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Breakthrough Creativity

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Breakthrough Creativity

Achieving Top Performance Using the Eight Creative Talents

Davies-Black Publishing,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

Want to be creative? You already are. How to tap into your creative abilities and (even harder) manage creative teams.

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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Innovative

Recommendation

In theory and in summary, author Lynne C. Levesque’s book sounds wonderful. Today’s changing business environment pressures everyone to come up with creative ideas, but not everyone is creative, or so goes common thinking. Levesque argues that everyone is creative, or can be, but that there are different types of creativity. Working from a base in Jungian psychology, and writing somewhat stiffly, Levesque explains eight major types of creativity. She has clearly studied creativity thoroughly. She provides historic examples, quotations and countless tools - including an analysis of creative personality strengths based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator - to support her thesis that minds work in different ways. Unfortunately, she gives little evidence that people become more creative when they follow her suggestions, and that’s the rub. Her specific suggestions sound great, but idealistic: how many organizations have the resources to assemble teams with complementary creativity styles? As a result, getAbstract.com recommends this book to two groups of readers who may have the knowledge to get the most from it: those who welcome the theoretical discussion as well as the practical suggestions, and those who are devoted to fostering creativity.

Summary

Understanding and Developing Creativity

Most people believe they are not creative because they compare themselves to great personalities in history who possessed "transformational or genius-level creativity." They judge themselves because they don’t produce completely original, unique ideas. That perspective is wrong and even dangerous to your productivity. First, redefine creativity as the ability to produce "different and valuable results" on a regular basis. Everyone can do this, but not everyone does it the same way. Everyone possesses one of the eight major types of creativity: "Adventurer, navigator, explorer, visionary, pilot, inventor, harmonizer or poet."

Determine your dominant type by examining how you process information. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test categorizes the spectrum of four primary mental functions (thinking, feeling, sensation and perception) by using a few simple distinctions denoted by one-letter abbreviations. People are primarily extraverted ("E") or introverted ("I"). Extraverts give the outside world and society more weight. Introverts accent their internal landscape. To make sense of things, they look first to what they think and...

About the Author

Lynne C. Levesque has more than two decades of experience in business, primarily in banking. She earned her bachelors at Mount Holyoke and holds an M.A. from Rutgers, an M.B.A. from Berkeley and an Ed.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she studied creativity. She is a consultant and trainer.

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