The Creative Priority

Brief Summary
The Creative Priority: Driving Innovative Business in the Real World
How does your company define creativity? Or does creativity define your company? In this remarkable book, Jerry Hirshberg, founder and president of Nissan Design International (NDI), distills his experience as leader of the world’s hotbed of automotive innovation and reveals his strategy for designing an organization around creativity.
Rather than championing the traditional treatment of creativity as a vital component in business, Hirshberg shows how creativity can become the fundamental organizing principle of business.
“Business,” Hirshberg writes in the introduction, “begins with an idea. And as never before, its growth, stability and ultimate success depend upon innovation and a continuing flow of imaginative thought. Throughout this book I will maintain that the most urgent business of business is ideas.”
Yet, Hirshberg claims, business has never been more poorly suited for stimulating original ideas. “Current organizational models revolving around productivity and efficiency at any cost produce a corporate culture hardly conducive to thinking — much less innovative thinking.”
In The Creative Priority, Hirshberg describes how NDI produced a culture that fostered innovation, enabling his team to produce such cutting-edge designs as Nissan’s Altima, Pathfinder, Quest and Maxima; Ford’s Villager; and Infiniti’s J30.
Hirshberg weaves together enlightening real-world anecdotes with the story of NDI’s genesis to illustrate 11 interlocking strategies that came to define NDI’s creative priority. The strategies are arranged according to four principles:
1. Polarity: Typically seen as an obstacle to creative thinking, the friction that exists among individuals or systems of thought can be harnessed to generate original ideas.
2. Unprecedented Thinking: The Nissan Altima materialized after Hirshberg’s entire company played hooky midday to see the opening of The Silence of the Lambs. Imagining a new idea into existence requires both stubborn determination and a childlike openness to serendipity.
3. Beyond the Edges: Many of the strategies for fostering creativity loose us from our moorings and blur the boundaries between traditionally distinct disciplines.
4. Synthesis: All too often corporations set creative activity apart from the rest of the organization. Far from being a romantic escape from disciplined thinking, genuine creative thought should be an imaginative escape with disciplined thinking.
5. Richly illustrated with NDI’s elegant designs and sketches, The Creative Priority is at once a compelling narrative, a rich store of hands-on experience and a grab bag of breakthrough insights that can help your business perform its most important function.

ISBN:9780887308307

Author:Jerry Hirshberg