Month: October 2024

 

Part of the caption is with respectful attribution to Ryan Holiday‘s seminal book ” The Obstacle is the Way ”

 

We have two options in a crisis:

 

• Accept the reality and accept the crisis as a catalyst for the change that we have always wanted to make..or
• Resist the reality and accept our temporary circumstances become our permanent identity

 

The worst thing you can do when you are unemployed is to spend all your time looking for a job. Why? because what you are doing is spending all your focus, energy and attention on the greatest source giving the maximum anxiety in your life.

 

Let’s remember that an economy that once rewarded people for fitting in now rewards people for standing out. Probably a rude awakening for some of us sitting around waiting.

 

It’s been a while since the dreaded Corona pulverised us but that said ” have we fallen prey to Cornona Fatigue?  The new term that has been coined to describe our collective sense of exhaustion, helplessness and inertia.

 

That means we seem to have dropped the ball on our creative work and doing the bare minimum that needs to be done( plus Prime and Netflix of course!) . We got tired, frustrated and just waiting for better days.

Creativity is future proof. Some of the most remarkable works of art were created in dire circumstances and in response to adversity, social injustice and major uncertainty.  Here goes a few examples:

 

• The seminal work of Viktor Frankl(inside a Nazi concentration camp)
• The Hemingway & Steinbeck novels
• The Diary of Anne Frank
• Picasso’s Guernica

 

If you have read up until this part of the rant, you would discover a gap between your capabilities and what you are actually doing. Maybe you are thinking:-

I’m my own greatest obstacle

My self-doubt is an obstacle

My own motivation and focus or lack thereof is my biggest obstacle

We may feel that there could be something better and more fulfilling to do with our time and energy

 

Enough of (doom)scrolling, tweeting and obsessive email checking. What else can we do and what can we do and what prevents us from doing those other things?

 

The pandemic has made us hyper-focused on what sucks and short sighted about other things that we still have control over.

 

Everyone feels like a fraud. We are all making it up. There is only one difference between people who get out of their way and those who don’t. People who get out of their way, persists, even if they feel like a fraud.

 

You don’t have to have your shit together in order to create.

 

The fact that you don’t have your shit together doesn’t mean that you are stupid or don’t know anything- it just shows that you are human.

 

We use our creativity to express our humanity and we connect with each other thanks to our common humanity.

 

So, let’s get out of our way to shovel a mountain of shit for our ounce of gold.

 

” Every act of creation is first an act of destruction “- Pablo Picasso

 

Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) coined the seemingly paradoxical term “creative destruction,” and generations of economists have adopted it as a shorthand description of the free market’s messy way of delivering progress.

 

The adoption of laissez faire and the ceaseless churning of the existing means lost jobs, ruined companies, and vanishing industries are inherent parts of the growth system. It comes with the territory.

 

Creative destruction-in the process of product innovation- is an old story. Voice mail comes along and sends armies of office workers looking for other lines of work. Cassettes replace vinyls and then get dis intermediated by CDs which loses out to MP3 players which become the guinea pig at the altar of streaming music. New Tide comes in and old Tide goes out. Coke begets New Coke which fizzles leading us back to the “real thing ” of Classic Coke. Sony brings a new product to market with alarming regularity, often times destroying the marketability of one of its existing products.

Back in 1776, at the dawn of industrial capitalism, Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith wrote, sadly but wisely, that it takes a ruin to build the wealth of a great nation. If we haven’t yet acclimated to that paradox, we’d better get out of business.

 

Look at the parallels that business and jazz music have. When we have a great conversation, we are jamming. Dancing can be very much about jamming. So is the road that an inspired product development team walks to come up with something new that compels customer’s attention. When a company walks the tightrope between analytical rigor and inspired passion, when it leaves the sheet music behind for new horizons, it is jamming. Jazz has so much to teach us about improvisation.

 

In jazz-and in business- the improvisational style derives its power from the way it juxtaposes certain vital human tensions or paradoxes. Here’s a partial list, in no particular order:

 

• The established( tradition, powers that be, status quo) in tension with the new
• The need for form in tension with the drive for openness
• Critical norms and standards in tension with the need to experiment
•  The security of the familiar in tension with the lure of the unknown
• Responsiveness(responsibility) to the group in tension with individual expressiveness
• Discipline in tension with freedom
• Power in tension with desire
• Established theory in tension with persistent experimentation
• Expertise in tension with freshness, naivete

 

Today’s global marketplace- turbulent, “spacey”, and endlessly demanding of the new, the experimental, the faster, the better and the cheaper- is NOT a concert-hall environment. There’s no time for business managers to look for solutions in the archives of corporate sheet music. Today’s highly competitive business world puts a premium on the skill of improvisation. All the world’s a jazz club. This is an era, in short, that calls for the inspiration of art. And discipline.

 

The perennial quest is to locate that sweet spot somewhere between systems and analysis on the one hand and the free-flowing creativity of the individual on the other. Jazz music and the management of business creativity are homologous: they emerge from the same sort of logic, a logic of the contemporary marketplace; what customers want, what sounds  good!

 

The art and practice of creativity management call for facilitating creative destruction-for jamming. We need to have a way to deal with inspiration: a way to help us determine the winners, and to assure (or terminate) their subsequent “lives” in the productive system.

 

Throw away your sheet music. Ready to jam?

 

“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Earlier this year in July we at ISD Global had conceptualised and curated a Trust Conclave in collaboration with IIM Bangalore and at that meet, one of the participants came up to me( a real water cooler moment) and said that ‘ Trust is higher than Love “, and that has stayed with me ever since. So when you read quotes like ” “Hope is the only thing stronger than fear.”– President Snow; or “Hope lives in those who believe in it.” – Buddha, you reconcile to them easily.

 

The English vocabulary has some beautiful four letter words including ‘ love ‘, ‘ kind ‘ , ‘ feel ‘, ‘ life ‘, ‘ meet ‘ , ‘ hand ‘, ‘ nest ‘ and many ‘ more ‘, and that said, for most of humanity, ‘ hope ‘ will be right on top of the pile.

 

Hope brings with it the energy of reassurance, the promise of tomorrow on the premise of today, the willpower and the tenacity, the resilience to get even against all odds, the question before the answer, the reinforcement of faith, the counter to fait accompli, the move from bitter to better, the silver lining on the horizon, the springboard for moonshots…and all of these for a small four letter word, it is saying a lot.

While hope is great as an individual strength, it is equally vital to reflect on its collective responsibility.

 

Here’s hoping it is au revoir and not goodbye.