Work is work, but it's better when done together

Skimming around Huffington Post during lunch, I found Jesse Kornbluth's blog post on working with Twyla Tharp on her new book that came out today, The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together. Kornbluth recounts his time working with her on the book, offering us a tasty morsel of insight on what it was like to work with a genius of her ilk. One of Tharp's earlier books, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life, was included in the Innovation and Creativity chapter of our The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. While it might have been regarded as a bit of a stretch to include The Creative Habit in a list of game-changing business books, Todd reasoned, "Artists have long struggled with constant and consistent idea generation for centuries longer than us corporate types. It is about time we use such methods of creativity to enrich our every project." According to Kornbluth, Tharp would agree that no matter what the work is—dance, design, or die-casting—the same principles of creativity and innovation apply because, she says, "work is work." In The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together, Tharp has written a book about the benefits of partnering, a theme that I am seeing quite often in the newest business/nonfiction books. Jack has recently reviewed and recommended Power of 2: How to Make the Most of Your Partnerships at Work and in Life by Rodd Wagner and Gale Mueller, published by Gallup Press. In The Power of 2, Wagner and Mueller propose that while there are certainly instances of individual success, when a person defies all odds and surmounts great challenges to excel at some endeavor, truly excellent work is more often the result of a great partnership, particularly one in which each person has complimentary strengths. While networking books abound, books that encourage you to gather a group of people that can help you land a better job or connect with new clients, these new books that focus on working together have a real spark of productivity to them, of creative combustion even. It's hard to share work, hard to give up control and to trust, but these books will inspire you to take the chance.