Matthew May - Featured Speaker

Meet Matt
 
You can call me Matt. I'm a blogger for the American Express OPEN Forum Ideas Hub which I reprint here. I've written three books, with the fourth, The Laws of Subtraction, coming out in a few months. I run a small creativity coaching agency called Edit Innovation (formerly Shibumi Creative Works).

I spent 8 years as an independent advisor to the U.S. corporate headquarters of Toyota. It changed my outlook on work and life. I learned how to learn and solve problems. I learned to "think lean". I learned the power of less. I took those lessons on the road to other organizations. Now I write, speak and coach others on creativity, innovation and design strategy. 

Why Subtraction?

Lao Tzu said: "To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day."

When you remove just the right thing in just the right way, something good happens. That's my go-to philosophy, and this blog is dedicated to sharing it along with all the amazing things that amazing people are doing to improve the world by waging "war on more" through subtracting from our collective experience anything obviously excessive, wasteful, complicated, unnatural, hazardous, hard to use or ugly. Or better yet, refraining from adding those things in the first place!

Matthew E. May, MBA will be presenting session 302: Laws of Subtraction: 7 Rules for Getting More and Using Less and the 2012 AAMSE Annual Conference in Los Angeles.