Keywords
Citation
Peters, J. (1999), "The Creativity Toolkit", Managing Service Quality: An International Journal, Vol. 9 No. 4, pp. 46-47. https://doi.org/10.1108/msq.1999.9.4.46.1
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
It′s hard not to like this book. Jim Harrington is an engaging sort of person and all credit to him that much of his enthusiastic and engaging nature has translated itself into the pages of this book and indeed the ”Performance Improvement“ series which this is part of.
First off, some important points. It doesn′t have too many pages ‐‐ always a good sign if like me you struggled through 600 pages of Michael Porter′s closely‐woven prose as a student only to find that there are one of three things to do if you want to be competitive, and one thing not to do. To reinforce the point, it has relatively big writing. You can read a chapter in about 5 minutes. It′s bite‐sized, like the books you read to your kids at bedtime. And it gets better. It has pictures. Not tiresome graphs and figures and diagrams which worthy folk obviously sweat over for years and earn PhDs over, but drawings. And little quizzes (more and more like the stuff I read to my daughter).
In short, it′s a book designed for readers. But with authors of the calibre of Harrington et al., it is not fluff ‐‐ there is lots of good stuff in there, although the authors I guess are self confident enough not to try to dazzle us with their erudition, but rather to explain, simply and easily, what creativity is and how it works in organizations. Creativity is one of those areas we all wish we had more of in our organizations but don′t do too much about encouraging. Our espoused theory doesn′t match our theory in use, so to speak.
I can think of lots of applications. Short workshops and presentations can easily be designed around it. Older school students would probably enjoy it as a part of a business studies class, as would undergraduates. Certainly working managers would get a lot from it, and would (unlike much of what is on the market) probably actually read the thing.
As I said, it′s hard not to like <it>The Creativity Toolkit.