Organizational Creativity

The Fearless Organization offers practical guidance for teams and organizations who are serious about success in the modern economy. With so much riding on innovation, creativity, and spark, it is essential to attract and retain quality talent, but what good does this talent do if no one is able to speak their mind? The traditional culture of "fitting in" and "going along" spells doom in the knowledge economy. Success requires a continuous influx of new ideas, new challenges, and critical thought, and the interpersonal climate must not suppress, silence, ridicule, or intimidate.

The hallmark of any exceptional career is the ability to devise innovative solutions for work challenges. Creative thinking skills are vital for your professional advancement.

From Seth Godin, one of the world's most influential business thinkers and bestselling author of This is Marketing, comes an essential guide to thinking strategically in a complex, ever-changing world. This is Strategy is a modern classic that offers perspectives you'll find yourself returning to again and again. Rather than providing step-by-step formulas, Godin offers something more valuable: a new way of seeing and thinking about the challenges you face.

In a world of unrelenting change and unprecedented challenges, we need organizations that are resilient and daring. Unfortunately, most organizations, overburdened by bureaucracy, are sluggish and timid. In Humanocracy, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini make a passionate, data-driven argument for excising bureaucracy and replacing it with something better. Drawing on more than a decade of research and packed with practical examples, Humanocracy lays out a detailed blueprint for creating organizations that are as inspired and ingenious as the human beings inside them.

Are your organization's ideas growing stale? Do your employees need to refresh their thinking? We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the 10 most important ones to help you instill creativity across your organization.

The traditional attitude toward creativity in the American business world is to "think outside the box": to brainstorm without restraint in hopes of coming up with a breakthrough idea, often in moments of crisis. Sometimes it works, but it’s a problem-specific solution that does nothing to engender creative thinking more generally. Inside the Box demonstrates Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT), a method that systemizes creativity as part of the corporate culture. SIT requires thinking "inside the box", working in one’s familiar world to create new ideas independent of specific problems.

Few would disagree that inclusion is both the right thing to do and good for business. Then why are we so terrible at it? If we believe in the morality and the profitability of including people of diverse and underestimated backgrounds in the workplace, why don't we do it? Because, explains Ruchika Tulshyan in this eye-opening book, we don't realize that inclusion takes awareness, intention, and regular practice. Inclusion doesn't just happen; we have to work at it. Tulshyan presents inclusion best practices, showing how leaders and organizations can meaningfully promote inclusion.

Resilient leaders rise: Empower yourself and your team to conquer every challenge. Have you ever experienced a moment when the pace of the world seemed to surpass your ability to keep up? As a leader, the demands of navigating through challenging times can feel utterly overwhelming. The business landscape is evolving at an unprecedented rate, presenting new challenges and uncertainties every day.

Life isn’t about “finding” fulfillment and success - it’s about creating it. Why then has creativity been given a back seat in our culture? No longer. Creativity is a force inside every person that, when unleashed, transforms our lives and delivers vitality to everything we do. Establishing a creative practice is therefore our most valuable and urgent task - as important to our well-being as exercise or nutrition. The good news? Renowned artist, author, and CreativeLive founder, Chase Jarvis, reminds us that creativity isn't a skill - it's a habit available to everyone.

The secret for creating magic in our careers, our organizations, and our lives is simple: outstanding leadership, the kind that inspires employees, delights customers, and achieves extraordinary business results. No one knows more about this kind of leadership than Lee Cockerell, the man who ran Walt Disney World Resort operations for over a decade.

While free markets have brought positive change, traditional capitalism cannot solve problems of inequality and poverty because of its view of people as solely profit-driven. In fact, humans have other drives and passions, including spiritual, social, and altruistic.

There used to be two teams in every workplace: management and labor. Now there’s a third team, the linchpins. These people invent, lead (regardless of title), connect others, make things happen, and create order out of chaos. They figure out what to do when there’s no rule book. They delight and challenge their customers and peers. They love their work, pour their best selves into it, and turn each day into a kind of art.

Become the Architect of Your Ideal Organization! Are you constantly fighting "fires" only to have them reignite again and again? Are you frustrated trying to meet the demands of multiple stakeholders - customers, employees, investors, etc.? What if you could develop your own custom leadership system and collaborative leadership style to leverage the forces of change to transform your organization's systems and culture? What if you could increase the odds of successful strategy deployment by using a flexible design framework to [re]design your organization systems and processes? What if you ...

Companies spend billions of dollars annually on diversity efforts, with remarkably few results. Too often diversity efforts rest on the assumption that all that's needed is an earnest conversation about "privilege." That's not enough. To truly make progress with diversity, equity and inclusion, we must focus less on documenting the problem and more on just stopping the transmission of it.

Two veteran executive coaches help today's leaders learn how to retain and inspire their teams through the one thing their research has found works: Leading with Heart. In this audio, leadership coaches John Baird and Edward Sullivan share hundreds of hours of research and firsthand accounts of guiding leaders at some of the world's most respected big brands and small startups (Apple, Nike, Google, and Slack to name a few).

Ben Horowitz, a leading venture capitalist, modern management expert, and New York Times best-selling author, combines lessons both from history and from modern organizational practice with practical and often surprising advice to help executives build cultures that can weather both good and bad times. What You Do Is Who You Are explains how to make your culture purposeful by spotlighting four models of leadership and culture-building.

Allies and Advocates: Creating an Inclusive and Equitable Culture delivers a powerful and useful message about inclusion and diversity in everyday life. Author Amber Cabral, a celebrated inclusion strategist, speaker, and writer, shows listeners how to move away from discriminatory/unjust behaviors and support and build meaningful connections with people across our diverse backgrounds and identities.

Decades before the business world discovered the power of authentic staff engagement, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters cofounder Bob Stiller was busy creating a company with a mission to build an engaged workforce focused on innovation. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters went public, moved to selling wholesale exclusively, invested in Keurig, and became one of the few coffee companies to ever reach $1 billion in sales. In Better and Better, Stiller explains how he did it.

Kindness and leadership aren't often synonymous. The purpose of this book is to teach leaders how to lead with kindness so they can influence the people they lead to create kinder workplaces, organizations, and the world. This book gives you a deep theoretical understanding of the importance of leading with kindness and also provides practical exercises for you to use. By the time you finish the book, you will feel confident in your ability to lead with kindness and also to address organizational problems at work, at home, and in the community with kindness.

Throughout the history of business, employees had to adapt to managers and managers had to adapt to organizations. In the future, this is reversed with managers and organizations adapting to employees. This means that in order to succeed and thrive, organizations must rethink and challenge everything they know about work. The demographics of employees are changing and so are employee expectations, values, attitudes, and styles of working.