The Craft of Creativity

284 Pages·2018·10.712 MB·English

by  Matthew A. Cronin, Jefferey Loewenstein

THE CRAFT OF CREATIVITY
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CR AF T
THE
OF
Creativity
MATTHEW A. CRONIN
JEFFREY LOEWENSTEIN
and
Stanford Business Books
AN IMPRINT OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS • STANFORD, CALIFORNIA
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
©2018 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cronin, Matthew A. (Professor of management), author. | Loewenstein,
Jeffrey, author.
Title: The craft of creativity / Matthew A. Cronin and Jeffrey Loewenstein.
Description: Stanford, California : Stanford Business Books, an imprint of
Stanford University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and
index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017031231 | ISBN 9780804787376 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781503605077 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Creative ability. | Creative thinking. | Creative ability in
business.
Classification: LCC BF408 .C7578 2018 | DDC 153.3/5—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031231
ISBN 9781503605510 (electronic)
Cover design: Matt Tanner
Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/14 Minion
For Hayes, who made it possible for me to start this work,
and for Jason, who made it possible for me to complete it
—Matt
For my craftiest creators, Jacki, Emma, and Alina
—Jeff
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CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
1 Perspectives on Creativity 1
2 Gaining Insight 31
3 Turning Potential into Inventions 65
4 Enlightenment as a Creative Product 99
5 Cues as Clues to Change Perspective 129
6 Thinking Tools 157
7 The Value of Persistence 185
8 Developing the Craft of Creativity 211
Appendix: Interview Participants 233
Notes 237
Index 261
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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is
no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Creativity is touted by educators, scientists, and business leaders as important,1
but bemoaned as all too scarce.2 The lack of creativity is not for lack of trying.
There are many calls to promote creativity and earnest attempts to support it
in our schools and workplaces.3 It is why so much is written on how to help
people to be more creative. Searching “how to be creative” will produce 812
books on Amazon and one million sites on Google. Yet for all this effort and
knowledge, the results have not been encouraging. Most people still struggle to
be creative or assume that they are not and cannot be creative. Creativity may
even be on the decline.4
Creativity is personal for us. One of us played music professionally before
becoming an academic. The other studied visual arts. Both of us realized we
were even more interested in studying the creative process than in employing
it in these areas. Both of us married people far more artistically talented than
ourselves and whose creativity is a continuing source of joy. Creativity saved
one of our spouse’s lives.
Heather has a lung disease, called interstitial pulmonary fibrosis, which is
poorly understood despite killing as many people per year as breast cancer. The
only known treatment is a lung transplant. Heather had been on a slow decline
for about a year. She was in the hospital, about to be put on a ventilator, and
she probably had about a month left to live.
When the call arrived that they had a matching lung, there was a catch. On
paper, the lung had some uncertainties (the donor was a smoker, for instance),