[MUSIC] I want to close this segment with a, with a story. It's quite a fun story, it's a story with a twist. And it's the story of the evolution of the world high jump record for men. Before you, you see a chart, and it's a chart showing the increases in high jump from what, 1.95 meters back at the turn of the previous century, up to about 2.55 meters today. And of course, what we see is progressively this, this world record inches up over that 100 year period, and the interesting point I want to draw your to atten, attention to is the circled area in the early 60s. Where we see a dramatic increase in the high jump standard. What do you think happened there? It's a rhetorical question, but I would like to guess that you're going to give me one of two answers, you might want to think it's about drugs but its not, more likely youre going to say, it's about a chap called Fosbury, Dick Fosbury, who created the Fosbury flop. And you're kind of half right if that's your answer. But actually, you, you're, you're, you're not quite there because it turns out that what really happened in that era was that there were two guys who were fighting it out with one another. There was John Thomas, who was an American, and there was Valeriy Brumel, who was a Russian. And these two guys, they were straddle jumpers, in other words, they jumped over the bar face-first. They bro, broke their chest almost touched the bar as they went over. You can almost see from the picture here how they were jumping. Now, they were arch rivals, John Thomas was perhaps better in the earlier part of the 60s. Valeriy Brumel Took over in the latter part of the 60s. And because they were arch rivals perhaps, they worked really hard to beat each other and they kept on pushing, literally pushing the bar up and that's what you see in that shot. However, there was a few interesting happened in that period. First of all was this chap, whose name is Dick Fosbury. And what you'll see here is that Dick Fosbury gradually figured out that there might be an alternative way of jumping. And as you see in this image he was the guy who pioneered the Fosbury flop where you jump over the bar backwards. It is actually your spine, but almost touches the bar rather than your chest. Now, when he first pioneered this technique in the early 60s, people thought he was crazy, they thought he was an idiot. Not only is this a technique which doesn't seem to be actually quite as good as the official straddle version, but also it was dangerous, it actually looked like he was going to break his neck when he, when he jumped over the bar and landed, you know, on his shoulders. But he percep, persevered and, and the point of the story will become clear in a second. He persevered despite everybody telling him that this was a crazy technique and then he had a stroke of luck. Because in the lead up to the Olympics in the 1968, what happened was that ,Valeriy Brumel who was the world champion at this point. He had the world record. He actually broke his legs in a motorcycle accident. And Valeriy Brumel, you know, he recovered, but he never recovered enough to actually get back to his former days as a world high jumper, record holder. And Valeriy Brumel missed the Mexico Olympics. And so, what happened of course as everyone now knows is Dick Fosbury took part in the Mexico olympics, he won the Mexico Olympics and that was the point at which the world sort of sat up and took notice and said wow, maybe there's something to this crazy technique afterall. Who is this crazy American who's jumping over the bar backwards when everyone else is jumping over it forwards? And so from that day on, many other people started experimenting with the Fosbury flop. And as you see in the chart, it's not a case that this Fosbury Flop immediately became the, the best technique. It turns out for the coming years actually the, the, the green dots and the red dots indicate that actually there was a mixture of the traditional straddle jump and the new Fosbury flop kind of vying for position as the better technique. Until eventually ten years later it became clear that the straddle jump was actually a less good way of jumping and the Fosbury flop never came, by the 80s, the absolute standard way of jumping. So to summarize the story, there were 3 rows of innovation actually, in the way that people jump over a high jump bar. There was the old western roll, we didn't talk about that, but that is what came before the straddle jump, then there was the straddle jump, and then there was the Fosbury flop. And each wave, of course, the new technique was not as good as the old technique when it was first created. So what does that mean? Why am I telling you this story at this point in the course? You know, we can use that metaphor of the high jump at two levels. One is, is at the level of industry innovation, you know, the concept of the high-jump technique being a bit like a new technology or so-called disruptive technology that actually supersedes the traditional one. So this is like digital imagine taking over from traditional imaging. [INAUDIBLE] it was just a word that Kodak created. But that' s not actually the angle I want to pursue here, the angle I want to pursue here is a very personal or individual angle which is the following. Any innovation whether it's in management, whether it's in the way that I personally work with my boss, whether it's a new product or service that I'm creating, any innovation takes somebody pushing against the norms and orthodoxies of the time. And it takes courage and it takes leadership, and it takes someone being prepared to actually kind of stand up and do something a bit differently. And when everyone tells them they're an idiot or crazy to actually ignore that and to persevere. Now that doesn't mean that every of those, one of those individuals will succeed, but we need people like that to try their ideas out, so that some of them will ultimately succeed in changing things for the better. So I already talked in the previous segment, about the fact that management innovation is really difficult, lots of companies are experimenting with new ways of working all the time. Some of them are working, some of them are failing, it's often two steps forward, and one steps back. My advice really to, to anybody and everybody who works in companies is, don't be afraid to try your new ideas out. You know, obviously some companies are much more accommodating of these sort of things than others. But my advice is absolutely to push on what is possible, and to see what happens as a result. George Bernard Shaw came up with this memorable phrase, many people will have heard it before. He said that the reasonable man adapts himself to the world, but the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. So, you know, George Bernard Shaw was writing in a different era. Men and women can both apply for this job, as it were. We all need to be a little bit more unreasonable in terms of trying out new stuff, in order to move society forward. And my favorite example of that is Elon Musk, who's a, a, a very famous Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur. He was one of the founders of PayPal, he went on to found SpaceX which was the world's first private space company. He also was the founder of Tesla Motors. Tesla now is, is in the, the world's most successful battery-powered super car. It goes from naught to sixty in about four seconds flat. And he's also now coming up with lots of new ideas, one of which is illustrated here in the so-called, Hyperloop, which is a way of whisking people from Los Angeles to, to San Francisco and back in about 35 minutes flat. It may be a crazy idea, but given his track record of success you know, nobody's really betting against him. My point is, Elon Musk is obviously a kind of a one of a kind. But in our own little way, we can all become a little bit more like that, in terms of coming up with challenging new ways of working in whatever job we've got. So I will finish there. This segment really is just opening up the door. As to what this course is really about for you as an individual. The course is all about giving you an understanding and an awareness, but it's also about trying to help you as a manager to do your job better, to get the most out of your people. And for you as an individual, wherever you're working, to be a little bit more yeah, curious, a little bit more risk taking in terms of trying new ways of working, because without that we can't actually advance the practice of management.
