Creativity Unleashed Book Reviews

Creativity

Creativity is the central focus of this site, so provides an obvious and important starting point for the bookshop.
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General Business

We are interested in creativity from a business viewpoint. This isn't detached, arty creativity, but creativity with a real business purpose. This makes it natural to expand into recommendations for wider business requirements.
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Popular Science

One of our strongest recommendations to help improve personal creativity is wider reading, and experience has shown a particularly effective subject to get a creative boost is popular science. This section links out to our sister popular science site, www.popularscience.co.uk
 

Featured Business/Creativity Book

Thinkertoys (Second Edition) by Michael Michalko

There are lots of good books on different aspects of creativity out in the world, but there really aren't many that you can regard as a book to buy if you really want to change the way you think to become generally more creative. We'd modestly say that one of these is our own Imagination Engineering, and another is Michael Michalko's Thinkertoys.

This is the second edition of Michalko's book - the first has been around since 1991 - but don't think that this makes Thinkertoys lack any freshness. One of the great things about a good creativity book is that it gets better with age, rather that dating. Creativity doesn't change - and neither do the effectiveness of good techniques. In fact in this case, coming back to the book after 10 years since I first read it, I'd say it has got better. It's partly because this an expanded and revised version, but also because it's more obvious that Thinkertoys really stands out from the crowd.

Practically from page one, this book leads you into the fundamental challenge of creativity - tackling the assumptions we make all the time, and that's an experience you will find repeated time and time again. This might seem a bit repetitive (and this was my original complaint about the book) but there are two important lessons. Firstly that it takes a lot of practice to become aware of making those assumptions - the reader gets caught out time and again - and there are all sorts of different ways we make assumptions and fail to find new ways of looking at a problem.

This is a really polished book. The pages neatly mix exercises, information, techniques and more with effortless ease. Sometimes there's so much on the page it can hit the eye rather hard, forcing the reader to slow down and pull it apart - but that's not a bad thing. Creativity is often a matter of slowing down your thinking.

It's interesting to put Thinkertoys alongside our Imagination Engineering, because each is better in a different way. If you want a framework - an approach to use to systematically come up with new ideas and solve problems, Imagination Engineering has the edge. But when it comes to a book designed to improve your personal creative ability, to make you as an individual more reflexively creative, Thinkertoys is peerless. It's simply the best.

This is a big book (over 380 large format pages), and isn't one I'd recommend reading from cover to cover in one go. It's more appropriate to treat it as a mini-course. Taken a chapter a day it works excellently.

For those who like their techniques packaged in card form to get an instant zap, there's the accompanying ThinkPak card pack. This can be used independently or as an add-on to the book. Accompanying card pack (Thinkpack):

Paperback.

Featured Popular Science Book

Being Me by Pete Moore 

Doing something really different with a popular science book is both difficult and risky. Pete Moore has largely pulled this off in this unusual and personal exploration of what it means to be human.

The book is divided into sections, each addressing a different aspect of our human nature - embodied, conscious, genetic, historic, related, material, spiritual and so on. In each, Moore gives us a view of a different part of the complex mix that is a human being. If the content had just been Moore's thoughts, the book would not have been particularly inspiring (not a criticism of the author's ability to think, just the limitation of one person's view), but what makes it so successful is that each of the sections is developed around one or more interviews with people who Moore sees as embodying the particular component (though, of course, like all of us, they have the other components as well).

Mostly this works remarkably effectively. Moore gives us a mix of scientific and philosophical theory, the interviews, and his personal view, including enough detail from his viewpoint of the interviews to make them more than a sterile set of quotes. The section that works least well, emphasizing the importance of the real people featured in the book, is the one on "the conscious being" which piles in too many pages of theory and isn't so strongly based around the interviews.

This is a very personal book. The chances are you won't agree with everything. But that's not a bad thing with a topic like this. The section that most raised my eyebrows in this respect was the "social being" one, where a lot of focus is put on how modern society is lacking the social thread that is part of human nature, and that this isn't good for us. Moore contrasts this with the African concept of ubuntu, which describes an intertwining of a human being with his fellow men and the environment, which Moore suggests leads to a much better support mechanism. This may be true, but makes a doubtful example. Moore does point out the paradox of the sometimes endemic violence in the same communities, but brushes this aside. I'm not sure this is wise. If part of the requirement for ubuntu is tribalism (which seems highly likely - it's much easier to have strong social loyalty when it's "us versus them"), then it comes at too high a price, as Rwanda and many other strife-torn nations can testify. This isn't an ideal contrast to the isolation of the Western individual.

Inevitably - and Moore notes this - the book can't be comprehensive. There are plenty of defining characteristics (Moore mentions language; I would think of creativity) that aren't covered. That doesn't really matter, though. The fact is that Moore has managed to paint a superb picture of the human being, using a scientific perspective, but admitting that science alone isn't enough. If you thought you had seen it all when it comes to popular science, think again.

Also in hardback:

Copyright © Creativity Unleashed Limited 2006
Last update 23 September 2006