Masters, Horse carts and Beatboxing: The Creative Leadership NZ Conference
December’s Creative Leadership (#cnlz18) conference saw 180 managers, leaders and entrepreneurs at Te Auaha, New Zealand’s Institute for Creativity in Wellington. The theme Intersections saw speakers and participants explore topics from a range of converging sectors and industries — from libraries to for-profits, from entertainment to indigenous issues, from online enterprises to academia — knowing that innovation often comes from outside a person’s area of focus.
“The format consisted of keynotes and short workshops. Highlights included a talk by entrepreneur and futurist Melissa Clark-Reynolds of New Zealand Futures Institute in which she looked at evolving creative business models. She spoke about businesses like IDAGIO, a classical-music streaming service that charges by the second, to democratise level the playing field between a 90-second sonata and a thirty-minute composition.
She also spoke about the true innovators, to the ‘lone nut’ of a person who was the first to drive the automobile when everyone else was driving a horse cart. At a time when the buildings of New York were equipped with horse stables on the ground floor, the owner of that one automobile had to send a cart and horse to procure petrol for the car. There were broader lessons at play for her: She suggested that “every time you finds yourself thinking ‘they’re an idiot’, pause and think, ‘What it is that they’re doing right?’”.
From business models like products-as-a-service to mass customisation, her talk ended with a provocation: “Rethink every business model you see to imagine how it would work as a platform or as a subscription model.”
“every time you finds yourself thinking ‘they’re an idiot’, pause and think, ‘What it is that they’re doing right?’”
Platforms, as she explained it, are companies like Amazon. The US retail giant doesn’t own the products it sells, but provides a platform for other sellers to shift their goods — and as part of that worked out how to sell people things they wanted. Given its scale and the data generated, the company is able to analyse sales, and, based on trends, make predictions as to what will be popular at certain times — like aspirin and coffee on a Sunday morning.
A subscription model she referenced is Cheese Cartel, a New Zealand-based company offering a monthly cheese delivery to your home (for those close to Dev Academy, you may recognise some familiar faces in its founding team).
Aaron Rasmussen, co-founder of online education company MasterClass, gave a nuanced talk on the characteristics of mastery.
Humility, hard work, rigorous analysis, following rule sets, insecurity and perfection are all traits shared by top talent. Not only did he share these principles, but followed each with an example of someone high-profile people they’d worked with. On the topic of perfection he told the audience how, when working with Serena Williams on how to execute a successful tennis serve, she had told him to film the sequence again because it wasn’t quite perfect. It led to the World Number 1 tennis professional to analyse what hadn’t gone quite right in front of the camera, contributing to a useful lesson to online learners.
“Rethink every business model you see to imagine how it would work as a platform or as a subscription model.”
Tim Kastelle, an academic who focuses on entrepreneurship and innovation at the University of Queensland, spoke to the three crucial elements that innovation needs to produce: good ideas, made real and unlocking value. He also spoke to range between order and chaos — and how they’re not a dichotomy, but each needed at different times. On the topic of good ideas, he stressed that the most important thing was to take action and try new things.
Diversity champion Jo Cribb, of the New Zealand Book Council, shared statistics on the economic importance of diversity: Racial and ethnic diversity at the board level contributes to business advantage. In the United States, “for every 10 percent increase in racial and ethnic diversity on the senior-executive team, earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) rise 0.8 percent” (McKinsey,Why Diversity Matters, January 2015). She framed inclusion as a leadership choice and highlighted the need for people to start seeing things through an “inclusive lens”. She came up with a list of ten handy points for privileged people keen to increase diversity in the workplace and work-related situations:
- In meetings, implement a no-interruptions rule
- Work out whose ideas get acknowledged — is it the white man in a suit?
- Analyse your personal network and work out how many people don’t look like you
- At networking events, speak to somebody who doesn’t look like you
- When it comes to speaker or workshop-host recommendations, don’t pass on the privilege (recommend people from minority backgrounds)
- Don’t touch up your lives — be authentic
- Check behaviours, e.g. around realistic expectations and boundaries around working late
- Listen
- Listen
- Listen.
Much of the day was focussed on doing things differently, rethinking how to create value and the importance of action over ideas. But little was said about the daily grind of entrepreneur life — whether it’s the burnout stats or the depressing reality of resource scarcity in early-stage ventures.
“Innovation needs to produce good ideas, made real and unlocking value.”
A two-fold question remained: How do we support the “lone nut” as referenced in Melissa Clark-Reynolds’ talk? And where does the team come in, for all those successful enterprises that got highlighted and referenced? So often we admire the founders, who may have been the lone nut, for their brilliant ideas — but generally they have a team supporting them to be that shining star (whether or not this a good approach in general is a whole different topic).
When asked this question in the Q&A with a few of the speakers, Tim and Aaron agreed on its relevance. Aaron said he’d had a slide on the topic of giving credit (and how top talent would be liberally crediting their teams) — but had taken it out due to time pressure.
Other highlights included beatbox champion Butterscotch, and a talk on Mana Economics by Te Aroha Morehu, Chief Innovation Officer of Ngāti Whātua Ōrakei.
Education featured as a theme to many of the talks and workshops. Whether it was rethinking its delivery or how to learn over what gets taught, much of it rang true from a Dev Academy lens. The importance of diversity, the distinction of how to learn vs. what we learn and the focus on it, the democracy of access when it comes to online courses, and the need for leaders to pay attention to the things traditionally considered soft skills.
One interesting take-away was that a few of the speakers all spoke to the importance of reading widely from people who don’t look like them. Afrofuturism and Chinese science fiction was at the top of the list for a few of them, with The Windup Girl, Who Fears Death and Three Body ProblemBehavioural Geneticsreferenced as examples.
Big mihi to creative producer DK, who pulled together a creative and stellar line-up and an incredibly well executed day. You can find the whole programme here.
