The Creative Leader

Young, who leads one of the ten largest churches in the United States, and his ministry team teach the importance of creativity among visionaries and those who benefit from it, detailing how creative pastors, ministries, and churches are made.

A practical handbook for every manager charged with leading teams to creative brilliance, from the author of The Accidental Creative and Die Empty. Doing the work and leading the work are very different things. When you make the transition from maker to manager, you give ownership of projects to your team even though you could do them yourself better and faster. You're juggling expectations from your manager, who wants consistent, predictable output from an inherently unpredictable creative process. And you're managing the pushback from your team of brilliant, headstrong, and possibly overqualified creatives. Leading talented, creative people requires a different skill set than the one many management books offer. As a consultant to creative companies, Todd Henry knows firsthand what prevents creative leaders from guiding their teams to success, and in Herding Tigers he provides a bold new blueprint to help you be the leader your team needs. Learn to lead by influence instead of control. Discover how to create a stable culture that empowers your team to take bold creative risks. And learn how to fight to protect the time, energy, and resources they need to do their best work. Full of stories and practical advice, Herding Tigers will give you the confidence and the skills to foster an environment where clients, management, and employees have a product they can be proud of and a process that works.

More and more makers, designers, writers, and artists are in demand as we enter the Age of Creatives. By understanding the new strategies and mindset required to succeed, you can manage other creatives successfully. For creators, getting that promotion to management is exciting but can also be scary. The skills that made them so successful may not translate to the skill required to be a great manager, and this gets even more complicated when managing other creatives who often don’t thrive under traditional management procedures. Creative Directions is a management masterclass in which you attend lectures and seminars as you learn from some of the best in the business, including directors Ava DuVernay (When They See Us) and Joe Russo (Avengers: Endgame); two-time Academy Award-winning editor Angus Wall (The Social Network); executive producers from hit TV shows like The Simpsons and GLOW; and creative directors and leaders at businesses like Amazon, Apple, Disney, TikTok, and more. In Creative Directions, you will: Receive essential guidance on how to master the delicate balance required to successfully lead a creative team. Learn from star creative leaders in the entertainment industry on essential lessons they learned on their path to success. Gain insights on how to balance mastering the new skills you need as a leader with finding the time and energy to focus on the creative work you love. All of these lessons are provided in an easily accessible format so that you can open the book to any page and find an actionable, inspirational insight or strategy.

Lessons for a new generation of leaders on teamwork, meetings, conversations, free food, social media, apologizing, and other topics. When designer and computer scientist John Maeda was tapped to be president of the celebrated Rhode Island School of Design in 2008, he had to learn how to be a leader quickly. He had to transform himself from a tenured professor—with a love of argument for argument's sake and the freedom to experiment—into the head of a hierarchical organization. The professor is free to speak his mind against “the man.” The college president is “the man.” Maeda has had to teach himself, through trial and error, about leadership. In Redesigning Leadership, he shares his learning process. Maeda, writing as an artist and designer, a technologist, and a professor, discusses intuition and risk-taking, “transparency,” and all the things that a conversation can do that an email can't. In his transition from MIT to RISD he finds that the most effective way to pull people together is not social networking but free food. Leading a team? The best way for a leader to leverage the collective power of a team is to reveal his or her own humanity. Asked if he has stopped designing, Maeda replied (via Twitter) “I'm designing how to talk about/with/for our #RISD community.” Maeda's creative nature makes him a different sort of leader—one who prizes experimentation, honest critique, and learning as you go. With Redesigning Leadership, he uses his experience to reveal a new model of leadership for the next generation of leaders.

A groundbreaking book that explores the theory and practice of leading in the creative workplace Leadership in the Creative Industries is a much-needed guide to the theory and practice of the creative leadership skills that are essential to lead effectively in creative fields. As the growth of creative industries continues to surge and “noncreative” businesses put increasing emphasis on creativity and innovation, this book offers a practical resource that explores how to confidently lead a workforce, creatively. In order to lead creative people it is essential to understand the creative process, creativity, and the range of variables that affect it. This book fills a gap in the literature by exploring the creative leadership practices that are solidly grounded in evidenced-based research. The author includes suggestions for overcoming the challenges associated with leading creative people, and puts to rest many of the current industry misconceptions about leading creatively. This vital resource: Is the first book that highlights the theory and practice of creative leadership skills in the creative industries Includes best practices of leading for creativity, and reveals what encourages creativity and what suppresses it Debunks commonly held myths about leading a creative workforce with evidence-based guidance Contains a wealth of helpful tips, visualizations, callouts from primary research, and anecdotes from recognized thought leaders, to highlight and underscore important principles. Written for academics and students of leadership, those working or aspiring to work in the creative industries, Leadership in the Creative Industries puts the focuses directly on theory and practice of creative leadership in creative fields.

The co-founder and longtime president of Pixar updates and expands his 2014 New York Times bestseller on creative leadership, reflecting on the management principles that built Pixar’s singularly successful culture, and on all he learned during the past nine years that allowed Pixar to retain its creative culture while continuing to evolve. “Might be the most thoughtful management book ever.”—Fast Company For nearly thirty years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such beloved films as the Toy Story trilogy, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner eighteen Academy Awards. The joyous storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Here, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar so widely admired—and so profitable. As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the first computer-animated movie. He nurtured that dream as a Ph.D. student, and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movie’s success—and in the twenty-five movies that followed—was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar, based on philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention, such as: • Give a good idea to a mediocre team and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team and they will either fix it or come up with something better. • It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It’s the manager’s job to make it safe for others to take them. • The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them. • A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody. Creativity, Inc. has been significantly expanded to illuminate the continuing development of the unique culture at Pixar. It features a new introduction, two entirely new chapters, four new chapter postscripts, and changes and updates throughout. Pursuing excellence isn’t a one-off assignment but an ongoing, day-in, day-out, full-time job. And Creativity, Inc. explores how it is done.

Transform Your Organization by Scaling Leadership How do senior leaders, in their own words, describe the most effective leaders—the ones that get results, grow the business, enhance the culture and leave in their wake a trail of other really effective leaders? Conversely, how do senior leaders describe the kind of leader that undercuts the organization’s capacity and capability to create its future? This book, based on groundbreaking research, shows how senior leaders describe and develop leadership that works, that does not, that scales, and that limits scale. Is your leadership built for scale as you advance in today’s volatile, uncertain, dynamic, and disruptive business environment? This context puts a premium on a very particular kind of leadership—High-Creative leadership capable of rapidly growing the organization while simultaneously transforming it into more agile, innovative, adaptive and engaging workplace. The research presented in this book suggests that senior leaders can describe the High-Creative leadership with surprising clarity. They also describe with equal precision the High-Reactive leadership that cancels itself out and seriously limits scale. Which type of leader are you? You scale your leadership by increasing the multiple on your leadership in three ways. First, by developing the strengths that differentiate the most effective leaders from the strengths deployed by the most Reactive and ineffective leaders. And second, by increasing your leadership ratio—the ratio of most the effective strengths to the most damaging liabilities. Third, by developing High-Creative leaders all around you. Scaling Leadership provides a proven framework for magnifying agile and scalable leadership in your organization. Scalable leadership drives forward-momentum by multiplying high-achieving leaders at scale so that growth, productivity and innovation increase exponentially. Creative leaders multiply their strengths beyond technical competence by leading in deep relationship, with radical humanity, passion and integrity. Drawing upon decades of solid research and experience enhancing individual capability and collective leadership effectiveness with Fortune 500 companies and government agencies, the authors provide an innovative and efficient framework to help you: Take stock of your own personal balance of leadership strengths and weaknesses Scale your leadership in deep relationship and high integrity Proliferate high-achievers throughout your organization’s leadership system Identify ineffective leadership and course-correct quickly Transform your organization by transforming leadership Scaling Leadership is an invaluable tool for executives, managers, and leaders in business, academia, nonprofit organizations, and more. This innovative resource provides effective techniques, real-world examples, and expert guidance for organizations seeking to improve performance, align and execute strategies, and transform their business with scalable leadership capability.

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.