The Medici Effect Very interestingly, Frans Johansson made his career with “The Medici Effect,” a book that suggested that organizations can harvest creativity by tossing together people with different backgrounds. His insight was that ‘outside the box’ thinking comes at the confluence of different experiences and different approaches to problem solving. Elsewhere, Christopher Hitchins described the catalytic effect of likeminded souls coming together and giving birth to new ideas that could become a new novel, a piece or art or music or a new genre. The idea is simple: When you step into an intersection of fields, disciplines, or cultures, you can combine existing concepts into a large number of extraordinary new ideas. The name I have given this phenomenon, the Medici Effect, comes from a remarkable burst of creativity in fifteenth-century Italy. The Medicis were a banking family in Florence who funded creators from a wide range of disciplines. Thanks to this family and a few others like it, sculptors, scientists, poets, philosophers, financiers, painters, and architects converged upon the city of Florence. There they found each other, learned from one another, and broke down invisible barriers. In real life, HR directors loved it, especially those tasked with enhancing corporate diversity. Johansson’s thesis seemed to offer support to their efforts and he himself presented a walking case study as the son of an African American/Cherokee mother and a Swedish father. He parlayed his first book into a career consulting companies on promoting creativity through diversity barriers between disciplines and cultures. Together they forged a new world based on new ideas—what became known as the Renaissance. As a result, the city became the epicentre of a creative explosion, one of the most innovative eras in history. The effects of the Medici family can be felt even to this day. We, too, can create the Medici Effect. We can ignite this explosion of extraordinary ideas and take advantage of it as individuals, as teams, and as organizations. We can do it by bringing together different disciplines and cultures and searching for the places where they connect. The Medici Effect will show you how to find such intersectional ideas and make them happen. The idea is about those elements that made that era possible. It is about what happens when you step into an intersection of different disciplines and cultures, and bring the ideas you find there to life. Historically, such phenomena have also been induced by far-sighted rulers in other cultures. In India, Emperor Akbar The Great had hand-picked nine gems of creative masters in his court, to induce the Medici Effect, which worked fine with him and his brood of exceptionally gifted artists, diplomats, wise men and much more. They actually inspired one another and of course, very often, perceptive artists attribute their extra-ordinarily high standards to the keenest competition all around. Resting on one’s laurels is, a very common phenomenon on the other hand. However the pioneers in exploiting serendipity like Priestley or Edison, never rested on their laurels. Nobody has said it better than the country singer Dolly Parton who said : A peacock that rests on its feathers is just another turkey. The Nobel Prize has often been described as the kiss of death because no world-enlightening research or even work of fiction or writing has ever emerged from the one awarded the highest distinction. Robert Louis Stevenson was right when he quipped : There is nothing more disenchanting than attainment. This obviously implies that all those turkeys could have remained peacocks had they been surviving in a deadly competitive environment. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted on: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 05:38:26 +0000
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