Hardly revolutionary, but sensible advice on how to nurture creativity.
Examining the lives of serial innovators reveals strong commonalities.
Applying the research methods of large sample studies to investigate genius, Schilling (Management and Organizations/New York Univ. Stern School of Business; Strategic Management of Technological Innovation, 2004, etc.) failed to answer her overarching question: “is there some combination of traits or resources that increases the likelihood of an individual becoming a serial breakthrough innovator?” Instead, she took “a multiple case study approach” of a small sample of innovators, aiming to identify any unusual characteristics that set these individuals apart. Focusing on science and technology, she chose men—and one woman, Marie Curie—from different time periods and about whom significant biographical details were available: Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, Dean Kamen, Elon Musk, and Nikola Tesla. Except for Kamen, the inventor of Segway as well as the first portable kidney dialysis machine, among other medical breakthroughs, all the innovators are likely to be familiar to readers, and Schilling offers no groundbreaking information about their lives or work. Her interest is in illuminating factors that enabled them to generate original ideas. She distinguishes between personal characteristics (such as a sense of separateness or rebellion against authority) and mechanisms (any situational advantage that allowed them to flourish). A feeling of being different or disconnected from the crowd, she found, “typically emerges quite early in life.” Einstein, Curie, and Jobs perceived themselves as different from peers and family; although this separateness may result in “a sense of suffering,” it also helps individuals “generate and pursue big and unusual ideas.” Although they thrive in solitude, innovators benefit from “a dense personal network” through which they can disseminate their ideas. Schilling uses her findings to offer suggestions to business leaders and parents about fostering innovation. She cites flexible teams at Pixar, for example, which give team members autonomy and support. She urges parents to consider that children who struggle in a structured classroom may benefit from a more fluid curriculum as well as access to intellectual and technological resources.
Hardly revolutionary, but sensible advice on how to nurture creativity.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61039-792-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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