Voices Of Change: Embracing Creativity In The Modern Workplace With Jamie Woolf & Chris Bell

In today’s rapidly changing world, fostering a culture of creativity within the workplace has become increasingly essential for organizations to stay competitive and adapt to new challenges. In this episode, Tony Martignetti delves into the compelling journeys of Jamie Woolf and Dr. Chris Bell of Creativity Partners, exploring their shared commitment to fostering creativity and inclusivity in the workplace. They discuss the importance of creativity in the workplace, emphasizing the need for a supportive environment that encourages innovation and collaboration. Through their struggles and successes, Jamie and Chris provide valuable guidance on creativity, diversity, and overcoming obstacles.

---

Listen to the podcast here

Voices Of Change: Embracing Creativity In The Modern Workplace With Jamie Woolf & Chris Bell

Introduction

It is my honor to introduce you to my guests. I have Jamie Woolf and Chris Bell. Jamie Woolf was the first director of culture at Pixar Animation Studios. After twelve years at Pixar and providing leadership consulting to a wide variety of organizations, she Cofounded Creativity Partners. It works with a diverse spectrum of industries to cultivate healthy and innovative cultures. Wonderful. When not working, she's outdoors playing tennis and hiking. She lives in Berkeley with her partner, Dave. It's wonderful to have you.

I also want to introduce you to my second guest, Dr. Christopher Bell, who is the President of Creativity Partners and the Executive in Residence at the College of Media Communications and Information at the University of Colorado. For over twenty years, Dr. Bell has been redefining the idea of diversity training in organizational practice on college campuses and in companies.

From AT&T to the United States Air Force Academy to Pixar Animation and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. When not working, Chris is an avid tabletop gamer. Some examples of that are Warhammer, Old Dominion, and an amateur chef with a master chef dream. I love that. He plays the mean ukulele.

I'm a ukulele player myself, but not great or on special occasions, a banjo-lele. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Megan, his high school daughter, Liv, and his two spoiled rotten cats. I love it. Welcome to you both to the show. I'm thrilled to have you both here and we're going to have a great conversation. I love the fact that we have the two of you, some doing such amazing things in the world, and I am thrilled to be able to share with the readers. Welcome.

Thank you.

We're happy to be here.

Just hearing the background that you both have, it's something that a lot of people sometimes shy away from. They say, “All these creative individuals.” I think about all the impact that you've already made and the things you're up to now. It's exciting. I think we're at a very big moment in our society where we need to embrace more creativity in the workplace.

Flashpoints

Before we get into that, I want to get people to understand who you both are. We're going to do that through what's called Flashpoints. These are points in your journey that have ignited your gifts into the world. To do that, I'd like to turn it over to you. We'll see, maybe we'll start with Jamie, and then we'll go over to Chris. I'll turn it over to you to share what you're called to share. Along the way, we'll pause and see what's showing up.

Thank you, Tony. I already love the improvisational nature of this show. I think one flashpoint that comes to mind is not rehearsed because you told us that you would be asking about flashpoints. I think what initially came to mind for me is I grew up with a single mom and school teacher, and I'm an only child.

Growing up with my mom, who was wildly creative, there were always art supplies and crafts. She didn't want to be a teacher, but in that generation, she was told she could be a teacher or a nurse, and I think she would have loved to be an artist or a journalist. That said, we had a lot of creativity in the house. We went to museums all the time. I have to say, as a kid, I didn't love it, but now I do.

More importantly, I saw her as a schoolteacher, and she became a very motivated and passionate schoolteacher, but she got burned out. I saw how exhausted she was at the end of the day. I also heard her and her friends often talking about how they were silenced. They would raise issues and be shrugged off by the principal, by the union, or by the administration.

I saw my mom, this brilliant woman, being silenced. I think I made this unconscious decision to do two things with my life. One was to help people fulfill their potential, whatever that is, because I saw my mom who wanted to be a journalist. She wrote a column for the LA Times about being a teacher and tried to raise issues that way. She found a way to find out why we're on this planet and being able to fulfill our potential.

The other passion is creativity, which we'll talk about, but I'll say three now. The third is that many people are silenced in the workplace. I have two kids who are now entering the workplace. It is my deep desire to leave the workplace better than I found it or my mom found it with a lot of struggles to be heard when you don't exist in the C-suite. I'll stop there.

I love what you shared. When you see this early childhood memory that manifests as an adult, you realize you couldn't be silenced, either. There's that thing that starts to show up over and over again. You can't go through life and say, “That was nice, but here's what I do,” as many people do. They tend to sometimes fall into a rut or feel they're programmed to do other types of work, but you didn't.

Chris and I realized that there are many things we're compatible with. One is that I think we were both a little bratty and unwilling to be silent as kids. I might be speaking out of tune.

No, I think my mother would certainly agree with you there.

Wonderful. Now, I can't wait to hear Chris's story. Chris, please take it away.

Jamie did three. I guess I'll do three. One is, as a childhood story, my real flashpoint both for what I would end up doing in life and my entire personality as a human being. I am nine years old and I get chicken pox. When I got chicken pox, the way that we all got chicken pox in the ‘80s, was when my parents heard there was a kid in the neighborhood with chicken pox and then sent me to go get the chicken pox. That was a thing that parents did in the ‘80s. They purposefully subjected their kids to chicken pox.

I'm sick, I'm in bed. I'm by myself. I'm isolated in my room in the basement. My brother smuggled me into a small black and white television that he stole out of the kitchen, brought downstairs, and put in my room so I could not die of boredom. I watch television, and I watch the most brilliant cartoon I have ever seen in my entire life. It was brand new. It had come on the air, and no one had ever heard of it. I begged my brother to go tell my mom that I needed one of these toys right this second. He went and my mom felt bad for me.

She brought me one and that began my lifelong love of the Transformers. At that moment, I realized that someday in my life, I was going to do something that had to do with cartoons. That's what I was going to do with my life. Anyone who knows me knows that Transformers has 70% of my personality as a human being. I have been a lifelong collector and a lifelong storyteller, and I attribute this to that flashpoint moment.

Fast forward to I am graduating with my master's degree. I got my master's in screenwriting. I graduate. I have my pocket full of scripts, and I'm going to be a big Hollywood writer. I go up to Hollywood and I fail miserably. I completely crashed and burned because I learned very quickly the early 2000s was a very weird time to be me because I am a biracial human being.

Hollywood was very segregated in the early to late ‘90s and early 2000s. I was too black to write for white shows. I was too white to write for black shows. Nobody would hire me. I got distraught about it and I was moping and doping alone on the beach one day and my then girlfriend, now wife, came up to me and said, “I can't marry you like this. You're a mess. We need to figure you out.”

We had this big come to Jesus with her and my best friend and we all decided that I've always been good at school so I'm going to go back to school. I went back to school, I got my PhD, and that completely changed the trajectory of my life because, by the time my break came, I was ready for it in a way that now, looking back, I was in no way ready for when I was 23 years old.

If I had gotten a job back then, I probably would have sucked at it and would have ended up doing something else anyway. I was ready for it when it came and now I'm an excellent story consultant. I'm an excellent story analyst. I'm a good writer. None of those things was I when I was 23. I wasn't ready for it.

The last piece of it is I had an entire career trajectory. I had an entire life path and an entire research agenda. Then, we got our daughter. When my daughter came along, my whole world changed. My whole path changed. I moved out of celebrity studies. I was doing studies of fame, heroism, and stuff. I moved into gender studies and I've been doing gender studies work for the last almost 17 to 18 years now.

Most of my work is around femininity and what we teach kids about masculinity and femininity because my entire purpose in life at this point is to make sure that my daughter gets to live in a world that's better than the one that I grew up in, where she's not going to be silenced because she's Brown and she's not going to be silenced because she's a girl.

My daughter is extremely conventionally beautiful. Conventionally pretty, not in some trite, “I'm your dad. These are the things.” She checks off all the boxes Western society tells us makes somebody beautiful and every piece of media she consumes is designed to make her hate herself so that someone else can sell her something to make her feel better about the fact that they made her hate herself.

I think to myself, “If my kid is the prettiest girl in school and still feels this way, what hope does any other girl have in that school? What hope does any other girl on the planet have?” If this is the way that our system is designed and that system is jacked up, it's my whole goal to fix that system from the inside, from the reach up.

I'm not going to stand by and let people be silenced. I'm not going to stand by and let people be told to know their place and not break the chain of command. Your ideas aren't worth anything until you have this title and only these people are allowed to talk in the room. Those kinds of motivation killers, innovation killers, and spirit killers have no place in the modern workplace.

It's my goal to eradicate them. Jamie and I are very much aligned on the way that we approach creativity in the workplace. The way we approach people's voices and people's places. My bio says I've been trying to redefine diversity, equity, and inclusion. That's what I'm about. I am about the best idea in the room who wins, not the dude with the best title. The best idea wins.

If you get to have your ideas all the time because you silence everyone else around you, you're a bad leader. You've got to go and you got to fix yourself. That's the bottom line. I have a very different approach to DEI. Lots of DEI people say, “Let's get our arms around everybody and bring up.” I have a very Thanos view of DEI, which is, “Half of you got to go.” Then we'll fix the rest of them. That's the place that I'm coming from.

As long as it's not a Megatron view of the world.

Exactly, a very Eastern tyranny kind of a thing. No, I'm on a different vibe.

Chris, you tapped into a lot of things there. It has me thinking about this idea, and I'll come back to how this all plays together, but to break through, we need to first make sure that we understand the patterns we're getting into ourselves. Seeing through the matrix, if you will, is hard, but you have to be somebody who can see through your patterns and say, “What do I need to break down to break through?”

Ultimately, that's what a lot of organizations sometimes have to do as well. It's a personal journey, but it's also a journey that companies go through. They have to say, “What do we need to stop? We can start something more powerful and create an environment that is more conducive to creating a better society and a better place for people to be?” Many things you tapped into in your story were just, I felt, connected to that ideology. I’m glad that you decided to take this path because your voice shouldn't be silenced. It's an amazing, powerful voice in the world.

Thank you. I have found the absolute single most amazing partner to work with. Jamie is flatly brilliant and brings much to the table. I think it's been an interesting journey to move into this corporate space, which she navigates very well and knows much more about than I do. She brings some of this to the table with someone who has as much fire as I do but approaches it very differently than I do, which has been a real benefit to doing the work that I find important.

Origin Story

It seems like that. Now, it's a great segue. Maybe I'll toss it over to Jamie to start this dialogue and we can go from here. What brought the two wonder twins together, if you will? What brought this Creative Partners to be something that was a wonderful connection between two amazing people? There's a united passion and I think you have had some intertwining at Pixar, but tell me, what was the origin story of Creative Partners?

Our origin story is very simple. I saw Chris's TED Talk. Somebody brought it to my attention from, I think, Consumer products, and I was flat-out blown away. I said, “I need to meet this person. I got in touch with Chris and I said, “Please come to Pixar.” The rest is history. We met. It was instant flicking, getting each other, and being on the same wavelength.

I was brought into Pixar by Ed Catmull, then president and co-founder said, “Your mandate is to be constructively disruptive.” I see Chris on stage, embodying constructive disruption with such humor and storytelling mastery with grace, fire, and passion. I had to know him. I can't even believe my luck that that TED Talk has led to us being partners.

It's amazing. I'll say that the power of something like that is wonderful. I had a guest on. We were talking about how words have much power and the courageousness of putting your words out into the world can start a movement. In this sense, it started a company and moved two people together to make an impact. I think that all we can ask for is to put good words into the world that are courageous and allow us to create something that can help others.

One thing that you're doing, Tony, is you're eliciting stories because it's not words. It's stories. That's what touched my heart when I heard Chris.

Chris, maybe you want to add a little bit of your spin on this. Did she get it right?

It's funny because the TED Talk was a fluke in the first place. My students came up to me and they told me that there is an audition for this TEDx thing that is happening in town. I said, “Cool, are you guys going to audition?” They replied, “No, we want you to go.” I don't think that's going to happen. I have too much to do.

This is that thing Jamie and I talk about all the time, this efficiency mindset that clones its doors to you. I said, “No, I got too much to do.” However, they stuck with me. I didn't have anything prepared. I went in there and thought here's what I'm lecturing about this week. I'll cut it down to twenty minutes. I can do a twenty-minute lecture, whatever.

I go in. I was talking out of my class notes. One of my superpowers at this point, I think it's probably fair to say, is that Jamie experiences this all the time, much to her chagrin, and I am pretty good at making something up on the spot. That's one of the things that I do. If you give me an index card with 17 words on it, I'll speak for 20 minutes, I can make that happen.

I would have my lecture notes. I got up and I gave this talk. They said, “That was great. Can you do it like that?” I said, “No, I sure can’t.” “What?” “I will give you something in the neighborhood.” I did the TED Talk. It ends up going viral in a very short amount of time. I started getting all these phone calls. The day that floored me was I picked up the phone and the voice on the phone. Melendy Britt is not a household name but she is the original voice of She-Ra, Princess of Power.

As an ‘80s kid, I knew her voice immediately. I asked, “Why are you on my phone?” It was the most amazing thing. Marcia Cross was retweeting my things. How do all these famous people know who I am and know what's going on or whatever? When Jamie called me, I was in this mode of, “You and my friends are messing with me?” “Pixar is not calling me. That's ridiculous.”

It took a little bit into that phone call for me to realize she was serious and wanted me to come to the studio and talk. I wasn't going to go because I'm not going to lie. I'm going to try to keep this as 100 as possible. I talk a lot of crap about Disney in that TED Talk and Pixar is calling me and they want me to come? Part of me wanted to go, but part of me also felt like there was a real, “Come say it to my face.” vibe.

I didn't know if that was a cool thing. If I was going to go there, the Disney people would jump me when I got off the plane. I said, “I guess I'll take my lumps.” That's what's happening. I got on the plane, and I'm glad that I did because it turned into this fantastic partnership that is going on for a decade now. However, there was a real part of me that wasn't going to go.

They're going to show up at the office and they're going to beat you up.

The police were going to be there with their mouse ears and nightsticks, and it would be a whole thing. I was terrified.

Chris did get in the room with Pixar's buy-ups and was constructively disruptive.

I have no filter and cannot say whatever the thing that needs to be said in the room, whether people it or not. There's a little bit of disruptiveness there, for sure.

Constructive Disruption And Creativity

I want to lead into that concept a bit more because I assume this is also an area that you love talking about, the constructive disruption and how that also connects to creativity. Let's expound on that a little bit in your own words. Maybe Jamie, if you want to start, and then we can head over to Chris. Tell me what that concept means and how people can embrace that more.

The origins. Ed Catmull coined that term during our interview. He was very honest in the interview about how he wanted to shake up the Pixar culture. He was worried that problems weren't surfacing to him because of his intimidating title, even though he's the least intimidating and leader with the least ego that I've ever met.

He also felt that because of all of the success, Pixar would become stale and derivative. Shaking up the status quo but not being a bull in a china shop. Be constructive, but if you're not disrupting, somebody else will disrupt you. We always say that people have a love-hate relationship with creativity. They love it because it sounds great.

Everybody logically understands that you need to be creative to be the best in class, beat out the competition, come up with original ideas, and solve vexing problems. We get creativity, and we love it, but we also hate it when you scratch under the surface of any company. You start to see that we're over-indexing on efficiency and profit.

The metrics of over-index extinguish creativity. We need to separate efficiency and metrics, which Ed always said, “Let's not talk about box office when we're talking about this idea of a rat that's going to make fancy cuisine.” He was very disciplined, saying, “We are not talking about profit when we're in the creative mode.”

We need to delineate the creative process. Of course, we need to be efficient and profitable. There's a way to protect the creative process that by the way involves a lot of pressure, deadlines, and challenges. It's not you're in the creative process without guardrails, but there's a very different mindset. The other thing that we truly believe is that you need to have a trustworthy environment.

That means that you need to trust that if there's dissonance in the room, it's a good thing. Steve Jobs drilled that into the Pixar culture, too, that you need to have dissonance, not harmony, to create creativity. That requires psychological safety, trust, and welcoming. Expecting and welcoming people to speak truth to power and it's very rare.

Something that's coming to mind, and I do want to hear Chris's perspective on this, but I also think that when I think about creativity, let's swap out the word for a moment and say if creativity wasn't the word we used. Instead, we said, change. Creativity is change. It's about imagining a future or imagining a different way of doing something.

People are afraid of change. They say they want change, but when they do get change, they are usually afraid of what that might look like. One of the things that we should correlate that with is that if we want something different, we have to think creatively about it. That means that it's going to thrust upon us a different way of looking at things.

It is true. Change and creativity. We want certainty and familiarity. That's why successful companies often fail because they want to stick with the familiar look that it got us success. The success that got you there won't get you to the next level of success. Many companies don't survive with that mindset. It takes trust and courage to thrust yourself into that zone of turmoil, iteration, and experimentation that's different than the more linear, “Let's get efficiently from A to B.”

Successful companies often fail because they want to stick with the familiar.

Chris, I'll turn it over to you for a moment to see if there's anything you want to add to the texture of this conversation.

Yes, from my perspective, where I come in the constructive disruptive space. To be 100% honest, I have very little patience for very “Serious people.” I think those kinds of people are the reason why innovation and creativity struggle in workplaces because the more you focus on profit, deliverables, end game, and efficiency. Here's the reality. It's a reality nobody likes to hear, but everyone needs to hear, which is why I always say it out loud. Work doesn't have to suck.

It doesn't. Work does not have to suck. Yet, we make workplaces suck all the time. I don't know why we do that. It doesn't matter what you do. It doesn't matter if you are doing something you love. It doesn't matter if you're doing something you've always wanted to do. When you have to do a thing, it makes it less fun.

When people put structural obstacles in your way, it makes it hard. I don't know why we do that. Yet, we do it all the time. People make workplaces less fun. If you want to get the most out of the people who work for and with you, you have to stop doing that. You have to stop making work so much work. The more we can inject fun and play, the more that we can make people feel as though coming to work and doing work is an enjoyable experience, and the more they will give us in terms of productivity, in terms of efficiency, and in terms of all of those deliverable outputs that we want.

I'm a huge believer that if you want the best out of the people who work around you, you work less at work and play more. I think you can do that through big and small things. Can you do stuff like throw a box of Legos in your break room, put together a puzzle table, and put some ping-pong tables in the lobby? Sure, you can do that but you can also do it in small ways as well.

You can start meetings off with something fun rather than walking in with your Manila folder, throwing it down, and saying, “Here's what we got to deal with.” You could start your meetings with, “Everybody, go around the table and say two cool things that happened to you this weekend.” Then, we're in a different mindset and moving into the thing that we have to do.

You can gamify. I'm a huge fan of gamification. There are prizes for the people who get the most sales calls this week. Let's keep a leaderboard here and assign points to those who said the funniest thing in the meeting or people who have those little quote walls, “You said a thing, that's going on the wall.” Those kinds of things are small but make the work environment more fun to be in and more playful because they put people into a creative mindset.

When people are more creative, they are more innovative. When people begin to develop, one of the things that artists do, whether it's writers or physical artists, is they see the world slightly differently. How do we begin to see the world slightly differently? We say, “Here's what's normal and I'm going to do something a little bit to the left of that.”

If we can get into that mindset about work, you'd be surprised how much better problem-solving skills people develop, how much more lateral thinking people can do, how much more critically they're able to analyze, and so forth. You're going to get the best out of people the more you give them space to be creative.

Time And Creativity

I love it when you're sharing this. I was thinking about this idea that great ideas come on the fringes of fields. They don't happen in the main center place of a particular discipline. They usually happen on the fringe because there's a sense of while you're playing on the fringe with something else. That's where things start to bubble up. The key thing that I keep on tapping into and this came to mind around a conversation I had recently about how time is the biggest limiting factor.

We don't allow ourselves or our teams to have that play, to have that creativity, and it's because we feel that we're also time-poor, and we feel that we have to buckle up, move forward, and get results. The reality is what you're saying, and I think that I can connect with this, is that when we give ourselves a little more time to play, we get better results and better-engaged employees. People are connected. They're creative and they're doing things. I'd love to hear your thoughts about that.

The most important investment your workplace will ever make is not financial, it's not capital or material. It is relational. Giving people the opportunity to build relationships will make a better workplace and a better business, period. Go ahead, Jamie.

The most important investment your workplace will ever make is not financial, capital, or material. It is relational.

There's a lot of research. One of the things that we do at Creativity Partners is we ground everything we do in academic research and social science research. Chris is my partner. There's a lot of stuff out there that isn't grounded in the science of the research. Ashley Whillans at Harvard has done a lot of work on time poverty and time affluence.

The creativity is extinguished as is motivation, retention, and all of the things that businesses need to thrive. Megan Reitz in the UK has a lot of work about mindfulness and spaciousness, which is a requirement for doing good business. Woo-woo is the hard stuff, in our opinion. It's not our opinion. It's grounded in research.

Lessons

We're going to run out of time quickly. I wish we had hours upon hours to dig into these topics, but I'd like to hear a lesson that you've learned about yourselves in this journey, whether it's something about creativity or about personal journey through life that you want to share with people that you haven't already shared. Maybe we'll start with Chris this time and then we'll go over to Jamie.

I'm glad Chris has to go first. Thanks for that.

The biggest lesson that I've learned that has been helpful for me on my journey is not to attribute malice where ignorance is a sufficient explanation. Not to assume people are doing things on purpose. Instead of approaching it from the perspective of maybe they don't know the impact of what it is that they're doing. I've found that approach has opened a lot more doors to conversations than how I used to be in the world, which is getting mad at everyone for everything all the time.

I think going in with a little bit of grace and a little bit of, I bet if they knew what they were doing, they would do something different. Sometimes it doesn't work out. Sometimes people are doing things on purpose. Now you know, but at least you came from a position of grace. Unball your fists. Your fists don't have to be balled up all the time. You can approach people with a little bit of grace.

I love that, Chris. I wrote that. I'm going to quote you. I love it.

How about you, Jamie? What are some things that come to mind for you?

One of the things that the passion project that Chris and I are doing is Grow Your Moxie. It's a program for leaders at all levels, but we do a lot of coaching with women and people of color. I think one of the lessons I learned is being as silenced as other people are when you speak truth to power. My job at Pixar was to be constructively disruptive, which means that you will get resistance.

You will be put in the doghouse. You will get resistance. Given that's the case, I think what I always help people understand when they do feel they have a strong why for speaking up is that you will be made to feel wrong for doing the right thing. Especially, I think a lot of younger people will internalize, “I said too much.” “I spoke up.” I've been talking to a lot of people who have been laid off from different industries. “Maybe if I hadn't spoken my mind too much, I’ve been a troublemaker.”

No, that's the wrong conclusion. Keep speaking up. What we're trying to teach people is you have to speak up in a skillful way and at the right time. Also, sometimes not speak up, but you will be made to feel wrong for doing the right thing, which depersonalizes it. For me, that's been my mantra because we can't change things if we don't speak up. We don't want a workforce filled with people who are toeing the line and telling bosses what they want to hear.

I love that lesson because there's something about that, which is that's how you find the people you belong with most when you do speak up. People say, “I love that she said better. I love that he said that because that's how I feel, too.” You then start to realize that other people feel the same way and that's the belonging you're looking for in connection with others who feel and think the same way. Not that we want to have an echo chamber, but it's more about realizing that you're not alone in feeling that.

Impactful Books

Our last question is always a fun one. I can't wait to hear the answer to this question. What are 1 or 2 books that have had an impact on you and why? If it's three, that's okay too. If you want to break the rules, that's what you guys are all about. Let's break some rules if you want. I'll start with, I guess, Chris, if you're called to be the first.

I got three, so there we go. The first one is the story that made me want to tell stories. It's a story that's very close to me and that is X-Men number 390. You have to be an X-Men fan to understand X-Men number 390. It is the end of my grand arc that takes place in the early 1990s. It is the death of Colossus that happens in that book. He sacrifices himself to save the world.

It was the first time that a comic book made me cry and figure out the power of the story in a way that was different than when I was eight and watching Transformers. I wanted to tell deep, meaningful stories that could move people and could have power. That story still resonates with me quite a bit. The second one is a book called Eating the Dinosaur. It's a Chuck Klosterman book.

I think Chuck Kloshman is flatly brilliant. He was a columnist for Rolling Stone for a long time. He's written a lot of cool things, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. He is a popular culture scholar, just like I am. Eating the Dinosaurs is an amazing book. If you travel back in time, you should always eat the dinosaur. That's the central concept of that book. The third one is a book called Don't Let the Pigeon Drive The Bus.

It is a children's book. It's written by Mo Willems, who used to be the head writer for Sesame Street. I have the pigeon tattooed on my arm. It is the book that connected my daughter and me. I've never heard a human being laugh as hard as the first time I read that book to her. I still get slightly weepy thinking about it. That was the moment when I felt like a dad. I carry that with me everywhere I go. Those are my three.

That's wonderful. I love it. First of all, this is a first for the show. I've had 270 episodes now and never had a comic book mentioned as a book. Meet is something that people wanted to mention. I love that. I like to change things up, but it's amazing. I love what you shared. Jamie, please take us away.

The first nonfiction is Your Brain on Art. It was written by Ivory Ross and Susan Magsamen, and when I read this book, it rocked my world because it validated much of what we do in the workplace around art and engaging in creativity. Now, there's science to it and all this research. When I read this book, much like when I saw Chris in a TED Talk, I reached out to Ivy on LinkedIn and said, “You rocked my world.”

Thirty seconds later, she wrote back, “Let's jump on a call.” Then we've spent a lot of time together. I tried to help her launch a movement and spent time with Susan and some amazing creatives and artists in the world. The second two are fiction, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. That's the most brilliant book maybe I've ever read. It was unbelievable. When I read the blurb about it, I thought, “That's not a book for me. It's about it's more a book for Chris.”

Somebody said, “My wife and Jamie are very much alike.” When she gave me that book, she said, “You're going to love this.” I said, “I don't read the same books you do.” It turns out that book is amazing.

That might be our intersection, Chris. That one book, although I do think that Don't Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus. I love children's books so much. I think we intersect on that one too. I love when you have a writer who constructs a character that you feel you know and you can't wait to get back to that book and it's a world that feels real. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and then also Demon Copperhead blew me away for the same reason. The voice, the humor, the sensitivity, the authenticity to it, and the realness of the character. I learned so much. Those three books rocked my world.

I love that you bring this up. First of all, I have to go and buy a couple of those. Your Brain on Art is one of my favorite books lately, and it's a brilliant book, but Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is now going to be a book I'm picking up. I'm going to buy that and figure it out.

We'll have another talk. We'll have a book club afterward.

Book club about Ron's, ours, and mine.

I was thinking about this idea of how cool it is to think about, as an adult reading a child's book now and looking at it from a different lens, but also writing one. Even if it's a short story, look at it from the lens of how you create a book with all of the innuendos and the different themes that can teach, but from a very playful lens. I think that's something that is a cool exercise to go through. Anyway, I digress.

One of my favorite classes at UCLA was called ZitLit because I still love YA fiction.

Me too. I've published seven books about Harry Potter. I'm right there in that.

I know we're at a time, and I wanted to say thank you very much for coming to the show. This was wonderful. I'm completely amazed by both of you.

Thank you for the invitation.

Thank you so much, Tony. This was a lot of fun. The time went by fast.

I know. I looked up. I said, “Wait, have we been here an hour already?”

It's crazy, and before I let you go, I want to ask, where can people find out more about you, both of you?

Creativity-Partners.com and we're Chris@CreativityPartners.com and Jamie@Creativity Partners.com. Anything else, Chris, to find us?

We're both on LinkedIn and the company is also on LinkedIn. Who knows, maybe you can find us in your lobby. No stalking. The day's not over yet, but no, please reach out.

Thank you again for coming on the journey with us and thanks to the readers. This has been a wonderful episode and I'm looking forward to hearing what people think. Thank you again.

Thank you very much, Tony.

Thanks.

You're welcome.

Important Links

• Jamie Woolf
• Jamie@Creativity Partners.com
• Dr. Christopher Bell
• Chris@CreativityPartners.com
• Creativity-Partners.com
• X-Men number 390
• Eating the Dinosaur
• Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs
• Don't Let the Pigeon Drive The Bus
• Your Brain on Art
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
• Demon Copperhead
• LinkedIn – Creativity Partners

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! https://www.ipurposepartners.com/podcast