I just finished Things a Little Bird Told Me by Biz Stone, one of the founders of Twitter.  (If you want to know more about Twitter and its complex history, I’ve also read Hatching Twitter, a pretty good narrative of Twitter’s founding.)  Biz has been a blogger forever, and it appears to have helped him craft engaging, pithy chapters full of interesting anecdotes about his own life and his experiences with Twitter.  It’s a good read, though I’d probably call it YA level or higher – Biz wrote for grown-ups, and he uses some colorful language in places.

Teachers might also not like how Biz describes his “no homework” policy – how he refused to do homework in high school and still managed to do reasonably well.  (I’m oversimplifying a little, but I know many students might also oversimplify in a similar way.)  He also tells a story about sneaking into a school dance, getting caught, and getting away with it because of an effective “apology.”  Some teachers might see this as a positive thing – but heads up.

My goal here is to talk a little about what Biz has to say about creativity.  I’ve read other stuff about it – Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson, which is probably my favorite book on creativity, and Imagine by Jonah Lehrer.  Both are full of analyses of how creative people have found solutions to old problems, or come up with innovative ways to develop new products.  Biz’s book isn’t quite the same thing.  It’s not an analysis of how creative people have found ideas – Biz considers himself a creative person.  I agree – I think he’s brilliant.  But it doesn’t read like a self-aggrandizing hero narrative.  It’s often – and mostly – about how creativity comes from collaboration.

This is a key idea for me, something that Walter Isaacson is trying to show in The Innovators, a long collage of stories about how many important technological innovations came from the collective efforts of teams of people.  We can often be more creative when we’re working with other people.  It helps us challenge ourselves, pushes us in new directions, helps us do more than we can alone, and generally improves our overall creativity.  I wouldn’t say this for all things and all people, but I think it’s important to recognize the importance of teamwork and collaboration in creativity.

I suppose we don’t always like that idea.  I’m thinking of Ayn Rand and The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged, books that I read many years ago and used to believe in.  (As a wannabe artist, not a libertarian politician.)  Howard Roark did much better alone than any team of architects could together.  We also want to believe that Steve Jobs was a lone genius, working to make Apple Computer into the juggernaut that it is today.  It doesn’t quite work that way, usually.

Take Biz Stone.  He readily acknowledges that many people created Twitter.  Many of his best ideas seemed to come from his collaboration with co-founder and CEO Evan Williams.  The two guys worked well together – Biz re-creates several conversations he had with Evan, including the idea for Odeo, the failed podcasting company that was a kind of stepping-stone to Twitter.  Biz has similar productive collaborations with Jack Dorsey, who originally developed the idea for Twitter as part of a “hackathon” at Odeo, and several others in the book.  The final chapter talks about Biz’s new company, Jelly, and how it came about because of a conversation with Ben Finkel.

There are other valuable points in the book, such as the value of constraint for creativity (like saying everything in 140 characters), creating “value before profit,” and the value of empathy.  There are some passages in the book where the relentless mention of Twitter gets tiresome, of course, and sometimes it’s hard to keep all of the characters from Twitter’s complex history straight.  But it’s a pretty good book – better than most former-CEO autobiography books that I’ve thumbed through.  This is the first that I’ve finished, actually.