Living outside France allows me to return to my country of birth with a foreigner’s sensitivity to quaint language developments there. The French proclivity for multisyllabic concepts is unmatched. If you can think of a concept, there’s a French word for it.
One of my favorites is primo-accédant, which refers to people who buy real estate property for the first time (not necessarily primo real estate, I might add). How many other languages have coined a term for such a person? French people also have a word for people who have multiple banking relationships, yielding the pentasyllabic multi-bancarisé. Multi-bancarisé is opposed to mono-bancarisé when they have only one bank. As for sex, however, it turns out the French prefer multiple relationships, yielding a sizable segment of primo-accédants multibancarisés for whose attention bankers fight. I am told from admittedly less than reliable sources that the new French President François Hollande was heard warming up for his victory speech at La Bastille by repeating primo-accédant multibancarisé a hundred times at fast pace .
“Why would one do simple when one can do complicated”, was the wisdom offered by an old French TV cartoon called Les Shadoks. This exemplifies French people’s approach to language. A problem used to be un problème, but has now migrated to une problématique, with sounds like a much larger headache (moving from a masculine to a feminine also appropriately connotes of greater complexity). It was appropriately used by the hotel maintenance staff at my Paris hotel this week to describe a leaky toilet in my room (la problématique de la chasse d’eau). Things also used to last (elles durent), but they now hyper-last (elles perdurent), which, best I can see, is the new watered-down definition of eternity given the increased secularism of France. Any kind of work-related injury used to be commonly referred to as un accident du travail (a work accident), but employers are now invited to prevent troubles musculo-squelettiques. As a modest French employer, I have spent many sleepless nights imagining employee body parts flying all over the hexagone and being held responsible for such human implosion.
The political language of the French presidential campaign has also co-created its share of new words, most of them quite divisive. Islamophobie, while elegantly polysyllabic, refers to the sad reality of immigration-related tension and the racist feelings it engenders. I even heard an interview on television where a young woman referred to herself as an anti-islamophobe (that’s seven syllables if you’re counting), which, she explained, is a lot stronger than being an islamophile. The presidential candidates have spent a lot of time trying to diaboliser their opponents (paint the other guy into a devil), while taxing the other one of angélisme, the art of attributing angel-like feelings to people who should clearly be diabolisés instead. There is a trend toward the désacralisation of everything (literally take the sacramental portion out things), most notably marriage, paying taxes and les institutions.
The French are also world-class when it comes to metaphoric expressions. When they mean to convey “let’s not worry about that”, hip French people like to say “on ne va pas se mettre la rate au court-bouillon”, which literally translated means something like “let us not make spleen soup out of it”. In case you wondered about ingredients in cuisine nouvelle. Another popular expression to convey “it’s not even close” is “y’a pas photo”, literally “there is no need for a photo-finish on this one”. This one appears to have originated with horse racing, and the celebrated tiercé et quarté du dimanche. French people used to eat horses in boucheries chevalines, but the trend is clearly toward less eating and more betting. Some uncharitable commentators have referred to the new French President François Hollande as “il n’a pas fait l’école du rire” (literally, “he did not graduate from laughing school”), because of his serious demeanor. I can’t wait for the slap fest at the next sommet franco-allemand with Angela Merkel. given her own barrel of laugh approach to things.
While I increasingly need an interpreter to decipher those new expressions, a few concepts have remained reassuringly the same (ils ont perduré, as it were). The dame pipi, still available at most French railroad stations in Paris, is still à son poste, collecting coins before letting you faire vos besoins (attend to your needs, or do your business). For good measure, the French have added some automation equipment (the French are big on infrastructure, particularly when it comes to bathrooms and fast trains), such that you now not only have to produce at least 50 centimes d’euro (or risk the wrath of madame pipi in a surprisingly polyglot tirade), but also have to jump turnstiles with suitcases, encouraged by a crowd of lookers-on inspired by the popular TV game show Fort Boyard. Engineers at the French railroad organization SNCF were clearly never told that train travelers use suitcases, in full illustration of the motto of the French elite engineering school Polytechnique which stipulates: we know some things works in practice, but do they work in theory?
Of course my timing is particularly bad here. The French are at a serious juncture in their political history, having just elected François Hollande to become Président de la République Française, and here I am, participating already in his désacralisation and his diabolisation. Cher Monsieur le Président, I present you with my best wishes in addressing la problématique of France, such that my former country can perdurer, with a special thought for the primo-accédants, whether of the monobancarisé or the multibancarisé variety, and whether they are prone to troubles musculo-squelettiques or not. Vive la République. Vive la France.
From Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, I have extracted the following ten principles of leadership.
- Start drugs early
- Smell
- Screw the friends that got you started
- Tell people they’re assholes
- Steal the ideas of the two or three people who are not
- Occupy handicapped people’s parking spaces
- Ignore your father, abuse your girlfriends, abandon your daughter
- Cartelize industries
- Post-date corporate options
- Despise philanthropy
Will anybody ever want to teach leadership after Steve Jobs?
(HBR article by Isaacson)
Periodically, I ask myself: “who are the most effective change agents when it comes to implementing co-creation inside a corporation?” Here is my list, in descending order of effectiveness:
1. Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
- Good news: The CFO’s source of power comes from controlling financial resources, often including IT money required for the development of co-creation platforms. They are often frustrated line managers who see co-creation as a means to gain influence over the operational side of the business.
- Bad news: their analytical bias can overpower the human side of co-creation.
- Good first step: issue cost reduction challenge to one of the businesses; suggest co-creation may be the way to reach that goal (get external people to do work for free that was previously done inside).
2. Chief Information Officer (CIO)
- Good news: CIOs get to co-creation through the funding of engagement platforms. The role of CIO in co-creation is legitimized by the app store phenomenon (co-creation with third-party developers).
- Bad news: CIOs often struggle with developing the human community part of co-creation (they can be too tool-focused).
- Good first step: find a few APIs and open up some aspect of your customer-facing sites to third-party developers. Start connecting customers and developers.
3. Chief Purchasing Officer (CPO), Directors of Supply Chain
- Good news: There is a new breath of fresh air with procurement departments; they increasingly recognize that they should be developing supplier networks rather than consolidating them. Supply chain people are often pushed to co-creation through the need to create transparency in their emerging country plants (often due to labor and sustainability issues).
- Bad news: Supply chain people can get confused on the difference between collaborative supply chain tools that have been around for several years, and the actual development of co-creative supply chain communities that allows the constant reinvention of those supply chains.
- Good first step: pick a particularly risky part of your supply chain (e.g., Chinese plant with labor issues), and demonstrate that you can remove some operational and reputational risk through co-creation.
4. Research and Development (R&D) Managers, Heads of Product Development
- Good news: Many product development people know that co-creation is coming to product development and product design (also often referred to as open innovation, or crowd-sourcing).
- Bad news: They often do not yet know how to involve their own people in co-creation and avoid the NIH syndrome. They often jump too fast to third-party platforms to generate product ideas, but fail to engage their own people in the dialogue.
- Good first step: start inside. Assemble your R&D people and see where they would welcome the engagement of external people. Only when you have their views will it become meaningful to engage external contributors.
5. Chief Experience Officer
- Good news: more and more companies have experience officers. Experience officers are natural sponsors for co-creation.
- Bad news: many of them focus on measuring “as is” experience rather than trying to change it.
- Good first step: pick a narrow segment (a single customer in B2B), engage the mini ecosystem involved in serving this narrow segment/single customer and see what co-creation can bring.
6. Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), Head of Market Research
- Good news: CMO and market research people understand experience.
- Bad news: they think of themselves as experience experts, and therefore see no reason to co-create any of that experience with anyone (since they know better).
- Good first step: open up one of the brand management processes to customers and employees, e.g., advertising, and see what you get.
7. Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO)
- Good news: sustainability is one of the best fields of application for co-creation because of the multi-stakeholder nature of the problem.
- Bad news: CSOs don’t typically have access to senior people and may not know how to engage them.
- Good first step: team up with the sales force to embed sustainability in the sales message.
8. Performance Management, Quality, Reengineering, 6 Sigma, Lean, Transformation Officers.
- Good news: Performance management people naturally gravitate toward co-creation as “the new tool kit.”
- Bad news: The concept of process can be so engrained that moving to platforms and self-configured interactions can represent a mental challenge. Many struggle with the notion that the transformation path can/should itself be co-created, rather than established by experts.
- Good first step: pick a customer-facing process, e.g., sales or customer service, and show how moving from process thinking to co-creation changes the outcome.
9. Strategy Officers
- Good news: A few strategy officers understand the power of human experience in generating insights.
- Bad news: most prefer an information-gathering and analytical approach.
- Good first step: pick a self-contained strategy issue, and ask customer-facing people and a few customers how they would frame and solve the issue. Compare to the answer an analytical approach would have provided.
10. Human Resources Officers, Diversity Head
- Good news: Of course, senior HR development people should be major players in co-creation.
- Bad news: In practice, they rarely have access to the proverbial strategic table.
- Good first step: co-create HR processes (e.g., training, hiring, career development) rather than tackling line processes.
It has been widely reported in the last few days that some players on the New Orleans Saints football team developed a home-grown bounty system whereby players would reward each other with personal money for inflicting injuries onto opposing players. While the National Football League is investigating the New Orleans Saints specifically, there are indications that such a system might be in existence across the league, along a continuum from the clearly legal (players rewarding a punt return) to the apparently illegal variety (the NFL seems to have rules that prohibit intentionally putting a quarterback on a stretcher).
The New Orleans Saints have developed a perfect system of co-creation we should write up in Harvard Business Review, not decry in the New York Times. The system developed by the players has all five ingredients of co-creation:
- A community. The players who decided they were going to build a kitty to reward injury-causing hits on opposing players set themselves up as a community. Had the NFL not intervened in ill-advised fashion, the player community might have expanded into allowing investment from fans into the bounty scheme. A “Knock Tom Brady cold” Super PAC could not have been far behind, supported by Libyan or Syrian capital.
- An engagement platform. The platform was an organized spreadsheet where players kept tabs on bets and rewards. The spreadsheet was further institutionalized when an assistant coach started keeping score on behalf of the players. The next expansion would have included an idea generation web site open to the public (myinjuryideas.com), with an injury pricing site and rotisserie league to follow.
- Continuously expanding interactions. The platform was originally developed as an incentive system to reward legal plays (e.g., causing a fumble), but started sprouting injury-causing moves over time. The community and platform in place could have been further expanded into player gambling on football games, sponsoring dog fights, or financing armed robbery by young deserving football players.
- New win-win experiences for all parties. We’re told the bounties helped young players round off their modest paycheck, allowing them “to buy shoes” with the proceeds. I understand Zappos and Nike were eager to become involved in the Saints co-creative ecosystem. Elder players enjoyed the developmental experience of providing nurturing advice to their younger colleagues, supported by the team’s Human Resources function. The assistant coach was clearly on the short list for Coaching Innovation of the Year. And the New Orleans Saints fans got a winning football team after years of futility, allowing the entire city to regain its pride after Katrina (well, sort of).
- New value for the club owner. The bounty system produced a highly motivated work force that fully dedicated itself to the task at hand, ultimately winning the Super Bowl. Absenteeism was at an all-time low. Career progression was rapid. The bounty system had no cost to the owner since everything was financed by the players. The system did have a tremendous revenue impact in terms of gate attendance and media revenue. What else could one wish for as an owner?
The bounty system was such a perfect example of co-creation and produced an ever-expanding win for all parties (except for a few injured parties along the way, but doesn’t there have to be some Schumpeterian creative destruction?). The Saints bounty system could have become the new Facebook, the new Google or the new Groupon. Will regulators ever learn?
I work with a lot of analytically-minded people. These people can be colleagues or client, often both. Because analytically-minded firms tend to hire analytical consultants, they often lock in a powerful embrace that makes it hard for either of them to view the world through the lens of co-creation. These are the workshops from hell. Their first objection is often that co-creation feels like a random process of human discovery void of any data. Real men don’t do co-creation, they say. They formulate a hypothesis, gather some analytical data through research that proves the hypothesis is right, may test the idea with some customers or other relevant stakeholders, and then go build whatever needs to be built, be it a product, a process, or a strategy. Data drives the hypothesis, and humans are there to validate the hypothesis.
Co-creation follows a different logic. In co-creation, the hypothesis is the result of the engagement process, and insights are in fact generated jointly by the company and the people it engages (this is the uncomfortable part, the “letting go” part). What is even harder for analytical people to see is that co-creation is equally data-driven as the more traditional company-centric process, product or strategy design, but the data is of a different nature because it comes from the people themselves.
In co-creation, what comes first is the platform, typically a very crude prototype in the early stages. The primary role of the platform is to generate data that can be analyzed and structured, which will then guide the next iteration of design, in effect making the early users of the crude platform into co-creators of the next iteration. When Mark Zuckerberg created the first Facebook site, he devised a blunt instrument that allowed obnoxious Harvard students to rate the attractiveness of female students at Harvard. Was it the ultimate design of the platform? Of course not (and mercifully so!). But what he did was engage a group of campus students on a topic that defined a community (Harvard male students) and a basic platform concept that could evolve from this humble beginning. The first draft of Facebook allowed Zuckerberg and his team to engage into a creative dialogue that generated subsequent interactions, leading to new features such as communicating one’s social status, or sharing photos. Since then, the platform has continuously morphed as a result of a natural Darwinian process where users co-evolve the platform through use.
So what is the role of data in this process of co-creation? Simply put, data is everything. The platform is a data machine. It records who comes to the platform, how long people stay on it, what people do on the platform, and what features they utilize. Platforms can be of a physical nature, like a store, or virtual kind, like a web site, but the metrics tend to be comparable. We’re all by now familiar with the “eyeballs” and “stickiness” metrics of interactive sites. Since co-creation requires the development of scale and efficiency (this is one of the main differences between collaboration and co-creation), co-creative firms need to develop scale and efficiency measures for the platform itself, e.g., how many interactions take place, how quickly they unfold, how many of them complete successfully, etc…
The most important data on a co-creation platform, however, is the constant qualitative bending of the performance model. Users continuously stretch the limits of the platform, imagining new interactions that would be of value to them. It typically starts by offering unfiltered feedback in exchanges between users (the site becomes the market research department). In some cases, on electronic platforms, this evolution occurs through downright hacking. The development of the Lego Mindstorms operating system (Lego robots) was one such case of hacking (ultimately grandfathered by Lego designers), and the insertion of Google maps into the Nike + runners community site is another case where two technologies were “mashed up” by users, rather than orchestrated by Nike web designers.
There are however a few fundamental differences in the data required by a co-creation strategy vs. a classic strategy. The first difference is that in co-creation, the data is not resident in some data base of trends or financial analysis of competitors which any analyst can access. This data is by definition much richer than any “study data” because it is only accessible to the company that curates the platform. It is original data generated by real people using the platform who find it valuable to share their data. This data is often quite intimate. Nike users will share weight and running patterns. Patients on the Patients like Me site share personal health and effectiveness of treatment data on profoundly debilitating diseases such as cancer or depression, because they believe insights and potentially new treatments will emerge from the sharing of this data. (Of course, no doctor or health insurance company would have the right to share this data, but patients willingly contribute it because they have a vested interest in it). People on mint.com find such value on the platform that they give the platform access to a large amount of personal financial information, because mint.com offers them insights they cannot get anywhere else.
Even more importantly, the data on co-creation platforms is alive rather than static. It is associated with individuals who are interested in continuously interacting with the company on new topics of mutual interest. At any one time, the company or the individuals can initiate the development a new branch in the tree of co-creation. They can generate a new algorithm on how to look at the data itself, e.g., suggest a new way of looking at how to train for Nike, a new treatment for Patients Like Me, or a new financial strategy insight for mint.com. Not only is the data co-created, but so is the analysis and the insights that come from this data.
The possibilities become endless when data and the development of associated insights are driven by the self-interest of passionate people combining with the professionalism of a co-creative staff at a company. The future of analytics in business is not company-created algorithms accumulated through CRM or other third-party data bases. It lies in the co-creation of both data and insights by willing individuals interested in working with companies of their choice to generate new experiences for themselves.
She’s young. She’s passionate. She’s an environmentalist. Her ecological ideas feel a bit out of place in the conservative bank where she works, but she doesn’t care. That’s her passion. Every Thursday night, she goes to the local movie theater to participate in the meetings of the sustainability group she’s part of. She wants to change the world, just from where she is.
She’s also a triathlete. She can swim, run and bike faster than anyone around her. She shrugs her shoulders when the conversation moves to the local soccer team and the thousands of people they attract every week. “Have you ever attended a track and field meeting she asks us?” None of us has. She describes the excitement of having so many things going on in the stadium at any one time: watch a race, then focus on a pole-vaulter clearing the bar or watch a javelin fly across the field. I feel like signing up.
I ‘m having lunch with a group of bank advisors, between a morning and an afternoon workshop session. I’m sitting next to this young bank advisor, and I feel young again. She operates in a small town that does not quite fit the community-building scheme we have devised, so we make lame excuses about not having enough resources to support her in her small town. She just ignores our objections. We rapidly understand that any resistance is futile. She wants to get involved in this co-creation project, and we will help her.
So we agree to run a workshop with the customer she’s identified. I am long gone by the time the workshop happens, but I get an account a couple of weeks later. Between her client and herself, they have mapped out what the community should do, how the bank should get involved and how everybody would benefit. The community is building itself. One of my colleagues calls me at the end of her day in Europe to give me the news. No need for deep analytics, or motivational speech. All we have to do is watch her run. It’s hard to know who’s more excited — the customer, the young bank advisor, the consultants or the banks’ management.
Why didn’t it happen before? She was there all along. All we did was give her a platform. Her passion is now channeled through her job. She’s become a business activist. I know she’ll run far and drag thousands of people with her. I will be rooting from afar.
I have a new teaching aid for co-creation: the HBO documentary by Cameron Crowe showing how Elton John and Leon Russell came together to produce a new CD called The Union (this is also the name of the documentary). On the analytical side, it shows how two people coming together initiated the development of a global community of fans (the record opened up at number 1 on Amazon in 2010 and rose to number 3 on the Billboard charts). On the experiential side, the story provides a window on the beautiful mind of Elton John and bears witness to the second birth of Leon Russell (“I was in a ditch and he treated me like a king”). The words of Elton John describing the transformative power of the experience on himself offer a better motivation for co-creation than any of us “experts” will ever provide.
The documentary starts with Elton John in a middle-aged funk, wondering how to avoid having to record a Christmas album for his label. He suddenly remembers the early influence on his piano playing of the American song writer and performer Leon Russell, once a pioneering rock star in the late 60s-early 70s, now a marginal musician in Nashville, Tennessee. He approaches Russell, a grouchy, tired 67 year old with this unlikely proposition: “Let’s make a record together, full 50-50 partnership, I’m renting a studio, let’s get on with it, what do you say?”
The early collaboration is awkward. Russell does not really understand what Elton John wants from him and why he’s there, complete with a camera crew filming a documentary on the creative process (“what are we going to do together for two days?”). Elton John’s approach is to pick a few standards and get Leon jamming. Early on, Russell suffers a major setback in the form of a brain incident requiring hospitalization, from which he comes back quite diminished. Elton John hangs around, relentless and passionate. He puts songs in front of him, patiently drawing him out.
As trust starts growing from the early timid sessions, Leon Russell comes alive. The perceptive camera of Cameron Crowe catches the early twinkle in his eye, particularly when a group of female singers comes in to provide back-up vocals on one of the songs. The rewiring of Leon Russell has started, giving him access to the talent of a broader cast of characters than he’s had in a long time. (As he touchingly confesses, he’s grown used to doing everything himself, playing the keyboards, the guitar, the drums and doing the singing). At some point, he begins to realize the opportunity he’s been offered. One morning, he shows up frantically looking for a piano to compose the music to some lyrics he’s developed overnight. The song, entitled In the Hands of Angels, is too well-meaning to be effective musically, but shows a man transformed.
The co-creative process is gently managed by T Bone Burnett, the record producer. He’s the ego-less voice of the public, subtly guiding both artists through gentle nudging. Bernie Taupin, Elton John’s lyricist, is never far behind in the ecosystem, at least in spirit (Elton John states in the movie that in thirty years of collaboration, Taupin has never witnessed the development of the music by Elton John in a studio, thereby showing that co-creative interactions can be remote, yet powerful). We feel privileged to watch just that, particularly when Elton John puts together the introduction to the haunting “Gone to Shiloh” and Elton and Leon start harmonizing. There again, something in the eyes of Elton John suddenly illuminates, and one cannot help but feel the power of creative voices coming together.
Perhaps the more remarkable part in the collaboration of the two artists is the fact that Elton John, the artist with the most powerful “bargaining power” of the two, never uses it to push Leon to do what he wants. Our entire business model is predicated on the notion that success comes from creating a competitive advantage and exploiting it. For Elton John, value derives less from exerting his clout than from connecting with a disadvantaged human being in a creative new way. Connecting human experiences is the new source of competitive advantage. May Michael Porter forgive me!
It’s a rude awakening. I have arrived in Saint-Etienne, France, where the temperature has dropped down to 10 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to 85 degrees earlier that morning in Mumbai. A cold suburban train from the Paris airport to Gare de Lyon and a TGV train down to Saint-Etienne, watching the snow-covered French landscape at high speed. I’m here for a workshop with a French bank, hoping to activate an economic community among the small business customers of the bank.
The temperature drop outside is huge, but the one in the room is even greater. Participants in the workshop are reluctant, to say the least. They simply don’t see the point of building a customer community. Yes, they care about Saint-Etienne, the 400,000 inhabitants city where they live, and a former mining town which struggles to find its next economic source of growth. But no, they do not see any role for their bank in activating the local economy beyond what the bank already does, i.e., gather savings and make loans to local businesses. “This is for the government to do”, one of the participants tells me in the uniquely dismissive style of my compatriots. This has to be the toughest workshop I’ve done in five years.
By mid-afternoon, there is a noticeable thaw. The bank advisors around the room are willing to contact one of their customers and ask them to describe their personal community network. The idea is to start with individual networks of individual small business owners, then see whether these individual networks somehow converge into communities we can engage on a larger scale. It’s a start. For the first time, participants start building on each other’s interventions, without my having to prompt every single comment with a question. This approach feels more concrete to them than any conceptualization of what communities and platforms can do: if co-creation starts with one advisor and one customer at a time, they’re willing to suspend disbelief and try it. I look out the window and notice the snow has stopped falling. By the time I sit down, I notice my shirt is soaked, in spite of the cold in the room.
The following day, we are in the small town of Montbrison, in the center of France. I have spent a good deal of time lying awake the preceding night, trying to mentally devise a more effective way of engaging the audience, but also still struggling with my Indian jet lag. By the morning, a miracle has occurred. The people at the workshop are warm. They’re ready to go. Ideas for communities fly around the room. They know exactly whom to engage to get started. It feels like an invisible hand is guiding us to co-creation heaven. Life is wonderful again. Thank you, Montbrison.
I sometimes wish I could predict how audiences will react to co-creation. The only thing I’ve learned is that I’m consistently wrong. My “sure thing” workshops often end up in agony, while my “fear of the unknown” workshops sometimes end up in blockbuster success. One of the teachings of co-creation is that you never know what lies beyond the initial engagement process. I guess I have to re-learn this lesson every day. I have to take my own “let go” medicine. It makes for anxious moments, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
When the dark days of winter get to me, I head for Mumbai. The business junkie I am does not need sun – although you also get that in Mumbai in January – but economic excitement. So here I am once again, arriving exhausted at midnight at the airport. My driver is not here and conversation with the hotel operator produces a strange mix of reassurance that the driver is already there and disturbing evidence that they may not have scheduled him after all. Unfathomable India. At the airport, I try to recruit the other drivers of competing hotels to help me locate my guy – building communities is after all what I have come here to teach – but instead, I get multiple offers to spend the night at other hotels or to drive me to my original hotel at what seems to be an exponentially decreasing cost. One hour later, the driver shows up, vaguely apologetic, making laconic references to a parking problem. I will never know what happened.
I have come to organize a preparatory workshop with a large European crop protection company wanting to develop a new partnership with a larger Indian trader. The idea is to get organized internally first, then propose a co-creation workshop to the partner at a subsequent time. The exciting part is that both parties are already poster children for co-creation, having each set up successful farmer communities of their own, which they now propose to connect. I have slept very little – adapting to a 10.5 hours time difference is never easy– and yet I feel totally “on” because workshop participants are so excited that all I have to do is feed off their enthusiasm. By the afternoon of the first day, the account manager for the trading company picks up the phone and calls someone at the trader to let them know we want to engage in co-creation with them. By the afternoon of the second day, we have a call organized between the two parties involving senior leadership on both sides. Yes, they agree, this makes a lot of sense, maybe a bit more of this hypothesis and a bit less of that one. We’re off to the races.
In the US or Europe, someone would have to check with legal or make sure everybody in management is on board. One would have to verify with a project management office that resources can indeed be allocated to this initiative, and a painstaking process of initiatives prioritization would have to take place. In India, the excitement drives everything. Passion is the currency. They even set up dates for the full co-creation workshop that will follow. And so I find myself volunteering for another visit to India in short order.
The other striking part of the workshop is the contrast of business model between the European and the Indian view of the same problem. The European model is a classic capitalistic model where the crop protection company tries to build a direct line between the investment in time and resources that the new partnership will require and more profits for the company. There has to be a “business case”, which implies an ability to see a causal relationship between what gets spent and the increased profits that will come out of it. By contrast, the Indian trader has adopted the triple balance sheet view that sustainable success is defined economically, socially and environmentally. The economic model is also quite important – they want to make more money – but they also understand that trying to build a linear cause-and-effect relationship between an investment and a predictable outcome can be a fool’s errand. As a result, they are quite content to take initiatives that will help the farmers that supply them make more money, on the assumption that good things will follow if they help the community of farmers grow their overall income and adopt more environmentally balanced agricultural practices. When pushed, they can articulate that more competitive agricultural products grown by their farmers will produce more quality supplies for them, or generate more goodwill with the Indian government, which may pay off in less regulation, but I can tell this is a concession to Western thinking. Left to their own device, they do not feel the need to map out every possible outcome from the co-creation effort, realizing that beyond the first or second-order hypotheses they develop, the outcome of the co-creation is largely unknowable. The European contingent struggles with the decidedly “un-analytic” point of view offered by the Indian folks. “If we build those communities of farmers, I know good things will happen”, a young Indian marketing manager simply states to me at dinner, as we are having a drink on the hotel terrace under the moon.
After a while, he adds: “… and this makes me proud of what I do.” That’s all he needs to know.
Enough already! In their recent editions, both Newsweek and Bloomberg Businessweek are vilifying Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany, for failing to solve the Euro crisis problem. The Newsweek article describes her in particularly unflattering terms, with not-so-subtle Aryan references (“the lady prefers blonds”), a Germanic over-preoccupation with rules and discipline, and an ill-advised focus on inflation rooted in the history of the Weimarer Republik. Bloomberg Businessweek’s article avoids WWII imagery, but similarly describes her as a cold-hearted incompetent leader, hopelessly stuck in a German paradigm of austerity and unable to grasp the new global economic realities.
I have been puzzled by this concentrated journalistic fire on the German chancellor in recent weeks. Why target her, when the euro crisis clearly did not originate with Germany, and when most country leaders are struggling with their response to the new economic challenge? At this stage, everybody is groping in the dark for a viable economic framework (the division of the US leaders on the virtues of tax reduction vs. stimulus spending constitutes exhibit A), so why zero in on Angela Merkel as particularly incompetent in this crowd of fumbling country leaders?
At the risk of inflaming the debate, these two articles seem to me to tap into both anti-German and anti-women-as-leaders sentiment. One way of hiding our own lack of answers is to find a common enemy, and what better enemy could there be than a German one, and a woman at that? The German thing is annoying because it reflects the continuing parochialism of some portion of the US electorate (witness Herman Cain displaying his utter insensitivity to global affairs in the infamous Uzbekistan interview) (link 4) and the willingness to mobilize against a common imaginary enemy, Germany in this most recent development (although China is the most common boogeyman, hello Donald Trump).
While the xenophobic overtone is annoying, I have particular trouble with the woman thing. I find it striking that both articles describe Angela Merkel as left-brained, analytical tendencies (the lady wrote her doctoral thesis on quantum chemistry) and highlight her lack of human warmth (“nobody really gets close to the chancellor”). What would we want Angela to be? A soft flower seeking men’s help in solving her government’s problems? A “don’t cry for me, Argentina” chancellor? Barack Obama is also predominantly left-brained, analytical and professorial, and arguably struggles with generating empathy among his electorate, yet this is not the stuff of magazine covers.
I am particularly troubled by the implicit reference to the lack of femininity of Mrs. Merkel. The unflattering pictures in both articles imply a “she’s not really a woman as we think of women” imagery, which is disturbingly sexist. There have occasionally been unflattering pictures of male leaders in magazines in the past (most recently Mitt Romney on the cover of Time Magazine), but they have not had the same gender-specific quality. Unlike many countries of the world, the US still hasn’t had a woman as its leader (Hillary Clinton came close in her 2008 presidential bid, and she generated some of the same anti-woman sentiment), so we may have to wait until then to see this ugly feature of anti-women-as-leaders sentiment finally fade away.
