To Be or Not to Be…Creative
Reported by CEO READ
While readying The 100 Best Business Books for All Time for it’s updated paperback release, we spent some extra time with the books we featured in our Takeaway chapter of the book, expanding the reviews to include more detail. It was especially fun for us to visit Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko because of it’s applicability. Just as the subtitle–A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques–says, Thinkertoys can help those aforementioned folks who aren’t the creative type learn how to be creative. That’s the important word here: learn. No, not everyone is creative. But creativity, according to Michalko, can be self-taught, cultivated, discovered. You can choose to BE creative.
And Michalko knows a thing or two about getting creativity-resistant organizations to change. As an officer in the United States Army, Michael organized a team of NATO intelligence specialists and international academics in Frankfurt, Germany, to research, collect, and categorize all known inventive-thinking methods. His international team applied those methods to various NATO military, political, and social problems and in doing so it produced a variety of breakthrough ideas and creative solutions to new and old problems. After leaving the military, Michael facilitated CIA think tanks using his creative thinking techniques.
His work is best appreciated in book form, where you can scribble in the margins, and bend the pages, and carry it over to your coworker’s cubicle to test them on one of his thought experiments. Yes, make sure you have a pen when you are open up one of Michalko’s books, you’ll need it to write down the ideas you will start getting.
The material he presents throughout the book is entertaining but also so very do-able. Through the exercises and insights in his books, Michalko provides the material to train even the most creatively-blind how to open his or her eyes to their own and others’ creative ideas.
Michael Michalko https://www.amazon.com/Thinkertoys-Handbook-Creative-Thinking-Techniques-2nd/dp/1580087736/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1487185063&sr=8-1&keywords=thinkertoys
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