Creative Leadership Ideas

This Center for Creative Leadership® publication shows you the important steps you can take to become more self-aware and to treat new ideas and those who suggest them with the respect and consideration they deserve. Ask any leader about innovation and you are likely to hear how critical it is to their organization. Innovation provides a way to stand out from competitors around the globe and to address ever-rising customer expectations for products, services, and experiences that are new, different, and make life easier. Despite what we say about innovation, how we act is often in direct contradiction to our words. Most of us are quick to see new ideas as a risk— lacking all the evidence and detail we need to make us feel comfortable. Rather than embracing new ideas and nurturing them along the way, we tend to discard them out of hand—sabotaging the very creativity we need to fuel innovation. The six tips described in this publication will inspire & equip any leader to become an innovation hero!

There has never been a better time to study, practice, and experience creative leadership. In the fluid and turbulent economic and social environments of the 21st century, creative leadership has become a cardinal force in the creation and evolution of adaptive organizations. In the last two decades, organizational science has witnessed a rapid increase in the number of studies on the nature, skills, and processes of creative leadership. The resulting accumulated body of knowledge has remained for many years dispersed and fragmented across multiple strands of organizational research. This volume seeks to foster the cross-fertilization of scientific knowledge and insight by bringing together authoritative contributions from leading scholars whose work is located in different strands of creative leadership research. Creative Leadership: Contexts and Prospects builds upon a recently introduced multi-context framework that integrates metatheoretically three conceptualizations of creative leadership found in the extant literature: Facilitating employee creativity; Directing the materialization of a leader’s creative vision; and Integrating heterogeneous creative contributions. These three conceptualizations reflect essential differences in the enactment of creative leadership across various collaborative contexts of creative work, and they underlie the intellectual efforts of different research strands. The collection of chapters in Creative Leadership: Contexts and Prospects offers the latest thinking on creative leadership in facilitative, directive, and integrative contexts, and a stimulating set of ideas for crafting the next generation of nuanced theories and empirical studies in the field.

If you've got an idea you want to sell, you need to do two things: scan your environment and use effective tactics. This guidebook explains how to scan your environment and provides a collection of tactics you can use to sell your idea. Using this systematic approach will make you more likely to accomplish your objective - solving a problem or making an improvement for the benefit of individuals, groups, and the organization as a whole.

This book covers a multitude of timeless leadership concepts distilled from numerous great thinkers. It was written while serving in executive leadership for the Presbytery of Donegal, a region of PCUSA churches in Pennsylvania. It's a quick read that drills down to some outstanding leadership principles. These concepts and principles will be useful in whatever leadership role you hold.

New ideas and new ways of doing things are one of the main ingredients in sustained business success, but how do you create the right conditions for innovation? Leadership for Innovation will help you to create an innovative climate that encourages the development of new products and services. Drawing upon real-life examples including Google, Honda and 3M, John Adair sets out practical ways for bringing about change in organizations. As well as identifying the characteristics of an innovative organization, he discusses key topics such as organizing for team creativity; motivating creative people, how to build on ideas and how to be a creative leader and team member. Leadership for Innovation will help you to inspire your team to go that one step further and generate the kind of ideas that are the foundations of future success.

Successful leadership today relies heavily on an individual's ability to effectively respond to and proactively drive change—in short, to be creative. This book helps readers enhance their creative talents and employ these skills as a leader. New to the Second Edition is an expanded discussion of the important role creativity plays in leadership, a more extensive account of the skills necessary to be an effective creative leader, a broader range of historical and contemporary examples, and enhanced graphics throughout that bring the Creative Problem Solving model to life visually.

A clash between the ideology of growth and the growth of ideas, between control and creativity, between measurement and the immeasurable, between predictability and the fickle muses of inspiration in engulfing our boardrooms. In this scathing swipe at the institutionalised idiocy that is stifling creativity just at the time the world needs it most Gordon Torr draws from the leading lights of creativity research to demolish the myths that surround the generation of ideas in the modern organisation. The curse of the brainstorm, the commoditisation of creative talent, the deskilling of the imagination, the startling inadequacies of management theory – these and the many other horrors of idea-assassination that run rampant in creative sector companies are dissected and disembowelled in this hilarious expose of the drama that unfolds every time a new idea slides across the boardroom table. This book sets out to address the black hole that surrounds the management of creative people, debunking many myths of creativity, and outlining a revolutionary approach to the pressing issue of creative productivity in the contemporary creative sector company. A handbook of tools, techniques, methods and practical ideas whose USP is a framework for thinking about efficient creative management – how to extract value from creative time. Gordon Torr presents a logical argument that puts in place the building blocks of the author’s knowledge and experience towards the final architecture. “We need them as never before. And we know that they’re somehow different. Yet the productive management of creative people is an almost totally neglected science. I doubt if there’s a single industry that wouldn’t gain immediate advantage from Gordon Torr’s scrupulous and enlightening detective work.” - Jeremy Bullmore

This book demonstrates how creative thinking is an essential element of leadership, especially when bringing about change. It provides a unique combination of conceptual arguments, practical principles, and proven tools to enhance future leaders' effectiveness in creating and managing change.