Creative Leadership
Skills That Drive Change
- Gerard J. Puccio - Buffalo State - State University of New York
- Marie Mance - Buffalo State - State University of New York
- Mary C. Murdock - Buffalo State - State University of New York
Key Features:
- Intimately connects leadership and creativity: Leadership is now characterized as the catalyst for change, while creative thinking is the process that leads to change. This is the first book to make an explicit and elaborate conceptual link between creativity and leadership.
- Utilizes the Creative Problem Solving process: This book explores the more than 50 years of Creative Problem Solving (CPS) research and application. While other books focus on creative thinking and CPS, this is the first to offer a philosophical position that is then followed up with specific principles and procedures that leaders can employ to deliberately enhance their effectiveness in creating and managing change.
- Promotes "deliberate creativity": The authors are all faculty at the International Center for Studies in Creativity, Buffalo State—State University of New York, internationally renowned as a leading authority on the topic of Creative Problem Solving. Their rich experience encourages students to take a proactive approach toward the production of novel and useful ideas that address a predicament or opportunity.
Good, with a broad approach, but a bit of a bias towards the idea that creativity is manageable within rational processes; at bit of a technological bias, so to speak.
Still in review.
A key text to inform student projects on IE3A8. I will also recommend for NPQICL which I facilitate for the University of Wolverhampton.
Contains a few really interesting chapters, and will be really useful as supplementary reading to the course
The book came much later as it was expected, so that the semester had already passed and we could not use this book.
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Feedback for the book:
The book provides information on main principles for creativity and proposes tools to enhance it. It succeeds to build a good connection between the theory and its verification by modern empirical research.
The authors give sometimes very obvious information (like definitions of „what is process“ (p.50), „curiosity“ or „data“ (p.114))
The book presents interesting information on changing view of creativity, underlying the possibility to „learn“ creativity. At the end of the book several small case studies are provided. It would be better to integrate the case studies directly into the theoretical part.
Choose a different book that you had on leadership (Northouse, 9781452203409).
This textbook is a useful source for those who want to know -in practice- how to be a creative leader. It is valuable, simple in presenting the content and application exercises, thus it ensures learning.
Other texts are better fit for the course.
I adopted Northouse's Leadership: Theory and Practice. His is an excellent approach to dealing with the theory that most students find difficult and boring. Yet, it covers the theory well. I am rebuilding the course for
Summer or Fall 2011. I did not adopt Puccio's Creative Leadership. I believe this is more in the line of \change management" rather than leadership. For leadership it does not cover the theory and would be too narrow. It is, however, well written and might be an interesting alternative read for some graduate courses.
Not as centered around Leadership and Change as needed.