yet the people most animated by ideas — the ones who read the footnotes, who send a Slack message at 10 p.m. with "okay but what about…" — often feel quieter

The past year has been an unusually rich one for the science and practice of ideation, with researchers at Duke, Harvard, Stanford, the Université de Montréal, and elsewhere publishing findings that challenge old assumptions and open up new questions.

There’s a particular kind of tension that only shows up once a brand starts to work. Not the early uncertainty of whether anyone will buy, but the more complex question of how to grow without breaking what’s already been built. Direct‑to‑consumer promises higher margins, richer customer data, and a deeper relationship with the buyer, but it demands constant spending on marketing, content, and infrastructure just to stay visible. Wholesale, on the other hand, offers credibili

There’s a particular moment in fast‑growing companies when success creates a new kind of pressure. The idea worked. The market responded. People showed up with money, enthusiasm, and expectations. Suddenly, the question is no longer whether the vision is viable, but whether the founder can keep carrying it alone. This stage hits especially hard for technical founders. For a long time, building was the edge. Knowing the system inside and out made execution faster, cleaner, an

There’s a specific kind of frustration that shows up after the early excitement wears off. The concept is solid. The branding is thoughtful. People say encouraging things. You hear “this is such a great idea” more times than you can count. And yet somehow, after months of effort, the revenue still hasn’t caught up to the vision. This is the stage where many early founders quietly stall. It’s not because they lack intelligence or work ethic. It’s because the work shifts from b

The hardest part of selling AI is rarely the technology itself. It’s the moment just before the conversation really begins, when someone hears about a new tool and quietly wonders what it means for their role, their value, and their place in the system they’ve spent years building. That question doesn’t get spoken out loud very often, but it shapes whether someone leans in or puts up guardrails almost immediately. This is where so many AI initiatives stall. Not because the pr

There’s a moment that keeps replaying in my head from my conversation with Dr. Coral Hoh , and it’s not a statistic or a technological breakthrough. It’s something much quieter, and much more unsettling. She said that for over a hundred years, we’ve been treating learning disabilities with approaches that never actually addressed the source of the problem. And that we collectively came to accept the results not because they worked, but because we ran out of better ideas. This

Every time a new wave of AI panic washes through LinkedIn, I notice the same pattern. The loudest voices are usually reacting to what technology could do rather than asking who is actually making the decisions, whose values are encoded into systems, and who gets left out when speed and scale become the primary incentives. That tension is exactly why I wanted to host a conversation with Jim Fruchterman . Jim is a MacArthur Genius, a Caltech‑trained physicist, the founder of m

Most of us don’t need another framework, another posting schedule, or another reminder to “show up consistently.” What we actually need is a better relationship with our own thinking—and more places where that thinking can be tested, stretched, and sharpened through conversation. That realization is what sat at the center of the Idea Citizen Brand Power‑Up , even if we didn’t name it that way at the start. On the surface, the conversation was about personal branding. In pract