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Number crunching - a useful introduction

The book: Super Crunchers: How Anything Can Be Predicted
Author: Ian Ayres
Genre: Business book

Interesting book touting the power of number crunching over intuition and gurus; it holds lots of amusing examples of how established experts fail to predict the future more accurately than simple data-driven decision-making tools such as regression analysis. I took a course on this stuff in my MBA, and it is a seriously fascinating; Super Crunchers is a great introduction to the subject for people who are unfamiliar with number crunching, but curious about how it can be used. A very relevant book, especially for the creative industries.

On a side note, it also forms an interesting counterpoint to Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (my review here), which heralds intuition and first impressions as the keys to making good decisions. While Gladwell’s book is well argued and has a slightly different aim, I have to say that I think the evidence favors the data-driven approach championed by Super Crunchers. The human mind is simply not very good at grappling with large amounts of variables, and suffers under a number of well-known biases, described in Cordelia Fine's entertaining book A mind of its own (my review here).

Creativity and innovation – some academic introductions

Genre: Academic
Readability: Scientific (not suited for casual reading)

If you are interested in exploring creativity and innovation from an academic standpoint, here’s a few good places to start.

Robert Sternberg’s Handbook of Creativity is a solid and wide-ranging collection of journal articles, most of them classics within the area. This book is probably the best place to start, if you haven’t read about the subject before.

Similar to Sternberg’s book, but more focused on the domain of business innovation is Davila, Epstein and Shelton's newly published three-volume series The Creative Enterprise. The series covers three main aspects of creativity and innovation in business – strategy, culture, and execution – and contains more up-to-date research articles. The books are good, but very expensive, so it might make sense to borrow them at your local library instead. (Disclaimer: Davila is an old professor of mine from IESE Business School).

Next, Csikszentmihalyi’s Creativity is not a collection of articles, but a longer, unified work based on hundreds of interviews with creative people. The book provides lots of case stories about creativity at work, and Csikszentmihalyi’s theoretical framework is interesting; however, the strong reliance on interviews makes some of his conclusions seem anecdotally based. As with many of the titles in this genre, it is mostly focused on creativity as it occurs within art and science; business innovation is touched upon, but not explored in depth.

Finally, if you (as I do) have a specific interest in brainstorming, then you might also consider checking out Paulus and Nijstaad’s Group Creativity, which focuses exclusively on this subject. Again, this is an academic book - if you are looking for practical brainstorming advice, check out IDEO's The Art of Innovation (see my review), which contains some good tips on this.

New personal website

I've created a personal website where I gather the feeds of all my different blogs - visit it on http://wedellsblog.wordpress.com/

Stickiness - a recipe for mental adhesives

The Book: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Take Hold and Others Come Unstuck
Authors: Chip and Dan Heath
Genre: Viral marketing

This book is a kind of sequel to Malcolm Gladwell's eminent book The Tipping Point. Informed by science, it explains what makes messages stick in our minds/go viral, and it does so in a way that is immediately applicable to whatever nefarious message you might be trying to spread at the moment.

It is as well-written as Gladwell's books, and more practically useful.

Idea Development at Ideo

The book: The Art of Innovation: Success Through Innovation the IDEO Way
Author: Thomas Kelley (co-founder of Ideo)
Genre: Business/idea generation

A thought-provoking book about brainstorming and product development, Ideo-style. Worth reading both because of the practical tips on how to develop innovative products (and innovative cultures), and because of the portrayal of Ideo, a super interesting product development company. Lots of good case stories, as well.

A guide to the creative industries

Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce
Author: Richard E. Caves
Genre: Academic - microeconomics in action

If you are interested in getting an in-depth understanding of how the creative industries work - movie production, book publishing, art galleries, music distribution, etc. - I know no better starting point than this book.

It explains why Hollywood occasionally releases ten ton turkeys like Travolta's infamous 'Battlestar Galactica', it illuminates exactly how difficult it is to get a fiction book published (and why), and it exposes how major music publishers have been ripping off their artists in a thorough and systematic manner. And lots more. Not a light read, but really interesting stuff. If I were to teach a course on either the creative industries or media economics, this would be the core curriculum.

The Medici Effect

The Medici Effect
Author: Frans Johansson
Genre: Business/innovation

Inspiring book about how innovation happens when you mix up different fields and disciplines, with lots of case stories. While a lot of the evidence presented in the book is anecdotal, the main argument still rings quite true.

The Medici in the title refers to the Renaissance Italian merchant family - according to the author, the intellectual environment in Florence at the time of the Medicis was an early example of an innovation powerhouse.

Dead, funny, fascinating

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Author: Mary Roach
Genre: Popular (yet ghoulish) science

This is a book about what happens to our bodies after we die. Dissection, cremation, decomposition, organ donation, forensic work – you name it, this book has it. Ever wondered whether people retain consciousness when they are beheaded, say, by a guillotine? I have. And so has the author, Mary Roach; in fact, she has been wondering about a lot of weird things, and she didn't stop there. The expression 'morbid curiosity' doesn't quite cover it.

Sounds grisly? It is. It is also eerily fascinating, and often laughing-out-loud funny. It’s a highly palatable read, but don’t bring it to the dinner table. Also, don’t read the section about what happens to people who fall out of airplanes when you are, as I was, sitting in an airplane.

Thanks to Sean Geer for this one. Sean, I strongly suspect this won’t be the last time I thank you for a book recommendation.

The Science of Happiness

Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile
Author: Daniel Nettle
Genre: Popular Science

Happiness is an interesting concept - we spend much of our lives chasing it, yet very few people define themselves as being 100 percent happy, no matter the level of their material wealth.

Actually, there is a reason for that, and the idea has been labeled the hedonic threadmill. No matter how much we get in life, we adjust to it very rapidly, so even the biggest lottery win will bring us happiness for a few months only.

This is one of the many interesting findings about happiness that Daniel Nettle write about in his book. (Despite the title, it is not at all a new age self-help kind of book - although it actually explains why these books sell so well.) Instead, Happiness presents a well-written summary of the latest knowledge about happiness as a scientific subject

The books ends with an informative review of how people can work on increasing their happiness. Amusingly, one of these pieces of advice is simply to do more of the things that make you happy. This may sound completely self-evident - and it is - but the troubling thing is that many people actually spend their lives doing anything but the things that would make them happy. Read it to get an explanation as to why this is.