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Sebastopol, CA—Great things don't happen in a vacuum. But creating an environment for creative thinking and innovation can be a daunting challenge. How can you make it happen at your company? The answer may surprise you: Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers (O'Reilly Media, $29.99 USD).
"If you want to stop talking about innovation and start actually doing it, Gamestorming is that how-to manual you've been waiting for," said Dave Gray (@davegray), founder of XPLANE, and the author of Gamestorming along with Sunni Brown and James Macanufo.
Gamestorming features more than 80 games to help you break down barriers, communicate better, and generate new ideas, insights, and strategies. The authors have identified tools and techniques from some of the world's most innovative professionals, whose teams collaborate and make great things happen.
Gamestorming will help you:
- Overcome conflict and increase engagement with team-oriented games
- Improve collaboration and communication in cross-disciplinary teams with visual-thinking techniques
- Improve understanding by role-playing customer and user experiences
- Generate better ideas and more of them, faster than ever before
- Shorten meetings and make them more productive
- Simulate and explore complex systems, interactions, and dynamics
- Identify a problem's root cause, and find the paths that point toward a solution
"My book is a playbook, a how-to manual. It's not intended to be read and stuck on a shelf—it's intended to be used. If people use it they will find they are more successful at networked work, by which I mean: working with people and companies that you don't control, having conversations across organizations and across disciplines, looking beyond today's business models, and imagining new ways of creating value," said Gray.
Advance Praise
"Everybody knows the problem: We need to be more innovative. Now we've got the solution: Gamestorming. This smart, fun, hands-on book will energize your brain and mobilize your creativity—and do it using stuff you already have in your supply closet!"
—Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive and A Whole New Mind
"At Zappos, one of our core values is to 'Be Creative, Adventurous, and Open-Minded.' Gamestorming is a great how-to manual for achieving that."
—Tony Hsieh, author of NY Times #1 Bestseller Delivering Happiness and CEO of Zappos.com, Inc
"Wow—I'm only into chapter 4 so far, but it really is an amazing book...I think could be one of Those Books—The Ones Everyone Has To Have."
—Kathy Sierra, founder of the Software Development/Jolt Productivity Award-winning javaranch.com
For a review copy or more information please email peyton@oreilly.com. Please include your delivery address and contact information.
About the Authors
Dave Gray is the Founder of XPLANE, the visual thinking company and a partner in the Dachis Group, a social business consultancy. Dave's time is spent researching and writing on visual business, as well as speaking, coaching and delivering workshops to educators, corporate clients and the public. He is also a founding member of VizThink, an international community of Visual Thinkers.
Sunni Brown, M.P.A., is Owner of BrightSpot Info Design, a company specializing in visual thinking to support organizational and group success.
As a consultant at XPLANE, James Macanufo helps large technology and government clients develop their vision, strategy and communication plans. He actively obsessed with understanding what things are, the way they work, and why they matter. He is also an active gamer and occasional inventor of card games.
Additional Resources:
For more information about the book, including sample content, full table of contents, author bio, and cover graphic, see:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596804183.
To read a recent interview in which Gray discusses the collaborative power of games and how they can cut through increasing workplace complexity, see: http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/07/in-defense-of-games-in-the-wor.html
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Gamestorming
Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, James Macanufo ISBN: 978-0-596-80417-6, 288 pages, Book Price: $29.99 USD, Ebook Price: $23.99 USD order@oreilly.com 1-800-998-9938 1-707-827-7000 |
About O’Reilly
O’Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O’Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying “faint signals” from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.