Instant Creativity, Brian Clegg & Paul Birch

Published by Kogan Page

Buy it now from Blackwell Books

Creativity catalyst

Competitors, costs, customers; life would be so much simpler without them. But they are facts of life and Messrs Clegg & Birch claim that creativity is the way to handle these and all the other problems business throws your way.. Creativity, they say, is a survival factor.

The authors have set out to create a handbook that is easy to use and will make the most of whatever creativity is available – yours or others’. They begin by establishing what exactly creativity is and what gets in its way before going on to look at specific creative techniques. These they split into two sections;

First, establishing exactly what the question is. This is handy when you know you have a problem but you aren’t quite sure what it is or what the cause is. So the techniques in this section are designed to help you get a clear understanding of the nature of the problem with, perhaps, some idea of a general approach. Once you have a clear statement of the problem, you are ready for …

Second, what’s the answer? You know pretty well what you want to achieve but how to achieve it is proving elusive. The problem solvers and idea generators in this section will get your juices going, the authors hope, and ultimately drag the optimum solution out into the open.

You may have briefly to suspend judgement as some of the techniques can seem bizarre. In fact, some of the titles seem bizarre, take ‘Time Slices’ for example, or ‘Mud Slinging’, ‘Cacophony’ and ‘Psychiatrist’s Couch’. Stick with it though; it all makes sense in the end.

This is a ‘dip-in’ book with more than seventy techniques explained and a selection guide to help you choose the best technique(s) each time you use it.

Recommended if you have problems or simply want to increase the amount of creative thinking that goes on in your business.