The closest thing to test day — before test day.

The National Parks of America

America’s national parks are one of the country’s most remarkable and influential initiatives. The concept of the national park originated in America, though it was quickly replicated by similar parks in Canada, Finland, New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere. The first American national park was Yellowstone, created in 1872. Yellowstone comprises some 3,500 square miles of wilderness and today attracts more than four million visitors a year. Since 1872, nearly 60 additional national parks have been established in the USA, incorporating almost every type of natural environment, from mountains to deserts, lakes, rivers and coastlines. They are administered by the National Parks Service (NPS), which also manages significant monuments and historic structures such as the Statue of Liberty, the Gettysburg Museum and Ford’s Theatre, where President Lincoln was assassinated.

The creation of the national parks came in response to a growing attachment to the natural world that was developing in American society. In 1832, the painter George Catlin dreamed of creating ‘a nation’s park’ to preserve the grasslands in the state of South Dakota. Catlin failed to see such a park established in his lifetime, but his vision lived on. Four years later the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson published an important essay entitled ‘Nature’ in which he argued that natural landscapes should be protected rather than exploited for agriculture and commerce. The campaigner Frederick Olmsted went further, claiming that every American, not only the wealthy and powerful, had the right to access places of natural beauty. The creation of a public park in the Yosemite Valley was directly the result of his work.

The development of the national parks was a process that continued through the late 19th century and the early 20th century. The establishment of the first park at Yellowstone in 1872 was perhaps the defining moment in this process. The Yellowstone national park not only preserved the headwaters of the Mississippi, Colorado and Snake rivers, but also provided a sanctuary for countless endangered species by imposing a ban on hunting in all its forms. Today such an initiative would be commonplace but in these earliest days of the conservation movement, many Americans still regarded it as their right to shoot or trap wild animals.

Yellowstone was followed by Sequoia (1890), Mount Rainier (1899), Crater Lake (1902) and Wind Cave (1903), among many other parks. But while the creation of additional parks enjoyed wide popular support, there were frequent disagreements about their purpose. For some, the primary goal was the protection of the natural world, while for others the parks were about providing public access to nature. These two goals were at times contradictory and led to a variety of competing voices and factions. In recognition of the difficulties of running these vast wilderness areas, their management was for many years placed in the hands of the military, rather than the federal or state government.

The late 19th century was also a time when railroads were being constructed across America. Increasingly, these ran through even the most remote areas, where many parks were located, making tourism possible in these locations for the very first time. While this was welcomed by many park supporters, others were concerned that visitors should appreciate the parks in particular ways. Nathaniel Langford was instrumental in setting up Yellowstone and saw the park as an ideal opportunity for the education of ordinary citizens in all aspects of the natural world and environmental conservation, which was his number one priority.

In the early 20th century, the first really significant development was the setting up of the NPS in 1916. Now for the first time a single body was charged with administering the network and managing the numerous groups and interests that had a stake in it. Stephen Mather was appointed as the first Superintendent of Parks and under his leadership seven new parks were established, including Grand Canyon, Hawaii and Mount McKinley. However, arguably even more important was Mather’s transformation of the hitherto poorly managed finances of the parks.

The NPS generally saw the primary role of the parks as being environmental protection. For this reason, most human activities were regulated – farming and forestry were certainly not allowed. However, the controversial decision to permit the construction of dams in national parks was made on the basis that the resulting supplies of water and hydroelectric power would be in the public interest. Certainly, visitor numbers were unaffected as park admissions increased every year. Then in the 1930s the number of visitors expanded dramatically, largely because mass-produced automobiles became affordable, allowing ever more city-dwellers to reach the park network. With this, the national parks assumed a pre-eminent position in the social fabric of America, a legacy that continues to the present day.

Achieving a Work–life Balance

A Anthropologists calculate that in the Stone Age, approximately one to two million years ago, the ancestors of modern humans worked on average two or three hours a day hunting and gathering food. This amount of labour was all that was necessary for survival. Today, it’s not uncommon to work 50–60 hours a week, and sometimes more. At the same time, there is a substantial body of international research showing that levels of work-related stress have never been higher. However, psychologist Dr Gina McDowell argues that the problem of stress caused by working too many hours still doesn’t receive sufficient recognition and ought to be addressed with greater commitment by executives, employees and academics. Dr McDowell is one of many calling for a better work–life balance: spending an appropriate amount of time at work, but leaving sufficient hours in the day to enjoy family, friends and recreations.

B Perhaps leading the search for work–life balance are technology companies, who frequently allow employees greater flexibility in everything from working hours and dress code to office design. Global tech giant MEdia operates what it calls the ‘20% scheme’: its engineers are free to use 20% of their working week (one full day) in any way they want. Ryan Schmidt, the director of human resources at MEdia, says that ‘Productivity in the economy generally has increased significantly over the last 50 years but there’s a common perception in the workforce that standards of living have not kept pace. Our company intends to turn that around.’ Business analyst Carla Deng has made a study of MEdia’s 20% scheme and says the results are overwhelmingly positive. Says Deng, ‘Our research found that when employees have greater individual choice and responsibility for their work time, they still devote some of those “free” hours to fulfilling their normal working roles. And they also feel a lot happier.’

C An alternative approach taken by some other American companies is the four-day week. Ordinarily, Americans work eight hours a day, five days a week, making 40 hours in total. In a four-day week, they work four 10-hour days instead, still completing 40 hours in total but having three days off. In general, several studies have shown benefits, including reduced stress, increased productivity and more fulfilled employees. However, there may also be downsides, according to Dean Hazel, a professor of economics. For example, customers may expect a certain employee to be present five days a week and feel disappointed when they are not available. ‘The truth is that such a four-day week has many attractions but it will not be appropriate in every instance,’ says Professor Hazel. ‘It depends very much on the company concerned, its size, internal structure and the nature of its relationships with customers, partners and suppliers.’

D Indeed, some commentators question the very idea of work–life balance. Faisal Hadi, a lecturer in sociology, argues that the term work–life balance implies that the two represent distinct aspects of life that are easily separable. But in fact, for many of us ‘work’ and ‘life’ intrude on each other all the time and trying to ‘balance’ them precisely represents a goal that can never be achieved. ‘This term work–life balance has become a cliché,’ says Hadi. ‘In reality, life is an intricate mix of work and leisure and the relationship between the two has so many strands that they cannot be neatly divided. The idea of work–life balance as it is often understood has limited value.’

E However, a recent experiment has certainly challenged this idea. Employees at the New Zealand company involved worked four eight-hour days a week, but were paid for five. The experiment was conducted at Certified Life, a firm which has sold insurance for more than six decades. At the end of the experiment, 78% of employees felt they were able to manage their work–life balance, up from 54%, when working a standard 40-hour week. The 240 employees at Certified Life completed surveys at the beginning and end of the experiment to provide information for the study. The employees themselves worked out how all the necessary tasks could be completed within deadlines while working fewer hours, and were then responsible for implementing those decisions. Lead researcher Dr Hannah Graham says that the experiment produced such positive results partly because employees were given a role in decision-making throughout it.

F The New Zealand experiment also showed a 7% drop in stress levels when working fewer hours, without any drop in productivity. The chief executive of Certified Life, Tane Robinson, says that the four-day week boosted the firm’s reputation and made it easier to retain staff who might otherwise have moved on. Furthermore, cooperation between employees was seen to improve significantly when working shorter hours and team cohesion was significantly enhanced, according to the supervisors. Quite apart from the benefits at Certified Life, Dr Graham also suggests that such schemes might also address the issue of congestion in major cities by restricting the numbers going to work each day. Roland Gillespie, workplace relations minister in the New Zealand government, described the findings as ‘enormously encouraging’ and said that he was keen to see businesses experiment with similar new and improved work models. Meanwhile, Certified Life has plans to see the four-day week implemented long term. It may become an initiative that is replicated in other companies.

BUSINESS INNOVATION

The Oxford English Dictionary defines innovation as ‘making changes to something established’. Invention, by contrast, is the act of ‘coming upon or finding; discovery’. Revolutionary ‘inventions’ of 20th-century US firms include, for example, the safety razor, the hydraulic brake, and DNA fingerprinting. However, as Adrian Slywotsky of Mercer Management Consulting says, ‘In most industries, truly differentiating new-product breakthroughs are becoming increasingly rare’. And as ‘blockbuster’ novel products become steadily more elusive, big companies would do well to focus instead on making lots of small things better.

Unfortunately, big companies often have big problems with innovation. ‘Innovators try to change the status quo’, says Bhaskar Chakravorti of the Monitor Group, ‘which is why markets tend to resist them (innovators)’. Innovations frequently disrupt the way companies do things (and may have been doing them for years). And it is not just markets that are nervous of innovation. Michael Hammer, co-author of ‘Re-engineering the Corporation’, cites the case of a PC-maker that set out to imitate Dell’s famous ‘Build to Order’ system of computer assembly. The company found its attempts were frustrated by both its head of manufacturing, who feared for his job, and its head of marketing, who did not want to upset his existing retail outlets. So the proposal got nowhere, and Dell continued to dominate the business.

Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School Professor, describes how disruptive innovations – simpler, cheaper and more convenient products that seriously upset the status quo – often herald the rapid downfall of thriving, long-standing businesses. This, it is widely recognised, is because most such organisations are designed to grow through a series of sustaining innovations – the sort which simply improve on existing products for existing markets.

William Baumol, professor at New York University, argues that large companies have been learning important lessons from the history of innovation. Most have both cut back and redirected their Research and Development spending in recent years. Innovation by big companies is now based less on the discoveries of white-coated scientists, and more on incremental improvements in the processes that constitute daily operations.

According to marketing specialist Vijay Vishwanath, companies also need to adjust to the ongoing fragmentation of markets. Once-uniform mass markets are breaking up into countless ‘niches’, in which everything has to be customised for a small group of consumers. Looking for blockbusters in such a world is a daunting task. Another problem, according to Chakravorti, lies in the marketing of innovations. Too many executives are still stuck with the strategies used to sell Kodak’s first camera 120 years ago, when the product was so revolutionary that the company could forget about competition for at least a decade. Today, rival products can be rushed onto the market at speeds which would have been unimaginable in those days.

Companies that fail to come up with headline-hitting new products should not despair. ‘There are plenty of other, albeit less glamorous, areas where innovation can take place’, says Erik Brynjolfsson of the MIT Sloan School of Management. He claims that the roots of the USA’s productivity surge originate in ‘a genuine revolution in how American companies are using information technology to reinvent their business processes from top to bottom’.

Hammer highlights several instances where firms have added considerably to their shareholder value through what he calls operational innovations – creativity in their business processes. Notable among these is the American retail giant Wal-Mart. While superficially mundane, their pioneering idea of ‘cross-docking’ – shifting merchandise off trucks from suppliers and straight onto trucks heading for stores – has been fundamental to the company’s ability to offer low prices, the platform for its outstanding success.

Companies are also being encouraged to embrace strategic innovations, following the example of such firms as Southwest Airlines, a low-cost American regional carrier, whose creative strategies and shrewd timing won it a victory over its ailing competitor US Airways. The Swedish packaging company Tetra Pak also used this style of innovation, by moving away from delivering ready-made containers for customers into providing machinery and supplying dedicated materials for them to make their own packaging. This strips out many costs from the process, and also makes it very difficult for the customer to switch suppliers. Like Southwest Airlines, they achieved success through strategic innovations alone, with little innovation in either the underlying technology or the product sold.

In his book ‘How to Grow When Markets Don’t’, Slywotsky and his co-author Richard Wise recommend what they call demand innovations. A few far-sighted organisations such as the French industrial gas company Air Liquide have found success not – as in the case of strategic innovations – by meeting existing demand in a new way, but by discovering new forms of demand and adapting to supply the products or services required. Air Liquide had been a leading supplier of industrial gases until the early 1990s, when gas became a commodity and their operational income plunged. Realising the value of the skills they had gained over the decades, the company became a supplier not only of gas, but also of the management services to accompany it. Within a short time their profits rose again.

There are certain things that managers can do to make innovations like these happen within their organisations. For example, projects with potential should be rapidly hived off into independent business units, away from the smothering influence of the status quo. The ultimate outcome of any one innovation may still be unpredictable, but the process from which it emerges is not.