How to manage the innovative spirit

"Conference rooms are where ideas go to die." That was among the not-dead ideas that came out of author Steven Johnson's mouth last week, when Tom Weber interviewed him at the Guthrie Theater for Bush Connect.

Johnson researches and writes about innovation and technology; his books include the 2005 hit "Everything Bad is Good for You." His latest book is "Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation." He's also the host of an upcoming PBS/BBC series, "How We Got to Now," which will debut later this year.

His conversation with Weber ranged far afield from office design, covering management style, the nature of innovation and creative thought.

"I don't speak as an expert here, because as my father likes to say, I've never had a real job," he said. "I keep this document, I call it the Spark File, where I write down every single random idea that I have for anything in one document. So it's an idea for a Web startup, it's an idea for a book, it's a magazine article, it's a lecture, whatever it is ... I write it down.

"I've been keeping it for seven years. It's now 65,000 words long, and ... I try and reread it every six months or so. Because what you find is, the idea you had in 2008 that made no sense in 2008 makes a lot of sense in 2014."

Such an approach, he said, also "gives you some way of measuring the uptake of your ideas in [your] organization, which might help you understand whether you should stay or go."

The Daily Circuit airs Johnson's conversation with Weber.