Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan
By M.J. Akbar
Publisher: Harper Collins
Price: Rs 499

Though it’s a great narration and analyses of events that created Pakistan in the name of Islam, read this book much more for the pre-Partition events to gain an understanding into the Muslim mind which so vehemently rejected Gandhi and his assurances after placing implicit faith in him.

Under Akbar’s engaging style and sharp eye, yesteryear’s leaders come alive in brilliant colours, with the greys highlighted with a masterly touch. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, “aristocrat by temperament, catholic in taste, British in manners, reserved by preference, was the unlikeliest parent” of an Islamic republic. “He broke every convention, ignored the dress code of beard and pyjama, preferring a cosmopolitan wardrobe of what grew to 200 well-cut suits.”

Jinnah’s vivid portrait

As in any India-Pak narrative, the most colourful figure here too is Jinnah. He spoke English, did not, or could not, use Quranic quotes to impress Muslim audiences, and had for hero Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk, who abolished the Ottoman Caliphate and separated religion from State. In contrast, Mahatma Gandhi believed that “politics without religion was immoral, and pandered to the Indian need for a religious identity. Privately critical of the ‘Mahatma’ title, publicly he never disowned it.” Colourful anecdotes are skilfully sewn into the fabric of the book to give relief from the tediousness of dates and numbers, without which, alas, history can’t be recorded. So Jinnah hosts a noon banquet for Lord Mountbatten on August 14, 1947, when Pakistan was founded, while the masses had been fasting for weeks! But, ironically, “the man who had little religion, divided India in the name of religion”.

India and Pakistan moved on divergent arcs, because, says Akbar, “the idea of India is stronger than the Indian; the idea of Pakistan is weaker than the Pakistani.” Against India’s four solid principles of “modernity, democracy, secularism, gender equality and free speech”, Pakistan went in a different direction, where “faith became the basis of nationalism”. It slowly “slipped towards a confused polity in which theocratic urges were patched onto the legislative framework”. And yet, religion failed to keep Pakistan united; in 1971 “cultural identity proved more powerful than Islamic cohesion.”

‘Bania cunning’

Pakistan was born out of the thesis that “Hindus and Muslims could never live together as equals in a single nation, a thesis sustained by nostalgia for the past and fear of the future,” argues the author. “Hindu tyranny” was touted and Gandhi’s secularism was dismissed as ‘bania’ cunning. The archetypical Hindu, in the Muslim League’s lexicon, was summed up thus: ‘ Bagal mein chhuri, munh mein Ram (Ram on the lips but a knife under his arm). The sly Hindu, went the logic, would take revenge for past Muslim dominance by keeping Muslims in permanent subservience, and would obliterate Islam from the subcontinent.

Such logic, argues Akbar, locked Muslims into a “minority complex”, while the Muslim elite, a coalition of landlords, professionals, quasi-nobility and businessmen, had its own agenda — “to exercise power without interference or competition from Hindus, and retain its traditional privileges without challenge from socialists like Jawaharlal”.

Interestingly, just like the Jinnah of Jaswant Singh, and before him L.K. Advani, Akbar’s Jinnah too comes out handsomely in this book. Against the popular Indian — particularly saffron — depiction of Jinnah as a monster, this Jinnah is different. His famous “icy reserve” broke down only twice in public, at the funeral of his young and estranged wife, Ruttie, in 1929 and after the anti-Hindu riots in Pakistan when he visited a Hindu refugee camp in Karachi in January 1948. He told an aide bitterly, “They used to call me Quaid-e-Azam (Great Leader) but now they call me Qatil-e-Azam (the Great Killer).

Akbar argues that despite his utterances against theocracy Jinnah did not fully understand the theocratic forces that would claim Pakistan. He believed that ties of travel, trade and investment between India and Pakistan would remain unaffected. Despite being elevated to the stature of a “demigod in official propaganda after his death, his views were slowly erased from public perception and discourse.” Some of his famous speeches against theocracy or how Hindus would be free to go to their temples, and how or where people worshipped wouldn’t concern the State have “become more famous outside Pakistan than in it.”

In 1948 Jinnah died; too late for those who wanted a united India, but too early “for those who sought a secular Pakistan.”

Pakistan’s Godfather

Jinnah’s antithesis, a powerful intellectual and ideologue, Maulana Maududi founded the Jammat-e-Islami, as well as Islamic fundamentalism — “or better put, the Islamist movement — in South Asia. This Godfather’s prime concern was that Islam and Islamic society should be able to withstand its increasingly corrosive encounter with the West.” Westernised leaders such as Liaquat Ali Khan (first Prime Minister) were against him and warned civil servants against joining the Jamaat, banned its publications and arrested its leaders but the Maulana had his support base.

Pakistan’s first military ruler, Ayub Khan, disliked Maududi. In childhood, he had slapped a bearded maulvi, ending his learning of the Quran. Ayub dismissed the mullahs as enemies of modern education and regretted the conversion of Islam from a “dynamic and progressive movement” into dogmatism.

When an Islamic scholar with liberal views was attacked by mullahs, Ayub Khan wrote how new interpretations of Islam had no place in this “priest ridden and ignorant society. These people will not allow Islam to become a vehicle of progress. What will be the future of such an Islam in the age of reason and science is not difficult to predict”.

Akbar’s comment: “In the context of what happened to Pakistan in the next three decades, these sentences need to be heavily unlined.”

Despite their personal lifestyles, Ayub Khan, who had “fantasised about flying the flag of Pakistan over Srinagar in 1965”, and Yahya Khan, who “overdid alcohol in his diet”, didn’t challenge the central place of Islam in Pakistan’s identity, but were not willing to “hand over Islam to the mullah”.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who came to power after the formation of Bangladesh in 1971 and was “Western in his personal preferences and Eastern in his public persona”, walked the “Islamic” path, pursuing funds from oil-rich Muslim nations.

But in 1977, when he got into trouble for rigging elections to defeat the coalition of religious parties, Bhutto tried to buy his way out by banning nightclubs, gambling and liquor. Says Akbar: “The interesting fact is that such pleasures were legal in the Islamic Republic till then”!

God’s General

Alas, Bhutto’s most important contribution to Pakistan’s Islamisation was “inadvertent” — appointing Zia ul Haq as army chief in 1976. In 1977, through a military coup, he became “God’s General”, confident that “Allah had sent him to claim Pakistan for Allah”. He declared he’d remain in power till Allah wanted. His death in 1988 in a mysterious air crash has also been attributed “to divine intervention”, says the author.

During his reign the Jamaat “became the standard-bearer of moral values” and Pakistan the “international headquarters of Islamist movements as the length of visas became commensurate with the length of beards”. Worse followed when the law of evidence was amended to deny women equality through Hudood (crimes listed in the Quran) laws, leading to atrocious trials and judgements in crimes against women.

Atrocious gender concepts of clerics claiming Allah wouldn’t accept the prayers of a woman who had angered her husband; the devil accompanied a woman the moment she stepped out of her house; women shouldn’t appear even before a blind stranger; and similar nonsense were reflected “in the social and legal norms” adopted under Zia’s rule.

Export of jihad

But “exporting jihad” to Kashmir began much earlier, when Liaquat Ali approved funds and weapons for the invasion of Kashmir by 2,000 tribesmen in October 1947. Their behaviour was atrocious in both “human and military terms”. Having entered Baramulla they could have “continued to a defenceless capital” just 35 miles away but got busy looting, raping women and killing. What followed, including the plebiscite bit, is well known, but what remains “inexplicable” is Nehru accepting ceasefire when the Indian army had the advantage and could have gained more territory. “It is generally believed that the reference to the UN was Nehru’s worst blunder; the Indian army believes, although it is too disciplined to say so publicly, that the ceasefire was a colossal mistake.”

Taliban era

The 1990s were dominated by the Taliban, “created in Pakistan for operations in Afghanistan, by Benazir Bhutto, who once described the Taliban as “my children”, put the Taliban amir, Mullah Omer, into the field to halt spiralling chaos and bring Kabul into Islamabad’s fold.” The Taliban advanced in Afghanistan in 1994, fortified by Pakistani weapons. Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari made a candid confession when he said in July 2009 that militants and extremists were “deliberately created and nurtured for short-term tactical objectives. Let’s be truthful, the terrorists of today were heroes of yesteryear(s) until 9/11 occurred.”

Akbar argues that fears of Pakistan’s “disintegration are highly exaggerated” and agrees with the theory of the “slow-burning fuse” of religious extremism rather than a collapse. George W. Bush attacked Iraq in 2003 to “eliminate nuclear weapons, dictatorship and terrorists… he would have found all three in Pakistan, including a champion proliferator in Dr A.Q. Khan.” But the single-most outstanding feature of this book is the manner in which it dives deep into the Muslim psyche, not 10, 20 or 50 years before the Partition but from Mughal India and even earlier. To get an insight into the anger, desolation, depression, desperation, suspicion and insecurity of a class that turned from rulers to subjects, read this book. Akbar is an excellent narrator of history; but his razor-sharp and bang-on analysis of the changing Indian Muslim mindset from Mughal to modern India is nothing short of brilliant.

 

How has ‘the practice’ been? Sample this, from a report dated January 2 in www.dailymail.co.uk, about the end of production at the Somerdale plant near Bristol: “The factory that the US food giant Kraft pledged to keep open during its bitter takeover battle for Cadbury — but then said would close — has made its last chocolate bar.” The reporter Jonathan Petre explains that the closure of the plant — which specialised in bars that were dipped in chocolate and made Fry’s Chocolate Creams from 1919 as well as favourites such as Curly Wurly, Double Decker and Crunchie for decades — has meant the loss of more than 400 jobs.

Community benefits

The effect of the merger on the workforce is not simply about job security; there is the wider community around Bournville that has benefited for years from the use of chocolate wealth to fund schools and colleges, hospitals, convalescent homes, churches, housing and sporting facilities, reminds the author. These contributed to the local sense of unity and belonging and also brought employment to the area, she adds.

The idea of a garden city around the factory, as Bournville village was conceived of, could have been considered Utopian, but it was in 1893 that the ambitious project of George Cadbury began with the building of 142 homes around the chocolate factory in a 118-acre estate.

“The key to his plan was land. Each home should have enough land around it for a family to cultivate a garden and grow food. This, he believed, would improve their quality of life and lead to a better diet,” the author narrates. Based on George’s reasoning that about a sixth of an acre is as much as a man working in a factory could cultivate in his leisure time, the village was designed with six or seven houses to the acre.

Model village

At the heart of the model village was ‘a green, graced with established trees, winding paths and rose beds,’ with homes ‘nestled around this green, each one individually designed to avoid ugly uniformity and set back from wide, tree-lined carriageways,’ one learns.

The thriving communities created by enlightened nineteenth-century business leaders lie in sad contrast to the antisocial attitudes of modern business magnates who think only of profit and the shareholder, rues A. N. Wilson, a Daily Mail columnist, in a January 2010 piece. The book cites his lament that globalisation of the marketplace has made us all come socially adrift, as victims of hostile takeover of one kind or another.

In conclusion, the book’s author raises questions such as whether Kraft will act for the betterment of the world, not just the top management, and whether it will be a tangible force for good in our global village — and frets that it is difficult not to feel sceptical.

A book that can leave you with a lingering taste of nostalgia.

D. Murali

 

Coaching is gaining popularity as a critical tool for organisational development and improved business results, but what forward-looking enterprises foster is ‘a culture of coaching,’ notes Sangeeth Varghese in Open Source Leader: The future of organizations and leadership (Penguin).

The author takes the example of Dave Whatmore who coached Bangladesh from 2003 to 2007, a team that had not won a match in several years. “Under Dave, they captured their first Test match victory early in 2005. Later that year, Bangladesh shocked the cricketing world with a victory over the top-ranked team, Australia. During the 2007 World Cup, they again defeated a top-ranked South Africa, and then India, to reach the Super 8 stage.”

Dave’s secret: During his stint as coach when he turned underdogs into winners, Dave transformed the ‘defeatist attitude’ to a ‘victorious approach’ by creating an atmosphere where the team management, captain and the board mutually encouraged and supported every player’s growth, the author explains. That way, he says, coaching can in a direct way nurture relationships and social capital and indirectly enhance results by relying on improved bonding. The title of the book is inspired by the ‘open source’ software initiative where the most valuable and vulnerable resource, the source code, is opened up for scrutiny and use by almost everyone.

Varghese likens the source code to the access to power, authority and influence which drives day-to-day operations and long-term vision in organisations. Traditional organisations, like closed source code software organisations, keep their secret code of power to themselves, while open source leadership opens it up, he distinguishes.

IISc, Bangalore: An interesting example of an open organisation that has been elaborately discussed in the book is the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, where every individual is on a mission to explore and find his or her own goal.

D. Murali

At the time of writing, more than a thousand news articles are about Nintendo 3DS, to be launched in March, at a sub-$250-dollar price. With the handheld, you can play 3-D games, without the need for glasses, and take 3-D pictures, reports state.

A section on 3DS in ‘Playing to Wiin: Nintendo and the video game industry’s greatest comeback’ by Daniel Sloan (www.wiley.com), cites the company’s president Satoru Iwata about how in a game like ‘Nintendogs,’ the dogs can “really pop out of that screen and you can see them… You’re kind of looking and touching, and it feels like you’re touching a real dog.”

Bark mode

Tracing the ‘dogs’ back to their release in April 2005 for the company’s DS (dual screen) console, the author informs that Nintendogs set the stage for a more inclusive user base. “In its first month in Japan, the game sold 400,000 units. By May 2006, with an avid market among young and older women, global sales reached six million.”

What can be more interesting than those numbers is that in Japan, “people in large cities sometimes paid for a brief opportunity to walk or play with others’ real dogs or pets, and the video game was an obvious avenue to attract those who owned – or wished they owned animals, without some of the time and resource commitments. Overseas, consumers were also waiting to rub the virtual bellies of the 18 dog breeds available…”

It may amaze you to read about the game’s ‘Bark Mode,’ which led to social networking for virtual pet owners, who were alerted if nearby players wanted to discuss or swap animals.

Senior plus

Corporate meetings are generally dull events but it was at one such meeting in Nintendo that an executive had asked why there were no games for older people. Taking that as a good start, Iwata decided, however, that it might be a mistake to target only seniors. In December 2004, Iwata went to meet Ryuta Kawashima, a professor at Tohoku University whose book ‘Train Your Brain: 60 days to a better brain’ had taken the country by storm. Iwata’s mission was to convince the professor to help develop games using his books on mental training.

During the three-hour meeting, Iwata showed him Nintendo’s prototype brain training software and explained how the book might translate to other media. “He was enthused,” reminisces Iwata. “His assistant came in with a strange bowl with wires attached. He placed it upside down on my team member’s head. It looked like a 1950s’ sci-fi movie. He could prove that the game was changing the blood movement on the surface of the brain.”

Brain game

Over three months, a small team developed ‘Brain Age,’ based on the neuroscientist’s writings, and it proved immensely popular, writes Sloan. He narrates that people responded eagerly to its potential to improve mental acuity, a self-help issue for middle-aged and senior players, many of whom had never touched a game console. Also, that the duration of play, long a major factor in why adults would not – or could not – commit to gaming, was addressed by designing the IQ builder to take only two minutes per session.

“The potential to work certain areas of grey matter with math and comprehension games that potentially countered memory loss proved a ‘no-brainer’ for sales success, as of course people wanted it. The daily training regimen, which involved drawing pictures using the stylus and even interfamily contests, also made the professor himself a character – his expressions denoted player progress.”

Software, then hardware

It is in a chapter titled ‘The kid’ that you meet Iwata, a ‘much admired game creator’ who had joined the company and board the previous year. “Iwata is the right guy for the job because he is acquainted with both game software and game hardware,” reads a quote of Hiroshi Yamauchi in the book. “Software should come first and hardware second, but some people seem to see it the other way around.” One of the first statements Iwata made as president was that no matter how many consoles Sony sold, and whatever Microsoft did, it was important for the company to make its game software attractive enough to drive consumers to buy the hardware. He publicly eschewed consoles with higher resolution, more digitally enhanced sound, and intricate design, instead calling for a product that would broaden the consumer base and ultimately sell more, notes the author.

Codename ‘Revolution’

What the success of DS reaffirmed to Nintendo was that a compelling interface with new utilities could help it regain the top position, Sloan chronicles. This, even as the rivals were betting on complex, multi-purpose machines. Codenamed ‘Revolution,’ it was to focus on improving energy consumption while maintaining performance, aiming to create a 24/7 console that ran software spanning the range from sports and leisure to self-help and e-commerce, he describes. “In automotive parlance, the console hardware, no bigger than three DVD cases, would down-shift power to ensure better – or continual – energy utilisation without affecting duration or quality of use.” Another automotive analogy is from Genyo Takeda, general manager of Integrated Research and Development Division of Nintendo, who was tasked with the development. If automobiles can be used as a metaphor, the industry has always been trying to compete on horsepower, even though not all cars are made to compete in F1 race, he says.

Next-generation remote

Take, for instance, the next-generation remote that went through over a hundred concept proposals and prototypes, including one worn on the head and another known as the gunbai, after a fan used by sumo judges, recounts Sloan. “But Shigeru Miyamoto would come to console planning meetings and pull out his cell phone or car navigation system pointer, asking the development group to try to make a controller in the same vein.”

Elaborates Sloan, how most game remotes had not changed significantly in two decades, requiring hunched-over, two-handed command execution, while TV and audio devices had, for decades, been employing single-handed ‘zappers,’ which had become increasingly ubiquitous in homes. “I wanted to make something that would make people want to pick it up and try using it… We started to question everything about conventional controllers, including the idea that a controller had to be held with both hands,” is a snatch of Miyamoto-speak in the book.

Disney of game design

To those who wonder who Miyamoto is, a quick fact-sheet about him at the age of 50, in 2002, can be helpful: Acclaimed ‘the Disney of game design,’ he was responsible for creating 6 of the 10 best-selling console games, producing more than $7 billion in sales with the ‘Mario’ franchise and $10 billion overall. In the early 1980s, ‘Donkey Kong’ was his brainchild, as a novice game designer, and it helped make the Nintendo name eponymous with the industry, underscores Sloan.

He takes us back to the time when Miyamoto was hired as a staff artist who was, however, to begin by remodelling a failed arcade game for the US, because the company’s top designers were focused on new games for the Japanese market, assuming the repurposing of game cabinets for an American audience to be a relative dead end.

The lesson that Miyamoto got from his mentor, the legendary designer Gunpei Yokoi, was about “the importance of treating the craft as the work of an artisan, as that of its first card makers had been. He also emphasised the absolute necessity of the search for ‘fun,’ which Miyamoto passed on to many others over the decades.”

Sturdy cards

Cards are where the origins of Nintendo lie, when started in September 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi, seeing that Kyoto’s gamblers as well as its landed elite, students, and labourers yearned for the turn of a friendly, well-made card. The city had been home to Japan’s emperors from the 8th century into the 19th, but like the entire nation it had endured a ban on card gambling for about 250 years, Sloan notes.

“The new Meiji Era government, as a sign of its progressive agenda, decided to allow card games using pictures instead of numbers… Fusajiro had a ready market for his ‘flower cards,’ which stunned players with their beauty. They presented 48 paintings in 12 suits based on the months of the year.” What contributed to the success of Fusajiro was that his mulberry-bark cards had brilliant artwork. And gambling with the sturdy cards became popular, particularly among Japanese yakuza, gangsters who wanted a new deck for each game, continues the ‘origins’ section of the book.

An inspiring corporate story, well told.

Tailpiece

“Motivated by a recent training programme, we created software to automatically draw the ego-grams of anyone entering the office. As a result…”

“You are able to work faster?”

“Yes, faster, going round in circles!”

Suppose 32 per cent of the households in a certain district are classified as ‘poor.’ If you randomly pick ten households (with replacement), what is the probability that the first two households in the sample are poor, while the remaining eight are not? Thus reads one of the example problems in ‘Principles of Econometrics: An introduction (using R)’ by Neeraj R. Hatekar (www.sagepublications.com).

One of the many anecdotes in ‘My Two Indias: A journey to the ends of opportunity’ by S. Mitra Kalita (Harper) is about a flat that the author and her husband wanted to buy on the eve of India’s sixtieth anniversary celebrations.

In the name of fiscal constraint and in the false hope of higher agricultural commodity prices and higher farm profits from liberalised external trade in agriculture, public expenditure in agriculture was severely curtailed, rues an essay on economic reforms and regional disparities, included in ‘Agrarian Crisis and Farmer Suicides’ edited by R. S. Deshpande and Saroj Arora (www.sagepublications.com).

 

But the different ways in which each woman looks at this stage of her life, setting off on a voyage of self-discovery, makes the book Now that I’m 50 (Women Unlimited), a compilation of short stories, an absorbing read.

Madhu, in Birthday Surprise, is the brilliant housewife who can arrange a dinner for 20 at an hour’s notice, arrange flowers, cut fruits in intricate patterns, “coax her old cook never to go on leave, detect the smallest fudging of household accounts by just sniffing the air in the kitchen,” and wins a prize for her garden every year.

But this smart housewife is at a loss when her husband, Jeevan, takes her to Pattaya in Thailand to celebrate her 50th birthday. From the balcony of her hotel room that overlooks the street, she is amazed to find “so many foreign men who seemed to have Thai wives”.

Jeevan spends most of his time with his business accomplice, visiting watch factories. During the long lonely spells in her room, she starts wondering about her existence. “Who was she? What had she done with her life? What had she really done for herself?” She was no longer excited at the “heavy gold necklace with an ugly diamond cluster pendant — yet another tedious surprise — (that was) sitting silently in his suitcase glittering away silently, waiting to surprise her in the morning.”

She is amazed at his transformation from his “usual sleepy self” to an excited man whose skin is glowing “as if it had been polished with oil”. What unfolds initially shakes this efficient woman from her depths, but she rebounds to cope with the crisis and, in the process, discovers the world of the Thai girls who inhabit the house with the red door, which can be seen from her balcony.

Then there is Nimmi in Should She, Or Shouldn’t She? with her life dictated by her husband, Mohan; even after 30 years of marriage, “a wave of panic rose in her stomach when he turned his bulging green eyes on her with some diktat or the other. The dog and the mother get much better treatment from him than she does. His toast had to be right and ready just when he came to the table. “The fruit was cut by Nimmi but placed on his plate by his mother. He had very light tea with just two drops of milk, and Nimmi’s hand sometimes shook when she had to pour the milk.” An extra half-drop got an admonition.

Sometimes she thinks if “she dropped dead right now on this polished dining table surrounded by tarnished salt cellars, no one would notice for weeks.” Her mother-in-law would blame it on the lousy dowry she brought, and Mohan would curse her for making a mess and scratching the fine table as she fell on it!

One fine day she decides to just walk out, and what happens forms the rest of the story.

Strangers in the Park is about the timid and conservative Sudha’s meeting with Ranjit, an interesting man, in the Lodi Gardens where she walks daily. Defying her disapproving friends and family — her husband died 10 years ago — she becomes his friend.

Malti, in Fifty Phobia, is trim and beautiful, and armed with the power of ‘good food thought’, fills her world with diet cokes, chopped cucumber and carrots, celery and bean sprouts and boiled chicken. She is obsessed about her workouts and meditation and massage regimen, looks like 30 instead of 50 and is terrified of aging. She’d “rather die than be like those fat, old women with grey hair and puffy faces. No one looked at old women, they could be part of the furniture”.

The stories are related simply and matter-of-factly without much flourish, and will certainly touch a raw spot or nerve in women who read them. Bulbul’s characters are not extraordinary… most of them are ordinary women and, unfortunately, remain ordinary even in their depiction. The collection is a quick and interesting read, but the excessive phobia of the women who hit the 50-mark is exaggerated. In an era when women embark on interesting journeys well beyond 50, and where Shobhaa De can pen an entire book, even though with trite narrative, Shobaa at Sixty, these women’s fear of turning 50 seems to belong to an era long past.

This is an easy book to read, but unfortunately none of the characters are powerful enough to be remembered after you’ve flipped through the pages. A very ordinary offering from Women Unlimited, an associate of Kali for Women, so well known for its books with powerful gender themes.

Rasheeda Bhagat

They trace how the company, originally called The Graphics Group, was purchased by Steve Jobs as a high-end computer hardware firm focused on developing graphical imaging systems for government and scientific work. “But their core product, called Pixar Image Computer, struggled to find a market. Desperate to generate sales, one young employee made short animated films…”

Maintaining the creative edge

The little animation team created a service revenue stream, doing contract animation for television commercials, and then came Disney offering a $26 million deal to produce three animated films, the first of which was Toy Story, one learns. After their initial wave of success producing three blockbuster hits, viz. Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, and Toy Story 2, what worried the company’s leaders was the potential for complacency to set in. The antidote came in the form of director Brad Bird, a veteran of Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, and Fox, who joined the Pixar team.

Bird pushed people beyond their comfort zones, gave outcast animators a voice, and encouraged dissent, the authors narrate. “He argued that doing something scary, that pushes you to the outer limits of your capabilities where you might fail, is how you maintain the creative edge.”

Heretical suggestions

During one such stretch project, with a huge budget and insane schedule, Bird shocked the purists by suggesting the use of a rudimentary ‘cheat’ – filming a pie plate flying across the screen to simulate a flying saucer versus an expensive computer animation. To those who screamed ‘heretical,’ Bird’s reasoning was that kids didn’t care how technically ‘cool’ the advanced animation was; what they cared was the story and where the flying saucer was going!

Even though Bird never actually threw the pie plate, his suggestion disrupted the animators’ conventional thinking and forced them to become more imaginative,” the authors note. “The disruption worked. Under Bird’s direction, Pixar won two Academy Awards for the innovative animation in the box-office hits, The Incredibles and Ratatouille.”

Break the rules

The parallel in the Nano project, as highlighted in the book, is the disruptive nature of the idea. It ripped the lid off the self-imposed creative limitations of the team members, unleashed a level of confidence that gave them the courage to think for themselves, the authors find.

Nanovation is about breaking rules, doing what seems ludicrous, displacing existing products and services, and disrupting the equilibrium of an entire industry, as reads a description in a chapter devoted to the first rule titled ‘Get wired for nanovation.’ Nanovators are constantly seeking to renew themselves, re-energise their organisations, and re-establish their edge on the competition, the authors instruct. “That’s why they are always seeking the next big thing. And they know that the ‘edge’ is where it will be found. This kind of optimism is contagious. Have you ever interacted with someone who really thinks big? Did you leave the conversation inspired to think bigger? It’s magnetic.”

Source of new ideas

Question the unquestionable, reads another rule in the list of eight. Posing the question, ‘Where do new ideas come from?’ the authors answer that ideas do not come from sitting in the same office, talking to the same people, looking at the same computer screens day after day. Spending the majority of your time with people who share your beliefs and assumptions does not unleash your creativity or promote discovery; it only sharpens your prejudices and leads to close-mindedness, they caution.

“So much of our daily work is routine; it can have a numbing effect on us. Our brains get lazy, we go on autopilot, and tend to become comfortable with the status quo. Breaking away, putting yourself in a place that’s new – whether it’s a new location, a new field of study, or a new group of people – enables you to stimulate the creative side of your brain.”

Strike ‘gold’ through the global community

In a section titled ‘Cast a wide net,’ the authors emphasise the importance of inviting some of the brightest, most creative thinkers into your businesses and tapping into the intellectual capital of the world outside the company’s walls. “In a flat world where the Internet offers unprecedented access to human imagination and ingenuity, innovation is global. Never before have we had the bandwidth to engage a global community in a conversation designed to address our biggest challenges.”

Examples mentioned in the book include GoldCorp, a Toronto-based company, which ran a contest on the Web inviting people to help them find gold on an ailing gold mine in the Red Lake area of Canada.

More than 1,400 downloaded the not so super-secret data on the 55-thousand acre property, and people from 51 countries submitted 77 proposals using methods and technology that, in many cases, even the company was unaware of. In a case of literal striking of gold, “for $500,000 in awards, the company and its global brain trust found over $3 billion in gold, making Red Lake the richest goldmine in the world.”

Jamming and gaming

IBM’s Innovation Jam, a worldwide event hosted each year, is cited as one other example of casting the net wide. The virtual brainstorming event takes up topics such as using clean coal to produce jet fuel, and building an electronic marketplace for retirees.

The book chronicles how the Jams started in 2001 with the belief that an open dialogue of fresh ideas could find solutions to huge challenges faster than IBM’s own researchers trying secretly on their own.

“The largest Jam ever was in 2006. More than 1.5 lakh people from 104 countries and sixty-seven companies came together. The result? IBM invested more than $100 million and launched ten new divisions with the ideas that were shared at the event.”

Just about five years ago, towards the end of 2005, Nintendo’s storied gaming business was facing the grim possibility of an end. Having ushered in the modern age of video games, Nintendo was bleeding market share to Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360, which had faster processing, better graphics, more memory and functions.

So Nintendo took a big leap and started spending large amounts of time with gamers, the authors recount. “They learned about what excited them and what seemed old-school. They listened to the questions the gamers asked and then forced themselves to ask even tougher questions.”

The result, as the authors observe, was the Wii, a pop culture phenomenon of such proportions that Nintendo could not make the product fast enough to keep up with the demand.

Instructive read for innovation-seekers.

Tailpiece

“I used to dream of making money by becoming an IT executive, but now I’d rather like to…”

“Get into finance?”

“No, into vegetable business!” 

D. Murali

The Path
Konosuke Matsushita

Respect the customer

Few customers will return to an establishment where they get little attention and where common courtesy and respect are not observed, the author cautions. “The shopkeeper who sees customers to the door with an almost-reverent feeling of appreciation and gratitude runs a shop that is successful. If the customer is sufficiently respected, the quality of the goods and the level of the service will naturally rise.”

In the author’s view, the successful shop does not keep customers waiting. He notes that no matter how good the product and courteous the service, in our time-is-money era, there is a limit to people’s patience. “The shopkeeper who is sufficiently attentive will be aware of a customer’s desire for speed and always ready to respond to it.”

Fans are a blessing

A section titled ‘Having fans’ begins by stating that fans are a blessing. “In sumo, for example, fans choose the wrestler they like. When he wins, they celebrate with delight; when he loses, they mourn and commiserate,” writes Matsushita. Adding that there is nothing to be won or gained by being a fan, he observes that fans champion a competitor they favour in some way, and they cheer him on for those qualities.

He points out that fans are important not only for competitors in sports but also for people in performing arts. “Celebrities work hard day and night to further enhance their performances, the better to respond to the expectations of their fans. By encouraging improvement among athletes and performing artists, fans thus play a role in the development of the sport or the art in question.”

Of value is his insight that not only celebrities but individuals, shops, companies – all have their own followers and admirers. Calling, therefore, for a fresh thinking about fans, Matsushita insists that we ought to be thankful for their presence, working harder to improve those parts of ourselves that we know appeal to those who support us. “That is the key to the prosperity of each individual, shop, or company.”

Each day is a new day

An apt thought for the New Year is discussed in a section titled, ‘Each day is a new day’. When the New Year comes, we feel the sense of a fresh start, an embarking on a new endeavour, the turning over of a new leaf, describes Matsushita. Fresh starts, new ventures are what we celebrate, not only at New Year’s but at any time, he reasons.

“The year starts with New Year’s Day, and each day begins when we awake. The dawn of the New Year seems in some way special, even though it is actually the same as any other day,” the author instructs. He suggests that if we could wake up with that sense of starting fresh every morning, then every day would be a kind of New Year.

Yesterday is yesterday, today is today, and so there is no need to let the woes of yesterday weigh down our step today, advises the founder of Panasonic, in his own simple style.

Obediently following precedent has its merits, but it is also important to break with precedent and find a new and better way of approaching a task, cheers Matsushita. “If you try a new method, it often opens up a completely new path. Rather than fearing failure, we should fear a life where there is no innovation at all.”

Ideal meditative read.

D. Murali

 

“The public and the Government have an obvious investment in the process. Together, all can benefit from what conscientious leaders accomplish in the classroom. Civilisation turns, slowly or swiftly, on the quality of its teachers and the quality of the students produced by our schools.”

Defining values: Foremost in the book’s list of strategies is to develop the value system. But what are values? They are what help us make sense of the world around us, the authors explain. A value is something that we cherish; it is our core principle, they add. “When facing difficulties, a strong value system will strengthen character. On the other hand, a weak value system can make trials seem more chaotic because it is hard to find balance when you are not sure about what you believe and can hold on to. Lack of balance can cause you to mistrust your own decisions. It can also cause others to doubt your abilities at many levels.”

Cultural axis: Developing a value system is the bedrock of one’s leadership effectiveness in the classroom and beyond, observe Osula and Ideboen. Describing values as the cultural axis around which the world turns, they aver that whether you live in Tibet, Indonesia, Colombia, Alaska, Western Samoa, or Ukraine, values will attend your waking, sleeping and even your dying moments. “Each day who you are will be influenced, if not directly shaped, by the values you hold dear or choose to ignore. Unearthing these values is a critical first step to understanding our relationship to both the local and global environment.”

D. Murali

Just as the modern multinational corporation sources ideas, parts, and materials from a vast external network of customers, researchers, and suppliers, so too should governments hone their capacity to integrate skills and knowledge from multiple participants to meet expectations for a more responsive, resourceful, efficient, and accountable form of governance, write Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams in MacroWikinomics (www.atlantic-books.co.uk).

Looking back at the first wave of digitally enabled ‘e-government’ strategies, which made government information and services more accessible to citizens while creating administrative and operational efficiencies, the authors observe that ‘too many of these initiatives simply paved the cow paths — that is, they focused on automating existing processes and moving existing government services online.’

Network of public servants

The next wave of innovation has the potential to redefine the government’s role in society, the authors assure, citing many examples. Such as GovLoop, the world’s fastest growing network of public servants, founded by Steve Ressler when he was with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The first thing Ressler noticed, new in his job, was that there were few other young people around, the book narrates. “And everywhere he looked there were silos. Departments weren’t talking to one another and there was no online home for connecting with colleagues or sharing ideas.”

When the department banned Facebook, Ressler called it the single most demoralising thing management had ever done, the authors inform. “It said to us we don’t get collaboration, your tools, your generation, and we don’t trust you,” is a snatch of Ressler-speak. Not surprising, because, in college he had majored in social network analysis and was an early adopter of networks such as Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook. “He’d hoped that by joining DHS he might get an opportunity to apply his expertise to the business of tracking down terrorist cells. But as a rookie, he quickly got bogged down in bureaucratic minutiae.”

Response to deficiencies

The growing popularity and influence of networks such as GovLoop, in the authors’ view, are a direct response to some of the well-known deficiencies in government, such as rigid HR (human resource) policies, insufficient training, sclerotic decision-making, hierarchical management structures, and a lack of inter-agency collaboration. “Young people, in particular, turn to these informal networks to navigate their way through an exceedingly cumbersome institutional environment.”

Thankfully, there are examples of networks flourishing inside government, such as NASA’s Spacebook, a social network for space scientists; and a government-wide brainstorming application called Spark in British Columbia, spurred by enthusiasm for open collaboration. In Spark, “Ideas posted to date range from new options for expanding online citizen self-service opportunities to operational ideas like establishing an internal talent bank to reduce the need for external contractors.”

Tackling tomorrow’s challenges

Though these are early days, networks in government can lead to its bottom-up reinvention, the authors foresee. They postulate that informal networks could do 80 per cent of what traditional departments do, but arguably they could do it better. “Think about it – what’s GovLoop at the end of the day: a repository for organisational knowledge; a source of new ideas and innovation; a forum for ad hoc cross-departmental collaboration; a provider of training and mentorship; or all of the above?”

Yet, this is the way to go, as we step into the future, urges the book. For, sustaining societies and economies in the face of climate change, energy shortages, poverty, demographic shifts, and security threats will test the ingenuity of those who wish to see, do, and participate in the public good, reason Tapscott and Williams. “In each of these issue areas governments face a reality in which they are increasingly dependent for authority on a network of powers and counterinfluences of which they are just a part.”

IT dashboard

The chapter titled ‘Creating public value: Government as a platform for social achievement’ opens with a description of the office of Vivek Kundra, the chief information officer of the US. His ‘IT Dashboard’ monitors in real time the portfolio of federal technology projects, showing how much was budgeted, how much was spent, and so on.

“There are plasma screens displaying information about tasks happening in the schools, streets, and administrative offices of the country. New tasks on the big spreadsheets come up in yellow, past due tasks in red, and completed tasks in green.” It works a bit like a stock market, as Kundra sees. “We make the decisions on which ones to sell, which ones to buy, which ones to… sink more investments into,” is a sample of Kundra’s thinking.

And he is not alone, the authors inform. There are federal administrators who take over the performance data at management accountability meetings with Jeffrey Zients, the US government’s chief performance officer, one learns. And, “Across town, the head of a D.C.-based government watchdog is preparing for her prime time media appearance by downloading exactly the same information. In the meantime she’s plotting trends on Google Earth and releasing new insights on her Twitter feed…”

App store for government

Innovations that Kundra is pursuing are genuinely laudable at a time when most people associate government with waste, inefficiency, and graft, the authors laud. They note that where most governments build mainframes and buy expensive software, Kundra is encouraging federal agencies to use free Google services and open-source wikis for everything from word processing to performance measurement to service improvement.

“He calls it the government cloud, but think ‘app store for government’ – a place where employees can access a vast ecosystem of secure applications and data sets for doing their jobs. It may sound like a no-brainer, but it’s an enormous improvement over the stubborn industrial age models that still prevail throughout much of government.”

Old ways of working

Tracing back the nearly half-a-century of ‘improvements’ in governments in the form of data processing automation, the authors fret that, in reality, old procedures, processes, and organisational forms were just encoded in software. They rue that huge, unwieldy mainframe beasts not only cemented old ways of working, but also required still greater levels of bureaucracy to plan, implement, operate, and control. “Even the most surgical IT experts have utterly failed to resolve the chaos of inconsistent databases, duelling spreadsheets, and other data anomalies that plague most government agencies…”

Thanks to the new Web, and a new generation of social innovators, open-source models of government are not just possible; they are often the best way to get things done, declare Tapscott and Williams. They cite an example from Estonia, which regained independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991, acquiring thus new political freedom, but also ‘a mass of rubbish – thousands and thousands of tonnes of it scattered across illegal dumping sites around the country.’

Time to clean upWhen concerned citizens of Estonia decided that the time had come to clean up the trash, they turned not to the government, but to tens of thousands of their peers, the authors recount. “Using a combination of global positioning systems and Google Maps, two entrepreneurs (Skype guru Ahti Heinla and Microlink and Delfi founder Rainer Nõlvak) enlisted volunteers to plot the locations of over ten thousand illegal dump sites, including detailed descriptions and photos.”

If that sounds ambitious, the second phase was outrageous – clean up all of the illegal sites in one day, using mass collaboration! Dream stuff? No. “On May 3, 2008, over fifty thousand people scoured fields, streets, forests, and riverbanks across the country, picking up everything from tractor batteries to paint cans. Much of this junk was ferried to central dumps, often in the vehicles of volunteers.”

To those who wonder what else could Estonians do, if 50,000 of them could clean up their country in one day, albeit a relatively small one, the answer comes from this quote of Tiina Urm, a spokesperson for the initiative: “It is not really about the rubbish. It is about changing people’s mindsets. Next year it might be something else.”

A book that can trigger the dismantling of many old ways of working.

Tailpiece

“We found that we could make public 100 per cent of our ministry’s data, except…”

“How it measures against performance targets?”

“No, the finer details about how our minister spends his time, and ‘earns’ his money!”