Creative Think

Favorite Creative Thinking Books

What are your favorite creative thinking books? Why?

Today is "Publication Day" for the 25th Anniversary Edition (fully revised, updated, and redesigned) of my book "A Whack on the Side of the Head." Naturally, I'm thrilled.

I got to thinking about my favorite creative thinking books. I've decided to list the ones that inspired me many years ago. So here goes (I'll limit myself to just five):

1. The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler. This is my very favorite "creative thinking" book. It came out in 1963, and I read it as a student in 1967. This is probably the best-written of all creativity books. Koestler, author of the landmark novel "Darkness At Noon," tackles the creative process with gusto. AOC is filled with great stories and anecdotes. Koestler coined the term "bi-sociation of matrices of thought" to describe the creative act, and he investigated it within the realms of science, humor, and art. I still read this book every couple years. Highly recommended.

2. Conceptual Blockbusting by Jim Adams. This book came out in the early 1970s (the edition I first read was published by the Stanford Alumni Association). Adams, an engineer and a practical academic, showed me just how interesting the creative process could be. It has a lot of classic "creativity" exercises in it. I was quite flattered when Adams wrote a blurb for the second edition of "Whack" in 1990.

3. Lateral Thinking by Edward de Bono (1973) This book made me think hard and deep about just what the mind is doing when it's able to get off the beaten path. A real classic mind-stretcher.

4. Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution by Paul Watzlawick (1974) . Watzlawick was an Austrian born psychotherapist who founded the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto. Many great (off-beat) stories and examples to support his ideas about "creative reframing." This book still sells well.

5. Applied Imagination by Alex Osborne (from circa 1953, currently out of print, unfortunately). Osborne was the "O" in the famed (1940s-1970s) ad agency BBDO. Thus, he worked with real clients and was in the position of seeing efforts succeed and fail. He coined the term "brainstorming." He's also sometimes credited with originating the SCAMPER creative technique.

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You may notice that there are no books on this list that are later than the mid-1970s. There are two reasons for this.

First, I wanted to share with you the books that inspired me to go into business for myself as a creativity consultant in 1977.

And, second, I wanted to leave plenty of room for your favorites! (There have been many, many very good ones in the past thirty years.)

So once, again: What are your favorite creative thinking books? What would you recommend? Why?

The Peloponnesian War

I just finished listening to The Peloponnesian War by Tulane Professor Kenneth Harl (36 lectures produced by the Teaching Company). This war was waged between the Athenian Empire and Sparta and her allies from 431 to 404 BC. I highly recommend this program: Harl does an excellent job of bringing this era to life.

This war has many features: the rise of terror tactics, ruinous plagues, large-scale sieges, out-of-control popular assemblies, ruthless butchering of civilian populations, breakdown of morality, cataclysmic sea battles, unscrupulous politicians, wasted military opportunities, court intrigue with the Persians, and the collapse of Athens' "Golden Age."

This is the first time I'd returned to this era since 1969-70 when I studied this war as a student (and even read Thucydides in the original Greek). In the intervening four decades, I've found that my perspective has changed considerably.

In the late 1960s, against the backdrop of the Cold War, it was customary to see a democratic and vibrant Athens in the role of the United States, and a stolid and secretive Sparta as a proto-Soviet Union. It was all too easy to downplay Athens' slavery and aggressive colonialism and play up Sparta's adherence to strong military values and deep suspicions about the outside world.

This time around I saw Athens in a less favorable light, and Sparta in a more positive way.

Athens greatly exploited (often cruelly) the member cities of her empire. And she used the slaughter of civilians to intimidate both foes and wavering allies.

And Sparta, after all, did win the war. And she did it because she proved to be the more flexible: she was able to build a fleet (quite an achievement for a land-locked power) and defeat Athens at her strength — on sea.

Also, for all the glory of the Athenian democratic popular assembly, the leaders it produced (after Pericles) tended to be weak, vacillating, and corrupt. Many of the Spartan leaders, on the other hand, e.g., Brasidas and Lysander, turned out to be more flexible, imaginative, and effective.

As companion reading material, I read Victor Davis Hanson's book, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and the Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War. I also re-read Book VII of Thucycides' Peloponnesian War (which deals with the failed Sicilian Expedition).

Hanson does a fine job of exploring how the two sides waged war. I came to understand the details of hoplite warfare, Greek cavalry tactics, and how two-year long sieges were conducted. Especially eye-opening is his description of life (cramped conditions, darkness, stench) aboard a Greek trireme (ship) and the terror that must have been a part of naval combat.

For me, the saddest and most sobering part of this entire story is the saga of the Athenian Expedition to Sicily. I kept thinking, "Why?" If you want the whole cocktail of hubris, strategic over-reach, poor leadership, bad timing, meddling politicians, and the bloody annihilation of an entire navy and army, it's all right there for you in the Athenian attempt to subdue Syracuse.

All in all, I'd say there is much to be learned from these events of nearly two-and-a-half millennia ago that can be applied to understanding what is happening to today. That is, after all, one of the reasons one studies history.

David Mamet: "Throw Out Stuff You Love"

I'm a long time fan of writer and playwright David Mamet. His films stand out for their stylized, pithy dialog and intricate plot twists. Glengarry Glen Ross (winner of the Pulitzer prize) is a classic. If you've never seen House of Games, Things Change, Heist, Wag the Dog, Oleanna, or The Spanish Prisoner, you should rent their DVDs.

Mamet was interviewed recently by Robert Hughes in the WSJ. Several of his answers dealt with his own creative process.

WSJ: How hard is plot for you?

Mamet: I once worked for a summer laying sod. This is the only thing I've ever done that was harder than that. You've got to get over your own cleverness. You have to become extraordinary analytical, and throw out all the stuff you love to get there. Sometimes it doesn't make sense. You stare at that sheet of paper for years and know there's something hiding in there.

WSJ: When you begin writing, do you have an idea where it's going to go?

Mamet: You've got to get in there and start mucking around. After a while the material is going to correct you. You have to listen to it, and extract the play that is hiding in your subconscious. If it can't trick you, it can't trick the audience. You have to follow your unconscious thoughts so that eventually you're encased in a structure that, as Aristotle says, is surprising and inevitable.

WSJ: Are you ruthless with your own rewriting?

Mamet: Oh yes. I don't care. I do it for a living. If something doesn't work, I'm going to throw it out. What pleasure is there in saying I'm right and the audience is wrong?

I'm no Mamet. But I will say that my writing experience (books and other products) is similar to his in this regard. Almost every time I've been stuck, it's usually because I've been in love with a particular idea, theme, metaphor, or quote. Only when I've "thrown out the stuff I love" (as Mamet would put it) do things begin to flow in a constructive way.

What can you "beloved ideas" can you throw away? What might that open up?

What Do Our Self-Help Books Say About Us?

Here's a question for you.

I've been listening to a Shakespeare course (from the Teaching Company).  In a lecture about the play Henry V, the author Peter Saccio makes an interesting aside.

"You can learn a lot about a culture and an era by examining the self-help books that were popular during that time."

For example, during Elizabethan Times (especially the 1590s), the top best-selling self-help books dealt with death, namely the correct way to approach death. This, in great part, reflects the deadly "London Plague" of that decade.

Best-selling self-help books during the Victorian Era dealt with proper etiquette. This is because a number of people had made substantial sums during the Industrial Revolution, and they were able to buy themselves a higher class lifestyle. One thing they needed to fit in was knowledge of the proper manners of their new class.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this genre produced best-sellers dealing with improved sexual performance and also consciousness-raising. (Picture from Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex.)

The 1990s produced a number of money-management and wealth-building guides. And this certainly reflects the "go-go" aspects of that decade.

Which brings me to my question:

As you look at the how-to/self-help best-sellers of 2007, what do they tell us about our era, our life-style, and our hopes, desires and frustrations?

Fake Steve Jobs' Book Is Really Funny

I just read Fake Steve Jobs' new book "Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs." Here's my verdict: it's really, really funny. Indeed, it reminds me of some of Christopher Buckley's best work (Thank You for Smoking and God Is My Broker).

Many of you know the blog by Fake Steve Jobs (who in real life is Daniel Lyons, a Forbes editor). The book is in a similar vein but much funnier and obviously more developed. The narrative deals with a year in the life of Fake Steve Jobs. The centerpiece is the options backdating investigation by the Feds into Apple and Jobs himself. But there are Fake Steve's insights into management philosophy, engineering, love, drug use, product development, and being a creative genius (just like Mozart!).

The Fake Steve Jobs character is a riot. I have no idea how close this character is to the Real Steve Jobs, but FSJ seems to conform to the many myths, bizarre stories, and stereotypes a number of us in the Valley have about the Real Steve. [I met the Real Steve Jobs several times in the early 1980s when he was Apple's Chairman, once in his office and again when he spoke at a conference I produced. He was cordial to me, but his "reality distortion field" was already fully developed then.]

Fake Steve's supporting cast is impressive: Larry Ellison, Bono, and Al Gore. They all seem like "letchtards." And then there are others: Hillary Clinton, the "Googletards," Arnold, John Doerr, and a couple of characters who greatly resemble Andy Grove and Tom Perkins.

Here's a sample from the book and it describes Fake Steve's new product development philosophy:

"Anyone can make a phone, just like anyone can make a computer. But that's not good enough for Apple. Part of what makes us different—and, yes, better—is the way we create products.

For example, we don't start with the product itself. We start with the ads. We'll spend months on advertisements alone. This is the reverse of how most companies do it. Everybody else starts with the product, and it's only when it's done do they go, "Oh wait, we need some ads, don't we?" Which is why most advertising sucks, because it's an afterthought.

Not here. At Apple, advertising a a pre-thought. If we can't come up with a good ad, we probably won't do the product. Once we've got the ad campaign, then we start work on the product. But we don't start with the technology. We start with the design . . . . "

Options: a good fun read! Check it out.

The Joseph Effect and the Noah Effect

I recently posted about the challenges of predicting the future in my review of Nassim Taleb's book, The Back Swan. Another person who has had a long interest in the underlying patterns in how things change is fractal geometrician Benoit Mandelbrot.

Mandelbrot studied the historical data of some of the world's great rivers, in particular the Nile. He characterized the patterns he saw by borrowing from stories from Genesis: the "Joseph Effect" and the Noah Effect.

The "Joseph Effect" — after Joseph's interpretation of Pharaoh's dream of seven fat cows and seven gaunt ones to mean that there would be seven prosperous years followed by seven lean ones — describes persistence. He discovered that trends tend to persist; that is, if a place has been suffering drought, it's likely it will suffer more of the same. In other words, things tend to stay the way they've been recently. Some examples:

• Healthy people tend to stay healthy;
• Winning teams tend to keep on winning; and,
• Products that have been successful for the past five years will probably be successful next month.

On the other hand, the "Noah Effect" — after the story of the Great Flood — describes discontinuity. Mandelbrot found that when something changes, it can change abruptly. For example, a stock priced at $40 a share can quickly fall to $5 without ever being priced at $30 or $20, if something significant triggers its collapse.

As science writer James Gleick put it:

The "Noah" and "Joseph" Effects push in different directions, but they add up to this: trends in nature are real, but they can vanish as quickly as they come.

Thus, we can expect what's been happening to continue to happen, but we should also expect the unexpected.

Questions to think about: What patterns describe the flow of your current situation? Where do you see "Joseph" or "Noah" at work in the world around you?

The Black Swan

Market crashes! Fads! 9/11! Fashion changes!
The quick demise of the Soviet Empire!
Epidemics! Viagra, a Success! Harry Potter, a Phenomenon!

Why are things so surprising?

Every so often, a book comes along that:

1. Forces you to question your basic assumptions about how human knowledge is created;
2. Reaffirms your skepticism about experts and their opinions and prognostications; and/or,
3. Is highly entertaining in its varied use of stories, examples, and anecdotes.

Nassim Taleb's new book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, happily and systematically delivers on all three counts.

I had read Taleb's Fooled By Randomness, and enjoyed it. But "The Black Swan" is a much deeper and well thought-out exploration of the "unexpected" in our lives.

While Taleb's style is fun (and sometimes rude), personal, and engaging, the book itself (because of its subject matter) is not easy to plow through. My strategy was to read 10-15 pages a night for three weeks. My reward: a fresh perspective of some basic epistemological concepts.

The two main points are the book are: 1) the future is unpredictable; and, 2) we humans try to concoct stories to convince ourselves that the world is more predictable than it actually is.

Taleb defines a "black swan" as having these three characteristics: 1) it's an outlier: something outside the realm of regular expectations; 2) it carries an extreme impact; and, 3) it can be explained after its occurrence but can't be predicted beforehand. There you have it: rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability.

Much of the book consists of an exploration of 1) our blindness to randomness — particularly the big deviations— and 2) what Taleb calls "Black Swan Logic." Taleb is especially hard on Plato (and his intellectual descendants), categorical thinking, and the "Bell Curve" of expectations.

The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is . . . .

. . . Black Swan Logic makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know. Consider that many Black Swans can be caused and exacerbated by their being unexpected.

Taleb has a different background from most philosophers: he grew up in Lebanon and came of age during their civil war; he studied at Wharton and was a successful Wall Street trader who made a killing during the market crash of 1987; and he seems at home throughout the world with friends and business associates from many different industries. All of this feeds the many diverse examples he shares throughout the book.

There area lot of juicy morsels in this book. After discussing several civil wars and the fall of the Soviet Empire, he muses:

The studious examination of the past in the greatest of detail does not teach you much about the mind of History; it only gives you the illusion of understanding it. History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go from fracture to fracture.

Here's his take on elite thinkers vs. cabdrivers (in their ability to predict events):

I noticed that very intelligent and informed people were at no advantage over cabdrivers in their predictions, but there was a crucial difference. Cabdrivers did not believe that they understood as much as learned people — really, they were not the experts and they knew it. Nobody knew anything, but elite thinkers thought they knew more than the rest because they were elite thinkers, and if you're a member of the elite, you automatically know more than the non-elite.

Another gem (based on his observations about Aristotle Onasis, and a psychology study investigating  information and problem-solving):

The more information you give someone, the more hypotheses they will formulate along the way, and the worse they will be [in their ability to solve the problem]. They see more random noise and mistake it for information.

Taleb believes that as the world becomes increasingly more complex, the sources of Black Swans have multiplied beyond measure. Thus, we need to clean up our thinking about just what is possible in the real world. Taleb's book, The Black Swan, is an excellent first step. I recommend it.

Here is a video of Taleb on the Colbert Report.

Does Your Bookshelf = Your World View?

Diego Rodriguez has a provocative quote from Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms, (as quoted in The Omnivore's Dilemma)

"The way I produce a chicken is an extension of my worldview.  You can learn more about that by seeing what's on my bookshelf than having me fill out a whole bunch of forms."

This quote led me to think about the idea of "what do the books on your bookshelf say about your world view?"

In my own case, I think that my book shelf was a better indicator of my world view twenty years ago than it is today. And I believe that it will be an even less of an indicator in the future. That's because many of the ideas and images that I pick up today aren't from the pages of a book, but from the screens of my various digital appliances. It's difficult to display those in an easy-to-grasp way for the casual browser.

Also, when I was younger, it gave me great comfort to see all of my books spread out on book shelves. I'd look at them and think, "So that's what I know!" (Don't laugh, I'm sure many of you have been there as well.) It was also fun to look at other people's books and their record collections (remember LPs and their great art?).

As the years have gone on, my philosophy has changed and I've tried to give a lot of these away to friends and libraries, so that I'm left with just a core set of books that I go back to from time to time for inspiration.

Question: Does your bookshelf equal your world view? And, if not, where would someone go to see your world view on display?

Re-Reading Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle"

I've already commented (here) about the recent passing of novelist Kurt Vonnegut at age 84. (The image on the left appeared on Vonnegut's website shortly after his death, meaning, I guess, "that bird has flown.")

We had a rainy morning in northern California and I didn't feel like going out. So I picked up my copy of "Cat's Cradle" and spent the next three hours re-reading a book that I had first digested nearly four decades ago. I've read all of Vonnegut's novels, but this was always my favorite.

It was interesting to be taken back to the world of the early 1960s in which the "Cat's Cradle" is set. It made me feel young again.

Vonnegut is funny. And perceptive, of course. And quite dark and cynical too. But the era in which this book is set was dark as well: atmospheric atomic weapons testing by the US and the Soviet Union, and a near miss of World War III during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. (Kind of makes today's "Global Warming" fears look like a walk in the park in comparison.) Those were some scary times. But looking back at them, I realized that if we can survive that, we can survive almost anything. (Of course, my parents' generation probably felt the same away about the Depression and World War II.)

Anyway, it's a interesting world that Vonnegut puts together. Some of the elements include: the inventor of the A-Bomb. Ice-9, a material that makes water hard. A holy fool, Bokonon, who starts a paradoxical religion. A Midget. Large company R&D. A Caribbean island. The "Grand Ah-Whoom, or the end of the world. A dysfunctional family. And so on. Read it for yourself.

Hollywood did a pretty decent job of making a film out of Slaughterhouse-Five (directed by George Roy Hill, 1972), but failed miserably bringing Breakfast of Champions (1999) to the big screen. I'm glad they never tried with "Cat's Cradle." It works best in the imagination of the reader.

"All of the true things I am about
to tell you are shameless lies." — Bokonon (Cat's Cradle)

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Note: When I went to Amazon to create the link for "Cat's Cradle," I noticed that it was #4 on their bestseller list, and that three other Vonnegut books were in their Top 100. I noticed that the same thing happened several years ago right after novelist Saul Bellow died — his books also zoomed to the top and went on back order. I guess there's a pattern there!

Twittering and Reading Update

David Armano and I are engaged in an exchange program: He's reading the novel The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason about Burma in the 1880s and I'm Twittering.

I'm in Day #5 and these are my observations about my experience with the Twitter phenomenon. (As a gesture of solidarity for David, I've been re-reading the Piano Tuner. Shown are some of my photos from my trip to Burma last year.)

Getting registered at Twitter is fairly simple. It's always good mental stimulation having to figure this stuff out. The Twitter interface seems fairly straight-forward.

My initial circle of "friends" consists of marketing people I've met blogging: Drew, Gavin, Ann Michael, Paul, David. Through Twitter, I also finally got to meet Mike Sansone. I'd seen his blog, but never commented. So we exchanged greetings.

I began to learn the ins and outs of "adding friends." I started receiving invitations from people all over: a veteran blogger in Austin, a teenager in Ann Arbor, a liquor store owner in Oklahoma, a designer in Munich, a lady (CleverClogs) in the Netherlands. I said "yes" to all of them. Why not?

I think that Twitter is having some major infrastructure issues. Response time during the day (I'm in California) was slow. I guess many people are responding to the Twitter buzz and wanting to try it out for themselves.

I found the most rewarding time (for me) to Twitter was 4-5 PM Pacific Time. Response time was good, and there were also a number of "friends" on at the same time. So, the experience felt a little like shooting the bull with about 10 other people. Some things were funny. Some were interesting. Some were inane.

This felt intimate — just a circle of "friends" tossing stuff out. But here's a big caution: you can go to someone's blog site that has "Twitteriffic" installed, and you can see that the whole conversation is being broadcast to the world. So, I learned it's important to watch what you say.

A lot of this experience made me feel like a teenager. I remember six or seven years ago when my then-in-high-school-son would spend a lot of time doing AOL IM with his friends. This is what he must have felt like.

Over the weekend, I tried to give people a sense of what I was doing: "Watching the Buckeyes put it to Memphis." "Took Corgis up to the hills to run around." "Planted De Arbol Chile Peppers." "Got up at 5AM  for Sunday morning swim practice." "Wondering how fast Michael Phelps will go this week." Etc. And I got pretty much the same from the "friends." "What's your favorite movie?" "What kind of bike is that?" "What do you think of Todd's Marketing list?" "Now that my wife is out of town, what should I do for fun?" "I've never been robbed in my liquor store, but the previous owner was." "I'm talking gratitude with my daughter."

At one point, I had the idea of using Twitter as an oracle. My question was: "What should I do next?" and the answer will be whatever the next entry in my Twitter box says. I tried this several times, but when the answers were "Drinking shots of tequilla, yum" and "Smoking a big cigar" I figured that the Twitter oracle was taking a break.

At this point, Twitter is still amusing. But I can see how it can suck a lot of time out of one's day. Also, as I mentioned, the Twitter folks have some serious infrastructure issues on their hands. Sudden popularity can be a real problem. Stay tuned!