Creativity is a strange beast. Pursuing creativity involves a paradox: seeking creativity seems to be self-defeating as the creative urge is often regarded to arrive when you least expect it. I recently encountered this paradox while working with organizational narratives. The storytellers of one organization both yearned for a more creative time they had enjoyed in the past, when they were active participants in a future yet unmade. Yet this longing for past glories is a contradiction, escaping the creative urge.

The album Kind of Blue by Miles Davis is one of those creative legends. It has been canonized as the jazz album that best captures the momentary creative urge. Ashley Kahn has written an informative book about it which I am in the midst of reading. The only musician from these sessions still alive, Jimmy Cobb maintains that "it was just another session for us back then", which I find plausible. Creativity hits you when you're ready, but not when you expect it.

A jazz metaphor I have found useful lately is the notion of "groove" or a "pocket". In organizational life, often a fruitful tension must be found between freedom and structure, for instance between individual disgression and official policy. In storytelling, for instance, one needs a certain amount of coherence, yet individual voices should not be smothered. In organizational culture, an "integrated enough" culture is needed, yet not a monolithic one. In jazz, there are "tight grooves" and "loose grooves", characteristics of individuals and subgenres. Similarly, in organizational life, the official policy and an individual need to negotiate between tightness and looseness.

Two very intensive weeks. Some colleagues/friends from abroad with whom I had wanted to work with for quite some time visited my team in Finland and we did a strategy storytelling workshop with an international group of dedicated management practitioners. I find myself energized, refreshed after seeing this group work.

This extra energy paid of as I facilitated a two-day workshop on organizational culture with a group of eMBA -students in Oulu this week. Having watched my friends work with their facilitation techniques gave me a bunch of new ideas and I had a really great MBA group to try new ideas with. These people were willing to appreciate contradictions and paradoxes in management literature and we could look at culture phenomena from multiple angles and appreciate the differences and tensions.

For some reason, I find myself really abhorring the tendency to make syntheses out of things nowadays. I seem to relish conflicts and struggles.

I am faced with a learning challenge: next autumn I am going to have to be able to speak Swedish on an everyday basis at work. The humiliation involved in speaking a language I practically have not spoken since high school will probably do me good.
Have been reading "The Club Dumas" by Arturo Perez-Reverte. Many of us know the movie "The Ninth Gate", directed by Roman Polanski. The movie is one of my favorites, and the movie follows the book quite closely. Still, it's been an enjoyable read, as the author has a very entertaining way to build on anecdotes from classical literature and mythology. He also introduces enticing details about book-collecting. Besides, the book shows what a great actor Johnny Depp is. His performance is a virtuoso portrayal of Johnny Corso, the cynical book hunter, a true antihero.

We spent Easter on the seashore. No signs of spring yet, except for birdsong. The sea still covered with ice with little sun.

Somehow I find this kind of experience of nature the most rewarding one. The bleak desolation really reminds one how there are no narratives in nature. Desolation resists sensemaking. The world is just there, not to support a wealth of plant- and animal life, or idiots on waterscoorers.



Finished reading Tuulen Varjo (The Shadow of the Wind) by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. An enjoyable romantic horror story, which was really a description of the upheavals in Spain during and after the civil war. Despite this, they key insight I found in the book was the expectation that we all seem to have about people existing for us. Fathers do horrible things to children, because the children fail to do what is expected of them, fail to fulfill their parents' dreams.

Blogging is strangely like an old senile man sitting in a corner of a crowded room, talking endlessly to himself. There is the same tragic element of wanting to be heard, and the remote possibility of that actually happening.


There was a teutonic shift in my value system yesterday when I surprised my self by bying the new album Ringleader of the Tormentors by the brit pop grand old man Morrissey. For as long as I can remember, I have hated brit pop in general, and Morrissey in particular. It represents non-musical singing and campfire-type guitar playing at its worst. However, a the phrase

And I just want to

I want to see the boy happy

With his arms around his first love
Is that too much to ask

kind of caught me off guard. I downloaded the album from iTunes and find that all of a sudden, I could relate to the music, brit pop and all.



It's funny how musical tastes develop. My taste usually works by accepting a foreign element when it's presented among familiar elements. For instance, my introduction to jazz, my current greatest musical love was through prog rock, my greatest musical love when I was in my teens. The drummer of both Yes and King Crimson, Bill Bruford is basically a jazz drummer, and his first solo album, Feels Good to Me - still a brilliant album after all these years - seemed to present many of prog rock's finest elements in the context of a jazz fusion album. When I had gotten used to the sound of the album, I started to introduce myself to the Biches Brew -era Miles Davis and slowly started my journey into jazz.



I guess the brit pop thing is the fault of a terrific neo-prog rock group called Porcupine Tree, the music of which I have listened to quite a bit lately. Their masterpiece In Absentia integrates heavy metal, prog rock and melancholy brit pop into a strange soup.

The problem with Morrissey is that there is less and less music that I hate. This is a problem, as I have always valued disidentification as a nice way to build one's identity. We are who we are by knowing who we dis.

Sunday night, while jogging in the rain, I was pleasantly surprised by my iPod, which started the evening random playlist with the song "Eagle fly free" by the teutonic heavy metal of Helloween. The band and the song were among the favorites of my early teenage years. For the first time, I noticed that the drummer in the band was actually quite good. The double-bass drum -driven assault was fluid and all over the set, and there was actually a groove, which is by no means a given in such a context.


I seemed to remember that the drummer had later killed himself. A curious association to one of my childhood friends, a great fan of the band and song at the same time. We lost touch in our later teens, me taking the beaten path to academic studies, him choosing a life of drugs. Last year I saw his obituary in Helsingin Sanomat. I still don't know what happened to him.

There is a curious and sad triangle between the dead drummer, the song and my friend wandering off the beaten path. The bridge and chorus of the song are the following:


In the sky a mighty eagle
Doesn’t care ’bout what’s illegal
On it’s wings the rainbow’s light
It’s flying to eternity

Eagle fly free
Let people see
Just make it your own way
Leave time behind
Follow the sign
Together we’ll fly someday

I thought that I would not have the time to write a blog. Maybe I don't. We'll see.

The reason I decided to try this is that I have noticed that I occasionally enjoy reading people's blogs. When I am bored, I sometimes check a blog written by a famous person whose work I enjoy, like (the guitarist) Robert Fripp's long-running weblog, or (fantasy author) George R.R. Martin's new blog. Writing a blog of my own from this basis would not be such a good idea, as I am not famous, but recently I have found that I enjoy readind blogs written by acquantainces such as the blog written by Ola Rinta-Koski, an old bandmate who moved to Australia and seems to enjoy a fabulous existence down under.

The thing I enjoy in blogs are not so much the little things from mundane existence but reading the thoughts of another person regarding some little thing or the other.

I'n going to give myself some ground rules. This blog is going to be about thoughts of things small and big. I am not going to discuss doing the laundry as something profoundly interesting. Yet if I have thoughts while doing the laundry, that's another story. I am not going to discuss details of my personal life: at least not the sort of things that would enable somebody to rob my house while I am away or cause embarrassment to a loved one. So while family life for instance does constitute a significant portion of my daily existence, I am not going to discuss it here.