Book Review: Unleashing Engineering Creativity

Can you do that? Review a book that you wrote? Hey, Gresh and I write the blog. Why am I even asking?

The book is Unleashing Engineering Creativity, and it came about as the result of a course I teach on engineering creativity. The cover photo you see above popped up on my Facebook feed yesterday (there’s old Zuckerberg, thinking of me again). So I shared the picture, and somebody made a comment that they didn’t understand the photos.

Okay, here’s the deal. Paul Mauser is widely credited as the guy who invented the bolt action rifle, and as he told the story, the idea came to him when he observed a simple gate latch (like you see on the book cover above). That led to a long line of Mauser and other bolt action rifles (but Mauser was the first). The one in the photo above is a Modelo 1909 Argentino Mauser, arguably the best version ever of the famed Model 98 Mauser (I have one and it is phenomenally accurate). The gate latch? That came from Lowe’s. I bought it to shoot the above photo.

You might think that engineers sit around in white lab coats and think deep thoughts when they need to invent something. It actually doesn’t work that way. No engineer worth a damn sits around very much, and when we have to invent things on demand, we’re usually not very good at it. In most companies, engineers just spitball it. You know, what we euphemistically call brainstorming (it’s no accident that the initials are so appropriate; it’s not a very effective way to come up with new designs).

The bad news is that we (as human beings) are at our most creative when we’re about 5 years old, and we lose much of our natural creativity (over 90%, according to the experts) by the time we finish high school. More bad news is that our creativity continues to erode after that. Bad news indeed, but the good news is that there are a bunch of great techniques we can use to get our creativity back.

One such technique is called TRIZ. It’s an acronym for a bunch of Russian words I can’t pronounce, but basically it means we define the problem we are trying to solve and then we look into other areas in other fields to see how they solved the problem. Like Paul Mauser did when he invented the bolt action rifle. TRIZ is a little more complicated that, but you get the idea.

Unleashing Engineering Creativity has 17 different approaches for improving creativity. It’s an expensive book, but if you’re looking to make the next technological breakthrough, the book’s cost is trivial. Like I always tell people: Don’t wait for the movie. I suppose I could do a YouTube video on some of the concepts. Maybe later. That YooHoo review still needs doing.

Joe Berk