Thoughts on Reading Business Model Generation and a Note on René Descartes

I recently re-read Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers. The book is available on Amazon.com, and you can currently download the first chapter of the book here. The goal of the book is to provide a useful framework and set of techniques for developing new business models. Reading it this past weekend also led me to reflect on the relationship between innovation and systematic approaches to business. As I have reflected on before, large corporations are often torn between two extremes: on the one hand the best way to control risk, to manage a large corporation, and to form incremental improvements is through systematization. On the other hand, such systems tend to reaffirm the status quo, and thereby stifle genuine innovation.

Business Model Generation is an attempt to develop a system that can lead to more innovative business models, and thus bridge these two extremes. The system the book presents is outlined in the first chapter, and it involves separating a corporation or business into 9 key components: a value proposition, key activities, key resources, customer relationships, distribution channels, customer segments, key partners, cost structure, and revenue streams. The different components are arranged on a "canvas" in which the value proposition is front and center, and it is possible to chart flows between components. The "canvas" helps one visualize different business models.

But the real value of the book is that it begins to augment this framework with actual examples of innovative business models and explains the trade-offs of each, and when it outlines design techniques that can be used to create new ones. The examples come from a wide range of industries. One reads about the contrasting approaches of the Maerki Baumann and Pictet banking institutions, how Telco unbundled the components of its infrastructure in order to better align its capabilities, how Lulu changed the publishing model, how Lego experiments with user-generated content, and how Nintendo Wii re-imagined the video game model. Apple and Google both have their requisite due. Metro's publishing model is explored. Red Hat is used to introduce the fremium model and Skype and Amazon are discussed. P&G's R&D gets significant attention, as does the classic Gillette bait and hook. All of these business models are related to the canvas developed in the first chapter, and it produces a type of alignment that allows one to see each innovative model as a general type. The presentation of each  business model is entertaining and insightful.

After this rich list of examples, the book turns its attention to more in-depth discussion of some aspects of the design approach to business including brainstorming techniques, how to gain customer insights, the importance of storytelling, and ways of analyzing markets for strategy. All of these topics are covered in more depth in other books, and serious innovation designers may find them old-hat. However, as with the canvas developed earlier in the book, having all these techniques in one place, with quick efficient overviews can give even an experienced innovation designer a nice bird's eye view of the business model landscape.

When all of this is put together the team responsible for Business Model Generation has created an ideal way to get a quick overview of cutting-edge approaches to business design. I have actually used the book on several occasions now. It has helped me and a group of colleagues understand our own business much better than other techniques we have used. But the understanding is peculiar: I have found that although Business Model Generation is a useful read, the practical utility of the "canvas" presented in the beginning can be somewhat limited. The divisions that the 9 components of business force on a particular case can often be too restricting and feel unnatural. This effect oddly reminds me of David Trood's famous National Geographic photos in which David uses hundreds of photos to produce unified images. In both cases the resulting products end up giving you a general picture from which you can glean some insight, but one is struck by how much is lost in the resulting image. As in life we often learn more from differences than similarities.

The limitations of the framework reminded me of a philosophical work I studied in graduate school. René Descartes once set himself the task of providing a unified system for developing new ideas. He called it his Rules for the Direction of the Mind. At the time Descartes was already an accomplished mathematician and had solved several problems that had baffled mathematicians for centuries. He did this by developing new innovative techniques for solving problems, including imagining the line of a curve to be traced by a complicated mechanical machine. The results of such thought experiments were not immediately accepted by the mathematical community, but in a suitably translated version they became the basis for much of modern mathematics. (The best account of Descartes' mathematics is Henk Bos' Redefining Geometrical Exactness: Descartes' Transformation of the Early Modern Concept of Construction.) Having been extremely successful in mathematics, I assume Descartes thought it would be easy to develop a formal approach to creativity that could be applied in all instances. However, he soon abandoned his work, and left the book incomplete. Many theories have been offered for this, but I think it is very likely that he realized at a certain point that truly innovative solutions could not be codified or mechanized in such a formal manner. One has great difficulty formalizing the process of innovation.

Llull developed a random idea generation machine.

I bring up the case of Descartes, because I think a similar phenomenon occurs any time one discusses innovation. A creative process generally ceases to be innovative the moment it is codified and mechanized. Even a system designed to produce random results, such as that of Ramon Llull,  is rarely as effective as someone thinking creatively outside of the rules, whether it is through analogy, brainstorming, or applying an example from a very different domain. The best that one can do to capture this kind of innovative thinking is to review examples and develop rough techniques for thinking about problems.

To Business Model Generation's credit it is pleasantly situated between the extremes of random creative thinking and a mechanized and codified process that stifles innovation. It provides enough detail to stimulate thought, but does not attempt to develop it to the level of being a formalized and unresponsive framework. This means that the reader has a loose and flexible tool that she or he can use to think about their own businesses, and perhaps stumble on an insight that will lead to new, truly creative developments. But, it is important to understand that having a framework is only the beginning of the road to innovation.

P.S. I should add that one of the most fascinating aspects of the book is the innovative way in which it was written. You can find more on the book website here.

7 Ways to Turn Failures into Successes

If someone is really trying to be innovative, almost by definition that person will fail from time to time. This is because innovations that have never been tried before are often risky undertakings, and failure is far more likely than success. James Dyson went through 5,127 prototypes before he came up with his famous vacuum cleaner. Thomas Edison famously said, "I have not failed, I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." To persevere is certainly a virtue, and many examples show that such persistence can ultimately pay off. But this kind of persistence is a virtue in an individual, not necessarily in an organization or company. A company that constantly follows failing strategies will be out of business rather quickly.

Because of this, businesses are very concerned with failure, and the punishment can often be severe: loss of jobs, financial penalties and so on. Although sometimes it is necessary to take such severe measures, there is a trade-off in terms of loss of communication, and such decisions can also limit the possibility for individual or organizational improvement. There are more constructive ways to respond to failure. Here are seven ways for a company to respond.

• Use mistakes to pinpoint areas of improvement. In a recent interview Milton Glaser made the observation that failures are sometimes better than successes: successes merely reaffirm your previously held views and reinforce the status quo; only failure provides genuine opportunities for improvement. But to actually produce this improvement takes more than simply admonishing an employee with a cliche like, "Don't do it again." Successful people and businesses know how to focus in on the specific factors that led to a failure. A pianist who simply continues to play a piece from the beginning, is unlikely to perform the piece as well as someone who spends extra time mastering the difficult passages. Similarly, a company that doesn't provide appropriate focus on the specific cause of a failure will not improve as quickly as one that does. Hence, you should offer people who have failed new ways to meet the challenge in the future. For instance, if a client presentation doesn't go well, offer to excuse the employee from other tasks in order that she or he can obtain sufficient training to do better next time. For a company, this is a prudent investment in the future.
• Use mistakes to understand the limits of current possibilities. Another way to learn from mistakes is to use them as opportunities for understanding the limits of a domain. I have a mathematician friend who spent more than a year with colleagues throughout the world working on a proof that ultimately didn't work. However, the funding for the project required a specific output, and so he did what scientists often do, and turned the study into a disproof of the original methodology. Far from being a cop-out, such a move represents a genuine advance in knowledge. This lesson can be applied to companies too. For instance, if there is a client product that cannot effectively compete against the competition based on feature or price, then that might be the signal that the company should leave that market, and head in a different direction that better suits its strengths. This is a loss, but because it allows you to redirect your resources, the project also represents a positive gain for future strategies.
• Steal from your mistakes. Google is a company that has managed to respond well to failures. For instance, consider the recent failure of Google's Wave service, a service Google pulled the plug on in August 2010. The service developed a fresh new approach to online messaging, but for various reasons it never caught on. However, despite the fact the service had to be closed, many features of that service are now entering the market as enhancements to other services that Google offers, and vestiges of Google Wave can be seen in Google Docs. This is one of the ways you can respond to failure in a creative way. If the overall system doesn't work, then analyze it down into its components and see if there are ways to construct new services from the pieces. This requires investing time in understanding a failure, and in seeing how to reintegrate the results into the overall strategy of a firm.
• Keep a record of mistakes. This is closely connected to the previous observation. It may be the case that there are no obvious ways to steal from a mistake at the moment, or that the reasons for the failure are currently too opaque. However, it may turn out that six months or a year down the road a new opportunity will arise in which the learnings can be applied to significant advantage. In order to take advantage of these situations, many details of the previous failure may need to be recorded and reviewed. If blame is attached to specific individuals they may be less forthcoming about the real reasons for the failure. Hence, a database of previously attempted initiatives incorporating a certain degree of anonymity should be maintained. I'm actually surprised so many companies do not have specific people in charge of understanding failures and finding new creative applications for the results. Given that the development costs of these failed initiatives are already paid for, such failures can often provide the proverbial "low hanging fruit."
• Turn the failure into a challenge. If it is particularly important to overcome a failure, throw down the gauntlet and constructively challenge people to do better. There is an amusing story recounted on Michael Schrage's HBR blog post of how Charles M. Schwab used a challenge to motivate workers. After learning that the day shift at a poor-performing mill produced only 6 heats, he proceeded to write a large "6." on the floor. When the night shift came on, they saw the number and knew that they could do better, and worked extra hard to put a "7" on the floor. The process accelerated when the day crew arrived, and by the time the competition completed the mill was producing more than any other mill in the plant. Competition is an effective tool for improvement whether it be in business, evolution of species, or in breaking the four minute mile. For this process to work well in a business it is important that the emphasis be on the success rather than the failure: in a race in which only one person wins, there is little point in berating everyone who didn't.
• Outsource a part of a challenge. If a product or service is generally working, but there is one component that is consistently failing, you may want to consider outsourcing that component of the product to a company that has the knowledge or resources to make it work. Although these may not be prime examples of "failures" Netflix was able to retool their algorithms for movie suggestions by outsourcing it through a competition. P&G famously decided to increase efficiency and reduce cost by aiming to outsource up to 50% of its R&D work to third-party providers. When companies outsource capabilities to other firms they can focus their resources on those aspects of projects in which they can obtain the highest value.
• Let an employee keep at it. There are a variety of ways of responding to failure, but one of the ones we value most in our society, whether it is in inventing or playing video games, is the value to keep at something. As the options above indicate, it is sometimes important to recognize when something will not work, but this doesn't mean that one should always give up. For instance, if there is an employee who is particularly passionate about a cause, why not let him or her spent a few hours each week pursuing it long after the company goes in a different direction? The most you are losing are a couple of hours, but the added gain in letting the passionate employee own the task, and of keeping the project within the company's fold may be significant if it does work out.

If you are striving to be innovative, it is important that you have a plan for dealing with inevitable failures. By concentrating creatively on what can be gained from a given case, one can turn current failures into future successes.

Do you have any interesting examples of failures that you turned into successes? Do you have ideas for other ways to make use of failures? Feel free to comment below.

Thoughts on Reading Sticky Wisdom

For Creativity and Innovation Week (April 15th-21st) I've decided to write something about a book that has recently had an impact on how I think about creativity. This is ?WhatIf!'s Sticky Wisdom: How to Start a Creative Revolution at Work. The book is relatively short, and can be finished in about a day. It has a number of interesting examples of creativity, and offers a framework for thinking about creativity and innovation.

The part of the book that I found most useful is the distinction between analytical and creative thinking and the importance of signaling when one is changing from the one to the other. I just defended a dissertation in analytical philosophy, so I am probably the poster-child for analytical thinking: whether it's ancient mathematical proofs, Gödel's incompleteness theorem, or applying skepticism to any proposition ("Do I exist?"—"Not entirely clear."), I've done it. "Analysis" means breaking down a proposition into its component parts, and comes from the Greek word for loosening or untying a difficult problem. Analysis is not necessarily the opposite of creativity: it can take considerable freshness of thinking to be able to see the assumptions upon which an approach or statement is based. But there are contexts in which it can definitely be in tension with creativity.

This is often the case in a business context. Businesses are incredibly analysis-based. This is in part because of the complex types of problems that corporations face. A successful launch of a product in a new country depends on getting hundreds of details right, whether it's understanding the customers, determining how to distribute the product, identifying costs, coming up with effective branding, and so on. If any one of these things goes wrong the launch could be a disaster. This is perhaps the reason why analysis is so central to MBA education, and why corporations and consulting firms can be obsessed with it in the interviewing process. But the analysis focus goes even deeper than this: most corporations are obsessed with risk management. There are people whose only jobs are to avoid risk, committees and boards are designed to distribute risk, jobs are reduced to such tiny pigeonholes that no one can cause too much damage, and at the top there is a CEO who's job it is to never say anything that will risk the company's reputation. Hence, when a new idea is proposed, the default setting for most people is, "What could go wrong with this? What are the risks if we do this?" Yet, although these are necessary questions to ask in some contexts, they can be inimical to truly creative and disruptive ideas that no one has thought of yet. This is because—by their very definition—such disruptive ideas are risky.

Hence, in Sticky Wisdom the authors argue that it is important to set aside space for another mindset. They call this "greenhousing," and it can be roughly described as a context in which risky ideas are not only allowed to grow, but are in fact encouraged to do so. This is particularly important in the early stages of an idea, before it has had a chance to be worked out in any detail. As Sticky Wisdom emphasizes, at these stages a simple, "Yes, but . . ." or "We've tried that before," could be enough to kill a potentially exciting and innovative idea. What one really needs is a context in which even an initially ridiculous idea can be explored. As I have said in an earlier post, I sometimes have started a brainstorming session with the question, "What's the most ridiculous way to solve this problem?," and have been surprised at how much insight can be gained in approaching a problem in this way. But given the focus on analytical thought in a corporation or in academia, you have to often make a point to signal when you are looking for growth-support rather than criticism.

The advantages of having an organization occasionally adopt this mindset are manifold: new opportunities can be identified, and genuinely innovative approaches to problems can be found. One might even argue that it is not accidental that many of the most influential technologies and innovations arise outside of a corporate setting: whether it be Twitter, Facebook or Google, small entrepreneurial groups can be more willing to take risks because they have less to lose if the idea doesn't work out, and are often more willing to be creative. When large corporations are not at least sometimes willing to take similar risks, they create risks of their own, including the risk of missing the next trend in innovation. And the funny thing is that large companies don't necessarily have to miss that boat: if a corporation provides contexts in which employees are encouraged to think creatively, they too can have the insight to come up with similarly innovative solutions. But this takes more than a mission statement about the importance of innovation, but a genuinely new way of looking at the world. Sticky Wisdom offers insights on how to look at the world in this way.

I hope in honor of Creativity and Innovation Week and Leonardo de Vinci's birthday companies, schools and organizations set aside some time to think about creativity. Having the staff reading Sticky Wisdom can be a good start.

The Farnsworth House and Innovation

Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House (1945-1951) is widely regarded as one of the most influential designs in 20th century architecture. The house itself is not only an icon of the International Style, but it also has inspired many equally iconic houses throughout the world: Philip Johnson's Glass House (1949), Steve Hermann's Glass Pavilion, the Division Knoll Residence, the Lumenhaus, and many others. (It would be an interesting project for someone to compile a site chronicling these many houses.)

I had the opportunity of visiting the house with a Canadian couple and one of the Trust tour guides towards the end of this past summer, and seeing the house was a genuinely moving experience. The house was far better designed than even I had imagined. I always recognized the importance of the large-scale design, but being able to walk through the rooms of the house made me aware that this high level of design is also reflected in smaller-scale aspects of the house. The depth of this design contributed to the fact that very little in the house seem out-dated, despite the fact that it is almost 70 years old.

The beauty of the design made me reflect on what is now being called the "design innovation" approach in business and elsewhere. It occurs to me that anyone who wants to adopt this approach, would do well to learn from the creations of brilliant designers, whether they be architects, product designers, or artists. Designers of all stripes can learn a lot from the Farnsworth House. What follows is a catalog of a few of the things I learned about innovation from visiting the house last September.

1. Innovations involve keeping an audience in mind. It may seem peculiar to pick a house that had such a tumultuous design and construction history as an example of keeping the audience in mind. Edith Farnsworth famously criticized Mies' design and added screened porches and various other "improvements." Yet, it seems clear that Mies did have an audience in mind. Instead of being designed for Ms. Farnsworth, the house was designed for a particular model of how a modern life should be lived. The fact that so many houses have been based on Mies' design is a testimony to the fact that his intended audience does exist. Further, Mies apparently articulated this to Ms. Farnsworth: when she complained that there was not enough closet space for her clothing, Mies countered that she didn't need to bring so much clothing to a weekend retreat. Everything coheres around an idea of a weekend retreat open to nature. For instance, because one might want to entertain guests on the weekends, there is a large patio that allows traffic to flow in and out, there are windows situated to allow cross-ventilation in the summertime, and there are even two bathrooms so that Ms. Farnsworth could keep her personal items separate when entertaining. Clearly, there were disconnects between the vision of these two people, but Mies did have an audience in mind. It just didn't end up being necessarily Ms. Farnsworth.

A Floor-Mounted Electrical Outlet

2. Innovations arise through constraints. Mies van der Rohe wanted to create a house that expressed his particular design aesthetic. One could imagine Mies drawing a sketch of the house in a few seconds. Perhaps a few minutes more would be all that was required to figure out the basic structural features that needed to be in place to create such a house. But, to this extent it is merely an idea, not an innovation. Innovation comes from working through the many challenges that need to be overcome to bring the final object into reality. The challenges he faced placed constraints on Mies' project that inevitably pushed him even further. For instance, Mies' desire to minimize the vertical structures of the building by using floor to ceiling glass and minimal steel supports resulted in no wall surfaces for electrical outlets. Hence, Mies had to put the electrical sockets in the floor, and he installed rather elegant openings for this purpose. It is the process of working out these details that differentiates a mere idea from an actual object in the real world.

3. Artistic innovations endure. Not all the design elements were the natural consequence of physical constraints. At times, Mies' artistic ambitions clearly pushed him further. For instance, the kitchen counter is made of a single piece of stainless steel that at one point becomes the top surface of the range. Mies could have easily made this counter out of multiple components. It would have been far simpler to construct, especially considering no one had attempted a single kitchen counter of this length in stainless steel before. However, the resulting continuous structure has a simplicity and beauty about it that no other kitchens of the time could match. It also presumably inspired a whole tradition of restaurant work surfaces. When one considers this innovation one is reminded of other product innovations like Apple's single stainless steel body in the MacBook and iPad lines of computing products. In fact, I would argue that one of the reasons for Apple's recent success is that its designers approached the task of creating products from a largely artistic perspective. This is apparent in the fact that Apple continues to produce videos highlighting the beauty of their single-piece construction.

The counter and range are made from a single
piece of stainless steel.

4. Innovations involve trade-offs. Although this post is mostly about Mies' design, visiting the house also made me aware of innovations that have happened since the house was built. When Mies designed the Farnsworth house he took extra care with materials, and had the large sheets of glass custom made for the residence. Since then, the standards of glass have changed, and when one of the large windows shattered in the 1996 flood, it had to be replaced with tempered glass to remain up to building code. Although the owner did a great job replacing the glass, and it is difficult to see any difference between the new and the old glass when viewed head-on, things change when you view the glass at an extreme angle. From an angle the new glass does not have the clarity or beauty of the old glass, as the tempering process changes the transparency of the glass ever so slightly. However, when compared with the alternative of a very dangerous glass surface, it is simply a trade-off that needs to be made. Trade-offs are not always apparent when one initially brainstorms ideas, but they become important when one moves to implementation.

5. Innovations can be serendipitous. Glass can get dirty. A house made of glass, situated in a tree-lined grove would seem to require significant care and maintenance. For instance, my apartment building has to clean windows on nearly a monthly basis.  However, I have been assured by a woman at the Farnsworth House office that the windows rarely need to be washed. The fact is that the water running down the flat surfaces during rain storms is sufficient to keep them clean throughout the year, except for a few occasional washings. Mies was a master architect, so this feature may have been designed in from the beginning, but the effectiveness is even more surprising when one sees the remarkable transparency of the glass: it would seem to be very difficult to maintain such remarkable transparency. This illustrates one principle of innovation: you may not be able to guess all the strengths and weaknesses of your creation ahead of time, or even how your product will ultimately be used. Coat hangers are excellent for fishing items out of drains. Standard cell-phones in India take on some of the qualities of smart phones thanks through the ingenuity of vendors in a train station. (As Genevieve Bell explained at SXSW 2010.) Science is full of examples of mistakes that end up being more profitable than the original experiments could ever have been. One cannot always predict how one's products will be used, and a truly innovative designer should always be open to these new possibilities.

6. Innovations involve leaving things out. Mies famously said, "Less is more," and it became one of the mantras of the International School. Even if you are striving for another aesthetic, there are important lesson that you can learn from this approach that many people, organizations, and corporations miss. It is true that the Farnsworth house pushes simplicity to the limit. The house seems to demand a particular style of living that even Mies does not seem to have embraced in his own life (see the 7 part video by the BBC). However, this is also what makes the house beautiful and interesting. In a similar fashion the Apple iPhone has only one button on its surface, Twitter's usefulness stems from the brevity of its postings, and even "knock-offs" products can be seen as remarkable innovations in simplicity: they omit features that some purchasers would find superfluous. (See this ?What If! video for more.) Less often can be more.

As with all great designs the beauty is not only in the initial idea, but it is also apparent in how that idea is developed and implemented. As a society we seem drawn to the idea of instantaneous ideas, and so we like the idea that Newton found the idea for gravity from being hit on the head, or credit people with objective intelligence regardless of what is done with that intelligence. But reality is a challenging and exciting place, and we should reserve our highest honor for the people who manage to bring their realities into being. There is a lot that one can learn from Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House.

Photos by John Hannon published with the permission of the National Trust. All rights reserved. Do not publish without written permission. If you would like to visit the Farnsworth House yourself, visit the Trust website at http://www.farnsworthhouse.org/.

Thoughts on Reading Rework

This past week I read Jason Fried and David Hansson's Rework on my iPhone. In retrospect, I think this is a book better purchased in book form: it's the kind of book you want to leave on your desk to start conversations. The useful and entertaining book argues that many of the standard practices in business are misguided, and provides examples to underscore this point.

To give you a flavor for the book, you might watch Jason's ted.com talk. There the emphasis falls on the problems with meetings and managers. Now, I think it is obvious that there is a role for both of these within a corporation, but Jason's point seems to me correct: they are overused, and often serve as crutches for poor management skills. For one thing, meetings take a lot of time out of the productivity of an organization. The time should be multiplied by the number of people participating. A meeting between 10 people for one hour takes 10 hours of productivity out of the organization. Understood this way, one should ask whether the goal of the meeting is worth this significant expenditure before scheduling it. In many cases a meeting could be avoided by having short exchanges in the hall, or reducing the number of people attending. This not only saves the company money, but may actually enhance employee morale. Employees have long complained about how meetings are a waste of time, and from my experience I would agree these complaints are often warranted. The low rate of information exchange alone underscores this fact.

As for managers, Jason has similar arguments. The main argument in this case comes from the way managers can interrupt the flow of thought. One simple check-in on an employee who is engaged in a project that requires concentration is often enough to put that process back 10 minutes. If enough of these interruptions happen throughout a day, then work can almost come to a stand-still. Of course, as is the case with meetings, there are places and times for these types of interruptions. I have had employees work for me from time to time who actually needed to have interruptions to stay on task, but I would say out of 100s of people I've worked with only a handful fell into this category. Most employees are motivated to do their work, and they just need to have the resources and opportunity to succeed.

How would a post-meeting/manager company function? It would rely more on passive modes of communication throughout the day. The advantage of passive communication is that it doesn't necessarily interrupt the workflow: people can respond to an e-mail at the time of their choosing. Employees should also be given enough ownership of their tasks that they can feel genuine entrepreneurial excitement. Managers' roles are to inspire employees and provide enough structure that the goal and requirements of a task are clear. If you add to this mix an enthusiastic workspace filled with employees who can be trusted to do good work, and such a well-run company would surely succeed.

Meetings and managers are often described as necessary evils. But why should anything evil be necessary? Far better to minimize interruptions so that when you do get together meetings and managers become necessary goods.

9 Steps To A More Successful Brainstorming Meeting

In the course of my time teaching and managing people, I have become very interested in how to make conversations more conducive to creativity and innovation. Although there are no general ways to guarantee that a conversation or meeting will lead to new and creative results, I have identified at least nine steps that can turn an ordinary brainstorming meeting into an innovative and interesting one.

1. Develop a Non-Standard Context. All too often managers and other employees are accustomed to interacting in very specific and structured ways: some people are used to talking, others to listening, and everyone wants to be recognized for their particular areas of expertise. To truly encourage creativity it is often very useful to introduce a context in which people have very few expectations, such as having a session in an unusual space like a hallway or kitchen, or encouraging people to play devil's advocate to their own ideas. One of my favorite ways to encourage creativity is to open up a meeting by presenting a problem and then asking, "What's the craziest way anyone could solve this problem?"  
2. Ensure Everyone is Beginning on the Same Page. Knowledge is power, and power can be used to quash discussion. It is important that everyone start from the most even playing field possible. If there are facts that a decision must be based on, it is useful to distribute those to all the participants ahead of time. Further, if a range of solutions is clearly "wrong," that should be known ahead of time too. One can always choose to ignore some of these considerations within the meeting or discussion, but no one should feel that she or he is walking into a "mine field" in which some of their answers will be criticized for being wrong for reasons they could not possibly know ahead of time. 
3. Remove Boundaries. In normal conversations, especially in a workplace, there are many conventions about how we interact with other people. People in authority generally demand some respect from those beneath them, new people in an organization who are unaccustomed to the conventions and expectations can often sound timid or out-of-touch, and experienced employees can be trapped by preconceptions about what their jobs are and what they are entitled to say. The first step in getting a group to truly foster creativity is to remove many of these boundaries. People in authority should let others take the lead; new employees should be encouraged to talk if only because their ideas have a better chance at being genuinely new, and more experienced employees should be challenged to think outside of their particular job functions or roles. 
4. Provide Structure. Even if one removes ordinary boundaries in a discussion, it can be very useful to impose novel or extraordinary structures in a discussion. No one can produce productive solutions to specific problems in a vacuum, and forcing people to look at problems in new ways can lead to new approaches and fresh ideas. For instance, ask people to think about the problem as someone else in the room would, or to look to a parallel problem in a very different environment, or ask participants to change sides in the middle of an argument. Creative rules often create creative solutions. 
5. Accommodate a Wide Variety of Styles of Thought. Some people need silence and preparation to develop genuine creative solutions, while other people need to hear lots of ideas and enjoy jumping into the discussion suddenly and unexpectedly. Some people demand logical precision in their thought, while other people like to think in metaphors. One of the main challenges in fostering creativity in a meeting is developing a way of interacting that allows each person to participate effectively. Often just recognizing the differences in the room can be a cathartic exercise. 
6. Actively Listen. In my experience, this is the single most important rule in encouraging creativity in a discussion. No one learns anything new in a meeting if they do not spend time listening to other people, and yet very few people are careful listeners. Listening involves not only passively hearing what other people are saying, but more importantly, it involves finding ways to interpret those utterances constructively. For instance, when I ask people to come up with the craziest possible solution to a particular problem, I am often surprised at how even the craziest ideas have a great deal of structure to them, and can be quickly developed into a constructive solution, provided that one pay attention to those details. 
7. Let Participants Own Their Ideas. The paradigms of creative individuals are artists at work in their studios, producing original books or paintings that express their particular viewpoints on the world. The connection between personal expression and creativity is strong. Hence, it is important to make people feel in control of their own ideas at a meeting, or when they seek to further develop or implement them. When a person feels responsible for his or her own idea's success, that person is more likely to be emotionally engaged with that idea, and there will be an added incentive to bring the idea to completion. 
8. Empower People to Develop their Ideas. Coming up with new ideas is just the first step when innovation is the goal. Providing the infrastructure for evaluating ideas, for developing them, and monitoring their progress is critical. People often fail to recognize just how much work and time it takes to bring an idea to fruition, but that is where the real work lies. Anyone can come up with a great idea; it takes true genius to bring it to fruition. 
9. End with Clearly Defined Next Steps. This is basic good business practice, but it is particularly important when a creative discussion ends that there be clearly defined next steps. This is because the particular context that produced these ideas may be difficult to replicate, and when people take up non-standard roles in a discussion, it may take serious thought to redistribute the components of those ideas to the right people in the organization who have the expertise and abilities to bring them to completion. Everyone should leave the room knowing what steps are being taken, that the right people are taking them, and understand the criterion for the success or failure of those steps. 

These are just some general ideas on how to structure a brainstorming discussion that is conducive to the creative and innovative development of new ideas. It is worth keeping in mind that this is only one of the contexts in which new ideas develop. In particular, in some stages of the development process a great deal of structure is needed, requiring managers to do what they should do best: distribute complicated tasks among the right people in the organization and at the right times to get them done. At other times, it may be more useful to have a passive way of gathering information, such as a designated bulletin board or wall. Nevertheless, if you find your company or organization is suffering from a lack of new ideas, occasionally implementing some of these steps in a meeting may help.

Do Non-Profits Have a Unique Metaphysical Structure? (Repost from September 13, 2008)

There are some obvious contrasts between for-profit and non-profit corporations. The basic philosophy of a for-profit company is clear: reduce operating costs, increase revenues, and thereby increase profits. In order to achieve these goals, most companies have three classes of individuals: the executives who set policy, the employees who do the work, and the management that ensures that the employees do their work and that the company succeeds in implementing the executives' policies. A well-run company with its unified purposes, efficient methods of implementation, and its clear system of responsibility has been one of the marvels of our age, and it explains the dominance of the corporate model throughout the world economy. Further, by focusing on profits, for-profit corporations are called upon to produce successful products and services, and this success or failure can be easy to track.

Although it is legally the case that a non-profit can have a very similar corporate structure to a for-profit company, with boards of directors, executives, managers, and employees, the philosophical structure is fundamentally different. By explicitly denying the pursuit of profit, corporations are denying the fundamental raison d'être of for-profit companies. As a consequence, many non-profits have goals that are less easy to define or track. For instance, a non-profit might be founded to increase awareness of an issue, but seldom are there viable ways of tracking how well it achieves this goal, or of comparing its current approach to other alternative approaches. A non-profit might be set up to pursue a religious, cultural, or charitable goal, but it may value the activity of pursuing that goal more highly than any specific product that is brought about.

And this may point to a fundamental metaphysical difference between corporations and non-profits: one tends to value an activity more than any specific product, and the other values the product more than the activity.

In both cases, however, the best run companies and non-profits can converge (See Economist July 15, 2010, "Profiting from Non-Profits"): both should be able to employ efficient means to achieving their goals, while at the same time valuing the activity highly enough that the activity itself can be a worthy goal. A corporation that provides good benefits to its employees, and that is sincere in its effort to produce a sense of responsibility and community among its employees, managers, and executives begins to converge on a non-profit model and to raise the status of activity within the organization. And a non-profit organization that is run efficiently, that offers its employees competitive wages, and has clearly defined goals and metrics, can be a lot like a for-profit corporation.

But the differences go further than this. Although this is not inevitable, anyone who has spent time working at a non-profit and a for-profit corporation may have realized that the culture can be quite different. Since for-profit companies are basically in existence for the purpose of making money, this infuses the culture of the individuals who make up that corporation, and you tend to get competition, a strong desire to advance, and basically, people are there to make money. The desire for financial gain among the individuals then transfers back to the company, and increases the drive towards profit. The reciprocal way that large-scale goals infuse small-scale actions and conversely small-scale actions lead to large-scale goals is an interesting philosophical feature of many group activities, and has been noted since antiquity. (Cf. Plato's Republic.)

Non-profits have a similar reciprocal system, but it is based on doing good. Since doing good tends to be a collaborative activity, or at least a non-hierarchical activity (i.e. each agent in the organization is capable of fulfilling the goal to a certain extent), it has the consequence that there is less competition within a non-profit, and it is less amenable to a traditional corporate hierarchy of authority and control. Now, of course, this isn't inevitable, but it does mean that there may be less emphasis on the rules and regulations that are at the heart of the success of a large for-profit corporation. People are less likely to be criticized for being late, less likely to have software on their computers that prevents surfing on the Internet or other similar security and efficiency measures, and people are probably less likely to be reprimanded or even fired for failing to produce good enough ROI. But since it can be argued that happiness is found in activity, it may very well be the case that non-profits tend to produce happier employees, especially if there is an emphasis on activity.

Does a non-profit company lose something when it aspires to be as efficient and effective as a corporation? I think it may well be the case that a non-profit would lose something under these circumstances. What do you think?

Fireplace in Maine

Synesthesia is the phenomenon in which one associates one sense with another. In its most extreme forms it is an involuntary neurological disorder that can be thoroughly unpleasant and potentially debilitating. However, there's a more general phenomenon that most of us can relate to. For instance, many people can be warmed or chilled by a visual impression. This thought was brought home to me this past week watching this video. I recorded it from my bed while staying in a room inside an inn in Maine. I was surprised that when I watched it on a fairly large screen in high resolution in my apartment, I actually felt as if it were warming the side of my body facing it.

Try the experiment, or even better turn out the lights, get under the covers, set the video on loop, and snuggle in front of this fire for a while. Instantly, you have a roaring fireplace in your room!

Julia Child and an Ode to Trout Meunière

A week ago I went to see Julie and Julia. It's a very entertaining movie. Before I went, I was told that Meryl Streep does a fantastic job in the role of Julia Child, and it's certainly true. Yes, everyone can do a Julia Child voice, but it takes real talent to actually convey a whole range of emotion without coming across as ridiculously goofy and over the top. This is not to say that Mrs. Streep doesn't sometime stretch Child's mannerisms to comedic lengths, but such moments come across as the result of a certain joie de vivre of playing the character, rather than as mere mockery. Stanley Tucci also comes out to wonderful effect playing Paul. The combination of Tucci and Streep really bring the movie to a new level. I was less happy with the Julie duo. Chris Messina and Amy Adams' roles are also played well, although their hum-drum 30 something lives with Sex-in-the-City-style voice-overs are clearly overshadowed by the other larger than life play. But such overshadowing is not entirely irredeemable: the dialogue between Julie and Eric occasionally provides a useful counterbalance to the Childs, and provide brief moments of rest as the plot develops.

The contrast between Julie and Julia is the main motif of the movie, and it leads a viewer to consider the similarities and differences between these two worlds, and to possibly make judgments between them. I should lay my cards on the table here: if there is a conflict between Julie Powell and Julia Child, I'll certainly side with Julia. Not only was she a chef of the very first rank, but she has had a remarkable influence over American cooking. I think it's safe to say that no chef in the middle part of the last century can claim to have the kind of influence over the world that Julia Child had when she came on the scene. Yes, there were arguably more famous chefs throughout the period: chefs who perhaps are more creative and who develop more complicated recipes: Alain Chapel comes to mind, as does Ferran Adrià, and Alain Ducasse. But what marked Julia as unique and especially compelling is that her cuisine was not meant to be appreciated by the few and the wealthy, but to be genuinely available to everyone who would take the time to learn how to properly cut carrots, and to pay attention to the sounds of the frying pan.

For me the disorienting thing about this film was the role of Julie Powell: the movie emphasizes the similarities between her life and Julia's. Both women were uncertain what to do with their time, and found solace and happiness through cooking. The movie makes a big deal about this connection, and there is an effort to coordinate the two story lines, and to show a real connection between the two women. But as I watched the movie, a more critical comparison was evident from the very beginning. The truth of the matter is that Julie and Julia were very different people, and it's entirely possible that, had they met, they would not get along at all. It's either a testimony to the writer's and director's care, or to their neglect that this alternate storyline manages to emerge so forcefully alongside the main narrative. Julia, after all, was a perfectionist who attended the best cooking school in the world, and then spent her time studying with the greatest chefs, collaborating on many cookbooks, and transforming American cooking. Julie merely cooked 524 recipes from a cookbook in the course of a year, and ended up writing a successful blog and book as a result. Amy Adams attempts to do a convincing version of Julie, and actually manages to develop a very believable character. But the further question of what the character of Julie adds to the narrative remains.

For better or worse, I don't think the movie ever really comes to terms with this question. You can see this result as either avoiding an obvious issue, or intentionally ending with an open question. The movie does play with the gimmick of the contrast between being Julia and being a blogger writing about Julia, but does little to explain why Julia was unhappy with Powell's blog. Yet, there are some obvious reasons one can think of for Julia's dissatisfaction: in the end Julia Child was an extremely good chef who had to work hard over the course of years to attain her success, and here was an amateur cook getting a lot of attention because she could merely simulate the outward appearance of these efforts by following a book of recipes. The movie essentially punts on this question by having Eric tell Julie that Julia's opinion doesn't matter.

But perhaps it does. One can argue that there is an even deeper distortion at play in the way the movie portrays Julie. Throughout the movie, Julia Child's recipes are portrayed as gourmet cooking challenges: difficult recipes that Julie Powell manages to conquer. But this haute cuisine portrayal distorts an essential aspect of Julia Child's approach to cooking: it's inherently practical. For a sense of this practical nature, consider what Julia Child writes in her introduction to The Way to Cook:

Even if you're working all day, why buy Chinese take-out food, or frozen dinners, or eat at a fast-food joint when you can make a fresh, informal home-cooked meal even in a minuscule kitchen — and you will know exactly what you are eating. Pour out a glass of wine, and while you're gossiping about the day and trimming the fish fillets, a big pot of water can be set to boil for skinning the tomatoes and blanching the green beans. Perhaps you'll get some help snapping the ends of those beans and preparing the salad greens, too. While the fish has its short sojourn in the oven, you're all but ready for dinner and everyone is refreshed and happy. Dessert can be cheese and fruit, or ice cream or sherbet from the freezer, and you've an easy, satisfying meal.

Provided that one reads this paragraph with adequate respect for Chinese cooking, this is exactly the right attitude to have to transform cooking into an enjoyable activity. The idea that Julia's recipes are some sort of esoteric challenge loses this fundamental philosophy. Unlike Ducasse, Trotter, or Keller, everything Julia did was eminently practical. If she gives a recipe for a complicated dish like the de-boned duck that Julie finishes her year with, it's a complicated recipe, but you can be assured that it's the simplest, most practical version of that recipe out there, with just enough flourish to make it tasty. I think this is something that Julia Child learned better than many of her successors: French cooking is at its heart not an esoteric, complicated sort of cuisine, but it's in fact the product of a few centuries of very practically-minded chefs making the most of what was available to them. One might even argue that the heart of French cooking is poor people's food: the reason French cooking produced such elaborate dishes with aspics and roasted innards, and dishes with blood as a key ingredient is that these were precisely the ingredients that poor people could afford. (Cf. Anthony Bourdain's episode of No Reservations on France "Why the French Don't Suck.") Hence, there is this continuum of French cooking that I think much of American cooking after the advance of fast-food has come to lack. (There are interesting exceptions, of course, like pockets of the Appalachia and the Bayou.) To me this sort of practical cooking is at the very heart of what is best about French cuisine. This is what Lulu Peyraud was all about, and I think this is what Julia Child is all about too.

Lest this e-mail sound too serious, I finish with an ode. Julia Child in many places talks about how perfect a trout or sole meunière is (Interestingly, in The Way to Cook they both fall under the same master recipe), and the movie makes a point of showing this realization in one of the very first scenes. Hence, after watching the movie I had to cook the classic dish following Julia's recipe. The experience, and the above reflections on practical cooking, leads me to write the following poem.

Ode to Trout Meunière.

If you are hungry, have no fear,
Look only to the noble trout meunière.
For the price of a burger or a Happy Meal,
It offers the prospect of a much bigger thrill,
One part flour, and many parts fish,
clarified butter is the only twist;
Add some parsley, pepper and salt,
And your dinner has instant clout.
And if your fish is extra fine,
Even a lemon is a waste of time;
Not the most complicated dish, I confess,
But many a king has been fed on less.

Venetian Night Dinner Party

Throughout the past few years I have tried to present the menus from my more important dinner parties. On the 25th of July I had one of my largest dinner parties, with 11 people making reservations, and 9 people attending. Since it was Venetian night in Chicago, all the courses were traditional recipes from families and restaurants in the Veneto, except that I wandered into neighboring Emiglia-Romagna for the secondi. The menu for the night was as follows.

Antipasti: while serving the antipasti we briefly watched the parade of boats from my windows.

• Olive fritte: Really one of the easiest dishes I've cooked. You take olives (some stuffed with garlic), and thoroughly dry them, cover them with egg and breadcrumbs, chill them for an hour and then pan fry them.
• Scampi in saor alla Veneziana served with Ferran Adrià's Inedit beverage in celebration for my friend Mark and Kim's recent wedding in Spain. This was one of the more elaborate dishes, and it took three days to prepare: shrimp are fried in olive oil, then onions are fried until golden, and pine nuts are toasted in an empty frying pan. Everything is combined with raisins, sugar, vinegar and wine, and chilled for 1-2 days.
• As an amuse-bouche I decided to have a spontaneous blind taste test between a very good 2 year old Parmigiano-Reggiano at $25 a pound and the $32 a pound Parmigiano-Reggiano delle Vacche Rosse, made from the traditional red cows of Northern Italy. The result: of the nine people 6 preferred the $25, and three of us preferred the Vacche Rosse product. Kudos to Rachel for not only accurately distinguishing the two cheeses, but for providing a perfect analytical description of both. I should have written it down, since a cheesemonger could not have done better.

Primi Piatti: 

• Gnocchi con burro nocciola. This is a dish I've served many times, and it is one of the only dishes that I don't make an effort to vary the recipe on each occasion I serve it: homemade gnocchi covered in butter and sage, served with lemon and fresh Parmigiano-Reggiano Cheese, why mess with perfection? I did, however, use the cheese of each individual's choice from the amuse-bouche.

Piatti Speciale: It is a special course, since usually Italian meals have two main courses, but I couldn't resist including another Venetian favorite.

• Risi e bisi. One of the most traditional dishes in Venice, somewhere between a pea soup and a pea risotto. I used two boxes of Campanini Vialone Nano rice, pureéd pea pods pressed through food mill, and pancetta and homemade vegetable broth. I think this was the best Risi e bisi I've made to date.

Secondi Piatti: Before the secondi we went to see the firework show, and returned to have the main course.

• Tracotto de maiale al latte. This was an experimental dish from Emiglio-Romagna. I've actually never braised a beef in milk before: most of the Italian dishes I know have wine bases instead. The dish was ridiculously simple: all you have is a pork shoulder, onions, milk and something to fry the ingredients in. I used my fish cooker for the meat. After the pork cooks for about three hours, you rapidly reduce the milk until you get a thick brown sauce. To keep up with the Parmigiano-Reggiano theme, I also grated cheese over the top.

Cotorni:

• Insalata di radicchio con acciughe. I like to bill this as the Venetian forerunner to the now ubiquitous Caesar salad. It is made from the bitter and nutty radicchio. The pièce de résistence were my homemade croutons, which were the best croutons I've ever made.

Dolci e Frutta: The desserts for the evening were both from the Veneto, but are dishes that are more typically served in fall or winter. Nevertheless, I thought they were nice treats on this night in July, since a passing rain storm added a certain coolness and crispness to the air.

• Pinza de polenta alla Veneziana: Venetian corn cakes with raisins, pine nuts, figs, grappa, and ricotta and vanilla, among other ingredients. It was coated in Amaretti di Saronno crumbs. And as an added treat, Vani brought an unopened bottle of grappa she purchased on a recent trip to Venice, which went perfect with the grappa-infused dessert.
• Ciliege cotte nel vino rosso: Washington cherries poached in a bottle of red wine with cloves, cinnamon, and lemon zest. I actually bought my first cherry stoner to make this.

Natural Waterfalls in Downtown Chicago

Chicago is a beautiful city. In addition to the wonderful skyline, the lake, and the parkland, we have a number of remarkable water fountains and examples of water art. Notable examples of water art include the famous Buckingham Fountain by Jacques Lambert, the large waterfall on the Lake Side of the McCormick Center, the new Crown Fountain by Jaume Plensa at Millennium Park, and the wonderful park around the AON center. They are all beautiful and worth visiting. But, having grown up in the mountains of Vermont I like to see water with a little less intentional design every now and then. There are no interesting rivulets or streams in the downtown area, and one hardly expects to find little natural treasures like an unexpected waterfall.

Waterfall 1 (Double-click picture to play video)

The other day while walking to meet some friends at a pub, however, I discovered that Chicago actually does have naturally occurring waterfalls. Perhaps "naturally occurring" is misleading. What I'm talking about is when water runs off the roads and highways and then descends into the labyrinth of streets that lie beneath. Downtown Chicago, unlike downtown New York or San Francisco, has complicated multi-level streets beneath the apparent street level. We rarely hear about these spaces, except when there are related construction accidents, but many people use these streets to commute; most of the major buildings in downtown Chicago use them for deliveries and trash removal, and our homeless populations use them to avoid the rain and bad weather. It's a very interesting underbelly of the city. When I first moved here, walking down in this underbelly made me uncomfortable: not only are the spaces not designed to be pedestrian friendly, but also you'll observe homeless people peeing on the streets, or if you're in an automobile, you'll observe concrete walls passing a few feet from your vehicle at 50 mph. None of these are particularly choice-worthy experiences. But, in my subsequent time living in downtown Chicago I've come to appreciate these sometimes magnificent multi-story spaces with their rust-covered columns, walls of concrete, and visible girders. They are intentionally designed spaces, lit 24 hours a day, and some are even adorned with architectural highlights, but even so, they are the sort of thing likely to be completely ignored by tourists and tour guides.

Waterfall 2 (Double-click picture to play video)

Because they are ignored, they're not always maintained in pristine condition. And it is when these systems break down during heavy rains that some of the more remarkable waterfalls in Chicago make their ephemeral appearances. It would be fun to see a collection of more of them, but I include three waterfalls from the night on my way to the pub here. Each one transfers large quantities of water, and persists for a while even after the rainstorms end. But it is sometimes difficult to see design errors as beautiful things. And there is no doubt that some of these are design or construction errors: they are eroding girders, damaging streets, and can potentially damage automobiles (see the video with the SUV below). But I like to think of these as naturally-occurring waterfalls, manifestations of nature taking back its great Metropolis. In that light they can be examples of unexpected beauty that refuse to be tamed.

Waterfall 3 (Double-click picture to play video)
This individual might want to park the SUV in a different locale!

Sarah Palin as Mad Hatter

In a recent Slate article Dahlia Lithwick argues that far from being the cause of her downfall, the media actually was Sarah Palin's greatest strength: in their efforts to create coherent arguments, they were constantly challenged to make sense of her seemingly nonsensical pronouncements. This was nowhere more evident in her resignation speech. In the course of Dahlia's argument she compares Sarah Palin to the Mad Hatter.

I find it interesting that people often describe Sarah Palin as a Mad Hatter because of her incoherent arguments. The interesting thing is that in Alice in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter is an amusing and entertaining character. (If there is any doubt, look who's playing him in the upcoming movie version). We are amused by the fictional character in part because there is some wit displayed at the tea party, but I think it's also because the Mad Hatter is so out of the ordinary. Our political system, for good or for bad, tends to value the ordinary: people who stick to the scripts, use the same talking points, and give the sense of order and coherence. No party has made more formidable use of the ordinary than the GOP. In contrast, Palin often did none of this, and so just like the Mad Hatter, people found the unusualness entertaining. It also enabled her to voice opinions that were just false or unjustified in a way that some supporters probably wish they could. And she could always pass the fault on to the media. So, if there is any mystery about Sarah Palin's popularity, it seems wise to look to Alice. Although, when it comes to the idea of Palin actually governing something, one feels that Alice was probably right, "I think you might do something better with the time . . ." It seems that Palin finally agrees.

Bach and Emotion

Today there is no question that Johann Sebastian Bach has become a part of our classical canon: his works are regularly performed, most people can probably recognize the vocal lines of his most famous chorales, and probably everyone who collects classical music recordings has a CD of Bach laying around, or at least a few MP3s that they play from time to time.

Despite the fact that nearly everyone can recognize Bach’s name, I still think that his reputation hasn’t completely emerged from the onslaught of Romanticism. Romantic music, by which I mean the classical music that appeared from roughly the time of Beethoven to the early twentieth century, has forever changed the landscape of the way that we listen to music, and what we expect from it. In a previous blog post, I remembered being in a master class for the piano in which no one except me even liked playing Bach on the piano. Everyone wanted to express the passion of Beethoven, or impress everyone else with the fast piano techniques required to play Chopin, Rachmaninoff, or Scriabin, and thought of Bach’s music as a boring collection of technical exercises. Although I think everyone in that class was wrong – they were expressing a far too limited conception of what Bach is about – it underscored for me the fact that Bach is often misunderstood, and often for quite specific reasons. The truth is that while there are plenty of opportunities for expressing emotion in Bach’s music, the way that you express it is very different from the way emotion is expressed in Romantic music.

Specifying these differences is actually not an easy exercise, but I want to take a few minutes today to explore this. I think the most fruitful place to begin talking about Bach is through the thing that he was most famous for in his day: his organ skills. Although he was modest in his conception of his own abilities – he famously once said that anyone could be as good an organist as he was with enough hard work¹ – the truth is that there were very few people who could match his skills in a time when playing the organ was taken very seriously. Legend has it that the one time when he had scheduled a competitive organ recital, at the behest of others, he so terrified his competitor, that the poor man ran away rather than face a musical dual with Bach.²

Now, it takes a unique skill set to play an organ at Bach’s level. In some ways organs can be forgiving when compared to other instruments. Unlike a piano, you can strike a key in a variety of different ways in order to get the same tonal effect, you can hold notes indefinitely if you’re feeling lazy, and you don’t have to worry about using the tips of your fingers to control dynamics. But on a number of parameters an organ can be absolutely unforgiving. If your rhythms are not perfect, the sound you will produce will become a dreadful mess, and if you hold a wrong note, it will produce a screeching sound that even a cat in heat couldn’t match. Compare this to the vocal music of Palestrina or Monteverdi: in this music you actually could sing a wrong note or mess up a rhythm and still sound reasonably OK; all you would have to do is wobble your pitch slightly or change the dynamics. But you have far less opportunity to do this with an organ fugue. Hence, a composer for an organ has to put extra care into the construction of chords, and pay particular attention to the way the different rhythms interact.

Bach’s polyphonic music seems to me to be a natural outgrowth of an organ’s demands. Two of the key characteristics of his works are the interestingly complex rhythmic structures, and the way all the harmonies often fit together perfectly. Compare this to Romantic music: although it is true that a performance of a symphony has to have nearly perfect synchronization, and most people can recognize when a wrong note is played, nevertheless, by varying the tonal qualities, it seems to me that Romantic music is far less demanding harmonically. And when we turn to later music with 13th chords and 15th chords, it seems clear that we are more willing to accept dissonances for their own sake. To be sure, there are lots of dissonances in Bach, and he has chords that can rival some of the most complex chords in Stravinsky, but in general they occur less frequently, in part, I imagine, because they would not sound as good on Bach’s main instrument. I think that Berg wrote some of the most beautiful music out there, but just try playing it on an organ with all the stops out, and you have a mess.

Discussing the organ leads me to one of the most crucial questions in Bach interpretation: the independence of his voice lines. Instructors frequently observe that it is important to keep Bach’s voices separate in a way that is very different from the music of subsequent eras. As it is normally described, this requires pianists to think “horizontally” rather than “vertically”: to pay more attention to how each voice develops independently rather than to emphasize the chordal structures. The best interpreters such as Rosalyn Tureck have inventive techniques to achieve this end. Forcing a pianist who is used to playing Chopin and Beethoven to do this will be a painful enterprise, and it is not at all obvious initially where the emotion is going to come in. Unlike music from other eras Bach doesn’t let you express emotion by simply playing louder and faster.

While there is a lot of truth to saying that one should play Bach horizontally rather than vertically, this independence can often be taken too far. It is worth remembering, that perhaps more than any other composer, Bach could keep two opposing forces in perfect balance: although he writes individual parts that are independent, and have profound vocal qualities of their own, he is always acutely aware of the collective effect he is producing with all the voices. I take this to be one of the most fruitful products of his time on the organ, and it appears throughout the music he wrote for other instruments. Anyone who has played even a smattering of Bach’s keyboard works can recognize this, because in almost all of his works there are moments when the voices come together and produce a collective sound that is very different from what one would expected from the individual melodic lines alone. Consider the effect of the entrance of the second voice in the second Invention, or the wonderful counterpoint that occur in bars 10-12 of the First Invention. My favorite moments of these effects are in bar 17 in the first Fugue of the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier (Something Rosalyn Tureck brings out to great effect in her recording), and the haunting melody in the 17th bar and following of the last Fugue of that work (a moment Barenboim plays exceptionally well). This last work provides particular testimony to Bach’s ability to think in two directions at once: he almost miraculously pulls out a lyrical melody from what is ostensibly a 12-tone theme worthy of Schoenberg. If we turn to his choral works these moments are even more dramatic and obvious: consider the magnificent rhythms from the middle Coro of Aus der Teifen rufe ich, Herr, zu dir (BWV 131).

All this is to say that the best interpreters of Bach can keep the voices independent while acknowledging these moments of sublime beauty. Of course, there is a range of possible interpretations in any given work. For piano works, I tend to like the balance that Rosalyn Tureck achieves in the piano works rather than the remarkable independence that Gould can achieve. In vocal works, I’ve come to like the emphasis on the individual voices found in Rifkin and some of Fisher-Diskau’s recordings, if only because most recordings sound too monotonic.

I think this contrast between independent and collective action lies at the heart of what I find most powerful about Bach’s work. There are many composers who can manage to carry you through a broad range of emotional responses in the half hour that you give them. Some of our most beloved composers fall in this category: Beethoven was a masters of this in his piano and orchestral works, Schumann in his piano works, and composers such as Verdi and Puccini in their vocal works can write music that can put a tear in the eyes of the most stoic of listeners (especially if they are played well). But although it is a fool-hearted task to try to rank composers of this caliber, I would venture to say that except for the sphere of string quartets, and especially the late quartets of Beethoven, few of these composers can match Bach at his most powerful. Although I’m sure reasonable people will disagree with me on this, one of the reasons I think this is that at those climactic moments in Bach you can feel that intensity not only in the collective effect, but simultaneously in a different way in the conversational interactions between each individual voice. And in fact, the emotional quality comes less from the individual dynamics of the individual musicians, and more from the abstract relations between the members and their relations to the overall monophonic effects. The clarity of the architectonics of the work emphasizes the emotional power.

It is worth making a side note on string quartets, since it does seem peculiar that they form an exception to the generalizations above. Actually, I think that there is a lot of similarity between some of Bach’s music such as works in the Art of the Fugue, and the best string quartets, such as the late quartets of Beethoven. To be sure, there are important differences between these two composers, but in the music of both, there are moments when each respective master does a fantastic job of both producing complicated collective musical effects while still giving each voice independence. I suggest that the uniform quality of the sound of a string quartet, in which all the sound is produced by prolonged contact with strings, finds a parallel in the uniformity of sound of a Baroque organ, in which all the sound is produced by prolonged sound from pipes. The effect in both of these cases is to force a composer to devote more attention to counterpoint and collective harmonies. This also underscores the persuasiveness of Albert Schweitzer’s observation that Bach learned a lot about the melody of vocal lines from the Italian masters of the violin.³

The twin impulses of Bach to let each line sing with its own voice, while producing large-scale effects may ultimately explain why those students in my piano master class did not like Bach. Bach does express intense emotion, but you can’t produce it without first mastering the architectonic structure that forms the basis of the pieces, for that very structure serves as a tool for emotional expression. Consequently, it takes a lot of work in order to get to the point of being able to express emotion in Bach: a performer can’t simply rely on the easy way of expressing emotional intensity, by simply playing faster and louder. The emotion comes from within the structure of the music itself.

Footnotes

1. ^ Forkel Johann Nikolaus, Johann Sebastian Bach: His Life, Art, and Work, translated by Charles Sanford Terry. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920. pp. 45ff.

2. ^ Schweitzer, Albert, J.S. Bach, translated by Ernest Newman in 2 Volumes. New York: Dover Publications, 1966.v. I. p. 153)

3. ^ Schweitzer, Albert, J.S. Bach, translated by Ernest Newman in 2 Volumes. New York: Dover Publications, 1966. v. I pp. 196-198. Schweitzer infers this, but it seems reasonable.