Book Review

Creative Together by Steven Kowalski

editor 


Creative Together by Steven Kowalski is not just a book; it’s a transformative experience. With its engaging exercises and thought-provoking prompts, this book will challenge you to push the boundaries of your creativity and tap into your true artistic potential.

Book Summary

To innovate, we need to get creative. Together.

In our era of rapid change and technological disruption, we’re being called on to innovate like never before. The trouble is, simply demanding or encouraging innovation and collaboration doesn’t work. Innovation doesn’t just happen. It’s the result of one of the most powerful and sustainable forces available to us: creativity.

If you want innovation, you must activate creativity. And in the new world of work, going it alone won’t work any longer. We have to get creative together. Drawing on his decades of experience as a coach, consultant, and organizational development expert, conscious creativity authority Steven Kowalski leads you on a three-part journey to reclaim your creativity and co-create with others.

First, you will rewrite the story of who you are as a creator. Then, you will learn to adventure together with others—bringing your whole, creative self into a new way of working together. With stories drawn from real, lived experiences, research-backed insights, and powerful questions that will open you to new possibilities, you’ll master Kowalski’s GIFTED methodology to unlock your creativity, and tackle the biggest threat to conscious creativity—Creative Disruption Disorder.

Despite what you may think, you have what it takes to embrace the new story, take accountability for your creative power, and create together within a world in flux. Once you claim your potential, there’s no turning back. By participating in your life with conscious creativity, you will transform the landscape of your future. You will become anew, with a deep faith in your resilience and resourcefulness, and a future full of possibility for yourself—and for the companies, organizations, and causes whose mission you share.

Review:

Creative Together: Sparking Innovation in the New World of Work reveals creativity as the driving force for innovation and shares how to unlock it and employ it effectively in group projects. The book illuminates the path to overcoming limitations to creativity in three sections. The first section is about challenging the old story and igniting your creativity. The second part explains the process of creating effectively with others and why this is important in your creativity journey. In the final section, we learn about adopting the principles of conscious co-creation into our everyday life and making proactive creative accountability a lifelong practice. By the time you complete the book, you will be mentally equipped to better face challenges and make use of opportunities at work and in your everyday life.

Like a luxurious watch crafted by the finest Swiss horologists, every intricate part of the book comes together to create a brilliant, satisfying work. It includes illustrative stories, research findings, the author’s personal experience, action words, practical exercises, and introspective questions. Steven’s lyrical writing is evidence that he practices what he preaches and that he has embodied the reality of being creative. Reading the book and all its brilliant metaphors felt like a thrilling adventure.

With refreshing honesty and exemplary generosity, Steven elucidates his team’s shortcomings during a three-year European project termed Creative Leadership, lighting a clear path for the reader to follow. From his experience in Europe, you will learn to examine how you’ve been compromising your creativity and what you can do to bring your best, innovative self to your workplace. His four core Creative Styles, which he discovered through his “doctoral research and subsequent practice,” helped me understand that I am a soloist. This means I tend to think of my ideas as mine, which might be limiting in a group project. I have come to see how what I perceive as mine is, in reality, a reflection of my experiences and my interaction with other people.

Steve’s book is indeed a paradigm shifter and a deeply enriching, impactful book. It has completely changed my perspective on creativity. With the right exposure, his thoughtful, logical conclusions in the book are bound to challenge what creativity means in today’s work environment. Rather than monopolizing creativity to one portion of the population while the rest watches helplessly, everyone will come to accept they have a creative side and get to explore it for the good of all humanity. Creative Together has lit a torch that will expose untapped potentials and connect us to our unblemished, inner creativity. Get ready to awaken your creative genius!

~ Foluso Falaye, San Francisco Book Review

Buy the Book – HERE

About the Author:

Steven Kowalski, Ph.D., is a leading voice in the global movement for conscious creativity and a long-time practitioner of Stanford University’s Creativity in Business approach. Every day, his groundbreaking work helps people from all walks of life reclaim their creative potential and focus it for real-world innovation. Steven’s mission is to support individuals, teams, and organizations in activating unique gifts that create possibility and shape our collective future.

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