This is a book from two brothers who have been close all their lives. As children in small-town Ohio, we played baseball on the same Tigers Little League teams in the summer and built snow forts together in the winter. We shared a bedroom for fourteen years, tacking up posters of muscle cars on the knotty-pine walls in the kind of finished basement that was popular in the Midwest. We went to the same grade school, joined the same Boy Scout troop, went on family vacations to Lake Erie, and once camped all the way to California and back with our parents and two sisters. We took many things apart, and put some of them back together.
But a close-knit relationship and overlapping lives do not mean our paths were the same. David has always been a bit unconventional. His favorite class in high school was art. He played in a local rock band called the Sabers with his friends. He built giant plywood structures like jukeboxes and grandfather clocks for the annual Spring Carnival at Carnegie Mellon. He started a firm called Intergalactic Destruction Company (the month Star Wars debuted in theaters) so he and his friends could do construction work together for the summer. Just for fun, he painted three bold green stripes along the back wall of our parents’ house, still there forty years later. And he always loved creating one-of-a-kind gifts, like the time he made his girlfriend a phone that would dial only his number, no matter what buttons she pushed.
Tom, on the other hand, followed a path that seemed more traditional. After studying liberal arts in college, he considered going to law school, tried working at an accounting firm for a while, and played an IT-related role at General Electric. After getting an MBA, he worked in a spreadsheet-intensive position as a management consultant. Along the way, his jobs were mostly predictable, both in their day-to-day work and the longer-term career paths each offered. Then he joined the design world and discovered there was more fun to be had coloring outside the lines.
We remained close all this time and spoke to each other most weeks, even when we lived eight thousand miles apart. After David founded the design and innovation firm that would become IDEO, Tom helped out there during business school and then rejoined full-time in 1987. We have worked together ever since, as the firm has continued to grow: David as CEO and then chairman, Tom in leadership roles that included marketing, business development, and storytelling.
The story of this book begins in April of 2007, when David—the older brother—got a call from his doctor, who uttered one of the scariest, most dreaded words in the medical lexicon: cancer. He was at his daughter’s fourth-grade class helping nine-year-olds think about how to redesign backpacks when the call came through, and he managed to spend another hour with the young students before breaking away to process this new setback. David had been diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma—throat cancer—and given a 40 percent chance of surviving the ordeal.
At that moment, Tom had just wrapped up a presentation to two thousand executives in São Paulo, Brazil. As he sat down backstage and switched his cell phone back on, it rang almost immediately. When he got the sobering news of David’s diagnosis, he abandoned the rest of his South American trip and headed straight for the airport. Although he knew there was little he could do to help, he had to get home to see David.
We had always been close, but David’s illness further cemented our bond that year. Through the next six months of chemotherapy, radiation, hydration, morphine, and finally surgery, we saw each other almost every day, sometimes talking endlessly and other times passing hours together while speaking barely a word. At the Stanford Cancer Center, we crossed paths with patients who eventually lost their battle with cancer. We couldn’t help wondering whether time was running out for David too.
If there is an upside to that terrible disease, it’s that cancer forces deep reflection, causing you to think about purpose and meaning in your life. Everyone we know who has survived cancer says that they look at life differently in its aftermath. Late in the year, as David recovered from surgery, we saw the first real hope of pushing cancer into the background of our lives. Faced with that joyous possibility, we vowed that if David survived, we would do two things together that involved neither doctors nor hospitals: First, we’d take a fun brother/brother trip together somewhere in the world, which we had never done in our adult lives. And second, we would work together side by side on a project that would allow us to share ideas with each other and the world.
The trip was an unforgettable week in Tokyo and Kyoto, exploring the best of modern and ancient Japanese cultures. And the collaborative project was creating the book you now hold in your hands.
Why a book about creative confidence? Because we have noticed from thirty years at IDEO that innovation can be both fun and rewarding. But as you look at the sweep of your life and start to think of a legacy that survives beyond it, giving others the opportunity to live up to their creative capacity seems like a worthy purpose. In the midst of David’s battle with cancer in 2007, a recurring question was “What was I put on Earth to do?” This book is part of the answer: To reach out to as many people as possible. To give future innovators the opportunity to follow their passions. To help individuals and organizations unleash their full potential—and build their own creative confidence.
David and Tom Kelley
(photo/illustration credit itr.1)
INTRODUCTION
When you hear the word “creativity,” what do you think of next?
If you are like many people, your mind immediately leaps to artistic endeavors like sculpture, drawing, music, or dance.
You may equate “creative” with “artistic.”
You may believe that architects and designers are paid to be creative thinkers, but CEOs, lawyers, and doctors are not.
Or you may feel that being creative is a fixed trait, like having brown eyes—either you’re born with creative genes, or you’re not.
As brothers who have worked together for thirty years at the forefront of innovation, we have come to see this set of misconceptions as “the creativity myth.” It is a myth that far too many people share. This book is about the opposite of that myth. It is about what we call “creative confidence.” And at its foundation is the belief that we are all creative.
The truth is, we all have far more creative potential waiting to be tapped.
We’ve helped thousands of companies bring breakthrough ideas to market—from Apple’s first computer mouse to next-generation surgical tools for Medtronic to fresh brand strategies for The North Face in China. And we’ve also seen that our methods can produce a new creative mindset in people that can dramatically enhance their lives, whether they work in the fields of medicine, law, business, education,