The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson (ISBN 978-1-4221-0282-4) says on the front “If you can’t read it and come up with at least a minor Mona Lisa or two, you’re not trying”. Pretty enticing, huh? Well, so far, it hasn’t done that for me. Am I not trying? Well, actually, as Johansson shows, just reading about something isn’t enough. You have to turn your reading into actions.
The front cover quote is kind of misleading – this is an inspiring book but it certainly isn’t a “how to do it” kind of book.
The Medici Effect is an exploration of a single, simple concept – the intersection. The author’s claim is that innovation and creativity flourishes in the intersections. What intersections? Where different disciplines come together in the same team or project; where cultures meet; where languages meet. This concept reminds me strongly of the network science ideas which I read about in the fabulously inspiring “Linked“.
I think it’s very true. Some of my most creative times come around my visits to France and Japan. I spend most of my holiday leave in France and I love to go to the bookshops and the newsagents. The French publish utterly different magazines and books from the kind I find anywhere else in the world, and there is something about their perspective which I find so different from the one I find in the UK. In fact, for me, there’s something about reading French which is stimulating and exciting. I also visit Japan a couple of times a year and there the culture, the architecture, the contrasts of the spiritually ancient and the gaudy new sitting side by side, the design ethos focussed on transience and the constant dynamism of change, I find totally inspiring. When I go to Japan, I teach, with the aid of an interpreter which slows down my presentation style and gives me much more time to reflect. I come up with a new way to communicate something every time I go there.
The Medici Effect is what happens when you bring together diverse influences, and Johansson makes the claim that creativity and innovation is, in the final analysis, something that happens randomly. He gives the example of Edgar Allen Poe, who used to randomly choose three words from the dictionary and try to tie them together to make a new story.
As well as the valuing of difference and diversity which challenges and shifts our perspectives and stimulates our creative flow, Frans Johansson recommends abundance. He gives the example of Joyce Carol Oates, who published 45 novels, 39 collections of stories, 8 poetry collections, 5 dramas and 9 essay collections in four decades.
I especially liked his point that to be an innovative person you can’t just come up with ideas, you have to come up with ideas which are valuable and which are taken up by society or by other people. That seems so true to me. The truly creative people produce. They don’t just think. They do.
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