No Creative Ideas Here
By Lina M. Echeverria
Amacom, $27.95, 276 pages
Since I have managed “creatives” in the past, I was excited to read Lina Echeverria’s book, Idea Agent. Additionally, since the marketplace is so competitive, I think innovation is a key topic in today’s business world. Echeverria had a two decade career at Corning, Inc. where she managed a group that needed to be innovative to survive. Echeverria explains her creative framework through her “Seven passions of innovation” which includes: looking at creative conflict directly, bringing teams together that are personally motivated, living values that set creativity free, cultivating a culture that gives time for creative flow, creating an organizational structure that supports creative thinking and providing leadership that guides innovation to happen. The book is full of examples from the author’s personal experience. Idea Agent reads like several other management and leadership books I have read. This book also feels very personal because she discusses her career at length and even discloses her battle with cancer. At times, I felt I was reading a memoir rather than a book about creativity. The book is very text heavy with no pictures or diagrams. I was disappointed with this book, given that the topic was innovation, I would have liked to have seen an innovative way to dispel the information or lots of specific examples of creativity in action. This book was missing those pieces and so missed the mark for me.
Reviewed by Seniye Groff
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