Customer Reviews

Creative Intelligence: Discovering the Innovative Potential in Ourselves and Others

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Creativity is power. The author makes a compelling case that in today's complex and chaotic environment, it is essential to solve what increasingly seems like the unsolvable.

The author, an emeritus USC professor of management, breaks his treatment of creativity into four parts:

1. Learning to harness your creative intelligence.

2. Exploring opportunities to apply your creativity.

3. Helping others recognize and use their creativity.

4. Creating open environments to support creative endeavors.

To me the most practical part of the book is a test instrument which identifies a person's creative potential. The 25-question test determines the taker's aptitude for the four basic creative styles:

1. Innovative

2. Imaginative

3. Intuitive

4. Inspirational

With the problems facing business and society, it is surprising more effort is not made to identify and encourage creative thinkers and thinking.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, "A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimensions."

Given the number and depth of the problems facing humankind, it is surprising to me that we continually resort to the same, worn-out and tired solutions.

Good News: Dr. Rowe makes new and useful distinctions on the four demensions of creative intelligence. Bad New: the book is missing the answer key to the Creative Intelligence Profile, which is the heart and value of the book rendering the profile useless. Too bad interesting tool. And attempts to reach out to Dr. Rowe go unanswered.

The best parts of this book are providing an understanding that there are different kinds of creativity and being able to assess one's creative potential, the chapter on education and how essential the creative process is for learning, and how to use our creativity to understand and solve problems in our turbulent society. Creativity helps in taking the risks that improve problem solving.

It is absolutely essential to develop our creativity to our fullest potential in order to be successful in our careers as well as in our personal lives. Creativity helps us see more options in every situation that confronts us.

For today's business people and for educators, I believe this book is an absolute must!