From the Preface and Introduction to
Creative Confidence
Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All
PREFACE
This is a book from two brothers who have been close all our 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 14 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 a bright green graphic stripe three feet tall along the back wall of our parents’ house that is still there 40 years later. And he always loved creating one-of-a-kind gifts, like the time he made his girlfriend a phone that would only dial 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 for General Electric. After getting an MBA, he worked in a spreadsheet-intensive position as a management consultant.
Belief in your creative capacity lies at the heart of innovation.
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 8,000 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 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 of us—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 9 year old s 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.
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