Speech by Glen Boreham, ACO Board Member and IBM Managing Director

IBM Managing Director and ACO Board Member Glen Boreham made this speech at a private concert recently.

Ladies and gentlemen, the ACO has been called ‘the best small orchestra in the world’ – and after that amazing performance, it’s easy to see why. Thank you Richard and the orchestra – it’s a privilege to hear you play in such an intimate setting.

In my introduction, you heard me talk about IBM’s long standing partnership with the ACO. And you may wonder – why are businesses interested in the arts? I mean, if I look at myself, I have little artistic talent. I can’t play a single instrument. As my wife Kim will tell you – I certainly can’t dance, although I occasionally think I can.

My closest brush with the arts came when I went to a choir school, but I grew quickly, and the Brothers decided my best use was to put me in the front row of the football team, rather than the front row of the choir. I think today we call that human capital management!

So, why does IBM invest considerable funds into the arts and the ACO? Why do I happily invest my time to be on the board of the ACO and Chair of Screen Australia?

The answer is: I believe there is an inextricable link, a link between a vibrant arts community supporting a thinking and open society, sustaining a creative and multi-talented workforce that then provides the foundation for innovation and success in business.

Many of you will know, IBM in Australia operates a large and complex business. But at our heart, what we do is quite simple: we help organisations to solve business problems they either can’t solve themselves or simply don’t want to because they have other priorities.

As my colleagues sit in IBM meeting rooms around the country, it is very clear that when we have a client problem out on the table, if we all look at that challenge through an identical lens – whether it is education, culture, age or gender – we will all come up with the same, stock standard, uninspired answer.

To me, there is no doubt that, if there is diversity around the table, it helps create that spark, that creativity, that unearths the unexpected solution to the problem.

Now, we’ve just seen extraordinary evidence of human creativity. And I’m interested in supporting that because – while I can’t tell you what the future will look like – I guarantee it will require all of us to be more creative and innovative than we have ever been. And, as some of you who’ve attended these events before will know, it worries me that our current education system doesn’t support this.

And I’m not alone in this concern. A recent OECD report on the need to refocus spending actually said: “...the costs of educational underperformance are higher than the costs of the [global] financial crisis.”

Yet it seems, all around the world, education systems are failing our children. Children enter the school system with an enormous capacity for creativity.

Creativity Expert, Sir Ken Robinson tells a great story about this (1): it was the kindergarten’s nativity play and they got to the part when the three kings deliver their gifts. So there’s three little boys with home-made crowns.

The first one says “I bring you gold”.
The second one says “I bring you myrrh”.
And the third one says “Hey, Frank sent this!”

The point is, at age 5, kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go – they’re not frightened of being wrong. Of course, being wrong is not the same as being innovative – but if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.

In Australia’s current education system, mistakes are the worst things you can make. And the result is we are educating the creativity out of our students. By the time we’re adults, we’ve lost that capacity to fearlessly have a go – we’ve become frightened of being wrong and, as individuals and companies, we suffer as a result – because we need people to have the courage to be creative.

As Picasso said: “all children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.”

I’m interested in how people like Richard, Melissa or Julian managed to remain an artist. Imagine Richard aged 7 at his Wollongong primary school – imagine being his music teacher. How tough would that have been?

“Richard, you must learn to play with the other children and stop getting ahead!”

You some of you know, I’ve lived all over the world, in Europe and Japan. And I’ve always been struck by the fact that every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects – at the top are maths and then the national language, then the sciences, the humanities, and, at the very bottom, are the arts.

There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches music every day in the same way we teach maths. Why not? I think maths is very important, but so is music. Surely creativity is just as important as literacy and numeracy – why don’t we treat it with the same status?

The answer is that our current education system was created to meet the needs of the industrial world – with the most useful subjects for the industrial age at the top. So, you were often steered away from the subjects you actually liked doing – and were good at – on the grounds that you wouldn’t be able to get a job doing it.

Wouldn’t you love to have been a fly on the wall when a teenage Richard Tognetti met with his careers officer.

“Let me see Richard, what do you want to be? A professional musician? Oh dear... How about something more sensible – perhaps IT?”

The trouble is, academic ability dominates our view of intelligence – and, because of that, our education system allows many highly talented, even brilliant people to think they have nothing to offer. Yet, as people like Richard Branson and Coco Chanel have proved – it’s possible to be quite successful without a university education...

I believe, we need to radically rethink our view of intelligence – in fact we need to take into account Ken Robinson’s 3 Ds of intelligence.

Human intelligence is: Diverse, Dynamic, and Distinct.

It’s diverse because we think about the world in the way we experience it. We think visually, in sound, in abstract terms and in movement. That’s why we shouldn’t be teaching kids in just one modality.

Some kids do remember information if they copy it off the board, or read it on a handout, but most of them don’t. They need opportunities to learn by drawing, or singing, or talking about the information.

You may not know this, but computer games don’t come with instructions any more – kids simply learn them intuitively – and notice how fast they do it. How quickly would they learn to play the computer game if we sat them in a classroom and made them copy the instructions off the white board?

The second thing we need to take into account is that intelligence is dynamic – it’s interactive. Innovation (by which I mean original ideas that have value) comes about from the interaction of different ways of thinking.

And finally, we need to take into account the fact that intelligence is distinct. In other words, everyone has their own kind of intelligence – and we need an education system that identifies and nurtures every child’s very different talents – because we need all of them to drive innovation.

Let me tell you the true story of Gillian Lynne as told in Ken Robinson’s Book The Element(1), who went to school in England in the 1930s. Gillian was hopeless at school – she couldn’t concentrate, she kept fidgeting. In fact, the school thought her problems were so severe, she was packed off to the hospital to see a specialist.

So this little girl sat on her hands for 20 minutes while her mother told the doctor all of Gillian’s problems at school. When she finished, the doctor said to the little girl: “I need to speak to your mother privately, so we’ll go out of the room for a minute”. But as they left, he turned on the radio. And as soon as they were in the corridor he said to her mother: “Just stand here a moment and see what she does.”

Immediately, the little girl was on her feet, moving to the music. And after a while, the doctor said: “Gillian isn’t sick – she’s a dancer – take her to a dancing school.” And so her mother did.

As Gillian later said: “I can’t tell you how wonderful it was. It was full of people like me – people who have to move to think.”

Gillian Lynne went on to be a soloist at the Royal Ballet and ended up as one of the world’s most successful choreographers, perhaps best well known for commercial hits like Cats and Phantom of the Opera. She has had a hugely successful and fulfilling life.

I wonder what would have happened to Gillian in our education system? Would we have punished her, criticised her work and told her to sit still – rather than harnessing her distinct and wonderful brand of intelligence?

I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new concept of intelligence and rethink the fundamental principles in which we are educating our children.

Tonight we are celebrating the gift of human creativity – but we need to harness this gift outside the arts – and bring it into the business world.

The only way we will do this is:
• by putting arts on an equal footing with Maths and English
• by seeing our children for the hope that they are
• and by educating them for a future that we cannot imagine

Tonight, the ACO has shown us the magic that happens when young people are allowed to let their distinct form of intelligence shine. Imagine what we could achieve as a country if every child had the same chance as these wonderful musicians.
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1 This is one of the stories in Ken Robinson’s new book “The Element: How finding your passion changes everything”