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Are you creative? Would you like to be? Why? Don’t creative people just cause trouble? If you’re still game…. Creativity is exciting, but also demanding, consuming, frustrating, and addicting. Creativity is inspiring, but also fickle, erratic, tricky, and risky. Creativity can be found anywhere, at home or work as easily as in art or science. It can erupt suddenly, or emerge slowly. The study of creativity combines sweeping theories, fascinating stories, clever experiments, and personal confessions.

Participants:  Cannell, Csikszentmihaly, Freeman, Kao, Kurzweil

Stephen J. Cannell is the most prolific producer and writer in television, having created or co-created 40 network television series, including The Rockford Files, Baretta, The A-Team, and Silk Stalkings, produced over 1000 hours of television, and personally written over 400 episodes. His production company, Stephen J. Cannell Productions, was the third largest studio in television productions. He is currently a major novelist, with six national best sellers to his credit. Remarkably, Steve is dyslexic, which he talks about openly and honestly.

Mihaly Csikszentmihaly is considered the leading academic authority on both creativity and happiness. He has been professor and head of the department of psychology at the University of Chicago and now at the Claremont Graduate School. His books are world famous: FLOW: The Psychology of Optimum Experience, Finding Flow, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, and The Evolving Self.

Robert Freeman is recognized as one of the world’s leading music intellectuals, educators and public spokesman for music education. He is Dean of the School of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin, and has been chief executive of two major music schools, as President of The New England Conservatory of Music and as Director of the Eastman School of Music for 25 years.

John Kao is an authority in the intersecting fields of corporate creativity, new media and entrepreneurial management. Both a psychiatrist and Harvard MBA, he taught the creativity courses at Harvard and Stanford Business Schools for 14 years. He is a multi-talented entrepreneur, the author of many books on creativity, including Jamming: The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity, and is widely quoted in the business press.

Ray Kurzweil is a world-renowned inventor, computer scientist and best-selling author. He founded four technology companies based on his revolutionary inventions in artificial intelligence, including reading machines for the blind, speech recognition, and music synthesis. He has been awarded numerous prizes, including MIT’s Inventor of the Year. His two books, The Age of Intelligent Machines and The Age of Spiritual Machines, have sparked great interest and controversy.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn is the creator and host of the Closer To Truth television series and author of the Closer To Truth book. Trained in brain research (Ph.D. UCLA), he has published more than twenty books, including the Handbook for Creative and Innovative Managers and the seven-volume Library of Investment Banking. He is the president of The Geneva Companies, a leading merger and acquisition firm for private, middle market businesses.

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