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McDonalds: The Price of Falling Asleep
By Shlomo Maital
McDonalds, the $87 b. global fast food chain, is in trouble. The world has changed and its senior management team missed the bus. The price for this is heavy. The newly appointed CEO Steve Easterbrook, an accountant, will have to deal with slumping sales and falling stock price. For years consumers have been opting for healthier food. McDonalds simply failed to meet or recognize the trend.
Here is how Bloomberg Businessweek describes McDonalds’ decline under its previous CEO: “The rocky two-and-a-half-year tenure of Don Thompson, Mr Easterbrook’s predecessor, was marked by flagging sales as the company’s key low-income customers continued to struggle in the wake of the financial crisis. It also coincided with the rise of upmarket burger chains such as Five Guys and Smashburger, and the explosive growth of fast-casual restaurants such as Chipotle. …. Last year, McDonald’s recorded its first annual decline in global same-store sales in a dozen years. The US, where McDonald’s is the target of criticism for its contribution to the obesity epidemic and wage inequality, is not its only tough market. Operations in Germany, Japan, Russia and China are also struggling. Consumers are no longer interested in food that is simply fast — they need to be convinced that it is, among other things, healthy, fresh and natural.”
McDonalds is an exceptionally arrogant organization, I am told. The global economic downturn began early in 2008; McDonalds could have seen that its customers would be pinched and less able to dine out. The trend toward healthy fresh fast food has been ongoing for years; Wendy’s and Subway have leveraged it with great success. People simply get tired of the same Big Mac.
To me, McDonalds proves a core dilemma in management. McDonalds has great operational discipline in its franchises; it has to, to survive. But the same discipline destroys creativity, flexibility and innovation. Somehow, McDonalds has to revive its agility, its ideation, without ruining its fabled discipline and cost management.
Let’s see if Steve Easterbrook, who played cricket in a British private school, will adopt a strategy that isn’t precisely “cricket”.
Messy Desk? Sign of Creativity
By Shlomo Maital
Say, is your desk messy? Are you troubled by it? Try to clean it up regularly, and fail? Get hassled by your neat obsessive significant other?
New evidence suggests – hug your messy room, don’t hassle it. It’s a sign you have a creative mind.
Writing in the online magazine NewsMic, (Nov. 10), Tom McKay reports that “There’s fairly robust psychological evidence that messiness isn’t just symptomatic of poor standards or effort, but might actually provoke creativity. He quotes psychologist Kathleen Vohs, who wrote in the New York Times, “being around messiness would lead people away from convention, in favor of new directions.”
Here is the experiment she ran. To test this hypothesis, Vohs invited 188 adults to rooms that were either tidy or “messy, with papers and books strewn around haphazardly.” Each adult was then presented with one of two menus from a deli that served fruit smoothies, with half of the subjects seeing a menu with one item billed as “classic” and another billed as “new.” The results (published in Psychological Science), Vohs reports, were enlightening. As predicted, when the subjects were in the tidy room they chose the health boost more often — almost twice as often — when it had the “classic” label: that is, when it was associated with convention. Also as predicted, when the subjects were in the messy room, they chose the health boost more often — more than twice as often — when it was said to be “new”: that is, when it was associated with novelty. Thus, people greatly preferred convention in the tidy room and novelty in the messy room. A second experiment with 48 adults found that subjects in a messy environment came up with ideas “28% more creative” while creating a list of unconventional uses for ping pong balls, even though the two groups came up with the same number of ideas. Vohs argues the results are clear: Messiness actually spurs creativity.”
The point here is obvious. Creativity itself is MESSY, in caps. Creativity people have messy minds, that collect random pieces of information and find new ways to link them. Creative ideas emerge from disorder and entropy, not order. The ultimate state of order is the universe as it will be in a few hundred billion years: All the energy will have been burnt up, and the universe will be perfectly orderly, at a temperature of absolute zero.
So — messy desk? Enjoy it. Cherish it. And, nonetheless — do clean it up once in a while, if only for your significant other.
Creativity & Innovation in Remote New Zealand
By Shlomo Maital
My wife Sharona and I are in New Zealand, on the very last leg of a world tour that has taken us around the world, from Brazil, to Boston, France, Singapore, Vietnam, Guangzhou and Shantou China, Hong Kong and now Auckland. It’s been a great adventure – we combined touring with lecturing, teaching, research and meeting the local Jewish communities on the Sabbath.
Here, I visited GridAKL, a local incubator located near Auckland Harbor, in the Wynyard Quarter, and designed to foster technological entrepreneurship. I met with Eva Perrone, whose title is “activation manager” and she showed me the facility. The first floor is an open ‘events’ area, where companies outside and inside the incubator can stage workshops, meetings, etc. The second floor is the incubator, designed as open space, with quiet areas, kitchens, and lots and lots of light.
Some of the entrepreneurs in GridAKL are from Aukland University of Technology (AUT), a fine university with entrepreneurial spirit.
Despite New Zealand’s remoteness from the world, it is super-connected, with fast broadband. Many of the startups in GridAKL are IT and software startups. New Zealand itself makes a living from tourism and dairy and food exports, but is eager to expand its portfolio and build a startup culture.
In our travels, from Brazil to Vietnam, to China, Hong Kong, and now New Zealand, we have seen young people eager to start businesses and change the world. This is an extremely positive trend. It is also one that should accelerate the heartbeat of an entrepreneur and pump a few grams of adrenaline. Today if you have a great idea, chances are so does someone else, who could be anywhere in the world, including places you might not think of.
Here in New Zealand, we saw an amazing site – the glow-worm cave (see my next blog), where Nature and Darwinian evolution has created incredible worms that glow in the dark inside the cave ceiling, and actually create tiny long ‘fishing lines’ that they use to catch their food (mosquitos and bugs). The ‘glow’ attracts the bugs. Evolution has produced amazing things, as species compete to survive. Entrepreneurship can do the same. The fierce competition among ideas and resources can generate truly wonderful new creative things that create value for the world and literally, produce something from nothing. And all it takes is a few young people (or young in spirit), some open spaces, accessible food (this is the key to a great incubator, Eva Perrone assured me, and I told her about Google’s executive restaurants in their Mountainview, CA campus), strong networking and a great university.
Strategic Coffee Machines: Creativity Through Chance Conversations
By Shlomo Maital
The latest issue of Harvard Business Review (October) has an interesting article by Ben Waber, Jennifer Magnolfi and Greg Lindsay, “Workspaces That Move People”. In it is an idea you can perhaps use. It’s called Strategic Coffee Machines. Here is the story:
Jon Fredrik Baksaas, CEO of Telenor, a Norwegian telecom company, thinks that the strategic placement of coffee machines helped the company shift from a state-run monopoly to a competitive company with 150 million subscribers.
How?
Once, the company had roughly one coffee machine for every six employees. The same people used the same machines every day. Sales people talked to each other. Marketing talked to each other. The coffee was terrible – how can you afford good coffee when you need hundreds of machines?
The company ripped out the coffee stations and built a few big ones – one for every 120 employees. It also created a big cafeteria for all employees, rather than a series of smaller ones. In the quarter after the coffee-and-cafeteria switch, sales rose by 20 percent, or $200 m. Pretty good return on investment!
The basic principle here is simple: People in companies, or even in cities or in neighborhoods, just don’t talk to one another. Especially people who don’t normally need to, in the course of their work. Find ways to get them to rub elbows, and chat, and you can boost creativity.
I know of a case, told to me by MIT Professor Tom Allen, of a company with four labs, at the four corners of a floor. Each lab had a small office attached to it for doing paperwork. Simply by moving the offices to the diagonally opposite corners forced people in Lab A to chat with those in Lab B, C and D (they met at the intersections of the floor).
Can you use the Telenor method? Can you use strategic coffee machines to boost creativity in your organization?
Need Ideas? Find a “John Lennon”
By Shlomo Maital
Joshua Wolf Shenk has written a wonderful book titled Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs. An excerpt is available from the Atlantic Monthly, June 25, 2014 issue. His point is simple: Very often, when two (different) people work together on an idea, the result is far better than when only one works on it.
I personally experienced this in working with my co-author Arie Ruttenberg on our book Cracking the Creativity Code (SAGE India 2014). I’m convinced the final product was many times better than if either of us had worked in isolation.
Shenk goes into detail in discussing the collaboration of Lennon and McCartney These two Beatles created some 180 songs! Most of them are wonderful, most were recorded by the Beatles.
Here is what Shenk observes about creative pairs:
For centuries, the myth of the lone genius has towered over us, its shadow obscuring the way creative work really gets done. The attempts to pick apart the Lennon-McCartney partnership reveal just how misleading that myth can be, because John and Paul were so obviously more creative as a pair than as individuals, even if at times they appeared to work in opposition to each other. The lone-genius myth prevents us from grappling with a series of paradoxes about creative pairs: that distance doesn’t impede intimacy, and is often a crucial ingredient of it; that competition and collaboration are often entwined. Only when we explore this terrain can we grasp how such pairs as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy all managed to do such creative work. The essence of their achievements, it turns out, was relational. If that seems far-fetched, it’s because our cultural obsession with the individual has obscured the power of the creative pair.
My main ‘take home’ or ‘take away’ from this book? Find someone to work with. If possible, don’t look for someone just like you. Find someone DIFFERENT from you, like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, or Lennon and McCartney.
Think B I G
By Shlomo Maital
Yesterday I spoke to a group of entrepreneurs, at University of Sao Paulo, hosted by Prof. Fabio Kon. The gathering was initiated by students, and it was organized in an interesting manner. Each participant identified himself or herself in one of three categories, using colored badges: criacao (creative ideas); negocios (manager or business person); and desenvolvedor (developer, or entrepreneur). There were very few “criacao’s”, but lots of negocios and desenvolvedor.
My main message to them was “think big”. If you’re going to invest years of your life in working on implementing an idea, it should be a big one, not an 8 per cent improvement in something that already exists.
There are three avenues for ‘thinking big’. I illustrate it using diagrams:
X axis: number of people you affect. Y axis: amount of value you create for each, on average.
One: Make a huge improvement in life, create huge value, for a huge number of people. Example: Jack Noyes inventing the integrated circuit. Or a cure/preventative for malaria.
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Two: Make a huge improvement in life, create huge value, for a relatively small number of people. Example: Vaccine for a rare disease.
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Three: Create fairly small value for a very large number of people. Example: iPhone.
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In other words: a huge fat rectangle; a thin tall rectangle; or a short wide rectangle.
But somehow – SOMEthing needs to be big, either the value you create or the number of people you affect, or both. Why?
Because big ideas attract people with big abilities. Because big ideas generate energy and passion you need to implement them. Because we need big ideas to fix big problems, when small ideas will just not do the job.
Persuaded? Do you have a big idea?
Can You Come Out to Play? WILL You?
By Shlomo Maital
I’m married to a very smart psychologist, who is an expert on children and play; as a result, I get to read many interesting, sometimes wonderful, articles. The latest is one published in 2007, by L.A. Barnett, titled “The nature of playfulness in young adults”. The purpose of the article was to see if the term “playfulness” could become a valid “construct”, i.e. a clear, well-defined concept recognizable by all and useful for further research. To this end, the author used focus groups of adults.
The result: A rather long, but insightful, definition of “playfulness” in adults.
Here it is. Read it. See if you have these qualities. Why? Because, as the author notes, “playful people are uniquely able to transform virtually any environment to make it more stimulating, enjoyable and entertaining.” Want an extreme example: Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, a film about a father who made life in a Nazi concentration camp into a game, for his young son (Academy Award, Best Actor 1999).
Playfulness is the predisposition to frame (or reframe) a situation in such a way as to provide oneself (and possibly others) with amusement, humor and/or entertainment. Individuals who have such a heightened predisposition are typically funny, humorous, spontaneous, unpredictable, impulsive, active, energetic, adventurous, sociable, outgoing, cheerful, and happy, and are likely to manifest playful behavior by joking, teasing, clowning, and acting silly.
Do any of those adjectives describe you? Yes? No? If no – do you want them to? If so, you can definitely change. Just remember how you played when you were a child, and copy yourself as you once were.
What does this have to do with innovation? “Reframing” (seeing the same thing differently from others) is a key part of playfulness, and a key aspect of creativity. If you can ‘reframe’ to play, you can reframe to create.
- L.A. Barnett. The Nature of Playfulness in Young Adults. Personality and Individual Differences, 43 (2007), pp. 949-958.
It Takes Two to (Create the) Tango
By Shlomo Maital
Not only does it take two to tango — it probably takes two to INVENT the tango. Tango probably comes from the Latin tangere, to touch, and it is a wonderful dance that was invented along the Rio del Plate, on the border between Uruguay and Argentina – and spread from there to the world.
Writing in the Global New York Times today (July 21), Joshua Wolf Shenk summarizes his forthcoming book Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs. His main point: The idea of a lone-wolf genius inventing breakthrough things is untrue. Usually great breakthroughs take two people.
He brings many examples: Lennon and McCartney; (I would add, Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart, the wonderful song writing team); Freud and his colleague Dr. Wilhelm Fliess; Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy; Picasso and Georges Braque; Picasso and his fierce adversary Henri Matisse (sometimes, creativity emerges not from collaboration but from competition); Einstein and his friend Michele Besso, with whom he walked through the Swiss mountains and discussed his ideas.
“Two people are the root of social experience – and of creative work,” Shenk argues. Why two? “We’re likely set up to interact with a single person more openly and deeply than with any group.”
I strongly believe this is true. When I embarked on writing a book on creativity (soon available as Cracking the Creativity Code), I felt it would be unbalanced, if I wrote it solo, as I had mainly an academic background. So I sought out my former student and current friend, Arie Ruttenberg, whose legendary creativity built a powerful ad agency. It was a wonderful collaboration, and our book was far better than if either of us had written it alone. By the way, we chose to preserve our individual ‘voices’ in the book, and hence identify the author of each chapter.
“The core experience of … one entity helping to inspire another is almost always true,” Shenk notes. I agree. So – if you seek ideas, if you have ideas, find a great partner. Preferably, someone very different from you. You’ll see – it will greatly enrich your creative productivity.
Creativity in a Flower Pot: The Case of the Upside Down Vase
By Shlomo Maital
Upside Down Flower Pots, in Kaunas Lithuania
My wife Sharona and I are at a school psychology conference here in Kaunas, Lithuania. While enjoying supper at an outdoor café, Sharona (who has very sharp observational skills) spotted these upside down flower pots and photographed them.
So, what exactly is this about?
Creativity is widening the range of choices. You can plant flowers in a flower pot conventionally. Or, like the clever people in this apartment, you can take the flower pot, put holes in the bottom so that the roots poke through and ‘grab’ the pot, then put a lid on the pot — and hang them on your balcony, upside down.
Why upside down?
Because, that way, you get to see much more of the beautiful flowers and leaves, instead of just the big ugly pot.
Think different. Do things different. Can you do something upside down? A French cook did, she invented tarte tatin, which is simply apple pie, but with the crust on the bottom instead of on the top. It’s delicious. Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion liked to stand on his head, believing it was healthy. He was the Upside Down Prime Minister. Lots of small children love to do that. And sometimes, I love to have an upside down meal – first, dessert, then the meal. Try it.
Why YOU Should Consider Writing a Blog
By Shlomo Maital
Here is why I think YOU, dear reader, should consider writing some sort of blog, even if you choose not to publish it.
This blog is #1,172. Over the past six years, I’ve written a 300-word-or-so blog at least two or three times a week. It’s now become part of my life.
Writing a blog brings this key benefit: If you know you will need to write about something, to share with others whom you care about, your brain is constantly working out, searching for new ideas, new tools, new facts, new things you can use, new stories that inspire.
Motivation is the key to action. And my motivation in writing the blog has been the need to share, to remain relevant, to share with others.
I try to work out at least every other day, alternating jogging, speed walking, stair walking (hey – take the stairs, skip the escalators), and moderate weights. But my blog gives my brain a workout too.
So, think about writing your own. Try writing a few before you publish them. Write about things that matter to YOU. Chances are, they may matter to others too. Some blogs have created raging worldwide successes, like the blog about preparing one recipe a day for a whole year, based on Julia Childs’ cookbook – a blog that led to a book and a great movie.
The insert shows the cover of our new book, Cracking the Creativity Code, soon to be published by SAGE India. We’re deeply grateful to SAGE for their wonderful creative cover design. Our theme in our book: Your brain is a muscle, exercise it daily, hourly. And a blog is one great way to do that.
TIMnovate 