Recommended New Fall 2015 Books for Better Creative Leadership

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Summer Reading for Creative Leaders 2015

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The Leadership Legacy of Hollywood Boss Charlie Bluhdorn

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The 7 Tyrannies that Creative Leaders Must Overcome

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The 'Whiplash' Effect: Rethinking the Lessons of Musical Leadership

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New Books for Creative Leaders to Read to Start 2015

Please find my latest list of recommended creative leadership readings for early 2015 on my new website at http://jdavidslocum.com.  Thanks for checking it out.

Top Ten Creative Leadership Books of 2014

I've selected my top ten books on Creative Leadership from the past year.  The list, along with other notable titles, is now posted on my new website at http://jdavidslocum.com.  Though quite a bit more is also already on the site, overall it's still very much in beta.  I hope you like the new look and promise of better content to come in the new year.  Thanks for visiting and letting me know what you think.  DS 

Recommended Readings for Creative Leaders for Fall 2014

Thus far in 2014, we have seen at least two additions to the short bookshelf of essential readings for creative leaders: Pixar CEO Ed Catmull’s account (with Amy Wallace) of building and sustaining a successful creative culture, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration; and Harvard Business School Professor Linda A. Hill’s masterful guide to leading successful innovation across organizations, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation (written with Greg Brandeau, Kent Lineback, and Emily Truelove). Other recent highlights included Connected by Design: Seven Principles for Business Transformation through Functional Integration, the outstanding work about new ways to create value through brand ecosystems, by Barry Wacksman and Chris Stutzman of the legendary creative agency, R/GA; Stanford professors Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao’s major study of how to build up businesses successfully, Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less; and Arianna Huffington’s manifesto for re-defining well-being, work and success, revisionist study of talent and creativity, Thrive: The Third Metric and Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-being, Wisdom, and Wonder.

The fall book season is now upon us and promises further new and relevant titles. These will include analyses of marketing, China, and Google, a handful of titles on innovation, ranging from practical implementation guides to a longer history, and, perhaps most far-reaching, reflections on the changes wrought by digital technologies to individuals and society. All contain insights valuable to the work and lives of creative leaders.

1) Ulrich Boser, The Leap: The Science of Trust and Why It Matters (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/New Harvest, September 16)

Traveling from rural Rwanda to corporate America, and from paying taxes to using technology, Boser argues that individuals are hard-wired for trust and trustworthiness and that emphasizing and restoring trust can benefit us as humans as well as our institutions and communities.

2) Richard Branson, The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership (Penguin/Portfolio, September 9)

The iconic CEO and entrepreneur, already author of a best-selling autobiography and books on business, here describes his key leadership principles like good listening, keeping things simple, remaining iconoclastic, motivating people, and having fun along the way.

3) Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (Norton, September 29)

Carr, the consistently trenchant analyst of technological change who wrote The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, here offers a thoughtful and sometimes disturbing account, grounded in science and poetry alike, of the ways that our increasing reliance on technology is affecting our happiness and re-shaping our humanity.

4) Lawrence A. Cunningham, Berkshire Beyond Buffett: The Enduring Value of Values (Columbia Business School Publishing, October 21)

An extraordinary portrait of the fifty direct subsidiaries of Berkshire Hathaway, investment guru Warren Buffett’s $300 billion conglomerate, told through the companies’ distinct stories and the vital values like integrity, autonomy, entrepreneurship and a sense of permanence that they, and Buffett, share.

5) Tom Doctoroff, Twitter Is Not a Strategy: Remastering the Art of Brand Marketing (Palgrave MacMillan, November 11)

The Asia CEO of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, Doctoroff uses characteristic wit and decades of experience to take on the twin hypes of digital media and the China market and to offer insightful principles for successful customer engagement and integrated brand marketing.

6) Stewart D. Friedman, Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life (Harvard Business Review Press, October 7)

Wharton professor Friedman, building on his excellent study, Total Leadership, uses examples ranging from Sheryl Sandberg to Bruce Springsteen to move from familiar calls to balance competing work and life commitments toward taking steps, instead, to integrate our passions and values across the domains of work, home, community, and the private self.

7) Nathan Furr and Jeff Dyer, The Innovator’s Method: Bringing the Lean Startup into Your Organization (Harvard Business Review Press, September 9)

How can business leaders better manage the uncertainty intrinsic to prototyping and experimentation? Picking up from Dyer’s bestselling guide to generating ideas, The Innovator’s DNA (written with Hal Gregersen and Clay Christensen), this new volume focuses on proven techniques that allow start-ups and established firms to commercialize ideas successfully.

8) Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (Simon & Schuster, October 7)

Isaacson, the biographer of Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, and most recently, Steve Jobs, has penned a sweeping history of digital technologies, the computer and internet, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, with Lord Byron’s daughter, and tracing the innovative thinking, creative leadership and energetic collaboration to the present day.  

9) Langdon Morris, Moses Ma and Po Chi Wu, Agile Innovation: The Revolutionary Approach to Accelerate Success, Inspire Engagement, and Ignite Creativity Hardcover (Wiley, September 22)

Two leading innovation thinkers and consultants (Morris and Ma) and an engineering professor (Wu) have written an excellent (and overdue) guide to how agile techniques, like process acceleration, risk management, and fuller team engagement, have fostered successful innovation for leading businesses and can be put into practice elsewhere.

10) Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, Alan Smith, Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want (Wiley, October 20)

Using the same engaging visual approach as their groundbreaking Business Model Generation, which pioneered the business model canvas, Osterwalder et al focus on the most important of the canvas’ building blocks, the value proposition, and enable readers to work through seven key principles for better designing what matters to customers. 

11) Shaun Rein, The End of Copycat China: The Rise of Creativity, Innovation and Individualism in China (Wiley, October 20)

A leading consultant and commentator on the Chinese society and economy, and the author of The End of Cheap China, Rein analyzes current large-scale shifts in China from investment toward consumption, and from copying to innovation, that require a strategic re-thinking by investors and creative leaders doing (or wanting to do) business there.

12) Paul Roberts, The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification (Bloomsbury, September 2)

A troubling, cross-disciplinary account of how individual pursuits of consumption, pleasure, and immediate rewards, advanced by new technologies and compromised ethics, have evolved in a new and pervasive ‘culture of narcissism’ — that journalist Roberts nevertheless closes on a hopeful note of how we can pull back and change.

13) Jonathan Rosenberg and Eric Schmidt, How Google Works (Grand Central/Business Plus, September 23).

Google’s former SVP of Products and ex-CEO reveal how the global tech company has grown by doing things differently, like hiring multitalented ‘smart creatives’ and leading with the recognition that ‘consensus requires dissension,’ in order to continually create new products and serve consumers in a fast-changing environment.

Cannes Lions as Global Creative Leadership Classroom

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity held each June is the world’s leading celebration of brand communications and creativity.  The official programme of the week-long festival combines a dizzying array of industry and agency showcases, formal seminars, lectures, workshops, teaching academies, and award shows.  Arguably even more happens unofficially, with agency and holding companies gathering their global talent and leadership, often with clients, in meetings and parties, and with informal business meetings and social gatherings occurring around the clock. 

For each of the last five years, the Berlin School ofCreative Leadership has partnered with Cannes Lions to offer the premiere educational programme among the many held at the festival.  The Cannes Creative Leaders Programme (CCLP) begins with six intensive days of leadership training in Berlin followed by six days of the festival curation and closed-door sessions with industry leaders in Cannes.  While individual faculty, industry speakers and sessions provide many specific insights to programme participants, CCLP also emphasizes how more generally to learn from the festival itself – from Cannes as a model classroom for creative excellence.  The result is a fresh approach to sustaining creative and intellectual stimulation both within individual businesses and at other idea and creativity festivals. 

Here are a handful of the touchstones we urge participants to adopt in making the most from the festival:

·      Relevance

Why should I care about what’s said or shown on the stage at Cannes when we are pursuing creative excellence?  It’s a large question but an essential one: beyond the hype and personality cults and justifiable admiration for strong imaginative work, what is relevant to my own creative leadership and why?  Is a brand, client or consumer problem being defined and an original solution being plotted, one or both of which may be relevant to my own situation (either now or in the foreseeable future)?  Direct relevance and applicability are not the only tests of value, of course, but particularly in sessions featuring high-profile individuals or agencies, we do well by asking what concretely are the ideas or insights being shared and how are they relevant to our own work.  Too often, on big stages in Cannes and elsewhere (from other live events like MIPTV for television professionals to online offerings like TED), we partake in what I call “popcorn creative thinking” – easy and even enjoyable to consume in the moment but failing to provide any real nourishment or impact.  The more we question relevance and value, the more sharply we gather knowledge and insights from others that can help to make us better leaders.

·      Inspiration

Part of what animates Cannes is a core tenet of creative leadership and all creative work: inspiration.  We’re inspired by the examples of new standards of work that move the industry forward and even improve society, the innovative solutions to business and human problems, and the perspectives of leading voices and thinkers.  Inspiration doesn’t always readily pass the relevance test, but it is vital to advancing creative excellence.  The challenge is to know how to take the inspiration of a Cannes session or speaker (or, again, those at any number of other events) back home to enrich our own work.  Sometimes the answer is as simple as reflecting on what kind of inspiration we’re experiencing.  In its 2012 CEO survey, IBM looked closely at what constituted inspirational leadership and revealed five major characteristics: creating a compelling vision, driving stretch goals, hewing to shared principles, exercising enthusiasm, and guiding with expertise.  By asking that additional question – how specifically are we being inspired? – we increase the likelihood of taking away practical knowledge of how to sustain the inspiration of the moment and use it to lead others.

·      Idea Events

Part of the attraction, even magic, of Cannes Lions is that it happens only once a year.  Thousands gather from around the world and produce a singular, energetic mass of industry voices, experience and successful work.  The festival consequently becomes what anthropologists call a “tournament of values,” a site where the priorities of a community, here of global creative communication professionals, determines its leading values, standards and priorities.  Tracking closely which values – or ideas, debates, challenges, and kinds of work – are highlighted and celebrated helps further our understanding of the shape and future of the industry.  Viewed this way as a hothouse of industry ideas, however, Cannes Lions also becomes a model for us as individual leaders to stimulate thinking and engage diverse ideas more consistently.  Put in more practical terms, how do we as creative leaders construct similar opportunities for our teams or businesses to learn from and be inspired by multiple voices and engage in industry-defining debates and conversations?  Many organizations, large and small, from BBDO’s Digital Lab to Pixar University, have institutionalized such continuing engagement with diverse and innovative ideas.  The question remains for us, how are we doing so in ours?

·      Creativity Voyeurism

Common to testing relevance, sustaining inspiration, and continuing engagement with diverse ideas is the challenge of actively taking home the experiences and insights of Cannes and making them a part of our own creative leadership practice.  Again, not all lessons or experiences of Cannes Lions or other events can or should be immediately applicable (some of what happens in Cannes should indeed stay in Cannes…).  But too often, the big names, the trend-setting work, and the fresh ideas – and a kind of romance with creativity they often come to represent – can turn us into passive viewers and admirers.  As an educator of professionals and executives, this tendency casts light on a special imperative for me in any setting in which I work: what will you do with what you’ve learned?  For creatives, the added burden of what I call “creativity voyeurism” can dull our capacity to embrace and transfer the rich diversity of ideas we experience.  Put simply, often the greatest challenge of participating in Cannes Lions or any idea festival is to act concretely and locally after the event is over. 

·      Making the Story Your Own

We have the good fortune to be living in (and hopefully contributing to) a golden age of creativity and innovation in business.  From reading Fast Company, Inc. and Entrepreneur to following our favorite TED-talks and video blogs to attending Cannes Lions and SXSW, we are awash in tales of creative leadership, bleeding-edge practices, and innovative possibility.  Yet the voyeurism I’ve mentioned, while allowing us to be cocktail-party conversant in what our creative heroes are doing, can easily leave us doing little if any comparable work ourselves.  One of the exercises we do in CCLP is to respond to sessions, speakers or experiences at Cannes Lions by creating our own individual stories about them.  They may be stories we would tell our bosses, our clients, our friends or loved ones and they may speak to the opportunity, awe or even irrelevance of the ideas or experiences.  But what’s crucial is that the stories of creativity become ours.  In the crucible of storymaking, we at least begin to transfer the creative leadership, learning and experience of others to ourselves.  In that way, we take a critical step toward making real for us the extraordinary ideas, insights, excitement, and possibilities of Cannes.

'Creativity Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration', by Ed Catmull, with Amy Wallace (Random House)

At first glance, the new book about Pixar, Creativity, Inc., seems like a deluxe version of the account of creative enterprise and management with which we have become increasingly familiar.  With war stories of perseverance and eventual success in the market, hard-won advice on how to overcome obstacles to creativity (as promised in the subtitle), and a concluding set of leadership principles, my first impression was that this would be an entertaining if inspiring victory lap for a storied creative organization.  

Pixar President Ed Catmull, with Amy Wallace, has produced something much, much more.  It’s one of the half-dozen best books that have been written about creative business and creative leadership.  Ever.

The “Thoughts for Managing a Creative Culture,” which close the volume, themselves offer a master class in creative leadership.  From managing fear and failure in an organization to protecting new ideas and imposing productive limits, these are 33 gems.  Yet with characteristic sagacity, Catmull makes clear how these principles should be viewed as starting points rather than ends to be achieved.  Indeed, the book’s last words are to avoid confusing the process with the goal and always to remember that that goal is “making the product great.” 

Particularly impressive here is an insistence on linking ideas about creative work to behaviors (even ones that ultimately fail).  Many of the ideas here, from fearless ideation and collaboration to tireless communication, are not surprising.  However, they are made compelling through tales of their implementation.  The tenet of intensive, democratic collaboration appears here as the belief in anyone being able to talk to anyone else at Pixar about their work, for example, and Catmull conveys it in his memorable recounting of how Toy Story taught him the value of bringing together product managers with artists and technicians.

That specific lesson and value also highlights a feature of Creativity, Inc. that is unusual in today’s surplus of writing on creativity and innovation across industries and markets.  With product managers, computer engineers and programmers, filmmakers and artists, Pixar has been blessed but also burdened with the necessary coordination of distinct creative cultures.  Catmull’s open and supportive leadership, evidenced throughout the book, has surely been a crucial factor in the success of this ongoing collaboration of different kinds of workers.  But his account, which consistently celebrates Steve Jobs and John Lasseter (among others), underscores how leadership among partners with complementary if distinct capabilities and even creative backgrounds can add value to a creative organization.

The overall arc of the book, tracing the development of Pixar through nearly four decades, foregrounds a daunting challenge for all leaders: how to sustain creative vitality and excellence over time.  Catmull separates his book into four parts: “Getting Started,” “Protecting the New,” “Building and Sustaining,” and “Testing What We Know.”  The third section begins with a thoughtful summary of several “models” employed by people at Pixar as their bases for successful creative work.  The section then concludes with his recollection of the first days after the 2005 merger with Disney and how Pixar’s creative culture evolved.  Drawing together the personal and organizational aspects of creative work in this way is itself instructive; describing how he led this evolution over years yields even more valuable insights.

Reading Creativity, Inc., one can easily appreciate Catmull’s gifts as a leader whose style – deft, open, humble, caring, trusting, purposeful – has built, shaped and sustained an exceptional creative culture.  At the same time, his account of Pixar’s ongoing success demonstrates the importance of having brought creative analysis and implementation to the dynamic complexity, of shifting markets and changing technologies, facing all organizations today.  That combination of effectively bringing creativity to his leadership challenges and leadership to his firm’s creative work is rare.  So is Catmull and Wallace’s exceptional new book.

The Rise of the Creative Leader

To speak of a creative leader, or manager, is for some a paradox: creativity is chaotic and unrestrained while leadership is orderly and controlling, and setting the two together makes for an uneasy, potentially volatile combination.

It was not always thus. A century ago, as businessmen entered the twentieth century seeking to differentiate themselves by building modern enterprises, the most respected outcomes of creative thinking and problem-solving took the form of order and process. The giants of the age were Henry Ford, whose automobile assembly line had revolutionized manufacturing production by changing and regimenting human behaviors, and Thomas Edison, a tireless inventor who sought constantly to make his process of experimentation and invention more systematic.

The evolution since has been fitful, swinging between the exigencies of commerce, with its demands for planning and predictability, and the realities of art, or creative production, with its requisite freedom and openness to exploration. The 1960s were particularly compelling years for this antithesis. The Romantic legacy of creativity as authentic self-expression, being true to oneself and one’s vision of the world, contrasted sharply with the rigidity of social conventions and corporate constraints. Opening a fictional window on this golden age of American advertising, the AMC television drama Mad Men has shown how that contrast led to the setting apart of creativity in its own departments, appreciated but anomalous, a necessary function of business to be tolerated and closely supervised.

Rightly admired for its historical accuracy, the series’ repeated celebration of the effectiveness of creative advertising also casts light on the apparently contradictory nature of real-life business creativity during the era. Business does not succeed in spite of creativity and free-spirited creative individuals but rather thrives because of their imaginative work. As a result, it would seem, successful leaders of creative enterprises may be less chaperones and disciplinarians than coaches and co-conspirators in their shared endeavors. Looking back at actual advertising agencies of the time, like Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) in the US with its pioneering teams combining art directors and copywriters, reveals the reality of such a shared sense of creative possibility.

The last two decades have seen nearly all businesses embrace innovation and creativity as central missions, at least at a high level, with leaders expected to serve as imaginative guides. Designated ‘creatives’ still do essential work in brand communications (or marketing services) industries like advertising and beyond, say, in the design areas of manufacturing firms. But more and more, creative production and excellence have become collective affairs with attention to the effectiveness of collaboration throughout businesses. For many, an equally dramatic realization has been that the most far-reaching instances of creativity involve organizational or process innovations rather than more obvious new product or service offerings. Hearkening back to Ford’s assembly line or DDB’s restructuring of traditional agency teams, these changes attest to the value and reach of leaders capable of the implementation of original thinking.

Technology-driven industries have been especially important to shaping this recent change in thinking about business creativity and many leadership icons of our time – Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma – have worked there. Yet creative leadership today is not simply about technological wizardry. At Apple, Jobs’ creative genius was to envision and market new horizons for emerging technologies and existing industries alike (going back to the company’s beginning, his skills were complemented by co-founder Steve Wozniak’s technical abilities in programming). The reverberations of new media and technology firms have been profound: the emergent approach to creative leadership often combines the Silicon Valley start-up ethos, traditional creative industry openness to expressiveness and exploration, design thinking, and the sheer need of all businesses to become more innovative to remain competitive and serve customers better.

The terms, leadership and management, of course are not entirely interchangeable. There are many distinctions drawn between the two, both functional (e.g., the manager administers what is; the leader innovates what will be) and cultural (Americans like to speak of leadership, Brits and other prefer management). One of the best-known is that managers focus on systems and structures while leaders focus on people. That particular distinction made good sense in the industrial era, when both managers and leaders were crucial, respectively, to organizing work and workers efficiently and to ensuring that the firm was effective, that is, competitive in the marketplace. However, in the 1990s, legendary management consultant and educator Peter Drucker recognized that such lines were increasingly blurring and less helpful in the information economy, in which the overriding task is to “make productive the specific strengths and knowledge of every individual.” Today, we might fairly extend Drucker’s insight to our own economy in which creativity is the new normal for businesses.

Understandings of creative productions and industries themselves have likewise changed dramatically during this time. The groundbreaking classification and mapping of the creative industries by the UK Department of Culture, Media and Sport first launched in 1997 has ushered in far-reaching reassessments of the status of creative activities, work and organizations around the world. While having the result of raising the profile of creative activities, such attention has been criticized by some for reducing the value of those activities to the purely economic. Richard Florida’s influential The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) claimed with comparable reach that the presence and work of creative talent could foster openness and ultimately attract business and capital to post-industrial cities. Even as the stakes of leadership in such scenarios grow far beyond individual firms or agencies, the core relationships between individuals with creative skills and talents and those seeking to marshal and direct them and their activities appear to become less oppositional and more fluid.

If creative leadership can no longer be readily understood through the tension between order and chaos, commerce and self-expression, what should be our orientation for its future? Returning to the words “creative” and “leadership” themselves, freighted as they are with history, offers some guidance. Together, they suggest bringing novel thinking to complex leadership challenges and at the same time deploying strategic prioritizing and decision-making to creative opportunities. Rather than antitheses, the words can convey a necessary balance and even symbiosis that support a sustainably successful creative business. No creative leader could ask for more.

This piece was originally written for House Magazine and also appears as a "Berlin Brief" on the Berlin School of Creative Leadership website.

Recommended Readings for Creative Leaders for the First Half of 2014

The new year has seen the publication of another crop of probing and provocative titles on economics, business and society.  Driving the most sustained public discussions thus far have been works on the inequalities driven by and increasingly defining the current economic system.  Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Belknap Press) is the magnum opus here, focusing on economics, with Matt Taibbi’s The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap (Spiegel & Grau) looking also at the social ramifications of inequality in the United States.  Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (Norton) arguably looks at one source of this growing disparity by examining the seeming advantage of professional, high-frequency traders over the rest of the public in financial markets.   

On the specific topics of creativity, leadership, and organizational and business success, 2014 has also already yielded some helpful titles.  Some of these are narrowly cast, for example, Ben Horowitz’ The Hard Thing about Hard Things: Building a Business When There are No Easy Answers (Harper Collins), which offers sage if targeted advice on starting a business, or Nick Udall’s “creative rollercoaster” model presented in Riding the Creative Rollercoaster: How Leaders Evoke Creativity, Productivity and Innovation (Kogan Page).  Others speak more generally to leaders across creative businesses and industries.  Following my listing last fall of useful books (http://onforb.es/19CsYft), here is another baker’s dozen of recommended reads from the start of this year that speak to the work and lives of creative leaders.  Once again, they comprise a diverse list, written by industry voices, journalist or academics and providing a wealth of insights, models and concrete advice.

(1) Julian Barling, The Science of Leadership: Lessons from Research for Organizational Leaders (Oxford University Press)

Barling, an organizational behavior professor at Canada’s Queen’s University, explores some central debates about leadership – whether leaders are born or made, the relevance of gender, the import of followership – by reference to mostly psychological research conducted over the past two decades. The result is an accessible and frequently illuminating tour of the evidence shaping and underlying popular if often superficial debates. Perhaps most directly relevant to many readers will be the question (and layered answer) about the effectiveness of leadership development programs.

(2) Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question (Bloomsbury)

What if companies had mission questions rather than mission statements? Looking closely at some of our most creative organizations, including Google, IDEO and Netflix, journalist Berger (who wrote the excellent Glimmer on design thinking) describes the importance of generating a culture of inquiry and learning. The result is potentially paradigm-shifting: rather than assuming great leaders, creatives, innovators, and entrepreneurs possess the distinctive ability to provide clear answers, the book proposes that asking the right questions might be a more fundamental skill.

(3) Adam Bryant, Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation (Times Books)

Offering consistently insightful glimpses of today’s leadership challenges and innovations, the New York Times ‘Corner Office’ column of interviews with executives appears twice weekly. In the second book drawing from his work on the column, Adam Bryant highlights lessons in innovation, change and, especially, building creative cultures. The result is a crisp summary of current leadership practice illustrated with helpful real-life examples of effective teams, increased respect, better conversations, and ongoing learning by leaders and organizations alike.

(4) Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (Norton)

How are digital technologies – from hardware and software to networks and data sets – fueling exponential growth and profound social and economic change? Two leading thinkers from MIT explore the forces reinventing fields as diverse as medicine, retail, and transportation and having far-ranging implications for creative collaboration, business leadership and policy-making alike. Maybe most importantly, these dramatic changes will enable and necessitate a revamping of our educational system in ways that both leverage new technologies and prepare people for the transformed economy. 

(5) Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration (Random House)

Catmull, co-founder and President of Pixar Animation Studios, one of the world’s most admired creative businesses, shares insights and proven techniques for harnessing talent, forming teams and structuring organizations, and producing fresh and original work. Mining his company’s illustrious production history for instructive episodes and helpful examples, he and Wallace devote special attention to the challenges of building and sustaining a creative culture.  Their closing list of principles alone constitute an essential master class in creative leadership.

(6) Lynda Gratton, The Key: How Corporations Succeed by Solving the World’s Toughest Problem (McGraw-Hill)

Professor of management practice at the London Business School and founder of the Hot Spots Movement, Gratton has produced a fresh model for scaling impact and innovating for good. ‘The Key’ is to coordinate the latest approaches to organizational design and talent development with purpose-driven support for broader communities. The outcome, she argues, is business organizations capable of confronting and solving global problems like rampant unemployment and climate change.

(7) Arianna Huffington, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-being, Wisdom, and Wonder (Harmony)

Exhausted and sleep-deprived, Arianna Huffington fell and injured herself in 2007.  Amidst a battery of medical tests and soul-searching, she came to realize that there was more to success than money and power and that she – and we – needed a third metric for celebrating our lives, maintaining our sense of wonder, prioritizing our relationships, and remaining compassionate and generous. Combining personal details of her own journey with the latest psychological and sleep research, Huffington has produced a manifesto for redefining well-being, work and success.

(8) Keith Reinhard, Any Wednesday (Any Wednesday)

An original Mad Man, Reinhard was an advertising creative legend before orchestrating the merger that formed Omnicom and becoming the CEO of DDB Worldwide. For more than two decades, he penned brief weekly memos filled with wit, wisdom and advice to all his employees. This collection of 104 of those pieces both shares some of his favorite insights for inspiring creative excellence and demonstrates one way he put consistent creative leadership into accessible and effective practice.

(9) Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t (Portfolio)

Sinek is the perceptive, best-selling author of Start with Why (your company exists and should be meaningful to your customers and society…).  Here, he turns to the crucial questions of how leaders can foster and support safety, trust and cooperation inside that organization as well as greater kinship with customers. While citing evolutionary biology and brain chemistry research, the book ultimately argues for the fundamental leadership values of hard work, empathy and sacrifice as bases for providing a safe environment for people to grow and succeed.

(10) Biz Stone, Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind (Hachette)

The co-founder of Twitter offers a creative memoir of his career in Silicon Valley (thus far), starting at Google, helping to pioneer both blogging and podcasting, and then launching the social media platform.  In the process, he explores the nature and potential of ingenuity and imagination, reflecting through his personal experience on vulnerability, failure, empathy, ambition, collaboration, and creative culture.  The result is an enjoyable and inspiring read that both reveals Stone as a genuine creative leader and summarizes many of the key lessons of building successful business enterprises today.

(11) Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well (Viking)

The authors of the invaluable Difficult Conversations take on an equally challenging aspect of work and life in this new volume: how (well) do we receive feedback? Extending some of the principles of their earlier work to being less defensive and building richer relationships to engaging the feedback of others, Stone and Heen also show how to gather and process honest insights about oneself.  The result is a book that very practically enables the development of greater self-awareness and deeper learning so helpful to becoming more effective leaders.

(12) Robert Sutton and Hayagreeva Rao, Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less (Crown Business)

This is a major work based on a decade’s research by two Stanford professors on the pervasive challenge of spreading and multiplying success in organizations. Looking across industries, and from small start-ups hoping to grow to mature large firms seeking to avoid stagnation, Sutton and Rao offer insights and proven practices for ‘scaling up’ farther, faster, and more effectively. In the process, they provide actionable advice on such vexing issues as balancing individual and organizational needs, replicating successful mindsets, and eliminating destructive behaviors.

(13) Barry Wacksman and Chris Stutzman, Connected by Design: Seven Principles of Business Transformation (Jossey-Bass)

R/GA is one of the world’s most consistently successful creative digital agencies. Wacksman, its Chief Growth Officer, describes how the agency has been a pioneer in helping develop new business models featuring highly interactive eco-systems of interrelated products, digital services, brand loyalty and continuous customer engagement. He then goes on to identify how such ‘functional integration,’ achieved by valued firms like Apple, Nike, Amazon, and Activision, can be understood according to principles ranging from ‘Utility is Relevance’ to ‘Lead like the world depends on it.’