Customer Reviews

Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration

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The Summary:
There have been a few books recently that have challenged the commonly held beliefs and myths of innovation. Keith Sawyer; professor of psychology at Washington University in St Louis; tackles probably the most prevalent innovation myth, the lone genius. He has written a fascinating book on the power of collaboration and how it is the secret to breakthrough creativity. This book joins a small group of my favorite books on innovation; How Breakthroughs Happen, Medici Effect, The Act of Creation and The Art of Innovation. Sawyer has written a very practical book that is based on some solid scientific research.

The Audience:
I would highly recommend this book for anyone interested innovation and wants a practical framework for infusing an innovative culture throughout their company. The book is definitely aimed at a general business audience but provides enough depth into the background research to make the practical advice more meaningful. It is a very fine line Sawyer has walked with the creation of this book and I applaud him on a job well done. This is by no means a simple `how to' book, it is far more. Great writing, great ideas and if you act upon it you will get great results!!

The Details:
Sawyer has spent the last 15 years researching and studying creativity, he worked with Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi on the research behind `Flow - the science of optimal experience'. He approached his research into creativity with a similar scientific approach using indirect and direct techniques to understand the brain in action. He focused on a subject close to his heart, Jazz. Sawyer has been playing Jazz since his college days and he realized that there was some real creativity at work in jazz performances. He quickly discovered that taking the standard approach of studying the individual seemed to miss an important piece of the experience. He realized he had to study how a whole jazz group collaborated to really understand what made one performance shine and another flop. When a group of jazz musicians found their `flow' they created something much more than the individual contributors. He used a technique called `interaction analysis' to study how a group collaborates in a dynamic environment. This is an intensive method where minute to minute interactions (gestures, body language and verbal cues) are analyzed. He expanded his research into another rich collaborative activity, improvisational theatre.
This research is the bedrock of his theories on group genius, he combined his research with some insights from his work on `flow' and coined what he called `group flow' to describe when a group gets into the zone of creativity.

Sawyer doesn't just show us the genius of groups, he takes it one step further to explain how when a lone genius generates a breakthrough idea, there is a web of people and ideas that are behind the breakthrough. He gives us examples from the work of Charles Darwin and Phil T. Farnsworth (TV) and shows the interconnected web that surrounded them to facilitate the breakthrough. Sawyer doesn't fully explore this idea, since his focus is on explaining collaboration, but it is easily translated to how individuals can leverage this network of people and ideas and use the power of collaboration to generate breakthrough ideas.

Sawyer, who started his life developing computer games for Atari and as a management consultant, uses his research to develop advice for businesses on how to build genius groups and get out of the standard `group think mentality'. He shows how to build an innovation lab and how to permeate an innovative culture through an organization. His advice will be hard to execute for most companies since they need to overcome some of the paradoxes of innovation. Innovation is predominantly inefficient, not something most managers want to hear. He even explores a lot of research from the original work on brainstorming by Alex Osborn and studies that followed that challenged the findings. He doesn't gloss over the fact that not all tasks need an innovative methodology and are better handled `solo' than in groups. He does explain that the studies that challenged Osborn's findings on brainstorming were using it for the wrong types of work. Sawyer shows that for companies that want to develop breakthrough ideas, they need to bite the bullet of inefficiency and develop genius groups.


The Take-Aways:
- Collaboration is the secret to breakthrough innovation
- Group Genius is best suited for breakthrough ideas and not for pedestrian improvement projects, where individuals perform far better
- Innovation is inefficient and companies need to embrace the risk of failure
- Even when individuals come up with a breakthrough, they are normally at the center of a web of people and ideas that came together

Innovation will never be routine and it comes with many challenges; Sawyer has written a great book that provides a good roadmap for a company that wants to infuse a creative culture throughout their organization.

Kes Sampanthar
Inventor of ThinkCube

I have had a lifelong interest in etymology. Curious to know the origin of "genius," I checked several sources and here is what I learned. The Latin word "genius" originally meant "deity of generation and birth" and as its meaning evolved over time via various languages, it was used to describe "a person of outstanding intellectual ability." We do indeed view those of superior intellect (e.g. Plato and Aristotle, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein) as secular equivalents of religious deities and certainly admire their mental capabilities. We also tend to toss the word "genius" around somewhat carelessly when referring to entertainers, athletes, and business executives. That said, the fact remains that throughout human history, what Keith Sawyer characterizes as "collaborative genius" has made significant contributions in ways and to an extent few (if any) individuals have. In fact, the more I think about all this, the more I appreciate the meaning and significance of Bernard of Chartres' observation (incorrectly attributed to Isaac Newton) that "We are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants."

Here is a brief excerpt which correctly indicates one of Keith Sawyer's core concepts: "In both an improv group and a successful work team, the members play off one another, each person's contributions providing the spark for the next. Together, the improvisational team creates a novel emergent product, one that's more responsive to the changing environment and [key point] better than what anyone could have developed alone. Improvisational teams are the building blocks of innovative organizations, and organizations that can successfully build improvisational teams will be more likely to innovate effectively."

Make no mistake about it: although there can be indeed great creative power of collaboration, the process is necessarily messy, frustrating, at times perhaps discouraging. However, on the basis of his extensive research since the 1990s, Sawyer has identified seven key characteristics of effective creative teams: Innovation emerges over time, successful collaborative teams practice "deep listening," team members build on their collaborators' ideas, only over a period of time do the meaning and significance of each idea become clear, meanwhile "surprising" (i.e. unforeseen) ideas emerge, innovation is inefficient (trial and error, frequent false starts and detours, "dry wells," etc.), and innovation emerges "from the bottom up."

Sawyer carefully organizes his material within three Parts: The Collaborative Team (Chapters 1-4), The Collaborative Mind (Chapters 5-7), and The Collaborative Organization (Chapters 8-11). One of Sawyer's most valuable insights, examined with both rigor and eloquence, is that people who are steadfastly convinced that they are not "creative" can nonetheless work effectively together to generate (albeit eventually) profoundly innovative ideas. There are some "ifs," of course. First, senior managers must provide full support (including sufficient resources, especially time) of a collaborative team. Next, they must be patient rather than committing the common mistake of "ripping out a seedling to see how well it's growing." Also, they must understand - really understand - the meaning and especially the implications of the aforementioned seven key characteristics of effective creative teams. Finally, they must recognize that each "failure" (however defined) is a unique learning opportunity for them as well as for team members.

Credit Keith Sawyer with a brilliant achievement, especially at a time when the need for innovative thinking and creative collaboration is greater now than ever before.

Those who share my high regard for this volume are urged to check out Howard Gardner's studies of multiple intelligences, notably Creating Minds (i.e. those of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi) and his more recently published Five Minds for the Future. Also Andrew Hargadon's How Breakthroughs Happen, Michael Ray and Rochelle's Myers' Creativity in Business, Frans Johansson's The Medici Effect, Henry Chesbrough's Open Innovation and Open Business Models, Michael Michalko's Cracking Creativity, Richard Ogle's Smart World, and X-teams co-authored by Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman.

As befits its subject matter, this is a lively and innovative book, which uses many examples drawn from the worlds of jazz and improvisational theater, as well as from creative writing, cycling, banking and computer technology. Keith Sawyer doesn't stop at telling stories, though; he also supports his ideas with solid evidence. In well-organized chapters, complete with summaries and checklists, he debunks common beliefs about the nature of creativity - primarily, the myth that you need to be an isolated genius to succeed. Instead, he argues that innovation is most often the result of collaboration. Sawyer overreaches in some instances: He does not fully explain why some individuals are so much more creative than others in the same "collaborative web," or why some individuals can produce revolutionary ideas in relative isolation. However, that's a quibble, since Sawyer tackles a complex and slippery topic and comes up with some genuinely new insights. We recommend this book to managers and members of workplace teams, and executives who wish to encourage creative thinking.

Ever thought that the Wright Brothers invented the airplane? Or that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, James Watt invented the steam engine, John Logie Baird did likewise for television and Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin (all from Scotland, by the way, the land of genius)? Sir Isaac Newton invented the calculus. Right! C.S. Lewis wrote the Chronicles of Narnia entirely from the spark of genius from within? Well, after reading this book you will see that these various stories of geniuses inventing things single-handedly, while warding off the depredations of jealous and rival others, are all myths, perpetuated by the believers in the importance of the individual and the notion that creativity can reside only within the single person.

This book makes a strong case for the view that inventions are, more likely than not, the outcome of collaboration or at least the use by individuals of information provided by a web of informants, friends, rivals, students, writers and a further miscellany of people, who provide the wherewithal that the "inventor" can use at the right time and the right place.

This book fulfils three purposes. The first is that it provides a free flowing and exciting account of how we think about the process of creativity. We can understand that how people produce the ideas and actions that lead to great works of art, scientific breakthroughs and the technology that we have all become so dependent upon in everyday living , have progressed from attempts to understand the thought processes of the lone genius to the realisation that creativity stems from teams of co-workers and collaborative webs of participants. As someone whose early research was concerned with the associative processes underlying creativity within the individual and who later worked through an understanding of the dynamics of group interaction to see the potential of collaboration, I can vouch that this book provides a good primer of work in the area and it does so with flair and humour.

The second is that it gives, in Part 2, a set of puzzles and tasks that can be used by individuals, but more importantly groups and organizations, to experience the insight that alerts them to the possibility of creative collaboration and which can also enhance that creativity. It is a primer and also a training manual.

The third benefit of reading this book is that it provides a series of case studies of successful modern companies that have benefited society through creative collaboration and many organizations, large and small, can take courage from these stories and consider breaking out of their current structures and practices and try the new.

A central premise of the book is that creativity and problem solving are dependent upon the utilisation of knowledge, distributed most effectively across many people and not only resident within an individual. This has always been the premise upon which the idea that distributed knowledge should be superior to individual knowledge. The problem until recently has been that the barriers to the sharing of knowledge have been difficult to overcome and groups of people share more than knowledge; they share inhibitions and past experiences which prevent the utilisation of knowledge that comes from other people. This book, like several others that have been recently published, is based upon the notion that with the internet and the development of network theory, the sharing and utilisation of knowledge have become more democratic and practical.

Sawyer looks at the literature on group problem solving and creativity in this light, and looks at what is emerging in work on webs of collaboration and networks of associations. There are many thoughts on how the utilisation of networks can facilitate thinking and problem solving and chapters 8 and 9 repay close attention and are rewarding.

As a social psychologist, however,one can take a more critical position. While Sawyer does acknowledge that there are lots of conditions that will produce quite the opposite state of affairs, he does not give this material much room. Individuals in many settings are far superior to groups in the quality of thinking that they produce. One can add countless examples of studies where it can be demonstrated that, in fact, groups are "dangerous to your mental health". Sawyer's book is one of several which have appeared recently with the same message. It is, however, more accessible than James Surowiecki's "The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few", and more balanced in its presentation of contrary evidence than Howe's "Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business". It is as optimistic as Sunstein's "Infotopia: How many minds produce knowledge" and one should not perhaps "rain on the parade" too liberally. But it would be foolish to take the contents of this book and apply the nostrums will-nilly to the all the tasks all organizations have to face. Like most insights which are used to generate formulae for practice, in this book, as in many others written today,one has to add "it depends" as a limiting statement after most observations and inferences.

Sawyer does add another important ingredient which does differentiate the book from these others,however, a set of core ideas concerned with the creative process that can be simply stated here and which can give a foretaste for the book. The first set of concepts stems from the idea of "flow", the notion that, when we are engaged in a task which entirely occupies our talents and we are concentrating on achieving our goal, we can attain a new state of consciousness where past, present and future seem to merge into one and we are almost outside of the environment. Sawyer applies this idea of individual consciousness to the experience we can attain within a successful operating group.

"Flow" in a group can be created when there at least five conditions in existence simultaneously. The group must have a clear goal, in the case of the dynamic tertiary education organization, a goal of solving specific problems within that environment. The group members must engage with each other completely, that is they demonstrate "close listening" where members are totally open to the ideas and suggestions of others, with no preconceptions. They are also concentrating only on the task, excluding intruding and distracting tasks and messages. They are given autonomy to address the task and have accepted that responsibility, and they subsume their own egos to the group, so that no one individual has individual leadership responsibility. If these conditions can be achieved, then the group is in a state of readiness to address the problems innovatively and to achieve novel solutions of high quality.

Of course, the achievement of this state of group consciousness is not easy and cannot be guaranteed, even if many of the conditions are in place. The group members need themselves to be skilled and knowledgeable, able to contribute and respond to others. But many people can report having experienced this state. Sawyer, while a psychologist, really formulated his ideas from his experience as a jazz musician, where collaboration and improvisation by the band members must predate the demonstration to the audience of a successful performance. If you are a musician or have played group sports, then you may well have experienced "flow" at some level, even if it has not been as an elite. The metaphor of music collaboration and sport makes an interesting comparison with the metaphor of the organisation as a military team prevalent today.

Setting aside any provisos, however, in the spirit of engaging creatively with an issue or problem, this book should be studied in the context in which it is written, to be seen as a creative solution to a pervasive issue in organisational behaviour. As a "Beginner's Guide" to the tribulations of group and organisational problem solving, this book on Group Genius, is certainly worth reading and studying. For an organization which has several teams, sometimes with goals and modes of operation which appear different, but which are, however, all seeking to achieve an overall goal within a particularly constrained market, this would be a good start to achieve a consensus that is, at the same time and perhaps somewhat paradoxically, creative.
Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce KnowledgeThe Wisdom of CrowdsCrowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business

The path to becoming more innovative often requires debunking a number of myths or commonly held beliefs. For instance, the idea that a lone genius is often responsible for an invention or innovation. In fact, most innovations or inventions spring from the combination of the work of many people. Edison did not create the lightbulb alone, nor did Al Gore invent the internet by himself.

In his book, Group Genius, Keith Sawyer looks at the power of Group Genius, the impact of collaboration on creativity and innovation. Rather than rely on a single genius, we should be harnessing the power and knowledge of many people in our organizations. Through a number of interesting examples, Sawyer demonstrates how the power of collaboration increases the capability of the firm to generate more ideas and better ideas, and enhances the culture of innovation.

Sawyer starts off the book with a few characteristics of creative teams:

1. Innovation emerges over time
2. Successful collaborative teams practice deep listening
3. Team members build on their collaborators' ideas
4. The meaning of an idea becomes clear over time
5. Reframing the problem or solving a different problem
6. Recognizing that innovation is inefficient
7. Innovation emerges from the bottom up

Although he presents these ideas early on, they don't receive enough exposition throughout the book. These concepts alone, however, are enough to chew on for quite some time.

Sawyer divides the book into three sections, looking at how teams collaborate and how corporations collaborate. Yes, I know that's two sections. The third section is a little less defined and really looks at how we as individuals think and the mental models we use which provide frameworks which can limit our thinking and creativity.

In the first section, on team collaboration, Sawyer demonstrates the power of improvisation as a method to improve problem solving and innovation. His argument is that too many rules and too much planning tend to choke out creativity and innovative problem solving. He provides several examples where groups were faced with significant challenges and had to improvise solutions on the spot. While improvisation is often inefficient, it can lead to better ideas and better results in some cases. Sawyer also describes "flow" - a concept that originates from research by Csikszentmihalyi. Flow is a heightened state of consciousness that occurs when:

* People are working on tasks that match their skills
* There's a clear goal
* There's constant feedback as to progress and attainment of the goal
* The person is free to fully engage in the task

Research shows that "flow" is essential to creativity. Sawyer moves on to describe a number of conditions that need to exist for a team to achieve flow, using examples from sports teams to improv to major corporations.

In the second section, the Collaborative Mind, Sawyer looks at successful innovators and people who were highly creative and seeks to determine how they got that way, and how "regular" people like you and me can become more creative. In this section there are a number of exercises to help you start reframing problems and step away from your usual perspectives and context.

In the third section of the book, Sawyer looks at using the concepts of collaboration and group genius within an organization - how to organize for improved collaboration and innovation, how to build collaborative webs and how to collaborate with customers. In this section he offers some very useful ideas and approaches to use within any team or organization.

Group Genius is an excellent book, because it combines theory with practice and practical guidelines. Too often, books about innovation and creativity are written from a purely academic viewpoint, with a lot of research and theory described, but not much information on how to put the information into practice, or from a very tactical perspective, suggesting a few tips or techniques or offering up some simple exercises. Sawyer does a good job of demonstrating the thinking behind his suggestions, but also presenting a number of actions that a team or corporation can take to become more innovative by tapping the collaborative genius of a team or the company. He uses a lot of examples, from improv actors to large corporations, but always within context. The section on the Collaborative Mind is interesting but really more focused on the individual and his or her creative capability, while the sections on team and organizational collaboration are focused on how your teams, groups and business units can harness the power of collaboration to achieve more creativity, better problem solving and generate better ideas.

Some books about creativity are read once and filed on the shelf for occasional reference. Group Genius is a book that will be so dog-eared and so heavily used you may need more than one copy for your own use, and a number of copies for your co-workers as well. This is a book that can be used by an individual, a team or a business unit, with relevance for all of them. This book is my first introduction to Keith Sawyer's work, and I look forward to reading his other books after reading this one. I highly recommend it to anyone who is searching for ways to improve the collaboration, creativity or innovative capability of a team or company.

Reposted from an original review on the Innovate on Purpose Blog.

After reading Keith Sawyer's interesting work for years, I added Group Genius as a required text in an Organization Design MBA class I teach. Students are evening students, middle managers to above. They represent all domains, IT, Finance, Engineering, Law, Accounting, Real Estate/Construction and other sciences as well. Following the addition of Group Genius, students began to turn in truly innovative work, creative and original, beyond anything I've seen in years of teaching. They recognized that this was no ordinary text but one they could apply instantly to their own group and team work. They wrote about using it immediately in the workplace, with extraordinary results. That's what I found too, in the classroom, among working people, extraordinary results.

CHRISTMAS TIP: For the CEO who has too much money, too little time, myopic solicitous subordinates, and some anxiety about the future, this book, together with Howard Gardner's Five Minds for the Future comprise the perfect Christmas gift. Print copies of my review of each and insert those inside each book's cover before wrapping.

I have been interested in collective intelligence ever since Howard Rheingold and John Perry Barlow kicked my secret intelligence colleagues in the head back in 1992, when I first started to reform the secret world by introducing them to Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). Today, OSINT is converging with Collective Intelligence, Peace Intelligence, and Commercial Intelligence, which is an order of magnitude superior to the standard Business Intelligence (internal data mining and dashboards) and Competitive Intelligence (narrow focus on competition, not on customers or externalities including Wild Cards).

This book, in my view is a Nobel-level contribution. If this author is not promoted to full Professor, he should move. This one book is a capstone book, a pioneering book, a summative work of extraordinary value to every leader, but especially for the asset managers, the hedge fund and pension fund managers, and the CEO's in the banking, communications, computing, education, entertainment, and publishing businesses, whose lunch is about to be eaten by Google unless they band together and force Google to the table.

The author is gifted at combining serious education with solid examples and inspiring suggestion. I actually got goose-bumps on pages 25-28 as he described the USS Palau entering a complicated harbor without rudders or electricity or gyro-compasses. The humans instantly created a group mind and devised a shared solution for what used to be a complex and time consuming process. The goose-bumps are returning, just visualizing this (I am retired naval officer, among other things).

The author begins with his appreciation for jazz and comedy improvisation to lay out a case against brainstorming per se, and in favor of innovation as a process that follows an extended conversation. He teaches us that creativity occurs in context, each individuals being sparked by others. He says that group genius can be nurtured and harvested, but not in the established ways. FUN is a required foundation.

His early work focused on interaction analysis, but I would hasten to add that this must be from the age of Kindergarten up. As Howard Bloom notes in Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, we will never solve the eternal conflicts until we are willing to intervene for a full generation--by the time kids are five they have a group bias, by the time they are 25 they are "locked in" to the cultural biases (e.g. Jews and Palestinians as monkeys or non-humans, BOTH sides have this culturally ingrained bias by t he age of 10).

Although there is not yet a satisfactory work on how our existing pyramidal organizations are incapable of reform or renaissance, Jean Francois Noubel, on the web at The Transitioner, will have a chapter in my next edited work, and I hope his book comes out soon--I share with my libertarian and moderate Republican colleagues the view that both Congress and the Executive have become dysfunctional, as have most of our major corporations such as Exxon, and the time is right for a massive non-violent upheaval across the board.

On this note see, for example:
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future - and What It Will Take to Win It Back

I am totally inspired by the author's discussion of how innovation cannot be planned (although planning helps), it must be nurtured and inspired, or more pointedly, ALLOWED TO HAPPEN. As the author of Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace documents so well, we beat the creativity out of our kids by the fifth grades, and most organizations consist of cattle, not free-running mustangs.

I am impressed that the author properly and without excess recognizes his mentor, Mahaly Csikzentmihali with the concept of flow, defined at the time as consisting of four elements:

01 Skills equal the challenge (too good is boring, not enough is frustrating)
02 Goal is clear
03 Feedback is frequent
04 Free to concentrate fully

The author has expanded this to ten conditions:

01 Goal is clear
02 Close listening by all
03 Complete concentration
04 In control
05 Blending egos
06 Equal participation
07 Familiarity
08 Communication
09 Moving it forward
10 Potential for failure

The third section focusing on companies and on organizing for innovation is a "must do" task for CEOs and it cannot be delegated. This is one book each boss has to read for themselves, and not on a train--in isolation, totally concentrating on the words and ideas.

"Bureacracy prevents innovation." This is so true. I gave up on the US Intelligence Community this year, after realizing that Buckminster Fuller had it right--instead of trying to help them as I have for fifteen years, I have to displace them with the Earth Intellligence Network.

In part because of the author's wisdom, I have real doubts about the IBM Cognos deal. Certainly IBM can afford to expand into that marketspace by buying Cognos, but the question on my mind is this: Cognos is in Quadrant I (Knowledge Management) while all the innovation in happening in Quadrants II (Social Networking), III (External Information), and IV (Organizational Intelligence). I am pretty certain that for $100 million I could I could acquire or integrate the 100 key companies and build the EarthGame/World Brain within 5 years. So the question begs to be asked by those who own big blocks of IBM stock: can we get Cognos for $4B and spend the other $1B on first to market, in partnership with CISCO AON, with a totally integrated offering that makes every person on the planet a collector, producer, and consumer of commercial intelligence?

This book is essential reading for acquisition, asset, and fund managers.

The author's advice for CEOs (there is NO SUBSTITUTE) for reading the book:

01 Keep many irons in the fire
02 Create a Department of Surprise
03 Build spaces for creative conversation
04 Allow time for ideas to emerge
05 Manage the risks of improvisation (including too many too much too fast)
06 Improvise on the edge of chaos
07 Manage knowledge for (toward) innovation
08 Build dense networks (with hubs)
09 Ditch the organizational charts
10 Measure the right things

I have a note in the fly-leaf: "This is one of the best thought-out, ably-presented, most useful (i.e. profitable) books it has ever been my pleasure to read." This is not over the top, given the number of books I have read, a quarter of which I have reviewed on Amazon, because I am focused on saving the planet with shared information and open, legal, ethical sense-making. From that perspective, along with "Five Minds," this book is the tip of the spear.

The section on collaboration web work:

01 Build on history
02 Combine many small sparks
03 Frequent interaction across boundaries
04 Multiple discovery is common
05 No one company can own web (Google hasn't realized this yet, for those who want to know more, find and buy "Google 2.0: The Calculating Predator" as offered online by Infonortics UK).

Creating a collaborative society:

01 Reduce copyright terms
02 Reward small sparks
03 Legalize modding (modifications)
04 Free the employees
05 Mandatory licensing (no icing of knowledge)
06 Pool patents
7. Encourage indcustry-wide standards

Coincident with receiving my latest batch of books, which jumped to the front of my 40-book "awaiting review" pile, I received from Babette Bensoussan in Australia, co-author of Strategic and Competitive Analysis: Methods and Techniques for Analyzing Business Competition the following Old and New Rules (adapted from Betsy Morris in Fortune Magazine, 7 August 2006) that every CEO should print out and memorize:

Old: Big dogs own the street
New: Agile is best; being big can bite

Old: Be #12 or #2 in your market
New: Find a niche, create something new

Old: Shareholders rule
New: The customer is king

Old: Be lean and mean
New: Look out, not in

Old: Rank employees, go with the A's
New: Hire passionate people

Old: Hire a charismatic CEO
New: Hire a courageous CEO

Old: Admire my might
New: Admire my soul

See my list on Collective and Commercial Intelligence for about 30 other recommendations. In relation to this specific book I recommend:

The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization

See also my many lists and my own books. On balance, although Amazon does not let us organize our reviews yet (I read in 85 topical areas), if you select me as an interesting person (sorry), and THEN use the lists, my reviews pop to the top.

I would love to get Keith Sawyer, Howard Gardner, Lawrence Lessig, and Cass Sunstein into a room together. If any of you can make that happen, let me know, I'll come at my own expense to moderate what could be the world's hottest new improvisational documentary.

`Group Genius' is a myth busting work articulating the results of many studies into how the creative process works. It demonstrates the difference between how we perceive it working and how it actually works.

In short:
While we perceive that we have sudden moments of insight, the `eureka!' moment, in reality these moments are really achieved through lots of tiny steps usually strongly influenced by input from other people. This process is not an `assertion' it is the result of many objective studies which are detailed in the book. The really interesting aspect of this is that the people that experienced the creative `eureka!' moment almost always perceived the experience differently to what actually took place.

What I learned:
1. That we cannot trust our subjective experiences to necessarily accurately reflect reality, at least not without objectively testing them.
2. There is not so much mystery nowadays regarding "Insight" or "Hunches" or "Instincts" and they are certainly not supernatural. They are understandable in practical ways.
3. If you study the latest developments and learnings in the field of neuroscience much of what used to be the realm of the `spiritual' and the `mystery of human existence' and `consciousness' is being understood in much the same way as we have learned why the sun comes up, why people get ill and why it rains.

The question:
Do you have the curiosity, drive and interest to learn about reality? Or like so many people nowadays do you prefer to sit inside of a protective shell of subjectivity and ignorance regarding the human experience?

The knowledge is there for those interested in learning.

Keith Sawyer's book does not travel down the well worn road of exploring individual genius. Instead he explores the much more important issue of how group genius works. Organisations need to learn how to play together - all too often intelligent people work alone in knowledge based organisations and thus individual expertise does not translate into corporate intelligence.

As a musician and university business academic I find his use of music analogies particularly interesting - exploring ideas such as flow in the context of jazz. Great musicians are BOTH immersed in their own performance, but also tuned in to what is going on around their - a hallmark of true emotional intelligence.

Organisations can learn much from how group genius works in music. If we are to have organisations that thrive on intelligence, this is not a 'nice to have' quality, but an essential 'rite of passage' to staying alive in an ever changing business world.

Peter Cook MBA, MRSC, C.Chem

Author 'Sex, Leadership and Rock'n'Roll - Leadership Lessons from the Academy of Rock'

Keith Sawyer's Group Genius is a terrific book: I highly recommend it to anyone who needs to build better teams, take their organization to
new levels of performance, or make their city or region a more creative
and exciting place.