Contemporary Authors

Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes

Mueller, Jennifer

WORK TITLE: Creative Change
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://jennifersmueller.com/
CITY: San Diego
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:

 

RESEARCHER NOTES:

 

LC control no.:    n 2016061369

Descriptive conventions:
                   rda

Personal name heading:
                   Mueller, Jennifer, 1972- 

Located:           Solana Beach (Calif.)

Birth date:        1972-05-04

Fuller form of name
                   Jennifer Suzanne

Affiliation:       University of San Diego

Profession or occupation:
                   College teachers

Found in:          Creative change, 2017: title page (Jennifer Mueller) jacket
                      (Jennifer Mueller holds a doctorate in social psychology
                      and has taught at topbusiness shcools ... She currently
                      serves on the faculty at the University of San Diego and
                      lives in Solana Beach, California)
                   Email from publisher, November 9, 2016: (born: 05/04/1972;
                      Jennifer Suzanne Mueller)

Associated language:
                   eng

================================================================================


LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20540

Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov

PERSONAL

Born May 4, 1972.

EDUCATION:

Southern Methodist University, B.S., 1994; Brandeis University, Ph.D., 2001.

ADDRESS

  • Home - Solana Beach, CA.

CAREER

Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA, research associate, 1997-2001; Yale School of Management, New Haven, CT, lecturer, 2001-03; New York University, Stern School of Business, New York, NY, visiting assistant professor, 2003-05; The Wharton School, Philadelphia, PA, assistant professor, 2005-12; University of San Diego School of Business, San Diego, CA, associate professor, 2012–.

WRITINGS

  • Creative Change: Why We Resist It . . . How We Can Embrace It, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Boston, MA), 2017

Contributor of articles to periodicals, including Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNN, HBR, FortuneForbes, and Fast Company.

SIDELIGHTS

Jennifer Mueller is a social psychologist who teaches and writes about creativity. Her article on “The Bias Against Creativity” for the Atlantic was downloaded over 65,000 times. The information in the article led to her writing the 2017 book, Creative Change: Why We Resist It . . . How We Can Embrace It. Mueller is an associate professor at the University of San Diego, and has been a lecturer or assistant professor at many business schools including The Wharton School, Yale School of Management, and NYU’s Stern School of Business. She holds a Ph.D. in Social and Developmental Psychology from Brandeis University.

In Creative Change, Mueller explores why creativity in the workplace is a good idea yet so many CEOs and top executives reject creative solutions and are afraid of real innovation. They more often cling to the familiar even when they know it isn’t working. Through studies and interviews with top business leaders, Mueller has discovered that not just CEOs, but also educators, scientists, and others who profess a desire for creativity actually hate the connotations associated with change and resort to risk averse solutions. Mueller delves into the love/hate relationship with creativity, biases toward change, and devastating steps leaders take to inadvertently kill innovation.

In the book, Mueller explores a four-step process to diagnose hidden barriers to innovation: recognizing self-disruption and lack of openness to seeing opportunities for creativity, overcoming status quo, disrupting cultural beliefs that hold your company back, and generating ideas that will get the attention of decision-makers. Mueller also gathers information from psychological studies conducted in the business community to create a plan to promote creativity and leadership. Despite Mueller presenting examples like Bob McDonald’s demise as CEO of Procter & Gamble to back up her thesis, Barbara Jacobs noted in Booklist that the book’s tone is academic and “At least one start-to-finish case history would have made this intriguing notion really come to life.”

Nevertheless, the book is “Solid reading for the business set though no substitute for books by Twyla Tharp, Daniel Dennett, and other creative thinkers,” according to a writer in Kirkus Reviews. In Library Journal, Littleton Maxwell commented that Mueller “has developed a well-formulated argument for creativity. Her ideas and research need to be available” to anyone in business leadership. Calling the book enlightening, a Publishers Weekly contributor said that it “not only shows why people reject creativity but provides solutions on how to switch one’s thinking.”

BIOCRIT

PERIODICALS

  • Booklist, December 15, 2016, Barbara Jacobs, review of Creative Change: Why We Resist It . . . How We Can Embrace It, p. 7.

  • Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2016, review of Creative Change.

  • Library Journal, November 15 2016, Littleton Maxwell, review of Creative Change, p. 97.

  • Publishers Weekly, October 17, 2016, review of Creative Change, p. 58.*

  • Why We Resist It ... How We Can Embrace It - 2017 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,, Boston, MA
  • author's site - http://jennifersmueller.com/

    About Jen Mueller

    I'm a social psychologist who loves stories. While getting my PhD, I started to collect peoples' stories about creativity. Overwhelmingly, people say they feel joy, pride, and exhilaration towards their creative ideas. But I also discovered a dark side - most people have a story about how someone else rejected their creative idea. So I started to wonder, could people love creative ideas - but also hate them? Now, a business school professor, my work shows that people - even experts - can hide their dislike of creative ideas. My work explores the possibility that embracing a creative idea is not a rational process of knowing the answer, but a psychological process of managing our own and others feelings. My work aims to provide people with tools to disrupt their own and others resistance to the creative ideas that would otherwise improve the quality of their lives and make the world a better place.

    Question & Answer with Jen

    Q: What is creative change?

    A: Creative change is a psychological process people undergo when they embrace new and productive definitions that often seem opposite the old. We can undergo creative change about how we define ourselves, a group of people, a product or a process. Q: Is creative change rare?

    A: Yes and no. We say we love creative ideas, but the sad truth is we resist embracing them, even when we want creativity and need it most. But it is possible for creative change to happen as often as you like. Opportunities to make creative change abound because you can make creative change in any aspect of your life. So if you learn to make creative change, you can enjoy all the benefits that truly creative solutions can bring. If you let it, creative change can happen often for you. Q: What are examples of creative changes?

    A: One creative change still going on right now is our embracing the shift from paper documents to online documentation without a physical copy. Another ongoing example is how people define women at work. The 1950s way of defining women was that women were communal and warm but NOT highly achievement oriented. There is a modern way of thinking about women that people with the 1950’s view would have to undergo creative change to embrace. The modern way defines women as communal AND high achieving. Organizations able to reject the old and embrace this new way of defining women are better able to attract and retain the best talent. Q: Is creative change something I can learn to do?

    A: Absolutely. Just like you can have expertise in a given domain (e.g., how to code in Java, chemical engineering) you can have expertise in creativity. But merely learning to generate creative ideas is not enough. Just because you can generate ideas does not mean you will use them, or use creative ideas developed by others. Further, merely generating an idea will not ensure you know how to get buy in from decision-makers either. Instead, embracing creative ideas is a process of managing your own and others psychological experience of uncertainty. Uncertainty is not just negative. It can be experienced positively (e.g., hope) or negatively (e.g., fear). Whether you can make yourself and others feel hope rather than anxiety around creative ideas is key to making creative change in your organization and in your life. Q: Does the book “Creative Change” have solutions to the problems raised?

    A: Yes! The book “Creative Change” contains processes around how to self-disrupt your mindset to better see value in creativity, influence others to use your creative solutions, build creative change into the fabric of your organization, recognize creative leaders, and generate creative ideas without diminishing your ability to make them count with decision-makers.
    Q: Why should I learn about creative change?

    A: a. You can be biased against creativity: Even if you are highly open to new ideas, my work shows you can still exhibit a bias against creative ideas under certain circumstances. Learning what those circumstances are can improve your ability to enhance your life in ways you never thought possible.

    b. Creative change is a key leadership skill: Creativity may be the number one skill needed to lead – according to a panel of roughly 1500 leaders at IBM – but leadership books side-step how creativity and leadership relate. The book “Creative Change” fills this gap and identifies the creative skills leaders need to move companies in productive new directions. Creative change is the ability to embrace useful ways of redefining something (e.g., a product, process, service, one’s self). Leaders must recognize productive new directions, as opposed embracing visions that merely extrapolate out from the status quo. Leaders must overcome knee-jerk resistance others (and they themselves) have to the new. Leaders must build organizations able to benefit from and use the creative ideas produced.

    c. Traditional selling practices can backfire when pitching creative ideas: Once you learn the psychology around making creative change – you will quickly see the pitfalls of trying to sell creative ideas using many traditional selling practices. The book “Creative Change” includes a framework you can use to sell creative ideas without evoking the status quo bias.

    d. Being a decision-maker makes it harder to embrace creative change: New evidence shows that experts and gatekeepers have been floundering in confusion when trying to make creative change. My work explains this puzzle by showing that the way we structure decision-making roles and train people to evaluate creative ideas may evoke a bias against creativity – even when creative is desired. Our rejection of creativity may happen unawares. My work shows that when we are in a mindset which lacks tolerance for uncertainty we can associate creativity with words like vomit, even as we espouse to love and value creativity. My work links this intolerance for uncertainty to how we train today’s business leaders and educate students. Learning how to make creative change will allow you to overcome your own tendency to undervalue new ideas when you need them most.

    e. Traditional innovation management practices can kill creativity: Traditional innovation management practices (e.g., stage gate processes, hierarchical decision-making) rely on the assumption that creative and familiar ideas can be evaluated using the same processes. This assumption is false and deadly for creative ideas. Learning how to make creative change will help you structure your organization to ensure the creativity you need the most isn’t systematically filtered out.

    Research

    The overarching theme of my work is to reveal the implicit beliefs (e.g., stereotypes, cultural narratives, or lay scripts) that harm effective collaboration, assessments of leadership potential, as well as the recognition of creative ideas.
    Creativity

    My work asks the following question: How can organizations implement creative ideas when desired? The answer to this question is complicated - while people say they desire creative ideas and creative leaders, they also have implicit or unacknowledged negative associations with creative ideas and downgrade creative people as less leader-like. By building a theory of negative implicit attitudes towards creative ideas and people, my work reveals many previously unidentified barriers to innovation - some of which point to the very manner in which we typically structure innovation in organizations. My work builds theory and provides evidence to show that merely placing a person in a decision-maker role (e.g., organizational gate-keepers responsible for resourcing ideas) can evoke a bias against creative ideas.
    Furthermore, my work uses the implicit theory of creativity to explain and unveil why many creative types struggle to gain resources for their ideas, and why familiar ideas often win even though these ideas often solve problems less effectively and efficiently in the long term. The goal of my work is to identify the mechanisms explaining why creative ideas are often rejected when desired as a means of helping organizations and employees gain influence for their creative ideas.
    Collaboration

    My work reveals how the implicit beliefs we have about effective collaboration (e.g., many hands make light work, two heads are better than one, and great leaders know the answers to problems) are inaccurate and can harm our ability to make collaborations work. My work shows that the mere act of collaborating can make people perform worse because they feel more confident than when working alone and so reject helpful outside advice. I have examined the social mechanics of operating in large teams. Specifically, I employed a field study to examine scientists in design teams ranging from 3-20 members in size to show that relational loss - a member's perception that support and help are less available in larger teams - mediated the relationship between team size and poor individual performance above and beyond coordination loss. I’ve also examined the implicit beliefs people hold about effective leaders – nothing that these beliefs exclude those (especially men) who seek help from subordinates and show humility. Future projects include examining whether harming behaviors may be more prevalent in female relative to mixed sex groups, as well as identifying why collaborators sometimes perform worse on judgment tasks relative to individuals.

  • linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-mueller-2a7b88129

    Jennifer Mueller
    Jennifer Mueller

    Associate Professor at University of San Diego School of Business

    Solana Beach, California
    Higher Education

    Current

    University of San Diego School of Business

    Previous

    The Wharton School, NYU Stern School of Business, Yale School of Management

    Education

    Brandeis University

    Jennifer’s Activity

    Loved doing this podcast with Gayle Allen - she is an...
    Jennifer shared
    Really excited to be an incoming Associate Editor at...
    Jennifer shared
    For those in LA who want to learn more about cutting edge...
    Jennifer shared
    Research Papers as Negotiations
    Jennifer liked
    Are you a designer/inventor who wants to know how...
    Jennifer shared
    Really excited about my live radio interview @ Wisconsin...
    Jennifer shared
    See all activity

    Summary

    I'm a social psychologist who loves stories. I earned my PhD in Social and Developmental Psychology at Brandeis University, and have had the fortune of been on the faculty of many top business schools including the Wharton School, Yale School of Management and NYU's Stern School of Business.

    When I started my research career, I was a research assistant at Harvard Business School, working for the wonderful Teresa Amabile on a large, longitudinal dataset which included daily diary entries for over 230 employees in around 26 project teams and 7 companies. I started to collect peoples' stories about creativity. Overwhelmingly, people say they feel joy, pride, and exhilaration towards their creative ideas. But I also discovered a dark side - most people have a story about how someone else rejected their creative idea. So I started to wonder, could people love creative ideas - but also hate them? Now, a business school professor, my work shows that people - even experts - can hide their dislike of creative ideas. My work explores the possibility that embracing a creative idea is not a rational process of knowing the answer, but a psychological process of managing our own and others feelings. My work aims to provide people with tools to disrupt their own and others resistance to the creative ideas that would otherwise improve the quality of their lives and make the world a better place.

    Experience

    University of San Diego School of Business
    Associate Professor
    University of San Diego School of Business
    July 2012 – Present (5 years 1 month)

    In this interview, we discuss the basic assumptions about how we recognize creative ideas, creative leaders, and the very fabric of how we structure organizations for innovation.
    The Wharton School
    Assistant Professor
    The Wharton School
    July 2005 – July 2012 (7 years 1 month)Greater Philadelphia Area
    NYU Stern School of Business
    Visiting Assistant Professor
    NYU Stern School of Business
    July 2003 – July 2005 (2 years 1 month)Greater New York City Area
    Yale School of Management
    Lecturer
    Yale School of Management
    July 2001 – July 2003 (2 years 1 month)
    Harvard Business School
    Research Associate
    Harvard Business School
    July 1997 – July 2001 (4 years 1 month)Greater Boston Area

    Research, data analysis, data collection, case writing

    Education

    Brandeis University
    Brandeis University
    Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Social Psychology
    1996 – 2001
    Southern Methodist University
    Southern Methodist University
    Bachelor’s Degree, Psychology
    1990 – 1994

    Activities and Societies: Phi Beta Kappa, Honors in Psychology, Distinction, Cum Laude

    Languages

    English

    Publications

    Creative Change: Why we resist it...How to embrace it
    Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

    All corporate CEOs, top executives, and other business leaders say they want creativity and need real innovation in order to thrive in a competitive world. But according to startling research from former Wharton management professor Jen Mueller, the truth is that many business leaders chronically reject creative solutions and often embrace the familiar, even as they profess commitment to innovation.

    Mueller’s research also reveals that it’s not just CEOs, but educators, scientists, and many, many others who often struggle to accept new and creative ideas even when desired. Mueller parses the tough questions that these findings raise. Could people love but also hate creative ideas? Could the mindset we use to evaluate ideas turn this love or hate on or off—in an instant? Do experts struggle even more than novices with this bias? And even more startling, could the “best practices” that organizations employ to manage innovation activate this bias, and inadvertently, kill innovation?

    Mueller diagnoses this hidden innovation barrier, and provides solutions, including:

    - a four-step process (and a fifth lifeline) to self-disrupt your current mindset and recognize creative opportunity,
    - an idea-pitching framework aimed at helping you overcome other people's sticky preference for the status quo,
    - key organizational levers to disrupt the cultural beliefs holding your company back,
    - tips to more accurately recognize creative leaders who can lead organizations in productive new directions,
    - and strategies to generate ideas without harming your ability to make them count with the decision makers.

    Authors:
    Jennifer Mueller

    Organizations

    Academy of Management

    Skills

    Higher EducationResearchData AnalysisLecturingWriting

  • facebook - https://www.facebook.com/jennifermuellerphd/

    About

    Suggest Edits
    CONTACT INFO
    stories.about.creativity@gmail.com
    http://jennifersmueller.com
    https://twitter.com/JennSMueller
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-mueller-2a7b88129
    MORE INFO
    About
    PhD in Social and Developmental Psychology. Professor at the University of San Diego. Author of "Creative Change: Why We Resist It; How We Can Embrace It".
    Biography
    I earned my PhD in Social and Developmental Psychology at Brandeis University, and have had the fortune of been on the faculty of many top business schools incl... See More
    Awards
    NPR: Why We Miss Creative Ideas That Are Right Under Our Noses
    http://www.npr.org/2014/02/26/282836487/why-we-miss-creative-ideas-that-are-right-under-our-noses... See More
    Gender
    Female
    categories
    Public Figure

  • U San Diego - https://www.sandiego.edu/changemaker/faculty/biography.php?profile_id=1845

    Jennifer Mueller
    Jennifer Mueller
    Email: jmueller@SanDiego.edu
    Phone: (619) 260-4861
    Office: Olin Hall 114

    Associate Professor of Management

    PhD, Brandeis University, Developmental and Social Psychology

    Jennifer Mueller is an associate professor of management in the University of San Diego School of Business, where she teaches organizational behavior and leadership classes at both the undergraduate and MBA levels. Mueller’s research examines the costs and benefits of collaboration in teams, as well as the biases people have against creative ideas and creative people. She has published several articles in top management journals including: Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and Psychological Science. She is currently on the editorial board of the Journal of Applied Psychology as well as Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. She has held positions at several business schools including Yale School of Management and the Stern School of Business at NYU, and she was an assistant professor at the Wharton School for seven years before joining the USD faculty in 2012.
    Professional Experience

    Associate Editor, Academy of Management Discoveries

Creative Change: Why We Resist It ... How We Can Embrace It
Barbara Jacobs
113.8 (Dec. 15, 2016): p7.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Creative Change: Why We Resist It ... How We Can Embrace It.

By Jennifer Mueller.

Jan. 2017.256p. illus. HMH, $28 (9780544703094); e-book (9780544882034). 650.1.

Hundreds (if not thousands) of articles and books have been written about change and about creativity. But few have addressed both in tandem and, more importantly, the reasons why innovation is not broadly accepted in the corporate world. UC-San Diego professor Mueller proffers one answer, explaining that humans basically hold two different mindsets--one conditioned to reject most ideas and the other more accepting of innovation. The rest of her book addresses the "how do we overcome those innate biases," covering topics ranging from how to manage your own thinking to convincing others (and the business) of the elegance of the innovation. Any number of examples back up her thesis, including the demise of Bob McDonald as Procter & Gamble CEO and well-disguised stories of stalemates within companies. Even with these illustrations, though, the solutions remain on an academic level; in other words, a few solid how-to's are featured along with a lot of references. At least one start-to-finish case history would have made this intriguing notion really come to life.--Barbara Jacobs

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Jacobs, Barbara. "Creative Change: Why We Resist It ... How We Can Embrace It." Booklist, 15 Dec. 2016, p. 7. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476563400&it=r&asid=25555fc77c407cc77eff058479cdae0a. Accessed 10 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A476563400

Mueller, Jennifer: CREATIVE CHANGE
(Dec. 1, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Mueller, Jennifer CREATIVE CHANGE Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 1, 17 ISBN: 978-0-544-70309-4

Of innovation and its great enemy, inertia.We face huge problems, not least of them, writes social psychologist Mueller (Management/Univ. of San Diego), the fact that the end-of-the-world clock that ticked so loudly during the Cold War has now landed on "three minutes to midnight." Huge problems require huge solutions, and huge solutions require creativity. But how does creativity flourish in cultures that are unused or even hostile to it? Some of our inability to leverage creativity can be linked to familiar human risk-averse behavior--and because she's a psychologist, Mueller goes straight to Ellsberg, Tversky, and other textbook examples--and some to the odd fact that while current corporate jargon places a high value on innovation, innovation is not really what the vaunted "continuous improvement" mantra really entails. Mueller looks at models for disrupting the chain of inertia and breaking some of the barriers to good ideas. She observes that certain problem-coping methods encode different requirements for structure and offer different levels of uncertainty and risk, for good and bad; institutions particularly crave structure because it yields measurable outcomes, while softer approaches may not net immediately quantifiable results. This is puzzling given that most CEOs identify creativity as "the number-one leadership competency to win in the future." Even so, the wheels turn slowly: one noteworthy innovation in measuring customer satisfaction took two years to run through the necessary channels, and this from the company's chief innovation officer. Suggesting a host of mindset-altering exercises for organizations, Mueller ventures the thought that maybe metrics aren't everything in arriving at a culture that is more conducive to creative thinking. As she notes in conclusion, "once we accept that our metrics are not themselves the answers but rather that they are the path to the answers, we are no longer limited by fear." Solid reading for the business set though no substitute for books by Twyla Tharp, Daniel Dennett, and other creative thinkers.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Mueller, Jennifer: CREATIVE CHANGE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471901852&it=r&asid=7040e6bcaa4f65c838843a302563c092. Accessed 10 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A471901852

Mueller, Jennifer. Creative Change: Why We Resist It ... How We Can Embrace It
Littleton Maxwell
141.19 (Nov. 15, 2016): p97.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Mueller, Jennifer. Creative Change: Why We Resist It ... How We Can Embrace It. Houghton Harcourt. Jan. 2017. 256p. notes, index. ISBN 9780544703094.

$28; ebk. ISBN 9780544703131. bus Mueller's (management, Univ. of San Diego Sch. of Business) thesis is that while top business leaders indicate that they want creativity for their organizations in order to compete and succeed in today's business environment, in practice, they often reject such innovations and favor the status quo. Mueller sets out to determine whether businesses are really encouraging inventiveness to take advantage of new discoveries and generate creative solutions for the many problems facing us today. She also examines whether they are establishing fresh and profitable products and services that would prove advantageous to their business. Mueller identifies "a hidden innovation barrier" that inhibits companies from taking chances. She defines the creative process, works on a method of evaluation, and concludes with a discussion of why we need to adopt a positive mind-set.

VERDICT Mueller, an accomplished scholar in the management field, has developed a well-formulated argument for creativity. Her ideas and research need to be available to academics, business practitioners, and, really, everyone.--Littleton Maxwell, Robins Sch. of Business, Univ. of Richmond

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Maxwell, Littleton. "Mueller, Jennifer. Creative Change: Why We Resist It ... How We Can Embrace It." Library Journal, 15 Nov. 2016, p. 97. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470367227&it=r&asid=fa8e3a76f8fe993b38bf19958d8ce4a3. Accessed 10 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A470367227

Creative Change: Why We Resist It ... How We Can Embrace It
263.42 (Oct. 17, 2016): p58.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Creative Change: Why We Resist It ... How We Can Embrace It

Jennifer Mueller. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28 (256p) ISBN 978-0-5447-0309-4

Mueller, a management professor and author of the viral paper "The Bias Against Creativity," has spent nearly two decades studying the subject of creativity. Her conclusion is that our current dialogue on the topic urgently needs to change, as American workplaces and institutions remain generally resistant to creativity. She asserts that this tendency will lead to "uncreative destruction"--a preference for the known even when new solutions are necessary. She seeks to provide insight into the origin of this "hidden barrier," putting forth the premise that people actually both love and hate creativity depending on the circumstances. The book outlines a four-step process for disrupting this dysfunctional mind-set in oneself, and it also provides strategies for getting others to break their habitual thinking. Elsewhere, Mueller looks at organizational structure and its role in stifling positive change. Of particular relevance is her chapter on the bias against innovative leadership. This enlightening book not only shows why people reject creativity but provides solutions on how to switch one's thinking and truly welcome it. Agent: Giles Anderson, Anderson Literary Agency. (Jan.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Creative Change: Why We Resist It ... How We Can Embrace It." Publishers Weekly, 17 Oct. 2016, p. 58. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468700051&it=r&asid=380c44574e114af2c7384a510733b687. Accessed 10 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A468700051

Jacobs, Barbara. "Creative Change: Why We Resist It ... How We Can Embrace It." Booklist, 15 Dec. 2016, p. 7. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA476563400&asid=25555fc77c407cc77eff058479cdae0a. Accessed 10 July 2017. "Mueller, Jennifer: CREATIVE CHANGE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA471901852&asid=7040e6bcaa4f65c838843a302563c092. Accessed 10 July 2017. Maxwell, Littleton. "Mueller, Jennifer. Creative Change: Why We Resist It ... How We Can Embrace It." Library Journal, 15 Nov. 2016, p. 97. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA470367227&asid=fa8e3a76f8fe993b38bf19958d8ce4a3. Accessed 10 July 2017. "Creative Change: Why We Resist It ... How We Can Embrace It." Publishers Weekly, 17 Oct. 2016, p. 58. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA468700051&asid=380c44574e114af2c7384a510733b687. Accessed 10 July 2017.