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 enlarge | Author: Keith Sawyer
Publisher: audible.com
Category: Book
List Price: $29.98
Buy New: $15.74
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Avg. Customer Rating:  10 reviews
Media: Audio Download
ASIN: B0012OMFAG
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 6-10 of 10 | | « PREV | | |
 Effective Argument Against the Myth of the Romantic Author August 11, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
R. Keith Sawyer's Group Genius is a fun read -- with great stories about Morse, Darwin, YouTube, Whole Foods, and Google, among others. Sawyer makes a compelling argument about how creativity and innovation come to pass. He writes about sparks and how they lead to great ideas. The book itself provokes sparks as you read along. It's hard not to be inspired by what he has to say, and to re-examine how you work with others or how you run an institution. The book rang particularly true from the perspective of someone who works in the information business, though I expect reading this book is time well-spent for almost anyone who cares about changing the world in virtually any way.
Note to Creative Leaders Everywhere July 31, 2007
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Keith Sawyer's Group Genius is a terrific book: I highly recommend it to anyone who needs to build better teams, take their organization to
new levels of performance, or make their city or region a more creative
and exciting place.
Exceptional July 22, 2007
Keith Sawyer is one of psychology's best writers, and "Group Genius" doesn't disappoint. "Group Genius" provides an exceptional and practical analysis of how creativity emerges from collaboration, improvisation, and social networks. Readers interested in a social-scientific perspective on creativity---versus mere opinions and punditry---will get a lot out of Sawyer's provocative book.
How "ordinary" people - working together -- can achieve extraordinary innovation July 17, 2007
16 out of 17 found this review helpful
I have had a lifelong interest in etymology. Curious to know the origin of "genius," I checked several sources and here is what I learned. The Latin word "genius" originally meant "deity of generation and birth" and as its meaning evolved over time via various languages, it was used to describe "a person of outstanding intellectual ability." We do indeed view those of superior intellect (e.g. Plato and Aristotle, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein) as secular equivalents of religious deities and certainly admire their mental capabilities. We also tend to toss the word "genius" around somewhat carelessly when referring to entertainers, athletes, and business executives. That said, the fact remains that throughout human history, what Keith Sawyer characterizes as "collaborative genius" has made significant contributions in ways and to an extent few (if any) individuals have. In fact, the more I think about all this, the more I appreciate the meaning and significance of Bernard of Chartres' observation (incorrectly attributed to Isaac Newton) that "We are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants."
Here is a brief excerpt which correctly indicates one of Keith Sawyer's core concepts: "In both an improv group and a successful work team, the members play off one another, each person's contributions providing the spark for the next. Together, the improvisational team creates a novel emergent product, one that's more responsive to the changing environment and [key point] better than what anyone could have developed alone. Improvisational teams are the building blocks of innovative organizations, and organizations that can successfully build improvisational teams will be more likely to innovate effectively."
Make no mistake about it: although there can be indeed great creative power of collaboration, the process is necessarily messy, frustrating, at times perhaps discouraging. However, on the basis of his extensive research since the 1990s, Sawyer has identified seven key characteristics of effective creative teams: Innovation emerges over time, successful collaborative teams practice "deep listening," team members build on their collaborators' ideas, only over a period of time do the meaning and significance of each idea become clear, meanwhile "surprising" (i.e. unforeseen) ideas emerge, innovation is inefficient (trial and error, frequent false starts and detours, "dry wells," etc.), and innovation emerges "from the bottom up."
Sawyer carefully organizes his material within three Parts: The Collaborative Team (Chapters 1-4), The Collaborative Mind (Chapters 5-7), and The Collaborative Organization (Chapters 8-11). One of Sawyer's most valuable insights, examined with both rigor and eloquence, is that people who are steadfastly convinced that they are not "creative" can nonetheless work effectively together to generate (albeit eventually) profoundly innovative ideas. There are some "ifs," of course. First, senior managers must provide full support (including sufficient resources, especially time) of a collaborative team. Next, they must be patient rather than committing the common mistake of "ripping out a seedling to see how well it's growing." Also, they must understand - really understand - the meaning and especially the implications of the aforementioned seven key characteristics of effective creative teams. Finally, they must recognize that each "failure" (however defined) is a unique learning opportunity for them as well as for team members.
Credit Keith Sawyer with a brilliant achievement, especially at a time when the need for innovative thinking and creative collaboration is greater now than ever before.
Those who share my high regard for this volume are urged to check out Howard Gardner's studies of multiple intelligences, notably Creating Minds (i.e. those of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi) and his more recently published Five Minds for the Future. Also Andrew Hargadon's How Breakthroughs Happen, Michael Ray and Rochelle's Myers' Creativity in Business, Frans Johansson's The Medici Effect, Henry Chesbrough's Open Innovation and Open Business Models, Michael Michalko's Cracking Creativity, Richard Ogle's Smart World, and X-teams co-authored by Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman.
Jazz up your groups for breakthrough genius June 30, 2007
29 out of 30 found this review helpful
The Summary:
There have been a few books recently that have challenged the commonly held beliefs and myths of innovation. Keith Sawyer; professor of psychology at Washington University in St Louis; tackles probably the most prevalent innovation myth, the lone genius. He has written a fascinating book on the power of collaboration and how it is the secret to breakthrough creativity. This book joins a small group of my favorite books on innovation; How Breakthroughs Happen, Medici Effect, The Act of Creation and The Art of Innovation. Sawyer has written a very practical book that is based on some solid scientific research.
The Audience:
I would highly recommend this book for anyone interested innovation and wants a practical framework for infusing an innovative culture throughout their company. The book is definitely aimed at a general business audience but provides enough depth into the background research to make the practical advice more meaningful. It is a very fine line Sawyer has walked with the creation of this book and I applaud him on a job well done. This is by no means a simple `how to' book, it is far more. Great writing, great ideas and if you act upon it you will get great results!!
The Details:
Sawyer has spent the last 15 years researching and studying creativity, he worked with Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi on the research behind `Flow - the science of optimal experience'. He approached his research into creativity with a similar scientific approach using indirect and direct techniques to understand the brain in action. He focused on a subject close to his heart, Jazz. Sawyer has been playing Jazz since his college days and he realized that there was some real creativity at work in jazz performances. He quickly discovered that taking the standard approach of studying the individual seemed to miss an important piece of the experience. He realized he had to study how a whole jazz group collaborated to really understand what made one performance shine and another flop. When a group of jazz musicians found their `flow' they created something much more than the individual contributors. He used a technique called `interaction analysis' to study how a group collaborates in a dynamic environment. This is an intensive method where minute to minute interactions (gestures, body language and verbal cues) are analyzed. He expanded his research into another rich collaborative activity, improvisational theatre.
This research is the bedrock of his theories on group genius, he combined his research with some insights from his work on `flow' and coined what he called `group flow' to describe when a group gets into the zone of creativity.
Sawyer doesn't just show us the genius of groups, he takes it one step further to explain how when a lone genius generates a breakthrough idea, there is a web of people and ideas that are behind the breakthrough. He gives us examples from the work of Charles Darwin and Phil T. Farnsworth (TV) and shows the interconnected web that surrounded them to facilitate the breakthrough. Sawyer doesn't fully explore this idea, since his focus is on explaining collaboration, but it is easily translated to how individuals can leverage this network of people and ideas and use the power of collaboration to generate breakthrough ideas.
Sawyer, who started his life developing computer games for Atari and as a management consultant, uses his research to develop advice for businesses on how to build genius groups and get out of the standard `group think mentality'. He shows how to build an innovation lab and how to permeate an innovative culture through an organization. His advice will be hard to execute for most companies since they need to overcome some of the paradoxes of innovation. Innovation is predominantly inefficient, not something most managers want to hear. He even explores a lot of research from the original work on brainstorming by Alex Osborn and studies that followed that challenged the findings. He doesn't gloss over the fact that not all tasks need an innovative methodology and are better handled `solo' than in groups. He does explain that the studies that challenged Osborn's findings on brainstorming were using it for the wrong types of work. Sawyer shows that for companies that want to develop breakthrough ideas, they need to bite the bullet of inefficiency and develop genius groups.
The Take-Aways:
- Collaboration is the secret to breakthrough innovation
- Group Genius is best suited for breakthrough ideas and not for pedestrian improvement projects, where individuals perform far better
- Innovation is inefficient and companies need to embrace the risk of failure
- Even when individuals come up with a breakthrough, they are normally at the center of a web of people and ideas that came together
Innovation will never be routine and it comes with many challenges; Sawyer has written a great book that provides a good roadmap for a company that wants to infuse a creative culture throughout their organization.
Kes Sampanthar
Inventor of ThinkCube
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