Learn the skills you must master to assume leadership roles—creative directors, art directors, and advertising managers—on creative teams and in integrated branding campaigns for corporate clients. This book compares and contrasts the skill sets and responsibilities of creatives with those of managers who direct creative teams. Technical competence in the creative arts is a necessary but not sufficient prerequisite for promotion to and success in positions directing creative teams. Business, management, and communication skills are equally necessary. Leading Creative Teams reviews the business metrics that the manager of a creative team must be able to manipulate and present persuasively to the organization to prove that the team’s creative excellence delivers superior ROI. Award-winning designer and veteran creative director Eleazar Hernández walks you through the creative manager’s skill sets—technical, business, management, and communication. He covers the techniques and tools common to the direction of creative teams in all industries: brainstorming, creative exploration and visual communication tools, internal and client presentations, critiquing, mentoring, and copywriting. Hernández shows how creative directors can apply management and leadership skill sets to different kinds of creative teams found across interactive, graphic design and advertising industries and how they orchestrate methods among team members. He details how creative teams vary in their concepts and principles, composition, objectives, and processes according to their specific industries and project requirements. And he shows you how to shape your career trajectories toward creative management roles in your chosen field. Leading Creative Teams features information on the processes and best practices for ideating, developing, and directing advertising campaigns, graphic design projects, :30 TV spot and :30 radio spots. Drawing on interviews with top creative directors, art directors, and advertising managers, the author explores how the roles of creative team managers are evolving in response to changing technologies and business models. What You'll Learn Learn the technical, business, and management skill sets of creative management Lead and orchestrate teams of creatives Discover tips, tricks, and techniques for creative direction of web, broadcast, and print projects Shape your career trajectory toward creative management Learn the dos and don’ts of creative presentations Who This Book Is For Mid-level and junior creatives—graphic designers, web designers, copywriters, and artists—and ad students who seek information on the specific skills, experience, and credentials they need to qualify for promotion to creative management. The secondary readership is creative directors, art directors, and advertising managers who lead web interactive, design, and advertising creative teams and who develop and direct integrated branding campaigns for corporate clients.

A practical handbook for every manager charged with leading teams to creative brilliance, from the author of The Accidental Creative and Die Empty. Doing the work and leading the work are very different things. When you make the transition from maker to manager, you give ownership of projects to your team even though you could do them yourself better and faster. You're juggling expectations from your manager, who wants consistent, predictable output from an inherently unpredictable creative process. And you're managing the pushback from your team of brilliant, headstrong, and possibly overqualified creatives. Leading talented, creative people requires a different skill set than the one many management books offer. As a consultant to creative companies, Todd Henry knows firsthand what prevents creative leaders from guiding their teams to success, and in Herding Tigers he provides a bold new blueprint to help you be the leader your team needs. Learn to lead by influence instead of control. Discover how to create a stable culture that empowers your team to take bold creative risks. And learn how to fight to protect the time, energy, and resources they need to do their best work. Full of stories and practical advice, Herding Tigers will give you the confidence and the skills to foster an environment where clients, management, and employees have a product they can be proud of and a process that works.

Ignite the creative spark within your team. For your company to stand out in today's competitive environment, you need to be original. You need to have fresh ideas, exciting products and offerings, and a willingness to experiment. And that starts at the team level. HBR's 10 Must Reads for Creative Teams Collection provides expert advice on how to foster curiosity, encourage better collaboration, and use design thinking to change the way you brainstorm, test, and execute new ideas. Included in this seven-book set are: HBR's 10 Must Reads on Creativity HBR's 10 Must Reads on Teams HBR's 10 Must Reads on Collaboration HBR's 10 Must Reads on Building a Great Culture HBR's 10 Must Reads on Design Thinking HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing People HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing People, Vol. 2 The collection includes seventy articles selected by HBR's editors from renowned thought leaders including Marcus Buckingham, Adam Grant, Francesca Gino, and Indra Nooyi, plus the indispensable article "How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity" by Ed Catmull. With HBR's 10 Must Reads for Creative Teams Collection, you can break free from the usual and capitalize on originality. HBR's 10 Must Reads paperback series is the definitive collection of books for new and experienced leaders alike. Leaders looking for the inspiration that big ideas provide, both to accelerate their own growth and that of their companies, should look no further. HBR's 10 Must Reads series focuses on the core topics that every ambitious manager needs to know: leadership, strategy, change, managing people, and managing yourself. Harvard Business Review has sorted through hundreds of articles and selected only the most essential reading on each topic. Each title includes timeless advice that will be relevant regardless of an ever‐changing business environment.

Today's workers spend upwards of 80% of their time collaborating and teams have become the fundamental unit within organizations. Creative Success in Teams summarizes for practitioners and researchers what drives team creativity. Utilizing research from psychology, organizational behavior/management, business, and education, the book discusses how best to start, manage, and foster creativity in team environments, how to encourage participation and collaboration, what makes for the most creative team, and how best to lead and evaluate creative teams. - Summarizes creativity research from psychology, education, and business - Identifies how best to form a team for creative output - Discusses how to foster team participation and collaboration - Includes multicultural, interdisciplinary, and diverse teams

Named one of "10 Management Classics for 2022" by Thinkers50 Why can some organizations innovate time and again, while most cannot? You might think the key to innovation is attracting exceptional creative talent. Or making the right investments. Or breaking down organizational silos. All of these things may help—but there’s only one way to ensure sustained innovation: you need to lead it—and with a special kind of leadership. Collective Genius shows you how. Preeminent leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and Being the Boss coauthor Kent Lineback, found among leaders a widely shared, and mistaken, assumption: that a “good” leader in all other respects would also be an effective leader of innovation. The truth is, leading innovation takes a distinctive kind of leadership, one that unleashes and harnesses the “collective genius” of the people in the organization. Using vivid stories of individual leaders at companies like Volkswagen, Google, eBay, and Pfizer, as well as nonprofits and international government agencies, the authors show how successful leaders of innovation don’t create a vision and try to make innovation happen themselves. Rather, they create and sustain a culture where innovation is allowed to happen again and again—an environment where people are both willing and able to do the hard work that innovative problem solving requires. Collective Genius will not only inspire you; it will give you the concrete, practical guidance you need to build innovation into the fabric of your business.

In Change by Design, Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, the celebrated innovation and design firm, shows how the techniques and strategies of design belong at every level of business. Change by Design is not a book by designers for designers; this is a book for creative leaders who seek to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization, product, or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.

Project Management Leadership is a comprehensive guide to the human factors involved in Project Management, in particular the leadership skills required to ensure successful implementation of current best practice. It provides the latest insights on team building, motivation, collaboration, and networking skills, and the way these can be harnessed to manage a successful project. Exercises and worked examples are provided throughout.

The legendary comedian, actor, and writer of Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, and A Fish Called Wanda fame shares his key ideas about creativity: that it’s a learnable, improvable skill. “Many people have written about creativity, but although they were very, very clever, they weren't actually creative. I like to think I'm writing about it from the inside.”—John Cleese You might think that creativity is some mysterious, rare gift—one that only a few possess. But you’d be wrong. As John Cleese shows in this short, practical, and often amusing guide, creativity is a skill that anyone can acquire. Drawing on his lifelong experience as a writer, Cleese shares his insights into the nature of creativity and offers advice on how to get your own inventive juices flowing. What do you need to do to get yourself in the right frame of mind? When do you know that you’ve come up with an idea that might be worth pursuing? What should you do if you think you’ve hit a brick wall? We can all be more creative. John Cleese shows us how.

WINNER OF THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD • “A delightful, compelling book that offers a dazzling array of practical, thoughtful exercises designed to spark creativity, help solve problems, foster connection, and make our lives better.”—Gretchen Rubin, New York Times bestselling author and host of the Happier podcast In an era of ambiguous, messy problems—as well as extraordinary opportunities for positive change—it’s vital to have both an inquisitive mind and the ability to act with intention. Creative Acts for Curious People is filled with ways to build those skills with resilience, care, and confidence. At Stanford University’s world-renowned Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, aka “the d.school,” students and faculty, experts and seekers bring together diverse perspectives to tackle ambitious projects; this book contains the experiences designed to help them do it. A provocative and highly visual companion, it’s a definitive resource for people who aim to draw on their curiosity and creativity in the face of uncertainty. Teeming with ideas about discovery, learning, and leading the way through unknown creative territory, Creative Acts for Curious People includes memorable stories and more than eighty innovative exercises. Curated by executive director Sarah Stein Greenberg, after being honed in the classrooms of the d.school, these exercises originated in some of the world’s most inventive and unconventional minds, including those of d.school and IDEO founder David M. Kelley, ReadyMade magazine founder Grace Hawthorne, innovative choreographer Aleta Hayes, Google chief innovation evangelist Frederik G. Pferdt, and many more. To bring fresh approaches to any challenge–world changing or close to home–you can draw on exercises such as Expert Eyes to hone observation skills, How to Talk to Strangers to foster understanding, and Designing Tools for Teams to build creative leadership. The activities are at once lighthearted, surprising, tough, and impactful–and reveal how the hidden dynamics of design can drive more vibrant ways of making, feeling, exploring, experimenting, and collaborating at work and in life. This book will help you develop the behaviors and deepen the mindsets that can turn your curiosity into ideas, and your ideas into action.