The book: Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where You Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life
Author: Richard Florida
Genre: Economics

The economist Richard Florida of Creative Class fame has written a seriously readworthy book about the importance of where you live. Basically, Florida demonstrates that your decision of which city or region to live in has a tremendous impact on the rest of your life, from your career to your life satisfaction and who you marry.

The idea that place is important is not new. For instance, economists have long since realised that cities, amongst other functions, also act like market mechanisms for dating. Who you meet determines who you eventually marry, so obviously your choice to live in New York will increase the chances that you marry, say, a banker or a neurotic artist. What sets Florida apart is his solidly grounded research into the subject of place; every major claim is backed up by reams of data. Mercifully, the data aspect is not overdone in the book – it reads considerably better than his first, famous book, The Rise of the Creative Class. 

In the latter part of the book, Florida also provides information to help the reader make informed choices about where to live. Also, another interesting finding from Who’s your city is that Florida mapped out where people of different personality types have chosen to live (as measured on the classic Big Five personality model). In an entirely unsurprising turn of events, pretty much all of the neurotic people seems to live in Manhattan.

Highly recommended.

The book: Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are
Author: Daniel Nettle
Genre: Popular psychology

How much has your personality been influenced by your parents and the home you grew up in? And similarly, how much influence does your own personality exert on that of your kids? The answer – because there is one – may surprise you; see further down.

Your personality is mostly stable thoughout your life, and most scientists of the subject employ the so-called Big Five model, which measures five core aspects of your personality: extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscentiousness, and openness to experience. In Personality, Daniel Nettle, who also committed a good book on the subject of happiness research, explains these five factors and provides a few self-test tools for the narcissistic curious reader.

While a good read, the book has one drawback; for each factor, Nettle also wants to give an account for the factor’s evolutionary raison d’etre, which is interesting but a bit unnecessary. This should not keep you from reading it, however – especially chapter 8 is worth the price of the book alone.

And the answer to the question that I opened up with? Parents have ZERO influence on the personality type of their kids. Zero as in none whatsoever - the personality of children is simply not measurably affected by their parents or the type of home they grow up in.

This finding is highly counterintuitive, and as you read this, you are probably thinking that it can’t be right; your own experience tells you differently. But the research has extremely strong empirical proof behind it, built on numerous studies of both adopted children and of identical twins that were reared apart. Which gives me an occasion to post the oft-cited first stanza of Philip Larkin‘s well-known poem, This be the verse:

They fuck you up, your mom and dad
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

Well, as it turns out, Larkin was wrong. Parents of the world, consider yourself vindicated.

The book: The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science
Author: Jonathan Haidt
Genre: Popular science/psychology

Another good book that explores the recent research into the subject of happiness. I have already recommended one book on this subject, but wanted to mention this one as well, as it is very well writtten and a bit more accessible than Nettle’s book. Also, in an interesting twist on the genre, it includes – and critically evaluates – the old sources of wisdom (Buddha, etc.), comparing their advice to what we know from modern research.

The book: Super Crunchers: How Anything Can Be Predicted 
Author: Ian Ayres
Genre: Business book

Interesting book touting the power of number crunching over intuition and gurus; it holds lots of amusing examples of how established experts fail to predict the future more accurately than simple data-driven decision-making tools such as regression analysis. I took a course on this stuff in my MBA, and it is a seriously fascinating; Super Crunchers is a great introduction to the subject for people who are unfamiliar with number crunching, but curious about how it can be used. A very relevant book, especially for the creative industries.

On a side note, it also forms an interesting counterpoint to Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (my review here), which heralds intuition and first impressions as the keys to making good decisions. While Gladwell’s book is well argued and has a slightly different aim, I have to say that I think the evidence favors the data-driven approach championed by Super Crunchers. The human mind is simply not very good at grappling with large amounts of variables, and suffers under a number of well-known biases, described in Cordelia Fine’s entertaining book A mind of its own (my review here).

Genre: Academic
Readability: Scientific (not suited for casual reading)

If you are interested in exploring creativity and innovation from an academic standpoint, here’s a few good places to start.

Robert Sternberg’s Handbook of Creativity is a solid and wide-ranging collection of journal articles, most of them classics within the area. This book is probably the best place to start, if you haven’t read about the subject before.

Similar to Sternberg’s book, but more focused on the domain of business innovation is Davila, Epstein and Shelton’s newly published three-volume series The Creative Enterprise. The series covers three main aspects of creativity and innovation in business – strategy, culture, and execution – and contains more up-to-date research articles. The books are good, but very expensive, so it might make sense to borrow them at your local library instead. (Disclaimer: Davila is an old professor of mine from IESE Business School).

Next, Csikszentmihalyi’s Creativity is not a collection of articles, but a longer, unified work based on hundreds of interviews with creative people. The book provides lots of case stories about creativity at work, and Csikszentmihalyi’s theoretical framework is interesting; however, the strong reliance on interviews makes some of his conclusions seem anecdotally based. As with many of the titles in this genre, it is mostly focused on creativity as it occurs within art and science; business innovation is touched upon, but not explored in depth.

Finally, if you (as I do) have a specific interest in brainstorming, then you might also consider checking out Paulus and Nijstaad’s Group Creativity, which focuses exclusively on this subject. Again, this is an academic book – if you are looking for practical brainstorming advice, check out IDEO’s The Art of Innovation (see my review), which contains some good tips on this.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Take Hold and Others Come Unstuck
Authors: Chip and Dan Heath
Genre: Viral marketing

This book is a kind of sequel to Malcolm Gladwell’s eminent book The Tipping Point. Informed by science, it explains what makes messages stick in our minds/go viral, and it does so in a way that is immediately applicable to whatever nefarious message you might be trying to spread at the moment.

It is as well-written as Gladwell’s books, and more practically useful.

The Art of Innovation: Success Through Innovation the IDEO Way
Author: Thomas Kelley (co-founder of Ideo)
Genre: Business/idea generation

A thought-provoking book about brainstorming and product development, Ideo-style. Worth reading both because of the practical tips on how to develop innovative products (and innovative cultures), and because of the portrayal of Ideo, a super interesting product development company. Lots of good case stories, as well.

Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce
Author: Richard E. Caves
Genre: Academic – microeconomics in action

If you are interested in getting an in-depth understanding of how the creative industries work – movie production, book publishing, art galleries, music distribution, etc. – I know no better starting point than this book.

It explains why Hollywood occasionally releases ten ton turkeys like Travolta’s infamous ‘Battlestar Galactica’, it illuminates exactly how difficult it is to get a fiction book published (and why), and it exposes how major music publishers have been ripping off their artists in a thorough and systematic manner. And lots more. Not a light read, but really interesting stuff. If I were to teach a course on either the creative industries or media economics, this would be the core curriculum.

The Medici Effect
Author: Frans Johansson
Genre: Business/innovation

Inspiring book about how innovation happens when you mix up different fields and disciplines, with lots of case stories. While a lot of the evidence presented in the book is anecdotal, the main argument still rings quite true.

The Medici in the title refers to the Renaissance Italian merchant family – according to the author, the intellectual environment in Florence at the time of the Medicis was an early example of an innovation powerhouse.