#49 (Tyra Banks) and #100 (Chris Ferguson)
Last week I wrote about Fast Company’s impressive June article on the 100 Most Creative People in Business: each person stars on his or her own dedicated web page, which in turn links to a diversity of information. If you’re interested in a specific person, trend, or occupation, you can drill down vertically and expand horizontally, exploring any topic you find intriguing.
What appealed to me most were the quotes made by these Creatives, each linking to an article, interview, book or other medium in which that quote appeared. Most quotes were incredibly focussed and specific to a person’s field of endeavor. If I wanted to know more I could link to the source, and read the quote within its original context.
The only drawback to all of this: quotes were given for only about half of the one-hundred Creatives. Some of the people who intrigued me most were quoteless. Nonetheless, I’ve culled some good material, which I’m passing on here, making for an easy way to explore the creativity of some pretty remarkable people.
For each person below you’ll find:
- Ranking # in the list of the 100 Most Creative People in Business
- Name
- Title
- Quote
- Source with direct link (when given)
Enjoy!
#1: Jonathan Ive
Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, Apple
“There’s an applied style of being minimal and simple, and then there’s real simplicity. This looks simple, because it really is.”
- Design According to Ive, Wired
#12: John Garing
Chief information officer, Defense Information Systems Agency
“We have a concept that we learned from Google called the sandbox. You bring a technology inside the sandbox and let people test it and see if it works. So it’s not the Wild West.”
- Creative Cooperation, Source
#14: JJ Abrams
Founder, Bad Robot Productions
“Star Wars is probably the most influential film of my generation. It’s the personification of good and evil and the way it opened up the world to space adventure, the way westerns had to our parents’ generations, left an indelible imprint. So, in a way, everything that any of us does is somehow directly or indirectly affected by the experience of seeing those first three films.”
-On the original Star Trek
#15: Thom Mayne
Design Director, Morphosis
“Architecture is a way of seeing, thinking, and questioning our world and our place in it. It requires a natural inquisitiveness, openness in our observations, and a will to act in affirmation…I’m chasing an architecture that engages and demands inquiry. Architecture is not passive, not decorative.”
- Pritzer Prize Acceptance Speech May 2005
#26: Sheila Bair
Chairman, FDIC
“We’ve moved beyond the liquidity crisis of last year. Most major institutions managed to turn a profit in the first quarter. And one of the few that didn’t was hurt by an improvement in its credit spreads, which damaged its balance sheet by increasing the theoretical cost of repurchasing its own debt. As I see it, we are now in the clean up phase. We need to get in, do the repair work, and get out. And we also must look to how to improve our system for the future.”
-Remarks by FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair to The Economic Club of New York
#34: Evan Williams
CEO, Twitter
“We do think Twitter is potentially a mainstream application. The way I look at it, coming from the blogging world, is that it touches a lot of the same motivations that drive people to blog, especially the more social motivations and the universal desire to put thoughts out there. Now there’s such a low barrier, combined with the ubiquity of mobile, we really think that we can reach very far and wide.”
- Q&A With Evan Williams, VentureBeat
#41: Maurice Sendak
Writer, illustrator, producer
“You dive deep and God help you. You could hit your head on something and never come up and nobody would even know you were missing. Or, you will find some nugget that was worth the pain in your chest, the blindness, everything, and you’ll come up with it and that will be what you went down for. In other words, you either risk it or you sell out.”
- An Interview with Maurice Sendak, Source
#43: Neri Oxman
Presidential Fellow, MIT Media Lab
“The biological world is displacing the machine as a general model of design.”
- ReMIXEDLIFE, ReMIXEDLIFE
#47: A.R. Rahman
Composer (Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack)
“I wasn’t too happy with the I-don’t-want-to-listen-to-it attitude of our youngsters towards film music. Why can’t we get our guys to listen to our own music rather than to Michael Jackson? I didn’t want us to lose the market to the West. The music had to be cool and rooted, and yet had to branch out. It was like the wild imagination of a child… but it worked… it did travel beyond Madras and attract people.”
- The Mozart of Madras, Indian Muslims
#49: Tyra Banks
Founder, Bankable Enterprises
“I do know about body image. About worrying about it. I made my living being 20 or 30 pounds heavier than the average model. And that’s where I got famous. Victoria’s Secret said I sold more bras and panties than anybody else, and I was traipsing down that runway with 30 pounds more booty than the other girls. So it had a lot to do with my success, my weight, but it’s also always been issue for me, so I can relate.”
- Interview: Tyra Banks - The supermodel turned spokeswoman, The Guardian
#57: Susan Wu
Chief executive officer, Ohai
“There are now a number of high profile consumer Web and gaming communities in the US making millions of dollars a year in virtual goods revenue.”
- Speakers in the News, SXSW.com
#58: June Arunga
Equity partner, Black Star Lines
“Many [African] laws breed corruption. For example, until eight years ago the Kenyan government, by law, had a monopoly on telephone service. Anyone who wanted to have this service had to go through a government employee and there was no other option. A law of this kind is not unjust but its impact is to create injustice.”
- An Interview With June Arunga, Global Envision
#61: Nora Ephron
Author, director, producer
“Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.”
#65: Consuelo Castiglioni
Creative director, Marni
“Clothes don’t necessarily render a man sexy—his attitude and his nature do. For me, someone who is not classically handsome but has a lot of charm is more attractive than a really good-looking guy with no personality.” — From 10 Rules of Fashion From Consuelo Castiglione of Marni, Details
#83: Brian Eno
Musician
“When I was at art college, the teachers who helped me were not the ones I agreed with, or the ones who encouraged me, but the ones who took very strong positions. Because if someone does that, you can find your own position in relation to it: what is it that I don’t agree with? In the studio I want to articulate a position clearly enough so that other people can use it - or chuck it away if they don’t want it.”
- Brian Eno - interview with the producer of U2’s No Line On The Horizon, Source
#85: Pier Giulianotti
Chief of minimally invasive, general and robotic surgery, University of Illinois Medical Center
“The idea of abandoning the safe hand of the surgeon and the idea of being operated on by a mechanical device is something weird, or even dangerous. In reality, behind the robot is the control of the human mind.”
- Robotic surgery chief on cutting edge, Source
#88: Karin Fong
Creative director, Imaginary Forces
“Animation yields huge opportunities for surrealism. You can make your own logic. The nice thing about working in this medium is that you can combine techniques, old and new. The computer is a fantastic collage-box. All kinds of drawings, photography and textures can be mashed together both by hand and then even further in the machine. They don’t have to be or look digital.”
- Interview with Karin Fong, Source
#93: Bill Bensley
Principal, Bensley Design Studios
“My philosophy on design has always been Lebih gila, lebih biak, which in Indonesian means the more odd, the better.”
- Architectural Digest 100, Source
#100: Chris Ferguson
Founder, Full Tilt Poker
“Most poker players don’t understand what it is they do,’ he says. ‘I understand what I do. The core strategy I use is based on mathematics and is very difficult to play against. When I think about poker, I’m concentrating more on my own game than my opponents. If I had to tell my opponent how I’m going to play every single hand, how would I play? I’m trying to come up with a strategy that even if he knows how I’m going to play, he’s not going to be able to beat me – even if he watches me for hours. That’s the way I think about poker.”
- Chris ‘Jesus’ Ferguson, Source
