Creative Management

Citation

Hoe, S. (2002), "Creative Management", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 23 No. 7, pp. 408-408. https://doi.org/10.1108/lodj.2002.23.7.408.1

Against a backdrop of a rapid rate of technological change and increased competition, organisations are constantly challenged to become more creative and innovative in the way they do business and in their product and service offerings. Thus, the idea of how creativity emerges in organisations becomes a key refrain among both scholars and managers alike. The development of creative management processes and the influence of innovative ideas on the approach to business are the key themes of this edited book by Jane Henry.

Creative Management is a collection of 22 articles that is divided into three main parts – perception, style and development. The various works examine the nature of creativity and how it relates to management issues from a wide variety of perspectives including organizational psychodynamics, knowledge management, social capital and environmentalsustainability.

Part one includes works on the topics of creativity, cognition and perception. The article by Teresa Amabile, “How to kill creativity”, draws attention to the importance of intrinsic motivation in creative endeavour while Milhaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work, “A systems perspective on creativity”, focuses on the social context out of which creativity and innovation emerge. Guy Claxton’s article, “Innovative mind: becoming smarter by thinking less”, outlines the reasons why creativity and innovation may benefit from a less hasty form of thinking which tends to be marginalised in the rationally dominated West. In his review of “Creativity and problem solving”, Geir Kauffman touches on the relationship between the two and explains how creative thinking has a lot to do with being sensitive to important problems that are worth addressing.

Knowledge management gurus Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi point out in their article, “Organizational knowledge creation”, the deficiency of Western conceptualisations of innovation and knowledge. The well‐known Canadian business professor, Henry Mintzberg, shares “Ten ideas designed to rile everyone who cares about management” in a short article of the same name. In Gareth Morgan’s article, “The theory behind the practice”, Morgan suggests that the conscious use of different frames will help reveal new ways of seeing and acting. Part one concludes with Gerrit Boekstra’s writings, “Metaphor and the evolution of the living organisation”, which chart the move from organisation as machine through organisation as organism to organisation as brain.

Part two focuses on the areas of emotion, style and learning. In the first article, Daniel Coleman elaborates on the concept of emotional intelligence in “What makes a leader”. Yiannis Gabriel’s article, “Psychodynamics, psychoanalysis and organizations”, argues that emotions operate at the organisational as much as individual and team levels. Sarah Hampson reviews issues related to personality testing in her work, “State of the art: personality”. In another article with a similar theme, Rowan Bayne explains the relationship between the big five traits and Myers‐Briggs “Types indicators”. In the article on “Adaptors and innovators: why new initiatives get blocked”, Michael Kirton emphasises the idea of having different creative styles. Other articles in part two includes “Learning and change through action research” by Peter Reason, “Empowerment: the emperor’s new clothes” by Chris Argyris and “Informal networks: the company behind the chart” by David Krackhardt and Jeffrey Hanson.

Part three presents sections on culture, responsibility and sustainability, and begins with Brazilian Richard Semler’s article, “Why my former employees still work for me”. Francis Fukuyama’s work on “Technology, networks and social capital” highlights the importance of building social capital for economic development. In “The citizen company”, Charles Handy argues that it is time to redefine the relationship between the employer and employee in a more socially responsible direction. Harvard Business School don, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, suggests that socially responsible activities can offer more than good public relations and a feel‐good factor for the staff in the her work, “From spare change to real change”. The last two articles, “A road map for natural capitalism” and “Monocultures of the mind” by Amory Lovins, Hunter Lovins and Paul Hawken, and Vandana Shiva respectively, touch on environmental sustainability.

This second edition of Creative Management helps to explore the roots of creative perception and judgement in the work place. It provides a comprehensive introduction on the topic of creativity with issues related to the study of creative management from both a micro and macro perspective. Besides the key articles from a panel of distinguished international contributors on creativity, the book also includes section commentaries by the editor. Published as a course reader for The Open University course on creativity, innovation and change, this is an essential sourcebook suitable and recommended for practising managers and students in the fields of organisational behaviour and strategic management.