Let us balance your brain in 2012
Edward P. Salek, CAE, Executive Director | TLT Headquarters Report December 2011
STLE can provide the creative spark that leads to innovative thinking.
Evaluations from 500 technical professionals who have attended an STLE Webinar have been positive and enthusiastic.
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SOME CASUAL ONLINE READING RECENTLY lead me to a post by
Harvard Business Review blogger Tony Schwartz. He is a journalist, consultant and professional speaker whose 30-year career highlights include serving as the co-author of Donald Trump’s book
The Art of the Deal.
The blog post had the engaging title, “Four Destructive Myths Most Companies Still Live By.” Myth Number 3 grabbed my attention:
Creativity is genetically inherited, and it’s impossible to teach. Let me explain why the reality behind this myth makes a compelling statement about the value to be derived from STLE membership.
Schwartz seeks to debunk the “deeply ingrained belief that creativity is mostly inborn and magical” by citing the following evidence:
“Researchers have developed a surprising degree of consensus about the stages of creativity and how to approach them. Our educational system and most company cultures favor and reward the rational, analytic, deductive left hemisphere thinking. We pay scant attention to intentionally cultivating the more visual, intuitive, big picture capacities of the right hemisphere.
“As it turns out, the creative process moves back and forth between left and right hemisphere dominance. Creativity is actually about using the whole brain more flexibly. This process unfolds in a far more systematic—and teachable—way than we ordinarily imagine. People can quickly learn to access the hemisphere of the brain that serves them best at each stage of the creative process—and to generate truly original ideas.”
STLE is all about supporting your right brain capacity by providing an opportunity to discover the big picture of what’s happening in a given technical area or the entire field. Here are three prime examples:
TLT publishes a range of technical information, research, best practices and opinions each month in both paper and digital formats. A recent readership survey confirmed its long-standing position as STLE’s most valuable member benefit.
STLE’s Annual Meeting & Exhibition runs a very close second to TLT in terms of member value. Registration is now open for the 2012 meeting, May 6-10 in St. Louis, Missouri (USA). Preliminary program information is available at
www.stle.org, with the complete advance brochure to follow in January.
STLE University’s online Webinar series emerged in 2011 as a new and valuable education resource. We offered more than a dozen one-hour technical presentations this year and have an expanded program of 20 Webinars scheduled for 2012.
Evaluations provided by the more than 500 technical professionals who have attended a Webinar have been positive and enthusiastic. As one participant told us, “At a time when budgets are tight—but employers still need their technicians, chemists and product reps to be up to date on all the latest research and technology—these Webinars are the perfect answer!” If you missed any of these excellent presentations when they were presented live, just log on to the STLE Website and click on the STLE Store link to access the recordings.
Membership doesn’t come with a guarantee that we’ll make you more creative by balancing your brain. But we’ll do our best to serve as your source for a wide-ranging look at what’s happening in the field of tribology and lubricants. If blogger Schwartz is correct, STLE hopes to inspire our community of more than 15,000 people worldwide to be even more innovative in the coming year.
You can reach Certified Association Executive Ed Salek at esalek@stle.org.