4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A MUST READ! Refreshes you view of the business enviornment, April 23, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: The Creative Priority: Driving Innovative Business in the Real World (Hardcover)
Wow. This book gives a gret refresh of the way one looks at the business day. No longer do I drone on about how bad my workplace is. I am finding new ways to improve the workplace, and the work I do creatively and effectively. Thank you, Jerry Hirshberg. I once again have a rejuvinated outlook on my career. This is the kind of book that I'm going to read every year to keep my focus.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A must-read!!, October 22, 2004
This review is from: The Creative Priority: Driving Innovative Business in the Real World (Hardcover)
What would it be like for you to work in an organization that does not make exceptions for the creative maverick, because there is value in what the maverick stands for, but that provides for the conceptual maverick to become the catalyst who forms the organization? Instead of tolerating creativity, questioning and innovation on the periphery of the organization, outside it's boundaries, you change your business culture to allow creativity, questioning and innovation to permeate and form your core business culture? You shrug off convention. You no longer "reel in the maverick." You are the maverick. You are the supreme collaborative, out of the box forward minded innovative think tank that no longer "deals with" creativity and no longer "deals with" innovation and no longer "deals with questioning" as a method of operating your business. Indeed, your business seeks no longer to control the maverick but lets the maverick control the business. How powerful is that?
How can you profess to your employees, peers and clients that you are providing them with the most cutting-edge, innovative, appropriate, and, dare I say, cool experiences, processes and products when you operate centrally within a dogmatically traditional organizational structure? You can't. That environment invariably seeks to "reel in" non-conformity and authoritatively rubber stamp their control over it. It does not provide an arena that permits in reality the necessary opportunity for your people to generate their most profound ideas and concepts - those that have the potential to result in the best product, most thoughtful recommendation, most effective solution, most comprehensive response - those that best solve your client's problem. You are lying to them.
It's inevitable that business books retain a particular style of writing. Hirshberg will not win a writing award. But, his candidness of real world successes and failures, which he shares fearlessly make this book remarkable.
Read the book. Look at what a remarkable process he formed and the result of that leap and then measure it against how your organization operates.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Unleashing Creativity, November 23, 2005
This review is from: The Creative Priority: Driving Innovative Business in the Real World (Hardcover)
This is a very good book. In it Jerry Hirshberg shares his experiences as founder and president of Nissan Design International. In so doing he characterizes the leadership, organization, and group dynamics that foster breakthrough innovation. Here is a sampling of the kind of thinking he unpacks...
* Bureaucratic "structure" with its need for predictability, linear logic, conformance to accepted norms, and the dictates of the most recent "long range" vision statement, is a nearly perfect idea killing machine.
* The atmosphere that follows out of the creative priority, while challenging and stimulating, also becomes supportive and humane, since a workplace safe for ideas is a workplace safe for people.
* Creative expression is a bipolar event; it requires both a sender and a receiver.
* There is a vital connection between abrasiveness and original thinking.
* Creativity and destructiveness are at the same time polar opposites and closely related cousins.
* The very idea of a "balanced person" as some kind of ideal is somehow troubling.
* New truths are often in plain sight, but are rendered invisible or menacing by an associated language, or a stubborn set of assumptions.
* Nothing can so effectively move work forward at times as not working.
* Work tends to be a convergent activity, focusing on the task at hand. Play is a divergent activity. It opens out and is not easy to contain.
* In the quest for creative thinking, research should never be left to someone else, as nothing stimulates the imagination as the impact of direct experience.
* Imaginative thinking cannot be constrained by preconception or prior intentions. Creativity does not play by the rules; it plays with the rules.
I would recommend this book for both leaders and members of creative groups as well those with whom they interact.
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