CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE
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CQ Makes Best Books in Creativity & Innovation for 2013
Creative Intelligence made this short-list for best books in 2013 on innovation and creativity. CEO-Read focuses on books for businesss execs and managers who want to raise their creativity game. Is that you?
I’m in good company on the list. David and Tom Kelley’s Creative Confidence is on the list as well.
Back in 2010, IBM did a global survey of 1500 CEOs. For the first time, the CEOs said that creativity was the most important leadership ability. Creativity is more important today for senior managers than operations, marketing or strategy.
Leadership plays two central roles in promoting creativity. First, CEOs must understand what is meaningful to their companies’ customers. This is not the same thing as conventional strategy. Knowing what Frank Knight, the Chicago School of Economics founder called “higher order wants,” not just needs, is key in orienting your business. Lou Gerstner saved IBM in the 1980s by talking with its customers and discovering that they wanted help, not heavy metal big computers, from IBM. He turned it into a service company.
Knowing how to mine meaning is a key creative competency.
Second, curating creativity and then scaling what offers the most value and the greatest chance of success is a key CEO/leadership capability. Nearly all the great labs and great companies that innovate well have terrific curators of creativity who supply finance, markets and the making stuff to what they believe will provide value. In the art world, these curators are patrons. In sports, coaches. In startups, venture capitalists (or crowdfunders as in Kickstarter).
My thanks tot he curators at CEO-Read for including Creative Intelligence in their list of Best Books for 2013.