Switzerland in top spot for innovation. Really?

I see that a new study puts Switzerland in top spot out of 125 countries for innovation.

Can this really be so? Or is it another example of garbage-in-garbage-out?

Anyway, the "Global Innovation Index" is the work of INSEAD in partnership with Alcatel-Lucent, Booz and Co and others, computed as an “average of scores across input pillars”, and also “how economies leverage their enabling environments to stimulate innovation results”. Ah.

Reading about it, my mind went immediately to Orson Welles’s brief speech in The Third Man:

“In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance.

“In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Blurting the truth

Reports in the Sunday Times of Charles Saatchi and Nigella Lawson’s new Chelsea home brings to mind the disastrous interview I did with another advertising legend, Frank Lowe, also in Chelsea.

He was looking for someone to head up his then burgeoning international agency business and I’d been recommended.

I arrived at his elegant terraced house and was shown into the “front room”. I marvelled at the extraordinary glass dome three stories above and the enormous fireplace. It reminded me of something, but what was it? Ah, yes - Orson Welles and “Citizen Kane”.

After a wait of thirty minutes or so, Frank finally appeared. “What do you think of the house?” he enquired.

“Seems to have been designed by a megalomaniac,” I blurted.

“Yes,” he said. “I designed it.”

I wasn’t offered the job.

It was one of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” moments for both of us: he knew instantly that I was not right for him. But, before he showed, I already knew that it was not for me.

Have you had instantaneous “Blink” moments - ones where you have blurted the truth?