8 books on creativity every entrepreneur should read

Creativity is essential for businesses. It doesn’t matter which industry you’re in, creativity within a company links to multiple business successes.

In fact, a survey of 1,500 chief executives found that creativity was the number one factor that linked to future business success, beating elements like management discipline and integrity.

Having said that, it’s thought that only 11 per cent of companies view themselves as highly creative.

So what can you do about it? The answer could lie between the pages of one of the books below.

Conscious Creativity: Look, Connect, Create

Written by artist Philippa Stanton, Conscious Creativity: Look, Connect, Create has been written to help readers unlock their innate creativity. Filled with thought exercises and ideas for practical tasks, the book helps people pay more attention to their senses in order to switch on areas of the brain linked to creative thought. The activities in the book are also designed to get people thinking differently throughout their day, paying attention to textures, colours and scents that they might usually ignore. Its ultimate aim is to get readers to see creativity as a lifestyle rather than a one-off task.

Unlocking Creativity: How to Solve Any Problem and Make the Best Decisions by Shifting Creative Mindsets

Published in March 2019, Unlocking Creativity: How to Solve Any Problem and Make the Best Decisions by Shifting Creative Mindsets is one of the newest books on creativity on the market. It’s been written by Michael A. Roberto, the director of the Centre for Program Innovation at Bryant University in the USA. The book focuses directly on creativity in the workplace. It starts by looking into the obstacles to creativity that exist in organisations. Then it moves on to discuss methods for building cultures of creativity within businesses, backing up each method with real-world case studies.

The Art of Creativity: The Daily Habits of Highly Creative People

The bad news is that you’ll have to wait until 2020 to get your hands on this book. It’s written by business coach Susie Pearl and it’s designed to help readers learn how to tap into their creative side in order to build better projects, develop better ideas and unearth creative solutions and innovations.

It touches on topics such as how to ignore critics, how to get through creative blocks and how to get into daily habits that foster creativity. In addition to including advice and tasks, it also features interviews with world famous creatives like Paul McCartney.

The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity

The second edition of The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity is a meaty read. It looks into everything from the psychology of creativity to theories on creativity and assessments of these theories. Chapters also delve into how creativity develops across a human lifespan, methods for improving creativity, and research that has been done on the subject in areas such as neuroscience and genetics.

The book also considers how environment, mood, self-belief, and cultural differences impact creativity. Of particular interest to business owners and entrepreneurs will be the sections on the common creative behaviours of leaders and managers.

The Imagination Gap: Stop Thinking the Way You Should and Start Making Extraordinary Things Happen

The premise of The Imagination Gap is that people in both personal life and business have become so focussed on making small, rapid improvements to keep up with the pace of change in the rest of the world that they’ve lost sight of the bigger picture. As a result, our biggest ideas and ambitions are never achieved.

In this book, author Brian Reich encourages readers to start thinking of imagination as a natural resource rather than a thing or process that you can follow. Inside the pages of the book Reich explains how people should ‘let imagination happen’ and provides a number of activities and tasks to help readers get used to applying their imaginations

Creativity Takes Courage

The idea behind Creativity Takes Courage is that creativity is something that everyone needs because it allows us to find solutions to daily problems. However, the book also highlights the fact that, more often than not, people are afraid to get creative.

Creativity Takes Courage is divided up into a series of ‘dares’ such as ‘dare to fail’, ‘dare to start’ and ‘dare to be quiet’. It also includes inspirational quotes, motivational stories, facts and ideas for hands-on projects and imaginative activities.

Deep Creativity: Seven Ways to Spark Your Creative Spirit

Deep Creativity: Seven Ways to Spark Your Creative Spirit is a collaboration by three authors from three generations. It’s designed to help readers ‘reignite’ their creative spark. The book explains how important it is for people to make time for creativity in personal and professional life and reviews pathways for engaging with the creative life. It also identifies seven ‘ways’ to evoke inspiration including nature, suffering, practice and art.

Miracle in the Mundane: Poems, Prompts, and Inspiration to Unlock Your Creativity and Unfiltered Joy

Published in June 2019, this book by Instagram favourite Tyler Knott Gregson promises to teach readers how to uncover their own creativity and find inspiration. It includes a series of writing, drawing and photography challenges to get readers into creative habits. In the book, the author also pulls back the curtain on his own creative processes, hoping to inspire others.