New Book Review: "Borrowing Brilliance"

Recently posted book review for Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others, by David Kord Murray, Gotham Books (Penguin), 2009, reposted here:

The assignment given to Murray by Intuit that led to this book involved coming up with new ideas and teaching others in the company to do the same. According to the author, the goals of this book are two-fold: to take the creative process out of the subconscious mind and bring it into the conscious world, and to dispel the misconceptions about creativity and show that brilliance is borrowed, because in order to create you first need to copy.

Murry describes a six-step process consisting of "the origin of a creative idea" and "the evolution of a creative idea", the former of which involves (1) definining the problem to be solved, (2) borrowing ideas from places with similar problems, and (3) connecting and combining these borrowed ideas, and the latter of which involves (4) allowing the combinations to incubate into a solution, (5) identifying the strength and weaknesses of the solution, and (6) eliminating the weak points and enhancing the strong points of the solution.

The work with which the author was involved at Intuit is discussed throughout, but while walking the reader through the six-step process he also touches on dozens of other cases to illustrate what he attempts to communicate, similar to the cases one might readily find in many Harvard Business School Press texts. In the opinion of this reviewer, the content that Murray provides during the latter half of his process is superior to that in the former.

During the "borrowing" second step of the process, Murray writes that "the source determines the creative perception of your solution" and that "the farther away from your subject you borrow materials from, the more creative your solution becomes". And he repeats this refrain several times throughout the rest of the book. His argument is well thought out, much better than, for example, when one might hear a fashion designer explain how they find inspiration everywhere.

"Remember, creative thinking is problem solving, and you find your solution in places with a similar problem to yours. Well, your competitors have a similar problem, so you're obligated to look there. But, if you're not comfortable flying a pirate flag in your conference room, then you'll need to venture away from home, away from your industry, and borrow from foreign lands, other industries, other places, and not from your own industry."

Later, the author writes that "people are made out of other people just as ideas are made out of other ideas", and "after all, that's why an idea is called a conception in the first place". In reading about the "combining" third step of the process, this reviewer could not help but be reminded of exercise Brain Program #12 in "Jump Start Your Brain" by Doug Hall (see my review), where force-association is used to arrive at connections one might not otherwise make when solving a problem.

But Murray does not go this far. In other words, he does not advocate spending the time it might take to winnow through many ideas to get to the one, although his process does conceivably allow this as a possible strategy. While describing the "incubating" fourth step, the author suggests writing the problem out, describing the borrowed ideas, and starting to make metaphorical combinations, followed by his declaration that "the game is creating the new idea".

Of the case studies presented throughout this text, one of the favorites of this reviewer is the one in which the author discusses Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone having been due in part to parapraxis. Bell had read a book by German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz which indicated that vowel sounds can be reproduced using electrical tuning forks and resonators. But Bell misinterpreted the passage because of his poor German reading skills, understanding it instead to read that vowel sounds can be reproduced using electrical wire.

And of course this misunderstanding led Bell to try to re-create speech using electrical wire, which he eventually did. While Bell later said that he may never have been able to begin his experiments in electricity if he had been able to read German well, the point that the author makes is that it may have been Bell's subconscious mind leaking into the conscious world that created the telephone. Good read.