Metaphor and the Art of Naval Warfare

Did you see Peter Weir’s film Master and Commander? It’s a great favourite of mine, as are several of Weir’s movies.

Having left the Galapagos Islands, where the ship’s surgeon, Maturin, and young Midshipman Blakeney have collected armfuls of newly discovered species (and spotted the enemy – the British ship is being pursued in the South Atlantic by a larger, better-armed French frigate). Maturin and Blakeney show the skipper, Jack Aubrey (brilliantly played by Russell Crowe), what appears to be a twig. It is in fact a phasmid, “an insect that disguises itself as a stick in order to confuse its predators,” says young Blakeney.

Intrigued, Aubrey conceives the idea of re-dressing his British warship as a harmless whaler, a “nautical phasmid”, luring the enemy into a trap. “I had no idea that a study of nature could advance the art of naval warfare,” says Aubrey.

Metaphors such as this are often the springboard for breakthrough ideas. As the Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset puts it: “The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by men.”

Do you have favourite ones that have led to Eureka moments?

The Pursuit of Perfection

The problem is this: if you wait till it’s perfect, first of all, you’ll never get there. And you’ll get beaten to market by a competitor.

For goodness sake, what’s perfect? If we demanded perfectly safe airplanes, we’d be sailing in ships. In point of fact, the Wright Brothers would never have taken off. If we wanted ships that never sank, we’d never leave harbour.

The real question is: when have we reached a threshold of acceptability? When that point has arrived, try it out, learn and adapt.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Do you have experience of losing out in this way?

Walkabout Verdi

Aside from silly and often irrelevant productions posing as creative, opera has not been noted for innovation in recent times. So what joy Graham Vick’s powerful new production of Verdi’s Othello in Birmingham.

Staged in a disused inner city factory. No seats, no shoes. Surrounded (it turns out) by actors and singers, it blasts off with the great storm and the arrival of the conquering hero in our midst. And before long, we are all dancing in cheerful circles.

Given that nowadays real black Othellos are the rule in the “legitimate” theatre, rather astonishingly Vick’s production has not only the first operatic black Othello, but also a black Iago, and is set in a contemporary, unidentified African state.

It’s an overwhelming experience. You can read my more extended review of it in Opera Britannia by clicking on the link below right.

What’s your experience of innovation in opera and theatre these days?

In Praise of Lists

The Italian writer, Umberto Eco, has curated an exhibition for the Louvre in Paris of lists. Of lists? “The list is the origin of culture,” says Eco, citing Homer, Thomas Mann and James Joyce’s Ulysses.

A personal favourite of mine are the lists in the extraordinary travel books of Patrick Leigh-Fermor. The Argentinean poet and essayist, Jorge Luis Borges, lists his special pleasures as: “Hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography, etymologies, the taste of coffee and Stevenson’s prose.” In Shakespeare’s Henry V, the king lists the names of the French and English dead, ending with plain Davy Gam, Esquire. Early in the Bible we encounter the Ten Commandments, and later the Beatitudes. Buying a CD or book or DVD, we get the help of Google to present us with a list of options.

And lists are at the core of effective work, as we sort out the important and the urgent each day from amongst the dozens of jobs competing for our attention. This is especially important in innovation projects, where things can inadvertently come off the rails at any moment.

But there is always a struggle - every day, every hour - between the important and the urgent, where the latter seems so often to drive out the former.

How do you deal with this problem?

Betting the bank: not such a great idea

When Coca-Cola had the result of a blind taste test for New Improved Coke involving 200,000 consumers, it clearly indicated to the company that they should launch – and massively support – the new formulation. And that’s exactly what they did.

That’s most probably what I would have done too. And if you are honest, so would your organisation, faced with apparently overwhelming consumer preference.

Of course, we all now know that it was the greatest marketing blunder in living memory. The question is: how could (and should) they have handled it differently?

My own view is that they should have area-tested the whole new mix – product, packaging, promotion, advertising, pricing etc – in a discrete part of the USA and learned from the response in reality of consumers, while at the same time gauging the counter-attack of Pepsi. That way they would have limited the downside risk dramatically.

Many years ago, I worked on P&G’s Fairy Snow brand when it was a fairly distant follower of the great Persil in the British washing powder market. These two brands were the only remaining “heavy duty” soap powders on the market, all other brands having switched to be synthetic detergents. Unilever wanted to switch Persil to be a detergent brand too. They knew that this would give consumers clearly better results in their wash. And research showed that consumers massively preferred the new detergent-based product.

Just as with Coke, the company did not anticipate the effect of the strong emotional attachment that consumers felt for their existing, “kinder”, soap-based brand.

But here’s the difference: unlike Coke, the company did not immediately go national with their hot new formula, they test-marketed the whole thing in an area with no more than 5% of the UK’s population. P&G and Fairy Snow came back with a hard-hitting “we’re your only soap powder now” campaign – and Persil started to lose share immediately, hand over fist. At least in this case Unilever had limited their exposure and were able to go back to the mix that was tried and true.

However confident they are of success, I always advise clients not to bet the bank on their current hot innovation, but to try it out and be prepared to move fast, one way or another, when they have genuine market-place response.

Not to bet the bank: hmmm…maybe it’s not just a metaphor these days.

Do you have experience of this issue? What are your own learnings?

The two stages of childhood

Discussing my seven year old and her process of growing up with my colleague at City University, Kristine Karlsen:

“There are two stages to child development,” said Kristine. “First we teach them to walk and talk. Then we teach them to sit down and be quiet.”

This seems to me the pithiest and most devastating of summations. It tells us so much about why children emerge into adulthood with their creative faculties diminished. And why too often we need to have that side of us re-awakened later in life.

I have been thinking a lot recently about the lack of creativity in our British education system and I have some ideas about it.

But what do you think?

The leadership of innovation – different?

The leadership of innovation teams – is it different in any way from leadership more generally?

Two things that are critical to success in innovation are: first, creating with your team a clear sense of direction and impetus; and second, maintaining a climate of possibility, supportive of speculation, creativity and problem-solving.

But aren’t those exactly the qualities you’d want in any leader? Does a climate of criticism and fear ever help the performance of a team, except maybe in the very short term?

In a recent Youth of Today survey, British teenagers have amongst their chosen Top 10 leaders celebrity businessman Sir Alan Sugar, X-Factor judge Simon Cowell and sixteenth century British king, Henry VIII. To be honest, I wouldn’t want to be in their teams, any of them. And what’s more I wouldn’t want them in mine.

Who would be your ideal leaders of innovation?

The Secrets of Followership

A very experienced American colleague, Marvin Smith, suggested we talk about “followership”. “What?” we chorused. “What’s all that about, Marvin?”

“Well everyone talks about leadership,” he responded, “and the bookstores are stacked high with a continuous stream of new books on that subject. But when they teach leadership, they hardly ever touch on followership.

“In fact, outside of religion, no one ever seems to talk about followership. There are hardly any books or training courses. But, without followers, there are no leaders. It’s as simple as that.

“So what makes a good follower?” he asked us.

We spent a memorable hour springboarding thoughts and ideas and developing some ideal characteristics and behaviours. We realised quickly that we all need to be leaders and all followers in different situations. I personally committed to learning and growing as a follower and as a leader. One thing I would say is that good followership is clearly not about uncritical servitude.

What for you makes an outstanding follower?