The Creative Priority: Driving Innovative Business in the Real World(Penguin business)

How does you company define creativity? Or does creativity define your company? In this book, Jerry Hirschberg - founder and president of Nissan Design International - distills his experience as a leader of the world's centre of innovative car design and reveals his strategy for designing an organization around creativity. Rather than championing the traditional treatment of creativity and a vital component in business, Hirschberg shows how creativity can become the fundamental organizing principle of business.

Table of Contents:
Part 1 Polarity: creative abrasion; hiring in divergent pairs; embracing the dragon. Part 2 Unprecedented thinking: creative questions before creative answers; stepping back from the canvas; failure, cheating and play. Part 3 Beyond the edges: the blurring of disciplinary boundaries; intercultural creativity - treating diverse disciplines as alien cultures; drinking form diverse wells. Part 4 Synthesis: informed intuition; porous planning. Part 5 Conclusion: upending.

About the Author :
In 1980, Jerry Hirshberg ended a 16-year stint as an executive designer at General Motors, where he headed design for Pontiac and Buick, and accepted the position of founding director and eventually President of Nissan Design International, Inc. This unique corporate hybrid has become a creative hotbed of automotive innovation, producing such cutting edge designs as the first Nissan Pathfinder, Altima, Maxima, Pulsar NX and Quest minivan, the Infiniti J30 and the Mercury Villager for Ford. Along the way, owing to an intriguing fixture of the agreement he forged between NDI and Nissan, Hirshberg's team also designs computer concepts for Apple and Motorola, golf clubs for Taylor Made (including the famed 'Bubble Burner'), medical instruments, ski-boots, yachts and pre-school daycare furniture for an international list of clients.Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1939, Mr. Hirshberg has spent a lifetime dealing with the creative process. Along with being a designer, he is a consummate painter and classical musician. He scored one of his earliest creative successes with the rock-and-roll hit 'Sparkling Blue, ' adopting the stage name Jerry Paul, and was the occasional opening act for such singers as Bobby Rydell, Fabian and Frankie Avalon. He studied Mechanical Engineering at Ohio State University and graduated with honors in Design from the Cleveland Institute of Art, with further study in Europe on a Mary C. Page Fellowship.He has served on the Board of Trustees for the Cleveland Institute of Art, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, the Board of Advisors for the Graduate School for Pacific and International Studies at UCSD and the Mayor's Growth Management Task Force for San Diego. He has been a member of the Design Arts Panel for the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C., and was a member of a select group of the country's leading designers invited to Little Rock, Arkansas to consider the implications of Design for the American economy. He chaired the national IDEA Awards program co-sponsored by Business Week and the Industrial Design Society of America, of which he has served as a national director.Mr. Hirshberg has lectured at such universities as Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA and Brown, many of which now teach the principles he and his colleagues developed at NDI. He has also addressed a broad variety of professional organizations and audiences worldwide, and has been the subject of several documentary films and television specials in Europe, for PBS in America, and for British television. He speaks on a wide variety of subjects ranging from design and automobiles to public art and creativity in business. He has even addressed the application of his ideas on creative thinking to leading police departments.The father of sons Eric, a graphic design and advertising executive, and Glen, a writer and teacher, he works and lives with his wife Linda, a Ph.D. Clinical and Organizational Psychologist and President of Applied Behavioral Systems, in Del Mar, California.

Review :
"This is a terrific book! Jerry Hirshberg demystifies creativity with eleven practical strategies for making creativity central to any endeavor, from running a business to facing life's challenges. The book is infused with candid humor, clear thinking, and a mind-set nothing short of revolutionary." -- Betty Edward, author of "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain""If you're a manager, you must read this book." -- "Wired""Do yourself a favor: go out and buy a copy of "The Creative Priority" by Jerry Hirshberg. Read through it once, and then go back and read it again. The strategies are both fascinating and immensely practical for those who work in idea-intensive environments--and who doesn't these days?" -- "Inc.""Fresh, clear practical, steps for moving from the drawing room to the boardroom. A landmark book on creativity that is itself creative." -- Max DePree, author of "Leadership Is an Art"