The First Kuala Lumpur Innovation Forum designed and delivered by the Malaysian Foundation for Innovation was an excellent example of collaboration in a secular Islamic state where the common good of the country and its people and their spiritual health is considered tantamout rather than any drive for individual riches and freedoms at any cost. Education, knowledge, understanding, experience and initiative dominated the topics of conversation not the rights and wrongs of a particular political ideology or philosophy.
In their new book Leading Innovasian launched at the event, the co-authors and Principal Consultants in Alpha Catalyst Consulting, Azim Pawanchik and Dr. Suraya Sulaiman offer insight as to why this is the case when they compare the culture of Asian innovation practice to the culture of Western innovation practice.
It is difficult to know how you are doing in your particular profession when you are working in creativity and innovation. Creativity in whatever endeavour or context is ruled by small continual loops of perception, judgment and reflection. It is not until you create a body of work in whatever practice or context over a period of time that you, as a creator, gain distance from your work. Even then you begin to wonder whether the work has any immediate or long term value or has made meaningful connections or sense with or for others. As a creator, it is not you who judges the effectiveness and quality of your work, it’s others.
So, against this backdrop, it was very nice to suddenly be approached by IBM saying I had been selected to be one of the 100 IBM Global Creative Leaders and would I be happy to participate in their on going global study on human capital management coming off the back of their 2010 Global CEO Global Study - Capitalising on Complexity: Creative Leadership is the Way To Go!
Our journey of discovering on this topic began almost two years ago when I wanted to try and assess the value of the creative leadership and creativity programmes we were delivering. The more I inquired the more it became apparent, answers were not easy or readily available.
The major national research project “Is Australian management creative and innovative?” the Creative Leadership Forum completed in 2008 further complicated the issue when it revealed over 75% of managers said the creativity and innovation training they received was at best ineffectual, at worst a complete waste of time and money.
Since 2008, I have had many conversations with senior leaders in organisations in which they were simply trying to define what innovation actually meant in the context of their organisations, before even starting to plan how to develop strategic thinking around the concept of creativity and innovation.
Last week one of the world's truly great innovators passed away. Malcolm McLaren, the inventor of the punk movement. McLaren's life work was that of a Renaisance man, an ideas man who changed popular culture both as an entreprenuer and as an artiste. His journey of invention was often misunderstood by artists, academics and the industry in which he operated because he continually moved outside the norms to create new forms and new products that questioned the accepted practice of his peers. As a manager, he was not a traditional band manager. He interfered artistically. As an artist, he was held in deep suspicion by musicians and practicing artists alike because he was seen as an entrepreneur first, part of the profit making machine artists inherently mistrust. Even worse, he couldn't play a musical instrument using digital sampling technology to create his work way before it was the accepted norm.
If you contrast his first outing publicly as the manager of the Sex Pistols and the recognised founder of the punk movement; his mentoring of Adam Ant and Boy George; his subsequent breaking of world music into popular culture through Duck Rock recorded and filmed in Soweto before the breakdown of Apartheid in South Africa; his contemporising and popularising of opera through Puccini's Madame Butterfly and his final album Paris containing a beautiful and romantic duet with Catherine Deneuve - Paris, Paris, you can see the emergence of the archetypical digital entrepreneur for the 21st century and the associated artistic and business model. He paved the way for all those "punk" young creative garage based internet and software coders, hackers and would be entrepreneurs who broke rules because they could and found ways to make money out of doing that - think Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter. McLaren was like all great entrepreneurs, a racconteur who understood strategic thinking - what made McLaren stand out was his ability to recognise his strength as an ideator, to see "ideas" as an artform in itself and their manifestation being their successful implementation artistically and commercially. Like all great innovators, he failed regularly yet always restlessly sought the next new idea, forever honing his craft - whatever you may label that!!.
A man of our times and one of the modern world's great creative and cultural leaders!
Here is a link to a feature on Malcolm McLaren made in 1984
Wednesday, December 15, 2010 at 09:18PM