| Creativity Inc.: Building
an Inventive Organization
By Jeff Mauzy and Richard A. Harriman
Harvard Business School Press, 2003.
Reviewed by Lynn Brandli
In our industry, we all share some values, and one of them is
the pursuit of a purely creative process. Jeff Mauzy and Richard
Harriman’s Creativity, Inc. is a new and valuable
tool for helping us meet this challenge. The book takes the reader
on a journey through the entire creative process, along the way
providing definitions, as well as practical examples of ways in
which work environments can be modified to become more creative.
Mauzy and Harriman begin by building the case for why creative
organizations outpace their competition, and for those who are trying
to influence executive management of the merits of creative thinking,
this is probably a good place to start. Most of us in the creative
business have already tried this in our quest to survive in a conventional
business environment, but this book could inspire others to become
a part of our world.
Creativity, Inc. gives excellent examples and business
cases showing how creativity has made a positive impact on organizations
ranging from service providers to product manufacturers. Use of
strong business cases is standard in a book about best practices,
but when it asked me to take an inventory of my own ability to perform
creative work, this book really started to engage me. The next step
is to use this profile to assess your own creative fitness. To take
yourself to the next level of being “creatively fit,”
the book provides you with an array of exercises. I loved this!
I will use it within my own creative department for assessing the
team’s strengths, and as an exercise to stimulate new creative
thinking.
If you are trying to effect change on a wider scale at a senior
executive level, I highly recommend reading chapter three, “Breaking
and Making Connections for an Enterprise.” Though it begins
with a rather lengthy business case that I found a bit tiring, it
soon picks up with a step-by-step approach to building a more creative
workplace. This chapter focuses on conflict, risk taking, and diversity
in leadership; it then leads into the next logical step: the creative
climate. Creativity, Inc. concludes with suggestions to
help the reader implement and sustain the creative environment.
I found the book to be engaging and refreshing—a very easy
read, because it spoke to me about challenging the traditional ways
of viewing a business. Creativity, Inc. will challenge
even the most seasoned creative professionals with questions about
how they function in a work environment, and it will give the reader
many new ways of applying an even more creative process. I highly
recommend this book to executive managers who are willing to open
their minds to building a more inventive organization. They will
find that it takes effort; there are many challenges in helping
a truly creative organization survive and sustain its growth. However,
after reading this book, I for one am up for the challenge!
Lynn Brandli is the manager of creative services
at the Russell Investment Group.
This review originally appeared in the Summer
2003 Design Management Review
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