Mr Hotchkiss and the stapler

I asked a group of managers in Tokyo to name their personal favourite inventions. We got a diverse range of proposals from them. Then they asked me for mine.

The humble paper staple, together with its stapler, I said. Such a deceptively simple piece of engineering.

It overcame all the disadvantages of its celebrated predecessor, the paperclip. The great adman, David Ogilvy, exhorted us to abandon the paperclip in favour of the staple in his Confessions of an Advertising Man. I never travel without it.

But who invented it? I’d never known. Well, they told me in Tokyo, in Japan it’s called a Hotchkiss. Was Mr Hotchkiss by any chance the inventor?

Apparently not. He seems merely to have been the importer of the product to the land of the rising sun.

So who did invent it? This is not quite so simple a question as one might expect.

George W McGill patented an early version in the USA in 1866 and continued to develop his product through the 1880s. Meanwhile CH Gould, working in parallel with McGill, took out a patent in England in 1868. Rather like early mobile phones, these initial staplers were bulky and heavy.

The slim and elegant product that we know today was invented by another Englishman, John Munford. He sold it to his employer in the early twentieth century (at a low price) and never has been properly recognised for his work.

Nellie Melba and The Star Spangled Banner

As we all know, a vital ability in life is to respond creatively to an unforeseen threat quickly and decisively.

The great Australian diva, Nellie Melba, was set to sing Rosina in The Barber of Seville in San Francisco in 1898. Nothing unusual about that. It was one of her regular and best roles.

The problem was that the opera is set in Spain and, at that moment, Spain was threatening to invade and lay claim to Cuba. War appeared imminent and anti-Spanish feeling in the USA was running high. At the performance, although Melba herself was treated courteously by the audience, the barber, Figaro, was roundly booed.

What to do?

It so happens that in Act 2 there is a singing lesson where the composer, Rossini, allows Rosina to perform a song of her own choosing “ad libitum”. In San Francisco, the piano was pushed on stage, and Melba, a fine pianist, accompanied herself singing one of America’s favourite songs of the day, Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home”. And, when the applause had died down a little, she followed up immediately with “The Star Spangled Banner”.

A local reporter noted: “People rose in their seats and cheered themselves hoarse.” The audience wept – the diva with them. Problem solved.

Sadly there are no recordings by her of those songs, nor of The Barber of Seville, so here she is singing (dazzlingly) the Jewel Song from Gounod’s Faust in 1905: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxrgX729kZA

In Memoriam Bill Boggs: Managing Mavericks

All my working life, I’ve worked with and managed mavericks – highly creative individuals who don’t fit well into the corporate mould.

For many years this was in ad agencies. They rarely produce outstanding work if they don’t have some mavericks on staff. And they won’t join unless there are signals that it’s OK to be different. It’s the same for all organisations that are committed to creating breakthrough of one kind or another.

When I joined the innovation consultancy, Synectics, one of my American colleagues, another recent joiner, was Dr Bill Boggs. And it didn’t take long to discover two things.

One was that most of my colleagues did not appreciate Bill’s ways. He was difficult, self-obsessed, driven, irreverent and disruptive. There’s no doubt that he thought that corporate rules, even ones he personally participated in shaping, applied to others, not to Bill.

The other thing that I discovered was that Bill was uniquely brilliant, creating completely new ways of working and producing far, far more business for our firm in the USA than anyone else – in effect bringing the revenue that paid many colleagues’ salaries. And he was on his day the finest facilitator of creativity I ever saw.

All this seemed to make no difference to colleagues’ attitudes to him and many thought he should be fired – and said so frequently.

Somehow or other we held on to him for several years, but in the end he went. What he discovered then was that in reality he needed the relatively secure home that we provided. He was nowhere near so effective without us.

But then we were so much less without him.

Put bluntly, the issue for organisations is: how to recruit and retain the mavericks who can and will drive their future – and have colleagues appreciate their value. It’s not easy, but it may be vitally important.