Amabile personally made a great difference in my life by introducing me to the field of creativity (who knew there was a field?) when I was still a teenage sophomore at Brandeis. Her pioneering research and writing (her Creativity in Context broke new ground as a comprehensive review of decades of key creativity studies) was so impressive that Harvard Business School soon snatched her up as one of their own. Before they did, though, I decided to take her "Psychology of Creativity" course, which changed my life. If you'll indulge me for a paragraph...
I still remember the feeling of the state Amabile would call "intrinsic motivation," as a class assignment led me to spend nights roaming the library, highly stimulated by ideas for perhaps the first time in my life. For my final paper and class speech, I felt so compelled to make an ambitiously-wide-ranging case about work and creativity that I sought out writers in different domains to see where they would lead me. I read social theorists and philosophers who had something to say about conditions for creativity--there was Dewey and Weber and Marx and others--and started to make direct connections between their conclusions and the findings of the psychological studies we were reading about in class. My wordy masterpiece, "The Stifling of Creativity in Work in Our Society" (yes, I still remember), was pretty good, but the speech I gave was, I believe, my best work as an academic, delivered with no-notes-needed passion and breaking the rules of academia (When I finished my diatribe, with smoke still coming out of my ears, I remember the stunned and lengthy silence in the room until the sole graduate student asked, "Do you have statistical evidence for this?"). When years later I learned that Amabile did not remember this greatest-student-speech-of-all-time, I realized the impact was made primarily on me, but it was, indeed, a lasting one. In any case, thank you, Teresa.
Amabile's The Progress Principle (written with her husband Steven Kramer) is distinguished by what she does best--unparalleled research, clear-eyed analysis and cogent writing full of evidence-based and practical human-centered principles. For the last several years, Amabile has been focusing on the workplace, using research findings to help guide leadership in organizations in ways that best leverages the talents, motivations and creativity of the humans who work there. This book is a culmination of reviewing, coding and making sense of more than 12,000 journal entries from the work trenches.
"Of all the events that can deeply engage people in their work," she says, "the single most important is simply making progress on meaningful work." Managers can best boost positive inner work life, she explains, by reviewing and supporting people's progress everyday--which might sound simple but is more often ignored. Even small wins can yield "significant work life benefits," and the book reviews other influencers, catalysts and inhibitors that impact inner work life. Just like she did for me personally years ago, Amabile once again convincingly makes the case for how best to engage and inspire, and foster the conditions for optimal creativity and productivity in ourselves and others.
