Michael LeBoeuf, Berkeley Books, 1980

Overview

This is one of the earlier books on Imagineering, and it is also one of the best.  And because imagineering is almost timeless it is just as useful today as the day it was written.  It is directed to you as someone working toward becoming an imagineer.  It covers all aspects of successful innovation, including creativity, completivity, myths, and teaming.

Since the book is very old it is also very cheap.  You can get a copy for one cent plus shipping costs of about three dollars, but it is worth a whole lot more than that.  The main areas of discussion are as follows.

Redesigning Your Imagination Foundation

The Creativity Gap – where LeBoeuf talks about how the brain takes on creativity and also discusses more than a dozen of the myths and traps that are common in creativity thinking.

Deciding What You Want – Here he emphasizes how important it is to decide what you want, and create your goals.  And he outlines some helpful ways and means to do this.

Generating and Processing Ideas

Understanding and Igniting Your Creative Abilities – with a couple of dozen pages of good advice.

Team Up for Super Imagineering – Here LeBoeuf takes up the value of team work, including teams of two, and teams of more than two.

Ask Questions to Spark Your Imagination – Here LeBoeuf discusses the importance of questions and suggests a good number of specific questions that can be used.

How to Evaluate Ideas – This section provides a lot of good advice on how to evaluate ideas once they have been produced and come to the fore.

Clearing the Hurdles Between Imagination and Realization

Now we are getting into the Completivity side of Imagineering.  LeBoeuf covers a number of topics.  Included are:

Getting People Behind Your Ideas – this is obviously a very important subject, and includes your teammates and your desired audience.

Situational Hurdles – LeBoeuf discusses the problem of hurdles, real and imaginary at great length with almost 20 pages of discussion.

Following Through to Successful Reality

Learning to Use Time – LeBoeuf is an expert on time management, and he provides here a lot of good advice on how to do that—about 20 pages of expert suggestions.

The Word is Action – Here LeBoeuf states in no uncertain terms that to be an Imagineer is to be a man or woman of action.  It takes action and plenty of it to turn your ideas into realities.

I very strongly recommend this book.