Rasa, CCTV, and a Laughing Club - Creativity and Failure in Society
February 21st, 2008
Submitted By: Jeff Mohr
[Prof. Carr Note: This post by Jeff, and the below by Shasta (be sure to see her post below after this one) raise some common issues, so I load and post both of them at the same time.]
Creativity.
Failure.
More and more these two words are defining success for thousands of garage engineers turned BlackBerry addicts. Millions of educated and hard-working graduates flow out of school systems in India and China, some of which will be tomorrow’s business leaders—in our country. How does creativity happen? Is it spanked into you at birth? Or rather developed throughout the rigorous curriculum applied in the school system? And what about failure? How do some cultures come to accept failures, while others try to avoid them like the plague?
These are important questions to ask. Globalization is inevitable and many are struggling to maintain some kind of competitive advantage—in schools, for jobs, between companies. I believe strong creative ability and an ability to deal with failure are some of the most important aspects in being successful in today’s highly competitive world. Trying to be an entrepreneur? You have to expect failure—of your entire idea, part of your business, an aspect of your personal life. What about applying for a competitive job? There will certainly be road bumps along the way. If you let one “thank you but no” get you down, you won’t ever find the job you started looking for in the first place. In my own job search I had my fair share of “no”. If I let these so called failures prevent me from trying even harder, I never would have gotten my job that I set my sights on to begin with.
Ytivitaerc. This may be even more important—at least the factor that sets apart repeat failures from those working toward success. But the important question is how we instill these traits in ourselves, our children, and our country. What factors make India able to be so creative in IT? What edge will China be able to gain through their school system? Will Silicon Valley ever be matched?
My first task for you is to watch Sir Ken Robinson at his TED talk (trust me—it deals directly with this topic and he has the best delivery I have seen in a long time). Comment about what changes you think should be made to the school systems or culture of your country—then continue below.
India. From what we have heard it is one of the most diverse places in the world. I can’t wait to see it. I have pulled together a combination of articles on creativity in business, school and social circles.
Creativity and Innovation Driving Business – The Innovation Index
A Creative Laughter Club in Pune, India
Creative Attempts at Justifying Creativity in the Regular School Curriculum
The idea of Rasa from the third article rang true as what creativity truly is. This quote especially…
“Rasa is beyond religion, culture, language, and economic status, rasa teaches one to experience the meanings of the words ‘love’, or ‘compassion’, ‘justice’ – all human concepts that need to be lived, not mimed or manipulated. Should not our children learn to access this energy buried deep inside that would help them to grow into healthy, happy, well balanced individuals, supporting them in a world that is increasingly cruel, intolerant and filled with conflict?”
How true and how powerful if we can find a way for children to grow up with these values instilled in them. Again comment as you see fit on these three articles.
CHINA. This manufacturing powerhouse has been known more for its social justice than for creativity in recent years. As Harry Shum described, “A Chinese journalist once asked me, ‘…what is the difference between China and the U.S.?…’ I joked, ‘… the difference between China high-tech and American high-tech is only three months - if you don’t count creativity.’”
This is all changing. The article below gives an excellent account of what new strategies businesses in China are using and how the world’s view of China as being mere copycats is unwarranted. Click here.
Take a look at this Adidas for both a sense of the pride behind the Olympics and the creativity in marketing.
And finally, the new CCTV building.
Creativity is obviously alive and well in both China and India. Under the criteria listed above, the only separating factor left is the perception of failure. At a speech at Cal Poly, Ashok Bardhan described that one of the advantages the US culture holds is its acceptance of failure. This is one of the elements in the “perfect storm” that permits an area like Silicon Valley to thrive. But as India and China both continue to produce greater numbers of entrepreneurs, I doubt how long this advantage will remain ours.
Entry Filed under: China
4 Comments Add your own
1. Shasta Palmer | February 22nd, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Sir Ken Robinsons video brings some interesting light to this education and creativity. It reminds me of the June graduation when we were all asked, “Who here can sing? Who here can dance?” About a quarter of the crowd raised their hands. A second set of questions were asked, “Could you sing and dance when you were six years old?” Almost everyone’s hand went up. We are trained into thinking we can’t do things. How do we change that into learning we can do things?
Dr. Carrs Questions:
How does creativity happen? I think creativity is being able to take the chance to think differently. Come up with an idea that is new and different from the accepted. It happens when people let allow themselves think differently, and let go of the fear of being different or wrong. How can anyone be creative if they are scared of saying something that wouldn’t be accepted by his or her peers?
Is it spanked into you at birth? No, I think it’s partially personality and then mostly training in positive ways, not negative scalding.
Or rather developed throughout the rigorous curriculum applied in the school system? Sir Ken Robinsons video brings to light that creativity can be fostered in education, or trained out of people like our current education system does. Creativity can be developed through the school system, but currently is not being foster in this area efficiently.
And what about failure? How do some cultures come to accept failures, while others try to avoid them like the plague? I think the reaction to failure is learned and trained into us. I’m not sure why cultures react differently to failure, but I do know that one’s culture and upbringing plays a large role in how someone reacts to failure. For example, if failure is made out to be the worst thing in the world, and people are thought of as a disgrace for it, they probably will do everything they can not to fail. However, if failure is thought of as part of life, someone may be more willing to take risks, and try again and again to get something to work.
2. Chris Carr | February 23rd, 2008 at 8:56 am
Good, thoughtful post.
The answer to many of these questions really depends how one defines loaded terms such as “innovation” and “creativity”. If defined as people with discretionary time on their hands to come up with cool ideas being able to tap into VC capital (or a bank credit line or angel investors) quickly to start the next Google and world’s leading company, then the answer is very different than if one frames the question along the lines of, “what country, with 20 percent of the world’s population and only 6 percent of its arable land, has ‘innovated’ its way into the modern era just 25 years?; then you get two vastly different answers.
Here is a good post by the This is China blog, with some good insight from the comment thread, for further reading: Are We Innovative Yet? The China Challenge.
The This is China blogger seems to have hit the mark in terms of identifying the things that help hold down one definition of “innovation”, in China, but if so, China’s increased wealth will in time, in my view, change things like IP protection, quality of education at all levels, parenting methods and the like and things that are held in esteem, etc. Keep in mind that this cycle is nothing terribly new. This same economic cycle of development already happened in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.
As an aside but related note, I recently heard Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun speak and he was excellent. He generally pulls no punches. He put an interesting twist to the “merits of online education debate” that relates to some of the issues that Jeff and Shasta raise in their posts. He said education should be much more open source, as Sun has been doing with its software (and which, by the way, Microsoft said it would start to do with part of its source code this week!).
He took a stats course, online, at Harvard a long time ago. He is a Harvard undergrad and Stanford MBA. They guy is not a dummy. He completed his stats course at Harvard in 48 hours (he stayed up for two days straight doing it). He got one of the few As awarded in the course.
He said, in effect (I am paraphrasing here), “Harvard failed students like me. If it had allowed me to take more of my Harvard coursework like I took my stats class, I could have got going on life and finished Harvard in a year, instead of 4, and then I could have moved on and would not have been so far behind in trying to catch up with the likes of Gates/Microsoft and Ellison/Oracle”.
The remainder of his message?
He took all of us in the audience to task (the audience was all academics) by in effect saying (again, I am paraphrasing), “you have all meant well to create a system that ‘leaves no child behind’ in how you build your institutions and educational systems and teach people, but in your attempt to leave no child behind, you have set up obstacles to change and moving society moving forward and have forgotten the many, many, folks like me who you were holding back because of the traditional way you teach students and capture them, what else you required me to do that may not have been value added, etc. Please stop doing this and get your crap together.”
The audience was dead silent. We had collectively been busted.
One way he suggested we might do this is to make much more education open source, and online where people are given feedback immediately how they are doing, they can learn at their own pace (fast like him or slow if they choose, etc.), they take greater responsibility for their own learning, in doing so you can pull from quality resources around the world, etc.
I am sure that most folks at Cal Poly would love McNealy and what he was suggesting.
And hey, don’t shoot me, the messenger …
3. Nic Marlin | February 23rd, 2008 at 4:02 pm
One’s level of creativity and relationship to failure are crucial in today’s business world. Especially for entrepreneurs, it seems that fostering a creative environment and having a healthy relationship to failure is critical to one’s success. Innovation and creativity are flourishing in businesses all over the planet. How would anyone be able to compete without creativity in their organizations when companies like Google exist?
How is one’s creativity and relationship to failure developed? I know that to a certain extent creativity is learned. It is learned through one’s upbringing, schooling, their friends, culture, etc., but I also know that it can always be learned. One can teach a dog new tricks- but it may take the old dog a bit longer to learn. It was brought to my attention in Organizational Behavior that structures for creativity inside organizations are just beginning to be studied and evaluated on their degree of effectiveness. New ways to develop creativity are being created, especially in organizations.
One’s relationship to failure is definitely something that can be transformed. Children are completely free of the constraints that fear of failure are. Throughout one’s upbringing things happen that cause them to develop a fear of failing. It is mostly what people make failure mean about themselves that has them be stopped by it. I know that as a former professional athlete, I had to overcome this fear in order to perform at a senior elite level. It took me numerous failures and a lot of mental training before I was able to not make failing mean anything negative about myself. My philosophy is that if one is not failing in life, then they simply are not playing hard enough.
Sir Ken Robinson had some great points. His example regarding the famous dancer is powerful and so accurate. It infuriates me that children who are not perfectly aligned with the current educational system’s teaching methodologies are considered to have some kind of a disorder and are usually put on drugs. I don’t have much experience with kids or the public educational system, but from what I hear the system is not working. The system needs a creative overhaul to foster and encourage the development of individuals in a variety of disciplines- including non-academic ones.
4. Simeon Trieu | February 25th, 2008 at 8:46 am
What an interesting discussion. I was reading Prof. Carr’s comment, particularly about the article “Are We Innovative Yet? The China Challenge”. I found the comments from the author of the article to be somewhat true and somewhat not. First, a comment about Chinese education. It’s true that Chinese are forced to study… and study hard. As many Prof. Morris has said, you study all of your life in Chinese society. What has developed over time, however, is the forced study of a particular subject.
Here is a startling story about an interview the daughter of my friend had. Our friend from Shandong, China e-mailed us one day with a peculiar question about his daughter. She just came out of an interview, not confident, but puzzled. She had been asked a question she didn’t know the answer to: “Where do you see yourself 5 years down the road?” We were incredulous at first, but quickly answered that this was a standard interview question that everyone thinks about. This just goes to show one example of how education is seriously in trouble in China. We have a word for those people in English: bookworms.
China, unfortunately, doesn’t have an education system that stresses one important aspect of study: passion. I come from an engineering background, which took many years of rigorous study and discipline. Since I started my educational career, one of my most trusted advisers, my father, told me that “in order to do well in your major, you must love it.” I can’t say that I loved computer engineering as a freshman, but I can say that I love it now. Part of it is sticking through it and just studying, even when it hurts. (the part Chinese excel at) And the other part is loving it, or having a passion for it. (the part Chinese lack) This is the major problem in their creativity. They don’t love what they do. They’re forced by their parents into studying that they do half-heartedly. They’re forced into a major that the government *picks* for them. (no joke) Which just spirals downward as they’re forced into a career that they have no particular interest in. Talk about a demotivator.
Finally, I just wanted to point out that there is a larger myth going around that states that “IP is not enforceable in China”. This myth has already been debunked (see my upcoming post on China IP, it’s been sent in for submission). As the post will say, in brief, there are two ways of enforcing IP in China, one is administrative, for smaller patent violations, and the other is judicial, for larger patent violations. So, you CAN keep what you invent. However, that’s not to say that people still won’t try to steal your ideas…..
Again, great post. Great comments. I much appreciated them.
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