M&C Saatchi chief strategy officer Justin Graham shares his recommended reads to inspire next level commercial creativity.
1. Creativity, Inc: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of Inspiration. By Ed Catmull, president of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation. Looks at the role creativity plays in one of the world’s most successful media businesses.
2. Creative Confidence. By David Kelley and Tom Kelley, founder and partner respectively at global design company IDEO. Aims to unleash the creativity that lies within everyone.
3. Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. By bestselling author and presenter Steven Johnson. An analysis of how we generate the ideas that push our careers, lives, society and culture forward.
4. Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity. By filmmaker David Lynch, who describes his personal methods of capturing and working with ideas.
5. Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success. By Ken Segall, who led the team behind Apple’s legendary Think Different campaign. You’ll understand how Steve Jobs’ obsession with simplicity helped Apple perform better and faster.
6. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. By Clayton M. Christensen. The innovation expert shows how even the most outstanding companies can do everything right yet still lose market leadership.
7. The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. By Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor. A guide for anyone trying to transform their business.
8. Thinking Fast and Slow. By pyschologist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking.
9. Hacker, Maker, Teacher, Thief: Advertising’s Next Generation. By Creative Social. A collection of essays from 35 leading creative directors and business owners asking provocative questions such as “Is digital collaboration the death of idea ownership?”
10. Eating the Big Fish: How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders. By Adam Morgan, founder of strategic brand consultancy eatbigfish. This revised edition contains over 25 new interviews and case histories and introduces a new typology of 12 different kinds of Challengers.
