Upload
george-kingston
View
213
Download
1
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
Book Reviews
Book Review Editor: Donovan R. Hardenbrook, NPDP
Books reviewed in this issue:
� Managing Creative People: Lessons in Leadership
for the Ideas Economy
� Triple C Model of Project Management: Communi-
cation, Cooperation, and Coordination
� Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities
that Lead to Business Breakthroughs
� Customer Visits
Managing Creative People: Lessons in Lead-ership for the Ideas Economy
Gordon Torr. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons,Ltd., 2008. 303þ xiv pages. US$39.95.
This is not your typical book on creativity. It will
give you a refreshingly different viewpoint on a sub-
ject that is critical for new product development or-
ganizations. Gordon Torr, formerly a global creative
director for the J. Walter Thompson advertising
agency and now the head of his own consultancy,
has extensive experience in managing truly creative
people. In this book, he proposes that creativity, like
high intelligence or athletic talent, is a characteristic
of a small subset of people, and then he goes on to
develop an approach for successfully managing
these creative individuals. This book is intended
for those who manage creative people, whether they
are artists, scientists, copy writers, engineers, or de-
signers.
The author does not deny that most people can
develop some degree of creativity, just as most people
can learn to hit a tennis ball or write an essay, but his
focus is on the creative equivalent of Olympic athletes.
These are people who have the special talents and
personalities needed to come up with breakthrough
ideas again and again. He argues that they are differ-
ent from other people and need to be managed
accordingly. They are creative because they are differ-
ent; they are not different because they are creative.
This thesis goes against the grain of the many writers
on creativity who seeks to show how creativity can be
taught, and Torr is not shy about skewering some
well-known names. As such the book is thought pro-
voking and enlightening.
The book is divided into two parts: The first part
describes and analyzes the creative individual, and the
second proposes a model for a creative organization.
The author begins by showing, from his own experi-
ence and from observations in a variety of industries,
that creative people do not respond well to the incen-
tives and controls that are generally successful for
managing large organizations. Rather, standard man-
agement techniques tend to suppress these individu-
als. He then looks at organizations that have been
successful at generating creative output and comes to
this conclusion: ‘‘The history of ideas teaches a very
simple lesson: that two guys in a garage will beat a
multi-million dollar corporation ninety-nine times out
of a hundred’’ (p. 23). This seemingly straightforward
statement contains two basic ideas that the author
goes on to develop in detail. First, it doesn’t apply to
any two guys. For example, many organizations have
tried to emulate the success of Edison’s Menlo Park
Laboratory or Lockheed’s Skunk Works, but without
a Thomas Edison or a Kelly Johnson to come up with
the ideas, they are often disappointed. Second, orga-
nizations can, and often do, negate the contributions
of really creative people by inappropriate manage-
ment. This is why breakthrough innovations often are
the result of a collaboration of a small group of highly
creative individuals operating semiautonomously.
Who are these creative individuals? The author
spends several chapters sorting through the sparse
and sometimes contradictory literature on the biolog-
ical and psychological bases of creativity, including an
exploration of the similarities between creative and
J PROD INNOV MANAG 2009;26:467–471r 2009 Product Development & Management Association
psychotic personalities. His conclusion is that creative
people are, in fact, different, but whether it is because
they are less inhibited, more open to experiment, more
perceptive, or just weirder than the rest of us remains
to be discovered. What is clear to him is that attempts
to reduce the act of creativity to a formula or a process
have to date been woefully inadequate. The author
concludes his discussion of the creative individual with
this provocative statement: ‘‘Process doesn’t really
matter. If we’re smart enough we will solve problems.
If we’re even smarter we will allow for the illogicality
that has brought us this far’’ (p. 116).
The first sentence of the second part of the book
sums up the author’s management philosophy: ‘‘A
belief in creativity for the sake of creativity is a nec-
essary condition for the success of creative compa-
nies’’ (p. 120). Reconciling the self-gratifying nature
of creativity with the demands of a profit-oriented
organization is the challenge of managing creative
people. Creativity results from intrinsic motivation;
organizations run on extrinsic motivation. Creativity
cannot demonstrate its instrumental value, that is, its
commercial worth, by itself, which makes it incom-
patible with a world of key performance indicators.
After a discussion of why creativity often fails to
survive in large organizations, the author comes to a
critical distinction: the difference between creativity
and innovation. By his definition, creativity is about
coming up with ideas, and innovation is about imple-
menting them in the real world. Innovation is a pro-
cess that can be managed, as evidenced by the
numerous permutations of the Stage-Gates ap-
proach. But most of these tend to gloss over the idea
generation step. Managing creative people is about
making that idea generation happen. As the author
points out, ‘‘Creativity without innovation, at least in
the commercial context, is a self-indulgent waste of
time. Innovation without creativity is absurd’’ (p. 175).
Leaning heavily on the work of Theresa Amabile
(1998), a professor at Harvard Business School, Torr
presents the evidence for intrinsic motivation being the
most effective driver of creativity. Intrinsic motivation
is best defined as doing something because you enjoy
doing it. He also shows how an overreliance on ex-
trinsic motivation can actually have a negative effect
on creativity and the performance of creative people.
As a model for the creative organization, Torr uses
Amabile’s analogy of a maze with one entrance and
five different exits. Exit one is directly opposite the
entrance and easy to find but leads to an incremental
benefit. Most people will use that exit. The other exits
are increasingly hard to find but lead to more inter-
esting places. Exit five is where the greatest result is
gained, but few people can find it. The goal of the
creative organization is find people who can and en-
able them to find that elusive exit. This means refusing
to let them use the easy exits or, to put it another way,
refusing to accept incremental improvements and hav-
ing the patience to encourage the persistence and
imagination that will result in great ideas.
The author does not prescribe a single, specific or-
ganizational model. Rather, he suggests carefully iden-
tifying the most creative people for the job, separating
them from the line functions of the organization, let-
ting them explore their particular maze, and protecting
them from organizational interference. He recom-
mends paying them well and recognizing them for
their output, not for the eventual commercial success
or failure of that output: ‘‘1. Hire the best talent you
can afford. 2. Let them get on with it’’ (p. 167).
As befits a book on creativity and the creative pro-
cess, this work tends to ramble. At times, the reader
may wonder why the author has taken off in a par-
ticular direction. But persistence is rewarded with im-
portant insights and a thought-provoking philosophy
for managing creative people.
Reference
Amabile, T. (1998). How to Kill Creativity. Harvard Business Review.
George Kingston
East Longmeadow, MA
Triple CModel of Project Management: Com-munication, Cooperation, and Coordination
Adedeji B. Badiru. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2008.204þ xvii pages. US$89.95.
This book provides some unique insights that are
equally applicable to product management and pro-
ject management. The Triple C model of project man-
agement involves three key facets of good project
management: communication, cooperation, and co-
ordination. It focuses on the issues of dealing with
people in project management: ‘‘This book presents
the soft side of project management which is not nec-
essarily the easiest [and] requires more managerial
468 J PROD INNOV MANAG2009;26:467–471
BOOK REVIEWS