Summary
Sequel to the bestselling How to Get Ideas (more than 40,000 copies sold in the world) Introduces a revolutionary concept of leadership: a leader`s most important tasks are to make employees believe that they are creative and make it fun to come to work Short, simple, and fun to read with dozens of proven, easy-to-implement techniques that will make employees more creative
Description
The benefit of having a work-force that is idea-prone can hardly be overstated. Ideaship aims to help employers turn average employees into great ones, by helping them to have more and better ideas. Ideaship is about how you can better make the people you work with more creative. According to Jack Foster, the primary job of a leader (what he calls an “Ideaer”) is to raise people`s self-esteem, to make it fun to come to work. Ideaship details thirty-nine ways to accomplish that job-ways born out of the need of creative directors in advertising agencies to lead their departments of misfits, free spirits, original thinkers, people who resist authority and reject dogma, people who cannot be led, but who must be “ideaed.”
Synopsis
Innovative, original ideas are a company`s most powerful competitive advantage. Nathan Mhyrvold, former chief technology officer at Microsoft, has said that a great employee is worth 1,000 times more than an average one simply because of his or her ideas. In Ideaship, the sequel to his bestselling book, How to Get Ideas, Jack Foster shifts from how individuals spark their new ideas to how to unleash the creative genius of an entire organization. To create an idea-prone workforce, Foster proposes a totally new concept of leadership: “ideaship.” Leaders shouldn`t be spending their time obsessing over profits or sales or quality or service. Instead, they should devote most of their energies to making the office a place where creative ideas flow, where the workforce truly believes in its ability to brilliantly solve any problem put before it. Above all, where it`s fun to work. With energy and humor, Foster draws on over thirty-five years as creative director of major advertising agencies-organizations whose only purpose is to constantly generate ideas-to offer dozens of fun, fast, often surprising nuggets of practical advice on how to create an environment where innovation and fresh thinking thrive. He reveals why you should only hire people you like, insist employees take vacations whether they want to or not, why efficiency is sometimes inefficient, and how sometimes you can accomplish more by playing the fool instead of the capital L “Leader.” Ideaship spells out proven ways to encourage creativity, simply and clearly and cogently, without a lot of charts and graphs and formulas and acronyms and statistics and fillers. It flips traditional leadership on its head and shows how simple acts of compassion, trust, and generosity of spirit, as well as some seemingly zany actions, can unleash unexpected, vital bursts of creativity.
About the author:
Jack Foster spent 35 years working in the creative departments of major advertising agencies; the first ten as a writer, the last 25 as a creative director. Foster has helped create advertising for scores companies including Carnation, Mazda, Sunkist, Mattel, ARCO, First Interstate Bank, Albertson`s, Ore-Ida, Suzuki, Denny`s, Universal Studios, Rand McNally, and Smokey Bear. He is a recipient of the Los Angeles Creative Club`s Creative Person of the Year award. He is the author of How to Get Ideas.
