God Save Punk Rock

Punk Britannia – featuring TV Smith, Johnny Rotten, Richard Strange – BBC4 Friday 01 June 9.00 pm

The Queen’s Jubilee celebrations approach and “Punk Britannia” hits the screens this Friday on BBC 4 – featuring several of the artists I’ve interviewed or seen recently at Richard Strange’s Cabaret Futura.   It seems that punk is back in fashion, given the imminent arrival of the Queen’s Jubilee.   I recall that my band partner cum journalist from our punk group “Alternative Posing” was censured on national TV in 1977 when he printed a punk fanzine which featured the Queen with a safety pin through her nose.  How the times, they have changed!

I bumped into another Punk HR manager on Twitter last week – none other than Perry Timms who has coined the Twitter hashtag #PUNKHR.  This reminds me to mention that you can still get a FREE copy of my new micro book Punk Rock People Management.  Mail me with PUNK in the title at peter@humdyn.co.uk   Punk Rock was about simplicity, brevity and authenticity and Punk Rock People Management is about these timeless qualities rather than the need to pogo whilst doing staff appraisals.  Feel free to post a response on these questions:

• How can we simplify business processes to the advantage of customers, staff and business?
• How can we deliver products and services faster than our competitors?
• How can we be more authentic in our dealings with customers?

Check the contents page of Punk Rock People Management out if you have not got your copy yet:

God Save Punk Rock HR

Contact us for a Punk Rock Business event or 24 hour retreat to consider critical challenges facing your business.  We have none other than Bernie Torme, who fronted Punk Rock band Skid Row, coming along to our next showcase event shortly – just 15 tickets left.  Finally, let’s see what started all the fuss about the Queen’s Jubilee:

The Phenomenal Rise of Richard Strange – PART TWO

Richard Strange gets ready to execute Kevin Costner

What’s the link between Harry Potter, Jarvis Cocker, Twiggy and Robin Hood?  Richard Strange of course!  Quoted by Johnny Rotten on the BBC’s ‘Punk Olympia’ as the man who invented punk, author, academic, Robin Hood’s executioner and the man who ate Harry Potter…  This is part two of the interview with Richard on creativity and innovation parallels from art, empire and industry. Read part one at Strangeways here we come.

The Phenomenal Rise of Richard Strange

PC : I read a review of the album ‘The Phenomenal Rise of Richard Strange’ and it said it was the greatest concept album ever made.  How did the concept for the album come about?

RS : When the Doctors finished in 1978 I’d already started to have the idea for the album.  The Phenomenal Rise describes a figure who wanted to play the system just because he could, not because he wanted to achieve power.  A cerebral pursuit.  He was someone who had learned the tricks of Rock’n’Roll, self-promotion and advertising.  Quite cynically, but also because it was a game, he wanted to see just how far he could take it.  Because he did not want the material trappings of power, he knew he could give everything away, all the stuff that people would obviously want from it.  He had just started to put his strategies into place when the system turned against him.

The character in the album was a glamorous figure, a little bit like a rock’n’roll Ronald Reagan, way before Tony Blair.  This idea of using techniques from show business but applying them to the acquisition of political power, in the same way that the Nazis did, held a great appeal to me at the time.  Perhaps it was influenced by some films I watched at the time by Francesco Rosi, the Italian director of films like The Mattei Affair and Illustrious Corpses.  These films concerned corruption, power, the way that the system is bent and skewed and so on.

The Phenomenal Rise of Richard Strange starts with kidnappings, bombs, terrorism, civil unrest and so on – a great backdrop! By appealing to the Hearts and Minds, He gets power (Magic Man).   Like all futurologists I got that bit wrong – I thought that technology would give us more time.  The reverse of this is of course true!  The press turns against him as he starts to dismantle the system that put him in power (Gutterpress).  His wife kills herself (International Language).  He sees his death coming (Premonition).  We think he has been kidnapped although it might all be an elaborate hoax to stage his own demise (The road to the room).  Finally, there is a kind of ‘My Way’ – a classic torch song at the end (I won’t run away), although I wanted to end it with a question mark.  The whole album has a cinematic feel, which sets it apart from most rock albums.

PC : How did the music industry respond to this?

RS : The Doctors of Madness finished on a real low point.  We self-imploded, blown away by the punk rock that we had helped bring into existence.  The Sex Pistols supported us.  The Damned supported us and so on.  I spent a couple of years writing the Phenomenal Rise and noticed there has been a shift in what people were saying about the Doctors of Madness.  Then I went off to the US and Canada touring the Phenomenal Rise with just a Revox Tape Recorder and a guitar and realized I never wanted to play a rock club again. It was liberating.

Like a virgin – Intuition + experience

The experience of touring without a rock band is how I came up with the idea of Cabaret Futura, a mixed media club with performance artists, poetry, short films and so on. I opened in December 1980 in Soho. The very first thing that happened to you as you entered the club was different as you were greeted by a large python, which was the pet snake of the receptionist.  Cabaret Futura became a big hit, ahead of time from the new romantic clubs of the 80’s like The Blitz and after punk had more or less extinguished itself.  We started to have bands coming through that were a little more art school.  The negativity and destructiveness of punk rock had given way to a slightly softer more creative feel.  We’d get people like Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, The Human League, Echo and the Bunnymen, Spandau Ballet, Richard Jobson and so on.  Richard Branson became very interested in signing me to Virgin.  We arrived on Richard’s boat in Little Venice with a copy of the album on cassette. He loved the first track and made me an initial offer of £54 000 for the album.  I declined.  He loved track 2 and came back with £58 000.  Track three did not go down so well – £42 000, but I thought he would like the final track and the offer back to £54 000 – I thought I’d better accept at this point!  They were also signing bands like Simple Minds, The Human League, Japan, Culture Club, Heaven 17 – bands that were much easier to market with good haircuts.  The Phenomenal Rise referenced Edith Piaf, Bertolt Brecht, Jacques Brel, electric disco and so on – much more difficult to market.

Overall, I’d say that record companies did not, and do not, offer much help to artists who wanted to break away from accepted music paradigms.  Added to that I was always able to assist in my own inimitable way!  For example, I opened the Manchester Virgin Megastore launch event on my back in a comatose position and ended up in a worse state.  Record companies don’t always understand such things!

No Limits – Stone Age Innovation

Innovation is just banging two existing rocks together and seeing what spark is produced.

PC : What should the record industry do now?  Is it the engine room of its own innovation or destruction?

RS : The idea of the pop star as we understood it, like the Stones, David Bowie and Madonna is over.  Rock music is now just a series of reprised poses and posturing. It is impossible to hold a guitar without referencing Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townsend or Keith Richard. It really has ALL BEEN DONE.  And that’s tragic for our kids.  What chance do they have except as purveyors of pastiche?

Music has become more disparate.  Malcolm McLaren said “We live in a pick and mix culture, where everyone wants a bit of this and a bit of that.”  Malcolm got a lot of things wrong, but I think he got this one right.  It was much easier to target stuff.  Now, there is just so much stuff and it is all much more bespoke.  The democratisation of music has made it possible for everyone to put make their own music and sell it, but the chances of anyone finding it on their own without a distribution or advertising machine is limited.  For example, I’ve got a 19 year old student with a lovely voice who sings cover versions – she has had 500 000 hits on youtube by using search engines and so on.  If that had happened in the world before social media she would have had a number one hit for many weeks in the UK, but she is still nowhere in terms of profile.

It would be clinically insane to predict where social media will be in five years time.  Everyone assumes it will get bigger and bigger but who knows. No one saw it coming ten years ago., so who can say where it’s going?

Mark Zuckerberg has said that the writing of computer code should be compulsory at school.  Spoken language has been round for hundreds of years. Computer language for maybe 50 years.   The horse and cart has been around for longer than the motor car, but who would say that the horse and cart is the future?  None of us know – all we can do is extrapolate from a few signifiers.  But in all probability computing is an important development.

Pop will eat itself? – Will music be it’s own enema?

PC : Music now can be considered to be the mixing of genres.  In some cases what emerges is sublime.  In other cases, something else comes out.  How do you see the thin slicing of genres, which is probably a marketing invention.

RS : I think musical genres are a total marketing invention.  All music is mongrel.  The Beatles rehashed a bit of Country and Western, a bit of old Rock’n’Roll and a bit of Tamla Motown and came up with Merseybeat.  The Stones did the blues – Sonny Boy Williamson, John Lee Hooker, Chuck Berry.  What were Oasis except the Sex Beatles? – a bit of attitude from here, a bit of melody etc.  What was Paul Weller ever apart from an accretion of influences?  David Bowie was Lou Reed, Scott Walker, Anthony Newley, Iggy Pop, Jacques Brel and Lindsay Kemp. But the SUM of those parts, those existing elements, was something we would call “original”.

There is no innovation in music, it’s all recombinant DNA.  It is just banging two existing rocks together and seeing what spark is produced.

In the afterglow – Strange views on the future

PC : What are you doing currently to pull art, empire and industry by the nose?

RS : I’ve always liked mixing up genres as a means of developing new stuff.  I host a monthly live chat show in Soho, called “A Mighty Big If”, with guests from the worlds of music, theatre, literature, comedy, art and film to come for an informal chat and to answer questions from members of the audience, plus some live performance.

I’ve been approached by Don Boyd, a film producer who did the Derek Jarman and Sex Pistols movies and so on.   After being on the receiving end of some shabby behavior by some TV commissioning editors a few years ago, he decided to set up an online arts streaming channel, HiBROW TV.  What he got crucially and uniquely right was to have practicing artists commission the actual work to be shown.  So, he has a number of curators, not broadcasters, not suits upstairs, not counting budgets etc. deciding what to commission.  There’s Gary Kemp, myself, Gavin Turk, Sir Richard Eyre, Mike Figgis, ARTISTS who decide what is worth commissioning – We then get a film crew and go and film it.  Because we don’t have to put it through committees etc. and leave it too late, it remains fresh and innovative, before all the life has been drained out of it.  If you can get a camera into the rehearsal room in the second week of rehearsal, that’s where all the creative stuff is done.   I know this, having been in a lot of plays.  By the 2^nd night of performance, the play is dead.  You’ve done all the interesting work in the rehearsal room….and all you are doing in the theatre is rehashing it again and again and again.

I’ve also worked with Marianne Faithful on the Tom Waits / William Burroughs / Robert Wilson collaboration The Black Rider, performing in theatres in London, San Francisco, Sydney and Los Angeles.  It’s a Faustian story with Tom Waits writing the music, William Burroughs wrote the book and Marianne Faithful playing the devil.  Absolute precision was required down to the last detail.  I came out of that experience to work with Harmony Korine on a film called Mr Lonely.  Harmony’s way of working is to use improvisation.  We were cast as impersonators living in a retirement home for impersonators up in the highlands.  I was Abraham Lincoln, Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplain, Three Stooges, James Dean and so on.  He says, “This scene is where Michael Jackson brings Marilyn Monroe back for the first time.  I want you all to be discussing a barbecue / picnic”.  So, we work out this scene.  Just before we start shooting, Harmony comes up to me, whispers in my ear and says “I don’t want you to do any of that.  I want you to talk about taking acid in Vietnam”. Then he shouts, “action!” and waits for the fun to start!  So creativity is often what happens off the stage.

PC : An implication for businesses interested in innovation is to find out what is ‘off stage’ and nurture it without trying to mainline it?

RS :  Yep. See what is happening on the street, in the clubs, listen to what is getting people excited.  Be prepared to ditch your preconceptions about “The Next Big Thing”.  You will nearly always get it wrong.

Kiss Hello Tomorrow – Strange but wise advice for innovators

Richard concluded by reminding us 3 pieces of advice to the aspiring artist trying to carve out an innovative niche for themselves.

1. Always carry a notebook

2. Be prepared to kill your babies

3. Never underestimate the power of charm

More at Richard Strange’s website  Check him out in person by attending Cabaret Futura or a Mighty Big If in London.  All details on the website.

The Great Strange

Another Brick in the Wall Thinking

Wall and peace

Introducing Tony Wall, who facilitates innovative learning strategies at the University of Chester in the UK.  I will leave him to take up the story, inspired by Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall”:

“Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!” is one of those lyrics that many of us recognise instantly. That’s not surprising as “Another Brick in the Wall” reached No 1 around the globe. For some, it was simply a unique and catchy melody, but for others, it was a lot more. For these, it was a powerful protest against rigid schooling, which created ‘another brick’ in a ‘wall of limited thinking and acting’ – a wall stopping the learner thinking differently or learning differently. For Pink Floyd, it was a wall of “thought control”, a message calling for our education systems to facilitate more innovative thinking. Listening and watching the song and its performances in 2012, it’s striking to realise how current Pink Floyd’s message is in today’s schools and universities…

Think about typical university education for a moment. What are the bricks in the ‘wall of limiting innovation’? The university says which courses are offered. It says what specifically will be learnt. It says where it will be learnt. It says how it will be learnt. It says how this learning will be assessed. It says when the student can start and stop learning. It might even say what date and specific time they have to learn. All in all, these are just more ‘bricks’ in the wall of standard thinking and acting (as Pink Floyd would probably not say). These ‘bricks’ exist within the model (or paradigm) of mass university education. If we took this paradigm, and turned it upside down, the wall would fall to pieces, but opens up new avenues for facilitating innovative thinking and acting. We might call the opposite model, a personalised university education, whereby the individual learner makes choices, and choices way beyond that already conceived by flexible universities around the globe.

What would such a radically innovative system be like? Within the UK, we can look to the University of Chester’s Centre for Work Related Studies (CWRS) who has been operating this system for over a decade. Here, the learner negotiates a qualification that meets their specific needs and aspirations, and negotiates their qualification’s title (say Masters in Business Innovation and Creativity or Masters in Leading Innovation). The learner chooses when to learn. They choose what specifically they need/want to learn. They choose how they will learn it. And they choose how they are assessed. In this model, this means learning normally (rather than abnormally) happens outside of the classroom, in the workplace, or in life. All in all, this enables innovative and diverse ways for the learner to make changes to their life, and engage in an educational approach, which is authentic and meaningful to them personally. They have to think for themselves, though supported and guided, and not constrained by the ‘walls’ of subjects, disciplines or Teacher preferences (or dark sarcasm!). It is a model that has led to CWRS being one of Europe’s largest centres of its kind, with commendations from the UK university quality body and showcases by the UK university funding body.

Shouting “Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!” in this new paradigm doesn’t apply, as the “Teacher” is replaced by tutors facilitating personalised learning with individuals. Turning existing paradigms upside down is one way of creating innovative solutions to challenges or seizing opportunities. So, that leaves us with two questions:

• What ‘bricks’ are you taking down to release innovative thinking?
• What model can you turn on its head for something radically new and valuable?

Innovation in teaching and learning is about getting the relationship right between teachers and learners.  This is exactly what they are doing at the University of Chester.  And, just for fun, these principles apply just as much in primary education as they do in tertiary.  See the piece from BBC News where we ran a ‘School of Rock’ which helped 10 year old kids surpass their teacher’s expectations of them in their exams.

Tony Wall facilitates innovative learning at CWRS and accredits commercial training with university credits. You can connect with Tony at LinkedIn

3M : Meatloaf, Macroeconomics and (Iron) Maiden – Rock’n'Roll Business hits the FT and The BBC

This week, I’ve prepared a round up of press articles on business, management, economics and music.   Starting with Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden, who has just opened an enterprise business in Wales, to service aircraft and provide jobs for 800 people in tough times.  The Financial Times covered the story:

Can I play with madness? Iron Maiden enter the fray to help fix the economy

Dickinson sounds a Mc Kinsey consultant who attended a ‘mass customisation masterclass’ and a ‘lean 5S programme’ when he says of the new aviation centre “We will tailor our services completely to the needs of our customers and we won’t employ more people than we need”.  To be fair, he makes his point much more clearly than a management consultant who swallowed an MBA for breakfast!  That said, I don’t see Dickinson’s business acumen embedded in the lyrics of Iron Maiden’s songs, such as “The number of the beast” or “Two minutes to midnight”, even after I played them backwards …  Why did I not learn more about entrepreneurship, business continuity and economic development when I attended Iron Maiden’s comeback tour at Twickenham with my testosterone-filled 13 year old son?  We must be told …

Moving on to Andrew Sentance, Senior Economics Adviser to Price Waterhouse Coopers.  I will be featuring a full interview with Andrew shortly, but could not resist a trailer in the form of this witty piece on Meatloaf and the economy from The Evening Standard.  Andrew stands head and shoulders above the consultancy profession with his approach, which is thoughtful but also incisive.  A rare breed.

“3M” : Meatloaf, Macro-economics and Management

Without realising it, Andrew had followed an earlier piece I wrote for The Financial Times, and another I wrote which got picked up by BBC Radio 4′s flagship “Today” programme.  Here’s the article and the Radio clip:

I’m delighted to say that the FT letter prompted a US University Academic to get in touch with me.  It turned out that he had spent three years sharing a college room with Jim Steinman.  I have performed a couple of times with Meatloaf’s female singing partner – she sang on “I’d do anything for love (but I won’t do that)”.

For more posts on the economy, see Vince Cable, Can rappers fix the economy? and Evan Davis, who I bumped into the other week whilst jogging round London.  Perhaps Evan is entering the Olympics?

To finish, let’s hear that classic Iron Maiden song again to see if there is any subliminal advice about the 3A’s of regeneration:  Aerospace, Aeroflot or Aerosmith contained within, 666, the number of the beast:

Postscript – The FT published a letter I sent in re this on Tuesday 8 May:

Can I play with madness (and the economy) ?

Rock of Ages

An extremely unusual event came up recently.  I was invited to attend “Rock of Ages” at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London by Angel Trains and Oracle Consulting.  It is quite exceptional for clients to invite consultants to socialise with them outside the more usual formal relationships that exist between such parties, so I was shocked and surprised by the invite, which spoke volumes about the two companies concerned.  To get us into the groove, let’s hear one of the show’s hits by Whitesnake:

Rock of Ages is a classic rock’n’roll story of love, truth, authenticity and the joy of relationships.  The theatre production breaks some of the conventions of theatre, as the actors directly address the audience from time to time.  Set in the 1980’s with a roster of glam metal songs from that period, ranging from Styx, Twisted Sister, Pat Benetar, Bon Jovi, Whitesnake to Europe.

The core of the story concerns the reconstruction of the Hollywood strip with a massive shopping development, devised by a soul-less German business entrepreneur and his son.  The rockers rebel against the plan, trying to keep the strip’s rock’n’roll heart. In this case rock’n’roll wins over the entrepreneur’s dream.  The property developer is converted to rock’n’roll and all live happily ever after.

It is often said that there is no such thing as a free lunch and this evening was no exception.  I nearly had to sing for my supper as it turned out that Angel and Oracle decided to go to a live jam session in Covent Garden afterwards at The Roadhouse.  We arrived too late to get on the list of singers.  Well, there’s always another time!

We will rock you

So, what did we learn from Rock of Ages?

• That authenticity often wins over a carefully crafted but emotionally bankrupt plan.
• That music touches every part of us, even if we are bankers, computer specialists, scientists or train enthusiasts.
• That, sometimes in life, the good guys win.

More lessons like this coming up at our Open University Business School event.

Finally, the musicians were absolutely superb and the evening reminded me to get some of Journey’s music out:

Let’s pretend we’re married – Getting engaged

Let's pretend we're married ... "Prince" attempts to forge a strange relationship with Miss Haversham and Scrooge

Employee engagement – what does it mean really?  Do more engaged employees do more and better work for longer?  Is engagement some kind of secret code for ‘in company dating’ or a causal relationship between casual workers and casual sex?  And so on… I attended an academic meeting on the vexed questions of employee engagement at the University of Kent the other day.  I took the opportunity to extract the gems from all the World Class speakers who presented.  But not before we take an insight from one of Rock’s Honorary Professors, none other than Prince:

Let’s pretend we’re married

Starting with Professor Paul Sparrow, Director of the Centre for Performance Led HR.  I’ve summarised Paul’s most compelling insight from his opening keynote:

Engagement is needed in the current age for three reasons:  When the world outside changes incrementally or radically; When you want to change the rules of the game for disruptive innovation or; When you want to become more fluid / adaptive

The last reason reminded me of Chris Argyris’ and Peter Senge’s work on learning companies – see the post on Britney Spears for more on this.

Dr Amanda Shantz from York University, Canada offered us some great insights into what to do with disengaged employees.  Dysfunctional relationships are at the heart of such problems and therefore part of any potential antidotes.  Once again Prince offers us a gem of wisdom via his piece “what’s this strange relationship, ship, ship, ship, ship” :

Amanda went for some good old-fashioned job design ideas courtesy of Hackman and Oldham.  I confess I found myself enjoying these since they align well with ideas I presented in Punk Rock People Management.  Just because Hackman and Oldham are a bit untrendy, does not mean that they should be displaced by a “7-dimensional model from a trendy HR consultancy firm”.  Click on the PUNK ROCK HR link to get a free copy of the book and some wholesome common sense on job design and engagement.

A no-nonsense guide to people management for busy people

On to Professor Rob Briner from University of Bath, who posed the ‘Morrissey question’:  How bad an idea is employee engagement?  A jolly good question in my view !  He provoked the audience in a very skilled way to question the notion that engagement is actually a good thing, supported by a good deal of well researched data.  Rob demonstrated eloquently the problem of HR gurus such as Gary Hamel, who seem to mouth the word ‘engagement’ at HR conferences more times per minute than Robert Plant used to sing ‘baby’ in the average Led Zeppelin song.  Rob’s wonderful talk ‘forces’ me to play Morrissey’s great hit on person-job fit and the HR ‘happiness’ agenda:

Dr Brad Shuck from the University of Louisville looked at the ever-present dilemma of measurement.  We are able to measure almost everything these days and many businesses do just that.  Just because you can measure everything doesn’t mean you should. One quote from Kahn stood out “The fragility of engagement is a function of how vulnerable we feel, and are, when we risk being fully present in a situation”.  Feels more like a poem or a lyric than a management consultancy concept  I later found out that Brad is an avid jazz and country musician which explained a lot for me.   A great treatment on a troublesome topic.

Professor John Purcell posed the thorny question “Is embedded employee voice an essential pre-requisite for engagement”.  But what did it mean?  John eruditely rehearsed the vital, if not Rock’n’Roll, concept of reciprocity.  In Punk Rock HR terms this translates to “What do I get?” i.e. If I give you something, I will expect something in return.  I think that is a handy definition of engagement although I don’t think it is well understood in the business world.

Finally, David McLeod and Nita Clarke outlined the steps to be taken in partnership with HR practitioners and academics to make high performance a part of ‘business as usual’. For more details on the University of Kent’s work in the field of high performance working, contact Katie Truss.  Professor Adrian Furnham’s work on this area is incisive – see the post on Adrian Furnham for more.  Or come along to our next event Riffs and Myths of Leadership for some high voltage lessons on employee engagement.  We have a few tickets available, although they are going fast now due to our incorporation of an honorary Professor of Rock, Bernie Torme, guitar player to the Prince of Darkness, Ozzy Osbourne and Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan.

THE Business and HR Leadership event of 2012 - a few tickets left

We must of course return to Prince for some salutary advice on the psychological contract, reciprocity and discretionary effort.  As usual Prince takes the whole subject of engagement well beyond the usual limits – you’ve gotta love him for it

"Let's pretend we're married" - Oh dear I look like Thomas Dolby At HRD 2012 with Lauren of www.growthepeople.co.uk

School of Innovation – An exclusive interview with Professor Adrian Furnham

Professor Adrian Furnham leads the way with his forthright views on the psychology of business and leadership, backed with a meticulous accuracy in the analysis that supports his provocations, compared with the usual suspects in this area.   A rare breed:  master academic, raconteur, prolific author and columnist.

Professor Adrian Furnham

I have followed Adrian’s work over many years and had the pleasure of sharing a platform with him at the 7^th International HR conference in Greece last year.  On returning to London, we set up an interview to get his thoughts on innovative people management strategy and practice, drawing on the past in order to examine the future.  Whilst our interview focused on the people dimension of innovation and HR’s role in that, his thoughts are applicable right across the leadership and management spectrum.

Furnham on innovative people management strategy

AF : One of the problems with the people dimension of innovation is that if HR strategy is not linked to company strategy, it will fail.  Most HR people don’t sit on the board because they don’t deserve to sit on the board a lot of the time.  HR will talk about being strategic but unless that strategy follows the business plan, it will go nowhere.

Professor Furnham discussed the different types of innovation:  Product / technical innovation and internal process innovation.

AF: HR people are famous for process and procedures. My feeling is that HR follows rather than leads most of the time.  As a broad exaggeration, most American CEO’s come from marketing, most UK CEO’s come from accounting/finance, because they are the people that really understand the business.  Some HR people do, but more often than not, they ‘tax’ the organisation, which most people don’t like.  They are a cost centre in every sense of the word, not a profit centre.

Some HR people can be very imaginative and innovative at helping to agree restructuring or implementing technology, but nearly always in my experience they are the implementers of other people’s changes.

Furnham on how HR practice helps or hinders high performance

AF : Good HR is if HR makes your job easier, more effective and efficient.  For instance, they help managers select more wisely, so they come up with a simple process that helps you get the people you want, they do a good job.  If they make payroll easier, they do a good job.   But HR are well-known for their strategies which people resist.  The famous example is that of appraisal.  Nearly everybody hates them, because all the systems are designed to punish people who won’t do it as opposed to reward people who will do it.  The HR people get bolshy by putting in excessive demands as to what is required.  Then you get a conspiracy between the manager and the appraisee to ‘knife’ HR – For example : ‘You tick the boxes and I’ll send it off to HR’.  That’s bad news when HR seem to always be imposing things.  The question good HR people always ask is: What effect will this have on the bottom line? Is there any proof that appraisals increase either job satisfaction or productivity?

The problem with performance management is that if you make pay part of it, people think it’s a performance-for-pay system and that’s all it is.  The problem with that is that it makes people very extrinsically motivated.  We’ve known since 1922 that when you can measure the performance of people at work, by and large the top 10% of people produce two-and-a-half times more than the bottom 10%.  The implication is that you should pay the top 10% two and a half times more than the bottom 10% but it never happens like that.  So you go through a lot of pain and suffering for a relatively undifferentiated set of benefits.

HR need to get people to understand that there other rewards at work other than pay – job swaps, training, sabbaticals and so on.  The more intrinsically rewarded you can make jobs, the less there is need for the extrinsic stuff.  It’s why academic staff are so badly paid, because we have so much fun on the job! J

Editor’s note : A visit to Professor Furnham’s office is proof positive of this.  I have rarely experienced an office in a university, which just reeks of the idea that work IS serious play!

Furnham on differences between public versus private sector

AF : It becomes much harder to track the link between effort and performance in public sector organisations.  This is because it is difficult to accurately and reliably measure actual outcomes and performance. Sometimes in an attempt to do so some very funny things happen For example I travel to work by bicycle unless it’s very wet when I catch the bus.   Last time I did this, lots of people were putting their hands up to stop the bus but the bus didn’t stop as the driver’s performance is measured on time.  He got his performance measures right – he just forgot about (i.e. ignored) the passengers!  The worry with some measurement is the necessity to find criteria even if they are not relevant to performance.  The private sector is characterized more by risk-taking, innovation and courageous management that the public sector

Furnham on the relative importance of creativity versus innovation

AF : It’s important to start with some definitions.  Creativity is coming up with a novel idea that is also useful.  Innovation is putting a novel idea into practical use.  People say we need more creative people in their organisation.  No, I often argue, we don’t.  Real, as opposed to self-defined creatives are difficult to manage.   You want more creative ideas and innovations in the organisation.  The question is that if you have creative ideas, you need to then innovate the ideas to produce a return on them.

Take, for example, airlines.  The Ryanair boss, Michael O’Leary has changed the world by turning some amazing ideas into everyday practices.  He makes people run onto airplanes because they have no seats booked.

The first airline to introduce beds on planes was Air Philippines.  Other people copied it.  So you see a good idea and then bring it into your organization.  So, you don’t have to be creative.  You have to spot ideas that are useful and will work.   The question is persuading people to do it.  One way is to reward those that follow behaviours that are innovative.  For example, suppose we want people to work on the way to work.  How do we do that?  We give you a laptop and measure how much work you do between 7 am and 9 am.

Furnham on measurement and innovation

I followed on my asking Adrian, whether innovation be measured at all?  If it should, what sorts of measures should be applied to innovation?

AF : The problem with having just one criterion is that you can jump to the criterion. For example:  My bicycle was stolen.  So I went to the Police Station.  The policeman didn’t want to record my complaint because it was a metric he did not like.  Because both he and I knew the crime would not be solved so it would be a black mark against him.  Therefore what he didn’t want to do was record it.  He would like to measure certain types of crime but only ones that are solvable.   Now the worry here is when you have a single criterion, then everybody jumps to fulfill that (and only that) criterion.  If you have multiple criteria then it’s different.  If bus drivers were rewarded for getting there on time as well as how much money they took and how few cyclists they killed, they would drive differently.   So, I think that measuring performance is important, but you have to be careful about the law of unintended consequences.

Furnham on creativity training

Adrian Furnham - Muesli muncher or corporate creativity arsonist?

AF : The language of creativity-cultivating workshops is particularly interesting. There seem to be five related models:

The muesli model – People need to unblock their creativity. They are in some curious way constipated and unable to let go and express themselves. In this sense creativity courses may be seen as laxatives.

The dominatrix model – Here we are told to unleash our creativity. Somehow one has been bound up, tied down, physically constrained from that most natural and normal of tasks namely being creative. So courses are liberators.

The arsonist model – Creative consultants and trainers aim to spark ideas and light fires. They see people as dry tinder just waiting for the right moment. Their job is to find ways of facilitating fire-setting ideas.

The kindergarten model – The problem appears to be that we have all forgotten how to be playful. Playfulness is apparently not only a lot of fun but it is also very productive. So our trainer helps us regress to a time when we were happy and quite unabashed to draw pictures, sing songs, etc.

AF : Yes – The gaol-liberator model – The problem, you see, is that we have all been boxed in a sort of cognitive gaol that has stopped us…..wait for it…thinking outside the box! And here, our happy consultants throws open the doors of our prison and out pops our creative jack-in-the-box.

PC : So, is there a 6^th model?

The talent and perspiration model – Each of the five creativity-cultivation models assume that somewhere and somehow our natural creativity is suppressed. Quite contrary to all that we know about individual differences and human abilities, the assumption is that creativity is not normally distributed: everybody is (potentially) very creative, but I will come on to say more about why creativity may not be a sufficient condition for innovation.

Furnham on innovative leadership

PC : If you were speaking to a large group of CEO’s and Directors seeking to make their workplaces more innovative, what things would you say to them:

AF : The Japanese have this concept of Kaizen – making, continuous, small improvements etc.  The issue is about someone who does the job coming up with a better way of doing things.  It’s not some manager sitting in an office.  It’s the person doing the job.  People should be rewarded for coming up with little ways to make things better.  This also means that you should be allowed to fail.  What we know about successful entrepreneurs is that they’ve all gone bankrupt at least once.  If you want to get an innovative culture you need to put up with failure because you will start something and it will go badly wrong.

Secondly that these ideas need to be put into practice, knowing that some of them will fail and that you are not going to be enormously punished for these failures.

PC : Can you characterise the sorts of companies that are good at innovation?

AF : They will be characterized as being startups, young people, technology / IT – clever  / imaginative people who see work as play rather than  to make money.

PC : What about size?  Does that matter?

AF : Once an organization gets too big it’s really difficult to maintain the sorts of behaviours that are required.   It’s also about the type of organization.  For example, you are not going to find these things in your local council.  They are not selected for it.  They are not rewarded for it.  If anything, they are punished for it.  If you are in sales and marketing organisation, they are up for creative ideas.  If you are in pharmaceuticals, they are creative but it’s much slower and cautious.  If you are in an administrative organistion, by and large its bad news.  People all say they want creativity and innovation, but as soon as they see it, they withdraw.

PC : Can elephants learn to dance?  In other words, can larger enterprise organize things such that they remain nimble and responsive to their customers and markets?  Can you bring any examples to mind?

AF : Yes they can but it takes effort? And may take the dynamism of a person like Steve Jobs. Clearly not an easy person but a determined one who know that in his world the only way to thrive and survive is to innovate all the time and have very high standards.  Young elephants learn better than old ones; and they dance better if there is both joy in the activity and a nice reward for doing so.

Furnham on the future

PC :  Can you say something about HR fads versus those that in your opinion have a sustainable future?

AF : Let me give you an example that is both.  The whole thing about emotional intelligence really took off – it is now manifest in the word engagement.  We used to talk about job satisfaction, then job involvement, then commitment, now we use the word engagement.

We all want engaged staff, because they don’t have to be managed so well, because the joy is in the activity.  What puzzles me is the following.  The emotional intelligence movement say that the emotionally intelligent manager is a better manager – they are able to understand and engage their staff better.  However, the research says that the people who get on in business are able to ‘kick ass’.  What that means that rather than being empathic, they are in some senses the opposite.  What they are able to do is to confront poor performance and there is nothing worse than having a manager who lets everyone off the hook.  I’ve done a study on this.  Do you want your boss to be High on IQ, Low on EQ or High on EQ and Low on IQ?  In other words, do you want them to be smartish and warm or clever, tough and cold?   Well, if you ask men, they say bright, tough and cold.  If you ask women they are a bit divided about this.  The problem comes when an organisation needs tough decisions to be taken and sometimes people with high EQ fail to address the bottom line, in other words the Darwinian nature of the whole thing.

PC :  One problem with EQ is that you can be surrounded by feedback and fail to take the organization forward?

AF : The 360 movement is famous for giving people multi-source feedback but it is only useful if you know what to do with it. Having an insight into what others think about you can be worthless if you don’t know what to do to improve, change or develop.

The best HR managers understand the business and have often had a line role.  They always ask the question “what effect does this stuff have on the bottom line?”   Not “will it make people feel better?” and so on.  That sounds very hard and mean but it’s what you’re in business for.  And all HR is a cost centre or a tax on the organization.

PC : Are there things that leaders can do that will make innovation more frequent and more probable?

AF : I’d say three things.  One of the issues around innovation for leaders is the question of integrity.  Nearly all leaders say they want creativity and innovation and then they punish it.  Some don’t want it at all, they want to be in control.  So, if you want innovation, you have to put up with ideas that will not work.  The Hawthorne experiment was a good example of this.  Whilst you cannot risk the enterprise, you can risk a part of it and be known for open-ness to experimentation and risk taking.

Next, I do think that youth is attractive – Young people are less risk averse, have less to lose and to have a youth mentality is a good approach.  I was with an organization where the average age of the board was 63 – this is not good.  So, look for and hire people that are imaginative and curious.  But expect that some things will not work; and some ideas are simply wacky.

The alternative is to come in as number two.  Some organisations are rather good at watching carefully what their competitors do and as soon as they have a success formula, they follow fast and learn quickly.  Words like the agile organisation.  Now the bigger the organisation, the older the organization, the more difficult this is to do.

PC : What is the role of organizational playfulness in all this?  What can leaders do to engender a climate where innovation efforts are balanced by a sense of absorbed fun?

AF : Playfulness is a good word. I search out people with curiosity and courage and ability. And a bit naughty: risk-takers, mavericks. They know about play. And the more you make work like play the more intrinsic motivation you get. I say to people I have never done a day’s work in my life, because I so enjoy what I do, and never want to retire. Despite my puritan up-bringing I think I have a capacity to play.  And I search out those who do likewise.  They know playfulness is paradoxically, the source of many good ideas.

Furnham’s top creativity tips

Given that creativity may be necessary but insufficient for an innovative enterprise, I asked Professor Furnham for his top tips to encourage personal creativity at work, learning and play:

AF : Here are ten simple but important ideas:

1. Sleep on it:  Come back to problems and issues.  Let them fall fallow for a bit; stew; incubate.  Revisit them when it suits.
2. Read widely: Talk to all sorts of experts.  Get outside your box. Talk to people who think about things differently from you.
3. Don’t give up:  Persistence is the key.  Most attempts fail.  Breakthroughs are rare.
4. Take a Risk: Fear of failure, humiliation, teasing and abuse are natural enemies of creativity.  Go on – play with hunches and tentative ideas.  Break the rules.  Take courage.
5. Piggy back:  Take others’ work and take it further.  Put things together which do not fit.
6. Identify peak times and conditions:  Work out when and where you are at your best for idea generation and refinement.  Set aside these times for those activities.
7. Record your flashes:  Have a place and method to record all ideas – some worth revisiting and incubation.
8. Build your particular expertise/skill/knowledge: creativity is always skill based.  Get to the cutting edge of your chosen area…..there is no substitute for this.
9. Question and Probe the obvious:  Take little for granted; turn things upside down; celebrate similarities and differences.
10. Lighten up:  Be playful; use humour; have a sense of the absurd and the ridiculous.

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Adrian Furnham was educated at the London School of Economics where he obtained a distinction in an MSc Econ., and at Oxford University where he completed a doctorate (D.Phil). He has subsequently earned a D.Sc and D.Litt. Previously a lecturer in Psychology at Pembroke College, Oxford, he has been Professor of Psychology at University College London since 1992. He has lectured widely abroad and held scholarships and visiting professorships at, amongst others, the University of New South Wales, the University of the West Indies, the University of Hong Kong and the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He has also been a Visiting Professor of Management at Henley Management College. He has recently been made Adjunct Professor of Management at the Norwegian School of Management.  He has written over 1000 scientific papers and 70 books.  More about his work at www.adrianfurnham.com

His latest book “The Talented Manager’ can be bought by clicking on the picture:

Buy it on Amazon - Click the picture

The numbers go up to 11 – Jim Marshall R.I.P 1924 – 2012

Peter displays his six Marshall stacks and his burnt Fender Strat - a total of 18 Watts of untamed power ...

Last week saw the passing of Jim Marshall, the father of rock and metal amplification.   Without the Marshall amp, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and a host of other musicians would not have got the classic sound that became a trademark of their music.  Marshall’s great contribution to the world of music was twofold:

The Marshall stack produced a warm fuzzy sound, beloved by rock musicians, unlike its peers such as Fender, which were considered more suitable for jazz.

Marshall stacks were quite simply loud, giving Jim Marshall the nickname “The Father of Loud”.  The spoof metal band ‘Spinal Tap’ coined the phrase “The numbers go up to 11”  and more recently “20″ based on the amplifier’s reputation:

As a tribute to the man behind the technology, I’ve put together a short series of videos that give testament to Jim Marshall’s contribution to music over the last 50 years.  No doubt Bernie Tormé will be cranking his Marshall stack up at our “Leadership meets Rock showcase” event in June.

Like a Rolling Stone – The art of empathy

I am privileged to belong to The Stone Club.  Led by Carole Stone, former producer of BBC’s flagship Question Time.  The Stone Club is a meeting place for minds, connecting businesses, social enterprises, entrepreneurs, media and politics.  During my time attending The Stone Club, I have met Professor Charles Handy, Michael Buerk, the entrepreneur Lara Morgan, senior executives for Fortune 500 companies and quite a few less famous but equally phenomenal people.

I first met Carole many years ago where we shared a stage at Pfizer alongside John Otway.  Carole’s last networking event had an extremely engaging presentation and dialogue on the art of empathic conversation in a complex and changing world.  This session was jointly presented by Oman Krznaric, writer, cultural thinker & Co-Founder of The School of Life, and Karl James, Director of The Dialogue Project.

One of the phenomenal people I connected with at this event was Andrea Ehrenberg who offers live graphic facilitation.  Here is the rich picture / word collage that she produced live during the conversation in front of about 70 people.  An amazing feat.  Although I am an expert mind mapper, Andrea combines systemic and creative thinking with a more artistic approach than my own fair hands are capable of.  Check her work out for your next live graphic facilitation event.

The art of empathy

For me, the hallmark of a great networking event is great company, the kind of learning that leaves you with as many new questions as answers, plus a superb social element to the event.   Carole Stone does it all with swan like grace.  Here are some of the questions we explored.  Feel free to post your thoughts here.

1. To what extent does an oversupply of Emotional Intelligence and empathy drive out the ability for business leaders to make tough decisions and lead change?
2. Can empathy be taught?  If so, are children naturally inclined to be empathetic but it is drilled out of them as they get older?  If that is true, do we need more empathy lessons for adults rather than thinking it needs to be taught to kids?
3. Is empathy a critical skill and more important than negotiation when dealing with critical conflict situations, such as the ones described in war zones?
4. When is empathy a more powerful ‘soft’ skill than ‘hard’ skills such as direction, selling, negotiation and so on?

Let us finish with a different kind of provocation about the past and future of pop, politics, people and life.  Not Carole Stone, but a Rolling Stone:

Monsters of Rock’n'Roll Business

I’m delighted to announce a very exciting event coming up.   We are putting on a ‘Monsters of Rock Business’ event.  A unique blend of a leadership keynote, business to business networking, a live music performance and an opportunity to meet Bernie Tormé and John Howitt, star performers.  See below for details.  Limited tickets are available for the event – To buy tickets, click on the link RIFFS AND MYTHS OF LEADERSHIP or e-mail me direct peter@humdyn.co.uk.

The event is part of an offering that we can deliver to businesses in a variety of formats from 90 minutes to a full day experience wrapped around specific business issues, identified in advance or as part of a corporate leadership development programme with one of our partners e.g. Imperial College London.

I interviewed Bernie Tormé the other week alongside the rest of the band and two clients, Steve and Andy, who came to Bernie’s studio for a private masterclass, to get the inside track on music, creativity and business.  Oh, yes, and joy of joy, we even had a jam session with the great man himself

Bernie : In the course of my career, I have worked with a fair mix of class A rock stars.  The music business is a great teacher of life skills such as negotiating, marketing, teamwork, high performance and so on, both how to do them well and occasionally the dark side of the force.  We’ll be discussing these and other topics at the event.   At the same time, I’ll be playing some music, which is always a lot of fun.  I’m leaving the satanic art of business to you lot!

On Improvisation and Innovation

Peter : Given that Rock’n’Roll has its own conventions and that there are only 12 intervals in an octave and so on, tell me about your approach to the guitar when you are trying to come up with something new?

Bernie:  For me, it is not an intellectual process.  I try to go blank and start afresh.  If then I spot something that I like, then I will refine it until I have something that hangs together for the piece I’m writing.

John : The Americans call this “If you think, you stink”.  It has to be fluid.  Some jazz players spend so much time intellectualising how to move from one chord to another that they never produce anything of great value.

Bernie: I have applied the same general approach to lyrics.  I’d play the songline over and over and just write phrases until they start to fit.  I’d thought that this was fairly unique but I’ve since found that its not.  It’s not exactly Bob Dylan ! but then I think even he did that from time to time.

Peter: Sam, you teach music for a living.  How do you escape the tramlines of rock history when composing or teaching others to improvise?

Sam : For me, the quote of Albert Einstein is instructive.  He said something like:  The people who seem like the best geniuses hide their influences the best.  So, at my tender age, my music is a sandwiching of my influences, although you would need to know what those were if you were to dissect a piece into its constituent influences.  If you did not know this information, you may well find something novel in it.  Perhaps novelty arises out of the combination of influences into something new and sublime.

Editor’s note:  Sam will not be able to be at the event as he has a hobby of extreme sports and is jumping out of a plane while we play guitars.  He will be replaced by Vicky Nolan of the rock band “Genital Sparrow”.  Here’s a bit of Sam’s work so you can see what you will miss on this occasion:

On tools for creativity

Peter : Are you aware of any techniques or approaches that assist you in the creative process?

John : I find that listening with new ears is a  very important skill.  For example, I have been listening again to Glenn Miller of late, noticing things that I’d never noticed before.  I think that’s an underrated skill in business.

Steve and Andy : We work in a highly regulated industry (Railways) with a long history.  Nonetheless, we need to constantly look for new ideas in the search for improvement and innovation.   The idea of looking again at old practices in a new way is highly transferable to our environment.  One of our difficulties is the ability to get people to empty their collective minds, due to the long legacy of our industry.  So, getting our people to ‘escape’ from the ‘burden’.  People tend to look towards their seniors or previous solutions which is not always the best way to solve problems.

Hear my train a comin' - Heavy industry meets heavy rock!

Bernie : I can relate to that. Some bands I’ve been in have had a strong hierarchy – basically “it’s my way or the highway”.  Big companies are far more complex, although it’s not as different as you would think.  The core of a band is surrounded by a plethora of people involved and they don’t always act in the bands best interests, so even a band is a what Peter would call a complex adaptive system.

John : Can you (Steve and Andy) comment on the impact of the work we did for the kick off of a major IT project?  Especially in regard to the value of music in that event.

Steve and Andy : Basically, in one day, we achieved as much as we would have done in 3-4 weeks of meetings in terms of developing a cohesive team that can work, learn and play together.

On whole brained musicianship

Peter : Where do you look in your personal search for inspiration re playing an instrument?

Bernie :  Using pure intuition to create and a more intellectual process to judge your work.  It sometimes helps to have a producer to fulfill this job as these two jobs require different sides of the brain – the right hand side for the more intuitive, playful style and the left hand side for judgement and evaluation.  I also love getting my hands on another instrument to shift gears in my thinking and playing.  I had a Sitar for a few years for example.  It only had 4 or so songs in it for me, but I would not have had those songs without it.

Peter: What examples would you point to re an innovative approach to rock music?

Bernie : For me, Jimi Hendrix epitomizes innovation in rock music still.  His willingness to explore sounds that were way beyond those being used by his contemporaries at the time still stands up to scrutiny.  He had a playground approach to using equipment and effects that was totally alien at the time.  If you listen carefully to Hendrix’s playing, you can hear hints of Steve Cropper, in the way in which he put in little fills and subtleties.  He also fused styles in ways that others would not dream of.

"Genital Sparrow" warm up for some hard rock with Bernie Torme

On the music machine

Peter : Can you tell me about the good, the bad and the ugly of working in a rock band that is printable?

Bernie :  NO, NO, NO Peter !  :-)  Suffice to say that some of the stories in ‘This is Spinal Tap’ are funny because they are not so far removed from real life.  I may offer some ‘Rock’n’Roll life lessons’ at the Monsters of Rock Business event coming up in June, but only if you are very nice to me indeed!  :-)

Peter : OK, so what can business people learn from music?

Bernie : One of the difficulties is that once you hit a success recipe, management are interested in you repeating that for years unless you are the exception.  For example it’s well known that Ozzy Osbourne is a great Beatles fan, but he has a great reputation for doing heavy metal and he knows that his fans expect that from him and he’s bloody good at it anyway!

John : On the other hand, some bands split up because they don’t evolve.  In your talks Peter, you discuss Madonna, Prince and Bowie as examples of that.  Is it too far a stretch to suggest that some businesses fail if they don’t evolve?

Peter : Absolutely, for some businesses, stagnation is not an option, but it’s a fine balance – Editor’s note – check out the posts on AC / DC and Learning Companies in this respect.

Bernie : I spotted an opportunity when I was in Ian Gillan’s band.  We had a top 10 album although the songs were written by someone else.  I found a niche in helping the band repeat and improve on that performance for the next two albums.

John : So, innovation is a brilliant thing, but it does not necessarily put food on the table.  A balance between existing and new ventures is needed in any enterprise.

Peter : What can business people learn from the music business?

Bernie : The music business is something of a basket case compared with the sorts of businesses you tend to work in Peter.  I understand that you have had a fairly lucky life, working in Research and Development for ‘decent’ companies and in academia, where work is play.  That’s pretty much a Rock’n’Roll lifestyle.  But my understanding of most businesses is that they are not about that.  In that respect management in the music business is no different to what happens in the ‘grind em down’ type of businesses that cause so many people to find work a chore.

Peter : I guess I do have the luxury of working for businesses that by and large have decent leaders and managers  My early years were spent at Wellcome Foundation, who gained 4 Nobel Prizes for its work in Tropical medicine etc.  We worked hard all day because we could and we played hard all night as well.  By modern standards, the company was poorly managed, but excellently led and I draw important parallels between this and the world of rock bands.  Perhaps that time has gone, or maybe we are at the tipping point where capitalism must rightly be balanced by a proper sense of purpose if we are to solve important world problems.  I have found that you get the best out of people by treating them as humane beings rather than human resources.  The world’s greatest leaders in business understand that.  The rest, well, perhaps they match some of the worst excesses of the music business.

So come along to Monsters of Rock Business and get yourself a supercharge of Rock’n’Roll Wisdom.  Here’s three summary points:

1.If you want to innovate, learn to ‘clear the screen’ of industry limitations for enough time to see the future.

2. Accept that creativity is necessary for innovation but insufficient – perspiration is always more important than inspiration.  Learn to sweat as well as glow.

3. Know when to intellectualise and when to behave like an animal in business.

Let’s get the real deal out – here’s Bernie Torme in action, causing some Trouble with Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan – it really does not get much better than this – see you at RIFFS AND MYTHS OF LEADERSHIP for some lessons from the School of Hard Rock.