Jamie M.

In The Unicorn Project, we follow Maxine, a senior lead developer and architect, as she is exiled to the Phoenix Project, to the horror of her friends and colleagues, as punishment for contributing to a payroll outage. She tries to survive in what feels like a heartless and uncaring bureaucracy and to work within a system where no one can get anything done without endless committees, paperwork, and approvals. One day, she is approached by a ragtag bunch of misfits who say they want to overthrow the existing order, to liberate developers, to bring joy back to technology work.

When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist.

The seemingly intractable problems we face today, says author Marty Neumeier, are symptoms of a more basic problem—our inability to deal with interconnected, nonlinear, amorphous challenges. Success in the post-industrial era asks that we move our thinking from the static, the linear, and the step-by-step to the dynamic, the holistic, and the creative. In this breathtaking vision of professional mastery, Neumeier presents five metaskills—feeling, seeing, dreaming, making, and learning—to help you reach your true potential in the creative workplace of the future.