The future is a foreign country

The re-positioning of many traditional market research departments as “insight” providers has made a lesser contribution to successful innovation than might have been expected.

There are a number of reasons for this, perhaps the main one being that supposed “insights” often result from looking into what is in effect a rear-view-mirror.

What is needed, of course, is a way of walking into the future (together with customers, consumers, suppliers, experts etc) and gaining insights from that perspective. I think this is better described as “foresight”. And it’s not a good fit with people who have a strongly rational and logical cast of mind.

After all, nobody knows exactly what the future will hold. What we do know is that it will be different from the past. So walking into it is fundamentally an imaginative exercise – a new perspective from which fresh innovations can be created. And to do it well, it needs radically different methods.

To adapt LP Hartley’s famous opening sentence in his novel, The Go-Between: “The future is a foreign country: they will do things differently there.”

Remembering Rich Gabriel: 9/11

Rich Gabriel was one of the smartest of my colleagues at Synectics.

He had an intense honesty and clarity of thinking, allied to a sharp, downbeat wit. In many ways he always seemed rather semi-detached at the firm, almost as though he’d joined by mistake.

He had been an officer in the US Marines in the Vietnam War, where he had lost a leg, and was awarded the Purple Heart.

I thought he might make a major contribution if we brought him on to the small management team, so I approached him. He thought about it, dealt with me with great courtesy, and said thanks but no.

Soon after, he left with his friend Ned Preble, and together they set up their own firm.

On 11 September 2001, Rich was flying from Washington DC to Australia on business aboard American Airlines Flight 77. Terrorists took over and flew it into the Pentagon.

RIP.

Byron’s daughter – the world’s first computer programmer

It’s not so easy finding important innovators in the history of science, mathematics and engineering who are women. In fact, it’s really quite hard. So I asked a couple of friends to come up with some names.

Suggested by Jacki Fortune in Sydney (who also proposed Helena Rubinstein), one who certainly deserves our attention is Ada Lovelace. She was born Ada Byron, the daughter of the poet, Lord Byron, in 1815. She was to marry the Earl of Lovelace.

Quite early in life she became fascinated by mathematics, and in due course by the work of Charles Babbage. Babbage was impressed with her intelligence – he called her “the enchantress of numbers” – and in 1842-43 she wrote a series of notes on his “Analytical Machine”, the world’s first computer. These notes described how Babbage’s machine could be programmed and are now widely credited as being the world’s first computer programme.

Of course, a major contributory reason for the lack of outstanding female maths, science and engineering students in our schools in western societies is the expectation that girls are not good at these subjects.

At a fine girl’s school in Sydney, Ascham, my daughter, Rachel, was lucky enough to find a brilliant (male) teacher of maths, who thought that she had real gifts. How right he was.

I wonder whether any real progress is being made now with the teaching of maths, science and engineering to girls in our schools?

And which are the other women who should be celebrated?

First-mover DISadvantage

For many years academic studies have touted the commercial advantages of being first to market with innovations.

More recently there has been a backlash and example after example has emerged where the second-mover has had the upper hand.

One of the darlings of the first-mover brigade has always been Procter & Gamble’s disposable diaper brand, Pampers. Certainly Pampers was and is a massive success.

Problem is – it was never the first-mover. That was Johnson & Johnson’s CHUX, which had first entered the market in 1949.

P&G’s R&D people were able to spendseveral years tackling each of the major problems with CHUX and in due course developed a product that was more absorbent, had lower leakage, was more comfortable on baby, offered two sizes and could be produced at significantly lower cost (and retail price).

Pampers was test-marketed in the early 1960s and by the end of that decade had achieved well over three-quarters of a market that itself was growing exponentially year on year. The game was over pretty much by the time I worked in that market – with Kimberly Clark’s brand in Australia.

So much for first-mover advantage. More like first-mover DISadvantage.

Do you Xerox?

I gather one must not use Xerox as a verb, ie to Xerox, or they come after you to protect their brand name.

Two major consequences of all that defensive corporate effort over several decades were:

1. to make several lawyers wealthier and

2. to take their eye off the ball, indulging in a series of expensive and irrelevant acquisitions, and losing their reputation for cutting-edge innovation in their core markets.

At one time, Xerox effectively owned the photocopier market, but then two Japanese companies ate their breakfast.

First Canon came in with the colour copier. Then Ricoh with the first digital copier. And both succeeded at Xerox’s expense with smaller machines, better attuned to customer needs.

To cap it all, as technology moved forward again, Hewlett-Packard arrived to dominate the office printer market.

So now, when you go “Xeroxing”, odds are you’ll actually be using a Canon or a Ricoh.

Luckily, a decade ago the company found a new CEO, Anne Mulcahy, who was able to re-focus and turn the business around. But even Mulcahy had a note of caution in returning Xerox to R&D-based innovation.

She said in an interview: “You can either sit and wait like Kodak or Fuji…It’s always more attractive to stay in the old technology from a profit standpoint. Always. But you’ll be going out of business.”

Innovation and Islam

I spoke recently about innovation at a conference (organised by Continuum) of family businesses from the Middle East.

Many issues were raised by the delegates, but there was one that seemed to hang in the air unspoken. And it was this: does Islam itself have a dampening effect on innovation?

I have thought about this a good deal in the intervening days – and my tentative answer is that any dampening effect springs not so much from Islam, but rather from the very hierarchical nature of Middle Eastern society. And, of course, this is so often strongly present in family businesses.

After all, Islam is alone among the major religions of the world in having been founded by a trader. And the Koran is supportive of success in business – quite unlike the New Testament, which has practically nothing positive to say about the creation of wealth.

The powerful presence of respect for elders, within a command and control culture, always has a negative impact on the expression of new thinking and new ideas. This is true in all societies where hierarchy is a primary force – in Russia, China, India, the Middle East and elsewhere.

If these countries wish to grow dramatically in their capacity to innovate – which they all do – the question in my mind is not so much how to reduce hierarchy in general, but how to create situations where it is temporarily removed, so that people can express new ideas without fear of reprisal.

My first opera

I was around fourteen when my mother took me to the opera for the first time. I think it was her first time too – not really her cup of tea. She knew that I had grown to love classical music, so this seemed a good next step.

We went to the Hippodrome in nearby Coventry to see Bizet’s Carmen. Performing it was the Sadler’s Wells company, on tour from London. Carmen was the sultry Patricia Johnson, and the Australian tenor, Donald Smith, her ill-used lover Don José. Colin Davis was the dazzling, youthful conductor.

I was utterly entranced from the first notes… The music, the story, the characters, the costumes and designs, the lights. The brilliant singing and playing. It sparked a life-long love affair.

Here is Donald Smith singing the Flower Song from Carmen – from that production, recorded in 1961: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q74t8LhATuM

And on Friday I shall have the pleasure of meeting another fine Australian tenor who was a leading member of the Sadler’s Wells company in the 1960s, Kevin Miller.

Discovering new oceans

It’s sad, when something profound has been written, to find it consistently attributed to the wrong person, or even to Anon.

What’s more, I’ve done this myself. When I put together the Imagine book for Synectics, I had no idea where the following quote came from. I just knew it was important. So I attributed it to the aforesaid Mr Anon. Here it is:

“One cannot discover new oceans without consenting, for a long time, to lose sight of the shore.”

I certainly was not alone. And even in the age of the World Wide Web, it’s still said to be by that prolific unknown author, or, sometimes, extraordinarily, by Christopher Columbus.

Well, in fact it’s from Les faux-monnayeurs [The Counterfeiters], a novel by the French writer and Nobel Prizewinner, André Gide, published in 1925.

And what a vivid metaphor it is. Fundamental to success in the creative process.

(The portrait of Gide, above, is a detail from “The reading by Emile Verhaeren” by Théo van Rysselberghe.)