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Tham and Apple

On 25 November, 2008 Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide (www.ogilvy.com) the world's third largest advertising agency, announced the appointment of Tham Khai Meng, a Singaporean, as its Worldwide Creative Director and Chairperson of its World Wide Creative Council. Tham is widely recognized as one of the world's most awarded creative directors. He joined Ogilvy & Mather Asia Pacific in 1999 to become its regional director. Under his leadership, the company was crowned 'Creative Network of the Year' by Campaign Brief Asia for seven consecutive years (2001 - 2008). In those seven years, Tham was named 'Creative Director of the Year'. In 2005, Hong Kong-based Media magazine named him 'Regional Head of the Year'.

Tham has served on a number of boards, including the National Arts Council Board and Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's Economic Review Committee, a think tank of business, academia and government leaders that was tasked with finding a strategic direction for the country that was migrating from a manufacturing to a knowledge-based economy. He has also published a book entitled The Ugly Duckling - A Cautionary Tale of Creativity, which has now been translated into Korean, Japanese and Mandarin.  

In The Peak, vol 21, no. 2, 2008, Tham said that businesses now depend on creativity for their survival. With consumer products delivering quality at reasonable prices, all that separates good companies from great ones are intangibles – aesthetics, beauty, design and marketing. According to him, there's no visible difference between a Japanese TV and a Korean TV; a Samsung phone or a Sony Ericson.

When survival in business depends more on creativity, what kind of CEOs are needed? According to Tham, the traditional CEO attributes – financially savvy, left-brain, number-cruncher type, are traits not quite in-sync with the demands of the times. They are good for hitting the spreadsheets and engineering a product but less than ideal for creating a product that moves others in a visceral and emotive way. According to him, Apple gets it right because their CEO understands design. Indeed, on 14 January, 2009 Apple stocks tumbled 6.54%, hours after its CEO Steve Jobs announced that he was going to take a six month medical leave of absence to go through some treatments to cure his hormonal problems. Indeed, investors put so much value on creative CEOs, especially during troubled times.

Now let's hear what this 'creativity' champion has to say about child education. Tham himself, father of two boys, went to an Anglo-Chinese School in Singapore before pursuing his higher education at Central Saint Martin's and Royal College of Art, London. He sternly warns parents against practicing censorship on the creative development of their children. "You need to teach your children how to think, then give them the freedom to think," he says. "When one or both parents steer the child towards math and science when the child would rather write or draw, that's also a form of censorship." Tham is convinced that an educational system that focuses on developing mathematical acumen and memory skills tends to kill creativity and thinking.

Do you agree with him? The Jakarta International Multicultural School (JIMS) would argue that the teaching of math and science should not necessarily kill creativity. There are different ways of teaching math and science. At JIMS, math and science are taught in problem solving ways to stimulate a child's curiosity and creative thinking. We could have long discussions about the benefit of number crunching and memorizing skills versus the merit of problem solving approaches in teaching. But I think Tham’s point is that as parents we should aspire to help our children to develop his/her creative mind and not suppress it.

In order to avoid censorship that kills the development of our children’s creative mind, firstly we need to understand the propensity of our children toward certain learning subjects and methods. What kinds of learning subjects and methods do our children wholeheartedly love the most? As parents, it should not be difficult to answer the question. My elder son, for example, fell asleep in his Kumon classes because he considered them boring. For him it didn’t make sense to learn math through “rote learning” method (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rote_learning) that drills memorization through repetition. He loves learning math through problem solving methods, which require him to put mathematical calculation within certain contexts. If I had insisted on him to continue the path of rote learning method that did not fit with his love of learning, I would be responsible for hindering the development of his creative mind. Many of us, parents, are obsessed with our own ambition to turn our child into a math or science wizard, or a musical maestro, by flooding repetition into his/her developing mind without realizing that we are actually killing his/her creativity in the process.

As parents, everyday we are facing the moment of truth. Our decision regarding the education of our child determines his/her future trajectory. Will he/she become a creative adult that has leadership capacity to face troubled times in the future? No matter how much we love Doris Day, as parents we cannot sing “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will be, Will Be)” when it comes to the future of our child. 

 
Alexander Irwan Ph.D, JIMS Board Member