This is the best guide I’ve read for innovation leaders and practitioners, yet it reads like a good spy novel. It offers a fascinating glimpse into the inner workings of creative intelligence and is a practical compendium of relevant cases studies, examples, stories, and advice. This remarkable book should be required reading for anyone interested in boosting organizational creativity, including every CIA leader and officer.
The authors bring unusual and valuable clarity to many issues associated with the innovation process, including the role of R&D. They offer many practical tools and techniques that can be used to identify and advance high-impact innovation opportunities. Most importantly, they offer insights into ways that innovative environments can be established, including the role and behaviors of innovative leaders. Finally, they establish that innovation is a mission-critical activity rather than a distraction from the core mission. This book should be read by all who are interested in creating mission impact.
The CIA’s national security mission puts it at the cutting edge of protecting America, and the three authors of Creating Mission Impact were among the most innovative Agency officers of the last several decades. They dedicated their careers with over 80 years of experience to enabling CIA to contend with a dramatically and rapidly changing threat landscape. Although the CIA has been among the most agile of government agencies, it still contended with bureaucracy, hierarchy, and well-established traditions of doing things in high-risk environments, which can make innovation and needed change quite difficult. This invaluable book’s description of successful innovation initiatives and strategies at CIA teaches both government and private sector employees how to grab leadership’s attention and increase the odds of implementation of new ways of doing business and increasing mission accomplishment. It should be required reading for everyone who wants to be a change agent with high positive impact in their organization.
,,,,,,,,,Chapters two and four are particularly illuminating. They focus on capturing attention for your ideas — how to brief them successfully — and the barriers to innovation. Each chapter offers specific and practical advice in these areas and offer much to think about. Officers at all levels would benefit from an examination of the tips offered in these two chapters. The authors have done yeoman research in the area as well. Excellent examples accompany each chapter. They also explore the intellectual underpinnings of innovation, resistance to change and emotional intelligence as a barrier to innovation. The combination of theory, example, and practical tips make the book a worthy read — not just for intelligence officers, but for anyone trying to produce needed organizational change. If there is a criticism, it is that the book is long overdue.
WIN Short-Form Book Reviews - Association of Former Intelligence Officers
.........Creating Mission
Impact is an innovative book about a much-advocated,
less-realized concept. Well written and thought provoking,
it is a very important contribution..........
Studies in Intelligence Vol. 69, No. 4 (Extracts, December 2025)
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