Helena Rubinstein and the Sheep of Australia

I have recently been discussing with Facebook friends the apparent shortage of women innovators. Among the many contributory factors, one is that so many of the trained engineers and scientists in the western world have always been men.

But innovation comes in many forms and one woman that I find fascinating is the legendary Helena Rubinstein.

Born in 1870 in Krakow, Poland, she moved to Australia in 1902. She had very little English and no money. But she did have family there – her uncle was a shopkeeper in Coleraine, a small town some 350 kilometres west of Melbourne. This was Big Sheep country and there was an unending supply of lanolin, the grease secreted by the sheep to keep their woolly coats in good condition. Rubinstein used the lanolin as the basis of her own skin creams, disguising its unpleasant odour with lavender and other fragrances.

Later she moved to set up business in Collins Street, still the smartest place for shopping in Melbourne, then Sydney, then London, Paris and New York. She was a brilliant marketer of her products, creating the whole concept of “problem skin” and discovering that, if sales were flagging, raising prices was a good way to get things moving again. Her pushy mantra was: “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.”

She was to become the first self-made female millionaire.

(I see that there’s a new book out by Ruth Brandon about Rubinstein and the founder of L’Oréal, Eugène Schueller, which I’ve not yet seen.)

Sixty-seven better than one?

While I was living and working in Sydney, I took the worldwide boss of Lintas to visit our office in Auckland. I don’t think such a thing had ever happened before.

He was impressed with the people and their work. Flying back together to Australia, he was in reflective mood.

“You know, Rog,” he said, “these people in Auckland. They handle the same number of clients that we handle in New York. And same number of brands. And they do all the things we do in New York. They plan strategy. They plan and buy media. They write and produce ads in all media. They create sales promotions and help clients to innovate. And I reckon their work overall is just as good as ours in New York.”

“Just one thing,” he went on. “In New York we have six hundred people, but in Auckland they have nine. That’s… sixty-seven to one”

So when people nowadays say that it’s totally impossible to cut staff numbers any more, or to be substantially more productive, I always think of Auckland.

Jerry Della Femina, a Pulse and a Five Dollar Bill

As deputy chairman of the advertising agency, WCRS Worldwide, I called a meeting of the bosses from around the network to discuss business development strategy.

We were at that time already the fastest-growing business of our kind in the world with a reputation for outstanding creativity. But, if we were to maintain momentum, we’d need to move to the next level in terms in terms of client acquisition.

My own intention in the meeting was to focus in on the major multinational corporations – Unilever, Nestlé, Coca-Cola, Diageo and so on - companies that clearly needed better creative work, but were currently locked into the established, generally rather dull, global agencies.

The boss of our New York agency, the legendary Jerry Della Femina, began to look uncomfortable, sensing that we were getting ahead of ourselves.

“I like it if they have a pulse and a five dollar bill,” he announced.

Collapse of stout party.

Creativity and Crime Reduction

In the early 90s the newly-elected Mayor of Boston and his team (including social services and police), together with local communities, the victims of crime (and the criminals), got together to reduce crime in Boston. The creative/innovation team was led by my colleague, Marvin Smith.

They started with a blank sheet of paper and something more than fifty new strategies were evolved in creative workshops - and put into action.

Extraordinarily, crime came down by over 50% within a twelve month period, and violent crime and homicide was reduced by some 75%. I was astonished by the sheer scale of the success, but Boston managed to maintain this improvement for nearly a decade – in effect until the aftermath of 9/11, when political priorities were rather radically changed.

The new strategies were eclectic in nature, aimed at attacking the major issues from many different angles. The strategy that dominated the media was "zero tolerance". It seemed to appeal strongly to both journalists and the police.

When I was building up a case study on the programme, I asked the central coordinator of the project at City Hall which of all the new strategies had been the most effective? Was it zero tolerance?

His response was very interesting - he said there was no way of knowing. It was the combination, the whole cocktail, that had done the business for them. For sure some strategies will have had a greater impact than others. But which? No one knew.

The most immediate aftermath was that the Chief of Police in Boston, Bill Bratton, was hired by Mayor Giuliani in New York to repeat the process. This he did and crime rates came down by similar amounts there.

Interestingly, Bratton had not been in the original group in Boston - and most of the new strategies had already been developed when he joined the team. He went on to become the world's most famous crime-reducing policeman, eventually (and very publicly) getting fired by Mayor Giuliani in New York (some said for getting too much limelight and too much of the credit), and turned himself into a "super-consultant", carrying that package of strategies (and subsets of it) around the world.

That rather seemed to miss the point . For example, Johannesburg, which he advised, has a quite different social context from New York and Boston. So it will undoubtedly have needed a quite different mix of strategies.

In the meantime other cities across America learned from Boston/New York and all experienced smaller but nevertheless significant reductions in crime, often with Bratton’s advice and counsel.

As a post-script, I went to talk with several police managements (and the Home Office) in Britain to explore whether a similar creative approach to strategy development might work
here. The consistent answer I got was that they knew all about it, knew what was needed, and were in the process of implementing it. Many times it appeared that they believed that zero-tolerance would on its own do the job for them. In no case that I encountered did British communities start out, as had happened in Boston, from scratch to create a set of specifically relevant new strategies – specifically relevant that is for London or Manchester or Glasgow or Belfast or wherever.

I wonder how our bright new coalition government is approaching this whole issue. Hopefully with open minds. There’s no doubt that in the tough times ahead, crime is likely to rise again.

Suggestions on how to influence them gratefully received.