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CREATE!
A Toolkit For Creative Problem Solving In The Not-For-Profit Sector

By Mark Butcher (DSC, 2005, ISBN 1903991579, £14.95 [£18.02 inc p&p]

How easy is it for those of us in the business of managing arts organisations to get tied up in knots when it comes to managing people in all their wonderful complexity? We work with them to achieve our visions, missions and aims, through a combination of business planning, forward thinking, marketing and fundraising. We negotiate Board relationships, partnership working, funding requirements, and complex policies and procedures. Will we forget the strength that comes when we apply our own creativity to this business of management? Not if this newly published little gem can help it!

Create! by Mark Butcher offers a wealth of ways that we can boost our management styles with verve. Based on his extensive experiences as a trainer and consultant in the international not-for-profit sector, the author has developed Create! as a technique for enlivening and transforming organisational thinking. The book offers six key stages for maintaining or attaining growth, dealing with standardisation and negotiating complexity. Create is an acronym for: Confirm, Risk, Expand, Analyse, Think and Encourage. Each word represents the stages that organisations might go through when dealing with ?issues?. The book offers these words as chapter headings. Within each chapter is a wealth of creative approaches to dealing with organisational issues that positively address the collisions that happen when people meet organisational change.

Targeted at the not-for-profit sector, this book is a handy little toolkit indeed. Investing in this paperback will mean that your organisation always has somewhere to turn when the going gets tough!

Review by Mark Richardson, Carousel.
e: projects@carousel.org.uk