BiblioVault - Books about Creative ability in business

Creativity on Demand

The Dilemmas of Innovation in an Accelerated Age

Eitan Y. Wilf

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Business consultants everywhere preach the benefits of innovation—and promise to help businesses reap them. A trendy industry, this type of consulting generates courses, workshops, books, and conferences that all claim to hold the secrets of success. But what promises does the notion of innovation entail? What is it about the ideology and practice of business innovation that has made these firms so successful at selling their services to everyone from small start-ups to Fortune 500 companies? And most important, what does business innovation actually mean for work and our economy today?

In Creativity on Demand, cultural anthropologist Eitan Wilf seeks to answer these questions by returning to the fundamental and pervasive expectation of continual innovation. Wilf focuses a keen eye on how our obsession with ceaseless innovation stems from the long-standing value of acceleration in capitalist society. Based on ethnographic work with innovation consultants in the United States, he reveals, among other surprises, how routine the culture of innovation actually is. Procedures and strategies are repeated in a formulaic way, and imagination is harnessed as a new professional ethos, not always to generate genuinely new thinking, but to produce predictable signs of continual change. A masterful look at the contradictions of our capitalist age, Creativity on Demand is a model for the anthropological study of our cultures of work.

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New Routes to Library Success

100+ Ideas from Outside the Stacks

Elisabeth Doucett

American Library Association, 2015

Pioneering Minds Worldwide

On the Entrepreneurial Principles of the Cultural and Creative Industries

Edited by Giep Hagoort, Aukje Thomassen, and Rene Kooyman

Eburon Academic Publishers, 2012

Even after the recent economic crisis, cultural and creative industries are still able to easily draw audience members and consumers, as well as new talent to enrich these fields. Exploring the topic from economic, artistic, and policymaking perspectives, Pioneering Minds Worldwide is an interdisciplinary approach to these trades on a global scale, while making an important distinction between the cultural sector—products that are consumed on the spot, such as concerts or dance performances—and the creative sector, which generates artistic products that we have a protracted interaction with, i.e. design, architecture, and advertising. The authors of these highly informative essays offer new concepts and viewpoints on the entrepreneurial dimension of the cultural and creative industries in sixteen countries and explore how urban area development, new technological innovations, and education all influence these continually expanding industries.

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What Poetry Brings to Business

Morgan Clare, Kristen Lange, Ted Buswick

University of Michigan Press, 2010

"Creativity is a means of controlling chaos, finding order. Business and poetry draw their waters out of the same well."
---John Barr, President, Poetry Foundation

"At last there is a book that explores the deep but unexpected connections between business and poetry. Clare Morgan and her colleagues demonstrate how the creative energy, emotional power, and communicative complexity of poetry relate directly to the practical needs for innovation and problem solving that face business managers. There has never been a book on developing managerial potential quite like this one."
---Dana Gioia, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and a former corporate executive at General Foods

What does poetry bring to business? According to Clare Morgan and her coauthors, it brings complexity and flexibility of thinking, along with the ability to empathize with and better understand the thoughts and feelings of others. Through her own experiences and many examples, Morgan demonstrates that the skills necessary to talk and think about poetry can be of significant benefit to leaders and strategists, to executives who are facing infinite complexity and who are armed with finite resources in a changing world.

What Poetry Brings to Business presents ways in which reading and thinking about poetry offer businesspeople new strategies for reflection on their companies, their daily tasks, and their work environments. The goal is both to increase and broaden readers' understanding of poems and how they convey meaning, and also to help readers develop analytical and cognitive skills that will be beneficial in a business context. The unique combinations and connections made in this book will open new avenues of thinking about poetry and business alike.

Clare Morgan is Director of the graduate creative writing programme at the University of Oxford. She has run workshops and given presentations on this topic in the United States, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and Japan. Dr. Morgan is a fiction writer and critic, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Kirsten Lange and Ted Buswick are employed by The Boston Consulting Group, an international management consulting firm, she as Managing Director of the Munich office, he as head of Oral History and Archiving.

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