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- P r o f e s s i o n a l _ D e v e l o p m e n t -
By John Kao
(Excerpt from Jamming by John Kao, HarperBusiness, 1996)
From such new paradigms, legends--the parables and folk tales by which a community teaches and reinforces its customs and spirit, its ethos and ethics--are born. Legends-- embellished, retold for years and years--give mythic status to history. So it happens that the people of Sony have mythologized that block of wood (which represented the size goal for the future Walkman ... an impossible size for a radio at that time), that the people at Oticon still talk about Lars Kolind's think-the-unthinkable memo, and that at AlliedSignal the two women who took up Bossidy's challenge and redesigned the raw-material cycle time (from five days to, eventually, two hours) emerge as folk heroes. Those legends are about people who created, molded, and met the challenge of creativity. The legends themselves perpetuate the impact of the managerial challenge.
How does a manager, on a day-to-day basis, create that challenge? This is where the art of stagecraft comes in. You want to surprise people? Shake them up. Grab their attention. Make them think, dream, and jam. Props--like a block of wood--work. Outrageousness, too, works. Consider the Coca-Cola executive who began a meeting by asking all the people there to imagine that they had just been laid off better yet, to imagine why they had been laid off. Or Jan Timmer of
Philips, who printed a newspaper datelined in the future that announced the company's bankruptcy. Or the strategy blueprint Lars Kolind drew after he went off by himself to ponder Oticon's conversion from a prosperous bureaucracy to a creative (and even more prosperous) dynamo.
Business schools don't teach us how to use those elements of stagecraft (although perhaps it's time they start). Managers who hope to thrive in today's new corporate climate would do well to take a class in stage direction. In theater, the director's role includes integrating the work of the creative team (writers, actors, and designers) with the production team (stage manager and stage crew) and the business team (producers). The director defines the dramatic vision and the boundaries of the creative act. Using actors, sets, costumes, lighting, and props, the director manipulates the audience's perceptions. During the rehearsal process, the director prods, provokes, inspires, and challenges the actors or designers who feel stuck or stymied. Using the unexpected, and even the outrageous, the skillful director controls the impact of the drama.
M. Douglas Ivester, president of the Coca-Cola Company, puts it this way:
"You need to make creativity the norm and the lack of creativity
the exception ...."