Forster N. - Maximum performance (2005)(en)

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week as a hospital intern. A vice-chancellor of a large university. A computer games software developer. A scientist working on nanotechnologies or biocomputers. A resource or mining manager. The CEOs of any of the Fortune top 100 companies.

It can be a sobering experience when we first realize that our personal understanding of the ‘real world’ is usually quite limited. When we look at the life worlds that most people inhabit, we invariably find that these are constructed and constrained by their upbringing, culture, gender, unique life experiences and education, as well as their choice of profession and the kinds of organizations they have chosen to work in. Hence the starting point on the journey to becoming more creative and innovative is the realization that there are a remarkable number of real worlds out there. All of these have the potential to inform the way we lead people and how we manage our businesses or organizations. Making the most of this journey means reading voraciously, studying areas of knowledge outside our immediate area of expertise, and taking the blinkers off. So, if you are an engineer, a technician or an accountant, read up on some qualitative or ‘soft’ subjects, such as existential philosophy or psychology or sociology. If you are an artist, graphic designer or a musician, read some Stephen Hawking. If you work in a university, spend at least 10 per cent of your time working with companies in the private sector. If you work in a large bureaucratic organization, read some books on innovation and entrepreneurship. If you run a small company, study the histories, cultures and management practices of the best (and the worst) large companies. If you haven’t travelled much, read up on the cultures and histories of other countries, or take a sabbatical and travel yourself. If you are hopeless at numbers, enrol on a statistics course. If you hate speaking in public, take some classes in presentation skills. Whatever you do, extend your personal ‘envelope’, push the bubble and get outside your comfort zone.

Read, or subscribe to, professional journals and magazines that have nothing to do with your job, profession or occupation. You will be amazed at how often insights and ideas from apparently unrelated areas have applications to your business, the way you go about doing your job and the way in which you go about leading and managing others. Increase your faith in intuition or ‘gut-feelings’. If you are skilled at information gathering and analysis, and lateral thinking, the chances are that your instincts will be the right ones to follow. We remarked in the notes at the end of Chapter 6 that intuition is a much undervalued management skill, and simply means the ability to make good decisions with incomplete data. At times, you will simply have to trust your judgment and go with this. Let your playful and child-like quality come out, use your daydreams and allow your unconscious

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mind to roam free.3 Make the most of your ‘creative bubbles’ and keep a notebook or electronic organizer to jot down any new ideas that you come up with. These will often pop up at the most unexpected moments, when doing the ironing, when out walking, during the night or when waking up in the morning, when our unconscious minds ‘release’ new ideas into the conscious mind. Remember also the emphasis placed on fun and creative learning in the companies we looked at in Chapter 4. Humour is a font of creativity, and creativity drives innovation.

Other useful insights into the creative mind can be found in the biographies of business leaders, innovators and paradigm breakers. A good starting point is the autobiographies of Akio Morita, Andy Grove and Thomas Edison, who were true visionaries, maverick geniuses and social philanthropists. Make creative use of all the future-casting, innovation and new technology sites that are now available on the web. Network incessantly and find a group of people or a partner who may share your ideas or vision of a new business opportunity. There are many examples of this kind of collaboration in the past, including the Wright Brothers, Gates and Allen at Microsoft, Jobs and Sculley at Apple, the Phillips Brothers and Hewlett and Packard, all of which can be described as genuine chalk and cheese partnerships. Last, but not least, make full use of the variety of presentation and persuasion skills that were reviewed in Chapter 3 to describe what you see to your peers, bosses and followers. You may have some great ideas, but you must be able to convince the people you work with that your ideas (or reinterpretations of reality) are correct, and also represent the right way, road or path to travel along in the future. If you can find some time to develop the skills described in this section, you will become more creative and innovative, more capable of envisioning the future and in a much better position to persuade other people that your ideas and innovations are the right ones to pursue.

In summary, the only way to become more open-minded and creative is to embrace different mind-sets. By taking this leap, we are then in a better position to make dissociative leaps between different real worlds and the bodies of knowledge they encapsulate. In turn, this will lead to greater personal creativity and innovation. Perhaps the best exemplar of this principle is Peter Drucker, the most innovative and visionary management thinker of the 20th century. In the early 1950s, he predicted that computer technologies would transform all businesses. In the 1960s, he was one of the first to warn of the rise of Japan as an economic powerhouse, and the first to warn of its economic decline when it was at the peak of its industrial power in the mid-1980s. Among many other new ideas he developed were ‘knowledge workers’,

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‘management by objectives’ and ‘privatization’. He was among the first to extol the importance of innovation in organizations and, more recently, to question pure economic rationalism as a sensible way to manage businesses. His ability to create these ideas stemmed in part from the sheer range of the intellectual and practical interests he pursued. These ranged from history to economics, from psychology to philosophy, from African cultures to Japanese art and opera. His consulting portfolio embraced hundreds of organizations, including small businesses, multinational corporations, churches, hospitals, NGOs, charities and governments. In 2004, at the age of 94, he was still searching for new and better ways to understand how business works and, more importantly, continued to make bold intuitive predictions about the future of business.

The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

(F. Scott Fitzgerald, cited by Richard Schickel, The Disney Version, 1968)

We become creative by finding a likeness between things that were not alike before. The creative mind is a mind that looks for unexpected likenesses in everyday things.

(Jacob Bronowski, 1980)

Creativity and innovation in practice

What is most remarkable about breakthrough thinking is that the way in which this process works has changed little over the last 100 000 years, although the general pace of innovation has certainly accelerated over the last 1000 years. From the time when our earliest ancestors discovered how to make fire by creating friction between two sticks; to using flints, stones and other materials to create a variety of tools and weapons; to employing coloured ochre to create the first cave paintings; to the discovery of smelting; the development of the wheel; the building of the first boats and the development of sails; the domestication of animals and planting seasonal crops in settled communities and, laterally, to the development of written languages, mathematics and philosophy; all of these innovations stemmed from creative imagining, breakthrough thinking and by asking the perennial question, ‘What if we . . .?’ The Greek scientist and innovator, Archimedes, was certainly not the first person to experience a Eureka moment in human history.

Two of the most famous examples of dissociative and creative leaps of imagination are the Gutenberg Press and the development of the first heavier-than-air flying machine. In the mid-15th century, only a tiny

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number of people were literate (primarily the clergy and some of the nobility), and all books were written by hand and took months to produce. Johannes Gutenberg, a German metal worker, had a vision and a mission: to create an efficient technology for mass-producing Bibles. He did not have to start from scratch. Primitive wood-plate printing did exist, but still required the laborious carving of every single page of a document or book. The actual printing was also done manually, by pressing the wooden plate against the paper. The finished product, while cheaper and quicker to produce, was of poorer quality than the hand-written books of the time. Gutenberg’s first breakthrough came as the result of a lateral leap. As a metal worker, he was familiar with the metal stamps used to emboss the wax seals on official documents. He then conceived the idea of a series of small metal stamps or plates, each with letters and symbols that could be assembled into the text for a given page. Multiple copies could then be printed off and the plates reassembled for the next page, and so forth. He then needed to find an efficient mechanical method for pressing the plates against the paper. After wrestling with this problem for months, he was taking a break and attending a local wine festival. By chance, he encountered another technology that would enable him to make the next vital breakthrough. There, amidst the high spirits and drunken revelry of the festival, he saw one of the first mechanical wine presses in Europe. Instantly, a lateral link occurred, and he developed this technology into a machine that led, amongst other things, to the industrial and scientific revolutions of the 19th century and the emergence of democracy in the 20th century. The arrival of the first recognizably modern printing press in 1455 had as big an impact on the world at that time as the Internet and the personal computer are having on our world today.

More recently, in the 1890s Orville and Wilbur Wright – like Leonardo da Vinci before them – took their initial inspiration from the flight of birds and the use of propellers to provide the necessary thrust for takeoff, combined with the new science of aeronautics. They assumed that they could make use of theories of propeller design contained in marine engineering textbooks. They quickly discovered that there weren’t any. After much brainstorming they developed a new theory: that the propeller should be thought of not as a screw, as used on ships to displace water, but as a rotary wing. Just as the wings of the plane would give lift, the ‘wings’ of the propeller would pull the plane forward. This breakthrough thinking allowed the Wright Brothers to apply what they already knew about wing design to the design of their propellers. Combined with a redesigned and more powerful internal combustion engine taken from already existing car engine technology, this was the last major hurdle to be overcome before powered flight became a reality (abridged from Perkins, 2001: 5–6, 44–6).

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Around the same time, when Edison’s inventors were developing the light bulb, their experimental bulbs kept falling out of their sockets. After trying dozens of different fixtures, one technician noted that the threaded cap of a kerosene bottle kept it firmly in place. Eureka, and the introduction of a design that has not changed in US light bulbs for more than one hundred years (Hargadon and Sutton, 2000:32). Again, what use could you make of glue that can’t join anything together? Marketing executives at 3m were shown this in the 1930s and, naturally enough, couldn’t think of any use for glue that didn’t dry and couldn’t actually stick things together. In the 1940s, one employee, who was also a devout Christian, realized that it was ideal for marking the pages of the bible that he was reading. He had also noticed that the bookmarks placed in hymnals at his church invariably fell out. After initially being taken up and used by secretaries within the company, the product was eventually marketed and became a hugely successful product. It is now sold in a mind-boggling array of shapes, colours, designs and dispensers in almost every country in the world: the ubiquitous Post It.

Another example of both lateral association and incubation is Velcro (from the ‘vel’ of velvet and the ‘cro’ of crochet). During the late 1940s, a Swiss national named George de Mistral was both irritated and intrigued by the way that the burrs of cocklebur bushes clung like limpets to his clothing and his dog when he returned from hiking or climbing. Examining these under a microscope, he saw that the burrs were covered in thousands of tiny hooks that caught on the tiny cotton hooks of his clothing (and his dog’s coat). Taking a lateral step, he conceived of developing a synthetic equivalent that could be used as a simple fastener on many different products. He approached several textile firms with his idea, and was rejected by all but one, a weaver from Lyon, who painstakingly created a prototype that he called a ‘locking tape’. However, it took another seven years to incubate the product and find a material sufficiently strong and flexible to cope with thousands of openings and closings. After many experiments, he eventually discovered that infrared-treated nylon became almost indestructible. By the late 1950s, 55 million metres of Velcro were being produced each year, and it has been estimated that four out of five of the world’s inhabitants have at some time owned a product that includes a Velcro fastener.

A more recent example of the power of bisociation is Java-Logs. Launched in 2003, these are made from 100 per cent recycled spent coffee grounds – a useful way to recycle the world’s most consumed beverage. These logs generate 25 per cent more energy and three times the heat of wood logs. At the same time, they produce 50 per cent less

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soot. Best of all, in an era of growing concerns about the impact of humanity on the natural environment, they also recycle an otherwise completely useless waste product from landfill sites: the traditional home of coffee dregs (Green Business, 2003).

Last, but not least, what could be created from these elements (Perkins, 2001: 56)?

Binary arithmetic + Charles Babbage’s calculating machine (first conceived in the early 19th century) + the Punch Card (first devised by Herman Hollerith, for the 1890 census in the USA) + the audion tube (invented in 1906) + symbolic logic (developed by Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead between 1910 and 1913) + the concepts of programming and feedback (which had arisen out of several abortive attempts to develop more effective anti-aircraft guns during World War 1).4

The most striking characteristic of the Wright Brothers, and other innovators and inventors, has been their ability to reframe reality and/or to look at existing realities in different ways, thereby becoming breakthrough thinkers. Linking already existing bodies of knowledge, or bisociation, is a very common way of creating new innovations, but, as we saw in the last example, sometimes it can take decades for people to pull together disparate bodies of knowledge to create something new. Charles Handy has described this process as ‘the displacement of concepts’: the ability to make links between two apparently unrelated areas in order to create a novel idea or product (Handy, 1999). Almost all human innovations have been derived from these processes, and the next section will look at how these can be built into the operational cultures and management practices of organizations.

Creating an innovative organization

Revel in your glorious failures. Dance on the borderline between success and disaster, because that’s where your next success will come from. (Alberto Alessi, CEO of the innovative Italian product design company Alessi, cited by Wylie, 2001)

You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find the prince; but remember that one prince can pay for a lot of frogs.

(Art Fry, talking about the innovative culture at 3m, The Australian, 3 March 1999)

Very few businesses will ever be lucky enough to find a Bill Hewlett, an Akio Morita or a Thomas Edison in their ranks, and innovative companies have long recognized that they cannot rely on a few maverick innovators or solitary geniuses to create new ideas. These organizations have created cultures that attract creative people and fostered

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working practices and processes that encourage the creation, crossfertilization and rapid dissemination of new ideas. As John Browne, CEO of BP, has commented, ‘The conventional wisdom is that excelling in incremental learning is a science – a matter of installing the right processes – while excelling in breakthrough thinking is more of an art. I disagree about the latter: I think you can install processes that generate breakthrough thinking. We have’ (cited by Prokesch, 1997: 150). Research over the last decade has shown that innovative companies like BP focus their energies in five main areas.

1They spend a lot of time and resources identifying and recruiting employees with good technical skills, who are also creative, have high levels of intrinsic motivation and whose personalities will fit in with their organizational cultures.

2They create work environments that foster and support the creation of new ideas amongst their employees.

3They recognize that new ideas are not the privilege of a minority of employees; everyone, at all levels, can and should contribute.

4They have leaders who know, intuitively, which are the right ideas to back and push into the marketplace.

5They reward employees who create new ideas and do not punish them if their experimental ideas fail.

This systemic and systematic approach to innovation means that creative mind-sets are built into the cultures of these organizations, their employees’ daily working practices and their human resource policies. How can the leader of a traditional company go about creating such a mind-set? It might sound daunting, but it can be done with time and commitment and, once established, the bottom line will shine through. The next section contains some suggestions for creating an innovative organizational culture (developed from Hamel, 2001a; 2001b; 2000a; 2000b; Harvard Business School, 1999; Drucker, 1985).

Understand creativity and innovation

As a leader/manager you have to really understand the process of lateral thinking, creativity and breakthrough thinking, and how this differs fundamentally from day-to-day linear thinking. This also requires nurturing and resourcing, because a ‘bean-counter’ mentality will not generate breakthrough thinking, nor will ‘cost-cutting’ or ‘efficiency drives’. It also means appreciating that it is a huge step from coming up with an innovative idea to then turning it into a concept for development, assessing its feasibility and market potential, pushing it

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through product development, marketing and advertising it and, finally, selling it in the marketplace. As Gary Hamel has observed:

For every 1000 ideas, only 100 will have enough commercial promise to merit a small-scale experiment, only ten of these will warrant a substantial financial commitment, and of those, only a couple will turn out to be unqualified successes. It’s the inverse log scale behind innovation. Innovation is an inherently inefficient process [ ] As top management strives for ever-greater efficiency, it must learn to tolerate ‘stupid’ ideas and ‘failed’ experiments. Those are the byproducts of a well-functioning innovation pipeline.

(Hamel, 2001b: 76–7).

In other words, to create even one great idea that will take the marketplace by storm, you need to generate hundreds of small ideas from your employees. Really big or revolutionary breakthroughs are very rare. This is an important point, because even the most innovative firms get it wrong sometimes. For example, do you remember satellite phones, promoted as the next-big-thing in telecommunications a few years ago? In the early 1990s, Motorola decided to back Iridium’s development of a system of 66 geostationary, low-orbit satellites, to create a global phone network that would operate independently of terrestrial systems. Big mistake. This strategy threatened national telephone monopolies and, as a result, it failed and cost the company $US150 million. Consequently, Motorola was very slow getting into the digital phone market and initially paid a heavy price for falling behind Nokia, who had got into this market at the very beginning. Another example was the battle between the Betamax video-recorder, first unveiled by Sony in 1974 and the VHS system unveiled by JVC in 1976. Both companies took an already existing technology (originally created by the American company, Ampex, in 1954), miniaturized the main components and targeted the home market. So far, so good. Two companies, with two good products and, potentially, multibilliondollar sales. However, what Sony did not foresee was that tape manufacturers and consumers would then opt for the simpler and more reliable VHS format, and it was this format that came to dominate the home VCR market of the 1980s and 1990s.

The average Silicon Valley venture capital firm gets as many as 5000 unsolicited business plans every year. How many new ideas does a Board of Directors in a non-innovative company get from its employees each year? A few dozen – if they’re lucky. What’s even more significant is that most new business ventures will be rejected a number of times by venture capitalists, and other lending institutions, before they find someone who is willing to back them. In large organizations, where new ideas may have to move up a chain of command, it takes just one ‘No’ to consign a good idea to oblivion, forever. In Silicon

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Valley, no one cares whether you are young or old, black or white, male or female, what clothes you wear or even if you have a university degree. All that matters is the power of your ideas and the quality of your business plan (abridged from Hamel, 2000b: 52).

Hire creatives and mavericks

It is much easier to build an innovative organizational culture if you can attract and retain creative people, and more employers are putting a premium on this kind of recruitment. For example, an AC Nielsen survey of 1105 Australian companies reported that many employers want more creative and critical thinkers. The survey also discovered that most employers believed that new graduates lacked communication skills, creativity, innovative capabilities, a capacity for independent thinking and ‘flair’. But this study also reported that one of the main reasons for employing graduates was ‘to introduce new ideas or fresh thinking into the organization’ (reported in The Australian, 1 January 2000). We saw, in Chapter 4, that cutting-edge companies spend a great deal of time recruiting and selecting their employees. They are also careful to recruit the best talent, regardless of their age, culture or gender. As Leonard and Strauss suggest, ‘to innovate successfully, you must hire, work with and promote people who are unlike you. You need to understand your own preferences and blind spots, so that you can complement your weaknesses and exploit your strengths. The biggest barrier to recognising the contributions of others who are unlike you is your own ego’ (1999: 66).

An example of a company that does this is McKinsey and Co. From the early 1990s, the company embraced a radical hiring policy that has aimed to recruit more creative brainpower. At that time, the only way to get into the company was with an MBA, preferably from one of the top US management schools. Since then, recruits are just as likely to be from economics, engineering science or law. McKinsey has also employed an ethnomusicologist, an expert in Ancient Greek and a Rhodes scholar in English literature. Managing partner John Stuckey has said that the company has one main criterion in recruitment: it wants ‘distinctive people’, who are best equipped to deal with the complex problems facing all companies in a globalized marketplace. Stuckey believes that ‘radical hirings’ bring heterogeneity of knowledge and creative thought styles to their clients’ problems and, as a result, are better able to analyse and solve them. Such hirings now make up 40 per cent of the company’s annual recruitment of new staff (up from 5 per cent in 1982) and the company has enjoyed a 90 per cent success rate with these non-traditional hirings (Bagwell, 1997).

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You then have to get your staff to build creativity/innovation into their personal managerial repertoires and ‘tool-kits’, to enable them to become intrapreneurs. This may also mean a committed investment in both in-house and external development programmes that can help them learn how to become more creative, to use their intuition, to think beyond common-sense ways of doing things, to look beyond the boundaries of the organization and to embrace the learning organization principles described in the last section of this chapter. Some companies, such as HP, General Electric and 3m, also use job rotation as a way of fostering innovation and knowledge sharing. At the Kao Corporation (a consumer products manufacturer), employees are expected to do at least three different jobs in any ten-year period. At Australia Post, graduate recruits are required to work in three or four different functional areas during their first two years of employment. These organizations use this as a means of preventing the emergence of ‘bunker’ mentalities, as a way to help future leaders understand the whole business from a variety of perspectives and to encourage the cross-fertilization of ideas, thus creating more ‘fluid’ knowledge sharing amongst different groups of employees. Last, you have to reward your innovators and intrapreneurs extremely well. As the futurist Jim Taylor puts it, ‘you need a tradition of spectacularly rewarding the people who make a non-linear change in the business. It has to be clear that spectacular innovation is the surest way of reaping spectacular economic rewards’ (cited by Hamel, 2000b: 60). Innovators need to seek a direct relationship between the ideas that they create and the rewards that they receive.5

Encourage play, fun, humour and games

The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment. Ritual emerged from sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play. We have to conclude, therefore, that civilization in its earliest phases played.

(Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, 1938)

What a depressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.

(Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1901)

It has been suggested several times in this book that a sense of humour is an important and often overlooked quality in leadership and people management. We’ve also seen that an atmosphere of fun and enjoyment is an integral part of the organizational cultures of some of the world’s most successful companies. There is also a close correlation between humour and creative thinking. This is because