The Medici Effect

The author of this volume (written for a business audience) believes that it is possible to recreate this type of explosion by finding the "intersectional" ideas that cross between disciplines and cultures. By "stepping into the Intersection," entrepreneurs and others can find the innovative ideas that can lead to the "Medici Effect."

Reading one of the book's chapters every morning before going to work (best over morning coffee, and instead of the sports or cooking page) should be the compulsory task for all executives -- especially those in a supervisory role.

For the first time in many, many years an author embarked upon the quest of promoting the concept of a generalist as the pillar of creativity, arguing that broad education and intellectual curiosity, combined with open mind and acceptance of diversity, not as a politically correct and entirely meaningless term, but as the essential constituent of life, are the critical prerogatives for breakthrough innovation.

Johansson took upon himself the task of demonstrating the almost desperate need for the return to what universities have largely abandoned: development of minds equipped with broad multi-disciplinary knowledge, and capable of multi-spectral intellectual curiosity and insight -- instead of the vigorous mass production of bachelor, master, and doctor experts in extraordinarily narrow sub-fragments of their disciplines of choice.

This book speaks to any reader, independently of his/her level of formal education. It also quite poignantly exposes the deficiencies of today's academic training that often fails to endow graduates with the gift of non-dogmatic and broadely educated mind.

The underlying notions of this book should be accepted and promoted with persistence. It is a book to which all should return when satisfaction with the accepted credo, and the often trivial progress that such dogma typically imposees, become the most attractive attributes of their professional lives.