Quite simply one of the best creativity books we've seen in a long time. It's part of the "brilliant ideas" series, and the series format has been very well thought out.

There are 52 short chapters (handily one a week if your mind works well with that sort of structure). Apart from the main text there's a here's an idea for you box to try out straight away, try another idea that links to another of the sections, defining idea which is a relevant quote and how did it go, which gives guidance when it hasn't worked out properly for you. To be honest, the defining ideas weren't particularly inspiring, but that last section, how did it go, is a brilliant concept - not original, but (as I'm sure the authors will tell you) creativity isn't always about being original, and having a "how to fix it if it didn't work for you" bit is superb.

Each of the 52 sections is a different idea to enhance and open up your creativity. One of the reasons we really like this book is that there's a different focus to many other creativity books. When we've analysed creativity in the past we identify five focus areas to improve creativity. These are:

• culture (it's hard to be creative at work if the response to ideas is "shut up and get on with your job")
• techniques (specific processes to generate, structure and refine ideas)
• environment
• personal development
• and fun

There have been books on many of these areas (see below for the best of these), but the real gap has been around environment and personal development, and that's exactly where this book concentrates. It's not about techniques, it's about getting yourself in a more creative environment and helping yourself to develop creatively.

Although some of the approaches will be familiar to anyone who has read a creativity book before, there's plenty here that's fresh and fun. I loved, for example, "don't do lunch", subtitled "drink too much, stay up late, take the morning off, get up at 4am, do all the wrong things and then start being creative". Every chapter won't work for everyone, but there's enough variety and challenge here to get anyone into a more creative frame of mind. Excellent.

One slight moan. The layout of the book (a series standard) is very stylish, but it suffers from over-styling on the page. There are too many irrelevant illustrations that don't show you anything but are just there to set the mood, and the text is too busy - they would have been better to have had the same amount of text with about twice as much white space. But this isn't a serious problem.

Overall a refreshing and excellent addition to the creativity world. At the moment not available directly in the US, but it only costs a few dollars more to order it from Amazon.co.uk and have it shipped across.

This is a great book for two of the five elements of enhancing creativity: here are recommendations for the others:

	CULTURE - it's no use making individuals in an organization creative if the culture suppresses it. In fact it's counter-productive. This is an essential book on changing organizational culture to support creativity. Creativity and Innovation for Managers (Brian Clegg) -
	TECHNIQUES - can make or break creativity. This is our main guide to using techniques to be more creative, including the essential framework for making the ideas work. Imagination Engineering (Brian Clegg & Paul Birch) -
	TECHNIQUES - a superb resource book of 150 techniques that can be used as a week-by-week course (ideal to accompany Unleash Your Creativity) or as a dip-in resource.  Crash Course in Creativity (Brian Clegg & Paul Birch) -
	FUN - excellent guide to bringing fun to the workplace.  Fun Works (Leslie Yerkes) -