The Hindu Business Line : Champion the idea when it is young and fragile

The creative journey started with a 26-year-old who had only been in the business for about two years, reminisces Shelly Lazarus, Chairman and CEO of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, in Managing Change ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com).

“He had this really zany idea to do commercials in many different languages — not usual ones; he started with one in Czech — and to run subtitles on the bottom, as a way of saying that technology is universal and that the solutions that technology is coming up with actually bring our world together and are present everywhere.”

The script had nuns talking in Czech about ‘the new software program that was about to be introduced by IBM,’ and there were some funny bits too — like a nun’s beeper going off.

Lazarus describes the process of creativity, thus: “Someone has a crazy idea, and they kind of throw it out there to see how people react. And you can’t be too judgmental at the start, because you need to give them a little support and let them breathe a little bit. Let them live and see where the idea goes.”

The ‘zany idea’ did go places. From church hallways, “to cowboys in Argentina, riding on the Pampas, talking about PCs, and two old Frenchmen walking by the Seine, talking about servers…”

Because, before going to the client, Lazarus and her team ‘had to develop a degree of conviction that this was a big idea and an important idea and a large idea that could go everywhere in the world and would really put IBM, which was suffering at the time — it was not a strong brand at the time — in a new place in the world.”

Then they went to the client and made the first presentation. “At the end, there was just sort of quiet. The clients asked a lot of questions. It was Abby Kohnstamm and Lou Gerstner, just the two of them,” recounts Lazarus. “And in the end, they said, ‘This is brilliant. This is fantastic. We love it, and we’re going to go with it.’”

Looking back, she remembers how it was so easy for the idea to die, at so many places, up to the point of approval. “You had to really support the idea, champion the idea, to get it to a point where it could live.”

In the realms of high creativity and innovation, ‘you’re always dealing with risk, because you’re trying things that have never been tried before,’ writes Lazarus. “So much of what my job is in leading the agency is to make it comfortable to take a risk, to champion ideas when they’re very young and fragile.”

This challenge is not just in advertising, but in everything, in all business, she says. Because, fewer than half the ideas are going to work! So, if you have to have two great ideas, have 10 experiments going at all times, advises Lazarus.

“That’s the fun. You’re allowed to experiment; you’re allowed to try things and to be wrong sometimes,” she urges. “And you have to institutionalise that part. You have to make it okay to be wrong.”

Great collection that fits in your pocket, as a ready takeaway.

A simple technique to generate ideas in groups

When idea-generating groups are at the job they are good at, it may be a good idea to use the PPC framework, suggest Neville Smith and Murray Ainsworth in A Guide to Organisational Creativity ( www.jaicobooks.com).

“The first P represents ‘the positives’ associated with the idea that has been put forward.” Explore the positives and record them before any negative judgments are allowed, the authors advise.

The second P is for ‘the possibles’ — that is, ‘the extended ideas or opportunities which the idea could lead to, or which grow out of it’. Explore the possibles too before allowing space for judgmental expressions. Finally, the C, for ‘the concerns’, allows time for the negatives to surface.

“This simple routine ensures that both positives and possibles have been explored before concern judgments are heard,” Smith and Ainsworth explain.

“Adherence to this routine over time signals to team members that you, the manager, or facilitator insist on every idea receiving a fair hearing before knee-jerk reactions prejudge it.”

Valuable input.

Is the swifter speed the better?

Sings the Bard, in one of his poems, “Heart is bleeding, all help needing, O cruel speeding…” But in ‘The Winter’s Tale’, he would allow Camillo to say, “The swifter speed the better.”

Contradictions are perhaps good at latching on fast to speed, as John Tomlinson explores in The Culture of Speed ( www.sagepublications.com).

Speed offers apparent opposites: ‘pleasures and pains, exhilarations and stresses, emancipation and domination’. The author, finds these aspects so intertwined that it seems impossible for us to say whether an increasing pace of life is, in essence, a good or a bad thing.

The book opens with a chapter on ‘machine speed’, in which Tomlinson elaborately discusses Le Corbusier’s view that a city made for speed is made for success.

“The necessity of work is something simply, ineluctably, inertly there at the core of our social existence: an activity to be expedited quickly and efficiently, rather than criticised, after which we can go quickly home to enjoy ‘the hours of repose’.”

But machine speed has ‘a rival sibling’, the ‘unruly speed’ – with non-rational elements of excitement, thrill, danger, risk and violence, and therefore at odds with the dominant modern discourse of reason, order, regulation and progress.

Tomlinson also discovers a new condition currently influencing cultural practices – ‘the condition of immediacy’. He draws many examples from everyday life to study immediacy.

Such as, “The ubiquity of keypads and screens in our everyday environment and the indispensability of skills in their use as a basic competence of modern life; digital photography that no longer requires us to wait for the image to be developed and printed; and 24-hour news coverage, in real-time.”

The generalisation of the computing term ‘multitasking’ to human activity, the author disturbingly observes, is related to ‘the fact that psychological stress in the workplace is threatening to replace back pain as the major reported cause of long-term invalidity’.

Foremost among the factors in our transition from speed to immediacy is ‘telemediatisation’, says Tomlinson. The word, he defines, as ‘the increasing implication of electronic communications and media systems in the constitution of everyday experience’.

Examples of telemediated activities are: ‘watching television; typing, scrolling, clicking and browsing at the computer screen; talking, texting or sending and receiving pictures on a mobile phone; tapping in PIN codes and conducting transactions on a keypad.”

These activities, says Tomlinson, “occupy a space in the everyday flow of experiences within the individual’s ‘lifeworld’ that is distinct, yet integrated with face-to-face interactions of physical proximity.”

It is a fact – that our media reception has been increasingly fractured by ‘personal computers, optical fibre cables, cellular phones, camcorders, video games, the Internet, e-mail, Web sites, search engines, blogs, social networking sites, DVDs, digital television and radio, broadband, TiVo, MP3 players, pod-casts…’

All these have introduced modes of experience for which we still have no adequate name, says the author. “Think ,for instance, of the experience of the instant and infinite availability of the world’s informational resources that is the defining phenomenology of the Web browser.”

A book that merits an immediate but a slow study.

Tailpiece

“We start pushing the papers real fast, and double-speed screen- scrolling…”

“When it’s time to go home?”

“No, when the boss suddenly slips into the room!”

dmurali@thehindu.co.in