Vincent Nolan RIP

I first met Vincent Nolan some forty years ago. He came to teach Synectics to a group of us at Garland-Compton (shortly before it morphed into Saatchi and Saatchi). I was in my late twenties and had risen quickly in the advertising business, but learning from Vincent undoubtedly transformed my life.

It dawned on me that one of my main skills up to that point was in identifying weaknesses in other people’s thinking and wielding the scalpel, and that this approach, while it had helped me to be successful, was of very limited value in promoting real creativity and innovation (the lifeblood of marketing communications). Vincent taught us that a better approach was first to articulate the value in emerging ideas, then going on to identify the key issues and problem-solve them.

This may seem simple, even obvious, but it required some complete personal rewiring in myself, changes that have lived at the heart of my life and work ever since.

Following that early encounter, I brought Vincent into each successive new role I found myself in – training my new teams in the whole Synectics bag of tricks. Perhaps most powerfully this was achieved at Lintas in Sydney, where, in a succession of visits from him, most colleagues in the agency were given the treatment. This was a major factor in enabling us to work together more effectively and creatively – and as a consequence we were able to rise from eighth in the local league table to second in just five years, quadrupling profits in the process.

Eventually I joined Synectics myself, as Vincent gradually wound down his life's work, concentrating more on his cello and his golf.  

At 85, Vincent Nolan died last Sunday, 17 August.

The Detail versus the Big Picture

So many seem to have been credited with the notion that the Devil (or is it God?) is in the detail – Goethe, Flaubert, Mies van der Rohe and Aby Warburg among them, not to mention Paul’s Letter to the Romans.

But is it really the detail that matters most?

I remember, at an international meeting of Synectics people in Washington DC, my esteemed colleague Vincent Nolan enjoined us all to attend to the detail. And immediately he was flatly contradicted by Sandy Dunlop.

“If anywhere,” said Sandy, “he is in the Big Picture.”

Why are senior managers the enemies of innovation?

Many years ago the founder of Synectics in Europe, Vincent Nolan, wrote an article entitled “Why is marketing the enemy of innovation?” It’s an apparently paradoxical but still very relevant question.

Building on Arun Prabhu’s comment on the “If at first the idea is not absurd…” post (October 28), I’d like to widen it to senior managers more generally. As Arun says, “In my experience, senior leaders who shout loudest about the need for breakthrough innovation are often the biggest barriers.”

There is the centre of the paradox. On the one hand, senior managers push hard for significant innovations, at the same time frequently putting the boot in when interesting, sometimes shocking, possibly breakthrough ideas are floated.

What’s more, the more a breakthrough the new concept seems, the less likely conventional market research is going to give a good reading on its performance in the marketplace.

Of course, there’s no evidence that seniority goes with judgement when it comes to new ideas – especially ones that break the mould in some way or other. In fact, there may well be an inverse correlation. They are exactly the folks who know lots about what has not worked in the past.

What’s needed? Often it’s for senior managers to invest in personally developing new skills in open-mindedness. Some chance?

So if that’s not going to happen, innovators need to develop new processes for getting senior managers into the boat.

What is your experience of all this?