Corporate Creativity John Kao
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John Kao On Corporate Creativity
About the author: John Kao draws on an appropriately eclectic background in his study of corporate creativity. He is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, a successful high-tech entrepreneur, and a film producer (of the award-winning “Sex, Lies, and Videotape”). But it’s his avocation as a jazz pianist that has given him the best metaphors to describe how some companies manage creativity better than others. He teaches
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anaging creativity really requires a new managerial mindset,” claims John Kao. “If you think about what traditional management is all about—how it’s taught in business schools and practiced in organizations—the skills that are rewarded have a lot to do with analyzing options, decreasing uncertainty, and paying a lot of attention to detail. But those kinds of skills may actually be highly dysfunctional in an environment where the mission is to generate new insights, ideas, and processes that lead to the realization of value.”
a course on the subject at Harvard
highlights with us . . .
So how are managers concerned with enhancing creativity supposed to approach their work? “One of the biggest clues for me,” says Kao, “came from ‘Schindler’s List.’” In one scene of that film, a worker observes Schindler not working like the others and questions his role. “And—if you remember the great line—he says: ‘I handle the presentation.’ More and more, when we talk about managing creativity, we are talking about stage managing—about creating hot environments where unprecedented things can take place.” Implicit in this new managerial mindset is the idea that the real strength of a company is the creativity of its people, and that great creative leaps happen only when people are able to improvise. Kao notes that good improvisation (or “jamming”) does require important kinds of knowledge, but also requires a comfort level with not knowing. In the words of Zen philosophers, part of what an organization must achieve is “beginner’s mind.”
Shared Conversation
Business School, and shared some
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A few voices stood out at the second annual Knowledge Advantage colloquium (held in November 1995 in Chicago), representing very different perspectives on the topic of knowledge management. John Kao explored the challenge of managing creativity, applying the metaphor of an improvisational jazz band and weaving in some Zen teachings. Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann looked at knowledge through the lens of complexity science. And Motorola’s Bob Galvin brought a bottom-line perspective to the conversation, describing why he believes it is just good business to invest in employees’ knowledge growth.
article abstract
Some companies have very effective techniques for clearing the mind—that is, challenging their expertise and perceiving new realities. “Jan Timmer,” notes Kao, “who ran the big change management process at Philips over the last few years (Project Centurion), called his managers together and said, ‘Nobody who has functional expertise in a particular area is going to be allowed to run a project having to do with that area.’” Similarly, The Coca-Cola Company recently hired 125 marketing executives, none of whom, by intention, had any beverage experience. Also at Coke, CEO Doug Ivester considers it his personal responsibility to visit typical stores anonymously, to get an unadulterated view of the market. Other companies make this a distinct role in the organization. Meiji Seika, a Japanese confectionery company, told one manager in 1994 that his job description was to live in Brussels, eat dinners out, and visit grocery stores. Period. His nickname at the company was “Tastebuds.” The organizational equivalent of “beginner’s mind” can be facilitated in other ways, too, says Kao. As well as clearing minds, managers can think about how to clear spaces and how to clear beliefs. Shared Conversation
When Kao talks about “clearing the space,” he means the actual physical work environment. “You can get very detailed about how to create environments
that are conducive to creativity, right down to the architectural details.” This was the case at Oticon, a hearing aid manufacturer in Denmark. An example: “They decided to build their staircase twice as wide. Why? Because they wanted people to be able to go up and down without having to say, ‘Oh, excuse me’— so they could continue the informal conversations they were having. Oticon’s premise was: If we’re going to compete through creativity, we have to\ maximize the opportunity for conversations internally.” Certainly, the office furniture maker Steelcase believes this. In its research, design, and communications investments, it is “betting the company that creative collaboration will be the theme of the future.” Finally, “clearing the beliefs” of a company is about “creating a climate of belief—fostering an expectation of not just the possibility but the inevitability of creativity.” Those who manage creativity astutely raise the company’s level of expectation of it and make it more tangible. The value and priority placed on creative work is clear.
A Shared Conversation
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Murray Gell-Mann on the Comple x Adaptive Business
Murray Gell-Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969, and is best known for his theory predicting the existence of “quarks”—a discovery which sparked the development of a new branch of physics known as quantum chromodynamics. His interests extend to many other subjects, including archaeology, history, evolutionary biology, linguistics, learning, and creative thinking. He was able to bring all these subjects together as a founding member of the Santa Fe Institute, where he is involved in the study of complex adaptive systems.
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hen W. Edwards Deming began his pioneering work with Japanese firms in the 1950s, he was, says Murray GellMann, essentially recognizing the firm as a complex adaptive system. He saw that organizations, like other evolving organisms, were constantly gathering information from their environments and adapting to it. Deming’s contribution, as Gell-Mann describes it, is something to which all managers should aspire: to ensure that the firm is always adapting to “the real selection pressures on the organization—namely the need to please and retain customers and to make a profit—rather than selection pressures generated by individuals in the organization, which may not be coincident with the needs of the organization as a whole.” Gell-Mann explains himself by way of a quick introduction to complexity science. The complexity that we see in the world all around us, he explains, is due to three basic things: “very simple rules, initial order, and the operation over and over and over again— the relentless operation—of chance.” What do we mean when we speak of an object’s or system’s complexity? A good definition is that its complexity is measured by “the length of a very concise description of its regularities.”
Shared Conversation
About the author:
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A Shared Conversation Finding these simple rules and regularities is the objective of scientific enterprise—itself a complex adaptive system. In science, the rules (or as GellMann calls them, schema) are the theories and equations proposed to describe the world and predict its workings. Like Maxwell’s equations or, today, superstream theory, they state the simple, robust laws that govern a diverse set of phenomena. Such schema are not absolute—there are always competing theories about, to be proved or disproved by further experimentation. As more information is gathered, the complex system that is science continues to adapt. Businesses too, of course, have their schema, in the forms of policies and practices. Those that lead to success are selected for continuance, while the others die off. The problem comes when the pressures on the selection process are coming not from paying customers but from internal players with personal agendas and the power to skew the feedback. As in science, Gell-Mann notes, “we see other selection pressures coming from human frailty: excessive ambition, greed, and so on.” Responsible managers will fight this threat by working to make the company into “a genuinely adaptive system.”
Gell-Mann notes another implication of complexity science (or what he calls “plectics”) for business: that the formulation of strategy is at best problematic. “A hundred years ago, every scientist would have said: ‘Of course, if you know the initial condition and you know the law, you can predict what will happen.’ Now we know that’s absolutely untrue.” Two sources of unpredictability are the problem. The first is that the fundamental laws of the universe are quantum mechanical: “all they give is a set of probabilities for alternative histories of the universe—not a clear prediction that one history will occur instead of the others.” Second, there is the famous phenomenon of chaos to contend with, which involves extreme sensitivity to initial conditions: “tiny, tiny changes in initial conditions can distort the outcome by huge amounts.”
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The translation to business is that it’s frequently impossible to find a “best” strategy. Instead, GellMann posits, “what is most important is to have a family of strategies, such that one can vary the response to one’s changing circumstances according to success.” Robustness doesn’t consist so much in having a particular pattern of response as in having an enormous set of possible responses. “At the very worst, you can move around at random among a set of related strategies—and if you can do better than random, fine.”
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Bob Galvin on Learning at Motorola
Robert W. Galvin stepped down as chairman of Motorola in January 1990 to become Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Board. Exactly 50 years earlier, his father, Motorola founder Paul Galvin, had invited him to perform his first assignment for the company: an address to its national sales convention. Under Bob Galvin’s leadership, Motorola expanded into international markets in the 1960s and, over the next decade, shifted its focus away from consumer electronics and into high-technology markets. By the end of the 1980s, Motorola had become the premier worldwide supplier of cellular telephones.
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ob Galvin, by his own account, has “been around a long time” in business, and has seen at least four eras of thinking about what makes for corporate competitiveness. But the best answer came to him one day when he was reflecting on his tennis game. “I simply noted that, when I lost, I lost because the other person was| better trained than I.” From that, a broader concern dawned: How could Motorola prevail unless it were competitive counterpart-to-counterpart, person-to-person? “I came into my associates the next day and said: ‘I think I’ve finally identified the essence of how we’re going to become more competitive. We must all strive to be as good or better than the best—not the average, but the best—of anybody who holds our job at a competitor.” This was the beginning of what would eventually become a huge commitment to training by the company, ultimately taking the form of Motorola University. But the idea was hardly a no-brainer. While no one refuted the value of learning, many claimed the cost would be too high. Galvin offered the counterintuitive argument. “My position was—and I’d done some thinking before I sprung this on the gang—that training wasn’t going to cost us anything.” Despite proposing an initial expenditure of $40 million, he was convinced the payback would more than repay the cost.
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About the author:
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A Shared Conversation Galvin increased Motorola’s knowledge advantage in other ways, as well. One idea he borrowed from the US government has since become common practice in industry: to establish an “intelligence department.” He even hired away an agent from the CIA to found it and build a staff of “professional knowledge acquirers.” The group has been invaluable to Motorola and to Galvin personally: “They knew what the Internet would do before its creators knew what it would do.” One key in such intense knowledge acquisition is, of course, to avoid “information overload.” This was a problem when Motorola executives were preparing to crack the Japanese market. “We were just buried with all the things we ultimately knew about Japan.” The breakthrough came when the team stepped back from the maze of information and focused on an essential factor: “that what the Japanese really respect is power.” As Galvin describes it, “we knew then we were going to have to use power as a two-by-four to break our way into Japan—or risk having the principle of sanctuary bury our entire industry.”
Shared Conversation
Focusing on the essence of what one knows or should know is not easy. But Galvin believes it is, like much of creative problem solving, a learnable skill— even, he says, a “vocational skill.” He personally undertook to learn how to think creatively some 40 years ago, with the help of a seminal guide: Applied Imagination by Alex Osborn. Like any learned skill, creativity takes practice. And practice Galvin does. “Now I do it almost instinctively. I’ll have an idea
walking down the street by putting some four things together. It may have no relevance for me, but at least I’m in motion, I’m practicing.” Not surprisingly, Galvin is now working to bring this skill to all of Motorola’s leaders. “We are explicitly directing our people, from middle managers on up, to be extremely conscious of the processes of creative thinking.” Just as importantly, they are being urged to go use it. Explains Galvin: “We’ve got to be bold. If we don’t leave a legacy—if we don’t use our knowledge to cause something different and better to occur, then we shouldn’t have our jobs. Because that is our job. We are leaders.”