This is a review of Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming The Obstacles Between Vision and Reality by Scott Belsky.

I used a review copy that was sent to me (thanks for that).

Background

Scott Belsky is a speaker, a writer, and an entrepreneur with a focus on the creative industries. He oversees three major initiatives as founder and CEO of Behance:

• The Behance Network/Platform
• The 99%
• Action Method

Making Ideas Happen is a book that describes a method to execute creative projects. It challenges the notion that creative work must be chaotic, disorganized and subject to the whims and temperament of the artist. It also attempts to dispel the notion of the solitary, solo creator by emphasizing the benefits of collaboration.

The book is divided into three main sections:

Organization and Execution – this section spends time Behance’s Action Method of doing projects, by presenting a project execution methodology that is stripped down to the essentials and provides a lighter alterative to more complex project management methodologies. It also looks at personal work habits and other keys to success.

The Forces of Community – the section describes how you really can’t do it alone and how you can work better with other people to achieve great things.

Leadership Capability – projects and organizations need leaders (yes, even those in creative realms) – fine out more here, including rewards, team chemistry and management, and self-leadership.

My thoughts:

I looked forward to getting this book because I thought it would hold all of the answers that I was looking for within my own creative projects. I was initially disappointed with the book because, quite frankly, I didn’t read the title and description carefully enough before getting my review copy.

Here’s the thing: this book is designed for those people who know, at least in general terms, what they want to do, whether it is:

• Writing a book
• Recording music
• Putting on a play
• Creating a small organization to do good work
• And so on.

However, if you haven’t figured that part out yet, this book isn’t any good to you because you’ve got no way to apply it.

After I processed this information and reset my expectations, I came to the conclusion that this book is really quite good. It does all the usual things:

• Describes ideas and the justification behind them
• Provides examples and anecdotes from experts and key practitioners
• Maintains readability so that it doesn’t feel like a textbook

However, the biggest benefit of this book is that it makes project management, project execution and leadership less scary to people who are intimidated by those things. It provides enough structure to prevent chaos while not feeling like a straightjacket.

I think that this is the kind of book that should be read multiple times and, most importantly, be used. There’s a lot of wisdom here.

Rating: 9/10