Handbook of Research on Leadership and Creativity


Book Description

The rapid pace of technological change and globalization of products, competition and services have conspired to place a new premium on innovation for firms across the world. Although many variables influence creativity and innovation, the effective leadership of creative teams has proved especially important. This timely Handbook presents the state of the art for what leaders must do to lead creative teams and how they should do it.




Creative Educational Leadership


Book Description

A guide to developing as a creative leader and to building creative capacity at a personal, institutional and community level.




Creativity, Inc. (The Expanded Edition)


Book Description

The co-founder and longtime president of Pixar updates and expands his 2014 New York Times bestseller on creative leadership, reflecting on the management principles that built Pixar’s singularly successful culture, and on all he learned during the past nine years that allowed Pixar to retain its creative culture while continuing to evolve. “Might be the most thoughtful management book ever.”—Fast Company For nearly thirty years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such beloved films as the Toy Story trilogy, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner eighteen Academy Awards. The joyous storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Here, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar so widely admired—and so profitable. As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the first computer-animated movie. He nurtured that dream as a Ph.D. student, and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movie’s success—and in the twenty-five movies that followed—was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar, based on philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention, such as: • Give a good idea to a mediocre team and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team and they will either fix it or come up with something better. • It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It’s the manager’s job to make it safe for others to take them. • The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them. • A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody. Creativity, Inc. has been significantly expanded to illuminate the continuing development of the unique culture at Pixar. It features a new introduction, two entirely new chapters, four new chapter postscripts, and changes and updates throughout. Pursuing excellence isn’t a one-off assignment but an ongoing, day-in, day-out, full-time job. And Creativity, Inc. explores how it is done.




The Oxford Handbook of Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship


Book Description

Creativity can be viewed as the first stage of the overall innovation process, an important dimension of the entrepreneurship and new venture creation processes, and as such, it is considered to be a cornerstone of organizational competitiveness in this global, knowledge-based economy. Research on creativity has increasingly become multilevel, with most work conducted at the individual or team level of analysis. At the same time, there is a large body of research being conducted at the organizational level of analysis on innovation, and there has been a significant amount of entrepreneurship research at the individual level, with an increasing focus on organizational entrepreneurship. However, these three research streams have developed independently, and there has been very little knowledge transfer between the three areas. Because entrepreneurship is often said to be a process that is required to convert innovation into business ventures that will deliver benefits to stakeholders, it is typically driven by an individual or small group of individuals. Creativity research, innovation research, and entrepreneurship research have the potential to inform each other, enriching our knowledge of each area, particularly with regard to the cognitive processes and behaviors that are most effective. This Handbook includes contributions from the leading scholars in these three research areas, who integrate contemporary research findings on organizational creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship and provide fruitful new research directions."




Team Creativity and Innovation


Book Description

For the past two decades, creativity and innovation have been viewed by researchers as critical to organizational success and survival. Understanding the factors that facilitate or inhibit creativity and innovation at the individual level has been the focus of much of the research in this area. However, while earlier work on teams considered the working dynamics of the group as a context variable with individual creativity the outcome, research now emphasizes group creativity as the intended, desired outcome. This shift in thought has occurred because many of the problems routinely facing organizations are complex and cannot be solved by a single individual at the helm. Edited by Roni Reiter-Palmon, Team Creativity and Innovation provides readers with a state-of-the-art review of the major concepts and current research related to the demonstrable benefits of team creativity and innovation. In this volume, Reiter-Palmon and contributors explore such topics as team collaboration and communication, trust and psychological safety, team diversity, social networks, conflict, organizational learning, and more as a way to introduce readers to the issues that matter most in today's modern, forward-thinking workplace.




Handbook for Creative Team Leaders


Book Description

Every worthwhile organization strives continuously to improve. What the authors of this groundbreaking book offer is nothing less than a system for achieving peak performance. As a result of their work with more than 2000 teams, in some 40 countries across the globe, the authors identified the 7 factors that distinguish what they call ’dream teams’ and on that basis they developed the structured approach described in the Handbook. Part I sets out the principles that underlie team performance. Part II shows how to train teams to become more creative. Finally, in Part III, the authors demonstrate their ideas in action with real-life examples from a wide variety of organizational settings. They emphasize throughout the role of leadership in stimulating creativity and innovation, and they explain how to inject new dynamism into existing organizational systems and practices. Anyone involved in teamworking would profit from a close study of the Handbook. It will be especially valuable to team leaders and facilitators, to project managers and to HRD practitioners and consultants.




Idea Agent


Book Description

How can you manage creativity--and turn it into innovation? Learn the seven proven principles for leading a team that delivers groundbreaking results.




Herding Tigers


Book Description

A practical handbook for every manager charged with leading teams to creative brilliance, from the author of The Accidental Creative and Die Empty. Doing the work and leading the work are very different things. When you make the transition from maker to manager, you give ownership of projects to your team even though you could do them yourself better and faster. You're juggling expectations from your manager, who wants consistent, predictable output from an inherently unpredictable creative process. And you're managing the pushback from your team of brilliant, headstrong, and possibly overqualified creatives. Leading talented, creative people requires a different skill set than the one many management books offer. As a consultant to creative companies, Todd Henry knows firsthand what prevents creative leaders from guiding their teams to success, and in Herding Tigers he provides a bold new blueprint to help you be the leader your team needs. Learn to lead by influence instead of control. Discover how to create a stable culture that empowers your team to take bold creative risks. And learn how to fight to protect the time, energy, and resources they need to do their best work. Full of stories and practical advice, Herding Tigers will give you the confidence and the skills to foster an environment where clients, management, and employees have a product they can be proud of and a process that works.




Creative Confidence


Book Description

IDEO founder and Stanford d.school creator David Kelley and his brother Tom Kelley, IDEO partner and the author of the bestselling The Art of Innovation, have written a powerful and compelling book on unleashing the creativity that lies within each and every one of us. Too often, companies and individuals assume that creativity and innovation are the domain of the "creative types." But two of the leading experts in innovation, design, and creativity on the planet show us that each and every one of us is creative. In an incredibly entertaining and inspiring narrative that draws on countless stories from their work at IDEO, the Stanford d.school, and with many of the world's top companies, David and Tom Kelley identify the principles and strategies that will allow us to tap into our creative potential in our work lives, and in our personal lives, and allow us to innovate in terms of how we approach and solve problems. It is a book that will help each of us be more productive and successful in our lives and in our careers.




How Leaders Learn To Boost Creativity In Teams: Innovation Catalysts


Book Description

The book focuses on how leaders are learning to develop the creative capabilities of their team members and themselves. Through this learning, teams are developing original approaches to their work, benefitting their customers, patients, employees and other stakeholders.Using a strong interdisciplinary approach, How Leaders Learn to Boost Creativity in Teams introduces insights from the domains of psychology, creativity, leadership and power, and integrates these through a proposed framework for leading innovation. It contains nine in-depth, current-day cases of learning and workplace-based applications and has an optimistic message: creativity can be learnt. Making connections between current day research, learning and application in work contexts, it will appeal to leaders and students alike seeking to think outside of the box.