Click here to pre-order CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE by Bruce Nussbaum, available March 5, 2013 from HarperBusiness
The world is quickly changing in ways we find hard to comprehend. Successful methods of dealing with problems have become outmoded. To be successful, you can’t just be good. You also need to be creative. In “Creative Intelligence”, innovation expert Bruce Nussbaum charts the making of a new literacy, “Creative Intelligence”, or CQ. From corporate CEOs trying to parse the confusing matrix of global business to K-12 teachers attempting to reach bored kids in increasingly wired classrooms, creativity is viewed as the antidote to uncertainty and complexity. “Creative Intelligence” embodies a bundle of specific literacies that increase our ability to navigate the unknown. It’s a skill-set that explorers have tacitly used for eons but which, only now, is explicitly revealing its secrets to us. Nussbaum explores how people and organizations are learning to be more creative in work and in life, and investigates the ways in which individuals, corporations, and nations are boosting their CQ-and how that translates into their abilities to make new products and solve new problems. “Creative Intelligence” shows readers how to frame problems in new ways and devise solutions that are original by drawing insight from anthropology and culture rather than psychology and the brain. Smart and eye opening, it introduces us to the next evolutionary step and our future. Ultimately, “Creative Intelligence” will show readers how to boost their creative capacity, build creative confidence, and connect creativity with capitalism in a new form - Indie Capitalism - that could, and should, replace Finance Capitalism.
Bruce Nussbaum is a Professor of Innovation and Design at Parsons The New School of Design in New York City, is a former Managing Editor at BusinessWeek and blogs for Fast Company and Harvard Business Review. He taught third grade science in the Peace Corps in the Philippines and studied anthropology, sociology and political science in grad school at the University of Michigan. At Business Week, he wrote dozens of cover stories but his favorites are “I’m Worried About My Job, I Can’t Get the !X@#! Thing To Work, The World’s Most Innovative Companies, The Power of Design and Get Creative, How to Build Innovative Companies.
Bruce birds Central Park and the world. He saw a black swan in Singapore but wasn’t surprised. He practices what he call "donut thinking” in his book, training to always look for what doesn’t fit the pattern (the “odd duck”). Bruce is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and used to go to the World Economic Forum in Davos all the time. He’s written two other books, The World After Oil in 1982 where he predicted the breakup of the Soviet Union and Good Intentions, where he analyzed AIDS research at the NIH. I.D. Magazine named Bruce one of the top figures in Design for 2005.
Bruce was asked to spell “polymath” in grade school. He could’t but looked it up and tried to become one when he grew up. He’s still trying.
Bruce + Banana image via Design Thinking Blog