Down at the Old Bull and Bush

It’s over two years since my friend and colleague, Tom Tracey, died. I went to the ceremony at Golders Green Crematorium on a wet day in June.

I’d first got to know him when he was the brilliant and iconoclastic creative director of Lintas in New Zealand in the 80s.

There were eight of us in all there at the service. For someone so interesting and engaging and creative, it was strange that there were so few. But then Liverpudlian Tom had lived his adult life all over the world, everywhere it seemed except London. The lady who led the ceremony read out loving remembrances and tributes from Tom's friends in far off lands.

It struck me that Tom made relationships with people wherever he happened to be. And that he tended to move on, appreciating each place, and his colleagues and friends there, without needing to hold on to the past.

At the ceremony I told the story of Tom's campaign for Unilever's Rinso, one that he was intensely proud of. Following orders from HQ, the brand name was dropped in favour of one of those international brands, although Rinso was right up there among the most trusted, even loved, products in New Zealand. It had been patiently renovated by Kiwi marketers over the best part of a century. Tom thought it right and proper that there should be a proper goodbye to such a constant friend, even if it was only a washing powder. What a paradox that he himself should leave us so quietly, without fuss.

Afterwards we repaired to the Old Bull and Bush in Hampstead. Somewhat embarrassed, we sang the chorus of Florrie Forde’s hit song from the early 1900s in the saloon bar - “Come, come, come and make eyes at me, down at...”, and we raised a glass to him.

Support for Creative Leaders - I don't think so

Our Centre for Creativity at City University yesterday held a “Creative Leadership Summit” at Cass Business School – a select group of leaders assembled to explore the implications arising from IBM’s recent global study of Chief Executives.

That survey revealed for the first time that “creative leadership” is now the number one requirement from CEOs around the world, 60% of them naming it as their top priority. It is an extraordinary rise in the perceived importance of creativity to leadership, quite unprecedented.

But how well equipped are British organisations to recruit and support creative leaders? The meeting concluded that Britain is at risk in two key areas that effect creative leadership.

First, current research conducted by Social Science colleagues at City makes it clear that less than a third of British organisations (29%) include innovativeness or creativity in their recruitment selection criteria. Yet the vast majority of our businesses (78%) recognise that innovation is vital to their future survival and success.

And second, less than one in three British organisations build innovation and creativity into their appraisal and reward programmes. This is quite tragic! Every company’s appraisal and reward processes need consistently to enhance creative potential.

In short, unless these issues are addressed, we will simply not have the creative leaders and innovation needed to get Britain moving decisively out of the current economic doldrums. CEOs in both the public and private sectors need to understand these issues and take decisive action to remedy the situation.

But not only CEOs. Government can also play a much more dynamic role in re-shaping attitudes and behaviours.

Creative Leadership Summit

On Tuesday 17th I’ll be chairing a meeting of prominent leaders at Cass Business School in London aiming to shed light on “Creative Leadership”.

As I wrote recently, it was voted as their top requirement in an IBM survey of 1,500 CEOs worldwide. But what does it really mean? Why is it so important? Are Creative Leaders properly supported and promoted? Is their special ability fully recognised and rewarded? Do recruitment processes make it easy for Creative Leaders to be hired?

I’ve already had valuable feedback by email. But what do YOU think about all this?

Creativity and Crime Reduction

In the early 90s the newly-elected Mayor of Boston and his team (including social services and police), together with local communities, the victims of crime (and the criminals), got together to reduce crime in Boston. The creative/innovation team was led by my colleague, Marvin Smith.

They started with a blank sheet of paper and something more than fifty new strategies were evolved in creative workshops - and put into action.

Extraordinarily, crime came down by over 50% within a twelve month period, and violent crime and homicide was reduced by some 75%. I was astonished by the sheer scale of the success, but Boston managed to maintain this improvement for nearly a decade – in effect until the aftermath of 9/11, when political priorities were rather radically changed.

The new strategies were eclectic in nature, aimed at attacking the major issues from many different angles. The strategy that dominated the media was "zero tolerance". It seemed to appeal strongly to both journalists and the police.

When I was building up a case study on the programme, I asked the central coordinator of the project at City Hall which of all the new strategies had been the most effective? Was it zero tolerance?

His response was very interesting - he said there was no way of knowing. It was the combination, the whole cocktail, that had done the business for them. For sure some strategies will have had a greater impact than others. But which? No one knew.

The most immediate aftermath was that the Chief of Police in Boston, Bill Bratton, was hired by Mayor Giuliani in New York to repeat the process. This he did and crime rates came down by similar amounts there.

Interestingly, Bratton had not been in the original group in Boston - and most of the new strategies had already been developed when he joined the team. He went on to become the world's most famous crime-reducing policeman, eventually (and very publicly) getting fired by Mayor Giuliani in New York (some said for getting too much limelight and too much of the credit), and turned himself into a "super-consultant", carrying that package of strategies (and subsets of it) around the world.

That rather seemed to miss the point . For example, Johannesburg, which he advised, has a quite different social context from New York and Boston. So it will undoubtedly have needed a quite different mix of strategies.

In the meantime other cities across America learned from Boston/New York and all experienced smaller but nevertheless significant reductions in crime, often with Bratton’s advice and counsel.

As a post-script, I went to talk with several police managements (and the Home Office) in Britain to explore whether a similar creative approach to strategy development might work
here. The consistent answer I got was that they knew all about it, knew what was needed, and were in the process of implementing it. Many times it appeared that they believed that zero-tolerance would on its own do the job for them. In no case that I encountered did British communities start out, as had happened in Boston, from scratch to create a set of specifically relevant new strategies – specifically relevant that is for London or Manchester or Glasgow or Belfast or wherever.

I wonder how our bright new coalition government is approaching this whole issue. Hopefully with open minds. There’s no doubt that in the tough times ahead, crime is likely to rise again.

Suggestions on how to influence them gratefully received.

“Wahn! Wahn! Überall Wahn!”

Among the Mastersingers in Wagner’s great opera, it is the cobbler-poet, Hans Sachs, who provides a potent mix of wisdom and disruption. It is he who points out to his fellow judges in the prize-song competition that they should not be trapped by their own rules, ignoring new forms of creativity and expression.

“Wahn! Wahn! Überall Wahn!” he sings in his famous Act 3 monologue. Wahn translates into English somewhere between madness and delusion. It is all around us and nothing happens without it, he sings, nothing whatever.

It seems to be an important mantra to bear in mind - both for innovators and for those who sit in judgement on innovations.

Wonderful new production from Welsh National Opera with Bryn Terfel as Sachs. It will arrive at the Proms in London tomorrow (Saturday 17 July). Beg, borrow or steal a ticket!

Creative Leadership is It

The latest IBM Global Chief Executive Officer Study, published a few weeks ago, has a rather extraordinary finding. The quality most cited and sought by CEOs around the world is CREATIVE LEADERSHIP.

This is not some small-sample, quick-fix survey. They interviewed over 1,500 CEOs all over the world and in all sectors – industry, services and public sector.

What’s more, it’s the fourth such study, and creativity has never been close to the number one previously. In fact, this time it ranked way ahead of the field at 60%, followed (at some distance) by integrity, global thinking, influence and openness.

There are several questions that arise in my mind:

What has pushed creative leadership to the forefront in CEOs minds? What is driving the dramatic rise in its importance? What do they really mean by creativity in leaders? How would they know when they've got it? And what are they doing to recruit, promote and support creativity and creative leaders?

One more question: Why has this rather dramatic shift not received more media attention? I think the answer to that is contained in the way the study has been packaged up by IBM. It’s entitled, for some reason, “Capitalizing on Complexity”, and you have to get to page 23 before you get to the important news.

I’ll be tackling all the issues surrounding creative leadership at the masterclass we’ll be running at Cass Business School on Thursday 9 September. More info on that here: http://www.perdiemprojects.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1276792934&archive=&start_from=&ucat=2&

Inventing lawn tennis: a tale of two majors

With Wimbledon almost upon us, I’ve been thinking about who might have invented the game.

Like so many innovations, it seems to have emerged in two different places at much the same time.

On a croquet lawn in Birmingham, an Englishman, Major Harry Gem, and his Spanish friend, Augurio Perera, started playing a game that combined rackets with the Basque game, pelota. In 1872 they founded the first tennis club at Leamington Spa, Warwickshire.

And in 1874 Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, a Welshman, invented a game with similar characteristics that he called “sphairistike” – from the Greek meaning skill at playing ball. He actually patented the net.

Why is it that inventions and discoveries so often appear in parallel?

Taking the MICL

Top priority, since I joined City University in London to set up their Centre for Creativity, has been the development of an interdisciplinary Masters in Innovation, Creativity and Leadership – the MICL.

That’s done now and over the past two weeks we have started the marketing campaign for it. A real opportunity, it seemed to me, for the marketing communications folk in the university to strut their stuff with this unique new offering.

Not so fast!

Because the Centre itself is interdisciplinary, the marketing people in the School of Informatics, where we live, said, “Sorry, you’re not part of our School. Nothing to do with us, Guv.” And the people in the corporate team said, “We don’t market academic courses, that’s all done by the specialists in the Schools. Nothing to do with us, Guv.”

The consequence has been that we decided to hire a dynamic, hungry young team at Claremont, who helped us shape up a complete strategy and plan, and went on to develop a range of exciting and unusual marketing materials.

The one I like best is the video they created for us, which links a Big City Brainstorm we ran together with the new Masters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqVqU-c00lE

The MICL is designed to give innovation leaders all the tools to turn ideas into action. It’s a two-year programme for people with experience who are looking for accelerated career progression.

You can read more about it here: http://creativity.city.ac.uk/master/overview.html

Something for you? Or for a colleague?