The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures [Hardcover]

As Johansson carefully explains, this book is really not about the Medici family, although the community of creative people its members funded exemplifies all manner of exciting possibilities for collaborative productivity; nor is it really a "business book," although Johansson asserts -- and I wholly agree -- that there are lessons to be learned from that community which can be of substantial value to organizations in the 21st century. For example, to corporations which rely on multi-lingual communications and multi-disciplinary initiatives to compete successfully in a global marketplace.

So, what is this book's core concept? The idea behind it is simple: "When you step into an intersection of fields, disciplines, or cultures, you can combine existing concepts into a large number of extraordinary ideas."

Johansson achieves three specific objectives: He explains what, exactly, "the Intersection is and why we can expect to see a lot more of it in the future"; next, he explains "why stepping into the Intersection creates the Medici Effect"; finally, he outlines "the unique challenges we face when executing intersectional ideas and how we can overcome those challenges." With regard to the third objective, I am again reminded of a passage in Leading Change where Jim O'Toole observes that there are always unique and formidable challenges when threatening what he characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom."

In Part One, Johansson focuses on the Intersection which, for most of us, offers the best environment in which to innovate. Next, he explains how to create the Medici Effect within that creative and collaborative environment. Then in Part Three, he offers specific suggestions as to HOW to make intersectional ideas happen. I share Johansson's faith in what an Intersection makes possible, no matter who is involved, no matter where that Intersection may be located. I also agree with him that we can all create the Medici Effect because we can all get to the Intersection. "The advantage goes to those with an open mind and the willingness to reach beyond their field of expertise. It goes to people who can break down barriers and stay motivated through failures." There are countless examples of groups whose talented members created the Medici Effect. For example, the research laboratory which Thomas Edison established for himself and his associates in Menlo Park (NJ) in 1876; he relocated it to West Orange (NJ) in 1883.

Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman examine more recent examples in their book, Creating Genius: the Disney studios which produced so many animation classics; Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) which developed the first personal computer; Apple Computer which then took it to market; in the so-called "War Room" which helped to elect Bill Clinton President in 1992; the so-called "Skunk Works" where so many of Lockheed's greatest designs were formulated; Black Mountain College which "wasn't simply a place where creative collaboration took place" for the artists in residence from 1933 to 1956, "it was about creative collaboration"; and Los Alamos (NM) and the University of Chicago where the Manhattan Project eventually produced a new weapon called "the Gadget."

Although the brief excerpt which follows is taken from Johansson's Introduction, it serves as an appropriate conclusion to my brief commentary: "We, too, can create the Medici Effect. We can ignite the explosion of extraordinary ideas and take advantage of its individuals, as teams, and as organizations. We can do it by bringing together different disciplines and cultures and searching for places where they connect. [begin italics] The Medici Effect [end italics] will show you how to find such intersectional ideas and make them happen. This book is not about the Renaissance era, nor is it about the the Medici family. Rather, it is about those elements that made that era possible. It is about what happens when you step into an intersection of different disciplines and cultures, and bring the ideas you find there to life."

If there is another book published in recent years which is more intellectually stimulating than this one, I have not as yet read it.

The central notion of the Medici Effect is compelling, useful and inspiring. The book argues that real innovation happens when different cultures, ideas and disciplines come together to spark off new and unprecedented solutions. It also proposes entirely sensible ways of improving the chances of this happening: create environments where people from different backgrounds are encouraged to interact and exchange ideas; try to break away from built-in associations that inform our view of the likely future; encourage radical thinking (try exploring 'reverse' scenarios - a restaurant should have no menus, not charge money for food and/or nor serve food at all: discuss); try to break away from your existing 'value network', because this is set up to encourage and reward success along familiar lines; have as many ideas as possible - great innovators have as many failures as the rest of us, but the sheer profusion of their new ideas greatly increases their chance of having the occasional big success.
Johansson gives several examples of innovators who pulled together apparently unrelated threads of thought into one new radical solution - a telecommunications engineer becomes intrigued by the biological systems that allow a colony of insects to find the most efficient route to a source of food; he leaves his job to study insects and develops a brilliant new routing solution for information technology.
The Medici Effect encourages us to break away from our entrenched ways of thinking to look for the genuinely radical solutions that may change our lives. It reminds us that the greatest breakthroughs in most fields have been made by people who see things with fresh eyes.
Johanssen possibly oversells his ideas with some (entirely understandable and successful) marketing hype. The book is called The Medici Effect because renaissance Florence, governed in effect by the wealthy Medici banking family, produced a great flourishing of ideas brought about - so the theory goes - by the bringing together of brilliant people in many spheres of art, culture and enterprise. Well yes, but political stability, wealth and patronage also had a great deal to do with it.
Johanssen has turned his big idea into what is, in effect, a brand: the Intersection - an idea (or is it a place?) so significant that it has its own capital letter. And some of the examples given are perhaps not good examples of the Intersection after all, but might rather reflect good, old-fashioned 1+1=2 kind of thinking. Like the medic who realised that the young man whose knife wound she had just stitched up was leaving the emergency ward in search of revenge. Should heath care operatives get involved in violence prevention? The medic in question drove through the structural changes to join up medicine and policing, which colleagues believed were different disciplines. It's impressive - but is it really the Intersection?
Calling an anlaysis the Intersection or The Medici Effect doesn't necessarily make it any more real or usable - but, then again, what the hell? A clever piece of writing with real substance at its heart, The Medici Effect deserves its success.

The connection of innovation and diversity appears to be obvious to some extend: You need significantly different perspectives and skills in order to create something groundbreaking. If only experts from a field work together, invention (or enhancement) will be the result, but no sought-after leap forward. Consequently, Frans Johansson's book, The Medici Effect, has been hyped in corporate and Diversity contexts for a while. Especially when you have followed one of the author's inspirational talks, you can't wait to read the book and find out more about how innovation happens or can be generated. But then, in order to set your expectations right, consider the following: Johansson is portrayed as an entrepreneur and journalist, and the book is described to focus less on a corporate setting than on self-starting and individual achievements.
No doubt, the book itself is an innovation as it offers new perspectives to explore creativity, and it combines a number of established facts or more-or-less-known examples in an inspiring way. However, Johansson does all this in a journalistic manner: He profiles fascinating people, and points to connections few people might have thought about before. And he does it in an entrepreneurial way: The (profitable) extend to which he combines publishing (it's available in several languages), presenting (his talks are legendary) and consulting is rare outside strategy and marketing. Just like a good journalist, the author had spoken to many people, and collected a multitude of views and a wealth of personal stories. Those stories, combined with the creative way of linking and commenting them, are the big plus of the book. Johansson illustrates in a powerful way, that the key to innovation is combining concepts from previously unrelated areas (in what he calls intersections), create large numbers of possible solutions (and being ready to see some fail), and to take risks (even against established ideas in one's networks) actually executing new concepts. While the book offers great ideas about how to look at the creative process (other books do that in different ways), it offers very little help as to how the innovation process can actually be managed. Notions like "explosion of ideas" or the "Medici effect" itself sound way to romantic in order to actually work in organisational contexts, where power issues and politics and many other influences determine if, where and how change happens.
If you take Managing Diversity & Inclusion as an innovation that is happening at the intersection of corporate management, personal values, political systems and societal change, you can easily see many of the dynamics described in `The Medici Effect'. Implementing Diversity programmes requires to use a number of methodologies from change management (overcoming resistance) and from innovation management (using promoters of power and others). If you combine the inspirational strength of this book with some robust models and some solid tools, you can make a big difference!

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