Weird Ideas That Work: How to Build a Creative Company

This book is a light read, pleasant read even. It is mind opening, absolutely worth the read. Reading it with application on mind, asking yourself how it fits in your company, team, group or organization brings immediate changes to your way of thinking about building products and solving problems.This being said, the formatting of the book is broken. A lot of spaces are missing, resulting in words being together, which often makes you lose your rhythm.Still, a very nice read.Addendum: It's interesting to note that the Kindle editions seems to be at fault for the missing spaces (as reported by the author, Robert I. Sutton, and hopefully will be corrected in future updates)

Tired of hearing about how 6-sigma will save the world? While everyone else is worrying about convergence, become an expert in divergent thinking by reading this fabulous book, another innovative work from management guru Robert Sutton.This is no "ivory-tower" management tomb -- as you read through each chapter, you can't avoid the fact that Sutton had to actually get out of his office to go prowl the trenches of the product development world in search of these 11.5 ideas. No pontificating here; these are real-world lessons gleaned from watching world-class firms like IDEO, Handspring, and 3M go about the difficult task of innovating on a routine basis.Weird though they may be, Sutton's 11.5 ideas are pragmatic, actionable, and will take your business to where you want it to be. Buy this book. Give it to your boss, and your boss's boss, and to anyone who thinks 6-sigma is the only answer to the world's problems.

Like so many lists of ways to improve a company it has some good ones. The ideas are indeed unconventional and could be valuable to keep in your back pocket. You never know when it might be the right time to employ one of them. Not a must read though. But good to read if you feel stuck or stale.

A rollicking read which definitely had me thinking about approaching life, in general, differently.I couldn't recommend more if you're lost with your career, or trying to find yourself and your own path.

Here's a book that gives you some idea about ideas that have worked, and probably will help your thinking today and in the future. Sutton is a good writer and knows of what he writes. Worth reading.

Leadership Gold!

As described.

Weird Ideas that Work takes an unusual perspective. Professor Sutton is focusing on how companies can be more creative for tomorrow, while still being effective at delivering today's products and services. Think of this book as what to read after finishing The Innovator's Dilemma.His perspective combines the concepts of evolutionary biology with behavioral psychology to provide key principles, 11 1/2 ideas for implementing those principles, and 9 guidelines for day-to-day management practices. The key points are supported by examples drawn from organizations that have experienced at least some periods of unusual effectiveness in creating new products and services. He chooses to call these ideas "weird" to get your attention, and to acknowledge that the ideas may not send too obviously correct to you the first few times you hear them.The three key principles are:"(1) increase variance in available knowledge,(2) see old things in new ways, and(3) break from the past."The 11 1/2 "weird" ideas for implementing those principles are paraphrased below:(1) Hire smart people who will avoid doing things the same way your company has always done things.(1 1/2) Diversify your talent and knowledge base, especially with people who get under your skin.(2) Hire people with skills you don't need yet, and put them in untraditional assignments.(3) Use job interviews as a source of new ideas more than as a way to hire.(4) Give room for people to focus on what interests them, and to develop their ideas in their own way.(5) Help people learn how to be tougher in testing ideas, while being considerate of the people involved.(6) Focus attention on new and smarter attempts whether they succeed or not.(7) Use the power of self-confidence to encourage unconventional trials.(8) Use "bad" ideas to help reveal good ones.(9) Keep a balance between having too much and too little outside contact in your creative activities.(10) Have people with little experience and new perspectives tackle key issues.(11) Escape from the mental shackles of your organization's past successes.Where most books on creativity focus on how the reader can make her- or himself more productive, this ones takes on what leaders and managers can do to establish an environment where more ideas will be generated and tested. There's no assumption that you can find ways to make few mistakes. In fact, you are encouraged to simply make more and different mistakes, and quit spending behind the ones that aren't working sooner.Professor Sutton leaves you with a challenging thought. "What if these are ideas are true?" The only way you can find out is to try them.I thought that the book's best advice was to fill the organization with "people who are passionate about solving problems." In my experience, it is hard to find people who are filled with "playfulness and curiosity" about the focus of a particular company. Once you have that situation, you need to "switch emotional gears between cynicism and belief." In reading this material, I was reminded of the section in Built to Last that encourages people to turn "or" choices into "and" situations.Although this book will not be enough to guide your company into being more creatively productive, I think it is an important addition to the literature on corporate creativity. I thought that the book's main weakness is that it made little attempt to differentiate among the techniques that might be used to solve different classes of problems. For example, creating the concept for a new service is fundamentally different from finding a better way to provide an existing one. From my own research, I am also convinced that creating a new business model is a different type of task from any other that companies do. I also think that acquisitions and mergers can either help or hurt corporate creativity. This book did not do enough to address that special circumstance. Perhaps Professor Sutton will follow up this interesting book with a series that looks more narrowly at different classes of problems that respond well to more creativity.How can your organization vastly increase its flow of new ideas, test them more rapidly and less expensively, and more certainly pick out the best ideas to implement? How much time are you spending on thinking about these important questions?Be open for and prepared to search far and wide for new variations to test!

a very useful, pragmatic book for all leaders. I fully recommend it

Not really that revolutionary or weird. But useful to provoke thought.

Good

A good thing about this book is you can read it as you wish.Start reading, stop, restart, stop again...The ideas are presented in a clear and independent way, which makes it easy to think about them. The author is sometimes too repetitive in its writing though.Thumbs up for the real life examples presented.A few ideas sound like common sense to me (and to a lot of other people, I bet!), and a few others sound a bit too much unorthodox, but I do believe those in charge of innovation could benefit from this book.

I love this book, but I am thinking about returning the kindle version : note numberings appear as huge numbers stuck to the next printed word, some words are missing and the text is not justified on all pages, it makes reading very annoying. There are no previews for kindle ebooks on Amazon.fr, it would be helpful if there was.Otherwise, it is a very good, interesting, well written book. I recommend purchasing the paperback or hardcover versions.