Beth Comstock: You Have To Tell A Story, Before You Can Sell A Story

Storytelling, experimentation, passion, and even failure - these are the ingredients that help great ideas make it to the finish line, says GE's Beth Comstock in this candid interview at the 99% Conference.

"Instigators wanted but not always welcomed."

In a rare interview, GE's SVP and Chief Marketing Officer Beth Comstock talks to Behance's Scott Belsky about what it takes to keep great ideas alive in a big company. Offering essential insights for creative leaders, the conversation touches on the power of passion and storytelling in getting ideas off the ground, why we should make heroes out of failures, and the challenges of driving change amidst bureaucracy.

John Rauser: What is a Career in Big Data?

John Rauser (Amazon), "What is a Career in Big Data?"

We are exposed to more and more data every day and the ability to make sense of it is crucial to our personal and professinal lives. In this talk, part of Strata New York 2011, John Rauser, Principal Engineer at Amazon.com, talks about the history of Data Science and how one develops a career in the field. Most importantly he discusses the challenges of extracting value from large quantities of data. 

(via +Tim Carmody)

Comedians@Google Eddie Izzard: Sometimes you have to kill your creative babies

Eddie Izzard stops by Google for a conversation about his life, his influences, and comedy. The interview was conducted by Mark Day.

I'm a big fan of Eddie Izzard and his erudite style of surreal comedy. In this conversation, conducted by Mark Day, he talks about his life, his influences, and comedy. His comedy DVDs are highly recommended as a source of creative inspiration as they are full of hilariously out there juxtapositions. (In an early-in-his-career performance he did a routine on technology and the ridiculous challenges of getting a printer to work correctly that basically rendered me into a convulsing mess of laughter the first time I saw it).

Some of his insights from the talk, slightly paraphrased: 
• Spend time on what you are making, don't see it as the obstacle between you and success. 
• If you try too hard at being good, then often the final result is lesser than if you let go and just do the work, especially in creativity. 
• You've got to create and then move on. 
• Create things to be constantly moving, designed to be fluid, so it's constantly alive.
• Avoid creating something fully concrete.
• Whatever you are doing, it's not rocket science, it's not that hard, it's just a lot of work.
• Shame and guilt together are humiliation.
• The first goal is to make them laugh, the second goal is to inform using street language and not preaching.
• Make yourself the first person in the audience.
• The whole world is about the classroom. 

Linda Rottenberg: If no one is calling you "crazy," you're probably not thinking big enough.

If no one is calling you "crazy," you're probably not thinking big enough. In this 2011 99% Conference talk, Endeavor CEO Linda Rottenberg shares unorthodox advice for startups.

Named one of “America’s Best Leaders” by US News & World Report and one of 100 “Innovators for the 21st century” by Time, Linda Rottenberg is one of the world’s most dynamic and respected experts on entrepreneurship, business opportunities in emerging markets, and innovative leadership for the new economy.  In this 99% talk, Rottenberg shares tips for new entrepreneurs and addresses some of the key challenges that creative startups face.

Paola Antonelli on Design as the Interface Between Progress and Humanity

Paola Antonelli — Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at the MoMA, longtime proponent of humanized technology, self-described “curious octopus” — has arguably done more for the mainstream infiltration of design literacy than any other individual in contemporary culture. In her recent opening keynote at the unequivocally titled media and ideas conference The Conference in Malmö, Sweden, Antonelli pulls the curtain on her curatorial process and, with her signature on-stage charisma, takes a revealing look at how her shows go about the incredible balancing act of being both beacons of the bleeding edge of design and an approachable education platform for instilling in the general public a basic understanding of the fundamental importance of design — something she describes as “push[ing] design down from the realm of art and up from the realm of decoration and prettification into real life.”

via openculture.com