Group Genius – Keith Sawyer

She quotes the feminist literary critics Carey Kaplan and Ellen C. Rose, who collaborated in writing books: Our minds meet in the air between us and we achieve, at our best, an unfettered, creative, generous reciprocity.… “She” and “I” metamorphose into “we,” hypothetical, invisible, yet nonetheless articulate.… We learned first that we could sit together before a computer and write sentences that worked even better than did sentences we wrote alone. The famous anthropologists Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin have engaged in a lifelong collaboration.

They talked constantly, took notes together, and analyzed transcripts of children talking together: We would always have the typewriter right there and we would switch off writing and talking.… We did not ever allocate parts of the paper to one person or another person but we actually [discussed]… every single sentence.… We would both kind of think of the next thing to say and then…

paraphrase one another. Claude Monet spoke of the famous creative circle of fellow impressionist painters—Alfred Sisley, Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro—who supported each other in Paris during their early years of rejection: Your mind was held in suspense all the time, you spurred the others on to sincere, disinterested inquiry and were spurred on yourself, you laid in a stock of enthusiasm that kept you going for weeks on end until you could give final form to the idea you had in mind.

You always went home afterwards better steeled for the fray, with a new sense of purpose and a clearer head. This wasn’t just a matter of talking at the café while taking time off from the studio; these painters often went to the countryside together. Renoir and Monet painted together frequently in the summer of 1869, setting up their canvases side by side, monitoring each other’s paintings, and discussing what they were doing.

Revised Edition copyright © 2017 by Keith Sawyer Published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Hardcover edition first published in 2007 by Basic Books Paperback edition first published in 2008 by Basic Books All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104.

Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected]. Designed by Amy Quinn Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sawyer, R. Keith (Robert Keith) Group genius : the creative power of collaboration / by Keith Sawyer.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-465-07192-0 ISBN-10: 0-465-07192-9 1. Group problem solving. 2. Creative thinking. I. Title. HD30.29.S29 2007 658.4’036—dc22 2007008007 ISBN-13: 978-0-465-09663-3 (2017 edition) EBook ISBN: 978-0-465-09358-8 E3-20170402-JV-NF OceanofPDF.com Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Introduction: Beyond the Lone Genius PART ONE THE COLLABORATIVE TEAM 1 The Power of Collaboration 2 Improvising Innovation 3 Group Flow 4 From Groupthink to Group Genius PART TWO THE COLLABORATIVE MIND 5 Small Sparks 6 Collaboration over Time 7 Conversation and the Mind PART THREE THE COLLABORATIVE ORGANIZATION 8 Organizing for Improvisation 9 The Collaborative Web 10 Collaborating with Customers 11 Creating the Collaborative Economy 12 Collaborating with Everybody Acknowledgments About the Author Also by Keith Sawyer Praise for Group Genius Notes Index OceanofPDF.com For Barb OceanofPDF.com Introduction Beyond the Lone Genius When CNN asked me to appear on a one-hour special about “genius” hosted by Sanjay Gupta, MD, the invitation presented a challenge: how to condense into a ten-minute segment my broad expertise and how to choose material that would be especially interesting to viewers.

I had ten years of business experience as a management consultant, advising large companies like Citibank and US West on innovation. I’d spent fifteen years studying the science of creativity, starting with my PhD in psychology at the University of Chicago.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 069dbf3e414e9900
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 4,671,127 bytes (4.455 MB)
• Title: –
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• ISBN: 9780465071920, 9780465096633, 9780465093588, 0465071929
• Pages: 298
• Language: English (en)

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