Creativity Books - Page 3

A Technique for Producing Ideas (Advertising Age Classics Library)

James Young

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

straight to the point, somewhat perceivable 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I really enjoyed reading this book. Although a bit too short, James Webb Young succeeds in clarifying the creative process with common wisdom. It will be helpful for almost anyone, but especially to those in the creative field.

Personally I have been using the same thought process for a couple of years now, but without paying the appropriate attention to detail in every single step of it.

Overall an easy to digest recommended reading.

Savvas S.

A Mere Outline of Common Idea Producing Themes 2 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

There are common themes among idea producing books that cover all aspects of developing the necessary state of mind to produce valuable ideas. Bernbach covers the basics in this book but offers little else. At best this book represents an outline of the common themes, and at worst is it a 20 page book stretched into 47 pages (very large font, small book, less than 20 lines per page - likely 15-20 pages for standard sizes).

I rate this book as a two instead of a one as it does momentarily capture the essence of idea production in the following statements:

"An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements."

"The capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships."

"The habit of the mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts becomes the highest importance of the production of ideas."

Beyond these quotes the book encompasses little else other than a three page chapter about taking action. I sincerely believe that if you understand the above quotations as well as the notion that once you have the idea, you have to actually use the idea for it to have value, then you already know everything this book has to offer.

I highly recommend much better material on the subject found in "How to Get Ideas" by Jack Foster; a book that will not disappoint you as it is laced with real world examples, applications, and exercises to produce countless ideas.

Editorial Review:

A McGraw-Hill Advertising Classic

A Technique for Producing Ideas reveals a simple, sensible idea-generation methodology that has stood the test of time.

First presented to students in 1939, published in 1965, and now reissued for a new generation of advertising professionals and others looking to jump-start their creative juices, this powerful guide details a five-step process for gathering information, stimulating imagination, and recombining old elements into dramatic new ideas.

The New Creative Artist

Nita Leland

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 21 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Definitely Creative! 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This book will get any creative body with a block back into their creative hobby. She gives so many great ideas, like that you should write down all the great creative ideas you think of and put them in to a jar. That way, whenever you can't think of something to get your creative juices flowing, just grab your jar and do whatever the piece of paper says!

On a sidenote: I also love that the binding is ring - so that you can fold the book flat and not worry about pages closing on you when you are trying out something new - but that it is also protected by a larger cover so the ring binder doesn't fall apart like they usually do - THANK YOU PUBLISHER!

Anyhow, great buy for any artist or artists' library - a book I will forever reference...I only wish that Leland explained more of the techniques behind rare art forms (but that would add a whole other book!).

Editorial Review:

This updated version of The Creative Artist breathes new life into a popular North Light classic, helping artists reach greater levels of creativity, inspiration and artistic fulfillment. Perfect for fans of the original--and anyone who wants to be more creative--this book includes:

-A fresh, eye-catching design that showcases 50 percent new material

-New instruction to address the creative challenges of today’s artist

-More than 60 fun, fabulous activities for achieving greater creativity

-Artwork in a wide variety of styles and mediums

Practical advice combined with inspiring exercises and insights from other artists make this the ultimate creativity guide!

Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration

Keith Sawyer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Leveraging the Genius of the Group 4 out of 5 stars.
7 of 7 people found this review helpful.

The path to becoming more innovative often requires debunking a number of myths or commonly held beliefs. For instance, the idea that a lone genius is often responsible for an invention or innovation. In fact, most innovations or inventions spring from the combination of the work of many people. Edison did not create the lightbulb alone, nor did Al Gore invent the internet by himself.

In his book, Group Genius, Keith Sawyer looks at the power of Group Genius, the impact of collaboration on creativity and innovation. Rather than rely on a single genius, we should be harnessing the power and knowledge of many people in our organizations. Through a number of interesting examples, Sawyer demonstrates how the power of collaboration increases the capability of the firm to generate more ideas and better ideas, and enhances the culture of innovation.

Sawyer starts off the book with a few characteristics of creative teams:

1. Innovation emerges over time
2. Successful collaborative teams practice deep listening
3. Team members build on their collaborators' ideas
4. The meaning of an idea becomes clear over time
5. Reframing the problem or solving a different problem
6. Recognizing that innovation is inefficient
7. Innovation emerges from the bottom up

Although he presents these ideas early on, they don't receive enough exposition throughout the book. These concepts alone, however, are enough to chew on for quite some time.

Sawyer divides the book into three sections, looking at how teams collaborate and how corporations collaborate. Yes, I know that's two sections. The third section is a little less defined and really looks at how we as individuals think and the mental models we use which provide frameworks which can limit our thinking and creativity.

In the first section, on team collaboration, Sawyer demonstrates the power of improvisation as a method to improve problem solving and innovation. His argument is that too many rules and too much planning tend to choke out creativity and innovative problem solving. He provides several examples where groups were faced with significant challenges and had to improvise solutions on the spot. While improvisation is often inefficient, it can lead to better ideas and better results in some cases. Sawyer also describes "flow" - a concept that originates from research by Csikszentmihalyi. Flow is a heightened state of consciousness that occurs when:

* People are working on tasks that match their skills
* There's a clear goal
* There's constant feedback as to progress and attainment of the goal
* The person is free to fully engage in the task

Research shows that "flow" is essential to creativity. Sawyer moves on to describe a number of conditions that need to exist for a team to achieve flow, using examples from sports teams to improv to major corporations.

In the second section, the Collaborative Mind, Sawyer looks at successful innovators and people who were highly creative and seeks to determine how they got that way, and how "regular" people like you and me can become more creative. In this section there are a number of exercises to help you start reframing problems and step away from your usual perspectives and context.

In the third section of the book, Sawyer looks at using the concepts of collaboration and group genius within an organization - how to organize for improved collaboration and innovation, how to build collaborative webs and how to collaborate with customers. In this section he offers some very useful ideas and approaches to use within any team or organization.

Group Genius is an excellent book, because it combines theory with practice and practical guidelines. Too often, books about innovation and creativity are written from a purely academic viewpoint, with a lot of research and theory described, but not much information on how to put the information into practice, or from a very tactical perspective, suggesting a few tips or techniques or offering up some simple exercises. Sawyer does a good job of demonstrating the thinking behind his suggestions, but also presenting a number of actions that a team or corporation can take to become more innovative by tapping the collaborative genius of a team or the company. He uses a lot of examples, from improv actors to large corporations, but always within context. The section on the Collaborative Mind is interesting but really more focused on the individual and his or her creative capability, while the sections on team and organizational collaboration are focused on how your teams, groups and business units can harness the power of collaboration to achieve more creativity, better problem solving and generate better ideas.

Some books about creativity are read once and filed on the shelf for occasional reference. Group Genius is a book that will be so dog-eared and so heavily used you may need more than one copy for your own use, and a number of copies for your co-workers as well. This is a book that can be used by an individual, a team or a business unit, with relevance for all of them. This book is my first introduction to Keith Sawyer's work, and I look forward to reading his other books after reading this one. I highly recommend it to anyone who is searching for ways to improve the collaboration, creativity or innovative capability of a team or company.

Reposted from an original review on the Innovate on Purpose Blog.

Editorial Review:

Creativity has long been thought to be an individual gift, best pursued alone; schools, organizations, and whole industries are built on this idea. But what if the most common beliefs about how creativity works are wrong? Group Genius tears down some of the most popular myths about creativity, revealing that creativity is always collaborative-even when you’re alone. Sharing the results of his own acclaimed research on jazz groups, theater ensembles, and conversation analysis, Keith Sawyer shows us how to be more creative in collaborative group settings, how to change organizational dynamics for the better, and how to tap into our own reserves of creativity.

The Creative Entrepreneur: A DIY Visual Guidebook for Making Business Ideas Real

Lisa Sonora Beam

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Common sense that pops! 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

I was skeptical. But, then I found that this book is a real motivator. Fun to read, fun to look at, but with a serious mission: how can business owners like me blend creativity and business success? The book goes on to answer that question.

Our small web company deals with the un-bending requirements of accounting/distribution systems with the softer, yet stronger, notions of creative presentation of products and company image. I am constantly looking for new inspiration, and this book has it.

I have already started my journal, and I have gleaned a couple of new ideas that I will use. I found it delightful to browse or to read chunks at one sitting, and it helped me look at my situation with a fresh point of view. I highly recommend it. I got a copy of the book for my son too.

Editorial Review:

The Creative Entrepreneur is a visual, results-oriented, step-by-step method of business development for creatives from all walks of life who want to turn their passions into viable business opportunities.

Whether you are and artist, designer, or small business owner, this book will empower you to renew and nurture your vision with the steps required to take an idea and make it real.

The Creative Entrepreneur offers a dynamic left brain/right brain approach to developing a business focus that evaluates underlying internal issues unique to creative types and shows how to practically address them.

You'll gain a combination of powerful business and strategic planning tools and learn how to use them like a pro. Related journal exercises further explore each concept in a visual and engaging way that appeals to how creative types think, learn and process information. Your journal becomes a companion and map for your creative business journey.

Art Journals and Creative Healing: Restoring the Spirit Through Self-Expression

Sharon Soneff

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A beautiful, artistic offering that offers projects on challenging, but universal subjects.

In follow up to Faith Books & Spiritual Journaling, author Sharon Soneff will continue to show that there is a richer, deeper reward to artistic, creative journals beyond the beauty they supply. In this new volume, Art Journals & Creative Healing, she demonstrates with real excerpts from beautiful and unusual artistic journals that the process of journaling can be a tool in navigating through some of lifeÆs more challenging seasons, as well as a tool to support personal growth and achievement. Challenging and complex experiences are treated with dignity and sensitivity, and will inspire readers dealing with their own issues, by placing the greater emphasis on the positive outcome that was yielded for the artist who is willing to be vulnerable in the process. Hope, growth, and healing are at the center of each work, and help deliver the message of the book.

Additionally, the ideas, artistic approaches, and resources provided by the author and numerous contributing artists will help the reader with creative ideas for working through various situations through their reflective and artistic journal keeping. Through a marriage of beautiful imagery, uplifting and literary quotations, and other rich sources, Art Journals & Creative Healing offers its audience a full-bodied experience pertaining to creative journals, along with journaling worksheets and journal prompts to help readers get started with their own journals. Specific topics to be addressed would include using mediums as metaphors, journaling for cathartic expression, gaining wisdom through introspection and reflection, finding strength in the midst of suffering, and finding beauty in pain. Art Journals & Creative Healing is a supportive and encouraging text offered as a creative companion of sorts for those traversing over the obstacles and overcoming the challenges of life.

Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

Frans Johansson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 38 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The Road to Systematic Innovation? 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

At first glance, "The Medici Effect" can seem like yet another quick-read business book that simply restates the obvious. The author's basic thesis is this: to spur innovation, we must bring people together from different backgrounds and disciplines.

Well, that seem true enough... Just visit Thomas Edison's complex at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, for an early example of this so-called "intersection of innovation." (Museum curators have done a fantastic job reconstructing his entire laboratory.)

What saves this book from the dust pile is the author's willingness to go beyond the easy answers. Brainstorming can often fail, says Johansson, and he spells out the most common pitfalls in great detail. Likewise, he says that building a culture of innovation must include both punishments and rewards for those involved -- even if those rewards are largely intangible. "Positive failure" is another powerful concept -- the idea that failure can be encouraged, managed and optimized for faster innovation.

Johansson illustrates his main point with a dozen or more entertaining anecdotes from a wide variety of fields, ranging from neurobiology at Brown University to video games to the restaurant business.

Along the way, he provides practical guidelines for team leaders and team members alike. Johansson knows that innovation isn't limited to PhD's in white lab coats or oddball geniuses with bad teeth. All of us are capable of (at least contributing to) breakthrough innovations, given the right support system and organizational attitude.

Of all the concepts Johansson presents, I found his section on "associative barriers" to be the most interesting. Here's a quick summary: As we become more knowledgeable about a particular field, we also begin to limit our cognitive freedom to make strange, unpredictable associations. For example, if I say "police," most people would associate that word with things like crime, violence, jail, justice or lawbreakers. Relatively few would jump to other associations, such as childhood disease or solar energy. By breaking down these associative barriers, we can see new connections and find new solutions to seemingly intractable problems.

If you don't have time to read the entire book (short as it is), I strongly recommend this section. The Medicis would certainly approve.

Editorial Review:

Why do so many world-changing insights come from people with little or no related experience? Charles Darwin was a geologist when he proposed the theory of evolution. And it was an astronomer who finally explained what happened to the dinosaurs.

Frans Johansson’s The Medici Effect shows how breakthrough ideas most often occur when we bring concepts from one field into a new, unfamiliar territory, and offers examples how we can turn the ideas we discover into path-breaking innovations.

Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step (Perennial Library)

Edward De Bono

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Sort of interesting - great primer for an IQ or SAT test! 3 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Well, I have to admit I was a bit disappointed, but maybe that's just from erroneous expectations. I'm an artist & designer, and a graphic designer I admire had this on his list of the most important books he'd read, and that was my motivation to pick it up.

My conclusion is that this is a great book for non-'Creative' types (not to mean that they're not creative, just that they're not in a 'Creative' field such as the arts) such as scientists and engineers, who are looking to round out their thought process, or young adults in jr. high or high school who are exploring the nature of creativity.

It is intriguing to hear someone dissect the creative process in a cold, calculating, scientific sort of way, and de Bono does this job quite well without coming off as too fatuous (a common fate in that endeavor it seems).

Ultimately though, the creative thinking de Bono discusses is a very specific and fairly limited type, namely problem-solving. It's telling that almost all of the examples & figures he gives are geometric puzzle-solving. This would be a great book to read right before you take a IQ or SAT test.

Editorial Review:

The seminal book that introduced a new way of reasoning and decision making. "Dr. de Bono does not claim to be able to turn us all into Miltons, Da Vincis, and Einsteins. . . . The Muse never appears to most of us--hence the value of this book."--Times Educational Supplement

Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity

David W. Galenson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

When in their lives do great artists produce their greatest art? Do they strive for creative perfection throughout decades of painstaking and frustrating experimentation, or do they achieve it confidently and decisively, through meticulous planning that yields masterpieces early in their lives?

By examining the careers not only of great painters but also of important sculptors, poets, novelists, and movie directors, Old Masters and Young Geniuses offers a profound new understanding of artistic creativity. Using a wide range of evidence, David Galenson demonstrates that there are two fundamentally different approaches to innovation, and that each is associated with a distinct pattern of discovery over a lifetime.

Experimental innovators work by trial and error, and arrive at their major contributions gradually, late in life. In contrast, conceptual innovators make sudden breakthroughs by formulating new ideas, usually at an early age. Galenson shows why such artists as Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Cézanne, Jackson Pollock, Virginia Woolf, Robert Frost, and Alfred Hitchcock were experimental old masters, and why Vermeer, van Gogh, Picasso, Herman Melville, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, and Orson Welles were conceptual young geniuses. He also explains how this changes our understanding of art and its past.

Experimental innovators seek, and conceptual innovators find. By illuminating the differences between them, this pioneering book provides vivid new insights into the mysterious processes of human creativity.

Think!: Why Crucial Decisions Can't Be Made in the Blink of an Eye

Michael R. LeGault

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Total reviews: 73 Average rating: 2.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Outraged by the downward spiral of intellect and culture, Michael LeGault offers the flip side of Malcolm Gladwell's bestselling phenomenon, "Blink", which theorized that our best decision-making is done on impulse, without factual knowledge or critical analysis. If bestselling books are advising us to not think, LeGault argues, it comes as no surprise that sharp, incisive reasoning has become a lost art in the daily life of people everywhere. Somewhere along the line, the Age of Reason morphed into the Age of Emotion; this systemic erosion is costing time, money, jobs, and lives in the twenty-first century, leading to less fulfilment and growing dysfunction. LeGault provides a bold, controversial, and objective analysis of the causes and solutions for some of the biggest problems facing Western culture in the 21st century. From the over- load of reality TV shows and gossip magazines that have rendered curiosity of the mind and spirit obsolete to permissive parenting and low standards that have caused an academic crisis among our children, LeGault looks at all aspects of modern lives and points to how and where it all went wrong.

Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance

Julia Cameron

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Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Disappointing Sequel 2 out of 5 stars.
15 of 15 people found this review helpful.

I agree that Ms. Cameron's current book sounds more like a cry for help than words of advice. After a life-changing experience of "The Artist's Way" for me and others, the exercises provided in "Finding Water" seem more rote and mechanical than truly enlightening. While there is some artistic merit to the book, I found it to be more of a disappointment than a true creative inspirational piece. A group of friends who formed because of "The Artist's Way" have read the book as a group and have found it to be a big disappointment.

Editorial Review:

This third book in Julia Cameron's bestselling trilogy on the creative process-beginning with The Artist's Way and Walking in This World-offers guidance on weathering the periods in an artist's life when inspiration appears to have run dry.

Julia Cameron presents a new twelve-week program for addressing those periods in an artist's life when inspiration is lacking. Finding Water offers advice and wisdom about tackling the most challenging issues an artist faces, such as:

- making the decision to begin a new project; - persevering when a new approach to your art does not bear immediate fruit; - staying focused when other parts of your life threaten to distract you from your art; and - spotting possibilities for artistic inspiration in the most unlikely places.

This powerful new installment in Cameron's groundbreaking body of work on the creative process will guide readers to discover enduring inspiration-it will lead them to water.