Think Better: An Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinking Think Better is about Productive Thinking -- why it's important, how it works, and how to use it at work, at home, and at play. Productive Thinking is a game changer -- a practical, easy-to-learn, repeatable process that helps people understand more clearly, think more creatively, and plan more effectively. [Read an Interview with Tim Hurson]
Swarm Creativity: Competitive Advantage through Collaborative Innovation Networks Swarm Creativity introduces a powerful new concept--Collaborative Innovation Networks, or COINs. Its aim is to make the concept of COINs as ubiquitous among business managers as any methodology to enhance quality and competitive advantage. A COIN is a cyberteam of self-motivated people with a collective vision, enabled by technology to collaborate in achieving a common goal--innovation-by sharing ideas, information, and work. [Read an Interview with Dr. Gloor]
Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition)
It is roughly true that the nature of our beliefs and perceptions are interpreted from our experiences. The field of grass cannot change its character. Grass cannot interpret and shape its experiences to create a different nature. We are not a field of grass. We can choose to interpret our experiences anyway we wish. You know as well as I do that few of us are even aware of what this means. [Read an Interview with Michael Michalko]
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
In this authoritative and fascinating new book, Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, tears down some of the most popular myths about creativity and erects new principles in their place. He reveals that creativity is always collaborative--even when you're alone. Sawyer draws on compelling stories of inventions and innovations: the inventors of the ATM, the mountain bike, and open source operating systems, among others, to demonstrate the freewheeling ways of true innovation. [Read an Interview with Dr. Sawyer]
The Thinker's Toolkit: 14 Powerful Techniques for Problem Solving
Leave it to a former CIA employee to conjure up a complicated yet definitely sensible approach to decision making. His point is that we don't know how to analyze and solve problems correctly, since we've been groomed to be subjective, not objective, thinkers. Fourteen mathematical and analytical thought processes are interpreted for the lay public, with 50 exercises and a cornucopia of examples.
New Thinking for the New Millennium
Edward de Bono believes that we have been let down by excellent but limited ways of thinking. He maintains that the thinking of the last millennium has been concerned with what is. This is the thinking of analysis, criticism and argument. What we have not sufficiently developed is the thinking concerend with what can be. This is thinking that is crative and constructive.
Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation
Johansson argues that innovations occur when people see beyond their expertise and approach situations actively, with an eye toward putting available materials together in new combinations. Because of ions, "the movement of people, the convergence of science, and the leap of computation," a wide range of materials available for new, recontextualized uses is becoming a norm rather than an exception.
When Things Start to Think
A computer in your shoe? Maybe so. Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT's Media Lab, joins the ranks of techno-prognosticators, and his focus is on how the future of computing will fit into our physical realities. This sensorial focus allows Gershenfeld to explore such science fictional ideas as wearable computers, nanotech circuitry implants, as well as such concerns as emotions, money, and civil rights in the new age of artificial intelligence.
The Circle of Innovation: You Can't Shrink Your Way to Greatness
Tom Peters presents a provocative new vision for prospering in the "permanent state of flux" ruling today's business world. By juxtaposing short text passages and bold graphic images, Peters simply but passionately offers his prescription--perpetual innovation--in a nontraditional manner intended to foster individual interpretation.
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
The title of this book is a mild pun. People are using smart "mobs" (rhymes with "robes") to become smart "mobs" (rhymes with "robs"), meaning, sophisticated mobile Internet access is allowing people who don't know each other to act in concert. In this timely if at times overenthusiastic survey of wireless communication devices, Rheingold conveys how cell phones, pagers and PDAs are shaping modern culture. [Read an interview with Howard Rheingold]
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of "thin slices" of behavior.
Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities By Adam Kahane
Adam Kahane spent years working in the world's hotspots, and came away with a new understanding of how to resolve conflict in a way that seems reasonable to all parties. Written in a relaxed, persuasive style, this is not a "how-to" book with glib answers, but rather, a very personal story of the author's progress to becoming an effective facilitator of positive change - by learning how to create environments that enable new ideas and creative solutions to emerge. [Read an Interview with Adam Kahane]
Dialogue: The Art Of Thinking Together
Modern conversation is a lot like nuclear physics, lots of atoms zoom around, many of which just rush past each other. But others collide, creating friction. One guy shares a statistic he's privy to, another shares another fact, and on and on. Each person fires off a tidbit, pauses to reload while someone else talks, then fires off another. Isaacs explains how we can do better than that.
The Wisdom of Crowds
Surowiecki first developed his ideas for Wisdom of Crowds in his "Financial Page" column of The New Yorker. Many critics found his premise to be an interesting twist on the long held notion that Americans generally question the masses and eschew groupthink. "A socialist might draw some optimistic conclusions from all of this," wrote The New York Times. "But Surowiecki’s framework is decidedly capitalist." Some reviewers felt that the academic language and business speak decreased the impact of the argument.
Social Neuroscience: People Thinking about Thinking People (Social Neuroscience)
Social neuroscience uses the methodologies and tools developed to measure mental and brain function to study social cognition, emotion, and behavior. In this collection, John Cacioppo, Penny Visser, and Cynthia Pickett have brought together contributions from psychologists, neurobiologists, psychiatrists, radiologists, and neurologists that focus on the neurobiological underpinnings of social information processing, particularly the mechanisms underlying "people thinking about thinking people."
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
Wikipedia, the user-edited online encyclopedia that now dwarfs the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica is the prime example of what is called the new Web, or Web 2.0, where sites allow mass collaboration from participants in the online community. These open systems can produce faster and more powerful results than the traditional closed proprietary systems that have been the norm for private industry and educational institutions.
The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm The Art of Innovation really teaches indirectly by telling great stories -- mainly, of how the best ideas for creating or improving products or processes come not from laboriously organized focus groups, but from keen observations of how regular people work and play on a daily basis. We learn the backstories of some consumer goods, from recent inventions like the Palm Pilot and the in-car beverage holder to things we nearly take for granted -- like Ivory soap.
