"You can't build a company that's fit for the future unless it's one that's fit for human beings." Gary Hamel



I was commenting yesterday on how standard management thinking was a thing of the past and this morning I came across this blog by Hutch Carpenter, talking about a session he went to where Gary Hamel was talking about management innovation and enterprise - essentially, Hamel was commenting on how, over the last century, the pace of economic change has increased exponentially whilst business nevertheless still operates on the same old management principles (Taylor, Sloan, McGregor and Deming). You can read the whole thing on http://www.business-strategy-innovation.com/2009/08/gary-hamel-on-management-innovation-and.html

Gary Hamel prescribes two strategies for companies in this 'post establishment' age:

• Increased organisational adaptability
• Pushing innovation and decision making out to employees

It's interesting - in many of the creative sector businesses we work with, these two strategies are statements of the obvious - without them, you simply fail. certainly in CIDA, it's our organisational adaptability that has kept us going this far - although our core principles remain unchanged, the company is very different from what we set out as, and certainly miles from any intial concept I had - but it is true that we have adapted as the business context around us has changed. For those of us leading the company, spotting those changes coming, understanding their impact, bringing that knowledge back into the company and exploiting the opportunities that arise from the change, is one of the most important things we do. And we know for certain that the best work we do is when everyone in the company has had a chance to help design and deliver it.

In small creative companies, the normal culture tends to be maverick: people are driven by ideas and ride over anything to get the ideas implemented. Maybe it's because of the personal investment, both intellectual and emotional, that creative entrepreneurs put into every piece of their work that they are more attuned to a changing world. Their inspiration comes from that changing world and instinctively they are pushing the boundaries, always asking 'what if...?' Creativity, i.e. the generation of new ideas, is at the core of what they do and how they think, and usually they surround themselves with people who think similarly, who thrive in the chaos of an ideas driven world, and who respond to the challenges. Successfully exploiting those ideas, however, delivering the innovation that arises from them, is the iron discipline that rides through the whole of the creative sector, through every company that gets its work delivered on time , as promised, to its paying public.

CIDA International Update

It occurs to me that the refurb of our website (www.cida.org) is taking longer than I expected, so I thought it might be useful to let people know what we are working on at the moment - as ever, it is hectically busy but it's also fun and challenging, the kind of mix everyone likes -

As ever, the creativity and the innovation agendas march side by side and it's fascinating to be working on how we bring them together to complement each other - Keith and I are going to be working with up to 25 businesses (5 days consultancy each) in Barnsley between now and January - I have my first client, a brilliant photographer Gavin Joynt, (www.gavinjoynt.co.uk) in the next week or so, and just looking at his website makes me feel excited - but we'll be working with businesses across all sectors, taking them through our Innovation process and helping to embed it in the DNA of the companies, so I think the experience will contain riches for all of us! As some of you know, we have a team of Innovation Coaches, including Lee Corner (http://www.lac-ltd.com/), Steve Manthorp (http://www.manthorp.co.uk/) and Val Monti Holland (no website, Val?), who are all based in Yorkshire, and a team based elsewhere including London, US and Australia but who all work with us on different projects. We all went through the training led by Herman Gyr and Laszlo Gyorffy (http://www.enterprisedevelop.com/) from Silicon Valley and we each bring our creative practice experience together with innovation process to create an unusual but tried and tested approach to help companies capture the innovation within their own workforce, colleagues and even clients.

Of course, Innovation is proving to be the new mantra, just like creativity was before it. Creativity as a word seems to have almost lost its meaning and I guess Innovation is going the same way - but the debate is intense and the thing I love is how the discussion has moved from trying to make creativity and innovation the latest tool in standard management thinking to the dawning realisation that standard management thinking itself is of the past. How funny it is for those of us who've spent most of our working lives in the creative sector, and lived with what that means (i.e. no job security, portfolio working, non hierarchical micro businesses, emphasis on collaboration, 'operating in hope of success instead of fear of failure'!) now to see how most industry sectors are slowly having to adapt to working the way we do - and to see how management theory is having to adapt to that!

Anyway, it makes life fun and we are enjoying it - we started a Raise the Bar course last week - this time especially for 20 established dancer/choreographers who want to develop their practice/business. Funded by the Arts Council, Yorkshire Dance Centre (led by the ineffable Wieke Ericke), has established a new CPD programme of which our course is part. It's 8 sessions between now and December. The first day was on Vision and Values and, at the end, one of them commented to Lee and Chantelle (our Course Directors) that she just wanted the day to go on and on - they all loved it and it made them think about themselves and their practice in a way they hadn't done before. That kind of reaction makes everyone feel good!

I kicked the day off with my presentation on Attributes of a Creative Entrepreneur. I've done it all over the world over the last few years and every time I do it, it gets a massively strong response. Once I was doing it in Saudi Arabia whilst Keith was doing it in Leeds and Lee was doing it in Utrecht - we were phoning each other as we finished just to hear each other's audiences' reactions! But the presentation has been given extra weight recently as we have just finished doing some interviews with UK creative entrepreneurs for the West Yorkshire Lifelong Learning Network (WYLLN). It reinforced a lot of our thinking but we also added in some of the more practical skills, like Marketing, Finance, IP etc, and it's made for an interesting pamphlet, I think - I am presenting next week to a WYLLN seminar and then will explore developing it into a book with Lee (Corner) collaborating to write the case studies. Since we have worked with creative entrepreneurs all over the world, there are some fabulous stories to tell so I think the problem might be choosing which ones we actually use! But we are also thinking of putting case studies on the CIDA website and portal (www.creativeportal.org) as a regular item, so I'm sure they'll all get used, one way or another!

Talking of books, Ana Carla Fonseca, a fabulous Creative Industries specialist in Sao Paulo, and Peter Kageyama of Creative Cities Summits, based in Tampa, Florida, both of whom work with us on various projects, are putting together a book due out before the end of the year. Called Creative City Perspectives, it features articles by about 18 different commentators (including me!) and has an Introduction by Charles Landry. After all the work involved in coordinating such a book, it's getting exciting seeing it coming to fruition -

Am happy to tell you we recently won a contract with the West Midlands Business Link to provide Innovation Advisory Services for SME businesses - that hasn't started yet but should be stimulating when it does. And of course we continue working with our partners in Doncaster Council - we are working with their LEGI programme, Success Doncaster, and meeting some extraordinary creative businesses; and the Council is also a partner in our Interreg ECCE Innovation transnational programme which is a fascinating project. As part of it, we've commissioned Graham Devlin to undertake a piece of research for us, looking at how HE supports R&D in the arts sector - he's taken an unexpected approach to it and I think it will prove fairly provocative in the end. Hopefully, it will be ready by the end of the year, and we'll be running a conference early next year to launch it.

Talking of European projects, we've won two Leonardo contracts, one to do with creativity and the other to do with innovation - working with Finland, Flanders and Barcelona on the latter - I'm particularly happy that at last we have a partner from the sunny South! - and Denmark joins us on the other. They both demand interesting work that complements what we are doing elsewhere so the synchronicity has been useful. The whole creativity and innovation agenda is a real hot topic in the EU just now - Keith has been invited to be founding member of a new EU network, EICI, that focuses just on this, so we are in at the heart of it all!

Finally, for now, we continue to work with the British Council Creative Economy Unit on their Creative Enterprise programme in Sub Saharan Africa. I'm probably going out to Kenya and Nigeria next month to work with tutors out there to help in the delivery of the course - meanwhile, the artists we worked with in Zimbabwe a few months ago are even now going from major city to major city in that country, delivering the course we did with them - apparently, it's going beautifully and Virginia ( Pirie, writer, www.nai.uu.se , and all round fabulous woman!) dropped me a note to say how responsive all the participants were - how fantastic that they can continue to develop their creative businesses and practice despite all that is going on out there -

There are a number of other possibilities on the horizon and exciting negotiations going on, from Middlesborough to Singapore - but I'd better wait for confirmations before I talk about them - !

Ah, well - there is one more thing you might be interested in! - I've been invited to address the Commonwealth Business Conference in Trinidad this November. It's all hugely formal, with Presidents, Prime Ministers and Ministers as well as leading international business leaders attending - I've been invited because of 'CIDA's strong global presence and experience in the creative industries' so all that travelling has paid off! Seriously, it's a thrill and I'm delighted - and, by the way, there is already a queue of people offering to carry my bags.................................!!

That's it for now - but there have been some really interesting pieces posted on the LinkedIn groups I belong to so will add them later on - does one say good bye at the end of a blog? Seems odd - I wonder what the etiquette is?

Been having fascinating discussion with Herman (Gyr) about incremental v radical innovation, customer led or customer focused.........will put it on our Innovation Advantage ning - in the meantime, have a look at this blog - from World Business Conference - genuinely thought provoking stuff and important to realise this is the context we all work in - and new insights from Gary Hamel which colour the way we work with clients -

http://www.linkedin.com/news?viewArticle=&articleID=77876620&gid=1851951&articleURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ebusiness-strategy-innovation%2Ecom%2F2009%2F10%2Fworld-business-forum-pulling-it-all%2Ehtml&urlhash=yM2Y&trk=news_discuss

I'm about to do some Innovation work with a sole trader (photographer) , with a local authority and with a group of dance organisations - this is stretching stuff!

Nurturing the innovation capabilities of your own staff

One of the key advantages of CIDA's Innovation process is that, in doing this work with you, we also show you how to do it yourselves and leave you with the tools that get used in the process. We firmly believe that the innovation process should be a regularly used tool in the management toolkit, enabling leaders to engage and capture the capacity for creative thinking and innovation amongst their own workforce. We're happy to come back from time to time to help refresh the practice if you wish, but really our success is measured in your ability to sustain an innovation process within your own company.



When Greg Dyke instituted this process in the BBC in his shortlived but acclaimed period of running the institution, he made a clear point of dispensing with the myriad consultants that had invaded the place under his predecessor. As described by Caroline Van Den Brul, the former Creativity Change Leader at the BBC, "The BBC in 2000 was using hundreds of consultants to bring creativity into the organization. At the same time a lot of top-down change programmes happened but did not succeed. The organization had become change fatigued.  Greg Dyke therefore wanted to awaken the untapped creative potential within the BBC. Dyke concluded that further radical change was needed: improve creativity, get closer to audiences and serve them better, make staff feel more valued, build trust and collaboration to the organisation and improve leadership and internal communications."  Andy Parfitt, Controller of Radio One, was sent on the 5-day Innovation Process workshop with CIDA's partners Herman Gyr and Laszlo Gyorffy.  On his return, he revolutionised the station's fortunes by implementing with his own staff some of the practice and new thinking he had learned.  (There is an excellent and inspirational short video showing the impact that this had on Radio One, leading to its current success.)


Then today comes news that the new CEO of AIG, the beleagured insurance company, has come in and sent consultants McKinsey packing............Bloomberg News says new AIG CEO Benmosche has given consultant McKinsey & Co. its marching orders. Benmosche says AIG already has “too many advisers” and “forgot to look in our own backyard for skills". Benmosche’s fighting words about revamping and reviving AIG by using its own staff means a lot to those who’ve been slaving under death threats and Congressional carping because of bonuses they never even received. (http://industry.bnet.com)


As management guru Tom Peters never tires of pointing out, if you want to know what your customer is thinking, ask your front line staff - no one knows better than them!

CIDA's Innovation Day

Well, we've run our first Innovation Watering Hole and what an amazing day!

About 25 people responded positively to an invitation to come and spend three hours on a Friday afternoon with CIDA to help us shape the way we offer our Innovation programme to our different constituencies - we used three tools from our own Innovation process to develop the ideas and the offers, and everyone contributed enthusiastically, honestly and generously. It was a terrific afternoon AND hugely productive!

The people who came were a mixed bunch - people who had worked for CIDA or who had been clients of CIDA; people who knew about us and wanted to get involved in our Innovation work particularly; and people who had vaguely heard about us and were curious to know more. They ranged across many different disciplines - from painters and musicians to corporate lawyers and local authority officers ; marketing specialists and police detectives to personal stylists and economists; and including strategists and funders - most didn't know each other at the start but the mixed groups gelled very quickly around common interests - the post-event buzz at our Cafe Ollo reception was intense and noisy and people stayed for at least an hour after it had finished!

In fact, the whole event had been pretty intense. We only had three hours in which to cover a lot of ground but we managed it. Each group focused on a particular segment of CIDA's customer base, and brought their own knowledge, experience, intellect and imagination to identify key issues and potential responses to those issues. Each mapped the external environment as it affected their customer base, and then they applied CIDA's COSTAR process. This is a structure, created by our Silicon Valley innovation partners Herman Gyr and Laszlo Gryorffy and developed with CIDA, which provides a methodology for making innovation 'do-able', making sure that you are addressing all the different aspects that are essential if you are to move from merely having good ideas to actually making them happen, and critically to do it in a way that benefits both your customer and your company.

When they had done this, after about an hour, each group then presented their proposals to the others, galvanising reactions and thoughtful feedback from that audience. Whilst the mood was certainly supportive, no one shrunk from home truths - realism was the order of the day and we in CIDA came away with a pretty clear sense of what was and what wasn't achievable! There was a lot of laughter as people shared experiences in their groups and as people discovered common cause. For CIDA, there was real awe at the generosity of people giving up their afternoon to help us - and I think for everyone there was a sense of discovery and then achievement as we pulled together innovative ideas for implementation.

We now have a lot of work in front of us, but each group has an in house CIDA Project Champion who will take responsibility for seeing it to fruition. We will run a few more Rapid Improvement sessions on each, as we rehearse and rehearse, polishing the offer until we have it pitch-perfect! And whilst the in house groups are doing that, a group of our specialist Innovation Coaches, including Keith and me, will be out there, working with a wide range of customers, from micro businesses to local authorities, actually helping them, where appropriate, to generate ideas and then to successfully exploit those ideas for the benefit of themselves and their customers. We'll keep feeding our experiences and findings into the CIDA groups' work so that it is constantly honed and kept relevant. And effective!