Shortlisted for the Business Book of the Year Awards, Smart Thinking Category, 2024

Almost 80% of CEOs identify innovation and creativity as a top-three priority, yet 94% of employees report that their companies are poor in those areas. There is no larger gap between aspiration and reality in business today. Sparking Success uncovers the importance of creativity as a tool for innovation and demonstrates how it can be a driving factor for success. In order to adapt to fast-moving trends and disruptions in the modern business landscape, you need to spark your creative outlook.

In this book, Adam Kingl profiles organisations from the arts – theatre, painting, writing, television, improv, music, cooking – and how they foster creativity, inspiration and adaptability.  Interviews include leaders from Carnegie Hall, Disney Imagineering, Broadway theatre, and hit TV sitcom Friends.  Then the author finds business leaders in so-called ‘traditional industries’ who are redefining themselves as creative pioneers using these lessons from the arts. From media powerhouses such as Netflix to major manufacturers such as Bosch and Panasonic, this book shows the universal importance of creativity for business leaders across the world. Each chapter poses a challenge or opportunity that will help you tap into an innovative mindset with fascinating insights from leaders in a creative field, and then demonstrates how that mindset or habit is applied in a corporate environment. Discover how you can become a dynamic, creative and empathetic leader through Sparking Success.

Review:

Sparking Success is a wonderful book that explores how ideas and practices from the arts world—including theatre, television, music, writing and painting—can help us enhance creativity at both the individual and the organisational level.  This is a powerful book, full of ideas, practical tools and inspiring stories to guide us in the journey of developing a creative mindset.  It belongs on the shelf of every leader!

– Costas Markides, Professor of Strategy, Holder of the Robert Bauman Chair in Strategic Leadership at London Business School and author of Organizing for the New Normal

Review:

Sparking Success achieves exactly what the title promises: it helps every leader to be much more creative, an essential attribute in our unfamiliar times of opportunity, challenge and change.  Adam Kingl is a masterful writer about business and leadership: insightful, engaging and highly original.  He has that rare gift of understanding the reality of life for leaders and anyone building their career in the third decade of the 21st century and then speaking directly to their needs. This is an immense achievement when the context for many at work is shifting significantly worldwide.  Sparking Success succeeds by highlighting the essential power of creativity and shows how we can all benefit from being much more creative. An example of this is ‘One thing you can do on Monday morning” – a call to action that ends key chapters, enables the reader to apply key concepts to their own specific situation and builds into a practical playbook for the reader. Kingl enables readers to embrace the power of creativity with a thought-provoking work that is brimming with optimism, practical relevance and, appropriately enough, creativity. This surely makes him one of the most effective business writers of his generation.

– Jeremy Kourdi, Writer, Entrepreneur and former Senior Vice President, The Economist

Review:

Are you ready for the next work revolution? It may surprise you how easy it is to succeed as a leader if you follow the advice of this engaging book. In Sparking Success, Adam Kingl nimbly offers a journey of first-hand lessons from leaders in the arts on how to unlock our own creativity to be natural and genuinely effective at whatever it is that we do. From his fun choice of subjects – ranging from interviews with an improv jazz musician to a showrunner on TV’s Friends – to his swift analysis and application of the neuroscience behind innovation, the book is filled with insights interspersed with bursts of practical exercises such as ‘One thing you can do on Monday morning’. The best thing I did one Monday morning was to read this book!

–  Dina Dommett, Dean of Ashridge, Hult International Business School