Creative Leadership: Skills That Drive Change demonstrates how creative thinking is an essential element of leadership, especially when bringing about change. In this engaging book, the authors provide a unique combination of conceptual arguments, practical principles, and proven tools to enhance future leaders' effectiveness in creating and managing change.
Key Features:
- Intimately connects leadership and creativity: Leadership is now characterized as the catalyst for change, while creative thinking is the process that leads to change. This is the first book to make an explicit and elaborate conceptual link between creativity and leadership.
- Utilizes the Creative Problem Solving process: This book explores the more than 50 years of Creative Problem Solving (CPS) research and application. While other books focus on creative thinking and CPS, this is the first to offer a philosophical position that is then followed up with specific principles and procedures that leaders can employ to deliberately enhance their effectiveness in creating and managing change.
- Promotes "deliberate creativity": The authors are all faculty at the International Center for Studies in Creativity, Buffalo State-State University of New York, internationally renowned as a leading authority on the topic of Creative Problem Solving. Their rich experience encourages students to take a proactive approach toward the production of novel and useful ideas that address a predicament or opportunity.
Author Biography:
Gerard J. Puccio is Department Chair and Professor at the International Center for Studies in Creativity, Buffalo State. Gerard has written more than 60 articles, chapters and books. His most recent book The Innovative Team, co-authored with Chris Grivas, is a fable about a team that turns around a dysfunctional situation through the use of proven creative-thinking tools. In 2011 he and his colleagues, Marie Mance and Mary Murdock, published the second edition of their widely adopted book Creative Leadership: Skills that Drive Change. Gerard is an accomplished speaker and consultant; he has worked with major corporations and universities. Some of his recent clients include the BBC, The Smithsonian Institute, BNP Paribas, Rubbermaid, and Coca-Cola. In 2013 Dr. Puccio was selected by the Teaching Company as one of America's Great Lecturers and as such was invited to design and deliver a course comprised of 24 video sessions. This "Great Course," titled The Creative Thinker's Toolkit, was released in January 2014. Among other responsibilities, Gerard serves as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Sheridan College, Oakville, Canada, and is a member of the selection committee for the Toy Hall of Fame at the National Museum of Play. Marie Mance is Director of Leadership Development at Buffalo State College and an adjunct faculty member at the International Center for Studies in Creativity, teaching in the undergraduate and graduate programs. She holds an M.S. in Creativity and M.Ed. in Counseling/Student Personnel. She has traveled internationally to present creativity and creative problem solving courses and workshops in Nigeria, Singapore and South Africa. She has also designed and delivered workshops in creativity, strategic planning and other change initiatives for a number of organizations in the public and private sector. Currently she is developing and presenting leadership programs for faculty, staff and students at Buffalo State with creativity as a core component. Marie also coaches in the leadership program and has completed training at the Coaches Training Institute. She is pursuing certification to become a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach. She is President of the Niagara Frontier chapter of ASTD (American Society for Training and Development) and a Colleague of the Creative Education Foundation. Mary C. Murdock was an Associate Professor and graduate faculty member at the International Center for Studies in Creativity, Buffalo State College, Buffalo, NY, where she taught graduate courses and supervised master's work. Through her career, Dr. Murdock was involved in international work, including work as a guest lecturer on qualitative research in the Cognitive Psychology Unit of the University of Bergen and in teaching Creative Problem Solving courses at international schools in five countries (Colombia, Dominican Republic, Tanzania, China, Malaysia). Her publications included two texts: Creative Problem Solving and Role Playing, co-authored with E. Paul Torrance and Creativity Assessment: Readings and Resources with Gerard Puccio. She was also a co-editor along with Center colleagues, of Understanding and Recognizing Creativity: The Emergence of a Discipline and Nurturing and Developing Creativity: The Emergence of a Discipline. Mary held a BA in English from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, an M.Ed. in Gifted Education and a doctorate in Educational Psychology from the University of Georgia.
