David Kelley (6) (1951–)

I came across Creative Confidence when I needed it the most. As I felt creatively down, the book gave me a creative boost.

Creative Confidence is a book full of stories of different companies. The writer duo - Tom Kelley and David Kelley - revealed how those companies solved problems by a creative shift in the mindset.

Good for thinking more expansively about design and creating change. The authors are clearly very privileged and sometimes it reads as an advertisement for the Dschool and IDEO.

The authors Tom and David Kelley work together at the Stanford design school, where they help both people and companies to think creatively. In Creative Confidence, they share their personal experiences with many clients as well as some of the exercises they use to help students improve their creativity. They are strong believers that everyone is creative and can learn to access their innate creativity.

Given the description, I was hopeful that this book would contain advice that would help show more me come up with more creative research ideas. I was disappointed to find that much of their advice seemed like it would be more helpful to someone in a business or design position than to someone doing research. While some of their exercises could be modified or extrapolated from, I found little to be applicable directly. For instance, many of their suggestions center on trying something, anything just to get started and then refining. This could potentially work for me during the idea generation phase but is really awful advice for starting a research project (a far better approach would involve a lot of pre-planning).

In addition to not being personally applicable, I had a few other problems with the book. Almost all of the book was centered on personal stories and anecdotes. Research supporting their advice was hardly ever mentioned. Each chapter was supposed to focus on one step on the path to becoming more creative, but there were so many anecdotes that seemed unrelated to the overall theme that I often lost track of the point of a given chapter. They were a bit short on specific advice too. There was one chapter that had perhaps ten ideas for getting started, but many of these required a group to implement them. Finally, at times I felt the authors were simply advertising their design school. The name of the school was mentioned on nearly every page and I felt the authors relied heavily on buzz words to describe their work.

That said, I don’t think I’m the target audience of this book. The specific examples of innovation and design might be more inspiring or even directly useful to people in other fields. The writing was clear and easy to follow. The choice to gather all of their advice into specific activities in one chapter could make this a great reference book. I was incredibly impressed by how well my ARC ebook was formatted already as well, so if you think this could be useful to you, don’t hesitate to buy it in that format. Hopefully someone in business or design will be better able to use this book.

This review first published on Doing Dewey. show less

IDEO founder and Stanford d.school creator David Kelley and his brother Tom Kelley, IDEO partner and the author of the bestselling The Art of Innovation, have written a powerful and compelling book on unleashing the creativity that lies within each and every one of us.

Too often, companies and individuals assume that creativity and innovation are the domain of the "creative types." But two of the leading experts in innovation, design, and creativity on the planet show us that each and every show more one of us is creative. In an incredibly entertaining and inspiring narrative that draws on countless stories from their work at IDEO and with many of the world's top companies, David and Tom Kelley identify the principles and strategies that will allow us to tap into our creative potential in our work lives, and in our personal lives, and allow us to innovate in terms of how we approach and solve problems. It is a book that will help each of us be more... show less