Feature - Upfront
Frans Johansson
by Matt Nippert
A doyen of diversity, Swede Frans Johansson reckons that creativity is correlated with difference and that homogenous companies are dinosaurs. In Auckland to speak at an Equal Employment Opportunities Trust symposium, the author of The Medici Effect casts his critical eye over the Listener Power List.
The 50 most powerful people in New Zealand are predominately old, white men. Is this a recipe for national success? Well, this is not something that’s unique to New Zealand. What I think is more interesting is: why isn’t it changing faster? But I should add that in relation to the indigenous population, New Zealand is probably engaged in one of the more exciting searches for intersections between cultures than most countries that I’ve visited.
Have you been to Australia? Yes, I just came from Melbourne and it was … different. Let’s put it that way.
Why did you title your book after a clan in 15th-century Italy? When the Medici family ruled the city of Florence, what they did – aside from assassinating a lot of people – was sponsor creative individuals from many different disciplines. You had painters and sculptors and architects and philosophers – including Leonardo da Vinci – from all over Europe and even as far away as China. These people were able to collaborate and ignite one of the most creative eras in Europe’s history – the Renaissance. Diversity is intrinsically linked to innovation.
You write about Marcus Samuelson’s fusion cooking in New York using the same concepts. He came up with sea-urchin lollipops, seaweed pasta, tandoori smoked salmon – and these combinations made him, at 24, the youngest chef ever to receive a three-star rating from the New York Times. He combined his knowledge of Swedish food with insights from other cultures and other cooking technologies and techniques to create something new. Innovation is critical, and using diversity is the lowest-hanging fruit. Most of your competitors aren’t doing it, so if you do it you’re setting yourself up for some serious possibilities.
Your own background is fairly diverse. My mother is from the United States – she’s black and a Cherokee native – and my father is Swedish. I grew up in Sweden and went over to the US for college. But also in my life’s work there’s been difference: I wrote a fantasy fiction book when I was in high school, and in college I studied environmental science. I then started a health-care company, went to business school, then started a software company. In a way, my background has made it easier for me to see the borders and boundaries of cultures and disciplines in order to explicitly search across them.
How did your software venture fare during the dot-com crash? Unlike the health-care company, which did all right, the software company did very well for a while … until it didn’t. It was a remarkable time, with people throwing money at all kinds of things. We were selling software to software companies, but let’s just say that software companies stopped buying anything. Many of them ceased to exist. I learnt a lot from that – you’re going to make mistakes.
So, risk isn’t a bad thing? For most creative folks, innovative folks, the biggest secret behind their success is that they have failures. It’s a fact, and successful companies plan for it. If you look at research and development spending, you’ll see that it is highly correlated with innovation – but only up to a point. After that, there’s almost no correlation. Obviously, you’re going to have to spend some money on R&D if you want to innovate – zero dollars is not the way to go – but at some point it’s what you do with that money that matters. Yes, there are risks, but they’re lower than we think. If we limit the amount of capital we spend on any specific idea then we can keep on playing the game over and over again.
