The meaning of The Duck Song

A good example of the late adopter would be my discovery recently of "The Duck Song".

I say discovery on a purely personal basis, because currently 89 million people have seen it ahead of me on YouTube.

But what does it all mean??

My wife says it’s about the reluctance of children to try new foods.

I think it’s about the need for manufacturers and service providers to be responsive to changing market needs.

When I asked her, our ten year old daughter said “dunno… but it’s meant to be funny.”

Whatever it means, I believe it’s intriguing and has an innate poetry of considerable beauty.

Just in case you haven’t seen it, here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtN1YnoL46Q

What does it mean for you?

José Rizal: pioneer of non-violent revolution

Although I’ve gone to work in Manila on several occasions, it’s really only because I have connected on this current trip with some very interesting Filipinos that I’ve finally come to grips with José Rizal.

Rizal was a very early proponent of non-violent revolution. Born in 1861, he wrote and published two novels – Noli Me Tángere and its sequel El Filibusterismo – which attacked both the Spanish colonists and the grip over the people of the Catholic Church in the Philippines.

While his aim was freedom from oppression, he was clear that there could be bear-traps in the path once that had been achieved. "Why independence,” he asked, “if the slaves of today will be the tyrants of tomorrow?" And, of course, this pit was indeed fallen into by a later generation. His life and work were influential for both Gandhi and Nehru.

He was an extraordinary man – a polymath beyond the boundaries of possibility, it might seem, having expertise in anthropology, architecture, botany, business, cartography, drama, economics, education, engineering, essay-writing, entomology, ethnology, farming, folklore, geography, grammar, history, horticulture, journalism, lexicography, medicine, music, novel-writing, ophthalmology, painting, philosophy, poetry, political theory, psychology, publishing, satire, sculpture, sports, sociology and zoology. Having traveled the world, he amassed twenty-two languages.

Yesterday, amongst much else, I saw some of his sculpture. Very accomplished.

His final poem, written in Spanish shortly before his death, starts

Farewell, my adored Land, region of the sun caressed,
Pearl of the Orient Sea, our Eden lost…

And, celebrating his unwed Irish wife, Josephine Bracken, it ends

Farewell, sweet stranger, my friend, my joy;
Farewell, to all I love. To die is to rest.

Rizal was executed by firing squad in 1896, aged just thirty-five.

Creativity and the Inner Child

He lived most of his adult life as a rather well-organised trader in, amongst other things, coffee and guns in the Middle East and Africa. He kept neat books.

Yet between the ages of fifteen (in 1870) and twenty, he had written a series of extraordinary poems that led him to be regarded by many as the founding father of modern poetry. And then no more.

He was Arthur Rimbaud.

His poems can still disturb, even shock. “Je est un autre,” he wrote. “I is someone else”.

In his later life he went so far as to describe his own poetic creations as “absurd, ridiculous, disgusting”. Endeavouring to make sense of the change in Rimbaud, his former friend and lover, Paul Verlaine, said: “One big reason, perhaps obvious, is that the child in him died.”

His work has gripped so many – not least the composer, Benjamin Britten, who made an electrifying setting of parts of Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations. That opens:

J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage.

I alone have the key to this savage show.

Harold Monro, poet

For whatever reason, I’ve only recently connected with the early twentieth century Anglo-Scottish poet, Harold Monro. He seems to have slipped off the radar screen, but, among others, TS Eliot admired his work greatly.

Like so much good poetry, Monro’s could be downbeat. But it always has, like Eliot’s, a profoundly musical quality.

In “Living”, in a rather rare glimpse of life as possibility, after a “Slow bleak awakening from the morning dream”, he writes

But suddenly, as if without reason,
Heart, Brain, and Body, and Imagination
All gather in tumultuous joy together,
Running like children down the path of morning
To fields where they can play without a quarrel:
A country I’d forgotten, but remember,
And welcome with a cry.

I don’t think you have to be a poet to recognise that exhilarating creative cocktail. (But you do need to be one to capture it so eloquently.)

Improv in Innovation

Angela Dove of Cass Business School proposes IMPROVISATION as an addition to my short list of “Words, words, words”.

I know that, well handled, it can be catalytic in powering up the creative process, enabling folk to escape from those unhelpful impulses – correct/incorrect, aggressive/defensive, rule-bound, power-driven, anxious, fearful, hierarchical, information-driven, sacred-cow-filled, risk-averse – and generate fresh, new thinking, feelings, connections and ideas.

Over the years I’ve used improv in many different contexts – loosening groups up, on the way to developing breakthrough concepts, problem-solving barriers, in NPD and in strategy development, and so on. Usually it creates a kind of stepping stone towards new solutions.

There are just so many different forms that improv can take. For example, I’ve had groups writing poems or jingles (sometimes a word at a time, working in a circle). I’ve had them creating and acting out a scene from a soap (Neighbours or Eastenders or Coronation Street or whatever), or collaboratively creating and presenting a human sculpture. Or making collages from piles of rubbish.

The important thing is to help people to be truly “in the moment” when they do it, spontaneously responding both to their own inner feelings and thoughts, and to others.

This kind of approach is habitually used these days in theatre, in comedy, dance and music. But I find it extraordinarily powerful when it’s used well with scientists and engineers, with lawyers, bankers and accountants.

What’s your experience with improv?