Interesting piece in Fast Company about the projected rise of China’s creative industries, challenging the idea that the Chinese will be content to “stamp out a widget, or knock off a DVD” while the West (spearheaded of course by Cool Britannia) leads the world in creativity.

China is not content to serve as factory to the globe. Call it economic foresight, or cultural pride, but despite the stratospheric growth of its economy–10.7% last year–China knows that cheap labor alone can’t sustain the boom. While a flurry of activity (and, yes, a government five-year plan) has stressed scientific and technological innovation, look a little closer and you’ll see that creativity in art and industry–in design, fashion, media, and the like–is fast becoming a driving national mission.

The article has plenty of awful puns about ‘cultural revolutions’ but also some fascinating examples of Chinese creatives doing amazing work in architecture, fashion, design, music etc. Judging by some of the comments on the online version, there’s some debate about the significance of these examples, but it’s a worth looking at the article. Apart from the intrinsic interest of the subject, it’s a good antidote against the lazy assumption that the West will enjoy an indefinite ‘creative advantage’ over the BRIC nations (not to mention the rest of the world).

Very enjoyable time at the PSFK London conference the other day. It’s being extensively blogged elsewhere (links below) so I won’t try to cover the whole thing, just edited highlights. If you’re not familiar with the PSFK blog, it describes itself as “a lens of changes in cultural behaviour that influence all of us” - or to mix the metaphor, it’s a constant stream of new trends in media, business, fashion, the environment, entertainment etc etc. For someone like me it’s an interesting read, for professional marketers I gather it’s essential.

So where are all these trends leading us? The first conference session presented us with contrasting visions of the future. First up was Timo Veikkola, whose job is predicting the future for Nokia. I was intrigued to learn that we’re currently in a “Noah’s Ark period” of floods, cataracts and hurricanoes, not to mention Famine, War, Pestilence etc - but that by 2010 or so we’ll see renewed optimism in society, which apparently happens at the dawn of every decade. I was fascinated by Timo’s predictions and explanations of how he extrapolates from “What’s happening now?” to “What’s going to happen next?”. By the end of his presentation I was even starting to feel (dare I say it) quite optimistic. Thenl the bubble was burst (for me) when we were presented with the following quotation, apparently without irony:

“The one fact about the future of which we can be certain is that it will be utterly fantastic.” Arthur C. Clarke.

I was horrified. Surely the one fact about the future of which we can be certain is that we can’t be certain of it? And surely we’ve seen enough of the Brave New World to suggest that it’s not likely to be relentlessly “fantastic”?

As if on cue, Regine Debatty of We Make Money Not Art stepped up to offer a distinctly less Utopian take on the shape of things to come. Read the rest of this entry »

Apologies for the interruption to my Introduction to Business Coaching series, it was one of the things that got put on hold as a result of moving house. Here goes for the second half of the series, beginning with a look at coaching and leadership.

If you’ve been following the series, particularly the post about The Manager as Coach, you won’t be surprised to hear me advocate coaching as an effective approach to leadership. But there’s there’s no one-size-fits-all approach when dealing with people, so it’s important to see coaching in context, to understand where, when and how it can be effective for leaders - and what the alternatives are.

In their well-known book Leadership and the One Minute Manager Ken Blanchard, Patricia Zigarmi and Drea Zigarmi present coaching as one of four basic leadership styles - Directing, Coaching Supporting and Delegating. They argue that managers need to be flexible in adopting the most effective style for any given situation. In a similar spirit, Daniel Goleman wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review called Leadership that Gets Results, in which he argued that managers should utilise “a collection of distinct leadership styles - each in the right measure, at just the right time”. The analogy he used (no doubt familiar to corporate executives) was of a bag of golf clubs:

Over the course of a game, the pro picks and chooses clubs based on the demands of tbe shot. Sometimes he has to ponder his selection, but usually it is automatic. The pro senses the challenge ahead, swiftly pulls out the right tool, and elegantly puts it to work. That’s how high-impact leaders operate, too.

What makes Goleman’s article really interesting is his presentation of a research project carried out by the consulting firm Hay/McBer, into the relative effectiveness of different leadership styles. He begins by identifying six basic leadership styles:

1. Coercive - demanding compliance
2. Authoritative - mobilizing people towards a vision
3. Affiliative - building relationships and promoting harmony
4. Democratic - promoting consensus through participation
5. Pacesetting - setting high standards by example and demanding the same of others
6. Coaching - delegating responsibility and developing people for success

Here’s Goleman’s characterization of the coaching style of leadership:

Coaching leaders help employees identify their unique strengths and weaknesses and tie them to their personal and career aspirations. They encourage employees to establish long-term development goals and help them conceptualize a plan for attaining them. They make agreements with their employees about their role and responsibilities in enacting development plans, and they give plentiful instruction and feedback

Read the rest of this entry »

Steve Moore of Policy Unplugged sent me this notice about their latest event:

As part of the 4 Talent ‘Four Days in June’ series Policy Unplugged is organising an event next Wednesday 13 June to debate the future of multimedia, online communities and the web with experts from Channel 4, MySpace and lastminute.com

All the details are below. Click here if you would like to book a place.

Wired and Ready

13 June 4-6pm, followed by drinks

Martha Lane Fox, co-founder of lastminute.com and Channel 4 board member will chair a discussion on the increasing importance for broadcasters and producers to build online communities and provide dynamic content for multimedia audiences.

She will be talking to James Fabricant, Head of Marketing and Content for MySpace UK & Ireland, James Kirkham from digital strategists Holler - developers of the marketing campaign for E4’s Skins - and Adam Gee, Channel 4’s Commissioning Editor, New Media Factual.

I’ve been to several Policy Unplugged events and they’ve been consistently excellent - a great mix of interesting speakers and equally interesting fellow delegates to mix with. Tickets are free - hope to see you there.

I’m thrilled to say that the issue of Magma Poetry which I edited is now available online at the UK Poetry Library website - including audio recordings of many of the featured poets.

Magma is one of the UK’s leading poetry magazines - its unique feature is its rotating editorship, which means every issue of the magazine offers a fresh and different perspective on contemporary poetry. I’m one of the magazine’s directors and edited issue 34 in 2005.

The UK Poetry Library is a distinguished institution that houses an unrivalled collection of modern poetry published in the UK. Its Poetry Magazines website is an online archive of back issues of leading poetry magazines, including Magma. Audio editions of selected issues form a new feature of the site, and I’m delighted that Magma is one of the first magazines to have its contributors recorded.

The audio edition of Magma 34 includes the text of most of the poems and articles in the issue, as well as MP3 recordings of many poets, including Mimi Khalvati, David Harsent, Susan Wicks, Lorraine Mariner and Alison Brackenbury, as well as Quentin S. Crisp reading the first UK translations of Machi Tawara, who is a huge star in Japan.

The issue also includes my article Poetry in Practice: Creative Flow, for which I interviewed several well-known poets about their creative process. Alastair Campbell is featured in the Guest Choice article, for which he wrote about his favourite poem.

Thanks to the staff at the Poetry Library for doing such an excellent job of the online edition. More details next door on my poetry blog.

Magma issues 29-33 have also been added to the Poetry Library archive - they include my poem Babel and my reviews of Roddy Lumsden and Tim Cumming, and of the Poetry Book Society’s Quarterly Selections.