Managing Creativity and Innovation (Harvard Business Essentials) [Paperback]

Harvard Business School Press (Compiler)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2003 | ISBN-10: 1591391121 | ISBN-13: 978-1591391128

Packed with practical information designed for business readers and managers at all levels, this essential volume offers insights on managing creativity in groups, developing creative conflict, and using technology to help foster innovation.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Harvard Business Essentials The Reliable Source for Busy Managers The Harvard Business Essentials series is designed to provide comprehensive advice, personal coaching, background information, and guidance on the most relevant topics in business. Drawing on rich content from Harvard Business School Publishing and other sources, these concise guides are carefully crafted to provide a highly practical resource for readers with all levels of experience. To assure quality and accuracy, each volume is closely reviewed by a specialized content adviser from a world class business school. Whether you are a new manager interested in expanding your skills or an experienced executive looking for a personal resource, these solution-oriented books offer reliable answers at your fingertips.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press (July 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591391121
• ISBN-13: 978-1591391128
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #583,543 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential, Informative, and Invaluable, August 26, 2004

By 

Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Managing Creativity and Innovation (Harvard Business Essentials) (Paperback)

This is one of the volumes in the new Harvard Business Essentials Series. Each offers authoritative answers to the most important questions concerning its specific subject. The material in this book is drawn from a variety of sources which include the Harvard Business School Press and the Harvard Business Review as well as Harvard ManageMentor®, an online service. Each volume is indeed "a highly practical resource for readers with all levels of experience." And each is by intent and in execution solution-oriented. Although I think those who have only recently embarked on a business career will derive the greatest benefit, the material is well-worth a periodic review by senior-level executives.

In this volume, Richard Luecke assembles cutting edge thinking about managing creativity and innovation, ably assisted subject adviser Ralph Katz, a professor at Northeastern University's College of Business and in the Management of Technology Group of M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management. They have carefully organized the material within these eight chapters:

1. Types of Innovation (Several Types on Many Fronts)
2. The S-Curve (A Concept and Its Lessons)
3. Idea Generation (Opening the Genie's Bottle)
4. Recognizing Opportunities (Don't Let the Good Ones Slip By)
5. Moving Innovation to Market (Will It Fly?)
6. Creativity and Creative Groups (Two Keys to Innovation)
7. Enhancing Creativity (Enriching the Organization and Workplace)
8. What Leaders Must Do (Making a Difference)

In the two appendices which follow, there are brief but insightful discussions of "The Time Value of Money" and "Useful Innovation Tools." Luecke and Katz also provide sections dedicated to Notes, Glossary, and For Further Reading. If you need assistance with mastering essentials in only one of these areas, I urge you to purchase a copy of this book ASAP. Luecke is an uncommonly clear thinker and writer. Thoughtfully, he provides a "Summing Up" section at the end of each chapter to facilitate a review of key points.

There are four other books which I also presume to recommend highly, all of which are available in a paperbound edition. First, Michael Michalko's Cracking Creativity in which he explains how to use various strategies to overcome ("crack") barriers to human creativity: knowing how to see, making a thought visible, thinking fluently, making novel (bizarre is better) combinations, connecting the unconnected, looking at "the other side," looking in other "worlds," finding what you are not looking for, and wakening the collaborative spirit. In Expect the Unexpected, Roger von Oech discusses 30 "Creative Insights" of Heraclitus which include, for example, #2. "Expect the unexpected or you won't find it," #4 "You can't step into the same river twice,"#12 "Many fail to grasp what's right in the palm of their hand," and #26 "Donkeys prefer garbage to gold." Obviously, von Oech agrees with Jim Collins that the most formidable barriers to creative thinking include what Collins describes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom." If you need expert advice on how to plan and then conduct effective brainstorming sessions, the "must reads" include Doug Hall's Jump Start Your Brain and Tom Kelley's The Art of Innovation.

As is also true of each of the others in the Harvard Business Essentials series, this volume is essentially a primer on cutting-edge thinking about an especially important business subject. Yes, much of the material is generic. No, it doesn't offer a cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effective system for managing creativity and innovation. However, any one of the eight chapters (all by itself) is worth far more than the cost of this book. Obviously, I highly recommend it. In fact, I think every decision-maker should read all of the volumes in the Harvard Business Essentials series and then re-visit relevant portions in them (previously highlighted, of course) on an as-needed basis.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Good, Basic Introduction, July 7, 2007

By 

A. J. Valasek (Clemmons, NC United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Managing Creativity and Innovation (Harvard Business Essentials) (Paperback)

This text serves as a good, basic introduction to the concept of idea management. It is discussed from a higher level and can help some organizations set up a basic framework for identifying and implementing new ideas. It would be most helpful to those leaders and managers who do not find themselves that creative and need some assistance identifying who is creative and how to best tap into those resources.

One area of weakness was that the book did not discuss implementation problems to the degree that is necessary for most organizations. This is the one area that generally troubles organizations the most. It did provide a basic framework, but little concerning the integration issues including; adapting to the current structure, organizational development, and cultural transformation, to name a few.

12 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars If you like this book you are too dumb to create, April 25, 2007

By 

Richard Greene "richardtaborgreene" (Sanda Japan) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Managing Creativity and Innovation (Harvard Business Essentials) (Paperback)

This book addresses none of the issues in getting creativity and doing business to relate to each other. I use the word "none" advisedly, not carelessly. I wanted a book I could recommend to consulting clients and trusted the name "Harvard". Boy was I wrong. This book is completely irrelevant for relating creativity to doing business. In addition, it is hard for me, honestly, to imagine anyone so mentally stunted that they would find the "insights" of this book, well, how shall I say...insightful!

I suppose if your prior business experience was fishing in a tiny land-locked lake somewhere, this would be a real eye-opener for you, but if you lived in any of the top 2000 cities of any of the top 20 industrial nations of the 21st century, you would find this book part of a giant "boring trite-isms about innovation" recycling system. Apparently every 20 years you can re-publish this stuff to a new generation.

Let me get real specific and real real about this for those of you doubting my review thus far--what SHOULD this sort of book be dealing with that it does not deal with? To wit:

1) most of business does not need creativity at all--a lot of business needs great execution, fast response, careful positioning, speedy admission of error, seeking help rather than re-investing in failing lines of action, and the like. Creativity is so popular and talked about in business not because it is so needed but it is in large part a cover for other, ulterior purposes--primarily doing something personal that is jazzy enough to get attention of higher ups, whether it helps the firm or not is irrelevant as long as it gets you visibility to help your career! This book takes a naive, pro-more-creativity tone and bias, that belittles the hard trade-offs between creativity and things more essential, one wants to say more "creative" for business survival.

2) Americans share a national neurosis of trying to cure all their ills of whatever sort by applying more: creativity, freedom, capitalism, you get the picture. So you find business people bandying about the word "creativity" as a solution to problems caused by too much creativity, among other causes. This book nowhere acknowledges the difference between "cute" creativity for show and life and death creativity for continued business survival. It takes a decorative sort of tone that I find highly irritating, like a whining employee who thinks he had got it but who clearly has not got it.

3) People can sell systems, it is a fact, by telling customers these systems "are creative" and "help you become creative"--so the creativity of products and services is grossly exaggerated nearly everywhere in modern businesses. In addition the difficulty of getting tiny amounts of novelty through modern business bureaucracies causes tired frustrated people to celebrate tiny innovations as if biggo paradigm shaking creations. This book never acknowledges the gross exaggeration of the role, import, amount, and destiny of creativity actually out there in real businesses today. It just recycles business magazine enthusiasms.

4) the career system generates simultaneous excesses and deficits of creativity--the famous inventory simultaneous overshoot and undershoot problem--it generates too much creativity because career forces drive people to exaggerate their "creativity" and the "creativity" of their "team" and "product"--it generates too little creativity because the fundamentals really needed like having a planet left for capitalism to profit from, decency of treatment of population lowest income levels so rich people do not die early(see the research on this), relevance to customers, value for price, solid execution of total quality principles, all of which would be creative accomplishments since US firms largely fail at them, are left undone (instead more "creative" things get done)

4) good longitudinal studies of innovations--mostly out of Van de Ven et al at Minnesota--showed that nearly all creative products/efforts have to be disguised and hidden, repeatedly, to protect them from careerist and other distortions and obstacles--the ordinary culture of business, for good reasons, is hostile to creativity and will always be so; to pretend, as this Harvard book does, that creativity will be welcomed and popular, seen as an asset to the business, embedded in the culture--is to be incredibly dishonest and naive--innovation hurts higher ups, makes their past innovations no longer innovative--always, so it is never popular with such higher ups--if you believe otherwise, just keep pluggin another few years and you will wise up eventually (besides the research on this was done in the 1960s, and well done statistically, apparently unread by the authors of this book).

5) being creative is largely the moral work of not exaggerating it and the cultural work of defining it in historic and self change terms not in groovy and advertising terms--this book views creativity as a kind of technical technique thing, produced by work as usual.

This book addresses none of the above, none, not one. Instead we get a recycling of trite commonsense--uh, let's get creativity by talking to, uh, our customers--yea, that's a good idea! Let's go for "incremental" creativity--it is easier to get tiny ideas through the small brains of our executives--the Doonebury door to creativity in modern business! You get the picture. To be honest, the first client I handed this book to read it as a comedy, sending me lines by email for me to laugh at with him.

This book, ironically, is a demonstration of the kind of dumb management ideas that go for thinking among people condemned to decades of reading what New York Publishers push out the door for "the businessman market"--

keep it simple so the poor mentally deficit businessmen will be able to read it, better still, make an executive summary reducing the book's main points to 5 lines of utterly trite tripe--executives love tripe!

In my opinion, this sort of book and the publishers of this stuff, patronize businessmen with this sort of dumbed down book. They insult me and all the businessmen I have worked with for years. I have never worked with anyone in business as mentally limited as the audience for this book is assumed to be. No one in any business I was in was mentally slow enough to fit this book. I feel sorry for the publishers of this stuff--they must have had really bad experiences in their first firms to reduce their view of businessman intelligence to the level this book targets and represents. Get real please.

Now for a bigger and much more devastating flaw in this book--every article in this book bandies about the word "creativity" as if it was one thing. What if creativity is not one thing but, say, 60 things, different in process to each other. Then you get this, very very interesting, powerful, and real conundrum--missing entirely from this book--(IMPORTANT STUFF FOLLOWS) the tactical actions that I take to enhance the one model, of what creativity is, that my paid-for consultant is foisting now onto me, interact so as to hinder a dozen other models of what creativity is, that that consultant is unaware of, and not selling to me, so overall the tactics I do shut down more creativity than they grow--but my consultant and I are unaware of this because we see and measure only one model of what creativity is. Not one word of this book acknowledges that creativity might just be not one simple obvious thing but many pluriform things in trade-off relations to each other. This is a devastating flaw.

The authors of this book do not have clue--I get the feel they have never managed a popsicle stand much less a real business. I get the feel they have read books about meeting payroll every month and have never actually felt responsiblity for 500 families eating next month. I get the idea they come from some sort of wimpy pale MBA rendition of what business is. Wimpy creativity does not get very far in this world.

Now for an even bigger flaw, a more devastating flaw. This book assumes that you, as you now are, can create much more than you ever have. This is a sucker's promise and if you fall for it you are a, well, to put it politely, suboptimal person. I was suspicious of it right off! The you that you now are, can never create. You are going to have to change you in order to change how creative you are. If you think that you can create a lot more while keeping the same you, you are guilty of the commonest form of mental illness--the belief that things can be made to be entirely different while keeping yourself the same person. Never happens. Childish illusion.

This book ignores decades of creativity research that show two things--one, that creative people first establish creative lives for themselves and it is those creative lives that do the creating, not the raw people by themselves. Second, creative people before their main famous creations, work up to it with hundreds of small inventions and discoveries and creations of work style and lifestyle tools that prepare the way for their biggo final creations--subcreations I call these though the research literature uses lots of terms. So, in this book, you get the sucker's illusion that you, without changing you, just by reading a few techniques, can become vastly more creative than all your life thus far made you. If you are dumb enough to believe that you should not be reading books at all! No, to greatly change creativity from you, YOU YOURSELF very intimately, will have to change a lot about YOU!!!! No input change, no output change. This book promotes a sucker line that you can get creativity "for free" by buying a clever system, installing a new "retiree research posting network". Also, this book never... Read more ›