I listened to Creative Confidence by Tom & David Kelley, brothers who co-founded Ideo the design consultancy, as an audiobook over 5 days. Quick thoughts and opinions.
I liked this book. I loved this book. It gets a solid 8.5 out of ten stars for me, and anybody looking for an interesting read for personal use, or for professional growth should read this book. Not all of their examples and case studies may be relevant, but there's lots of good stuff.
Okay, now that we've got the important part out, I want to discuss something that really bothered me. I want to know why the book feels like two distinct pieces smooshed together. The first 60% or so is about personal creativity, and how to encourage one's creative juices to flow, how to consistently work, and so on and so forth. It's about creative confidence in a very personal sense. The last 30-40% gets extremely corporate. It's about how to foster creativity in one's organization, and the last couple of 'pages' are basically ads for various design consultancies and services, and ad-reads for Ideo and OpenIDEO.
I want to know how that came to be about. Did they first write the first part, and thought they should do something for their corporate clients? Or was it the other way round? Or did their editor have a lot to say on the matter?
I'll say this: the last 10 minutes made the Kelley brothers sound like lot bigger sellouts than I'd have thought...They talk about how you will be able to find meaning in your existing work and see it as important as the rest of your life, or something else. Not a big deal and I have no complaints, I ain't no hippy, but it came out as weird, coming from strictly NorCal hippy-vibe folks or so I thought.
Anyway, good book, found it inspirational, gave me leads for a tonne of other books, highly recommend!
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