"Challenge yourself to a new type of exercise with Creative Sprint! You know that if you practice yoga, guitar, salsa dancing, tennis, or pretty much anything else, you're going to get better at it. In fact, if you practice every day you're going to be pretty darn good! While you might not think of your own creativity as something you can practice, it actually works the same way. In Creative Sprint you'll find an interactive workbook with 30-day challenges designed to build your creative muscles. It's loaded with prompts to get you drawing, journaling, taking photos, and making collages - doing anything creative that you choose to do! The sprints each have a theme, such as Think Small, Work with the Unexpected, and Embrace Limitations. Throughout the book you'll find features focused on fellow sprinters as well as inspirational quotes, and every sprint ends with a recap that encourages reflection. How you use the book is up to you! Complete sprint after sprint, channeling your creativity into new challenges. Or pick up the book every couple of months, whenever you feel like you need a jolt of motivation!"--

From inside Google Ventures, a unique five-day process for solving tough problems, proven at thousands of companies in mobile, e-commerce, healthcare, finance, and more. Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution? Now there’s a surefire way to answer these important questions: the Design Sprint, created at Google by Jake Knapp. This method is like fast-forwarding into the future, so you can see how customers react before you invest all the time and expense of creating your new product, service, or campaign. In a Design Sprint, you take a small team, clear your schedules for a week, and rapidly progress from problem, to prototype, to tested solution using the step-by-step five-day process in this book. A practical guide to answering critical business questions, Sprint is a book for teams of any size, from small startups to Fortune 100s, from teachers to nonprofits. It can replace the old office defaults with a smarter, more respectful, and more effective way of solving problems that brings out the best contributions of everyone on the team—and helps you spend your time on work that really matters.

A fast and practical visual storytelling method that puts a powerful new toolkit into the hands of leaders, innovators, salespeople, teachers and anyone else who needs to quickly make an impact on increasingly distracted audiences. The Pop-Up Pitch is a radical new approach to help you create the perfect presentation, combining three key elements of persuasive storytelling-simple pictures, clear words, and powerful emotions-that together motivate audiences to pay attention, learn something new, and make effective decisions. The Pop-Up Pitch weaves together the latest insights on visual cognition, behavioral economics, and classic story structures in an easy-to-learn and inspiring storytelling algorithm. In this new era of remote, work and online presenting, it delivers powerful and persuasive outcomes for time-limited professionals dealing with complex ideas, attention-deficit audiences, and the evolving challenges of modern meetings.

Escape “Zombie Scrum” and Get Real Value from Agile! “Professional Scrum and Zombie Scrum are mortal enemies in eternal combat. If you relax your guard, Zombie Scrum comes back. This guide helps you stay on your guard, providing very practical tips for identifying when you have become a Zombie and how to stop this from happening. A must-have for any Zombie Scrum hunter.” --Dave West, CEO, Scrum.org “Barry, Christiaan, and Johannes have done a magnificent job of accumulating successful experiences and sharing their inspiring stories in this very practical book. They don't shy away from telling it like it is, which is why their proposals are always as useful as they are grounded in reality.” --Henri Lipmanowicz, cofounder, Liberating Structures Millions of professionals use Scrum. It is the #1 approach to agile software development in the world. Even so, by some estimates, over 70% of Scrum adoptions fall flat. Developers find themselves using “Zombie Scrum” processes that look like Scrum, but are slow, lifeless, and joyless. Scrum is just not working for them. Zombie Scrum Survival Guide reveals why Scrum runs aground and shows how to supercharge your Scrum outcomes, while having a lot more fun along the way. Humorous, visual, and extremely relatable, it offers practical approaches, exercises, and tools for escaping Zombie Scrum. Even if you are surrounded by skeptics, this book will be the antidote to help you build more of what users need, ship faster, improve more continuously, interact more successfully in any team, and feel a whole lot better about what you are doing. Suddenly, one day soon, you will remember: that is why we adopted Scrum in the first place! Learn how Zombie Scrum infects you, why it spreads, and how to inoculate yourself Get closer to your stakeholders, and wake up to their understanding of value Discover why Zombie teams can't learn, and what to do about it Clear away the specific obstacles to real continuous improvement Make self-managed teams real so people can behave like humans, not Zombies Zombie Scrum Survival Guide is for Scrum Masters, Scrum practitioners, Agile coaches and leaders, and everyone who wants to transform the promises of Scrum into reality. Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

The co-founder and longtime president of Pixar updates and expands his 2014 New York Times bestseller on creative leadership, reflecting on the management principles that built Pixar’s singularly successful culture, and on all he learned during the past nine years that allowed Pixar to retain its creative culture while continuing to evolve. “Might be the most thoughtful management book ever.”—Fast Company For nearly thirty years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such beloved films as the Toy Story trilogy, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner eighteen Academy Awards. The joyous storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Here, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar so widely admired—and so profitable. As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the first computer-animated movie. He nurtured that dream as a Ph.D. student, and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movie’s success—and in the twenty-five movies that followed—was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar, based on philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention, such as: • Give a good idea to a mediocre team and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team and they will either fix it or come up with something better. • It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It’s the manager’s job to make it safe for others to take them. • The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them. • A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody. Creativity, Inc. has been significantly expanded to illuminate the continuing development of the unique culture at Pixar. It features a new introduction, two entirely new chapters, four new chapter postscripts, and changes and updates throughout. Pursuing excellence isn’t a one-off assignment but an ongoing, day-in, day-out, full-time job. And Creativity, Inc. explores how it is done.

In their first book, Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators, the authors provided a better model for executing disruptive innovation. They laid out a three-part plan for launching high-risk/high-reward innovation efforts: (1) borrow assets from the existing firms, (2) unlearn and unload certain processes and systems that do not serve the new entity, and (3) learn and build all new capabilities and skills. In their study of the Ten Rules in action, Govindarajan and Trimble observed many other kinds of innovation that were less risky but still critical to the company's ongoing success. In case after case, senior executives expected leaders of innovation initiatives to grapple with forces of resistence, namely incentives to keep doing what the company has always done--rather than develop new competence and knowledge. But where to begin? In this book, the authors argue that the most successful everyday innovators break down the process into six manageable steps: 1. Divide the labor 2. Assemble the dedicated team 3. Manage the partnership 4. Formalize the experiment 5. Break down the hypothesis 6. Seek the truth. The Other Side of Innovation codifies this staged approach in a variety of contexts. It delivers a proven step-by-step guide to executing (launching, managing, and measuring) more modest but necessary innovations within large firms without disrupting their bread-and-butter business.

FunRetrospectives is a book with the necessary tools to develop the main element of continuous improvement: an effective, committed team! With several years working with agile teams, Paulo Caroli and Tainã Caetano Coimbra know there are two main ingredients to finding the path to success and continuous improvement. First, a team that is aligned and committed to the project. Second, a work environment that fosters collaboration, one in which everyone can openly reflect, debate, and learn. But how can we achieve that? Each person in a team brings a different life experience and perspective, and we know that a group of people doesn't become a team overnight. That's why the main purpose of this work is to offer the necessary activities and tools to make everyone comfortable, aligned, and ready to be part of the best possible experience. The authors have gathered years of experience in this book, offering simple and straightforward activities. There will always be ups and downs, but everything that happens is essential for the team's growth, and a fun, safe environment allows you to get the best out of every situation.

"Can't get the creative juices flowing? Unstuck features 52 simple, creativity-generating projects that can fit into any lifestyle. Arranged in order of time commitment--from 30 seconds to several hours--the 52 projects can be done randomly or one per week for an entire year of creativity building. Also included are 12 artist profiles that illuminate what other successful creative people do to stay inspired and productive, along with blank journaling pages to sketch, scribble, and jot down your experiences and ideas. Roll the dice (made from the "custom inspiration dice" template in the book) and see where your creative energy takes you! www.noahscalin.com www.skulladay.blogspot.com www.makesomething365.blogspot.com"--

Big data entrepreneur Allen Gannett overturns the mythology around creative genius, and reveals the science and secrets behind achieving breakout commercial success in any field. We have been spoon-fed the notion that creativity is the province of genius -- of those favored, brilliant few whose moments of insight arrive in unpredictable flashes of divine inspiration. And if we are not a genius, we might as well pack it in and give up. Either we have that gift, or we don’t. But Allen shows that simply isn’t true. Recent research has shown that there is a predictable science behind achieving commercial success in any creative endeavor, from writing a popular novel to starting up a successful company to creating an effective marketing campaign. As the world’s most creative people have discovered, we are enticed by the novel and the familiar. By understanding the mechanics of what Gannett calls “the creative curve” – the point of optimal tension between the novel and the familiar – everyone can better engineer mainstream success. In a thoroughly entertaining book that describes the stories and insights of everyone from the Broadway team behind Dear Evan Hansen, to the founder of Reddit, from the Chief Content Officer of Netflix to Michelin star chefs, Gannett reveals the four laws of creative success and identifies the common patterns behind their achievement.