Karma Chameleon

There were few established rock stars that survived the onslaught of punk. Of course the pantheon of the ‘rawk gawds’ and dinosaurs were kept in place; your Sones, the ‘orrible Who, Fleetwood Mac etc. survived and flourished due to the critical mass of fans achieved by the time punk erupted from the gutters of the Bowery and the Kings Road. There was one act though, that was openly embraced as an influence by the punks while still maintaining his mainstream appeal. He created music and art on his own terms and saw the wave of cultural innovations as they were rising and jumped on for the ride. Heck, some times he was the guy generating the waves. Ladies and gentleman, there’s old wave, there’s new wave and there’s David Bowie.

Occasionally it looked like Bowie was cannibalising his own success; say for instance when he relocated to LA to make the starkly European ‘Station to Station’ after achieving his first US number 1 single, ‘Fame’ on the funky ‘Young Americans’ album. Bowie wasn’t afraid to drop from the zeitgeist and follow what he felt was right for him – as a result he became a disruptive entity in the music industry. He wasn’t necessarily an originator but he was certainly an innovator, taking different elements from theatre, art, politics and music and combining them in a sleek, devastatingly successful package. A lot of our outstanding companies follow a similar theme – be it looking at ‘new markets’ and ‘new products’ (Ansoff matrix) or mixing different elements of the innovation process to create a change and add new products /offerings or new dimensions to existing products/offerings.

I try to envisage the innovation process like a musical chord. You play one note and it has no context. You play a series of sequential notes and you get a melody and a song begins to emerge. Now if you play a musical chord with multiple notes played concurrently, a new fuller, harmonious sound blossoms and it makes you feel all warm inside. Obviously there are issues to surmount; an out of tune string that needs tuning, replacing a broken string, having to change tunings completely to play a particular song but these are incremental changes that can be managed.

Innovation is one of the most overused terms in todays business-scape and there is an overly techno-fascistic approach to managing it. Innovation encompasses all aspects of the business not just the product and service offerings but all the financial, networking, channel, brand and supporting processes. Companies that are able to simultaneously innovate across multiple different innovation types by strumming a chord of multiple innovation notes will develop offerings that are more difficult to copy and generate higher returns.

Innovation doesn’t happen in an ivory tower hidden away from other areas of the business, it needs to be embedded in the everyday culture of an organisation. Let me get back to my musical analogy to stress my point. Imagine getting other people to start playing in a band with you; a drummer giving a driving beat, a bassist to give your sound some bottom, and keyboards, vocals and any other assortment of instruments to fill out the sound. When you lock-in as a group that’s when the magic happens. It’s much the same with successful businesses today. Different units have to master their own craft and be aware of trends in their area but they also have to make sure that they are locking in with whats going on in the business and the environment as a whole. It is possible for most firms to get their business units working together in simpatico. However to get that extra edge you have to look beyond the horizon and be willing to challenge what it is you do on a regular basis which can be daunting and leave you exposed – but hey change is inevitable and sometimes it’s worth the risk. As the erstwhile Ziggy Stardust sang “Time may change me/But I can’t trace time”.

Music