Author Archives: Ken Goldstein

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Creativity and Courage

Teddy Roosevelt — who legend has it never wanted to be called by that name — is back in the news, at least to the extent that we are finding reason to quote him of late.  In response to an earlier post of mine, a friend who had a challenging year sent me the following quote from Theodore Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. 

The quote comes from a speech Roosevelt delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris on April 23, 1910, just after the completion of his presidency.  He ponders a world which is increasingly industrialized, the role of the common man in its development, and the critical nature of risk in our capitalist economy.  Roosevelt is optimistic about America’s role in the New World, the rising living standard for the middle class, and the importance of learning — academic and experiential — to the evolution of our civilization.  “The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer,” spoke the former President.  He was a champion of character.  He had no appetite for the voice of the cynic.

There is a lot of substance in Roosevelt’s reflection, but the essence for me comes back to the notion of the creative process, whether in business or government or science or art, what it means to put oneself in the public light with new ideas.  I write a good deal about innovation and creative destruction, how it is essential to the evolution of our norms, but not enough about the drive behind that process, the extremely hard work of dodging the ordinary and then attempting to get others onboard where they might otherwise be uncomfortable.  Getting attacked is no fun, but it comes with the territory of the new.  Creativity is not only exhausting, it’s messy.

I think this is what Roosevelt was getting at, how leaders in any field first dare themselves to expose a new idea, then attempt to explain that idea to others, then prepare themselves to share the bounty in success or accept the blame in failure, as if neither is more likely or important than the other.  The point in finding the courage to advance an untested notion is specifically that, to test it.  If the notion proves of merit than the win is broad, but if not, the win is equally broad because the test has eliminated a dead-end we all can acknowledge and use as a new reference point for further testing.

It is the courage to address the critic, the skeptic, that is so uncommon.  We know it when we see it, but we don’t see it enough.  We are hungry to hear ideas, but too often all we hear is naysaying.  It is much easier to be a critic than an innovator, in that the innovator approaches creativity with self-critique an implicit part of the process, a means, not an end.  The critic whose work begins and ends there offers opinion, even explanation, but if there is no build on the work of the innovator, then what is the value added?

We hear our political candidates bash each other for sport, so much so that we become numb to it.  They are not listening to each other and we are not listening to them so what good is being accomplished by the perpetuating standoff?  When this happens in business, companies are lost.  When it happens in science, we run in place.  When it happens in the arts, our culture becomes stagnant.  Roosevelt looked forward and advised us to fear the downside of not trying more than the downside of coming up short.

The individual who has a story to tell risks all, because the more that story is original, the more it is likely to be rejected.  Think of the powerful corporations who did not believe we would all have our own computers someday, and the few individuals who thought we would and got them to our desktops.  Think of Martin Luther King’s vision for a desegregated America, the resistance against his ideals, and the normalcy today of celebrating diversity.  Think of The Beatles dreaming in those seedy clubs in Hamburg, when much of the music establishment was convinced that guitar bands were on their way out.  Think of the first doctors and medical researchers to propose the notion of a vaccine, how frightening that seemed to so many, and the diseases we would still suffer today were it not for their willingness to persevere.

Not all ideas are good, and not all visionaries are right.  True visionaries know this, and they know that failure will always be part of the package.  As we listen to those around us attempting to tackle the more complex problems of the day, perhaps we would do well to remember that even if an idea proves wrong, the people courageous enough to explore that idea might be doing something right.  Everyone wants to win, but not everyone is brave enough to want to try.  Where we are unable to find that courage in ourselves, let’s not forget to praise it in those who are exposing themselves to critique.

Look for the spark in the brave people around us who worry less about what others say about them, and worry more about overcoming constraints on what can be possible when we appropriately embrace courage.  To be honest, they don’t much care what the crowd thinks, but the crowd has everything to gain by inviting themselves to the party.  We have more challenges facing us today than the Progressive Republican President Roosevelt could have imagined, yet even more paths to triumph through knowledge if the most inspired creative voices are heard.

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The Real Lesson of Kodak

KodakIt is hard not to feel at least somewhat sentimental watching Kodak exit the world’s business stage in such a sad state after such a storied run. You have to feel sorry for the employees, especially those likely to lose retirement benefits after long careers of loyal service. It is also hard to feel sorry for the company, particularly its management. Kodak had the solution to its own ills and chose to submarine it. The lesson: if you don’t cannibalize your own business, count on a competitor to do it for you.

A timeline of “Kodak’s Key Moments” recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal, and what is too easily forgotten is that Kodak developed the first digital camera as early as 1975, but chose not to bring it to market for fear of cannibalizing its hugely popular film business. That’s an easy enough Monday morning quarterback call, but how many companies right now know they are on a path to their own obsolescence, have a pretty good idea what the long-term answer to their ills may be, but are ceding alternative paths to their competitors for fear of short-term pain or possibly looking stupid? The answer: more than you think.

In a subsequent article entitled Avoiding Innovation’s Terrible Toll, the Journal further noted that in a study of more than six million firms, only a tiny fraction made it to the ripe old age of 40. The authors of that report, Charles I. Stubbart and Michael B. Knight, reflect that “…despite their size, their vast financial and human resources, average large firms do not ‘live’ as long as ordinary Americans.” We have just seen this of late with the beloved Borders Books, and now we are watching Barnes and Noble try to pull off a comeback around its initiatives with Nook. Other companies like Apple, Johnson & Johnson, IBM, and General Electric have steered their ships across longer journeys. It is possible to go the distance, but it requires an openness to change that is so uncommon in business, you almost have to shake people physically to get them to see how to save themselves. Generally speaking, corporate people don’t like to be shaken, even if it’s good for them.

Creative destruction as most commonly defined by Joseph Schumpeter is real and unavoidable. It is also reasonably easy to argue that despite the pain it causes in transition, it is a positive force of social evolution that drives us forward and replaces inefficient procedures with new technology, updated methodology, and even new financial opportunities for investment and return. My dear friend Kermet Apio, a wonderfully successful standup comedian, captures the essence of Creative Destruction in a 90 second bit where he compares the joy and simplicity today of clicking on a song you might want to hear versus trying to find it on a cassette tape, which might take you so long you’d almost certainly abandon the task unfinished, or worse, try using your pinkie on the internal reels to queue up the precise starting spot. There’s a touch of nostalgia here, and we do find ourselves laughing very hard at what was our norm not so long ago. Click on the link above to see how Kermet tells the tale, the chuckle makes the point.

But no one is laughing at Kodak’s headquarters in Rochester, and no one should be. Kodak had the first digital camera in 1975, and while admittedly neither they nor anyone else knew what to make of this at the time, they had a much more important mandate on their mind: Protect Film. Kodachrome was not only iconic, it was hugely profitable. So was motion picture film processing. So were all their other traditional film developing technologies, not to mention the sale of retail supplies, equipment repairs, and patent licensing. Kodak was a beloved company and a global brand that made the same wrong decision so many other short-life companies make—they worried too much about cannibalism, and not enough about what happens if they don’t cannibalize their own markets.

It doesn’t get any easier to understand than this—if you don’t cannibalize your own markets, someone will do it for you. The choice is that simple: do it to yourself for your own good, or be the victim of outside attack. No form of technology is forever, and any trend you’re surfing is going to break flat on the beach. In Kermet’s bit, he talks about the Sony Walkman. Everyone had one. It was great. Then came the CD, Sony had a piece of that technology, so far so good. Then came Apple with the iPod, not the inventor of portable digital music playback, but the “perfector.” By the time Sony responded, they were on defense instead of offense. Too late. The cannibal is here, it came from elsewhere and did what you feared it would. You knew it would happen, you couldn’t stop it, but you could have been it. That’s the choice. Not will it come, but from where will it come.

That is the real lesson of Kodak: no one can stop the march of innovation because it is inconvenient or upsetting. No company can duck cannibalism by refusing to acknowledge that current markets have to be sacrificed for new markets to be built. If you’re young and just getting into business, get used to this, and get used to your bosses telling you all the reasons why they have to protect what you have today, that the hit to earnings to attack your own hugely successful lines of business with nascent replacement ventures is just too painful. If you’ve been doing this a few decades, remember back on all those long and awful bureaucratic meetings where you wished someone would have pounded the table and screamed, “To Hell with cannibalism, we’re doing this—keep the cannibal in the family!” There were meetings where that happened. Those are the companies with the 100 year brands.

If you are at CES this week wandering the endless aisles of new stuff and you see something that could eat your lunch, ask yourself, why didn’t we think of that? And if we did, would we have had the courage to launch it? Let’s hope this lesson gets easier to recite so we don’t see loyal employees lose their benefits because political correctness forced a gag order or management failed to act when time was on their side. Manage the product life cycle, but don’t be afraid to leave a little money on the table. Get the new products out there before someone does it for you. The real money is in longevity, which means innovation, which means playing offense against yourself.

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Do Books Matter Less?

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus was an early observer of the ever-occurring change in our universe. About the same time in the 5th Century BC, Parmenides pondered the notion of permanence, what we could presume in nature to be essential. Between the two of them, we have a thesis and an antithesis that have yet to reveal a synthesis beyond argument some 2500 years later. We see change all around us in almost unfathomable complexity, while we wonder what we can hold onto as firm. For me, it’s a good problem to have, as contemplation of the unsettled forces us to chew harder and argue better.

Then there are books.

In a recent Wall Street Journal piece with the header “Books That Are Never Done Being Written,” Nicholas Carr contemplates the far-ranging impact of digital distribution on long-established but fluid notions of traditional publishing:

An e-book, I realized, is far different from an old-fashioned printed one. The words in the latter stay put. In the former, the words can keep changing, at the whim of the author or anyone else with access to the source file. The endless malleability of digital writing promises to overturn a whole lot of our assumptions about publishing.

The realization that books are no more permanent than this year’s understanding of medical treatment is hardly shocking. The very paradigm of printing on paper and binding a work has throughout its history adopted the notion of editions and revisions. Where would the school textbook industry be without an excuse to update a classroom volume rather than allow you to feel comfortable buying a dog-eared half price two-year old version? If we only needed one unabridged edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, think of how many academic preface summaries we would have been denied annotating discovered corrections in the core text.

Yet in the worlds of literature and even political theory, we do seem to maintain an expectation that the version we read of Charles Dickens or John Stuart Mill is largely the same as the draft the author called final. “A Tale of Two Cities” even when presented in its initial serialization was eventually finished, as was the essay “On Liberty,” and when we buy a copy of one of these today, either in paperback or download, we do believe in the authenticity of replication representing if not a fully steady state, a pretty firm slice of life. That is helpful not only in getting us all on the same page for discussion and critique; it also offers us grounding in history and social evolution, the ceaseless churn emerging from deliberately placed bricks in the wall.

I have a hard time thinking today is much different, and no matter the short attention span theater that victimizes so much of our patience, my sense is our books have never been more important — no matter the brevity of their life-cycle, no matter their imposed truncation or expansion, no matter their delivery format or storage means on a wooden shelf or cloud server. Our books will change as they must, but their timeliness and meditation as a collective might be the primary permanence we retain, even if it is more spiritual and metaphorical than natural or physical. The means of delivering the book does not define the book; it is largely irrelevant, a timely convenience worthy of disruption. The material of delivery is subordinated to the material of substance. It is the content that matters, not the media. The Platonic Form is the ideal, and that cannot be taken from us by technology.

However we acknowledge its consumption mechanism, the book as ideal is a bridge among scattered coordinates. We learn to read an organized set of drawn thoughts to see what is meant by change, and those who have the gift and discipline to construct a book add to the global library of permanence by carrying the torch that challenges all that came before. Historic observation is clear and consistent: the buildings decay, the land can be conquered and utilized anew after wars and governments are gone, but the ideas underlying arts remain for examination. The composed book is the codification of the idea however it is presented — that does not change.

My amazing wife, who is also an amazing teacher, enters her classroom on the first day with a simple statement:

“Our books are our treasures.”

Her specialty is English as a Second Language, and whether she is teaching adults or children, this mantra is always the same. Books are precious. If you look around our house, you might see why this is our chorus. Books are everywhere. That is what we want to be surrounded by. We also have a Kindle and an iPad.  They are filled with books as well.

Another recent story in the Wall Street Journal discussed how the price of e-books was sometimes dropping below the price of “real” books, which I guess means paper books. To me, one is no less real than the other. The broader question is whether the great majority of people should still find the time for long-form written expression in a world cluttered with half-baked tidbit social media posts like this one. The answer has to be yes, because if we are going to allow character count to trump in-depth inquiry, we condemn our more severe concerns to being adequately addressed by less than substantial narrative. Our pace of change is only becoming more frantic, and the hope for some form of understandable permanence is all the more desirable in addressing unending anxieties. Committed writing and reading get us a good deal of the way there, because the acts of reading and writing might be one of the few forms of permanence we can share.

I say this as someone who just spent the better part of a year writing my first book, which is now in first draft and undergoing edit. I haven’t talked much about the book, and won’t until we get closer to publication, but let me say that whether anyone reads it or it sells a single copy, it will remain one of my proudest achievements. Right now it is a long book. It will get shorter to accommodate marketing concerns, but hopefully it will still be a substantial book. I couldn’t have said all I needed to say in a blog post or I would have. Believe me, I would have!

In our world of constant and increasing hyper flux, books can be thought of as a noble but flawed exercise in establishing some sense of the enduring. Now that digital publishing allows current authors easy access to further disturbing permanence, any foothold in establishing the concrete may remain even more illusive, but the stepping-stones of thought that bridge us from there to here can certainly maintain significance if we view thought as continuum, a timeline. In that regard, as a roadmap or even a set of breadcrumbs, books for me have never been more relevant, nor the mission of authors any less permanent. Some books are good and some are bad, some certainly more ephemeral than others, but the connectivity of books is ongoing. Apps or facings, that is as it should be, as long as I can read.

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Photo: Pixabay

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A Little More, A Little Less

To help bring in the New Year, here is a quick punch list of what I would like to see a little more of and a little less of in 2012.  These are not meant to be far-reaching or prophetic ideals, just small steps we can choose to make concrete in and out of business to “advance the brand” ever so slightly each day.  Please feel free to stretch the list and add your “asks” in the comments section.

For starters…

A little more focus on sustainable job creation with decent paying gigs for those who want to work; a little less badgering of the unemployed who are nobly trying to spring themselves back into action.

A little more attention to world-class customer service that shows true respect for those who pay the bills; a little less maneuvering in the shadows to squeeze unwarranted improvements in margin by taking advantage of customer patience and goodwill with hidden garbage.

A little more good theater onstage; a little less awful theater everywhere else.

A little more listening to creative thinking before blurting out that it won’t work; a little less condemnation of those who are carrying the bag before questioning their character.

A little more pay down of available credit by all borrowers; a little less concern with things we don’t have and might like, but can live without no problem.

A little more conservation of the Earth’s precious and limited resources; a little less right to entitlement via purchase power.

A little more earnings from growth and investment in the enterprise; a little less cap on hiring while stockpiling cash reserves.

A little more commitment to making broad education a national priority; a little less earthquake type each time a professional athlete signs a seven-figure contract.

And then…

A little less spotlight on celebrities and their personal dramas; a little more celebration of everyday unsung heroes who quietly make our world better just doing what they do.

A little less fireworks around award shows for mediocre creative work; a little more visionary creative work worth celebrating.

A little less self-aggrandized noise and plotted invective in media placement; a little more interesting dialogue and engaging discussion in the public square.

A little less “them” where rhetoric is an intentional tactic of divisiveness; a little more “us” where national pride and humility are shared values.

A little less last-minute antics in Congress where critical deadlines loom; a little more thoughtful strategic planning around long-term solutions demanded by voters.

A little less concern around titles and press releases; a little more measurable goal achievement and personal job satisfaction.

A little less built to flip and business as usual; a little more built to last and Think Different.

A little less criticism of people who look, talk, and behave differently from our routine; a little more tolerance of diversity that opens the door to understanding — on that last one, maybe a lot more.

Okay, that’s my zapping of the spark plugs.  What’s yours?

Thank you for welcoming Corporate Intelligence Radio in its first year and all your great comments (private as well as public) in our shared exploration of how to make work matter more.  Together we can make 2012 a turning point.  Why not?