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.

Building New Strategies for Creative Excellence: Michael Porter vs. Chuck Porter

On Thursday evening, June 19, I had the privilege of presenting ideas for 'building new strategies for creative excellence' at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.  The session grew out of a White Paper with the same title co-authored with my Berlin School of Creative Leadership colleague, Professor Paul Verdin.  Guiding both session and paper were a series of contrasts drawn between the strategic thinking of Harvard Professor Michael Porter and the strategy Paul and I identified in the words and work of advertising legend Chuck Porter.  (The full paper is downloadable here.)

The Executive Summary reads:

Strategy is changing amidst volatile markets, disruptive technologies, and transformed customer and public relationships. Contrasting some of the major tenets of traditional strategic thinking, an analysis of the work and words of Chuck Porter enables the mapping of several key principles of a new strategy of creative excellence.  These include 1) forming an adaptive commitment to strategic intent and ongoing public engagement, 2) fostering communities of participation as part of generating a wider cultural conversation of creative work, 3) building trust through imaginative, often offbeat and interactive storytelling, and 4) moving beyond competition to highlight the value emerging through creative breakthroughs or community-building.

The following images give a further sense of the contrast we draw between the 'Five Forces' model of industry competition that shape firm strategy of Michael Porter and the emergent Forces that enable value creation we associate with Chuck Porter.

'The Soft Edge: Where Great Companies Find Lasting Success,' by Rich Karlgaard (Wiley)

For Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes and writer of its “Innovation Rules” column, businesses able to create and sustain success do so by balancing attention and development of a strategic base, a hard edge and a soft edge.  Each of those edges is constituted, in turn, by five elements.  Historically, managers have tended to focus on the hard edge as the basis of business success, favoring its more clearly concrete and measurable focus on speed, cost, supply chain, logistics, and capital efficiency in decision-making and the fight for organizational resources.  The soft edge, by contrast, has until recently been viewed, as secondary, fuzzy and, yes, soft, values that are nice to have but not at the core of lasting success.  Karlgaard’s new book, The Soft Edge, seeks to re-set those priorities. 

Most of the book is taken up exploring the five deep values of the soft edge.  Trust between leaders and their teams, and colleagues more generally, is needed to create grit, the ability to sustain interest in and effort toward very long-term goals (as advanced by Angela Duckworth).  Smarts takes the idea of grit and contends that it helps to accelerate and sustain learning, both learning new things and solving novel problems and applying the outcomes of learning.  Teams, marked by chemistry, passion and grit, are where the hard work of combining and building on different perspectives and shared values take place.  Taste is the discernment that guides the design process, a broader sensibility that deploys teamwork to generate abiding experiences for customers.  Story is the source of persuasion in the market but also of purpose and motivation for teams and organizations, even when those stories are increasingly told better by outsiders, like customers, and data.

Of the five values, taste is perhaps the book’s most distinctive contribution for leaders seeking to build brands, organizations, and lasting success.  Karlgaard breaks out that sensibility into function, form and finally meaning, indicating how all three must combine to create “an emotional engagement” or demonstrate “the significance and associations customers experience with a product” or service.  The resulting complex and well-integrated experience flies in the face of classical business ideas like building economies of scale, as he acknowledges, shifting focus from pursuing cost advantage over competition to delivering more substantially to customers.  Summing up this priority, Margit Wennmachers of Andreesen Horowitz is quoted to say, “taste is a matter of really understanding your customer on a very, very fundamental level.”

Using the example of Specialized Bicycle’s data analysis of wind resistance in designing high-performance bicycles, Karlgaard argues how leaders should seek to combine design, creativity and data for memorable experiences today.  One of the commendable features of The Soft Edge is its consistent attention to how the tools of the digital age and the knowledge production and management that makes those tools all the more important have altered the business landscape.  In fact, the book closes with a sustained discussion across the five values of how important is the collaboration of CMOs and CIOs for businesses to be successful amidst the increasing complexity of messaging and marketing platforms shaped by sensors, computers, and analytics.

Specifically how and when to apply the values of the soft edge, particularly in coordination with  each other and the elements of the other edges, is mostly not discussed here.  Nor is there an elaboration of the potentially distinct approaches to developing soft edge values and, again, their balance, with other core elements of lasting value, in different kinds of businesses, particularly creative ones.  Even at its most evocative, as in the closing call for leaders to operate in the “elusive sweet spot between data truth and human truth,” the book also leaves largely open the matter of how to work in that zone effectively.  More than once while reading, I hoped that a Soft Edge “Workbook” might soon appear to help leaders and others to take and implement the wealth of practically helpful thinking here.  (Several related tools, including a free self-assessment of individual leadership needs and opportunities related to the values of the soft edge, are available online at http://bit.ly/TJRWFg).

Yet even without additional guidance for implementation, the model of organizational success in The Soft Edge provides many useful spurs to those striving to improve their businesses.  Producing and sustaining high performance depends of striking the right balance of hard and soft skills in given settings and situations.  Karlgaard’s useful insights and varied business examples offer a valuable resource for leaders committed to thinking deeply about and engaging in their own organizations the too-often-neglected values of the soft edge.

A Resolution for Creative Leaders in 2013: Give Up Power and Cede Control...to Create More Value

‘Tis the season of making resolutions for the new year.  Of looking back at what has been been and looking ahead to what can be.  It’s a season of future possibilities grounded in the hard work, the successes and the failures, of the past twelve months.

One of the core tenets of creative leadership is reflection – consistent, constructive, courageous reflection about our individual values and beliefs and the actions they guide.  Reflection serves as a crucial basis for understanding ourselves as well as our actions as leaders.  Reflection and the self-knowledge it generates also shapes our decisions about the future.   We pause to reflect on the “why” of our busy lives in order to decide on “what” to do next and “how” effectively to take that action.

This dynamic of reflection enabling us to align our beliefs and actions as creative leaders makes looking forward to the arrival of a new year filled with possibilities so exciting.

Yet as we approach the new year, my wish is for you to consider taking an especially challenging action.  Most of us will make lists of resolutions for the months to come.  We’ll design ambitious goals and then dedicate ourselves to achieving them.  Some of these may involve committing to more regular practice of reflection on our days, perhaps meditation, and to stay grounded by integrating different areas of our lives.

More likely, though, the majority of our professional goals for the new year will involve re-focusing our time, attention and energies with our clients or customers, associates and colleagues.  We’ll dedicate ourselves to new projects.  We’ll re-double our efforts on existing ones.  We’ll pledge to be more effective leaders of people, teams and organizations.  All noble and worthwhile aspirations, but our way to reach those goals will typically be by taking on more responsibilities and assuming more control ourselves.  Ultimately, many of our resolutions will translate into accruing more power.

Instead of resolving to gather more power, let me offer an alternative approach to your 2013: Consider how to give up more power.  To cede more control.  To share more responsibility.  Ask yourself, how will you build more trust in your core team next year so you can collaborate with rather than control them?  How will you move beyond providing direct inspiration to fostering an individual sense of aspiration in each of those around you?  Ultimately, how will you stir the passions of those with whom you work in order to be more innovative together?

These are hard questions.  For power and control in many organizations means final decision-making authority or profit and loss responsibility or supervision over people or departments.  It’s very difficult giving up those hard-won markers of success – they’re typically our rewards for, and outward signs of, our achievements, after all.

Yet by giving up tight-fisted individual control, we allow for an increased sense of shared ownership that translates, ultimately, into the creation of greater value.  You may recognize such thinking from the recent work of Tim Leberecht, Charlene Li, Nilofer Merchant, among others (and yes, I recommend their work for your 2013 reading lists…).  However, creative leaders have long understood that fostering creative excellence requires purposeful openness and genuine trust to draw fully on all the passion and capabilities of those with whom we work.  The challenge is to reflect on that understanding for our own lives as leaders and to act.

So, Happy New Year.  And all good wishes for your giving up power and control for a more creative and successful 2013.