Bursts of Fresh Squeezed Ideas

Bursts of Fresh Squeezed Ideas
Dan Coleman
Chautauqua Press
ISBN: 978-0981485225
Non-Fiction, Business
Reviewed by Muhammed Hassanali

Bursts of Fresh Squeezed Ideas is primarily a workbook designed to unleash your creativity. The underlying premise is that creativity is a learned skill, and hence anyone can learn to be creative. Most of the time when we talk about creativity, we are primarily referring to divergent thinking.

In this book, creativity entails both divergent and convergent thinking. This is because the book is geared towards business applications, and for creativity to pay-off, there needs to be some profitable good or service that should result from being creative. Typically creative people are seen as thinking outside the box (relaxing some of the constraints that currently exist). This is referred to as “Innovative Creativity.” Coleman also identifies “Adaptive Creativity” where one works within the current constraints to make the existing system more efficient.

The book lays out an eight-week course that is intended to unleash the group’s creativity. There are three major phases to unleashing creativity. These are identified as: Climb the Right Mountain, Storm the Brains, and Ignite Your Engines.

Climb the Mountain is covered in three weeks and consists of four sub-sections: Explore the Challenge, Visualize the Future, Get the Facts, and Clarify the Opportunity. Storm the Brains is covered in another three weeks and consists of three sub-sections: Rain Ideas, Take a Break and Incubate, and Strengthen and Select the Best Ideas and Solutions. Ignite Your Engines takes the reaming two weeks and consists of the following two sub-sections: Get the Momentum, and Accelerate the Momentum and Adapt. The ideas presented are great, but only if one is willing to invest the time to get everything out of this book.