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.