Future Perfect

by Robyn Williams

  2020 Sex-free holidays corner singles market.

  5500 Men and women become distinct species. (Again.)

  7. The Future of Innovation – Inventing the Future?

  Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

  – H.G. Wells

  David Bodanis landed at the airport in the US in the early 21st century, survived the formalities and caught a cab. The radio was on and he heard first news and then some music. At that point something peculiar struck him.

  His plane, a jumbo, had been designed in the 1960s; the taxi was really not much more than a car from way back plus gloss and widgets. The radio station hadn’t changed in style from the mid-1970s: raucous announcing, news and discs. The news itself covered the tribulations of the space shuttle, again decades old. Even the music following was good ol’ country and western, with mournful slide guitar and lyrics about dying dogs and fickle wives.

  Everything that he’d just done could have taken place nearly 40 years before.

  David is a friend of mine. He writes prize-winning books about the history of science-his latest, Electric Universe, picked up the Aventis Prize for best science book of the year in Britain. He, like me, is puzzled why we are not living in the space age (which began 50 years ago with Sputnik!,) but in Blade Runners, LA, a mixture of flash gear and squalid dysfunction. Trains crawl, planes are delayed, paper persists, machines break, drains block up, water leaks, tunnels fail and prime ministers hail from the 1950s. On the President of the United States I must remain silent.

  With so much smart theory on innovation, why are our lives not transformed rather than tricked up? I spend my life broadcasting news about the latest brilliant technological ideas and David writing books about their impact and the people who make them happen. Are we wrong? Is everyone else living in a Shining New Age? I think not.

  When I looked at the figures, it turned out that the heyday of innovation (in terms of patents per head of population) was in 1873 according to Jonathan Huebner of the Pentagon. The twentieth century slowed a bit and now, in the 21st century, innovation has dipped significantly. There are two reasons for this. First, the process of getting your idea or system up is tortuous: local rights, international rights, lawyers, manufacturing feasibilities… on and on. Second, there is a better payoff if you add a tiny twist to a proven product instead of going flat out to try to pull off a mega-innovation like an Internet or an iPod. I call this the Branson Effect.

  Richard Branson has accumulated several fortunes by adding a gloss to standard products: phones, plane travel, pop music, finance-standard fare to which he gives a Branson Tweak together with lots of grinning girls in semi-undress. Now he’s intending to borrow someone else’s spacecraft to launch cosmic tourism. Branson’s boast is that he has done all this unencumbered by tertiary education. We’ll come to that. (I do, however, applaud Sir Richard’s moves to support environmental innovation).

  A couple of years ago The Economist carried an editorial and devoted a section of the magazine to this effect. It demonstrated that the American food company Frito-Lay had made serious money by relaunching its corn chip with a curl in the corner instead of… well, flat. This meant consumers could now more easily scoop up a dollop of guacamole. Sales soared. The Economist asked whether making this simple, quick-return innovation was better than going to the expense of having scientists on staff doing in-house R &D. The magazine’s conclusion was that you could keep a bit of science-but outsource it.

  The point about innovation, as CSIRO chair Catherine Livingston makes clear, is that a transformative idea takes a lot of investment and time to realise. And, as soon as you’ve launched it-the Viagra, the CD, the laptop-everyone knows it’s a winner and jumps on the bandwagon. Your market kill does not last that long. Better twist a crisp-an incremental innovation.

  We live in an Incremental Society. Things creep, they don’t transform. Having avoided, just now, the mention of George W Bush, I must just mention the difference between the pin-point accuracy of the electronic wars our movies made much of in the 1980s and ‘90s and the utter shambles of warfare perpetrated by the world’s superpower in the new century. The Somme with lasers.

  What about the innovators? Richard Branson, as I have noted, left school at sixteen. He was unbesmirched by a university degree and boasts that it is one of the secrets of his success-no second thoughts about subtleties. It just so happens that half of the UK ’s billionaires are also, notably, not university products. In Australia the ratio is similar. The last time I looked, seven of our billionaires (Richard Pratt, Kerry Stokes, Gerry Harvey, Harry Triguboff et al.) had been to some kind of college while eight (Frank Lowy, James Packer, Stan Perron et al.) had not.

  Most of the mega innovations have, not surprisingly, come from men who went to university, even if some of them dropped out. So they gave us Windows, Google, the Internet and email. But mega is not predictable or quick enough to excite investors, and so the Branson Effect rules. The government tries to fill the gap. But another paradox is that rich countries manage to seem poor (the headline on the front page of my paper today proclaims ‘Our Maths Teaching Below India’s’). Thus I was leaked some preliminary figures by one of our state’s chief scientists. It showed Victoria and Queensland state governments investing ‘heavily’ in innovation ($620 million and $306 million respectively over nine or ten years) while the figure for New South Wales-the biggest, richest, flashiest state-was $10 million. Third World?

  I am not suggesting old-fashioned socialism with top-down funding using your taxes for governments to pick winners but, frankly, if innovation is not receiving sufficient private funding where is the money going to come from? Ali Baba? This question applies to most of the activities partially vacated by government since the 1970s: science, education, museums, public broadcasting, infrastructure. This is what John Kenneth Galbraith used to describe as private wealth and public squalor.

  What of the future? This is a tricky one because the historical perspective looks forbidding. There are two great instigators of innovation: disaster and war. I have mentioned in the Introduction how plague in the fourteenth century and thereafter preceded the Renaissance, Gutenberg (printing) and other revolutions in living. Innovation during war is obvious. The Second World War practically invented they way we live now, from space exploration to nuclear technology and materials. It is stunning to realise how quickly both nuclear weapons and penicillin were realised as products: barely four years from go to whoa! Compare the embarrassments of the International Space Station (decades), Wembley Stadium (years) and a cure for malaria (we keep waiting).

  War and disaster focus the effort. In times of greater calm, or when leaders insist on short-term achievement (early China and present-day Australia, for example), bright ideas are not fostered. Australia has seen a doubling of students in business courses since 2000, while we rank 29th in the world in maths and science studies according to the World Economic Forum. This places us very well to sell things in the future, but with nothing much of our own, apart from rocks and crops, to offer. As the WEF observes: ‘Today’s globalising economy requires countries to nurture pools of well-educated workers able to adapt to their changing environment.’ Our performance looks better among fifteen-year-olds, mainly in problem solving, but academically we remain on the B list. Think we’ll make it?

  What would the third way be, other than war or disaster, to focus our minds on innovation for the future? Two answers. The first is the very act of imagining how we might live in ten, twenty or thirty years’ time. This is an exercise any primary school child could (and has) tried. Schools, businesses, councils, governments, unions can all have a go. I well remember, when the miners went on their tragic strike in the 1980s in Margaret Thatcher’s UK, getting in touch with the miners’ union (my father had been an official in the 1940s and ‘50s) to ask whether they had any in-house information on the future of coal. Their answer was no; they responded on wages and conditions
only. They were reactive. The print unions in Britain had a similar antediluvian attitude to newspapers and in many ways deserved what Rupert Murdoch did to them.

  Picture the kind of future you would choose. Do it in simple, everyday scenarios, like what your house should look like, your road, your shopping centre or gym. Apply possible improvements, based on every science program you’ve ever seen or any science fiction book you’ve enjoyed, and create your dream. Enough dreamers and it could be realised!

  The second answer is to understand the environmental crunch we are now facing. It is not yet a disaster, but close. All the innovations we need, including your personal prudence and parsimony, are mostly ready. What we need is to get them in place. We have about ten years.

  It could be exciting. I am sure David Bodanis would agree.

  * * * *

  The Hunches of Nostradamus

  2008 Richard Branson launches new line of mobile phone covers which colour-shift automatically to match your frock.

  2209 Macquarie Bank buys top five Australian universities.

  2010 Graeme Clark develops bionic prostate.

  2011 Solar-driven water purification plant established in Adelaide. Serves 26.

  2012 Macquarie Bank buys CSIRO.

  2013 Spam causes 47 mobile phones to explode. Nokia announces filter.

  2014 Nabisco launches diet crisp (more you eat, more you lose). Makes $US2.5 billion…

  2015 Macquarie Bank sells CSIRO to Chicago syndicate, which on-sells it to China.

  2016 Nine Australian universities close. Seven become branches of Chinese campuses.

  2017 All light bulbs banned. Everything now illuminated by piped daylight.

  2018 Plug-in electric cars dominate world market. Branson launches Green Garages.

  2019 Self-cleaning suits offered to men worldwide. Most say they thought they did that anyway.

  2020 Implanted brain chip fixes Alzheimer’s.

  8. The Future of Work – Failing Upwards

  The three most useless things in life:

  Men’s tits, the Pope’s balls…

  And a vote of thanks for all the workers.

  When I was growing up we looked to a future in which machines did chores, robots maintained the household and people were free to sit around like ancient Greeks contemplating the meaning of life. Only the togas were missing.

  All this free time could also be spent playing in string quartets, making pottery or composing quatrains. Lots of sport also featured, naturally.

  When ‘leisure’ did turn up in the 1980s it was called unemployment. There were few pots and fewer poems. Since then work has grown like technology: it is messy, changeable, uncertain, fragmented and ruled by new kinds of bureaucrats: technocrats and human-resources people, the dreaded HRs.

  My own employment record is simple. I have had only one constant employer: the ABC. But I have had substantial contact with other organisations, many of which I’ve chaired (Australian Museum, Commission for the Future, NSW Peace Trust, National Council for Environmental Education).

  On only three occasions in 35 years has the ABC’s HR department contacted me. Once it was about a colleague’s RSI, once to read me the legalistic restrictions on business-class overseas travel (we qualified, but no one was going to pay) and once to attend a course on bullying. Straight after spending the compulsory three hours at the latter, a straightforward recitation of rights and (again) legal responsibilities, I attended a function at which I met a well-known TV reporter who told me that she had left the ABC in distress when it closed ranks around a bullying boss instead of fighting her cause. The most puzzling thing for me about HR people is that, in all the decades I have been in the building, none of them have thought to enquire how I am getting on. Are they like God, benignly watching from afar, not wishing to trouble my busy day but willing to step in should something flare, and leap to the rescue? I don’t believe in God.

  David Williamson has produced several disturbing plays about HR fascism and the psychopathology of many modern bosses. He has noticed the way the modern corporation has relinquished its ambition of the 1970s to go from the hierarchy of an army to the pluralism of an orchestra. The ranking would remain there but it would be devolved, honouring specialisation. The theory was that essential decisions should be centralised but all the rest handled at the coalface, among staff. Now we are back in the army. This is partly to do with the abolition of executive careers. No longer do you ‘come up’ through the Post Office, or David Jones, or the ABC, where girls and boys could once start delivering mail and end up running the joint. Nowadays executives are guns for hire and do not expect to stay more than five years in a company (running airports, national broadcasters or bean factories is taken to be much the same), and they become used to a five-stage assault on the status quo.

  First year, paint the walls purple (I’ve arrived!) and sack a third of the staff; second year, train up your newly hired executive force and jemmy your new plan through the system; third year, sack some more, fix some intercorporate alliances; fourth year, cope with bad results, blame government and international conditions, foreshadow plan B; fifth year, produce figures and charts showing results have been staggeringly good but more austerity is required. Adopt plan B: accept golden parachute.

  As managers become more itinerant, underlings become shiftless. Even in ABC-TV, where you would think jobs would be prized and not easily relinquished, there is a turnover that would shock even the English cricket team. My partner, Jonica Newby of Catalyst, finds that every time she returns from leave or a long recording trip half the staff are new. How do you build teams or loyalty in conditions like that?

  Students prepare for all this when young. Gone are the days when (especially arts) students lounged on lawns dreaming of…well, whatever noble things we 1960s students did dream of: Utopias, world peace, remedial massage (more likely beer, more beer and Jenny Lustgrove). Now students have three part-time jobs, call in to campuses for what they need, then shoot through. University bars are almost deserted.

  The managers also have new priorities: compliance. And compliance. I am usually grilled three times to justify a $240 trip to Melbourne. Why am I going? asks clerk No. 2 preparing to send my answers up several layers of determined executive scrutiny. ‘Why, to shag the choirboy I have secreted there,’ I want to reply. ‘Oddly enough, to record radio, as I’ve been doing for 35 years,’ I once answered. The clerk, who didn’t know me from Peter Foster, sent the form back.

  Managers are seen at 1. fare-well parties, 2. strike negotiations, 3. airport club lounges. Some are never seen by staff at all and are said to be shy. This is the strange world David Williamson has written about in plays such as Operator and Charitable Intent. Psychopathic bosses are encouraged by a top-down, ruthlessly competitive system because they are manipulators par excellence and can combine charm with lots of cod jargon and pseudo MBA guff. Their path to power is made easier in a world of short-term goals and high turnover. It seems unlikely, but it’s true, and worrying. On one occasion, following a Catalyst report on psychopathic bosses, a startled Geraldine Doogue, who has wide contact with executive Australia, asked whether we were really referring to all the chaps from the Forbes 500 List as megalomaniacs, and we replied, ‘Not at all.’ The villain in the piece could just as well run a mail room or a shoe shop as run the company.

  Dr John Clarke (no, not Fred Dagg, I’m being serious for a change) who has written about all this in Working With Monsters, estimates that 0.5 per cent of women and 2 per cent of men qualify as corporate psychopaths according to his definition-and they’ve never had a better time. Despite the current obsession with compliance, it is they who slide around systems by knowing their inner workings and by playing colleagues off against each other.

  The answer? Well, Dr Clarke doesn’t recommend therapy for the offenders. They’d just learn new tricks. I am convinced that old-fashioned devolution is the way forward. It is surprising, but shouldn’t be, how much workers know
about the breadth of their job and how both efficiency and creativity can be nurtured. It is also interesting to see how little the checks and rechecks fail to spot the fraudsters. In this age of bureaucracy sans frontières, companies still miss rorters hiring yachts on expenses for New Year’s parties and managers creaming hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions.

  Compliance can also be counterproductive. An example from outside the workplace: fear of paedophiles has generated an obscene list of regulations in the UK covering clowns at kids’ parties, Santa Claus and Scouts. The result is that parents are no longer content to allow their children to walk or bike to school. Predatory men might be hiding behind pillar boxes. As a result, children are driven to and fro. Apart from the green implications of this extra chauffeuring and the children’s lack of exercise, and even an undue fear of strangers, it now turns out that, for every child saved from a predator, three hundred are killed in car crashes. The price of vigilance can be greater than the gain.

  What of the future of work? Must it be a discontinuous patchwork of jobs, a gypsy-like lifetime of discontinuity? The answer is, yes, for the time being. And it is a terrible waste.

  * * * *

  The management model I like, being fond of animals, is the goose-flight-in-formation theory of the workplace. The goose flying in front is not the leader who sets the course. They all take turns in front and they all know where they are going. Those honks coming from the back of the V shape are simply to assure the lead bird that the gang are still there. Keep going, they say.

  After a while another goose takes over. Should one goose get exhausted and need to land, two other geese will accompany her, to oblige and protect.

  The reason they fly in a V formation is that the slight overlap with the next bird’s flight path saves energy by cancelling some of the air turbulence. The ‘energetic advantage’ could be as much as 50 per cent. A corporate equivalent of this goose theory of management is long overdue. The future depends on it.