I am not an instant fan of books with clever titles because many times the title is the high point of the book. Not true with this book. Sutton writes with a real flare for his subject, and shows a real investment in creativity. He fills the books with stories of great feats of innovation. Some of these stories weve heard about, but many we havent, involving companies we all know. The first chapter makes clear why weird ideas work, and then the second chapter proves that they do. It is called, What is creativity, anyway? This is a chapter that can be read many times because the examples of innovative successes Sutton uses are great. Let me start with my favorite:

Sutton tells about Marks and Spencers, a leading food store in England, problem buttering bread (really!). They were expanding so rapidly and their prepared sandwiches were selling so well that a huge amount of employee time was taken up buttering the bread. What to do? One of the executives was visiting a bed sheet supplier and saw them using silk-screens to apply the designs on the sheets. He discovered that same technology would be applicable to his bread buttering problem. Now, all of Marks and Spencer sandwiches are buttered by silk-screen. Thinking out of the box. That is Suttons message. Another good one? Back in the early nineties, many companies were developing super mini- computers for business folks to use. These inventions generally failed until Palms Jeff Hawkins realized that his competition was paper, not computers. The rest is history.

The next 12 chapters are on the authors own 11 weird ideas. As you would expect, these are provocative practices, such as: Encourage people to ignore and defy superiors and peers (Weird Idea #4) and Reward success and failure, punish inaction (Weird Idea #6). These ideas were drawn from Suttons research in behavioral psychology to explain how innovation can be fostered. He shows how the best teams and companies use these and other counter-intuitive ideas to crank out new ideas, and he demonstrates that every company can reap sales and profits from this creativity. Then, as I often admire about the most successful books, he includes an application chapter about how to implement these ideas in your organization.