Recommends The Triumph of the American Imagination. Recommends Creativity Inc. Recommends The Ten Faces of Innovation.

Transcript context

…Let's do it. First question, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? Yeah, I love books on creativity and innovation, Lenny, and some of my classic favorites are Walt Disney's biography. And there's several out there, but I think the one that I like the most is the Triumph of the American Imagination. And what's interesting is it talks about how Walt Disney actually loved the theme parks more than the movies. And the reason for that was he could actually tinker with the theme parks. He could make changes to where the rides were, he could change rides in and out, and then he could observe real sort of changes to reactions of people flowing into the theme parks, which he couldn't do with the movies because once it was produced, it was done, it was out of his control. And it was interesting, he was basically A-B testing long before the term was coined. And it's just a fascinating look into how his brain worked, way ahead of its time. The other classic is Ed Catmull's Creativity Inc, and it talks about all the negative forces that eat away at creativity in an organization. How do you, as the leader, have to keep them at bay and make sure the team can innovate? And then there's this probably less popular book, but really good one from Tom Kelly of IDEO, which is The Ten Faces of Innovation. It talks about different archetypes that you need on the team that are essential for creating something special. And you actually need, I think there's the devil's advocate, you need the researcher, you need the ethnographer, you need the stage setter. There's all these interesting personalities that you need to actually make something successful. So I would say those are some of the ones that I usually recommend, yeah. That's a really cool... That third book is really interesting, I haven't heard of that. And Creativity Inc, something I want to highlight real quick is to your point, that a lot of it is how to avoid killing good ideas. And my favorite metaphor from that book is the ugly baby metaphor where every new idea is an ugly baby that people just want to get rid of. Get rid of this ugly baby, we don't want this around here. And just every new idea is ugly when it starts, and you need to protect the ugly baby, basically. Although I don't know who's hurting ugly babies, that's not-…

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