<p>Without getting into who does what, creativity and innovation go hand and hand, and there are cultural reasons why certain approaches work in terms of promoting creativity and innovation more then others.</p>
<p>Using the example of the book’s approach, the problem is that creativity and innovation take, for lack of a better word, a willingness to go beyond what is ‘important’, it takes looking at things, not as a series of rules on how to do it ‘the right way’ but a path with many approaches. Chua’s approach assumes something fundamentally against creativity, it assumes that there is only one right way and it is a narrow, rigid path, defined by ‘never wasting time’ and ‘doing the important things’ and excelling at them.</p>
<p>The history of innovation and creativity is full of people and generally it is not people like that, people who grow up with ideas like that may very well be successful but it likely is going to be status quo. Innovation and creativity come from being able to look beyond that and think about things most people don’t. </p>
<p>Okay, so what are the cultural aspects that can drive creativity? Here are some:</p>
<p>-A focus on the individual is critical, more importantly respect for the individual. In cultures that are group based, where, for example, society trumps the individual, it can be hard to create, because as an individual you aren’t basically allowed to go there. China is facing that big time, when you have a government of any kind that limits access to information, that is paranoid about ‘order’, creativity is a dangerous thing. It also breeds hierarchy, where you do as the boss says, and so forth (think of Chua totally obliterating what her kids want to do, with almost everything</p>
<p>-a culture with a healthy disrespect for authority, people willing to tell ‘experts’ and the like where to go with themselves. My father used to call that respecting the mavericks, and that is something some cultures have done a good job with. I have a pretty good example of this, from a while ago. The lean production techniques Japanese companies made famous require, among other things, employees willing to speak up and point out errors and problems. Akio Morita, the head of Sony, was asked if he worried about Sony TV sets being made in the US (San Diego then), about US workers screwing up the works, and he basically laughed. He said that if anything, the US workers were better then the Japanese ones, because an assembly line worker in the US, given the chance, was not afraid to challenge something they felt was designed badly, challenge an engineer, which in Japan would be unthinkable…challenge an engineer with a college degree? No way…</p>
<p>-The idea of second and third chances, and also that failing is often the path to succeeding. When you have a culture, that is kind of like what Ms. Chua et al are part of, that fears failure, that does everything it can to guarantee success, by staying with time tested formulas for success, a narrow path, etc, it may achieve success financially, but what does the kid learn? That failure is this horrible thing, that if you fail at something you try it is the end of the world, that it is shameful and so forth. </p>
<p>How many scientists and engineers have had multiple failures before hitting pay dirt (and how many products came out of failure? Polymer plastics and the post it note came from failures). Edison in his search for new things failed a lot more then he succeeded, Henry Ford’s first company went under…and so forth. </p>
<p>If you are afraid to fail, you also are afraid to take risks. </p>
<p>-Creation and innovation take creating new ways to do things, come up with what Richard Feynman called “a different set of tools”. When you have rote teaching, that teaches 'this is the way, do it this way, it is the only way" and you get evaluated on doing it the one, true way, how can that person ever innovate or be truly creative, when they are told anything but this one way is wrong (btw, US schools aren’t necessarily a hotbed for this kind of thing necessarily, lot of dead wood, stupid teachers who are just as rigid), but the culture here is, we respect the person who builds the better mousetrap, while in other cultures it is like “but the old mousetrap has worked for centuries, why change it?”. I ran into this in college, where I had foreign trained TA’s taking points off exams because I took a different approach to solving a problem, or doing things like skipping basic alegebra steps that were obvious, because they were taught “you show every line, you show every step, no questions asked” (I generally got the points back after talking to the professor). </p>
<p>I have noted before that the academia of Einsteins day was quite that rigid, and that had he stayed in it, after getting his PHd, he probably wouldn’t have rocked the world of physics…he would have been pretty much forced to stay in the bounds of what was ‘the truth’, of maxwell and newton, and wouldn’t have been able to dream.</p>
<p>-cultures that value nothing unless it ‘produces value’ also have trouble with creativity and innovation, which often comes out of ‘unproductive’ work. Some great things were created by accident, by people ‘playing around’, people dreaming or doing something like drumming or cracking safes. </p>
<p>-cultures that readily adopt the ideas of other places tend to be more creative and innovative. As rough as it can be at times, the US, because it is not homogeneous, because it has always kind of taken bits and pieces from all over, because it values oddballs and weirdos other countries would probably put in a mental hospital or otherwise ignore them, has sparks flying from all over. Has nothing to do about ethnicity, some of the great breakthroughs in science have happened from people from all over the world working in the US, Asian, non asian, whatever…on the other hand, if they were working in their native country, they very well may never have been able to do what they did, because the environment was too constricting.</p>
<p>My problem with all this is if people look at the accomplishments of people raised by Chua and her type in a one dimensional world, look at the track record of academic success, and whatever, and not ask the real question “what did they really do? What did they create? What did they leave behind?”. You can do well in school, and get that great job, and make a lot of money, but is that the only kind of success? Is an investment banker who made millions worth more then the poet or musician? Is the person who discovers a cure for cancer, who probably isn’t making a lot, worth more then Bernie Madoff or Warren Buffet?</p>
