The article Adopt a Cow: Strategy as Improvisational Theater recently penned by Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter from Harvard Business School is a perfect example of why business schools and their academics are being questioned as to their relevancy to the real world of business.
Professor Kanter is neither a business entrepreneur, although she gets paid well for public speaking about her writing on business, nor is she a person of the theatre, more like a theatre critic, someone who is not practised in the theatre but instead is practised writing about it.
Professor Kanter writes about business using the Harvard Business school methodology of interview and case study as the base material adding her own commentary and interpretation to fit her theories rather than as an experienced entrepreneur and innovator risking cash and assets. As a theatre practitioner, Professor Kanter is by her own admission, an observer not a practitioner, again reducing her ability to truly understand the experience of theatrical theory and performance.
Her article Adopt a Cow: Strategy as Improvisational Theater needs to answer the question “Does the content provide new insight and reflection on my work?” Likewise she needs to make the case for her use of improvisational theatre as an analogy for strategy by demonstrating how improvisation can be viewed, thought about and implemented as strategy.
So allow me to critique this recent article as both a theatre director and successful creative industries entrepreneur.
A quick background – I am graduate of one of Australia’s leading acting schools and as a professional theatre director worked for sometime as Associate Director of the Sydney Theatre Company currently under the artistic direction of the Oscar award winning actress Kate Blanchett. (I just wanted to add my own level of brand status to the game here) I founded and worked as creative director for 14 years of Eventures Australia Pty. Ltd, an experience design company designing experiences using theatrical methodologies that I built into one of Australia’s top ten event design and management companies. So along the way I have used my training in theatre to make a successful living commercially, thus I speak from a practitioners perspective.
So let’s examine the first paragraph of Kanter’s article and use of “script” as a loose theatrical analogy.
Eg…“For entrepreneurs and innovators, it's absurd to equate strategy with a Plan, with a capital P, all wrapped up in one neat package to be studied and followed slavishly. Certainly they need a theme, a domain, and a target. And they must show investors that there's a market. But because they are creating something new, how can they possibly follow a script?”…
All forms of live performance, new or old, have some form of protocol, rules, compliance, constraints and context that approximate a script and act as a guide. Music has arrangements, dance has notation, theatre has a script, and film has a storyboard, investors need a business plan.
These documents are never meant to be followed whether new or old. They are meant to be interpreted. Without them, all you have is an idea and hot air!!
“John Kao likened the work of innovators to the jamming of jazz musicians who improvise around a theme; Amar Bhide said hustle can be strategy. I think of this as the difference between traditional theater and improvisational theater, or between traditional television drama and reality TV. “
Who does this statement apply to? Professor Kanter seems to have forgotten most of the world’s companies are not theatre or TV companies. They come from industries such as infrastructure, IT, construction, government, defense, energy, mining, telecommunications, transport and logistics driven by entrepreneurs and innovators. When these industries create or design anything, there can be no improvisation. Hustle is not an option. They operate under strict governance and compliance protocols so they need plans or else they don't get to first base in their business discussions. Innovation strategically in these contexts takes on a whole different meaning. It is about deliberate design thinking and planning, not improvisation.
“In traditional theater, everything is pre-programmed. The playwrights from the strategic planning department write the script and run rehearsals, i.e., training sessions, to prepare the actors to act out their parts flawlessly, as conceived by the planners.”
This statement is factually incorrect and has no resemblance to theatrical reality, thus undermining all validity for the premise of this article and the analogy - “strategy as improvisational theatre”.
Pre-programming is a technological and IT metaphor and is just plain wrong to use as a descriptor of rehearsals and live performance. Live performance is not something you pre-programme. Live performance, whether in rehearsal or during a show, occurs in the moment.
Theatre companies do not have playwrights sitting in strategic planning departments. They have executive producers, the financiers and marketing people sitting in those spaces. Playwrights do not run rehearsals, they write scripts. Directors run rehearsals and they are not training sessions. They are sessions of creative discovery with the actors preparing in his/her own time bringing his/her own experience, skills and imagination to the rehearsal room to add to the creative discovery and journey taking place around the script to bring the creative work to life.
Everything in rehearsals is in a fluid state, including the script, until a couple of days before opening night of the performance. At dress rehearsals just before opening night, director, actors and technicians finally agree on cues notated in a stage manager’s manual during the rehearsals,(the most authoratative and important documentation in the world of theatre - something Kanter either doesn’t know about or has chosen to ignore for the sake of her argument). Cues cover all matter of movement on and off stage, lighting, sound, the movement in or out of scenery, scene changes etc. Most importantly, each one of those cues is operated manually every performance even though lights and sound maybe programmed into a computer. Live performance doesn’t trust technology.
An actor’s work can never be flawless as Kantor writes. An actor treats each night’s performance as another new experience upon which to develop the character he/she is playing and to learn more about their practice as an actor. Performance is human and thus never perfect. Each night’s performance is different.
Kanter's metaphor is ridiculous and lazy!!
….Improv throws out the book. The actors count on their own imagination and teamwork. They start with a rough theme and to play off of it, coming up with variations to which they each adjust, changing in response to audience reactions. In fact audiences sometimes define the theme. The actors must think fast and adapt quickly. In the fast-paced technology world, this is called rapid prototyping — developing a series of possibilities in close communication with users and without knowing in advance exactly what will emerge…
Improvisation does not throw out the book. If it does it fails. Improvisation in all art forms has very strict protocols. In theatrical improv, the Yes And protocol is its strict ground rule and has become common fare in training programmes in organisations of late to demonstrate how collaboration works.
Here’s an example of a Yes And improvisation.
First Improvor: Will you kill the cow?
Second Improvor: Yes and I will bury it in the annuals of nonsense
First Improvor: Thank you!! Where are the annuals of nonsense located then?
Second Improvor: Boston in this instance I think...
And away goes the improv on a delightful journey of the imagination about the death of a cow in Boston!
If however, the second improver had said, no he would not kill the cow, the flow in the improvisation would have been fundamentally different. “Why not?” could have been an obvious retort from the First Improvor but the flight of our improvisational imagination as audience would have already been lost with the next response - the improvisation floundering with failure looming around the corner of the next line.
Likewise musical improv revolves around the very strict protocol of musicians recognising who and when a player feels the urge to solo or riff and needs to take the lead and when that player has finished being leader.
If we followed Kanter’s instruction and tossed the book out, musical improvisation would sound like the orchestra before a performance in which each musician is practising part of a song or tuning his or her own instrument up alone. Cacophony instead of music!!
….”That brings me to the cow-based marketing programs created by Stonyfield. Stonyfield, an organic yogurt producer, began with more imagination than cash. But Stonyfield's "CE-Yo" Gary Hirshberg had a big goal: commitment to becoming a SuperCorp (as I call it), combining innovation, profitable growth, and social good, improving health and the environment.
Using cows as their theme, Hirshberg's team improvised their way around the obstacles to a small upstart in the huge food industry.
With theatrical flair, Stonyfield uses the Web and live events to get close to consumers and garner free media, starring the cows. Fans can adopt a cow on the website and get regular emails from their cow. They can also tune into to You Tube videos of cows chewing their cuds. The videos proved popular in unexpected ways, finding a receptive audience among Wall Street bankers who found it relaxing to take a cow break. …
Here my sense of what Professor Kanter is trying to argue is completely lost because her essay seems full of false analogies, nonsense metaphors, malapropisms and management mumbo-jumbo.Indeed, she seems literally to have lost the plot.
So I had no alternative but to read her text in these last three paragraphs literally asking my imagination to make sense of it and here is what it came up with …
"Gary Hirshberg , who had for many years been a street performer on the corners of Wall Street, has decided to take the team down town to his old haunt to test his new viral corporate marketing campaign idea based on cow improvisations.
He has dropped the team off two blocks from Wall Street as he wants them to experience the impact of the cow outfits on the people in the street first.
4 out of the team have connected head and tails in two black and white Jersey cow outfits hired from Disney and have settled into a cow improvisational routine – mooing at potential yogurt users as they walk by gauging their reaction.
Both the cows’ improvisers and the potential yogurt users are suddenly distracted. Hirshberg is having trouble trying to persuade the additional promotional girl they have hired to make up even numbers for the head and tail cow outfits, from taking up the rear end position in the cow outfit with him.
Felicia Walten is a statuesque blonde 23 year old business school graduate who looks as if she has stepped out of a Clairol advertisement. She still thinks Hugh Hefner is a possibility because she has had to give up on Donald Trump after failing the audition for the Apprentice several times. The promotional agency has not told Hirshshberg Felicia has just been sacked from Hooters for abusing patrons who kept looking at her chest.
Felicia (at the top of her voice): The agency didn’t tell me I was going to have put my head up your bum. I didn’t go to business school just to disappear up someone’s bum, Gary – CeYo or whatever you call yourself.
Gary (testily but calmly): So, Felicia, how might we overcome this obstacle?
Felicia: Well I have always been told my arse is my best feature – so why don’t you take up the rear position."
This exchange was grabbed by a cameraman from the John Stewart Daily Report who just happened to be in the vicinty at the time, was aired on the show and as a result the Stonyfield brand received instant recognition over night.
And thus, the obstacle from the small upstart outlined in Professor Kanter’s final paragraph was overcome.
The moral of the story. There was no plan, as Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter suggests, things just happen"
Professor Kanter, if you intend using theatrical metaphors please pay the theatrical profession the respect of understanding the elemental aspects of their art, practice and language before you write about it.
Oh and by the way, actors bringing improvisational classes to leadership development programmes have nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with presentation, content and how to deliver the message. Actors don’t do strategy and neither do cows!!
Readers, forget Evolve. If you want to read insightful literature that deals with the topic of strategy and theatre (improvisational or otherwise) here are few recommendations that provided me with some insight.
“It seems that even established companies want the entrepreneurial spirit of getting on with it, rather than waiting for the script. Like organic yogurt, it's a healthy development.”
This last sentence is like the rest of the article – cow nonsense!!