Two Books on Creativity

Former O'Reilly creative director Edie Freedman sent me a link to a review of a couple of interesting-sounding books on creativity, entitled The Elusive Goal of Corporate Creativity:

"Seven steps for encouraging/leveraging creativity in a corporate setting--I am especially fond of the one about "proprietary emotion": Always start from scratch. "Demand a ruthlessly simple definition of the business problem." Find a "proprietary emotion" you can appeal to. "Marketers who favor reason over emotion," they write, "will find themselves quite literally forgotten." Think big. Don't be limited by the budget or the initial challenge. Take calculated risks. Collaborate with others both inside and outside your company to solve the problem. "Listen hard to your customers. (Then listen some more.)"

These principles are from the first of the three books reviewed, Juicing the Orange, by the founders of ad agency Fallon Worldwide. The reviewer picked this book as the best of the crop, but the second book, How Invention Begins, also sounds very interesting, and makes a point so very true in my experience:

In virtually every case, the credited inventor built on many ideas preceding his own. To some degree, the author says, an invention is the product of group intelligence. "The fabric of causality becomes terribly complex in the case of invention," Mr. Lienhard writes. "That is why we do better if we begin with a seemingly illogical acceptance that invention is the emergence of a collective idea at the same time it is an expression of one person's genius. Once we make that willing suspension of common sense, we are in a position to start looking for ways that the individual and community form two facets of a single cause."

The old bon mot, "success has a hundred fathers," is true not just as a cynical commentary on human hunger for credit but as an understanding of how new ideas emerge. I've watched this firsthand in the major technology movements I've been associated with: the emergence of the commercial internet, open source software, and the ideas of Web 2.0. Those of us who have been there know how complex the relationships and contributions are in the evolution of new technology. Key figures and contributions are ignored while others are credited beyond their due. No matter how hard journalists and historians try to get it right, the reality is too complex, no -- too multiplex -- to be captured by a single story line.

That's why history provides such continuing fodder for historians, even on well-trodden subjects. History is a bit like Yeats' view of love:

Oh, love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
to find out all that is in it
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.

In creativity as in love, we are exploring the endless possibilities engendered by random combinations within a framework that somehow appears as destiny to those in its embrace.