My unreasonably fair lady

Ask anyone to name an Irish author and you might get Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. And

not much else.

But if you were to ask the Man on the Clapham Omnibus to name anything written by Shaw you might get ‘My Fair Lady’.

It wasn’t.

That was Lerner and Loewe.

But he did write ‘Pygmalion’, the play on which the musical is based.

His name might be famous but famous for what.

Yet this was a man who wrote more than 60 plays.

Including ‘Man and Superman’, ‘Arms and the man’, ‘Major Barbara’, and ‘Saint Joan’.

And he is the only person to have been awarded a Nobel Prize (for literature) and an Oscar (for best adapted screenplay) for his film adaptation of his play ’Pygmalion’.

He had nothing to do with ‘My Fair Lady’ which appeared 3 years after his death.

But Shaw was far more than a playwright.

He wanted to change society, not through revolution, but through a gradual promotion of socialism.

He was a leading light in the Fabian Society which became the foundation philosophy of the Labour Party

He was a man of vision and championed many causes unpopular at the time but which we now take for granted.

He wanted to change society, to change the world, to make it a better place.

A man determined to leave his thumbprint on the world around him.

He spoke for a woman’s right to vote which begat Margaret Thatcher.

He promoted universal healthcare which begat the NHS.

He championed a minimum wage which begat the Living Wage, a cause now taken up by George Osborne.

And he sought the abolition of hereditary privilege which begat the introduction of Life Peers.

He helped establish the London School of Economics.

After death he even funded a new alphabet, the Shavian Alphabet, to address the vagaries of English spelling.

He was not a man to accept the world as it was.

He wanted a better world, a different world. He wanted society, the world to change, to progress. And he would use his skills as a writer, as an essayist and a lecturer to bring this about.

But his most impactful words appear in ‘Maxims for Revolutionaries’ in ‘Man and Superman’:

‘The reasonable adapts himself to the conditions around him. The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself. All progress depends on the unreasonable man’

You might describe these words as at the heart of Shaw’s approach to life.

And a philosophy adopted at great personal cost by Rosa Parks to end segregation in America; by Nelson Mandela to end apartheid; even by Tim Berners Lee to improve our lives through the World Wide Web.

This has to be the most important quote in the world. Ever. For anyone wanting to challenge and change.

And that is why it behoves us all to be unreasonable. To adapt the world to ourselves. In everything we do.

How unreasonable are you going to be today?

Be brief to be creative

After a few months away I am delighted to be back.

So let us start with a short story about creativity.

In some people’s eyes Ernest Hemingway is America’s finest writer. He certainly liked to be at the centre of the action. This is what makes his writing a great read.

When America entered World War 1 he enlisted immediately and was sent to Italy. On his first day he was dragging shredded bodies away after an explosion.

Later he was seriously hurt by mortar fire suffering serious shrapnel wounds to both legs. He feared that he might never walk again.

His experiences of war, life and death inspired his novel, ‘A Farewell to Arms’.

He was sent as a journalist to cover the Spanish Civil War which he did from the front lines. If there was a battle or a war you could bet Hemingway would be there.

His time in Spain inspired ‘Death in the Afternoon’ and ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’.

In World War 2 he was present at the Normandy landings, fought his way through France, was there at the liberation of Paris, and covered the Battle of the Bulge.

He won a Bronze Star.

His Big Game hunting experiences in Africa, when he nearly died, inspired ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’.

And in 1954 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

He was an author. A journalist. A soldier. A real life Action Man.

And yet the piece of literature he considered his finest consists of 6 words.

In the 1920s he was challenged by some literary friends to compose a short story with no more than six words.

The result.

‘For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.’

Which only goes to show that creativity and innovation does not require much.

Indeed it might be said that less is more when it comes to creativity and imagination and innovation.

Creative thinking is far more likely when there are restraints and constraints in place.

Restraints and constraints forces people to step back. To look at the big picture. And make connections between ideas, concepts, stuff they might not otherwise make.

This is the hallmark of creativity. And the way I believe creativity and innovation should be uncovered.

The tighter the brief the better the output.

The less time, the less money, the less resources we have at our disposal, the better the solution we can come up with, provided we think things through properly.

Too often in an effort to cover every base, to ensure we include everything, to quite literally throw the kitchen sink at a problem, we can fail to focus our thinking.

Great strategic thinking, brilliant marketing, is about deciding what not to do, who not to target, what not to say, as much as it is about deciding what to do, who to target, what to say.

And it is about looking hard for connections and opportunities that might not be as apparent if resources are in abundance.

If you have no constraints, impose some, and see where your thinking takes you.

You never know, you might just come up with a Nobel Prize winning solution.