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Vive la Différence! |
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For the same reason Booz Allen & Hamilton recruits students pursuing non-business PhDs and more than half of McKinsey & Company's consultants lack an MBA--cross-pollination. Coming up with great, breakthrough ideas demands not just great quantities of ideas. The chances of blowing out the doors lies in employing the greatest possible diversity of ideators. The more diverse, the better. If you keep going to the same well, you keep getting the same water. Besides, "If Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos didn't need and MBA, some people wonder why they do, either," writes David Leonhardt in the New York Times. What's to wonder? Language was invented by illiterates. Music by people who had no training in music. James Burke in his monthly Scientific American column and PBS special, "Connections," traces the world's greatest creative breakthroughs back through a history of chance as well as intentional clashes of diverse and unrelated ideas and events. In her essay, "Carnatak Music and Hindustani Music a long history of cross-pollination," Shantha Benegal finds the same borrowing and trading of ideas in the history of Indian music that nurtured Western music, writing, "One can only conclude then that music is a two-way street; actually a crossroads, where several influences constantly act, react, and interact." Yesterday's two-way street has become a vast, global web. The Beatles opened the eyes of the popular-music world when they fertilized their music with the rhythms and instruments of India as delivered by Ravi Shankar. Today music from anywhere in the world is a click away. The word foreign should be stricken from the vocabulary of any creative person who wants to make a difference. |
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Don't take my word for it. Dig deeper. |
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