Umbrex is pleased to welcome Gerardo Alvarez-Franyutti with Alfatti. Gerardo Alvarez-Franyutti started Alfatti in 2018, an advisory network focused on strategy, creativity and maximizing potential across international markets. Previous to this he was a VP at Orbia, an industrial multinational. Earlier in his career he worked at Egon Zehnder, Microsoft, McKinsey and Procter & Gamble in the US, Europe and Latin America….

Kaihan Krippendorff shares an article that draws from a Harvard study on the three areas of the brain responsible for creativity and how technology and human creativity will collaborate in the future. In 2018, a famous Harvard study sought to understand which parts of the brain are responsible for creativity. Creativity, as defined in the study, is “the ability to come up with new and useful ideas.” To test it, researchers hooked participants up to fMRI scanners and had them…

Most people value creativity, but only one out of four feel they’re living up to their own creative potential. Fostering creativity in your business brings many benefits, professionally and personally. So says consultant and brand strategist Susan Meier, who led a virtual workshop on creativity in brand-building for Umbrex and Veritux women’s groups in April. Meier, who runs Susan Meier Studio where she acts as a brand consultant and conducts workshops on the topic, says that fostering your own creativity…

  Susan Hamilton unlocks the beautiful paradox hidden in the boundaries that constrain us, whether physical, intellectual, or emotional, and reveals a few obstacles that have stimulated creativity.  At the moment, many of us are encountering more constraints than we have ever experienced in our lifetimes. Options and freedoms of all kinds are limited. Your summer vacation plans? Canceled. Back to school in the fall? Not so sure. Even a simple trip to the grocery store has become a somewhat…

  In a recent interview on The Transformative Leader Podcast, Susan Meier discusses the importance of integrating creativity at work even, and especially, in jobs not traditionally considered creative. I always had these two very strong, for a long time, parallel and separate tracks of things that I was interested in. I was always interested in the arts, both in making art and studying the history of art, and then I was also really captivated by the problem solving analytical…

  Recently, there has been much discussion about the value of play for helping creative ideas flourish, but Kaihan Krippendorff shares examples of play at work and provides 10 ways to inject play into your organization.  In the 1830s, an artist and tinkerer, Samuel Morse, directed his curiosity to a question few had considered before. Numerous scientists and inventors across the globe were working on the problem of how to communicate across long distances more quickly. At the time, information…