I landed in Tokyo early Saturday morning (20th February) and immediately began the unreliable art of summarising a country and a civilisation on the basis of a few day's visit. I am not alone in doing this. I have watched numerous reports on Japan from journalists who, like me, do not speak Japanese, know little of its history and are unfamiliar with its culture and complexity. Their reports always feature a film from a Shinkansen (bullet train), shots of crowded streets with neon signs, and dark tales of a declining economy, conformity under challenge and so on. I suspect these opinions were not based on observing what was around them, but on repeating what they had heard from other journalists and on what they thought their audience expected to hear.
My superficial impressions differ in being based, where possible, on what I actually saw. I saw a city that is almost entirely made of concrete but is not a jungle. There are none of the obvious signs of personal dereliction found in many European and North American cities. People are remarkably polite and tolerant of strangers. Far from dull conformity, people (especially young people) express their individuality in their clothes and personal style. The City is far from beautiful, but it works as a city. There is a phenomenally efficient public transport system, little sign of public disorder, and the streets are clean. Oh - and there are the best neon signs I have seen anywhere in the world.
Saturday, 27 February 2010
Friday, 12 February 2010
How to stifle innovation
For big commercial organisations, innovation is a requirement and a threat. Innovation is essential because it provides a means of developing products that are more attractive to their consumers than those of rival firms, or at least can be produced at lower cost. A reputation can also be useful in marketing: Apple can announce some re-design of an existing device, cunningly presented to resemble our idea of the modern (sleek, smooth, and shiny). But innovation is also destructive: old product lines are closed and their workers displaced. Whole companies disappear, and the towns that depended on them decline and empty. Few universities have closed, but departments, courses and research teams have. Scientific reputations have been lost, and well-established theories ridiculed and discredited.
There will therefore always be resistance to innovation, and this will be most successful when rival organisations can either be eradicated or (for the time being) ignored. There are several ways to stifle innovation. One is to reward conformity, and promote people regarded as being ‘a safe pair of hands’. By contrast, innovative people should be identified and excluded from promotion or, in more authoritarian societies, from life itself. But heretics are persistent, and other means of stifling their ideas are needed. One that is particularly successful is to regulate every aspect of organisational life in detailed procedures manuals, quality assurance rituals, and the kind of job descriptions that comprise series of bullet-point lists. This method essentially outlaws the kind of local innovation that generates change in organisations and societies. Instead, things can only change when everyone changes. The organisation thereby innovates at the pace of the slowest or, more likely, not at all. The final means of stifling innovation is to generate a culture of smug superiority: this usually involves asserting that potential rivals are inferior without bothering to find out if this is the case. After all, why go through all the fuss and disturbance of innovation when you are already the best there is.
These techniques succeeded in resisting innovation for centuries in the great empires of the past. Egypt, Rome and the later Chinese Empire were technically stagnant, believing themselves to be protected by legions, deserts, seas and great walls from the threat of rivals. These rivals were weaker and more disorderly, and hence less willing to resist innovation. The Roman Empire was eventually destroyed by tribes which had learnt how to use stirrups and hence could ride heavy cavalry horses. The small European states, locked in perpetual warfare with each other, refined the gunpowder technology invented by the Chinese to bring about the destruction of the vast and populous Chinese Empire.
Not just empires lie in ruins. Every day I travel to work, my train passes a large cleared space at Longbridge in Birmingham, where there was once the largest car factory in Europe. On the other side of the City, there once stood the largest motor bike factory in the world. Further North are the remains of yards which a century ago built half the world’s shipping. These empty spaces and ruins are all the products of organisations which successfully resisted innovation. How I wish they had failed to do so.
There will therefore always be resistance to innovation, and this will be most successful when rival organisations can either be eradicated or (for the time being) ignored. There are several ways to stifle innovation. One is to reward conformity, and promote people regarded as being ‘a safe pair of hands’. By contrast, innovative people should be identified and excluded from promotion or, in more authoritarian societies, from life itself. But heretics are persistent, and other means of stifling their ideas are needed. One that is particularly successful is to regulate every aspect of organisational life in detailed procedures manuals, quality assurance rituals, and the kind of job descriptions that comprise series of bullet-point lists. This method essentially outlaws the kind of local innovation that generates change in organisations and societies. Instead, things can only change when everyone changes. The organisation thereby innovates at the pace of the slowest or, more likely, not at all. The final means of stifling innovation is to generate a culture of smug superiority: this usually involves asserting that potential rivals are inferior without bothering to find out if this is the case. After all, why go through all the fuss and disturbance of innovation when you are already the best there is.
These techniques succeeded in resisting innovation for centuries in the great empires of the past. Egypt, Rome and the later Chinese Empire were technically stagnant, believing themselves to be protected by legions, deserts, seas and great walls from the threat of rivals. These rivals were weaker and more disorderly, and hence less willing to resist innovation. The Roman Empire was eventually destroyed by tribes which had learnt how to use stirrups and hence could ride heavy cavalry horses. The small European states, locked in perpetual warfare with each other, refined the gunpowder technology invented by the Chinese to bring about the destruction of the vast and populous Chinese Empire.
Not just empires lie in ruins. Every day I travel to work, my train passes a large cleared space at Longbridge in Birmingham, where there was once the largest car factory in Europe. On the other side of the City, there once stood the largest motor bike factory in the world. Further North are the remains of yards which a century ago built half the world’s shipping. These empty spaces and ruins are all the products of organisations which successfully resisted innovation. How I wish they had failed to do so.
Saturday, 6 February 2010
The Conservative mood
Conservatism is more a mood or temperament than a philosophy. This is easily recognised. A conservative is generally suspicious at best of innovation, and fearful at worst. He is inclined to think that human life is diverse and varied, and better lived in a predictable routine than subject to incessant diversions. This mood applies to societies as a whole: these are seen as complex networks of obligations and hierarchies, rather than the application of rational design. Opposition to ‘rationalism’ is a key theme in conservative self-justification. Conservatives see life as the exercise of skills that are learnt through performance and habituation, rather than from textbooks and manuals. These beliefs have implications for the conservative view of political and social leadership. Leaders are seen as being drawn best from those who have accumulated expertise through practice and experience, to be acquired in part as a member of a traditional ruling elite, or at least from a background where people are expected to fill positions of leadership in business, the military, or some other field of achievement.
The conservative mood in politics has some appeal, particularly as a counter to management and economic rationalism, which sees all human activity as a means of accumulating wealth and places no monetary value on custom, art, beauty or devotion. The conservative opposition to rationalism also produces an unwillingness to consider large-scale social engineering, intended to coerce people into what reformers regard as a better way of life. Conservatism too can be a basis for tolerance of different cultures and societies: if these are indeed complex and based on tradition, then they will be expected to vary and be self-justified. No true conservative would imagine that other cultures and societies can be remade on a rational basis, nor turned into imitations of our own.
But conservatism has limitations. Conservatives often resist worthy innovations until they become an accepted part of life, which they then feel obliged to defend. Talented people from outside the usual social elites are blocked from advancement in preference to unimaginative dullards with manners, social connections and conventional views. At its worst, conservatism becomes tainted by a fearful xenophobia and the arrogance of the powerful. These have unfortunately been dominant characteristics of conservative political movements in many countries. In some cases, as with Thatcher’s government in the UK, conservative politicians inflict destructive changes to national life as a means of consolidating their own power and the wealth of their supporters.
It is, however, possible to imagine a humane conservatism, without these destructive tendencies. A humane conservatism would involve respect for the customs of the multiple and diverse communities of modern society, and promote families and communities rather than the state as the true basis for effective social action. It would protect people from political excess by establishing the importance of human rights, and would protect the wealth, possessions and occupations of ordinary people as well as of the wealthy. It would not, in other words, have done most of what governments in the UK, both Conservative and ‘New Labour’, have done in the past 30 years.
The conservative mood in politics has some appeal, particularly as a counter to management and economic rationalism, which sees all human activity as a means of accumulating wealth and places no monetary value on custom, art, beauty or devotion. The conservative opposition to rationalism also produces an unwillingness to consider large-scale social engineering, intended to coerce people into what reformers regard as a better way of life. Conservatism too can be a basis for tolerance of different cultures and societies: if these are indeed complex and based on tradition, then they will be expected to vary and be self-justified. No true conservative would imagine that other cultures and societies can be remade on a rational basis, nor turned into imitations of our own.
But conservatism has limitations. Conservatives often resist worthy innovations until they become an accepted part of life, which they then feel obliged to defend. Talented people from outside the usual social elites are blocked from advancement in preference to unimaginative dullards with manners, social connections and conventional views. At its worst, conservatism becomes tainted by a fearful xenophobia and the arrogance of the powerful. These have unfortunately been dominant characteristics of conservative political movements in many countries. In some cases, as with Thatcher’s government in the UK, conservative politicians inflict destructive changes to national life as a means of consolidating their own power and the wealth of their supporters.
It is, however, possible to imagine a humane conservatism, without these destructive tendencies. A humane conservatism would involve respect for the customs of the multiple and diverse communities of modern society, and promote families and communities rather than the state as the true basis for effective social action. It would protect people from political excess by establishing the importance of human rights, and would protect the wealth, possessions and occupations of ordinary people as well as of the wealthy. It would not, in other words, have done most of what governments in the UK, both Conservative and ‘New Labour’, have done in the past 30 years.
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