The Medici Effect, by Frans Johansson
The connection of innovation and diversity appears to be obvious to some extend: You need significantly different perspectives and skills in order to create something groundbreaking. If only experts from a field work together, invention (or enhancement) will be the result, but no sought-after leap forward. Consequently, Frans Johansson’s book, The Medici Effect, has been hyped in corporate and Diversity contexts for a while. Especially when you have followed one of the author’s inspirational talks, you can’t wait to read the book and find out more about how innovation happens or can be generated. But then, in order to set your expectations right, consider the following: Johansson is portrayed as an entrepreneur and journalist, and the book is described to focus less on a corporate setting than on self-starting and individual achievements.
No doubt, the book itself is an innovation as it offers new perspectives to explore creativity, and it combines a number of established facts or more-or-less-known examples in an inspiring way. However, Johansson does all this in a journalistic manner: He profiles fascinating people, and points to connections few people might have thought about before. And he does it in an entrepreneurial way: The (profitable) extend to which he combines publishing (it’s available in several languages), presenting (his talks are legendary) and consulting is rare outside strategy and marketing. Just like a good journalist, the author had spoken to many people, and collected a multitude of views and a wealth of personal stories. Those stories, combined with the creative way of linking and commenting them, are the big plus of the book. Johansson illustrates in a powerful way, that the key to innovation is combining concepts from previously unrelated areas (in what he calls intersections), create large numbers of possible solutions (and being ready to see some fail), and to take risks (even against established ideas in one’s networks) actually executing new concepts. While the book offers great ideas about how to look at the creative process (other books do that in different ways), it offers very little help as to how the innovation process can actually be managed. Notions like “explosion of ideas” or the “Medici effect” itself sound way to romantic in order to actually work in organisational contexts, where power issues and politics and many other influences determine if, where and how change happens.
If you take Managing Diversity & Inclusion as an innovation that is happening at the intersection of corporate management, personal values, political systems and societal change, you can easily see many of the dynamics described in ‘The Medici Effect’. Implementing Diversity programmes requires to use a number of methodologies from change management (overcoming resistance) and from innovation management (using promoters of power and others). If you combine the inspirational strength of this book with some robust models and some solid tools, you can make a big difference! (ms)
