Book Description
"Toyota is becoming a double threat: the world's finest manufacturer and a truly great innovator . . . that formula, a combination of production prowess and technical innovation, is an unbeatable recipe for success."
-- Fortune, February 2006
For the first time, an insider reveals the formula behind Toyota's unceasing quest to innovate and do more with less, a philosophy that has made it one of the ten most profitable companies in the world (and worth more than GM, Ford, DaimlerChrysler, and Honda combined). In a rare look into Toyota's ability to consistently achieve breakthroughs that outperform the competition, The Elegant Solution explains what Toyota associates have known all along: it's not about the cars. Rather, Toyota's astounding success is just the visible result of a hidden creative process that begins with a seven-digit number.
One million. That's how many new ideas the Toyota organization implements every year. These ideas come from every level of the organization -- from the factory floors to the corporate suites. And organizations all over the world want to learn how it's done. Now senior University of Toyota advisor Matthew May shows how any company can achieve an environment of everyday innovation and discover the kinds of elegant solutions that hold the power to change the game forever. World-class benchmarks like Lexus, Prius, Scion -- even Toyota's vaunted production system -- are simply shining examples of elegant solutions.
A tactical playbook for team-based innovation, The Elegant Solution delivers powerful lessons in breakthrough thinking in a provocative yet practical guide to the three core principles and ten key practices that shape successful business innovation. Innovation isn't just about technology -- it's about value, opportunity, and impact. When a company embeds a real discipline around tapping ingenuity in the pursuit of perfection, the sky is the limit. Dozens of case studies (from Toyota and other companies) illustrate the universal power and applicability of these concepts. A unique "clamshell strategy" prepares managers to successfully lead and sustain the innovation effort.
At once a thought-starter and a taskmaster, The Elegant Solution is a vital prescription for anyone wanting to truly master business innovation.
Customer Reviews:
Nice stories, little new content.......2007-08-27
I excepted a lot from the elegant solution. It has been recommended by a lot of persons as a must read. Honestly, I was dissapointed. It's still an good book, but didn't find it as "classic" as people had suggested to me.
"The elegant solution" is about tools for creating innovation on your job. These tools are based on Toyota's tools and practices. The book is devided in three parts. The first part sets three general principles. The second part, by far the largest, provides the tools for innovation, the practices. The last part talks about implementing these practices.
The three principles are "the art of ingenuity", "pursuit of perfection" and "rhythm of fit". They were interesting principles, but not really new or shocking. Sometimes I found them even a little too vague.
The practices range from "thinking in pictures" to "master the tension". Each chapter shortly states the practice and explains the key ideas. After that it uses stories to clarify the practice. Lot's of stories are from inside Toyota. Some stories related to Lance Armstrong, a little too many in my opinion and they were somewhat boring. Anyways, in general, the stories were what made the book interesting.
The third part didn't provide very much content.
In summary, I enjoyed the book, for the stories. I didn't find the practices new and the book didn't provided me with any new insight that other lean books did not provide. The book was written a little bit too much in a "popular style" which annoyed me.
Worth reading for the stories. When wanting to know more on lean or toyota I'd recommend other books like "Toyota way" or "Lean product and process development".
Good nuggets, lots of fluff, some really sloppy thinking.......2007-08-22
I came to this book via the Shampoo Problem that's been floating around the internet these past couple of weeks (which he published in his Change This manifesto). The puzzle is this - a high-end health club puts nice shampoo in their showers, but customers keep stealing it. How do you implement a solution that takes no time to implement, doesn't inconvenience customers at all, and doesn't require any money? That's a lot of constrictions, but the author claims it can be done! (you can search for the answer yourself, I don't want to spoil your fun.)
The question itself reminded me of so many bad professors who would ask totally subjective questions and disregard legitimate answers until they found someone who agreed with them. "Who can give me an example of an apple that's tasty? Macintosh? No too sweet. Granny smith? No too bitter. Golden delicious? Why yes Bobby, you get a star."
This is the tone in my head while I read the book - condescending. Maybe he didn't write it that way, but that's how I'm reading it, and honestly, it fits. On page 21 he chides psychologists for loving "to explain our uniquely hardwired capabilities in hugely complex terms. Sixteen types, thirty-four strengths, etc." and then goes on to give his "easier, more elegant" (but no less arbitrary "four basic buckets of natural ability." (Four because the ancient Greeks loved the number four.) Of course, what he fails to mention is that the psychologists he's referring to all write for pop magazines like Cosmopolitan and their articles appear alongside such classics as "10 ways to improve your sex life" and "5 ways to tell if your man is cheating on you." He also never mentions the "four basic buckets of natural ability" again and they have absolutely no bearing on the rest of the book. (The book is filled with useless random made up facts like those.)
He also throws out sentences that have huge presumptions built in to them, but have absolutely no evidence to back them up. Stuff that, in a seminar you wouldn't want to question him on because "there is no right answer" or the facts are obscure enough that he could bluster his way though most arguments that weren't from an expert on the subject. In book form, though, and knowing better myself, I read this stuff and think "well there's a very poor and inaccurate description." Luckily there's an only 50% chance that even the next sentence will depend on you agreeing with that statement, much less the next page.
In a later section he rehashes "the scientific method" (I put it in quotes because he botched his basic characterization of it) and compares it to other four step iterative processes, mostly those developed by the military - Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA), Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA), Observe-Orient-Decide-Act (OODA), Scan-Analyze-Respond-Assess (SARA), etc. and comes up with his own version, cleverly called IDEA - Investigate, Design, Execute, Adjust. It's not much different than the others, but it's his and he can teach it in seminars as his own. FWIW, "While Toyota officially recognizes only PDCA (not IDEA), they actually use all of these (methodologies) to some degree." (page 73-4)
Well of course they use all of the methodologies to some degree - they all describe the same basic thing, and very few organizations are so button-down that they actually only use a single methodology and follow it to the letter each time.
The very next sentence is "Let's look closer at the process." But that's pretty much the last time PDCA is mentioned in the book, the next section is about process in general and why it's good to "Insist on a common approach."
Another example of sloppy leaps in logic and condescending attitude is the Edsel. (page 93) Ford did their research and designed a car that people would want - except nobody wanted it. Why? "The problem was, all the research was based on a forty-year-old market belief... that buyers fell into one of four income segments: low, low-middle, upper-middle, and upper... Except markets don't think that way. When it comes to cars, consumers were thinking `lifestyle,' not income."
I like how he swaps an old marketing tool for a modern one as if that's the answer to all the world's problems. Lifestyle marketing was originated in the 70's and 80's as a result of - surprise surprise - new market research techniques developed by psychologists who were using statistical analysis more and more in their psychological research. (I wonder if he thinks those psychologists are too complex now.)
He also utterly fails to get into the concept of lifestyle marketing - he tells you why the Edsel failed, and what they should have done, (or his completely arbitrary and baseless versions of them) but what they should have done is literally one word. "lifestyle." Shame on Ford in the 1950's for not using an 80's marketing concept to understand how the market thinks. Why didn't they use the word "lifestyle" instead - then the Edsel would have been a huge success.
Hansei is another example of this sloppy, condescending thinking. "Hansei is the rigorous review conducted after action has been taken. It's a huge and absolutely vital part of learning. And with few exceptions, our Western culture is just plain miserable at it." Of course there's not one mention of the term "post-mortem" which is a western term and performs the exact same function. Sure most businesses don't do it (most businesses don't follow a lot of best practices), but don't pretend that Toyota or "Eastern culture" somehow invented the concept and that nobody in the west does it. If there's an existing best practice that we understand, then why not just tell us about it rather than pretending that it came from the fount of the Toyota godhead?
"Ford hadn't gone to the field to see what was actually happening. They remained in the office and believed the data. Big mistake. The Edsel was dead on arrival, a complete and utter failure."
Of course the next chapter is about how Toyota did the same basic thing, but managed to succeed. Their data told them that the youth of today would be the car buyers of tomorrow (startling, I know). The case study for the Scion reveals absolutely nothing about the techniques they used to study the market - it's the after report.
"Where are these kids going to buy the car? There's no time or money for new stores. That's a problem. That means they go to a Toyota store. Okay, so they'll know it's a Toyota. How do we get around that? Think? We don't. It's not the ugly stepchild. It's legit, but different. It's Scion, offspring of Toyota. Don't ignore the Toyota link, it's got cred...."
Note the use of the magical word "Think" in that paragraph. He totally neglects to address what "Think" means. Think is the Elegant part of the solution (he also likes the word "Intuitive" and uses it liberally), yet he doesn't describe it at all.
"Think" is where all the magic happens. Katie Lucas calls this the "Run really, really fast" step for "how to win a marathon" methodologies. It's the step where all the real difficult, nitty-gritty stuff magically happens. South Park summarizes it "Step 1: Steal underpants. Step 2...... Step 3: Profit."
Ostensibly the whole book is about that one word "Think" but the tools he provides - the IDEA loop, mind mapping, story boarding are nothing new, and the book is utterly lacking a cohesive whole. They're just scattered ideas, praised one second, and then dropped in the next chapter. He even mentions the Toyota "dashboard" which is a tool for getting a quick overview of a problem - except he (again) utterly fails in to a dashboard. "Dashboard" doesn't even appear in the index of the book, and if it did, the only occurrence would be on page 113.
Here's all the text on page 113. "Creative Visual Control - Visual control is an integral part of Toyota's methodology. The Project Management Office of Toyota's North American Parts Operation (NAPO) used creative visual `dashboards' to track performance in their Stretch Goals Initiative (see Chapter 9)."
Chapter 9 is on how to stretch goals, not about dashboards. He clearly states "Visual control is an integral part of Toyota's methodology" yet it's explained nowhere in the book in any depth.
In fairness, Toyota did do something Ford didn't do (or at least something he claims Ford didn't do) - they got to know their market. Really engage them and have a conversation with them. Learn about them, and let those learnings drive their product, and he does get into that in the book.
The main thrust of the book - if I can understand it all because it's couched in so many superlatives and it jumps from topic to topic so fast that it's really difficult to tease core themes out - seems to be something like: Move forward by getting hands-on experience with your product and your customers. Don't dictate strategy based on numbers alone, or build bureaucracies - get down and dirty and get to know the product you're selling and get to know the marketplace. Come up with grand "elegant" visions for the future, but innovate little by little - tiniest bit by tiniest bit. Listen to everyone and implement every good idea, then standardize it so that the whole company benefits. Don't let the numbers do all the talking; learn the context, the story behind the numbers. Which is a pretty good message, and he does give you some tools to do that, but the tools are often vague, and you feel that the real tools are mentioned only in passing.
The subtitle of the book is "Toyota's Formula for Mastering Innovation." If this book was about the "formula" for Coca-Cola, it would say something like "cola syrup and seltzer" and go on about the intuitive and elegant way they matched cola syrup to the bubbling process and created a dynamic new soft drink and how the other soft drink companies of the day - lemonade, sugar-water and apple-juice - failed to really understand the problem, which is why they didn't come up with the cola + seltzer combination first and why they lost so much market share. (If only apple juice had thought "lifestyle" instead of "income segment!")
Overall, it's an okay read and a decent introduction to the subject of business innovation, though for a book that's supposedly written by a guy who's on the ground floor with this stuff, I would expect a *lot* more meat and a lot less fluff. Get it if you think you'll like it, but don't expect as much as the other reviewers seem to be hinting at.
"Keep it lean. Scale it back, make it simple, and let it flow.".......2007-05-22
The subtitle of this book ("Toyota's Formula for Mastering Innovation") is not inaccurate but somewhat misleading. Although, yes, Matthew E. May has much of interest and value to say about the Toyota Production System, his attention is by no means limited to it and to the remarkable organization within which it was developed and within which it continues to flourish. Today, Toyota is one of the ten most profitable companies in the world and worth more than General Motors, Ford, DaimlerChrysler, and Honda...combined. Obviously there are reasons for such extraordinary success but it would be incorrect to assume that other organizations can achieve the same success once they know what Toyota's "formula for mastering innovation" is.
What about this book's title? According to May, "Elegance isn't about being hoity-toity. It's not about lofty concepts and grand designs. It's not about beauty or grace, or anything to do with aesthetics - ugly is okay. Elegance is about something much more profound. It's about finding the `aha' solution to a problem with the greatest parsimony of effort and expense. Creativity plays a part. Simplicity plays a part. Intelligence plays a part. Add in subtlety, economy, and quality, and you get elegance...Elegant solutions relieve creative tension by solving the problem in finito as it's been defined, in a way that avoids creating other problems that then need to be solved. Elegant solutions render only new possibilities to chase and exploit. Finally, elegant solutions aren't obvious, except, of course, in retrospect."
Elegant solutions include library, paper money, pencil, wallet, wristwatch, icebox, mortgage, Social Security, credit card, cell phone, and auto leasing. These and other elegant solutions, as May correctly points out, "universally change the world's attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and habits." Efforts to formulate elegant solutions are guided and informed by three principles: ingenuity in craft, pursuit of perfection, and fit with society. "They're the raison d'etre at Toyota, and nonnegotiable."
Earlier, I suggested that this book takes a close look at the mindset and the process by which Toyota continues to formulate elegant solutions. In fact, the Toyota organization implements a million ideas a year. May also includes within his narrative dozens of non-Toyota cases that indicate that none of the individual concepts are new, or even unique to Toyota. All organizations that formulate elegant solutions have people at all levels and in all areas of operation who possess both an ability and a determination to collectively and completely master all of the concepts as "a way of life, not a program centered on select teams led by specialists with artificial agendas."
But what about much smaller organizations, especially those with severely limited resources? Decision-makers in those organizations will be delighted (and perhaps surprised) to find that May provides a wealth of material that they can immediately put to use, once they understand the "deeper principles" that he discusses in Part I and the "ten key practices supported by tools and techniques" that he discusses in Part II. Then in Part III, May explains "how to put the practices and tools together well to achieve a [desired] result." He helps his reader to track the course of an exemplary team through a day of searching for the elegant solution.
For me, some of the most interesting and valuable material is provided in Chapter 12, "Make Kaizen Mandatory," as May poses again (as he does in other chapters) a combination of Problem, Cause, and Solution:
Problem: Innovation is hit or miss.
Cause: Creativity is misdirected and mismanaged.
Solution: Embed the kaizen ethic.
After a brief review of the factors that came together to help embed the kaizen ethic in Japanese business ethic during the decade or so following World War Two, he goes on to explain that at companies such as Toyota, the key issue is that they view kaizen in terms of standards that are created by the individuals performing the work, and, that standards are dynamic, and not everything gets standardized. These companies establish a best practice, document the standard, and train accordingly. Then in the next chapter, May shares his thoughts about "the power of lean" thinking and execution that reduce (if not eliminate) inconsistency, overload, and (most important) waste. Here is another combination:
Problem: Too many, too much - of everything.
Cause: Assumption that more is better.
Solution: Start thinking lean.
Once again, when it comes to innovation and designing solutions, the emphasis remains the same: "whatever you do, keep it lean. Scale it back, make it simple, and let it flow."
And that is what elegance really is all about.
Easy Reading.......2007-03-25
A must read for learning how to implement and sustain continuous improvement enabking lean to become part of the compny's culture
Interesting but little new insights.......2007-03-14
If you're trying to learn how to develop great products, this is not the book that you need to read. However if you're looking for a relatively entertaining book that has a lot of anecdotes of how Toyota and other world-class product developers have approached product development, this will suit you fine.
Book Description
Lawrence Lessig, “the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era” (The New Yorker), masterfully argues that never before in human history has the power to control creative progress been so concentrated in the hands of the powerful few, the so-called Big Media. Never before have the cultural powers- that-be been able to exert such control over what we can and can't do with the culture around us. Our society defends free markets and free speech; why then does it permit such top-down control? To lose our long tradition of free culture, Lawrence Lessig shows us, is to lose our freedom to create, our freedom to build, and, ultimately, our freedom to imagine.
Customer Reviews:
Everyone should read this.......2007-04-06
This book is excellent. Lessig's argument is thorough and well-developed, showing why the copyright laws affect all of us, from producers of copyright material to consumers and creative innovators building off of previous work. A great, and important, read for anyone, especially those interested in learning how Big Media in bed with Congress has successfully limited the freedom of typically law-abiding citizens to empower the old corporations and enfeeble the upstarts.
Whether conservative or liberal or anything in between, the book should really "strike home" and make you understand just how important it is to have a free culture.
A must for anyone online.......2007-01-09
I heard Lawrence Lessig speak at a conference earlier in 2006 and it was one of the best presentations I'd ever heard. So it will come as no surprise that his book is written in the same to the point, easy to follow and conscise style.
It's historical research sets the foundation for a look at things to come on the Internet as new technology threatens established media, much the same way as Lessig points out it did in previous centuries. The pirates of yesteryear are the corporations of today who threaten the pirates of today. He is humble as he describes his defeat in the US Supreme Court and proactive as he puts some suggestions forward to resolve the current crisis affecting copyright on the Net.
Couldn't put it down and have already purchased Code 2 by the same author.
This is an incredible book and a must-have if you want to learn about new copyright rules!.......2007-01-01
This is an incredible book. I agree so much with the discussions that Lawrence gives, and the material is a great look at issues related to the special interest groups and some of the things they have pushed and are trying to push through Congress.
An excellent summary of the history and potential future of copyright.......2006-12-27
You might think a book about the history and future of copyright law would be painfully boring. If the book is Free Culture: The Nature & Future of Creativity, by Lawrence Lessig, you'd be wrong. Lessig does a fantastic job of framing copyright with terms and scenarios everyone can understand. On top of that, he's a very engaging writer, the type that can probably make just about any topic interesting.
Lessig explains how large media companies like Disney got their start in an era of very relaxed copyright rules and regulations. In fact, Disney's classic Steamboat Willie was nothing more than a knock-off of Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr. What would happen if you tried to do the same thing today and based your video on a Disney character? You'd probably get a nice cease and desist letter from the folks at Disney.
One could argue that the IP policies that existed when Disney got off the ground needed some adjustments to fit today's content world. Lessig points out where things have probably gone too far though (e.g., the ridiculously high financial penalties associated with peer-to-peer file sharing). I'm not saying piracy isn't wrong. Not at all. As I've said on my blog, stealing is stealing, but Lessig gives plenty of examples to show how the resulting penalties are more than excessive.
A main thrust of the book has to do with how Congress keeps extending copyright terms and that almost nothing is therefore allowed to move into the public domain. He argued the case at the Supreme Court level but apparently lost because he couldn't show how the situation was hurting anyone. He makes a good point that there are plenty of works in a state of limbo, not really in distribution but beyond the reach of the public domain because they're still covered by copyright term extensions. I tend to agree with the Supreme Court though and find it hard to believe there are loads of derivative works opportunities that aren't being leveraged because of this. That said, Lessig presents an interesting alternative copyright model where owners can opt in to extend the original term.
Lessig is also well-known for his work on the Creative Commons (CCL) initiative. The CCL is a valuable model and a nice alternative for certain uses. Although I had originally thought this book wasn't available via CCL I now understand that was an oversight in the printed book. It is a CCL product and you can obtain the content, and various remixes of the content, at free-culture.org.
today's content owners are yesterday's pirates.......2006-07-06
Lessig has written a very clear and entertaining book about copyright, piracy, and culture, filled with lots of real-world examples to make his points. The book covers major events in the history of copyright in the United States (from its beginnings in English common law and the UK Statute of Anne) in order to show how its meaning has changed, and how those who are making accusations of piracy today were the pirates of yesterday. (Jessica Littman's book, Digital Copyright, is a nice complement to this book, covering the history of copyright in greater depth.) Lessig makes a strong case that the direction of copyright, giving greater control over content to a very small number of owners than has ever existed, is eroding the freedom that we've historically had to preserve and transform the elements of our culture.
Lessig begins by describing how the notion of a real property right for land extending into the sky to "an indefinite extent, upwards" became a real rather than theoretical issue with the invention of the airplane. In 1945, the Causbys, a family of North Carolina farmers, filed a suit against the government for trespassing with its low-flying planes, and the Supreme Court declared the airways to be public space. This example shows how the scope of property rights can change with changes of technology, in this particular case resulting in an uncompensated taking from private property owners, yet leading to enormous innovation and the development of a new industry and form of transportation. He follows this with the example of the development of FM radio, which was intentionally back-burnered by RCA and then hobbled by government regulation at RCA's behest in order to protect its existing investment in AM radio. This example shows how powerful interests can stifle technological change through its ownership of intellectual property (in this case, the patents regarding FM radio).
He then discusses how intellectual property laws have developed in the U.S., pointing out that Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse made his talking picture debut in the movie "Steamboat Willie" (he had earlier appeared in a silent cartoon, "Plane Crazy"), which was a parody of Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill." Many of Disney's characters and stories were taken directly from the previous work of others, such as the Brothers Grimm--works in the public domain, freely available for such copying. As new forms of media have been created, they have borrowed from previous forms. Today, however, the creators of content who have borrowed from their predecessors have successfully changed the rules so that their successors cannot borrow from them, both by extending the term and scope of copyright protection and by developing technologies that have greatly reduced the ability of successors to borrow or re-use content. The specific rules are completely inconsistent, based on the political power of the relevant parties at the time the laws were changed. When Edison developed the ability to record sounds, including recording music written by others, copyright law was changed to provide for compulsory licensing for a fee paid to the composer. With radio broadcasting, the fee still goes to the composer, but not to the recording artist. But put that same radio broadcast on the Internet, and now fees must be paid to both the composer and the recording artist.
Where there used to be a sea of unregulated uses of copyrighted material containing a small island of restricted uses (with shores of fair use), there is now a vast continent of restricted uses, a stark cliff of fair use, and a tiny channel of unregulated uses. Lessig shows a table on pp. 170-171 showing commercial and noncommercial uses and the rights to publish and transform for each. In 1790, copyright only governed publication rights for commercial uses, the other three cells of the table being free. At the end of the 19th century, publication and transformation for commercial use was governed by copyright, while noncommercial use was free. The law was changed to govern copies, including much noncommercial use. Today, all four cells of the table are governed by copyright.
Lessig discusses Eric Eldred's attempt to defend the right to transform public domain works into electronic versions by fighting Congress's continuing extensions of the term of copyright in the face of the Constitution's restriction to "limited Times," and how the case was lost at the U.S. Supreme Court to inconsistent reasoning from the conservative justices who failed to even address the commerce clause argument and the precedent they set in Lopez v. Morrison case. This is a wonderfully written, persuasive, entertaining, and dismaying book. It deserves to be widely read and understood, so that ultimately intellectual property law in the U.S. will be reformed.
[...]
Book Description
Interactive, ingenious, and practical exercises to stimulateyour imagination and inspire new ideas The Imagineering Workout will get your imagination into the best shape it's ever been, with interactive, ingenious, and practical exercises that will stimulate and strengthen ideas, tone your creative muscles, and, most important, inspire new approaches.
Customer Reviews:
Not just for 'tweens.......2007-07-10
Disney tends to target its Imagineering messages and publications to a junior high/high school audience, but these exercises can benefit all age groups. Unlike most Disney products, this book doesn't pound you over the head with Disney cross-promotions/cross-marketing. There are obviously plenty of references to Disneyland and Disney World (since those are the two primary venues for Imagineering projects), but it's not heavy-handed, and the exercises are each geared toward "real-world" application.
This little volume was a great first read and will no doubt get pulled down from its slot amongst my writing and other creativity books and thumbed through on a regular basis.
great book.......2007-03-22
This book really is useful and should be read by all high school students! We need to make sure that children learn creative thinking and this book is well suited to help teach this.
Great techniques to use on the job and in life........2006-07-15
This book, like its title says, really will help you shape your creative muscles. The exercises that are provided are good and often can help you see things in a way you would have otherwise never imagined.
You don't need to be in the entertainment industry to find value in this book, there are practical stories of creativity; such as creating a more engaging party by giving it a themed story, thus giving every decision you make a direction.
You can begin to apply the concepts immediately and begin to consciously think about creative solutions to problems you might be facing at home or at work.
For decades I have admired Imagineers..........2006-03-19
This insightful journey into the world of Imagineering is one sparkling with all of the mystery, surprise, magic and the element of believing to make it wonderful for boys or girls of any age, who want to reach beyond todays limits... you will have no limits on what you can accomplish, Disney is a great place to get a boost.
Casey Jacobson
Book Description
From "the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era" (The New Yorker), a landmark manifesto about the genuine closing of the American mind.
Lawrence Lessig could be called a cultural environmentalist. One of America's most original and influential public intellectuals, his focus is the social dimension of creativity: how creative work builds on the past and how society encourages or inhibits that building with laws and technologies. In his two previous books, Code and The Future of Ideas, Lessig concentrated on the destruction of much of the original promise of the Internet. Now, in Free Culture, he widens his focus to consider the diminishment of the larger public domain of ideas. In this powerful wake-up call he shows how short-sighted interests blind to the long-term damage they're inflicting are poisoning the ecosystem that fosters innovation.
All creative works-books, movies, records, software, and so on-are a compromise between what can be imagined and what is possible-technologically and legally. For more than two hundred years, laws in America have sought a balance between rewarding creativity and allowing the borrowing from which new creativity springs. The original term of copyright set by the Constitution in 1787 was seventeen years. Now it is closer to two hundred. Thomas Jefferson considered protecting the public against overly long monopolies on creative works an essential government role. What did he know that we've forgotten?
Lawrence Lessig shows us that while new technologies always lead to new laws, never before have the big cultural monopolists used the fear created by new technologies, specifically the Internet, to shrink the public domain of ideas, even as the same corporations use the same technologies to control more and more what we can and can't do with culture. As more and more culture becomes digitized, more and more becomes controllable, even as laws are being toughened at the behest of the big media groups. What's at stake is our freedom-freedom to create, freedom to build, and ultimately, freedom to imagine.
Download Description
"From ""the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era"" (The New Yorker), a landmark manifesto about the genuine closing of the American mind. Lawrence Lessig could be called a cultural environmentalist. One of America's most original and influential public intellectuals, his focus is the social dimension of creativity: how creative work builds on the past and how society encourages or inhibits that building with laws and technologies. In his two previous books, Code and The Future of Ideas, Lessig concentrated on the destruction of much of the original promise of the Internet. Now, in Free Culture, he widens his focus to consider the diminishment of the larger public domain of ideas. In this powerful wake-up call he shows how short-sighted interests blind to the long-term damage they're inflicting are poisoning the ecosystem that fosters innovation. All creative works-books, movies, records, software, and so on-are a compromise between what can be imagined and what is possible-technologically and legally. For more than two hundred years, laws in America have sought a balance between rewarding creativity and allowing the borrowing from which new creativity springs. The original term of copyright set by the Constitution in 1787 was seventeen years. Now it is closer to two hundred. Thomas Jefferson considered protecting the public against overly long monopolies on creative works an essential government role. What did he know that we've forgotten?
Customer Reviews:
Obscure and not totally convincing (3.25 *s).......2007-04-16
The author is a well-known advocate for "free culture," a culture where creators and innovators are supported and protected, which he claims is part of our tradition. Copyright laws have ensured that authors have a property right in their work for a limited duration. Part of the reason for a limitation is that cultural advancements and change have always drawn upon past culture to produce the new. Copyrights extending into perpetuity would harm cultural growth.
The author is alarmed by two developments: the extension of copyright to 95 years from an original period of 28 years via the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998 and, with the rise of the Internet and the ease of copying and sharing content, the ability of technology controlled by big media companies to discover copying, whether illegal or not, and their willingness to rigidly enforce, even unfairly, copyright laws. Ironically, as he points out, many large companies in film, television, and music have often advanced by borrowing content from past work. Now it seems that similarly-situated companies want to slam the door shut.
Not all use of copyrighted materials is illegal. There is the legal concept of "fair use," where such material is incidentally used not for direct financial gain. But the author claims that we are becoming a "permission" culture, where expensive, legal action is required to gain access to copyrighted material for even innocuous purposes. The author gives several examples where users of original content were clearly not involved in piracy, yet found themselves on the losing end of legal proceedings largely because of a lack of sufficient resources.
The author shows a narrow legal perspective with his view that he had considered the massive consolidation of media that has occurred over the last few decades to have had a non-harmful impact on creativity (p 164). Now he is changing his mind. He apparently ignored the tremendous amount of commentary on the ability of huge media corporations to censor independent views and to dumb-down the culture, if not engage in propaganda.
One of the prime motivating factors for this book was the author's role in a losing effort as the principal litigator in Eldred vs. Ashcroft at the Supreme Ct, which was an attempt to overturn the CETA on the Constitutional right of Congress to promote progress in ideas by granting exclusive rights to works and discoveries for a limited time. In reviewing his arguments, the author admits to not demonstrating a decided decrease in creativity due to copyright extension. And that is a problem with the book.
The book is actually somewhat obscure. The interaction of computer software and technology within and over the Internet combined with the application of copyright law is vaguely presented. Beyond some horror stories, it's hard to determine the true impact on creativity. The author agrees that selling copyrighted material without compensating the author is illegal whether on or off the Internet. There is no doubt that commercial web sites can impose any restrictions on accessing their content, regardless of copyright status. The author seems to suggest that cracking down on replicating thousands of copies of copyrighted content on the Internet stifles creativity and is contrary to the precedence established by reading or reselling books. But such issues within the scope and instant access of the Internet are complex and are far from being resolved.
Far more persuasive in terms of suppressing the free advance of ideas in our society is the growth of mega-corporations squeezing out small producers of cultural content and homogenizing our culture. Within such huge organizations independent voices like journalists are controlled or silenced. The free and widely disseminated exchange of ideas so vital to a vibrant democracy is hurt by the massive consolidation of the media intent on not offending and accommodating the status quo. The author notes the rise of web-logs on the Internet. It is unclear as to whether such random postings can counter the huge trend of controlling information.
Our culture is suffering. We as a society and as individual citizens are uninformed and lack empowerment. No more evidence is needed than our political debacles and international misadventures over the last few years. Overagressive enforcement of copyrights on the Internet may be problematical but is hardly our main problem in the assault on a free culture.
Well done.......2007-01-28
This book gives a comprehensive presentation against the current copyright theory and why we should go towards a more copyleft/creative commons type system.
Really provocative.......2005-09-21
I loved this illuminating and thought-provoking book. Lessig makes a compelling argument against extended copyright laws and other issues that may interfere with creating new projects based on derivative works.
The book was a bit repetitive but easy to read unlike his earlier book, the Future Of Ideas, which I found to be overly technical.
The Internet opens up so many vast possibilities for us to expand creative intellectual ideas but these will never materialize if we continue on our current path of making it nearly impossible to borrow from other people's works.
Lessig is imminently reasonable and has a great deal of respect for property and the rights of authors or creators. As soon as I finished reading Free Culture, I registered two of my Web blogs with Creative Comments. Now they both say "Some Rights Reserved." :-)
Sigrid Macdonald
Author of D'Amour Road
Intellectual Property Rights & HIV/AIDS.......2005-05-23
Like we need another review here. Anyhow, my 2 bits . . . because no one else has mentioned it.
The heart of Lessig's discussion/idea/arguement is where the debate over Intellectual Property Rights leads regarding HIV/AIDS and the availability of drugs to help fight or control the disease in Africa.
Sure, grant Disney Corp. another 20? years of pimping M-I-C-K-E-Y . . . and keep Dr. Seuss from falling into the hands of pornographers. Who cares?
Lessig points out where the obnoxiously single-minded, show-me-the-money (oops! is this a copyright infringement?) p.o.v. of the wealthy leads us as a culture: that, collectively, we can dispense with the lives of millions of people while upholding a legal argument based on principal.
It's about money clamping down on life, whether that's the freedom to have the creative works, which were created within a cultural context, return something of value to the culture that spawned them, or whether it means the very lives of HIV/AIDS sufferers in the "3rd World."
Read.
a fantastic read. well crafted - couldn't put it down!.......2005-04-26
i am a content creator myself (artist and graphic designer) and this presented issues of intellectual property, copyrights and file sharing in a proper perspective. lessig stays fairly moderate throughout, borrowing rally cries from both the left and the right. the reviewer who called him a "communist" has obviously not read the whole book. a person of such limited mental faculty probably had difficulty finishing it.
lessig is a law professor and a constitutional scholar - many of his problems with the perpetual extensions of copyright stem from the fact that very plainly they are unconstitutional.
the author proposes that copyrights be limited reasonably (as provided by the constitution) so that public domain will continue to grow. as it stands anything before the great depression is part of this domain - "free" in the sense that it is part of our general cultural output - owned by no one. through corporate lobbying efforts, it is quite possible that nothing new will be added to the public domain in our lifetime.
the framers of the constitutions SPECIFICALLY limited the duration of copyright so that a creative work, after making money for the creator and living a commercial life, would then become part of the PUBLIC domain - a domain that we all share and all contribute to.
some readers, like the communist-brander, may have been thrown by the title. the author does in no way suggest that creators should not get paid and that everything is for free. "free" culture does NOT mean a "free" lunch, but a "free" society of "free" markets. the freedom to create, the freedom to get paid, and THEN the freedom for the creative work to join to public domain (after the author has died) and be FREE to us all.
lessig is certainly no radical - although i suppose for even raising some of these questions about the crackdown on p2p networks and the nature of intellectual property he will be branded one by the crazies dominating the current debate.
a free society, and indeed a free culture, is about asking tough questions, and that is what lessig is doing with this book.
highly recommended.
Book Description
Introduction
To survive and prosper in the long term, people in companies need to create and innovate. And they need to do so as regularly and reliably as they breathe.
We begin our discussion of the need for creativity with a look at a successful company that recognized and met a serious new challenge by installing effective creative practices. In the late 1980s, Steelcase Inc., one of the largest U.S. manufacturers of office furniture, like its competitors was investing heavily in research and development in the hot area of its business, modular furniture units.1 "We had all evolved to the same perspective," says Mark Greiner, senior vice president of R&D at Steelcase. "There was an accepted framework in the industry, defined by three points on a triangle: high design, low cost, and customer relationship." Furniture companies had been differentiating themselves along the points of that triangle for some time. Steelcase was proudest of its customer relationships and placed most of its emphasis on maintaining that edge. "But in fact," Greiner says, "all the manufacturers, by watching each other, had gravitated over time toward safer and safer ground in the middle of the triangle defined by those three points." Thus, the differences between Steelcase and its rivals had grown almost nonexistent. "We were supposedly the most advanced office furniture company in the world, but in fact we were looking pretty much like our competition," he says.
Worse, the customer was in motion. The exciting technological liberties of computing and communications made office design and furniture seem less urgent, even less relevant to some businesses. This realization didn't come suddenly, says Greiner. "But it started creeping more often into our conversations. Where's the difference? What's our value?"
While the industry focused on a familiar, well-understood, highly defined world, the real world was changing. Steelcase needed to break free of many long-held beliefs about customer needs, beliefs that had become invalid. To reconnect with office furniture buyers, the company needed new ideas.
Steelcase in the late 1980s qualified as a candidate for creativity and innovation, and through the course of the book, we'll follow the Steelcase story.
But the Steelcase story is not unique. Corporate leaders in almost any business today need to know the fundamental elements for initiating and sustaining creativity and innovation. And they must understand the ways in which those elements work together.
The speed of change in the economy has long since penalized companies and industries that try to coast with scattershot innovation or a single moment of creative serendipity. It now punishes even strategically astute companies that make serious but only sporadic, isolated, or conventional efforts at creativity and innovation.
In the 1870s, Aaron Ward targeted quality-and-value-starved rural shoppers with a single-page, cash-only price list mailed to National Grange members. There was enough creativity and innovation in that business plan to start Montgomery Ward on a 125-year run. The only further innovation of any scope, however, was to build out stores across the country, a strategy that within a few decades caused the company to fall so far behind the pace of change in contemporary imagination and desires that customers stayed away.
Still, 125 years is a good ride. Increasingly, the time period that an innovation can last is far shorter. Look at the home audio music business. The music box controlled that market for 100 years. The phonograph controlled the market for 70 years. Cassette tapes dominated for 25 years until the arrival of CDs. Now, after 10 years, CDs compete with mini-disks, DVDs, MP3, and the Internet.
And, as if the inexorable compounding in the rate of technological change weren't sufficiently uncomfortable, consider Digital Equipment Corporation and Wang. In 1985, the two pioneering computer companies were at the top of their business and successfully defending their competitive advantages by locking in corporate customers with exclusive networks of proprietary machinery and software. Within a decade both companies were as good as gone, victims of a home computing and open architecture evolution that bypassed their proprietary protections.
Not only, then, does competitive advantage have a time limit, a limit shrinking before the accelerating pace of technological change, but resources given to protecting today's competitive advantage can distract companies from keeping an eye on the creative work of developing and deploying the innovations that could drive tomorrow's business.
Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter draws an analogy between doing business now and playing croquet beside Alice in Wonderland, with the mallets, balls, wickets, and stakes all alive and all whimsically free to decide when and how they want to move. And Dartmouth business professor Richard D'Aveni says that relying too long on a competitive advantage is like "shoveling sand against the tide."
The message in all this, as Steelcase found out, is that tomorrow, with all its surprises, comes more relentlessly and more quickly than ever before. To respond to and take advantage of the surprises, individuals and companies will want to be as ready as possible. And readiness requires creativity.
We contend that the successful companies will have established constant, systemic creativity. They'll do so to fuel the moment-to-moment innovative responses a high-speed marketplace demands. They'll do so to maintain imaginative resources that can project operations into a future that will change even faster than the present. They'll do so to develop, in our here-and-gone business environment, the reliably pliable foundations from which breakthrough innovations can be launched.
Companies will strive to become systemically creative because creativity pays. It pays financially and it provides a rich array of other rewards: employee and customer satisfaction, incremental growth, the flexibility to match relentless change, the ability to attract good talent, elevated market interest, and strengthened competitive readiness. The rewards of some of the creativity programs that we explore in the book are illustrative:
In Creativity, Inc., our goal is to enhance a company's ability to create and innovate-reliably, systemically, without stop. We start with six essential understandings that weave through the book and the creative process.
There is no recipe for systemic creativity. There is no fixed recipe for all or even most companies. The field of systemic creativity and innovation is still so immature that there are none of the requisite benchmarks needed for universal recipes. In fact, our experience suggests that while more specific guidelines will evolve, a more complete and replicable formula for creative success will be elusive for quite some time. So, instead of a recipe, Creativity, Inc. provides the foundational principles and practices a company needs to build the framework that's right for itself.
Creativity and innovation are two distinct concepts. Although people often use the terms interchangeably, creativity and innovation differ from one another. Each demands different treatment, and each has a different science. To paraphrase Harvard Business School's Teresa Amabile, a leading researcher in the field, creativity is the generation of novel and appropriate ideas.5 Innovation, as we define it, implements those ideas and thereby changes the order of things in the world.
Creativity is about breaking down prior assumptions and making new connections for new ideas. Innovation means taking new ideas and turning them into corporate and marketplace reality. True innovation, as opposed to low-level refinement, takes extended creative effort, yet much of the innovation effort lends itself to direction and organizing. ...
Customer Reviews:
Fair content. Flat and unimaginative. .......2006-11-10
There is some fair content, however I was not inspired or blown away so-to-speak with the presentation and usefulness of the book. It felt high-level, flat and academic at best. Shouldn't a book on creativity be creative?
Cabbages, Kings, and Creativity.......2005-06-08
There are so many other books now in print which offer valuable guidance to those who wish to increase creative and innovative thinking within their own organizations. I identify several of them at the conclusion of this brief commentary. Include Mauzy and Harriman's among them. In fact, it is one of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking books on the separate but related subjects, creativity and innovation. Mauzy and Harriman agree with Teresa Amabile that creativity is the generation of novel and appropriate ideas whereas innovation implements those ideas "and thereby changes the order of things in the world." They carefully organize their material as follows:
Part I: Creative Thinking (The Dynamics That Underlie Creative Thinking, Becoming Creatively Fit as an Individual;l, and Breaking and Making Connections for an Enterprise)
Part II: Climate (The Climate for Creativity in an Enterprise and Personal Creative Climate: The Bubble)
Part III: Action (Leadership: Fostering Systemic Creativity, Purposeful Creativity, and Sustaining the Change)
I agree with Mauzy and Harriman that, "When systemic creativity is in place, creativity flourishes from top to bottom and across all functions. People and teams come up with blockbuster ideas that turn into multimillion-dollar products or even billion-dollar new businesses. Or they create ingenious marketing campaigns that ratchet up revenue, or lead process improvement programs that delight customers and empower employees alike, or implement restructuring initiatives that maximize cost reductions but minimize layoffs. And systemic creativity does not apply just to the big creative triumphs: People in organizations daily spark thousands of ideas that provide value in themselves and also build a higher plateau from which greater peaks of creativity can rise." I agree with Mauzy and Harriman that there is no "recipe" for systemic creativity but that most people within almost any organization (regardless of size or nature) can -- and will -- think more creatively if what Mauzy and Harriman characterize as "four critical dynamics" are present: motivation, curiosity and fear, the breaking and making of connections, and evaluation.
True, there are individuals who -- almost single-handedly -- have generated novel and appropriate ideas or implemented someone else's ideas and thereby changed "the order of things in the world." However, there are more instructive examples of how important, climate, environment, culture, etc. are to nourishing creative thought by members of teams or coalitions. Perhaps the most widely cited example is the world's first research and development center which Thomas Edison established in West Orange, New Jersey, in 1887. Others exceptionally creative "communities" include the Disney studios which produced so many animation classics; Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) which developed the first personal computer; Apple Computer which then took it to market; the so-called "Skunk Works" where so many of Lockheed's greatest aircraft designs were formulated; and Los Alamos (NM) and the University of Chicago where the Manhattan Project eventually produced a new weapon called "The Gadget."
Everyone seems to agree that having creative and innovative people throughout all levels of any organization is highly desirable and substantially beneficial. To achieve "systemic creativity," the question remains: HOW? The book which Mauzy and Harriman have written is their response to that question. I especially want to commend them on the fact that they devote much less attention to principles and much more attention to implementation than do most other books on this subject. With due respect to their talents as creators and innovators, I appreciate the fact that they are also pragmatists. No doubt each bears some scar tissue from combat with those who felt threatened by what is new or what is different.
When nearing the conclusion of their book, Mauzy and Harriman assert that information "is the fluid expression of knowledge feeding the creative effort. Keep it available, keep it rich and diverse, keep it flowing. And remember to keep it flowing up to leadership, not just horizontally or from the top down....If you and your organization have the resolve to carry on, the creative effort you undertake now will continue. In evolving forms, the effort will begin again and still continue. The rewards that creativity brings will continue and renew as well." To paraphrase Henry Ford, whether you think you can or think you can't think creatively, you're right. Most limits really are self-imposed.
For many of those who read Mauzy and Harriman's brilliant book, this will be the most exciting intellectual experience they have had in years.
Those who share my high regard for it are urged to check out Evan Schwartz's Juice: The Creative Fuel That Drives World-Class Inventors. Also Harvard Business Review on Innovation and Harvard Business Review on Breakthrough Thinking as well as Tom Kelley's The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm, Robert I. Sutton's Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation, Roger Von Oech's Expect the Unexpected or You Won't Find It: A Creativity Tool Based on the Ancient Wisdom of Heraclitus, Joey Reiman's Thinking for a Living: Creating Ideas That Revitalize Your Business, Career, and Life, Doug Hall Jump Start Your Business Brain: Win More, Lose Less, and Make More Money with Your New Products, Services, Sales & Advertising, and Michael Michalko's Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius.
From The Innovation Road Map Magazine.......2005-05-13
Because I've studied and read so much about creativity I must admit that I approached this book with a certain amount of trepidation. I wasn't sure that I wanted to read it. I told myself, just read the intro and the first chapter and then stop if you don't like it. Well, I didn't stop. It was an enjoyable read throughout with many insights along the way. What the authors bring forward in this book is a methodological approach to creativity in organizations, more particularly corporations. They describe a system that seems to touch all the right points in order to increase creativity in an organization. In addition, they provide some helpful information for individuals who want to improve their own creativity.
The book is broken into three parts and eight chapters:
Part 1 - Creative thinking
The Dynamics That Underlie Creative Thinking
Becoming Creatively Fit as an Individual
Breaking and Making Connections for an Enterprise
Part2 - Climate
The Climate for Creativity in an Enterprise
Personal Creative Climate: The Bubble
Part 3 - Action
Leadership: Fostering Systemic Creativity
Purposeful Creativity
Sustaining the Change
When an organization has systemic creativity, the authors write "systemic creativity becomes an integral part of everyday operations and spawns new thought, from small changes to breakthroughs, that organizations now need in every activity that makes a competitive difference.
For this to happen, creativity must become the responsibility of everyone - every leader and senior manager as well as every employee. Systemic creativity is only systemic when everyone in an organization learns how to practice it and then promotes it constantly."
This is not an easy task in today's short-term, bottom-line, stockholder-value driven organization. The authors point out "The behaviors required for successful creativity are out of tune with the behaviors that make a company operationally efficient, well-organized and clear-sighted on its mission and goals."
The authors also correctly point out that there is no "right way" to foster creativity in an organization. The approach depends upon a number of factors. "There are, however, basic principles and practical techniques that have stood the test of time." This book is a great contribution that goal.
The book is informed by six basic understandings:
1. There is no recipe for systemic creativity.
2. Creativity and innovation are two distinct concepts.
3. Creativity happens with individuals, coalitions and teams, and organizations.
4. There are four critical dynamics.
5. Creativity depends on climate.
6. Systemic creativity asks everyone to be a leader.
According to the authors, the four inter-linking dynamics of creativity are motivation, curiosity and fear, making and breaking connections, and evaluation.
In the authors' model, making and breaking connections within an enterprise is the pivotal dynamic of the creative process. To foster this, they encourage conflict of ideas, encourage risk taking, the promotion of diversity, organizing for intrinsic motivation, the development of information flows that support creativity, and the utilization of more and less information.
The "conflict of ideas" concept is one of the few areas in the book that I find myself disagreeing. I have found that the metaphor of battle in creativity to be de-motivating for many people. There may be certain personality types that enjoy competition over new ideas, but there are even more people who find this stressful and a turnoff. I think what needs to be fostered in organizations to promote creativity is the development and facilitation of conversations about ideas. Non judgmental conversations about ideas usually generates new ideas that quite often are better than the originals. To converse is to turn around together.
The authors make a distinction between climate and culture. The difference according to their definition is understandable. Many models of culture include a hierarchy of philosophies, beliefs, values and behaviors. Values set expectations and therefore the author's definition of climate encompasses values and behaviors.
The concept of a personal creative climate, a "bubble" is an extremely powerful one. There are many distractions, conflicting priorities, and decentives to creativity in organizations. I have always found for myself, as well as observing the behavior of others, that those who can create this "bubble" are the most productive and the most creative.
The authors end the book with some wise advice to would be promoters of creativity in organizations. They write "As the change to systemic creativity goes forward, everything covered in the introduction and the first seven chapters - from the dynamics of the creative process and their relationship to individuals and companies, through personal; and corporate climate, through leadership and innovation - requires continued attention, reinforcement, exercise, follow-through, and reinvention." They explain that the forces against creativity are so strong, that without continued reinforcement and reinvention, any approach to systemic creativity will fail. Their advice:
Plan ahead
Record results
Expect resistance
Encourage the flow of information
"More than forty years ago, in The Human Side of Enterprise, Douglas MacGregor challenged the command-and-control assumptions about the business establishment: `The distinctive potential contribution of the human being...at every level of the organization stems form his capacity to think, to plan, to exercise judgement, to be creative, to direct and control his own behavior.'
MacGregor was arguing on behalf of the creative climate. Today, while there has been much progress, too few leaders ask and expect creativity of their employees; too few leaders provide the climate in which creativity can flourish."
How true!
Jeff Mauzy is a Consulting Manager and Richard Harriman is Managing Partner at Synectics, a pioneering consulting firm specializing in business creativity and innovation.
Exemplary creativity.......2004-11-23
Jeff Mauzy and Richard Harriman's seminal volume on systematic creativity garnered a lasting impression largely due to his gift for making the corporate world intelligible. The book is not solely intended for the tenacious "higher-ups" that dictate the feel of the workplace, but instead tends towards the hands-on approach that is the hallmark of the individuated sucessful corporation.<br />
<br />
The main thrust of his approach is to create a kind of learning environment that allows for "growth" and "specialization" in a particular field. Mauzy's knack for egalitarian leadership is firmly based in his experience in child-rearing. Allowing a young person to mature into a specialized and highly competant individual is analogous to the process that Mauzy and Harriman espouse.<br />
<br />
I found it to be especially useful when the book described the creative process as being like the teaching of mathematics. It seems counter-intuitive to link creativity to mathematics, but in fact one can be expressive within a rigidly defined field, much like the corporate world itself. I highly recommend this book for its emphasis on the educational and mathematical aspects of corporate creativity.
40 years of creativity research delivered in a fun package.......2003-11-27
Creativity cannot be reserved for the R&D team or the marketing department. Every enterprise needs to be creative at all times, in all areas, and in all activities. This is what Jeff Mauzy and Richard Harriman call "systematic creativity". Their call for universal and constant creativity might be a slight stretch but it stretches in the right direction. The universal nature of their opening message does not carry over into some unique formula for fostering systemic creativity. Instead of one "right" way, they draw on four decades of research in the field of creativity to set out basic principles and practical techniques that have endured.
The emphasis on tested principles and practices in place of a fixed recipe is the first of six underlying central assumptions for the book. The second assumption is that creativity and innovation are two distinct concepts. The authors follow clear practice in distinguishing creativity - "the generation of novel and appropriate ideas" - from innovation - which "implements those ideas". A third central assumption is that creativity occurs in three areas: individuals, coalitions and teams, and organizations.
The remaining pillars that hold up the perspective of Creativity, Inc.: Underlying creativity are four interconnected dynamics that form the "heartbeat" of systemic creativity: motivation, curiosity and fear, the breaking and making of connections, and evaluation; Creativity depends on climate; Systematic creativity asks everyone to be a leader.
This stimulating, informative, and cleanly written book is organized in three parts. Part I, Creative Thinking, Part II, Climate, and Part III, Action. The first two parts examine a range of aspects involved in building individual and organizational creative capability, while the final part shows how to connect creativity to purposeful work. Happily, the authors understand that organizations find it easier to boost creativity temporarily; making it stick as an integral part of the organization is much tougher. They devote the final chapter to "Sustaining the Change".
If you're the kind of reader who likes to go beyond the main text and dig into the authors' sources and references, you'll be delighted to find that the compact (185 pages) of the main text is followed by copious chapter notes and references. Creativity, Inc. provides a rich set of principles and tools for steeping every aspect of your organization in creativity. Mauzy and Harriman's book on systemic creativity complements work on systematic innovation processes. Businesses that manage to get the twin engines of creativity and innovation running at full power will have the only enduring competitive advantage left.
Average customer rating:
- Pure drivel.
- The spark of genius
|
Why Are You Creative?
Hermann Vaske
Manufacturer: fivedegreesbelowzero press
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Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Hermann Vaske's Conversations With the Masters of Advertising
ASIN: 0970877927 |
Book Description
This book offers a unique approach to the study of creativity by posing the title question to dozens of various creative professionals--actors, artists, musicians, filmmakers, writers and politicians--and then analyzing their ultimately revealing answers. Readers will discover fascinating insights into the nature of creativity and their favorite celebrities, including: Mel Gibson
Johnny Depp Stephen Spielberg
George Bush David Bowie
Salman Rushdie Juliette Binoche
and more Author Hermann Vaske has packed this extraordinary pop culture treasure with original sketches, scribblings and responses from and photos of each interviewee. Throughout, the hidden meanings and motivations of each subject reveal the wonder of individual creativity, and provide a foundation for the beginning of a fascinating dialogue about this aspect of being human.
Customer Reviews:
Pure drivel........2006-04-29
This book is pure drivel, don't be fooled. If it's possible to put together a volume that has more self-aggrandizing and outright preposterous chapters I can't imagine who could pull it off. Take the chapter on Stephen Hawking as an example. Hawking states, "You have to be creative to do science. Otherwise you're just repeating tired formulas. You aren't doing anything new." Fair enough. The book's pseudo-analisys of this statement is the following,"Hawking deconstructs the universe. It is not his job to be creative, nor does he mean to be creative. He wants to understand creation." Give me a break. The only use for this book, outside of an expensive and ugly drink coaster, is as an exercise in self-parody.
The spark of genius.......2004-05-13
This interesting work investigates the creative genius of some of the world's most prominent creatives in various fields. They are each asked the question Why Are You Creative; the answers are in some cases both verbal and graphic in the form of drawings. The answers are then analysed by a panel of psychologists. A photograph of the person concerned plus a short biography accompany each entry.
These creative people come from a vast spectrum of disciplines like art, design, architecture, advertising, photography, fashion, music, film, science and literature. The following are some of them: Laurie Anderson, Bono, David Bowie, Nick Cave, Johnny Depp, Peter Gabriel, Mel Gibson, Stephen Hawking, Damien Hirst, Quincy Jones, Milla Jovovich, Jeff Koons, Nelson Mandela, Yoko Ono, Leni Riefenstahl, Steven Spielberg, Oliviero Toscani, Wim Wenders and Vivienne Westwood.
The introductory section includes a foreword by the Dalai Lama, a chapter by Wim Wenders and an exploration of the categories of creative stimuli by Vaske. This fascinating study concludes with a bibliography and filmography.
Average customer rating:
- Bruno-Faria reviews
- Excellent Complement to Handbook of Creativity
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The International Handbook of Creativity
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Handbook of Creativity
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Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized
ASIN: 0521547318 |
Book Description
What constitutes a creative person? Different cultures have different perspectives on what it means to be creative, yet it is nearly always the American or Western perspective that is represented in the psychological literature. The goal of this handbook is to present a truly international and diverse set of perspectives on the psychology of human creativity. Distinguished international scholars have contributed to this book's chapters on the history and current state of creativity research and theory in their respective parts of the world. Much of the work discussed has never before been available in English.
Download Description
What constitutes a creative person? Is it someone who can perform many tasks innovatively? Is it someone who exhibits creative genius in one area? Is it someone who utilizes her creativity for good and moral causes? Is it someone who uses his creativity to help his company or country succeed? Different cultures have different perspectives on what it means to be creative, yet it is nearly always the American or Western perspective that is represented in the psychological literature. The goal of The International Handbook of Creativity is to present a truly international and diverse set of perspectives on the psychology of human creativity. Distinguished scholars from around the world have written chapters for this book about the history and current state of creativity research and theory in their respective parts of the world. The book presents a wide array of international perspectives and research, with much of the work discussed never before available in English.
Customer Reviews:
Bruno-Faria reviews.......2007-01-10
This is a very interesting book. It shows me that we need to publish our articles in international periodicals to reveal the state of art the production in our country. Moreover I could know what others countries search about the subject.It is fundamental for someone that dedicate to study creativity.
Excellent Complement to Handbook of Creativity.......2006-11-10
The International Handbook of Creativity rounds off the picture presented in Sternberg's Handbook of Creativity. Where the Handbook provides an in depth picture of theories, strands, and foundation data for the study of creativity, the International Handbook completes the picture with worldwide applications of creativity. I am using the two in my Ph.D. class and students find both challenging and informative.
Book Description
In The Art of Moral Protest, James Jasper integrates diverse examples of protest—from nineteenth-century boycotts to recent movements—into a distinctive new understanding of how social movements work. Jasper highlights their creativity, not only in forging new morals but in adopting courses of action and inventing organizational forms.
"A provocative perspective on the cultural implications of political and social protest."—Library Journal
Customer Reviews:
Still the best book on social movements.......2005-09-21
I use this book every year in my social movement class at the University of Texas at Austin. It provides an excellent overview of the social movement literature through the mid-1990s. More importantly, it provides a pathbreaking theoretical approach to social protest with rich empirical evidence.
My students are also very high on the book. It is a must read for all students of social movements.
Will be considered a classic by future generation.......2003-01-16
James Jasper offers one of the best books available on social movements. In "The Art of Moral Protest" it is mostly the cultural and emotional sides of social movements which is explored leaving aside the more traditional structural accounts of social movement theory. Jasper emphasize principally 4 dimensions of protest: culture, resources, strategies and biographies and divide movements into two categories: citizenship movements and post-citizenship movements. Interestingly however, the structure of the book do not follow these main dimensions and categories but propose a kind of linear logic of movements' evolution from the emotion (moral shock) which send people into action to the creation of a movement culture which help sustain participation to the relation between movements and the broader culture in which they evolve and try to change. An interesting last part deal with the author's own "normative view" of social movements exploring the pleasures associated with movement participation, the danger sometimes embodied in social movement (particularly those who harbour totalizing ideologies) but also the necessity of protest for our societies. The book is full of stories and historical details which help make sense of the arguments developed in the book and keep this theoretical book as interesting as a novel.
If I had to teach a course on social movements, I would probably chose two books for my students to read. The first one would be "Power in Movement" from Tarrow and the second one would be "The Art of Moral Protest". Many excellent books have been written on social movements but very few complement each other as well as these two books. They present the two current main branches of social movement studies.
If I had to find a few problems with the book it would be related to the reference system adopted. By placing all references and notes at the end of the book, the more interested reader easily get lost. It might sound silly at first, but since the book is quite thick it becomes quite annoying with time... especially when you are thrilled by the reading but still want to get that extra detail hidden at the end of the book.
The best recent book on social movements!.......2001-06-05
I loved this book. Anyone who likes the cultural side of politics will appreciate this book, Jasper's magnum opus. If you're writing a dissertation on social movements, you can't not read it.
A Pathbreaking Book.......2000-07-05
James Jasper's "The Art of Moral Protest" is one of the most important recent contributions to the scholarly literature on social movements and political and moral protest. The book's title signifies two important ideas. First, Jasper wants to restore the moral dimension to political protest, which of late has been reduced by many scholars to the calculated pursuit of material interests. Second, the book stresses the "artful" nature of protest, the fact, that is, that protest doesn't simply arise in some mechanical fashion from "structural" preconditions, but involves choices and improvisation by thinking (and feeling) individuals. Indeed, Jasper wants to reintegrate feelings and emotions, which scholars have studiously avoided in recent years, back into our understanding of moral protest. And he emphasizes how specific individuals with specific biographies (who, again, have been largely purged from the scholarly literature) matter for protest. The book weaves a powerful critique of dominant ways of thinking about protest through a series of fascinating studies of several movements and movement participants. In sum, this is an extremely important and pathbreaking book. It should be read by anyone with an interest in politics, social movements, or protest.
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