C..C..C…..
February 17, 2011 by Holst Group
Classic de BonoMessage – first published 6th November 2000
Competence in business is essential – but is it enough? If your strategy for survival is that you continue to be more competent than your competitors, is that enough? What happens when your competitiors catch up and also become competent? You cannot really become ’super competent’. Competence is a condition you gradually approach. You can indeed continue to make small improvement – and so can your competitiors.
In the future three things are going to be needed in business. In the English language they all start with ‘C’. So we have the three ‘C’s.
Cash
Competence
Creativity
You can indeed find special circumstances where one or other of these is not essential. For example in a huge market with few players, then cash and competence will allow you to do exactly what the others players are doing and still get a share of the market. But, on the whole, all three are important.
Cash is the fuel in the car. Competence is the engineering competence of the car. Creativity is the driver’s choice of destination.
Many organsiations claim that they are not short of ideas and have more than they can handle. Yet surveys show that the biggest barrier to innovation is simply lack of new ideas. Just as advertising is usually outsourced because organisations feel they cannot have all the creative talent in-house, so the same will (partially) apply to idea generation.
For this reason I have set up a consortium to provide comprehensive and experienced creativity (Saatchi for ideas and communication, Ernst and Young for analysis and creativity, DMR for software/IT and creativity, Shine for public relations/youth market and creativity – and myself).
Most organisations greatly underuse their assets: talented people, competent infrastructure, brand image, know-how, market position, distribution system etc.
There is always a need to choose and tailor the ideas that suit your organisation. Organisations need to set up an ‘ideas liason office’ to deal with idea sources.
That this message first went out in the first year of the new millennium is indicative of an available structured approach, ideas, services and products all in a mix of the right people – yet we find ourselves in what is not a broken economy but which is a NEW economy.
I would love to know of the survivors and developing organisations in private & public sectors who took advantage of this incredible offer and resources made available – to apply the 3 Cs and all else that could have been or was facilitated.
There is much going on in the world today – yet it remains that it is the lack of systemic & intellectual approach which prevents the great ideas either hatching or being actioned, to grow and develop – to arrive at solutions and actions plans which designers can and are able to realise.
In a backward fashion, the major issues, such as sustainable solutions and simply maintaining what we have – e.g. fish stocks and forestation – may come about by default (much as I may like to believe that it is part of a big designed picture led and managed by caring humans). Stressed humans, working together with a common aim, can achieve anything and everything – nothing is impossible. Yet hubris and avarice prevent the ideal philosophy being generated and applied.
To deal with these issues anew philosophy must be developed, agreed and planned for action, in answer to the many challenges facing us which must be converted into opportunities.
Perhaps it is as simple as improving the marketing. What happened to Saatchi? Who knows just how and what this De Bono gathering of experts can achieve? Who is already using the team?
Keeping this simple, instead of creating perceived hurdles in the minds of so called leaders who are burdened with a high degree of learned helplessness brought about by the levels of concerns and undermining influences that always occur in organisations under war conditions, let’s get this message out there – apply these brains to the major solutions, take a lead in creativity.
I heard a story the other day that, at a high level corporate board meeting, some powerful individual referred to ‘six hats thinking’, as an aside. To me, this indicated the scale of the challenge. People and leaders, rushing madly towards decisions for which they have not applied sufficient thinking, skirt around issues by referring to the fact that thinking tools and methods exist. But they do not use them. The first thing that serious leaders could and should but won’t do is innovate themselves, use thinking tools and training to change themselves. Only then would marketing the three Cs and all the knowledge and skills behind all of this be successful. It will take time. Today would be a good day to change.
Let’s imagine our future without such change.