The Creative Priority: Driving Innovative Business In The Real World

How does your company define creativity? Or does creativity define your company? In this remarkable book, Jerry Hirshberg, founder and president of Nissan Design International (NDI), distills his experience as leader of the world's hotbed of automotive innovation and reveals his strategy for designing an organization around creativity. Rather than championing the traditional treatment of creativity as a vital component in business, Hirshberg shows how creativity can become the fundamental organizing principle of business. "Business," Hirshberg writes in the introduction, "begins with an idea. And as never before, its growth, stability and ultimate success depend upon innovation and a continuing flow of imaginative thought. Throughout this book I will maintain that the most urgent business of business is ideas." Yet, Hirshberg claims, business has never been more poorly suited for stimulating original ideas. "Current organizational models revolving around productivity and efficiency at any cost produce a corporate culture hardly conducive to thinking -- much less innovative thinking." In The Creative Priority, Hirshberg describes how NDI produced a culture that fostered innovation, enabling his team to produce such cutting-edge designs as Nissan's Altima, Pathfinder, Quest and Maxima; Ford's Villager; and Infiniti's J30. Hirshberg weaves together enlightening real-world anecdotes with the story of NDI's genesis to illustrate 11 interlocking strategies that came to define NDI's creative priority. The strategies are arranged according to four