Initially, I picked up this book just for the sheer brilliance of its title. As it turned out it was the right book at the right time as well. The War of Art is about realizing your ideas, and with that you creative potential. Steven Pressfield, bestselling author of fiction novels ‘The Legend of Bagger Vance’ and ‘Gates of Fire’ reveals his secrets ‘to getting things done’ by dissecting the element of ‘resistance’, the thing standing between you and putting your creativity into practice.

“There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny. This second, we can turn the tables on Resistance. This second, we can sit down and do our work.”

The reason this book worked for me was because it didn’t focus on the solution, but on the problem. It effectively speaks to the inner nay-sayer in all of us that sabotages your ideas the moment they threaten to become to real.

Loved it because:

• The War of Art provides great context for a recognizable problem, drawing a beautiful metaphor with ‘The Art of War’ – overcoming your fears and knowing your ‘enemy’.
• The author speaks from experience and has a very credible record writing multiple best-sellers
• It manages to inspire effectively with the use of good examples and quotes, making it a real page-turner

You might not like it because:

• The Art of War is an almost philosophical approach to creativity and ‘getting things done’. If you are looking for real ‘GTD methods’ this book offers not many ‘tangible’ pointers to put ideas into practice (and see them get done to the end).

Complex ideas explained and simplified through the power of visuals. That is the essence of ‘The back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam.

In this book Roam takes you through various steps on how to illustrate complex ideas understandably.  Using techniques such as getting a complete picture (the overview), a string of events (the scenario) and many more to sell your idea more effecively, and get abstract thoughts out on paper in a way everyone can understand. And understanding is the first step to selling ideas.

Liked:

• Practical: Learning a new thinking framework (visual thinking) in just a matter of hours
• Illustrated (of course)  and putting his theory into practice by giving comprehensive illustrations of the theory
• Dan Roam addresses specific business cases he helped solve through visual thinking

Disliked:

• At 300 pages the book is quite lengthy – even though most pages are filled with illustrations it might make you want to skip a few paragraphs here and there because the picture already explained it, or because the paragraph feels a little redundant.

Juicing the Orange is at its most basic level a book about applying creativity in marketing by ad agency Fallon Worldwide. Though the book starts out somewhat self-congratulatory on their successful campaigns, the book soon picks up phase and focuses more on the element they feel made these campaigns successes – creativity.

What makes Juicing the Orange worth reading is that apart from entertaining and proven case studies, the books explains how how to get clients and management to recognize the value of creative risks above safe but nearly ubiquitous campaigns (“The door to most business people’s right brain is through their left brain”).

Loved it because:

• Though marketing themed, Juicing the Orange is mostly about the value and application in creativity in business on any level.
• Real cases and often brilliant concepts explained in detail
• It provided me with a pitch for rationalizing the use of risky but creative ideas versus safe but unremarkable ideas.

You might not like it because:

• The book starts out somewhat like an Advertising Agency manifesto – telling you how they did things right and why they are so good. I think this is to establish some sort of credibility for the authors but it distracted me from the valid points they are making in the first few chapters. Beyond the introduction, the authors focus more on the issue at hand- justifying the value of creativity and support their arguments with remarkable and proven case-studies.

In ‘A Whole New Mind’ former chief speechwriter for former vice-president Al Gore Daniel H. Pink paints a picture of a future where collaboration, creativity and cultivating six senses ( design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning) are no longer optional to prosper in the Western World. The book is an accurate guide to survival in a world that seems to increasingly resemble the future as depicted by Pink at the time of writing, and is one of the Crinid bibles.

Loved it because:

• Stuff that matters – Pink writes accurately about changes we can observe every day, and the opportunities inside them
• Gamechanger – Insights into our own thinking, providing insights into human behavior
• Must-read for marketers and PR people that want to understand the modern economy without ‘technobabble’

You might not like it because:

• A Whole New Mind promises a lot at the start of the book, but slowly starts to get more practical and focus on the 3 major ‘issues’ facing our economy (Abundance, Asia, and Automation) which in my opinion damaged some of the potentially visionary ideas offered and turns them into reactionary models.

When John Cleese calls your book ‘brilliant’, and your presentation on education and creativity is the #1 watched video on TED.com, you know you’ve done something right. And needless to say Sir Ken Robinson has done something right in writing this book, exploring the fields of education, creativity, and why we are destined to fail at being creative unless we change some fundamental things in the way we teach, learn, communicate and understand society.

Loved it because:

• Deep understanding of creativity, social dogma’s and the problem at hand
• Inspirational stories that make the theory come alive
• Informative yet entertaining writing style that makes you keep on reading
• Exploring fundamental stuff that holds the promise of big, big changes ahead

You might not like it because:

• The book raises many questions the curious reader wants to see answered, but don’t get answered directly. The book explores, uncovers and envisions, not nessecarily answers the though questions it poses.
• The book made me want to read more once I got through it. The high phase, joke and idea filled pages just seem to fly by as you read and suddenly come to a full stop at the last page.

Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is an excellent analysis of how creativity occurs, and how creative individuals have influenced their respective fields and domains of knowledge and arts. He does so by going through an extensive analysis of over ninety creative individuals of note. The book presents a process that is useful to any person who is attempting to improve their organizational or personal creativity or is curious about the components of creativity.

Loved it because:

• Written by a very talented writer, and author of the best seller ‘Flow‘.
• Insights from actually, successful, creative people. Mihaly observed and interviewed a long list of creatives and hands you their insights that have come with experience.
• A good definition and insights into the essence of creativity itself – the psychology of wanting to invent, improve and discover.

You might not like it because:

• Mihaly makes a number of claims that are a little hard to swallow for young professionals and digital natives (the idea that you have to work in one field for about 10 years in order to do something truly creative), a group that is fairly unrepresented in the book and list of interviewed creatives.
  

Lateral Thinking by Edward de Bono is the first best-seller in a long series of creativity books by the uber-guru of creative thinking.Lateral Thinking is a way of thinking that is different from our natural thinking process (linear thinking), one that heightens the chance of developing a creative idea.

Loved it because:

• Game-changing insight into our mind and the way the generate ideas
• Entertaining examples and puzzles
• Clear formats for educating the idea of Lateral Thinking

You might not like it because:

• The book gets a little repetitive after the first 200 pages, with a strong focus on grade-school education in the last third of the book.