IBM’s Creative Culture

I have been meaning to blog a little about IBM as until starting my masters i had very little knowledge or understanding of this multinational corporation, other than it was BIG and SUCCESSFUL.

Did you know that during 2011 IBM received 6,180 patents?! IBM was the lead patent recipient for the 19^th year! (IBM, 2012)

Check out: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/36463.wss

The articles i have been reading online today suggest that the scale and success of IBM is due to it:

 ‘creating a culture of innovation’ (Macanfo, E. 2010)

IBM has ‘Think Fridays’:

‘we like to give half a day per week as think time. Our employees consider how you make your life, the clients’ life or the world easier.’ (Petite, J, 2010 cited in Macanfo, E. 2010)

Innovation Jam is an impressive online idea generation session. Over 150,000 employees, universities, IBM business partners and clients worldwide take part and in 72 hours generate thousands of ideas they explore:

‘IBM’s most advanced research technologies and considered their application to real-world problems and emerging business opportunities’ (Macanfo, E. 2010)

Innovation Jam is:

 ‘harnessing the energy and the power of our staff to take things to the next innovation plateau’ (Petite, J, 2010 cited in Macanfo, E. 2010).

Richardson (2010) refers to IBM’s CEO Samuel J. Palmisano who highlights why they believe in a culture of innovation and creativity:

‘Events, threats and opportunities aren’t just coming at us faster or with less predictability; they are converging and influencing each other to create entirely unique situations. These firsts-of-their-kind developments require unprecedented degrees of creativity — which has become a more important leadership quality than attributes like management discipline, rigor or operational acumen.’

According to Richardson (2010)

‘Creative leaders invite disruptive innovation, encourage others to drop outdated approaches and take balanced risks’.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13641_3-10474433-44.html

http://www.inmagazine.cgsm.org/indepth/hr-perspective/past-articles/ibm-creating-a-culture-of-innovation?p=all

Who gets the best jobs?

Following guest speaker Helen Ross's recommendation today in my Understanding and Managing Creativity module i have 'googled' and found 'Who gets the best jobs?', a BBC  documentary from last year. I haven't watched them yet but thought i'd post them up on here for my fellow course mates and all you other lovely people to have a watch too.

I believe that its looking at the value of Higher Education, should be quite interesting!

Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNRP8xc5aFA

Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFom1vekU4g&feature=related

Part 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S7i4JS-fcs&feature=related

Part 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9S4ubM0IOw8&feature=related

Creative Industries Funding: Winners and Losers

In the news today:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17183033

In Times of Leadership

‘To be or not to be: Should leaders be nasty or nice?

In the consulting I do for businesses, I find that leaders are increasingly wary of being nasty. They go on courses to develop their emotional intelligence. They subject themselves to feedback from their peers. They read books on how to motivate their staff. They’re getting a lot nicer. But is that a good thing?

The debate has a noble antecedent in Machiavelli, of course. He argued it was better to be feared than loved, but since then the forces of democracy, modernity and celebrity have reversed the equation. A case point would be Vladimir Putin, who has to struggle against his inner Stalin, and overcompensates by showing off his torso in the hope of adoration. Modern leaders love to be loved.

In a business context, however, this can be unhelpful. A business exists to generate value in the form of a product of service. Generating it is what we call work. The fundamental role of the leader therefore is to secure the greatest value for the least work, a mixture of effectiveness with efficiency. That leader might not need to be nasty as such, but he or she does need to be a pretty steely technocrat.

But the niceness of modern leaders is not an end in itself. It’s a technique aimed at making the workforce more efficient-the nicer I am, the harder they’ll work. After all, if niceness isn’t aimed at that, it’s kind of irrelevant. The same goes for nastiness too; if it doesn’t help the business, it’s just bullying.’

(Smith, R. R. 2005. To be or not to be: Should leaders be nasty or nice? The Sunday Times, 27 February. (Kindle Edition))

Creative Latitude - If this doesn't get you talking.....i don't know what will!

Rowan Atkinson has hit the headlines today with his views on a TV ageism row involving the BBC and Miriam O'Reilly. O'Reilly won her employment tribunal after taking the BBC to court after claiming she had been unfairly dismissed as host of Country File because of her age.

 'Writing to BBC Radio 4's Media Show, Atkinson said creative industries were "completely inappropriate environments for anti-discrimination legislation" ' (bbc.co.uk,24/2/12)

 "And as with any creative construct, whether it's a BBC factual television programme or a film or an oil painting, if creative freedom means anything, it is having complete creative latitude to include or exclude anybody or anything for any reason." Rowan Atkinson (bbc.co.uk,24/2/12)

This article has already sparked huge interest this morning on the BBC's websites with comments and views that are worth a look. Follow the link below!


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17145591

Mindonthemoney - another thought provoking post!

“… primary concern is with the free creative individual and that, through-out history, environments – including states – have been obstacles to individual.” O’Manique (mindonthemoney.wordpress.com)

http://mindonthemoney.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/primary-concern-is-with-the-free-creative-individual-and-that-through-out-history-environments-including-states-have-been-obstacles-to-individual-o/

Art....Priceless, for everything else theres Mastercard....in an ideal world of course....

'Arts value is difficult to quantify' (Mindonthemoney.wordpress.com)

Mindonthemoney is a blog focusing on arts, ploitics and the question of money. It's topical and thought provoking posts have already raised some interesting questions with the potential for some very interesting discussion which hopefully you'll all want to participate in!

So, what do you think about my little 'spin' of the well known Mastercard advert? Follow the link at the end of this post to Mindonthemoney's post 'Money is itself a kind of reduction...' This particular post has struck a chord, is this really the world we live in? A world where:

 'Money in fact, in one way or another, reduces every moment of art to a single transaction of currency' (Mindonthemoney.wordpress.com)

http://mindonthemoney.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/money-is-itself-a-kind-of-reductionism-it-packs-whole-universes-into-a-handful-of-coppers-eagleton/