Arriving in Trinidad

Arriving in Trinidad
Should have written this on Monday night but, by the time everything was sorted, it was late and I was tired – still, recent enough to recall so have decided to record it anyway –
Woke up early, had breakfast and then went for walk to see where I was. The whole area dominated by the colossal vision of two Royal Caribbean cruise liners moored in the port. The scale is extraordinary – seems greater than standing beside a Boeing 747 – you are completely dwarfed as a mere mortal! The harbour area is some way from the centre of Port of Spain so it’s not especially attractive to walkers, except that there is a CHOGM Village – specially set up, I think, and comprising a range of white tents (there must be a more elegant word for these amazing white canvas ‘pavilions’) which feature stalls by artists and designer makers as well as more traditional touristy stuff – it was all closed (too early in the morning!) when I was there but will aim to get there again –
The cab dropped me off later at the ship’s entrance – Serenade of the Seas - a complicated procedure for checking in but, because I was much earlier than other people, I met no queues. Then, led by a friendly but mostly silent young porter, I made my way through the halls and corridors, finally emerging on the dockside, wide and long, and with the enormity of this huge ship right beside me. Suddenly, the whole event overtook me. Very uncharacteristically, I had a moment of panic! I suddenly understood how people, who have never previously travelled on aeroplanes, must feel on their first arrival at an airport, an environment that has always been so familiar to me – this time, it was me who was totally out of my comfort zone, no idea of what was expected and what the rules of the game were, dwarfed by the physical size of everything, intimidated by the uniformed formality of everything, and overwhelmed by the sudden sense of complete isolation in negotiating bridges, lifts, corridors and – for god’s sake – staterooms!!
The ship was pretty deserted when I arrived – all 13 stories of it! How odd to talk of ‘stories’ – of course, I mean ‘decks’! Everything is uncompromisingly in ship language – heaven help you if you don’t know your port from your starboard! Lovely ( if small) ‘stateroom’ – bedroom to you and me! But I do have a balcony – imagine it would be very nice if we were actually sailing with an accompanying breeze and view of the wide silver sea – however, we are moored and my best view is of the ships’ huge packing crates that dominate most ports these days – actually, I enjoy it – it feels real, reminds me of Singapore and feels friendly. In the distance I can see the new Trinidadian Performing Arts Centre so that’s comforting too!
The 13 ‘decks’ make this place feel more like a hotel than like a ship – there is absolutely no movement that one would normally expect of a ship so it’s a bit hard to remember we’re on board! The decks vary from bedrooms to bars and restaurants to casinos and shops – on the 11th floor is the pool and solarium – and there is an ‘atrium’ in the centre so that, from every level, you can see down to the main centre bar lounge on the 4th deck. Nothing is open – and virtually no one except laconic staff is around – apparently, the shop owners couldn’t come to a satisfactory deal with the organisers so they will not open at all during our stay on board – tantalising, since they sell at duty and tax free prices and are full of gold which, CNN says authoritatively, is the thing to buy right now!
At 7pm people appear and there is a reception – Andrew Senior from the British Council, who is chairing my panel, arrives accompanied by Hardesh, the BC Music Young Entrepreneur 2009. Pablo Francisco Arrieta, another panel member, appears – he was the chatty one on the coach from the airport and turns out to be from Colombia. Within minutes, we discover that one of my favourite people in Bogota when we worked there is actually one of his mother’s closest friends – after that, there is no separating us! Of course, he’s a genius – Colombia is full of them! But Pablo is genuinely exciting and I will talk about him later –

Arriving in Trinidad

Ever since we started CIDA, I have always had a deeply personal ambition to do work in the Caribbean - there have been a couple of false dawns but now finally it feels like a foot on this particular ladder. The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) is taking place in Trinidad this year and I have been invited to address the Commonwealth Business Forum (CBF) - this is one of the main activities that takes place during the week, and attracts Presidents, Ministers and leading businesses so it's a pretty spectacular forum - when I came through Immigration tonight at Port of Spain airport, the officer asked if I was with the conference and what was I going to be doing - when I told her, she clucked sympathetically and said 'Are you nervous?' - I said no automatically but suddenly thought to myself that that would probably change on the day! - then she asked what my topic was and I said Creative Industries - to my surprise (and pleasure!) she just nodded and said 'great!'

Very good flight - it was absolutely packed and full of diplomats and musicians in particular; Claudio Kron do Brazil, the really wonderful drummer from Brazil based in Dewsbury but who works all over the world, was sitting just behind me and he seeemed to know everyone so by the time we got to Port of Spain, there was a distinctly party atmosphere brewing! Claudio is apparently performing with a range of African and Caribbean musicians during the week but he seemed wonderfully uninformed about exactly what, where and when! At least we know we are all on the ship together (the CBF is taking place on board the Caribbean cruise liner Serenade of the Seas - they've taken over the whole ship for the four days and we're even staying on board.......this is the way to work!) -

The real joy of the flight, however, was when we landed briefly in St Lucia - I hadn't looked at my itinerary properly so it came as a bit of a surprise but, heavens above, what an amazing looking island - huge dark green mountains, like sugar loaf mountains in green, rising out of the sea guarding the harbours and beaches; very little development as far as I could see as we flew in ; spectacular white beaches in some areas but mostly high cliff coastline with the green growing right to the edge; why on earth would anyone live anywhere else?! I have been to, and for years have been in love with, Jamaica, Barbados and Antigua but I have to say I was knocked out by what I saw today - have to come back properly!

Found myself sitting next to a banker from Central Bank of Nigeria - only recently moved there from the City in London - fascinating discussion - we talked about the different personalities of the different countries in Africa - big generalisations of course but still with some truth - the sheer energy in Nigeria is almost palpable - he reckons they are the most naturally entrepreneurial country in the world, including the US - they don't have the appropriate infrastructure, physically as well as in terms of services and people, but it will come - they benchmark themselves against South Africa, apparently - but the feeling is that South Africa is heading into stormclouds whereas Nigeria is already under stormclouds so their future is to move into the sunshine!

So first night here - in a hotel tonight but can see the ship all lit up from my bedroom window - move in there tomorrow - just want to say thank you to the Arts Council and Kirklees Council for making it possible for me to be here - the CBF doesn't pay - but the biggest surprise all day has been the huge numbers of young people who are descending on this island for this event - not just performers but what I take to be social activists of one kind and another - the mix of accents is extraordinary - from every part of the world - apparently they are expecting 5000 visitors for the conference - how do you make impact on that?!

Mandelson and Murdoch and downloading

Spent last weekend in Brussels with colleagues - with Jo (Wilkinson) and Lee (Corner), we were there for the first of our two new Leonardo projects; I took advantage of being there to introduce Pernille Askerud, terific woman from UNESCO Bangkok and just back from working on cultural industries mapping in Bhutan, to Philippe Kern and Jan Runge of KEA, the Brussels-based EU consultancy. We ended up having quite a good chat and, in a rush of enthusiasm, I expounded my theory about free downloading being here to stay. There was an exchange of glances between Philippe and Jan and then they gently told me that they don't agree with me - they think the world is changing and that Governments are increasingly moving towards imposing penalties on those who dare. In fact, they commented that the UK, which has been so ahead of the field on all this and championed free access in the early days, is now being seen, thanks to Mandelson's recent moves, as moving in the opposite direction..."and Anamaria, if the UK is doing it, then what hope for the rest of us......!" Pernille, Lee and I spent the afternoon discussing it and its consequences - whether or not it is worth taking action.......who knows? - and then another nail in the coffin - Murdoch confirming that he is going to charge for downloading any of News International material - not if but when: he apparently is having some technical difficulties at the moment - and he is seriously considering blocking Google and suing the BBC for apparently using some of his material in their news sites................this just gets worse!

For those of us who are signed up members (metaphorically!!) of the Google School of Research, things sound as though they are going to get really tedious!

Awards

So CIDA won the Examiner's 2009 Creative Business Award - what a terrific pleasure that is as we come to the end of our first ten years! (Well, the birthday is actually on 18 January but it's as near as makes no difference!)

I don't want to write about those ten years just yet - but I do want to record our instinctive reaction to this event.

We thought of the hundreds of people who have worked with us in a wide range of capacities over the ten years and acknowledge our debt to them - we've always tried to keep the core of CIDA small so that we are able to commission a wide range of creative practitioners to go out and share their knowledge and skills with others. Some have worked with us from the beginning, some are only just starting with us, but all bring a talent, a commitment, an intellectual curiosity that prompts engagement and innovation, and a joy in their work that infuses their relationship with our clients.

They are as much part of who and what CIDA is as the rest of us - and we are profoundly grateful to them all!

File sharers are big spenders too!

Huh! Interesting! BBC News today reveals research by Demos that people who download music illegally also spend almost twice (£77 per month) compared with £44 per mth spent averagely by those who don't download - the Govt give a mealy mouthed response and manage to face both ways in typical political double speak - but critically they pronounce that "The scale of unlawful file-sharing poses a real threat to the long-term sustainability of our creative industries". This is simply not true. What it does do is reinforce the need for the creative industries (well, the big music producer boys, at any rate!) to get more creative, more imaginative about their business models. File sharing, downloading, is here to stay. When Mandelson (rather uncharacteristically I thought - he's usually more in touch than this - must be the company he's keeping!) threatened his draconian response to free downloading, most of the young people I know and work with just laughed - and continued downloading. And the interesting thing about that is that most of those young people are musicians and music makers...........

Govt has got to realise that they cannot put the lid back on this particular box. But they will insist on
listening to the wrong people - from Govt's own statistics, the creative industries is characterised by 94% of companies who employ less than 10 people - in fact the vast majority employ between 1 and 5 people. These are small businesses - and Govt has no mechanisms for hearing the voice of small creative businesses!

So instead they listen to the voice of the 6% minority who qualify as large companies, and who, turn out to be the very people who have grown large and rich by exploiting (through publishing and distributing etc) the creativity and IP of the small businesses - so the major music businesses, for example, whose market is rapidly disappearing as independent musicians learn how to publish and distribute their work themselves over the internet, now go wailing to government about how the creative industries are in danger from this unregulated behaviour and, idiotically, Government listen!! Instead of celebrating this new world where potentially artists take more control of their work, their market and their earnings!

What do we have to do to get Govt to realise that the world has changed? We now have an economy that is knowledge based, where the ecology is moving away from large monolithic companies to the vibrancy and fast moving culture of small and micro businesses for whom rules of practice are changing every day - all the old criteria that Government still use to identify '"success" are largely irrelevant - if a creative company doesn't "last for more than three years", that doesn't necessarily mean failure; it just means that they have chosen to move on to something else; if they don't "employ more than 5 people" , that doesn't mean that they don't know how to grow; it means that they choose to stay small - often so that their capacity for collaboration across a range of activities remains an essential part of their business practice! We don't have to behave - and indeed we don't behave - the way the companies behaved in the old manufacturing economy days - with huge investments in capital and labour that made fast moving agendas impossible to handle. We are fleet of foot, we change our perspectives and our business practice as we go, we are global in outlook and practice, we collaborate and then break up again, we offer no job security but we offer adventure, challenge, risk and reward - and we are much more fun - come on, Government, wake up and hear the music!

"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?