Several of our Most Creative People have made news since our list came out in June: Jon Rubinstein (No. 9) was named CEO of Palm; W!ldbrain CEO Charles Rivkin (No. 56) was nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to France; Zaha Hadid (No. 68) won a competition to design Cairo Expo City; and New York's High Line park, with plantings by Piet Oudolf (No. 76), opened to enthusiastic reviews. Still, there has been controversy about our choices: Some readers offered their own candidates -- including Indian carmaker Ratan Tata -- and a few attacked our decisions.
Great article ("The 100 Most Creative People in Business," June), but I must comment on the sentence "There are no rules about creativity." That ignores 50 years of research and development in deliberate creativity. There are many processes taught across the world, including one profiled in "Intelligent Design" in the same issue. I am an alum of the world's first master of science pro-gram in creative studies at Buffalo State College. It was founded by Sid Parnes who, with Alex Osborn of BBD&O, developed in the mid-1950s the rules to what we all call brainstorming. I agree that creative business leaders are not easily categorized. How about: Creativity knows no bounds?
Anthony G. Billoni
Buffalo, New York
I'm truly delighted about your No. 1 pick for "The 100 Most Creative People in Busi-ness." I think Jonathan Ive deserves much more atten-tion than he's garnered, not only for his specific role at Apple, but for the overall impact of his design credo and Apple's democratization of design. Thank you for your continued focus on design.
José Fernando Vázquez-Pérez
San Juan, Puerto Rico<
Your article about creative people is the latest among far too many that seem to imply that the only things of importance to American business are innovation, creativity, IT, finance, and entrepreneurship. Sometime over the past quarter century, Americans stopped caring about manufacturing (making things) and running firms effectively and efficiently, and instead became infatuated with innovation. As a result, we have been treated to end-less articles in business magazines, such as yours, worshipping at the altar of innovation and creativity. Economies grow and become rich because they make things and manage their businesses better than others. Creativity and innovation are important but not sufficient in and of themselves. I would urge you to spend a little more time talking about manufacturing and management of real companies.
Mark Sullivan
Rochester Hills, Michigan
Thank you for including Humanscale's new Diffrient World Chair in the June issue's "In the Hot Seat" article. Unfortunately, the article gives Fast Company readers an inaccurate representation of our chair. When we delivered the chairs to your office, only the fixed-arm version was available. One reviewer's comment that "the armrests are annoyingly low, and I had trouble fig-uring out how to adjust them" sug-gests that the armrests were adjustable but difficult to use. Had we been able to supply our adjustable-arm version, the reviewer would have found them incredibly easy to adjust.
Tom Revelle, Humanscale
New York, New York
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