"Love your country, tell the truth and don’t dawdle"

I wonder if I’d have enjoyed working with Lt Col Maurice Brown.

He was born and brought up in New Zealand, going on to serve in the New Zealand army, in the Second World War in the RAF and the RNZAF, before returning to army life in New Zealand again.

After working as a military observer in Kashmir, he founded Faujdarhat Cadet College in Bangladesh, which became one of the leading schools of its kind in the country.

But that’s not the reason he intrigues me. It’s his motto that does that:

“Love your country, tell the truth and don’t dawdle.”

It’s so resonant of his time and background. So certain in its precepts. So simple.

One has the sense that Col Brown would not have had much truck with the ideas that countries are less than permanent entities, that truth depends so often on perspective, or that there’s an upside to taking one’s time.

People like Brown are good to have on an innovation team as implementers – making things happen. But new ideas, the sources of innovation, spring from a much more flexible kind of mentality.

My top 10 visitors

These are the top 10 visitor countries to my blog for the month of September 2012: UK, USA, Russia, Australia, Germany, Denmark, France, India, Italy, New Zealand.

But, if one recalculates in terms of per capita population, a quite different list emerges:

1. Denmark
2.  UK
3. New Zealand
4. Australia
5. USA
6. Russia
7. Germany
8. Italy
9. France
10. India

Wonder what that tells us if anything? Are Danes and Kiwis especially interested in innovation, creativity and leadership? And, if so, does that show up in their economic performance?

Southerly Sunday

One of my favourite poems and poets. Ursula Bethell’s “Southerly Sunday”.

Born in England in 1874, she grew up in New Zealand, but was educated in Oxford and Switzerland. She returned more permanently to live in New Zealand in the 1920s, where she created a garden and was a committed High Anglican. She lived in the Cashmere Hills outside Christchurch, where this poem is set, before moving back into the city.

The great south wind has covered with cloud the whole of the river-plain,
soft white ocean of foaming mist, blotting out, billowing
fast to the east, where Pacific main surges on vaster bed.

But here, on the hills, south wind unvapoured encounters the sunshine,
lacing and interlocking, the invisible effervescence
you almost hear, and the laughter of light and air at play overhead.

Seabirds fly free; see the sharp flash of their underwings!
and high lifted up to the north, the mountains, the mighty, the white ones
rising sheer from the cloudy sea, light-crowned, establishéd.

This sparkling day is the Lord’s day. Let us be glad and rejoice in it;
for he cometh, he cometh to judge and redeem his beautiful universe,
and holds in his hands all worlds, all men, the quick and the dead.

Echoes of Gerard Manley Hopkins?

The extraordinary creative journey of Frances Hodgkins

In Brand Renovation masterclasses, one of the examples that I use is the wonderful Kylie Minogue. Has there ever been a singer more skilful than her at consistently re-inventing her public self?

But it’s not only in pop music that artistic renovation happens. The New Zealand-born painter, Frances Hodgkins, managed to stay current through six decades - and through several radical changes of artistic fashion.

First, in the 1890s in her hometown of Dunedin, she fell under the spell of the Italian impressionist, Girolamo Pieri-Nerli.

Then, in the period before the First World War in Europe, she was influenced by the Newlyn School in England, and particularly the work of the Scottish colourist, Arthur Melville. .

After the war in the early 1920s she embraced the Post-Impressionists Matisse and Derain and the Cubists - Braque, Picasso and others.

In the latter part of that decade, when she was already sixty years old, Hodgkins was invited to join the Seven and Five Society, a group of younger British modernists, including Ben Nicholson and his then wife Winifred, Christopher Wood, David Jones, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and John Piper. With them she moved steadily towards abstraction.

Through the thirties and forties, she continued to evolve, becoming closely identified with the leading Neo-Romantics – Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash, John Craxton, John Minton and others.

Altogether an extraordinary creative journey of a fine artist.

Time for a major exhibition of her work in Britain?

Above: Frances Hodgkins, Self portrait: still life, oil on cardboard, c. 1935, Auckland Art Gallery

Women wanted for innovation?

Interesting piece on the Voxy news/blog site in New Zealand lamenting the lack of women innovators: http://www.voxy.co.nz/business/women-wanted-innovation/5/116926

According to Voxy, women take out less than 1% of all patents in New Zealand. Of course, this is a real problem – and not only in Kiwiland, but all over the Western world.

In my view the source of the matter lies in the negative attitudes of women towards science and mathematics, and in particular towards engineering. In the “West” there are simply too few women engineers. For it’s engineers that dominate the patent game.

I wonder what the figures look like in Russia or China, where there are shedloads of female engineers?

But perhaps Voxy is taking too pessimistic a view of the situation. After all, in the real world, most innovation happens without any consideration of patents – in strategy, in brand development, in organisational change, in people management, in design, in cultural development, in the arts and so on.

And women may well be in the majority in all those fields, innovating day by day.

Alfred Hill: Australasia’s finest composer?

How exciting it must have been for the sixteen year-old Australasian, Alfred Hill, to arrive in Leipzig to study violin and composition in 1887, able to observe at close quarters most of the greatest musicians and composers of that time – Brahms, Joachim, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Sarasate, Bruch and Ysaÿe among them ‒ and within two years to be inducted into the legendary Gewandhaus orchestra.

Born in Melbourne in 1869, he was raised in Wellington, where he became something of a musical prodigy before going on to Leipzig to study at the Conservatorium. The training he received there was extremely thorough, but already Leipzig was felt by many to be living in the past, under the shadow of Mendelssohn and Schumann.

So how sad, later in life, to be deemed out-of-date and consequently ignored in one’s own lifetime.

Over the course of a long life, lived primarily in Sydney, Alfred Hill composed constantly, and, although he experimentally incorporated both Maori and Aboriginal motifs in his work, he never escaped from the late Romantic style he acquired in Leipzig. In the meantime, from the early years of the twentieth century, the musical world had become preoccupied with “modernism” – Stravinsky, Bartok, Debussy, Schoenberg and the rest.

The consequence is that the bulk of Hill’s music languishes in various libraries in Australia and New Zealand, unperformed and unknown.

So kudos to Naxos and to the Dominion Quartet for recording all of Alfred Hill’s fine series of quartets for the first time. And to the DQ’s viola-player, Donald Maurice, for editing and publishing Hill’s fascinating Leipzig diary.

But there’s so much more to discover.

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.

Le Fair Play

Shortly after the bombing of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour in 1985 – I was there and heard the blast – I was having lunch in Sydney with my then boss, regional director Jean-François Lacour.

“What’s the French for fair play?” I asked provocatively.

The French government of the day had decided that interference in their atomic testing programme had gone far enough and had sent secret service agents to deal with Rainbow Warrior.

Their action appalled New Zealanders. And I myself was outraged and thought it a clear breach of the unwritten rules of fairness.

Lacour thought for a moment. “Le Fair Play,” he responded.

Of course, the concept of fairness does not rank high in the value system of the French, whereas for Australians and New Zealanders it comes right at the top of the pile.

Now, some twenty six years later, I’m much less clear as to how to understand the notion, nor how to know it when you’ve got it.

Will Hutton has recently published a book entitled Them and Us: Politics, Greed and Inequality – Why we need a Fair Society. If you decide to read it, do let me know if he gets anywhere useful in defining fairness.

Is it the same as “win-win”? Or something else entirely?

Down at the Old Bull and Bush

It’s over two years since my friend and colleague, Tom Tracey, died. I went to the ceremony at Golders Green Crematorium on a wet day in June.

I’d first got to know him when he was the brilliant and iconoclastic creative director of Lintas in New Zealand in the 80s.

There were eight of us in all there at the service. For someone so interesting and engaging and creative, it was strange that there were so few. But then Liverpudlian Tom had lived his adult life all over the world, everywhere it seemed except London. The lady who led the ceremony read out loving remembrances and tributes from Tom's friends in far off lands.

It struck me that Tom made relationships with people wherever he happened to be. And that he tended to move on, appreciating each place, and his colleagues and friends there, without needing to hold on to the past.

At the ceremony I told the story of Tom's campaign for Unilever's Rinso, one that he was intensely proud of. Following orders from HQ, the brand name was dropped in favour of one of those international brands, although Rinso was right up there among the most trusted, even loved, products in New Zealand. It had been patiently renovated by Kiwi marketers over the best part of a century. Tom thought it right and proper that there should be a proper goodbye to such a constant friend, even if it was only a washing powder. What a paradox that he himself should leave us so quietly, without fuss.

Afterwards we repaired to the Old Bull and Bush in Hampstead. Somewhat embarrassed, we sang the chorus of Florrie Forde’s hit song from the early 1900s in the saloon bar - “Come, come, come and make eyes at me, down at...”, and we raised a glass to him.