Here is my favorite Peter Drucker quote (forgive me if it's not exact): 'Don't solve problems.  Seek opportunities.'  I love that idea because it goes to the heart of the human challenge - when we rise above the immediate issue and pressing system problems, we can often creatively generate new ideas and reframe opportunities for the future.   

I've been re-reading Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything and one of the points the authors make is with the continual rise of open-source commerce and participation of the many, those with the most creative ability will shape the marketplace.  This is the theme of my blog and my personal gospel so of course I think they are right. Web 2.0 has released this groundswell of opportunity - what you dream of you can create and you can upload it for the world to evaluate. 

Many business people talk about surviving changes - market changes, organization changes, personal changes.  But what we need to do is start creating mental habits in which we can't wait for a change to happen.  Because changes, good and bad, portend opportunity.  There is something lurking to take advantage of.

NYT's article on Vudu, highlights just this ability to force opportunity to knock.  Movie DVD's have been slowing for quite some time.  Studio executives, faced with continual industry change have to welcome it to survive.  The internet is rewriting the power of the movie score.  Vudu is just one technology they are beginning to embrace.  With their unique technology, consumers can buy a 'box ' that allows almost immediate movie downloads. Studios like NBC Universal are signing deals with this start-up.  Seeking opportunity.

When I was little, we played Monopoly and there was space on the board called 'Opportunity Knocks'.  With the pace of change around us, we can't afford to wait until it comes knocking on the door.  We have to force it to knock. 

It isn't obvious who will win in the constant mix-up/mash-up of web video.  Certainly, Google has a lead with YouTube in the amateur segment.  But Comcast, the largest cable provider, is jumping into the entertainment segment with www.fastcast.com.  And the competition from Amazon, AOL and of course iTunes is sure to be stiff.

But one thing that is obvious is the increasing demand for quality content.  As the venues proliferate and the market segments, there is sure to be great film available for every taste.  And that's great news for the consumer.  Even Bruce Springsteen's line "57 channels and nothing on" will become irrelevant.

This is also good news for the aspiring creative talent.  There will be more opportunities to go direct to consumers with great ideas, great scripts and great productions. In this brave new web world - it's all about content, content, content.

For just another example of friction-free power of on-line commerce, check out www.redfin.com.  Here is a clearing house for home buyers and sellers to meet with the "flat-rate" services of a real estate agent.  It will be interesting to watch if traditional agents can continue to command their price, based on the quality of their service.

It's been around for over a year, but the tech blogs have just recently made this site soar into the stratosphere.  www.twitter.com is on-line messaging service which asks the world the question "What are you doing now?".  People from around the world check in via mobile phone and tell you whether they are making a latte for themselves or creating a new form of payroll software.  Of course, the big deal here is the ability to create large communities and share what may be personal trivia or potentially some profound technology breakthrough. Cooler still is www.twittervision.com which is a map of the world where you can view messages from Brazil, Japan, Iceland and more being shared. 

This is an interesting site because it points up the never-ending need for human contact and the ability for technology to creatively solve our longing for meaningful interaction.  Get ready for banner ads or a wave of corporate "word-of-mouth" marketing to show up on Twitter.  But for now, it's a raw experiment in the lengths people will go to express themselves in the hope someone will listen.

Wired Magazine (April 07) recently mentioned Southwest Airlines' new 'on-line watercooler'.  This is an employee blog that is widely read throughout the company.  When the CEO announced a new strategy of eliminating the first come, first seated approach to boarding, employees across the company contributed to the site to voice their opinion.

Creating a culture of innovation isn't easy.  But one of the driving principles behind creating change is creating personal investment.  When management is upfront and honest, when employees feel their ideas are heard and their creative contributions recognized, you've got a recipe for success. 

The famous psychologist Rollo May in his book, The Courage to Create, talks about the fact that creative contribution is not the just the icing on the cake of life, it is the entireity of life.  Providing that environment for employees to contribute is the engine of innovation.

Why is it that the seminal business writers in the last few years have been journalists?  Malcolm Gladwell - The Tipping Point, Blink.  Thomas Friedman - The World is Flat.  Dan Pink - A Whole New Brain.  Even one of the NYT's frequent business writers, G. Pascal Zachary, is not trained in business but as a journalist.  What is it about the journalistic view that creates business insights?

The journalist is first and foremost an observer.  They watch.  They analyze.  They abstract and conclude from the data.  Journalists provide DEW - Distant Early Warnings of trends ahead and what to expect next. In my book, The Five Faces of Genius, I laud this power of the Observer as a creative thinking style.  One that acts with great wisdom and power to create.   

I love the idea of the great physicist, Richard Feynman who said, "We are not that much smarter than each other."  That in fact, as much as we try to discriminate based on 'smarts' in this country, what really differentiates us is our creativity.  If journalists can jump in make significant contributions by virtue of their creativity, each of us have the capacity to do so.  And if citizen journalism is the next wave, think of the creative contributions to business and anything else any person can make.  It's the great democracy of genius.  

I confess I am a Deal or No Deal addict.  I love to watch the balance between luck & reason weigh in the contestants minds.  But the part I find particularly interesting is the end of the game when Howie says, "Let's see what kind of deal you made.  What would your next case choice have been?"  Howie proceeds to open cases and contestants moan or cheer based on the predictions of what their actions might have been.

But is it really possible for these predictions to be correct?  Would the contestant have truly picked those cases?  Duncan J. Watts, in a NYT Magazine article, puts this pheonomena in high relief.  He discusses the inability to predict cultural trends.  Using research he fielded with music preferences, he points up the power of randomness and our ability to be swayed by what other people around us prefer or the 'cumulative advantage' effect.  Watts points out that it would be impossible for the editors who passed on the Harry Potter series to have predicted it's incredible success.  Who could have anticipated the network effects of people buying simply because it was increasingly popular?  And in the same way, the Deal or No Deal contestant really doesn't know what the next cases would be because he or she hasn't yet made them. 

So what does this have to do with the average business person? First, it gets us off the hook for our 'failed' ideas.  We can cut ourselves a break. Sure we need to analyze what went wrong, but it normalizes the events of failure and points up our need to keep trying to create new ones.  And second while we should keep trying to anticipate the future, how to share the idea and create the market for it may be as important as the quality of the idea itself.  We have to recognize the power of unpredictability as well as the volatile power of networks. And it means that the Deal or No Deal contestants should cut themselves a break and sleep well with their winnings because who knows what cases they might really have chosen?

As the mother of two teenage daughters, I work hard at limiting "screen time" - tv, internet, movies, etc.  But one exception I've made recently, much to their surprise, is that I let them loose on video games.  An article I read over vacation in the Jan/Feb edition of the Utne Reader, "Playing With Our Heads", pushed me over the edge. 

The article quotes the authors John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade of Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever.  The authors claim that younger generations do better in business precisely because of their experience with video games.  "Beck and Wade argue that the gamers somehow intuitively acquired traits that many more-senior managers took years to develop and that their nongaming contemporaries still lack." Most notably those skills are competence in strategy and comfort with risk and failure. 

In my audio download of the same name as this blog, I talk about video games as an analogy to chess.  Perhaps letting your child loose on gaming  (within reasons of course) is a legitimate way to build their genius.

Check out www.threadless.com.  Threadless sells T-shirts.  So what's new about that?  Threadless is a community of people who care about T-shirts - they wear them, buy them and most of all design them.  Each week there is a contest with a $2,000 prize for the winning design.  You upload your design, the community votes and the winning design is produced by Threadless.  Threadless then sells and ships the T-shirts to all who buy.

What is so refreshing about this idea (although the design of this site needs to be refreshed) is that it celebrates the power of creative expression in action.  More than the $2,000.00 prize, the primary motivation of these designers is to bring their imaginations to life, to show it off to the Threadless "world" and perhaps beyond.  This eternal power of personal expression is one that will never go away and the web brings to life in new and exciting ways - just like this.

No company has flown higher in the last two years than Google.  They've been touted as the best company to work for, heralded as the most innovative in product design and responsible for ushering in a new era of commerce. 

David Vise and Robert Cyran from WSJ's Financial Insight provide an interesting take on the Google's inability to diversify their profit stream beyond on-line advertising.  They point out Google's flops in social networking, online video and more. It begs the question about Google's growth position and the consumer's stomach for the barrage of on-line advertising. 

True "search" should be a search for information.  Increasingly, "googling" feels like a search for .coms and big brother monitoring your imagination. Will there come a day when search will be a monthly charge, but brings a promise of higher quality data and complete privacy?