Jackie Danicki

My friend (and beauty blog co-editor) Hillary Johnson is working a new gig right now, helping a hardware start-up manage its considerable IP. What’s that mean?

My job, right now, is to attempt to build up a methodology that can support an inventor’s native processes, to get the inventor’s creative output to stream into the work flow of the company, without inadvertently creating a dam.

The challenge is to avoid the kind of soul-killing “project management” approach that most companies use to impose order on chaotic processes. Did Tolstoy take a “project management” approach to writing novels? I hardly think so. I want to create a structure in which creative thinkers can effectively communicate their ideas without imposing any kind of conformity on the ideas or the process of generating them. (Hint: Will the end product look a lot like a blog? It just might.)

Facts about Hillary:

She is a high school dropout, and doesn’t buy the ‘kids need school to learn social skills’ line (neither do I)
She has a degree in English and Psychology
She has taught at UCLA (creative writing and sailing courses)
She lives on a boat
She is a great road trip partner
She has written 124 articles for the Los Angeles Times, plus many for Inc, Worth, and Equity, including a biography of her secondhand Chanel suit
She used to live in India - not in a ‘finding herself’ way, but among Indian entrepreneurs in Nehru’s closed economy
She’s written a bunch of novels, starting in her early 20s
While editor-in-chief of a newspaper (the Ventura County Reporter), she scouted the Target employee who helped her with a camera purchase and hired him as a photographer, thus propelling him to photography awards and an actual career doing what he loves
You should read what she just wrote on net ‘neutrality’

Filed under: Life