Recommended Reading

A Whack on the Side of the Head

Roger von Oech

This is the 25th anniversary edition of the creativity classic, A Whack on the Side of the Head, and is fully illustrated and filled with even more provocative puzzles, anecdotes, exercises, metaphors, cartoons, questions, quotations, stories, and tips designed to systematically break through your mental blocks and unlock your mind for creative thinking.

The Creative Habit

Twyla Tharp

Whether you are a painter, musician, businessperson, or simply an individual yearning to put your creativity to use, The Creative Habit provides you with thirty-two practical exercises. Tharp leads you through the painful first steps of scratching for ideas, finding the spine of your work, and getting out of ruts and into productive grooves.

How to have Kick Ass Ideas

Chris Barez-Brown

This book is chock-full of practical and inspirational ways to help you jump-start your creativity, identify what you want in life, and then make it happen. Chris Baréz-Brown pours his best techniques into a book that reunites you with the imaginative genius inside you. It’s about fun, freshness, and new ways of thinking, filling your life with new experiences, and then getting playful.

Mavericks at Work

Taylor & LaBarre

With respect to Mavericks, the book reflects our in-depth access to the 32 companies featured in the book.  It’s a report from the front lines of the future of business. It is not a book of best practices. It is a book of next practices—a set of insights and a collection of case studies that amount to a business plan for the 21st century, a new way to lead, compete, and succeed.

Out of Our Minds

Ken Robinson

Ken Robinson argues that organizations everywhere are trying to fix a problem that originates in schools and universities. Many people leave education with no idea what their creative abilities and strengths are. In a powerful and original way, he says why this is and what organizations and individuals can do immediately to recover their creative talents.

The Way of Innovation

Kaihan Krippendorff

Inside The Way of Innovation, corporate strategist Kaihan Krippendorff explains how you can adapt and thrive by recognizing, understanding, and utilizing the ancient Asian approach to innovation. He illustrates how companies like Microsoft and Nokia use this powerful wisdom, and how you too can pass through the five stages of innovation. With this book, you have the ancient strategies you need to lead the way to a more productive – and profitable – future.

Leading the Revolution

Gary Hamel

Leading the Revolution is not a calm analysis of what will or won’t work in a post-industrial world. Instead, it’s an impassioned call for revolutionary activists to shake the foundations of their companies’ beliefs and move from a linear age of getting better, smarter, and faster, to a nonlinear age of becoming different. While in the past incremental improvements in products and services were accepted as good enough, Hamel shows that true innovation is the demolition and re-creation of an entire business concept.

The Rise of the Creative Class

Richard Florida

The Rise of the Creative Class gives us a provocative new way to think about why we live as we do today – and where we might be headed. In a book that weaves story-telling with a massive body of research, Richard Florida traces the fundamental theme that runs through a host of seemingly unrelated changes in American society: the growing role of creativity in our economy.

A Whole New Mind

Daniel Pink

Gone is the age of “left-brain” dominance. The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: designers, inventors, teachers, storytellers – creative and emphatic “right-brain” thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn’t. Drawing on research from around the advanced world. Daniel Pink outlines the six fundamentally human abilities that are essential for professional success and personal fulfillment – and reveals how to master them.

Coaching the Artist Within

Eric Maisel

Coaching the Artist Within is the first book to explain the techniques that creativity coaches use to help their clients survive and thrive in the arts. Designed to help any person become more creative, this book offers a complete program for developing the habits that make creating an everyday routing. The book’s twelve lessons and numerous exercises are at once inspiring, practical and fun.

Stimulated!

Pek & McGlade

Stimulated! is an energetic exploration of five habits that can help you release your creativity and expand your innovative thinking. The method is playful, fun, enriching, and mind-expanding, but most important, it’s a step-by-stop process for getting unstuck.

Jamming

John Kao

To survive and triumph in today’s marketplace, all organizations-airlines, accounting firms, show manufacturers, software developers-must make creativity their number one priority.  Kao shows how businesses can accomplish this.  Using the jazz jamming session as a brilliant metaphor, Kao explains how creativity has both a vocabulary and a grammar.  Jamming shows that stimulating creativity is a process that can be observed, analyzed, understood, replicated, taught and managed. 

Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Drawing on nearly one hundred interviews with creative people in every field and thirty years of research on the subject of creativity, Professor Csikszentmihalyi uses his famous “flow” theory to explain the creative process and show how creativity enrich all of us.

Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques

Michael Michalko

Creativity expert Michael Michalko reveals life-changing tools that will help you think like a genius. From the linear to the intuitive, this comprehensive handbook details ingenious creative-thinking techniques for approaching problems in unconventional ways. Through fun and thought-provoking exercises, you’ll learn how to create original ideas that will improve your personal life and business life. Michalko’s techniques show you how to look at the same information as everyone else and see something different.

The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm

Tom Kelley

The Art of Innovation really teaches indirectly (not to mention enlightens and entertains) by telling great stories—mainly, of how the best ideas for creating or improving products or processes come not from laboriously organized focus groups, but from keen observations of how regular people work and play on a daily basis. On nearly every page, we learn the backstories of some now-well-established consumer goods, from recent inventions like the Palm Pilot and the in-car beverage holder to things we nearly take for granted—like Ivory soap and Kleenex. Best of all, Kelley opens wide the doors to IDEO’s vibrant, sometimes wacky office environment.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Daniel H. Pink

According to Pink (A Whole New Mind), everything we think we know about what motivates us is wrong. He pits the latest scientific discoveries about the mind against the outmoded wisdom that claims people can only be motivated by the hope of gain and the fear of loss. Pink cites a dizzying number of studies revealing that carrot and stick can actually significantly reduce the ability of workers to produce creative solutions to problems. What motivates us once our basic survival needs are met is the ability to grow and develop, to realize our fullest potential.

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

Seth Godin

A linchpin, as Seth describes it, is somebody in an organization who is indispensable, who cannot be replaced—her role is just far too unique and valuable. And then he goes on to say, well, seriously folks, you need to be one of these people, you really do. To not be one is economic and career suicide.

Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step

Edward De Bono

“The underlying argument of the book is that there are two kinds of thinking – vertical and lateral. Most of us are educated to think vertically, to go from one logical step to the next, moving all the time towards the one correct solution of our problem. We are not usually educated to be creative, to generate idea after idea…