M.004 From Bathrooms to Boardrooms
What strategy can learn from a urinal
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In April 1917, an unknown artist named Richard Mutt submitted an artwork to the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artist in New York City. The rules of the society stated that all works would be accepted to the exhibition, as long as the artist paid a fee.
Despite having both submitted an artwork and paying the fee, Richard Mutt's contribution was not included in the main show. Or more correctly, it was there, but hidden so that no one could see it. And for good reason some might say, because his submission was a mass produced urinal with the inscription "R.Mutt 1917", placed on a pedestal with its back facing down.
According to the evaluation committee, "the Fountain", which the artwork was called, "may be a very useful object in its place, but its place is not an art exhibition, and it is by no definition, a work of art."
Today, "the Fountain" is recognized as one of the most important artworks of the 20th century, and Marcel Duchamp, the artist who hid behind the pseudonym R.Mutt, is considered among the most influential artists of all time.
But how could a urinal, submitted to an art exhibition, hidden from sight, end up having such a tremendous impact? And is there anything strategy can learn from this story?
The genius of Duchamp
A key reason that Duchamp and his Fountain had such and impact on the arts was that this work directly challenged a fundamental assumption in art at the time, and hit a chord while doing so.
Duchamp challenged the assumption that the importance of art wasn’t in the craftsmanship of the artist. His claim was that the value of art could solely arise from the conceptual ideas and choices of the artists.
Duchamp did not produce the urinal, he simply chose to use a urinal for his artwork, and then he went to a sanitary equipment store in New York and chose one to buy. The only physical addition he did was to add the inscription "R. Mutt 1917".
Anyone could have done this.
But only Duchamp did.
And that's where it starts to get interesting: Because what enabled Duchamp to do this, while the rest of the arts ran in a very different direction?
From bathroom to boardroom
Duchamp saw the world differently than most artists at the time. And this different perspective of what art was and could be, guided him to look for solutions in different places than most other artists.
Most of his artist peers looked for solutions within the confinement of a canvas. Duchamp questioned the frame. And once questioned, it made sense to look for solutions in a sanitary store.
Turning to strategy, the question is if the market space have its own urinals. Valuable offerings, assets or processes, hidden in plain sight, just waiting for someone to see them as something else?
The answer is yes.
Just as Duchamp's art was driven by a unique overarching artist-specific vision of what art could be, the strategic choices of innovative entrepreneurs or leaders are also guided by overarching, firm-specific belief systems. These overarching beliefs are often referred to as firms' corporate, entrepreneurial or value theories (as I will call them here).
A value theory is the business world's version of the scientific theory. In the words of Zenger (2016), it is "(...) a logic that managers repeatedly use to identify from among a vast array of possible asset, activity, and resource combinations those complementary bundles that are likely to be value creating for the firm".
Since the number of potential combinations of choices and decisions in both arts and business is just far too large to be optimized mathematically, value theories provide a simple and elegant solution to an immensely complex problem. They provide the criteria for which decision makers can choose the most relevant menu of choices, and decide which alternative on this menu best fits their overarching belief. This makes value theories incredibly useful as a guiding light for strategic decisions related to both opportunities and constraints.
Beyond the obvious
Having a value theory does, however, not guarantee you neither success nor innovative capabilities. As a value theory is an overarching belief system that guides our search for solutions, all of us have them. Whether explicit or implicit.
When some people or firms manage to be more innovative than others, its often because they have a value theory that differs from those of others. A theory that cause them to look for solution elsewhere than most. Just like Marcel Duchamp’s theory of art did back in the early 1900s.
But different is not enough to be truly innovative. The value theories that end up shaking up an industry and a field do more than that. They also tend to challenge established assumptions of that area.
Duchamp challenged the assumption that artwork had to be made by an artist, Jobs and Wozniak challenged the assumption that computers was something to be found in offices and not in homes. But both Duchamp and Apple took it one step forward and found solutions to the problems that had to be tackled for their alternative assumptions to be true.
The beauty of value theories that challenge established assumptions is that they unlock completely new opportunity spaces. When Duchamp rejected the necessity of craftsmanship for the arts, he opened up an entirely new area of artistic expression. Suddenly artists could look for ideas and solutions in very different places than before. When Apple rejected the assumption that computers were just for offices, they created new ways of thinking about what computing products could be.
So it seems that a solution to creating innovative strategies is straight forward: Just formulate a unique, novel and contrarian value theory that reject established assumptions, and success will follow. For example by using the brilliant value lab framework. Right?
There is only one problem: doing so is much harder than it seems.
Genius start dumb
Explaining the artistic brilliance of Marcel Duchamp and the unique product vision of Steven Jobs is easy.
In retrospect.
But coming up with a novel, unique and contrarian theory with high value creation potential is anything but easy. And finding good solutions to the problems that has to be solved for the theory to hold, is often even harder.
What makes all this hard is this word contrarian. Seeing the world differently than most, getting others to accept your unique and contrarian belief, and convince yourself and others to put money and effort behind it, that is anything but easy. After all, most of the time the many are more right than the few. Successful innovative strategies are the exceptions to this rule.
Paradoxically, this is also where the high potential value is created.
Genius often starts with dumb.
The problem is, so does dumb.
And because its very difficult to separate the two a priori, the genius theories have a clear tendency to be vastly underpriced early on relative to their potential.
Creativity, the forgotten friend
While the world often fails to recognize genius early, the deeper question for each of us that work with strategy lies upstream: how are contrarian theories born in the first place? What kind of mindset allows someone to see differently, to construct a value theory few others would have come up with?
That’s where creativity enters the picture. The often forgotten piece of the strategy puzzle.
In art, and especially in Marcel Duchamp's branch of contemporary art, the ingredient that gets the most attention is often the idea and the creative component of a piece. In arts, creativity is celebrated, mystified and associated with greatness.
In business, where uniqueness is a holy grail, novel ideas and creativity should intuitively hold similar weight. But they don’t.
In neither academic- nor practitioner strategy circles do people celebrate and mystify creativity in the same way as in art. This is not because strategy people have fully understood where novel ideas come from or how to generate them. It is because academics and practitioners have been too busy thinking of other things.
Instead of focusing on understanding how novel and unique ideas can be generated, strategy scholars and business people alike have traditionally devoted most of their attention to understand how a firm can create and maintain a competitive advantage based on ideas that are already there. And using the strategic analysis toolbox to do so.
The paradox
This points to a beautiful paradox: While novel ideas and the creative processes that generate them are key explanatory variables for success in business, the standard strategy toolbox is weak on questions related to how novel ideas can be created, or how creativity can be integrated with the existing analytical tools of strategic analysis.
This has improved somewhat lately with increased focus on innovation, but both academic- and practical strategy would benefit from turning up the volume on creativity, playfulness and imagination to reflect the importance of novel ideas for success in business.
Rory Sutherland, chairman of the marketing agency Ogilvy, reportedly said that creatives need to go to rational people for approval. And that it never goes the other way.
Maybe it should go the other way more often when crafting new strategies? Think about how different our approach to strategy might be if we allocated the same energy to creative thinking as we currently do to analysis?
Instead of always starting with internal and external strategic analysis, we could try to start with imagination. Instead of beginning with positioning, we might begin with identifying and challenging key assumptions. Strategic analyses would still matter, but as a sanity check of the outcome of creative processes rather than something that constrain them.
Its time to get weird
In the end, both art and strategy are about making choices that leads to the creation of value. And both art and strategy widely accept that having a novel, unique and contrarian view to the world is a key to challenge establish assumptions, and unlock innovative successes.
But while art has fully embraced creativity as a key ingredient to this process, strategy has long forgotten its artistic roots.
Luckily, creativity has recently started to find it's way back into strategy. But it's strength is not as replacement of analysis, but as a complement.
Because just like Duchamp's urinal became a masterpiece by challenging established assumptions about what art could be, tomorrow's business successes will come from those who challenge established assumptions of today. Those who look dumb today, but not tomorrow. Those who find creative ways to make alternative realities true. And those who formulate robust strategies to released the uncovered potential.
So the question isn't whether we need more creativity in strategy. It's how we can integrate creativity with the analytical rigor that has served strategy so well over the years. So instead of always starting with the spreadsheet, maybe your next strategy should start in a sketchbook?