Le Fair Play

Shortly after the bombing of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour in 1985 – I was there and heard the blast – I was having lunch in Sydney with my then boss, regional director Jean-François Lacour.

“What’s the French for fair play?” I asked provocatively.

The French government of the day had decided that interference in their atomic testing programme had gone far enough and had sent secret service agents to deal with Rainbow Warrior.

Their action appalled New Zealanders. And I myself was outraged and thought it a clear breach of the unwritten rules of fairness.

Lacour thought for a moment. “Le Fair Play,” he responded.

Of course, the concept of fairness does not rank high in the value system of the French, whereas for Australians and New Zealanders it comes right at the top of the pile.

Now, some twenty six years later, I’m much less clear as to how to understand the notion, nor how to know it when you’ve got it.

Will Hutton has recently published a book entitled Them and Us: Politics, Greed and Inequality – Why we need a Fair Society. If you decide to read it, do let me know if he gets anywhere useful in defining fairness.

Is it the same as “win-win”? Or something else entirely?

Innovation in Japan 2

From Alison Roberts-Brown:

Nemawashi and the way many giant Japanese corporations were set up does stifle creativity. For example the way the companies also shy away from creating specialists, constantly moving people around, creating armies of generalists - it was designed like that to serve a purpose.

I moved to Japan in 1989 and lived there until three years ago, so my observations may already be dated.

I feel like Japan went through the social revolution the West experienced post-war (and then in the 50s, 60s and 70s) all at once during the time I lived there. Then suddenly they did the 80s and 90s too, catching up with the rest of the world socially.

I'm sure you will have seen and experienced that business-wise there have been massive changes - many of them forced by the fact that we (or "KK Japan") found the existing system wasn't working well for us any more. Everyone was still very attached to the value systems of the old ways, but we all knew things had to change. After the economic bubble burst, there were no real wake-up calls for years. In the early 90s the international news reported the state of the Japanese economy. In Japan the hedonism of wealth reigned for years to come, particularly in the thriving cities.

All of those massive corporations who were the saviors of the nation after the war - employing the Japanese army, creating a manufacturing, corporate and then financial services sector - they could not have succeeded without the systems and processes that most agree are now "preventing Japan from coming up with major breakthroughs".

It was not until the late 1990s that things really began to change dramatically - the situation of many major corporations was desperate. Nissan's appointment of Carlos Ghosn, a Lebanese Frenchman who came in and slashed the company into shape, was a major source of shame and awakening for Japan. Ghosn became national hero and eventually this trickled down to an acceptance of the fact that change was needed, and that it's often easier for outsiders to do it. Although the Nissan story is an extraordinary one, many corporations kept the blinkers on.

But everyone knew the unspoken words: job for life was no more and KK Japan was dissolving like an aspirin. During the same period doors opened to foreign investment, first a little and then the flood gates opened in the twenty-first century.

During my years in Japan I've been privileged to meet and spend time with some of the fires who lit up the massive corporations of innovation, like Morita-san of Sony. These men were leaders, warriors, heroes, but the system could not work with too many like that - one leader for an army, that's how the system succeeded.
I've spent a lot more time with the second generations, the sons of these famous leaders. There lies a big problem for Japan, but most companies have dealt with it cleverly, elevating these people to positions suited to them. The PR value of having a direct relative is immense and will always be beneficial, but kids don't always share Dad's genius for leadership.

No matter what, Japan will always be home to creative genius and leaders with creative genius.

I'm inspired by people like Tadao Ando (above). When I first met Ando-san he was a radical. Later he was recognized as one of the world's most incredible architects. Self-educated, he had been a truck driver and a professional boxer. His twin brother, Kitayama, who had his institute near my Tokyo home, was one of Japan's most creative and dynamic town planners. The two were separated as infants and adopted by different families. Neither was able to tread the corporate path - and they became leaders in their own right. There are many stories of success and creativity like theirs, perhaps not so well-known. Ando-Sensei will be 70 this year. It's good to know that even a difficult entrenched system designed to hold people back can recognize a genius such as Ando.

Small business - this is where Japan is excelling. The twenty-first century opened up a reduced-fee company-founding system and much reduction in red tape. There is strong recognition of the fact that small businesses are able to make decisions fast and move forward quickly. It's just a matter of figuring out how the armies are going to be employed and who will foot the bill.

Innovation in Japan

A friend who does much business in Japan emailed me (just hours before the tsunami struck) to say: “I'm in Japan on business again and thinking how much Japanese business needs some creative thinking.”
He continues: “After many years of coming here, I really feel as if the country is reverting to type as an insular, protected society. With due respect to the Japanese, they need to break out of this.”
That’s my sense too. I have been visiting Japan to work with companies there over a thirty year period and have worked with Japanese companies outside of their home market for several years longer than that.
It seems to be something of a mystery as to why the Japanese should be so effective in obtaining continuous incremental innovation, yet so ineffective in developing real breakthroughs.
Of course, the former has a highly systematic approach behind it which really works, a key part of which is a process called nemawashi. Literally, nemawashi means “preparing the roots”, being an metaphor from rice-growing. Preparing the roots so that the plant shall grow strong.
In organisations, nemawashi means building support for a project by gaining feedback (and buy-in) from all the key players ahead of a decision-making meeting. Of course, it is designed to maintain harmony and build consensus.
And therein lies the problem. The more radical, disruptive, out-of-the-box a new idea is, the more certain it is not to survive the process of nemawashi. It’s so deeply ingrained in the culture that breaking away from it would be really hard to bring about.
A possible way forward is to get away from the highly disciplined Japanese workplace, and to create a temporary climate where collaborative wishing and dreaming can take place without the intrusion of nemawashi.

David Cameron loves innovation?

Speaking a short while before the election that propelled him to be Prime Minister, David Cameron said: “Innovation must be at the heart of public policy.” Did I miss something since then? Enterprise and entrepreneurship are now rightly central to government rhetoric and policy if the British economy is to move into real growth. But creativity and innovation? Scarcely to be seen or heard of. Yet critical to enterprise and entrepreneurship.

Strangeness in proportion

There are always problems in recognising breakthrough innovations at the initial idea stage.

Incremental innovations are a doddle to get by comparison. I’m sure there are no hard and fast rules. But generally real breakthrough ideas do make one feel uncomfortable. Sometimes even slightly cross.

The real question to ask is: is it really intriguing? Is there something about it that, although it feels unnerving, has one sensing that it just might change the game, be disruptive, break current rules, create a new way of being?

Sir Francis Bacon, a contemporary of Shakespeare (wrongly believed by some to have written those amazing plays and poems), wrote: “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in proportion.”

Worth bearing in mind when you’re confronted with tomorrow’s equivalent of the internet, the mobile phone, the airplane, the bicycle, the light bulb, the plough, the wheel…

In praise of idleness

Engaging article in Lapham’s Quarterly by Sven Birkerts on the pleasures of idleness - http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/the-mother-of-possibility.php .

One of the benefits he teases out in his essay is that idleness is the place where new thoughts, new ideas, new connections are born. Over perhaps a quarter of a century I have asked hundreds (maybe thousands) of people when and where they are at their most creative. After a pause to consider, they most often come up with a situation adjacent to being idle – walking, falling asleep, in the shower, driving their car, daydreaming and so on. A couple of weeks ago, someone came up with “riding my motor-bike”.

There is definitely a connection between being distant from a problem one has been grappling with, in a situation where one’s brain is freewheeling, and having a solution pop up, apparently uninvited. Rarely do people mention watching TV, or working at the computer, or using their mobile devices as places where creativity happens. Perhaps there’s just not enough white space available.

Of course, the nexus between daydreaming and creativity is territory explored by Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, JM Barrie and many others.

How does being personally creative intersect with the pressurised contemporary life at work? Not easily.

Connecting with metaphor

If you catch a cold when things go badly, you’re using metaphor.

If you reach for low hanging fruit when you want immediate success, you’re using metaphor. If you decide to get focussed, deploy new tactics, develop a strategy, attack the competition at their weakest point, launch a new product – you’re using metaphor.

If your sales spike, or peak, or plummet, or plateau, or even are smokin’. Or maybe you’re pushing water uphill. You’re using metaphor.

If you’re going all the way, or the extra mile, or the full nine yards. If you build castles in the air, or on rocky ground. If you’re feeling fragile, or bubbly, or the shadow of your usual self. If you saw it coming, or are in a mental cul-de-sac.

If you have a heart of stone, or, better, of a lion. If you are the light in my life. My North, my South, my East, my West. If you had better pull your socks up. If you’re drowning in work, or jumping for joy. If you’re the apple of my eye. If it’s raining cats and dogs. If you can charm the birds out of the trees. If you’re cold to someone, or coarse, or hard, or flexible, or polished, or soft, or sparky, or seedy. You’re using metaphor.

The theatre and opera director, Jonathan Miller, once wrote: “Since finding out what something is, is largely a matter of discovering what it is like, the most impressive contribution to the growth of intelligibility has been made by the application of suggestive metaphors.”

And since so many of our best new ideas spring from the use of metaphor in making new connections, often quite accidentally, it’s probably best to get good at using it as a more systematic tool in creativity.

As PG Wodehouse put it: “I pressed down on the mental accelerator. The old lemon throbbed fiercely. I got an idea.”

Now that’s the spirit…

First you win it. Then you lose it.

A common theme in business is this: the initial innovator becomes leader in their field and then in time becomes change-resistant, believing that the things that made them great will keep them up there for ever.

Of course, in time they get overtaken by a new pretender who arrives with new breakthroughs that trump the original competitive advantage.

A great example is the piano manufacturer, Broadwood. Their founder, the Scottish cabinet-maker, John Broadwood, came down to London in 1761 aged 33, learned the relatively new skills of piano-making there, and made a number of important discoveries that enabled his pianos to produce a stronger, more resonant sound and to retain their tuning better.

The consequence was that Broadwood had a clear competitive edge, both for concert performance and for playing at home, becoming dominant market leader worldwide. His pianos were used by all the great players – Haydn, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann and Liszt among them.

Then, in the late nineteenth century, along came the iron frame (pianos up to that time had been wooden framed), and this, combined with innovations in the keyboard action of their pianos, enabled the German-American firm, Steinway, to emerge and overhaul Broadwood. A leadership position they hold up to this day.

Nevertheless, the massive sound that a modern instrument can generate is not the sound that those composers would ever have heard. So the fact that the church in our local village has a fine, well-restored Broadwood grand of 1872 means that we can still hear their music on the sort of instrument that the composers themselves wrote for and played.

And we’ll be doing just that at our village music festival at King’s Sutton in June – played by a swag of world-class pianists, some of them re-discovering these sounds for the first time.

King's Sutton Music Weekends are on 17-19 and 25-26 June. Performers will include: Alissa Firsova, Kenneth Hamilton, Bela Hartmann, Christopher Windass, Viv McLean, Sally Wilson and Mark Kruger.