Keith Sawyer - Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration

Insightful.

Fast Company

Sawyer is an unusually interesting writer: jazz pianist, former video-game designer, and now a university professor of education and psychology. [Group Genius] offers interesting angles (a writer alone in his attic is still in some sense collaborating with all the other writers who wrote the books he has read), and the accounts of his own close studies of theatre-improv groups or jazz bands are fresh and illuminating.

Guardian (UK)

Making good use of examples from jazz, theater, creative writing, cycling, banking, and computers, the associate professor tries to drive home his points in a lively manner.

Shanghai Daily

Keith Sawyers Group Genius is an intriguing look at the role of collaboration in creativity and innovation. It will likely challenge your understanding of how innovation happens and how a culture that encourages innovation can be developed within your organization.

Asheville Citizen Times

There is plenty of good thinking [in Group Genius] about the creative process and how it has successfully been applied to products that are central to our daily lives.

Financial Executive

Judiciously wielding exercises and dozens of examples, Sawyer (Explaining Creativity) helps the reader think and function in and out of groups.

Publishers Weekly

I cant stop thinking and talking about Group Genius. Its filled with insightful nuggetsfrom improvisational theater to the advent of Monopoly to Impressionist painting to the invention of the mountain bikeabout teams and the creative process. Whether shedding new light on brainstorming or exploring the subtleties of language, Sawyer made me see creativity in a whole new way.

Ori Brafman, author of The Starfish and the Spider

Creativity can be planned. Keith Sawyer spent years studying jazz bands and improvisational theater troupes, discovering the structural rules underneath their seemingly effortless creativity.

Chip Heath and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick

One of the best book Ive read about creativity and collaboration. Youll find fascinating stories and insightful advice on every page. Everybody who seeks to be more creative should read this book right away.

Josh Linkner, New York Timesbestselling author of Disciplined Dreaming and The Road To Reinvention, four-time tech founder and CEO, and chairman of the Institute for Applied Creativity

Keith Sawyer has emerged as the worlds leading scholar on innovative, collaborative creativity. Sawyer is that rare scholar who has also been there in the start-ups and the jazz joints and the improv meccas. He is a consummate storyteller and a sure-handed guide to the secrets of success in the ever-changing global marketplace. Group Genius is essential reading for anyone who competes in that marketplace.

David Henry Feldman, professor of child development, Tufts University

Filled with a wealth of wisdom and rich examples, Group Genius provides actionable guidance on how to generate truly innovative ideas through collaboration. It is a terrific manual for any team!

Tina Seelig, professor of the practice, Stanford University, and author of Insight Out, inGenius, and What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20

Group Genius is a lighthouse of a book. It sheds light on knowledge that has always been there but slightly in the dark. The arrival of crowdsourcing is further proof of the extreme validity of Keith Sawyers thesis. Ideas no longer come from some guy in a garage, they come from the meeting of 6 billion minds.

Alasdhair Macgregor-Hastie, vice president, BETC

So you think that every creative breakthrough is the brainchild of a single lone genius? Think again. Using both scientific research and specific examples, Keith Sawyer makes the strongest possible case for the creativity of collaborative groups.

Dr. Dean Keith Simonton, distinguished professor of psychology, University of California, Davis

Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity

Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation

Group Creativity: Music, Theater, Collaboration

Creativity and Development

Improvised Dialogues: Emergence and Creativity in Conversation

Creating Conversations: Improvisation in Everyday Discourse

Creativity in Performance

For Barb