Jamming

John Kao

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061873089
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

In today's competitive environment, creativity is no longer an option. Companies that understand how to manage creativity in their people, organize for creative results and willingly implement good new ideas will triumph.

In Jamming, John Kao also offers an approach that demystifies a topic traditionally confounding to businesspeople everywhere. He begins by showing how creativity, like the musical discipline of jazz, has a vocabulary and a grammar. It is a process, and because of that it can be observed, analyzed, understood, replicated, taught and managed. He explains how creativity needs a particular environment in which to blossom and grow. Like musicians in a jam session, a group of businesspeople can take an idea, challenge one another's imagination and produce an entirely new set of possibilities. Kao reveals how managers can stimulate creativity in their employees, explores the impact of information technology on creativity, looks at the globalization of creativity and shows how to ensure the loyalty of people who design, build and deliver today's vital products and services.

1

THE AGE OF CREATIVITY

The business world is already launched on a new quest. The ancient pursuits—for capital, for raw materials, for process technology—remain eternal. But now business seeks a new advantage—delicate and dangerous, and absolutely vital—the creativity advantage.

• Breakfast in the Camillia Cafe in Tokyo’s Hotel Okura. Coffee costs $6, an omelet $20 (and this is before the dollar’s latest nosedive against the yen). I’m here to speak with a business professor named Hiro Takeuchi. When I tell him I’m writing a book about creativity, his expression turns quizzical. Not a man to blurt out his opinions, Takeuchi-san informs me in his own good time that “creativity is not a major issue in Japan.” He pauses again, then adds: “No, it’s the only issue.”
• Now we are at the end of a long day of interviews at the Paris headquarters of Renault, where a fighting-weight company is emerging from a state-subsidized bureaucratic blimp and is en route to privatization. I ask Yves Dubriel, project director in charge of compact cars, and champion of the Twingo, Renault’s snazzy new automotive child of the twist and the tango, if he has a secret for the car company’s future success. “We think a lot about creativity,” he answers, adding with French culinary flair, “It’s a team cocktail. How we combine the mentalities—the perspectives—is everything.”
• Here at São Paolo’s Hotel Imperador, where I’ve just finished speaking to two hundred Brazilian executives, the reception is gratifyingly noisy. A young woman pushes through the crowd surrounding the podium to hand me a gift: A bumper sticker with her company’s slogan, “Boas ideas nacem aqui”: Portuguese for “Beautiful ideas are created here.”
• Red and white explosions light up the Aegean Sea’s evening sky. Standing on the fantail of the good ship Sea Goddess II, I watch a battery of flares launched from the shore spell out a greeting to Pepsi. The senior management of PepsiCo Foods & Beverages International has gathered at this ultimate executive retreat to discuss high-performance leadership. The critical skill? Creativity.
• I’m at a resort hotel in Westchester County, New York, working with a team of Tiffany & Company executives. The subject of the seminar? Learning to think out of the light blue box.
• Today’s meeting with cabinet-level representatives of Singapore’s government takes place in a glass and steel tower overlooking this dynamic city-state. Its business policies have been so successful that astute visitors observe and listen carefully. What they hear is Singaporeans speaking of creativity as integral to corporate and national strategy. Today’s meeting is about how to teach creativity to children. The idea is to inculcate the necessary skills in primary-school pupils by including the subject in the required curriculum. “We must start early,” confides an earnest official, “if we want to keep up with the creativity race.”

These are just a few stories from my own experience, but they should be enough to suggest that the business world is already launched on a new quest. The ancient pursuits—for capital, for raw materials, for process technology, for all the usual sources of competitive advantage—remain eternal. But now business seeks a new advantage—delicate and dangerous, and absolutely vital—the creativity advantage. The focus of human history has evolved from soil and rainfall and iron and coal. Now it’s about the chemistry of the brain and the people whose neurons fire fastest and best. We’re moving beyond preoccupation with the physical and financial to a concern for the purely human: imagination, inspiration, ingenuity, and initiative.

My obsession over the past decade has been the pursuit of the remarkably creative. I have found people and companies that know something distinctive, something too fresh to be reduced to academic principles. The expert practitioners remind me of the fabled Zen master chefs whose knives, it has been said, grow sharper as they slice ingredients. Creativity is the knife that grows sharper in the hands of the astute business practitioner.

If this is the age of creativity—and you had better believe it is—why has it come about now, in our time? And what got it going?

• 1. This is the age of creativity because that’s where information technology wants us to go next.

The Nomura Institute classifies four eras of economic activity. The first three are the agricultural, the industrial, and the informational. The fourth? The creative. Just so. It is information technology that has enabled this new creative era, dramatically expanding the space for speculative thought. Information technology is evolving into the technology of relationships, facilitating the flow of creative interaction through computer-based communication networks, groupware, increasingly intelligent agents, knowledge representation and management systems, videoconferencing systems, and the convergence of different forms of traditional media.

Using their computers to access the riches of cyberspace, people tap into a host of new stimuli, challenging input, and dissonant opinions that form the raw materials of the creative process. Information technology is a medium for representing, organizing, and deploying knowledge. It can also amplify corporate awareness, allowing us to monitor our environment and to position ourselves to perceive what is genuinely new.

Everyone has a shot in cyberspace. Those new technologies qualitatively improve the basis on which people collaborate and increase everyone’s potential to gain insight, share knowledge, draw from a wide range of creativity inputs, and consider and develop the widest possible array of ideas.

All companies, as Percy Barnevik, chairman of ABB Asea Brown Boveri, the $30-billion Swiss/Swedish engineering firm, observed, are information technology companies. The big difference is between those that are good at using those technologies and those that aren’t.

Throughout history, commerce and manufacturing have undergone enormous change whenever information has become more widespread. The world changed radically when Gutenberg printed his first book in 1450, when Luca di Pacioli published the first double-entry bookkeeping system in 1494, and when the British Parliament passed the Public Libraries Act in 1850. The present leap has had even greater impact. Suddenly everyone everywhere has unprecedented access to information and ideas, regardless of social position or organizational rank. Everyman, Everywoman, even Everychild, can download a Library of Congress’s worth of data onto a personal computer in his or her workroom or bedroom and create new value from it—for mere information is more a commodity than ever before.

Information technology has also fundamentally altered the nature of collaboration. Groupware, software that supports collaboration, brings about a phenomenon similar to the multiplier effect in economics: Moore’s Law set the stage by providing the economic foundation for the information age; the cost of computing power decreases exponentially over time. Enhanced computing muscle in turn gives rise to Metcalfe’s Law, which postulates that as the number of users on a network increases, so the value of the network increases, at an expotential rate. I would suggest that there is another law as well: The power of creativity rises exponentially with the diversity and divergence of those users.

In traditional companies, organizational charts map the circuitry of permissible conversations and commands. Information technology abolishes the hard-wired routes, substituting flexible networks that enable people to communicate instantly and freely. Linear sequences give way to simultaneous and iterative processes. A good idea can provoke an uninhibited cascade of reactions in a hundred expected and unexpected places. These technologies of connection, and the ease with which we can change boundaries, also streamline the processes by which people interact. Boeing is only one example of a company whose information technology, in the form of design, simulation, and prototype-testing systems, enables it to reduce labor costs by eliminating unnecessary portions of the production process.

Furthermore, information technology greatly enhances institutional memory: a retrievable account of what an organization has done—who did what, with what resources, at what cost, and with what results. Even well-managed companies can suffer from a kind of corporate amnesia that allows them to persist in error, ignorance, and missed opportunities. A product development team rushes to the patent office to file, only to discover a preexisting patent filed by another group in the same company. Business comedy? No, true story. How can they do otherwise with no “past” to learn from? Information technology can become a business’s single greatest path to wisdom and inspiration—to a digital remembrance of things past.

Yet mere access to information does not automatically bestow power, as it sometimes did when corporations employed intricate control systems to supply, ration, or deny such access. The crucial variable in the process of turning knowledge into value is creativity. Always more important than the tool itself is the use to which the hand directs it.

Intelligence, F. Scott Fitzgerald remarked, is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. Creativity can certainly come of such a feat: Contradiction and divergence create puzzlement, tension, and stress. And the almost instinctive desire to overcome or encompass contradiction can be achieved only with creativity. My point is that contradictions with creative potential are likely to increase on networks of information exchange. Today’s creative player is someone who picks up—faster, more deftly, and more usefully than others—the conflicts that need resolution, the gaps that need filling, the hidden connections that need drawing, all the quirky, and possibly profitable, interrelationships that can be discerned in the new oceans of information. Computers generate a distinctive ease of virtual human connection at the same time that they arouse a powerful yearning for actual human connection. The creative management of those cross currents—whether in retailing or process management—will determine winners and losers.

• 2. This is the age of creativity because it’s the age of knowledge. And in an era that prizes knowledge, creativity adds value to knowledge and makes it progressively more useful.

Companies will increasingly be measured by their knowledge rather than their physical assets. But we still must ask: What is knowledge, and why should it matter for business? Pundits speak glibly of knowledge as if it had a single definition. It’s important to distinguish among different levels of knowledge. First, there is knowledge as raw material: facts, information, data. Such knowledge contains the ingredients of information clutter and overload. It’s what we read in newspapers. The second type of knowledge is insight. Insight connotes seeing into a situation, leading to connections defined by inner perception, or representation, of knowledge: the “Aha!” Then we have ideas. Ideas are interconnected insights that we can run with. An idea is a response to the what ifs and if only we coulds. Finally, we have knowledge as perceived value to a customer or other stakeholder.

But it’s creativity that enables the transformation of one form of knowledge to the next. For example, the nonlinear, discontinuous processing of data leads to the perception of relationships and connections, to insight. The act of perceiving relationships among insights leads us to ideas, and the creativity with which we pursue ideas engenders value. In each case, creativity comes with quantum leaps in insight and understanding that lead to value. Far from being a simple flash of mental lightning, creativity is a process with a grammar.

When we add information technology to the mix of creativity and knowledge, we get a particularly potent combination: capabilities to represent, deploy, and track knowledge coupled with technologies to promote collaboration across divergent disciplines and perspectives. When properly managed, the combination results in creative combustion.

Sweden’s leading insurer, Skandia, knows this well. Since 1994, the company has systematically tracked what it calls its intellectual capital as part of its annual report and as a key to sustainable growth. It calculates leading indicators and intellectual capital ratios that allow it to benchmark its intellectual capital strategy. The company also carries out internal knowledge audits and sees them as integral to the expression of corporate creativity for competitive advantage.

Cincinnati’s Senco, in the apparently low-tech business of fasteners and pneumatic tools, is another example. Senco is one of the world’s most sophisticated companies in managing knowledge for creative capability. The company invests heavily in knowledge capabilities and has its own internal “corporate epistemology” or philosophy of knowledge that clearly differentiates between knowledge required for efficient operation and knowledge required for corporate advancement. Internal corporate seminars on such topics as complexity theory, and the management of imprecise systems coexist with business departments whose sole responsibility is to practice the art and discipline of corporate awareness and to bring new data, insights, and ideas to the attention of senior management.

• 3. This is the age of creativity because companies are increasingly obliged to rapidly reinvent themselves to achieve growth.

The achievement of growth via efficiency, via rightsizing, downsizing, and cost cutting has a limited run. And it can be a disaster for creativity, which often results from redundancy and a reasonable level of sometimes intentional disorganization. And to look for sources of future growth—discontinuous leaps in insight and understanding that lead to value—requires creativity. Whether it is Skandia’s emphasis on renewal or Senco’s concern with its management concepts, their success derives from identifying the sources of future growth—through creativity.

Bain & Company has recently completed a major study that shows that as many as 50 percent of America’s larger corporations are in industries exhibiting significant turmoil. In other words, shifts in competitive dynamics—deep technological change, vanishing consumer loyalty, demographic shifts, and changes in expectations about work—are seriously unsettling those industries. Obviously, companies wishing to survive this tumult will have to find new sources of sustainable growth, even if this entails—as it surely will—reinventing their marketplace mission. Avery Dennison Corporation, a Fortune 500 company famous for its file folders and adhesive labels, is a good example of the point. The company’s leaders, well aware that advances in technology will soon bring their core businesses to the edge of extinction, know they must invent—which is to say, create—new fuel, new engines, new vehicles of growth.

Corporate decision makers know that rather than simply awaiting the future, they are well advised to invent it for themselves. There is no safe harbor where companies, sheltered from the turbulence, can rethink their missions. And there are no dry docks where they can refit or rebuild their ships. In today’s climate, the captains of industry have no choice but to effect change while their vessels are at sea. Moreover, you cannot simply order a make-over plan—by mail order, say, from this year’s most fashionable reengineer. You forge your plans, like every other creative act, right on board. No wonder Paul Roemer, professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has recently argued that growth in the economy is related to, of all things, innovation—the development of ideas. Not the so-called productivity gains that squeeze growth from efficiency, downsizing, and rightsizing, but the ideas that drive those gains and enable companies to create the future.

• 4. This is the age of creativity because many workers today feel entitled to creative jobs, and talented people are mobile as never before.

Workers’ expectations have changed substantially in recent decades. Worldwide, individuals are honing a new sense of possibility—not their village’s, or their tribe’s, or even humankind’s, but their own. In the United States, the birthplace of individual possibility, workers have a seemingly insatiable appetite for self-fulfillment, and they crave the respect that translates into freedom from close supervision. Although their fathers and mothers could never have conceived of such “demands,” today’s workers insist on the opportunity to do creative work.

It’s no coincidence that the era in which our younger workers grew up has been profoundly entrepreneurial—that is, individualistic. My desk runneth over with business plans from talented MBA students for whom a corner office with an impressive title just doesn’t cut it. They don’t want to work for big companies. They ply me for tips on how to escape corporate restrictions and tedium. MBAs are not alone in this. Many others entering today’s workplace are emphatically unenthusiastic about sitting at a workstation, having to refer to an employee manual, and possibly losing their jobs when their employer decides to downsize. They are learning the new truth of employment: that everyone today is his or her own entrepreneur and that the primary qualifications for this new role are imagination, inspiration, ingenuity, and initiative—in a word, creativity. Intermediaries of every sort, from venture capitalists to talent agents, stand ready (for a price) to help those with dreams turn them into reality. More and more people, at every level, will jump the job ...