What Improv Can Teach Us About Creation, Collaboration, and Communication with Tom Yorton
The Unmistakable Creative Podcast
Srinivas Rao
4.8 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 23 March 2015
⏱️ 56 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode of the podcast, Tom Yorton, CEO of SecondCity Works, Chicago’s world renown improv theater whose alumni include Steven Colbert, Tina Fey and many other high profile comedians talks about what the world of improv can teach us about creation, communication and collaboration.
- Finding different ways to connect with an audience
- The role that music played in Tom’s career
- Redeveloping curiosity and tolerance for risk
- Why the resume building approach to education hurts kids
- Developing adaptive skills and becoming an agile learner
- Finding the through line of your career
- Using humor as a way to get to the truth
- Applying the improviser’s tool kit to your work
- Key concepts from improv that allow you to communicate, create and collaborate more effectively
Quotes
Life is a series of happy accidents if you want to look it that way.
Resources
3 Improv Exercises That Can Change The Way Your Team Works
As CEO of Second City Communications, Tom Yorton is creating a positive, disruptive force that changes how people communicate, collaborate and learn in the business world. His work is guided by a fundamental assumption: Business is an act of improvisation. Through comedy, his organization brings sorely needed humanity and authenticity to work environments by challenging unproductive conventions in marketing, learning, business development, and internal communications.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Second City is very well known for alums from you know the Tina phase and Stephen Colbert's and Steve Corrals to |
| 0:07.8 | Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Martin Short, you know the list goes on and on and on. |
| 0:13.5 | And literally, you know, dozens, if not hundreds of high profile people have gone on to |
| 0:18.1 | individual stardom and fame and what's interesting about it is they learned everything that they learned in the context of an ensemble. |
| 0:26.0 | So I love that model too that you can commit to an ensemble and commit to those around you yet still achieve individual |
| 0:38.2 | accolades and individual focus. And I think often in business it's seen as a zero-sum game if I if I you know going for the team I am risking my own individual |
| 0:50.3 | start on or my own individual opportunity and I think our place is such a perfect example of how you can blend both and if you really truly commit to the ensemble |
| 1:00.0 | the best ensemble players can go on to amazing things. |
| 1:04.0 | I'm Sreni Rao and this is the unmistakable creative |
| 1:11.0 | podcast where you get a window into the stories and |
| 1:13.4 | insights of the most innovative and creative minds who started movements, built |
| 1:17.2 | thriving businesses, written best-selling books, and created insanely interesting art. |
| 1:21.4 | For more, check out our 500 episode archive |
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... |
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