John Kao is one of the world's leading experts on corporate change. In a disarming programme recorded at his grand piano in San Francisco, "Mr Creativity" shows Peter Day how jazz improvisation can help companies learn how to innovate.
NB: A PODCAST WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE FOR THIS PROGRAMME.
About this programme by Peter Day
All That Jazz..not
Before I start, apologies; we have a problem this week: a programme that we cannot put out as a podcast.
It’s a goodie, too. But the BBC has no rights to put out much of its broadcast music here on the Internet, and this week’s programme is full of music. Here is what you are missing, unless you catch the broadcast version.
John Kao is American-born Chinese, and multitalented. He’s a Harvard MBA, a Master of Business Administration, and he’s also got a medical degree from Yale; he’s been an academic, an entrepreneur, a consultant and a best-selling author, with a worrying book on the future of the USA as his last publication: Innovation Nation.
The magazine The Economist calls him “a serial innovator”.
His father was a musician and John Kao is a talented jazz pianist. So I wanted him to show me how to use jazz improvisation to gain insights into the tricky business of corporate (and country) innovation.
So a few months ago we sat down at his grand piano in his lofty studio in the former military buildings of the huge Presidio park close to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
And John Kao talked about innovation ... illustrating some his ideas on the keyboard.
But we can’t play the music on this podcast, so there seems little point in putting out a programme thus emasculated. I promise it won’t happen very often.
PS: Among the John Kao's insights into company innovation as he shows me how to improvise at the piano are these :
Innovation defined: "It’ s the capabilities by which we get the future we want as opposed to getting the future that we receive by default."
· The immortal jazz trumpeter Miles Davis was asked what's the most important part of managing a band? It's four words, man, he said : "Don't say too much".
Great managers of great innovation know how to get out of the way of the progress of the work.
Being born global is a reality for many entrepreneurs now
· There's a mistaken tendency to equate innovations simply with high tech or whizz band new technology. Innovation is now what organisation do at the level of strategy, process, at the level of business model, at the level of customers. It’s a rare company that is showing real sophistication not only in framing innovation but in having plans to make it become real.
Innovating countries : there’s the kind of left brain issues of articulating the narrative, establishing the strategy, figuring out the action plan. Then there’s the right brain agenda : how does that society learn how to jam, to improvise in the right way by balancing several contradictory imperatives … to make the music sound good.
Those are the words of the "serial innovator" John Kao. Unfortunately, we can't play the music.
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In Business is all about change. New ways of work and new technologies are challenging most of the assumptions by which organisations have been run for the last 100 years. We try to report on ideas coming over the horizon, just before they start being talked about. We hope it is an exhilarating ride.
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