#the article is so painfully a middle aged american perspective

[tutyayilmazz]

The sheer number of older and more experienced professionals involved in Måneskin introduces a tension between the rock conventions that characterize their songwriting and the fundamentally pop circumstances under which those songs are produced. They are four friends in a band, but that band is inside an enormous machine. From their perspective, though, the machine is good.

The American visitor to Rome arrives with certain preconceptions that feel like stereotypes but turn out to be basically accurate. There really are mopeds flying around everywhere, and traffic seems governed by the principle that anyone can be replaced. Breakfast is coffee and cigarettes. Despite these orthopedic and nutritional hazards, everyone is better looking — not literally everyone, of course, but statistically, as if whatever selective forces that emerge from urban density have had an extra hundred generations or so to work. And they really do talk like that, an emphatic mix of vowels, gestures and car horns known as “Italian.” To be scolded in this language by a driver who wants to park in the crosswalk is to realize that some popular ideas are actually true. Also, it is hot.

The triumphant return to Rome of Måneskin — arguably the only rock stars of their generation, and almost certainly the biggest Italian rock band of all time — coincided with a heat wave across Southern Europe. On that Tuesday in July the temperature hit 107 degrees. The Tiber looked thick, rippled in places and still in others, as if it were reducing. By Thursday morning the band’s vast management team was officially concerned that the night’s sold-out performance at the Stadio Olimpico would be delayed. When Måneskin finally took the stage around 9:30 p.m., it was still well into the 90s — which was too bad, because there would be pyro.

There was no opening act, possibly because no rock band operating at this level is within 10 years of Måneskin’s age. The guitarist Thomas Raggi played the riff to “Don’t Wanna Sleep,” the lights came up and 60,000 Italians screamed. Damiano David — the band’s singer and, at age 24, its oldest member — charged out in black flared trousers and a mesh top that bisected his torso diagonally, his heavy brow and hypersymmetrical features making him look like some futuristic nomad who hunted the fishnet mammoth. Victoria De Angelis, the bassist, wore a minidress made from strips of leather or possibly bungee cords. Raggi wore nonporous pants and a black button-down he quickly discarded, while Ethan Torchio drummed in a vest with no shirt underneath, his hair flying. For the next several minutes of alternately disciplined and frenzied noise, they sounded as if Motley Crüe had been cryogenically frozen, then revived in 2010 with Rob Thomas on vocals.

That hypothetical will appeal to some while repelling others, and which category you fall into is, with all due respect, not my business here. Rolling Stone, for its part, said that Måneskin “only manage to confirm how hard rock & roll has to work these days to be noticed,” and a viral Pitchfork review called their most recent album “absolutely terrible at every conceivable level.” But this kind of thumbs up/thumbs down criticism is pretty much vestigial now that music is free. If you want to know whether you like Måneskin — the name is Danish and pronounced MOAN-eh-skin — you can fire up the internet and add to the more than nine billion streams Sony Music claims the band has accumulated across Spotify, YouTube, et cetera. As for whether Måneskin is good, de gustibus non est disputandum, as previous Italians once said: In matters of taste, there can be no arguments.

You should know, though, that even though their music has been heard most often through phone and laptop speakers, Måneskin sounds better on a soccer field. That is what tens of thousands of fans came to the Stadio Olimpico on an eyelid-scorching Thursday to experience: the culturally-if-not-personally-familiar commodity of a stadium rock show, delivered by the unprecedented phenomenon of a stadium-level Italian rock band. The pyro — 20-foot jets of swivel-articulated flame that you could feel all the way up in the mezzanine — kicked in on “Gasoline,” a song Måneskin wrote to protest Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. From a thrust platform in the center of the field, David poured his full emotive powers into the pre-chorus: “Standing alone on that hill/using your fuel to kill/we won’t take it standing still/watch us dance.”

The effect these words will have on President Putin is unknown. They capture something, though, about rock ’n’ roll, which has established certain conventions over the last seven decades. One of those conventions is an atmosphere of rebellion. It doesn’t have to be real — you probably don’t even want it to be — but neither can it seem too contrived, because the defining constraint of rock as a genre is that you have to feel it. The successful rock song creates in listeners the sensation of defying consensus, even if they are right in step with it.

The need to feel the rock may explain the documented problem of fans’ taste becoming frozen in whatever era was happening when they were between the ages of 15 and 25. Anyone who adolesced after Spotify, however, did not grow up with rock as an organically developing form and is likely to have experienced the whole catalog simultaneously, listening to Led Zeppelin at the same time they listened to Pixies and Franz Ferdinand — i.e. as a genre rather than as particular artists, the way my generation (I’m 46) experienced jazz. The members of Måneskin belong to this post-Spotify cohort. As the youngest and most prominent custodians of the rock tradition, their job is to sell new, guitar-driven songs of 100 to 150 beats per minute to a larger and larger audience, many of whom are young people who primarily think of such music as a historical artifact. Starting this month, Måneskin will take this business on a multivenue tour of the United States — a market where they are considerably less known — whose first stop is Madison Square Garden.

“I think the genre thing is like ... ” Torchio said to me backstage in Rome, making a gesture that conveyed translingual complexity. “We can do a metaphor: If you eat fish, meat and peanuts every day, like for years, and then you discover potatoes one day, you’ll be like: ‘Wow, potatoes! I like potatoes; potatoes are great.’ But potatoes have been there the whole time.” Rock was the potato in this metaphor, and he seemed to be saying that even though many people were just now discovering that they liked it, it had actually been around for a long time. It was a revealing analogy: The implication was that rock, like the potato, is here to stay; but what if rock is, like the potato in our age of abundance, comparatively bland and no longer anyone’s favorite?

Which rock song came first is a topic of disagreement, but one strong candidate is “Rocket 88,” recorded by Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythym band in 1951. It’s about a car and, in its final verse, about drinking in the car. These themes capture the context in which rock ’n’ roll emerged: a period when household incomes, availability of consumer goods and the share of Americans experiencing adolescence all increased simultaneously.

Although and possibly because rock started as Black music, it found a gigantic audience of white teenagers during the so-called British Invasion of the mid-1960s (the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who), which made it the dominant form of pop music for the next two decades. The stadium/progressive era (Journey, Fleetwood Mac, Foreigner) that now constitutes the bulk of classic-rock radio gave way, eventually, to punk (the Ramones, Patti Smith, Minor Threat) and then glam metal: Twisted Sister, Guns N’ Roses and various other hair-intensive bands that were obliterated by the success of Nirvana and Pearl Jam in 1991. This shift can be understood as the ultimate triumph of punk, both in its return to emotive content expressed through simpler arrangements and in its professed hostility toward the music industry itself. After 1991, suspicion of anything resembling pop became a mark of seriousness among both rock critics and fans.

It is probably not a coincidence that this period is also when rock’s cultural hegemony began to wane. As the ’90s progressed, larger and again whiter audiences embraced hip-hop, and the last song classified as “rock” to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 was Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me” in 2001. The run of bands that became popular during the ’00s — the Strokes, the Killers, Kings of Leon — constituted rock’s last great commercial gasp, but none of their singles charted higher than No. 4. Let us say, then, that the era of rock as pop music lasted from 1951 to 2011. That’s a three-generation run, if you take seriously rock’s advice to get drunk and have sex in the car and therefore produce children at around age 20. Baby boomers were the generation that made rock a zillion-dollar industry; Gen X saved it from that industry with punk and indie, and millennials closed it all out playing Guitar Hero.

The members of Måneskin are between the ages of 22 and 24, situating them firmly within the cadre of people who understand rock in the past tense. De Angelis, the bassist, and Raggi, the guitarist, formed the band when they were both attending a music-oriented middle school; David was a friend of friends, while Torchio was the only person who responded to their Facebook ad seeking a drummer. There are few entry-level rock venues in Rome, so they started by busking on the streets. In 2017, they entered the cattle-call audition for the Italian version of “The X Factor.” They eventually finished as runners-up to the balladeer Lorenzo Licitra, and an EP of songs they performed on the show was released by Sony Music and went triple platinum.

In 2021, Måneskin won the Sanremo Music Festival, earning the right to represent Italy with their song “Zitti e Buoni” (whose title roughly translates to “shut up and behave”) in that year’s Eurovision Song Contest. This program is not widely viewed in the United States, but it is a gigantic deal in Europe, and Måneskin won. Not long after, they began to appear on international singles charts, and “I Wanna Be Your Slave” broke the British Top 10. A European tour followed, as well as U.S. appearances at festivals and historic venues.

This ascent to stardom was not unmarred by controversy. The Eurovison live broadcast caught David bending over a table offstage, and members of the media accused him of snorting cocaine. David insisted he was innocent and took a drug test, which he passed, but Måneskin and their management still seem indignant about the whole affair. It’s exactly this kind of incongruous detail — this damaging rumor that a rock star did cocaine — that highlights how the Italian music-consuming public differs from the American one. Many elements of Måneskin’s presentation, like the cross-dressing and the occasional male-on-male kiss, are genuinely upsetting to older Italians, even as they seem familiar or even hackneyed to audiences in the United States.

“They see a band of young, good-looking guys that are dressing up too much, and then it’s not pure rock ’n’ roll, because you’re not in a garage, looking ugly,” De Angelis says. “The more conservative side, they’re shocked because of how we dress or move onstage, or the boys wear makeup.”

She and her bandmates are caught between two demographics: the relatively conservative European audience that made them famous and the more tolerant if not downright desensitized American audience that they must impress to keep the ride moving. And they do have to keep it moving, because — like many rock stars before them — most of the band dropped out of high school to do this. At one point, Raggi told me that he had sat in on some classes at a university, “Just to try to understand, ‘What is that?’”

One question that emerged early in my discussions with Måneskin’s friendly and professional management team was whether I was going to say that their music was bad. This concern seemed related to the aforementioned viral Pitchfork review, in which the editor Jeremy Larson wrote that their new album, “RUSH!” sounds “like it’s made for introducing the all-new Ford F-150” and “seems to be optimized for getting busy in a Buffalo Wild Wings bathroom” en route to a score of 2.0 (out of 10). While the members of Måneskin seemed to take this review philosophically, their press liaisons were concerned that I was coming to Italy to have a similar type of fun.

Here I should disclose that Larson edited an essay I wrote for Pitchfork about the Talking Heads album “Remain in Light” (score: 10.0) and that I think of myself as his friend. Possibly because of these biases, I read his review as reflecting his deeply held and, among rock fans, widely shared need to feel the music, something that the many pop/commercial elements of “RUSH!” (e.g. familiar song structures, lyrics that seem to have emerged from a collaboration between Google Translate and Nikki Sixx, compulsive use of multiband compression) left him unable to do.

This perspective reflects the post-’90s rock consensus (PNRC) that anything that sounds too much like a mass-market product is no good. The PNRC is premised on the idea that rock is not just a structure of song but also a structure of relationship between the band and society. From rock’s earliest days as Black music, the real or perceived opposition between rocker and society has been central to its appeal; this adversarial relationship animated the youth and counterculture eras of the ’60s and then, when the economic dominance of mass-market rock made it impossible to believe in, provoked the revitalizing backlash of punk. Even major labels felt obliged to play into this paradoxical worldview, e.g. that period after Nirvana when the most popular genre of music was called “alternative.” Måneskin, however, are defined by their isolation from the PNRC. They play rock music, but operate according to the logic of pop.

In Milan, where Måneskin would finish their Italian minitour, I had lunch with the band, as well as two of their managers, Marica Casalinuovo and Fabrizio Ferraguzzo. Casalinuovo had been an executive producer working on “The X Factor,” and Ferraguzzo was its musical director; around the time that Måneskin broke through, Casalinuovo and Ferraguzzo left the show and began working with the stars it had made. We were at the in-house restaurant of Moysa, the combination recording studio, soundstage, rehearsal space, offices, party venue and “creative playground” that Ferraguzzo opened two months earlier. After clarifying that he was in no way criticizing major record labels and the many vendors they engaged to record, promote and distribute albums, he laid out his vision for Moysa, a place where all those functions were performed by a single corporate entity — basically describing the concept of vertical integration.

Ferraguzzo oversaw the recording of “RUSH!” along with a group of producers that included Max Martin, the Swedish hitmaker best known for his work with Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. At Moysa, Ferraguzzo played for me Måneskin’s then-unreleased new single, “Honey (Are U Coming?)” which features many of the band’s signature moves — guitar and bass playing the same melodic phrases at the same time, unswung boogie-type rhythm of the post-Strokes style — but also has David singing in a higher register than usual. I listened to it first on studio monitors and then through the speaker of Ferraguzzo’s phone, and it sounded clean and well produced both times, as if a team of industry veterans with unlimited access to espresso had come together to perfect it.

The sheer number of older and more experienced professionals involved in Måneskin introduces a tension between the rock conventions that characterize their songwriting and the fundamentally pop circumstances under which those songs are produced. They are four friends in a band, but that band is inside an enormous machine. From their perspective, though, the machine is good.

“There’s hundreds of people working and talking about you and giving opinions,” De Angelis said at lunch. “So if you start to get in this loop of wanting to know and control and being anxious about it, it really ruins everything.” Here lies the conflict between what the PNRC wants from a band — resistance to outside influences, contempt for commerce, authenticity as measured in doing everything themselves — and what any sane 23-year-old would want, which is to have someone with an M.B.A. make all the decisions so she can concentrate on playing bass.

The other way Måneskin is isolated from the PNRC is geographic. Over the course of lunch, it became clear that they had encyclopedic knowledge of certain eras in American rock history but were only dimly aware of others. Raggi, for instance, loves Motley Crüe and has an album-by-album command of the Los Angeles hair-metal band Skid Row, which he and his bandmates seemed to understand were supposed to be guilty pleasures. But none of them had ever heard of Fugazi, the post-hardcore band whose hatred of major labels, refusal to sell merchandise and commitment to keeping ticket prices as low as possible set the standard for a generation of American rock snobs. In general, Måneskin’s timeline of influences seems to break off around 1990, when the rock most respected by Anglophone critics was produced by independent labels that did not have strong overseas distribution. It picks up again with Franz Ferdinand and the “emo” era of mainstream pop rock. This retrospect leaves them unaware of the indie/punk/D.I.Y. period that was probably most important in forming the PNRC.

The question is whether that consensus still matters. While snobs like Larson and me are overrepresented in journalism, we never constituted a majority of rock fans. That’s the whole point of being a snob. And snobbery is obsolete anyway; digital distribution ended the correlation between how obscure your favorite band was and how much effort you put into listening to them. The longevity of rock ’n’ roll as a genre, meanwhile, has solidified a core audience that is now between the ages of 40 and 80, rendering the fan-versus-society dimension of the PNRC impossible to believe. And the economics of the industry — in which streaming has reduced the profit margin on recorded music, and the closure of small venues has made stadiums and big auditoriums the only reliable way to make money on tour — have decimated the indie model. All these forces have converged to make rock, for the first time in its history, merely a way of writing songs instead of a way of life.

Yet rock as a cluster of signifiers retains its power around the world. In the same way everyone knows what a castle is and what it signifies, even though actual castles are no longer a meaningful force in our lives, rock remains a shared language of cultural expression even though it is no longer determining our friendships, turning children against their parents, yelling truth at power, et cetera. Also like a castle, a lot of people will pay good money to see a preserved historical example of rock or even a convincing replica of it, especially in Europe.

In Milan, the temperature had dropped 20 degrees, and Måneskin’s show at Stadio Giuseppe Meazza — commonly known as San Siro, the largest stadium in Italy, sold out that night at 60,000 — was threatened by thunderstorms instead of record-breaking heat. Fans remained undaunted: Many camped in the parking lot the night before in order to be among the first to enter the stadium. One of them was Tamara, an American who reported her age as 60½ and said she had skipped a reservation to see da Vinci’s “Last Supper” in order to stay in line. “When you get to knocking on the door, you kind of want to do what you want,” she said.

The threat of rain was made good at pretty much the exact moment the show began. The sea of black T-shirts on the pitch became a field of multicolored ponchos, and raindrops were bouncing visibly off the surface of the stage. David lost his footing near the end of “I Wanna Be Your Slave,” briefly rolling to his back, while De Angelis — who is very good at making lips-parted-in-ecstasy-type rock faces — played with her eyes turned upward to the flashing sky, like a martyr.

The rain stopped in time for “Kool Kids,” a punk-inspired song in which David affects a Cockney accent to sing about the vexed cultural position of rock ’n’ roll: “Cool kids, they do not like rock/they only listen to trap and pop.” These are probably the Måneskin lyrics most quoted by music journalists, although they should probably be taken with a grain of salt, considering that the song also contains lyrics like “I like doin’ things I love, yeah” and “Cool kids, they do not vomit.”

“Kool Kids” was the last song before the encore, and each night a few dozen good-looking 20-somethings were released onto the stage to dance and then, as the band walked off, to make we’re-not-worthy bows around Raggi’s abandoned guitar. The whole thing looked at least semichoreographed, but management assured me that the Kool Kids were not professional dancers — just enthusiastic fans who had been asked if they wanted to be part of the show. I kept trying to meet the person in charge of wrangling these Kool Kids, and there kept being new reasons that was not possible.

The regular kids, on the other hand, were available and friendly throughout. In Rome, Dorca and Sara, two young members of a Måneskin fan club, saw my notebook and shot right over to tell me they loved the band because, as Sara put it, “they allow you to be yourself.” When asked whether they felt their culture was conservative in ways that prevented them from being themselves, Dorca — who was 21 and wearing eyeglasses that looked like part of her daily wardrobe and a mesh top that didn’t — said: “Maybe it turns out that you can be yourself. But you don’t know that at first. You feel like you can’t.”

Here lies the element of rock that functions independently from the economics of the industry or the shifting preferences of critics, the part that is maybe independent from time itself: the continually renewed experience of adolescence, of hearing and therefore feeling it all for the first time. But how disorienting must those feelings be when they have been fully monetized, fully sanctioned — when the response to your demand to rock ’n’ roll all night and party every day is, “Great, exactly, thank you.” In a culture where defying consensus is the dominant value, anything is possible except rebellion. It must be strange, in this post-everything century, to finally become yourself and discover that no one has any problem with that.

[minimalism-v1]

heodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures is a wonderful victory tale, both in the true story it depicts and in how it has, as a film about Black women in STEM, been so warmly received by audiences. A lot of attention has been given to the first half (that is, it being a film centered around three Black women), and rightly so. As a Black woman, I left the film with a proud smile only somewhat tempered by the wistful thought that I wished such a film had been around when I was a little girl. But today I want to shine a light on the second part — the part where Hidden Figures demonstrates that fact-based films revolving around STEM (short for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) history can have mass appeal. More importantly, how Hidden Figures serves as a sort of blueprint as to exactly how STEM stories can also be financially viable crowd pleasers — because we, perhaps now more than ever, need these types of stories, and for all sorts of STEM disciplines. Space science encompasses the disciplines that have likely benefited most from film, just because it’s gotten the most attention, but other disciplines do have the potential, and could desperately use the “Hollywood treatment.”

While people throw around the term STEM a good deal, the fact of the matter is that the numerous disciplines encompassed do not necessarily sink or swim together, though they are all valuable. In recent years, the biopic treatment has been more or less exclusively limited to stories of mathematicians, physicists, and computer programers, with the occasional psychologist thrown in. While other disciplines such as chemistry and biology are now woefully ignored, it is not for lack of stories waiting to be told — something Hollywood used to recognize. The 1930s and 40s are referred to as Hollywood’s Golden Age, but they were also a time when major studios warmly embraced research scientist biopics, referred to by film historian Alberto Elena as “true forerunners of the genre in the United States.”

Itseems silly that major studios now insist on churning out reboots and remakes that nobody asked for, and that rarely seem to succeed either critically or commercially, when STEM history has so many stories just waiting to be told. If we are so insistent on repeating ourselves, why not revitalize the scientist biopic genre? The genre was believed to have flourished in the 30s and 40s due to a desire to present the possibility of a national society united in support of science and education in a time of great political instability (sound familiar?).

Last week I wrote about monsters in film, and how sympathetic portrayals of monsters blow open, the concept of “people are frightened by what they don’t understand.” Well, in modern, everyday life, this quote is painfully applicable to a lot of things within STEM, especially biology. When I think of “people are frightened by what they don’t understand,” the first thing that pops into mind is vaccines. Vaccination used to be a widely supported public health issue — the March of Dimes was originally the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and funded the development and distribution of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine — but many today look upon vaccination as a danger in need of containment. A good deal of this, I believe, stems from a lack of both understanding and urgency, with the exception of smallpox, all diseases for which we have vaccines are still in existence, and therefore could potentially make a comeback.

So where does film come in?

In a New Yorker article, Richard Brody refers to Hidden Figures as a “subtle and powerful work of counter-history, or, rather, of a finally and long-deferred accurate history” that both depicts the important roles of Black women at NASA in the early 1960s and the “repugnant attitudes and practices of white supremacy that poisoned earlier generations’ achievements and that are inseparable from those achievements.” Cultural memory is a very powerful thing, and films — specifically Hollywood films — play a considerable role in shaping it. They say that looking at the past is the best way to anticipate what will happen in the future, but the “history” that actually shapes current attitudes and opinions is history as remembered, which can vary significantly from history as it actually was (thus, “Make America Great Again”). It could be argued that films and popular culture are responsible for a lot of the misremembrance of the past that fuels popular nostalgia, but by the same token films are similarly capable of counteracting the image of the rose-tinted world of yesteryear — a time of blatant racism, sexism, and a lot of diseases.

My favorite example of this medical history amnesia (and one of my biggest cinematic pet peeves) has to do with the 1918 flu pandemic, which infected an estimated 500 million people (somewhere between a third to a fourth of the global population) and killed an estimated 50 million. I only very recently discovered that that estimate included my great-grandfather; with those sorts of numbers, most of us wouldn’t have to branch too far out in our family tree to find someone afflicted. And yet, it has largely been forgotten.

I certainly saw war films growing up — films that took place in the year 1918 — and yet I didn’t know about the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic until I saw a PBS documentary in middle school because most films and TV shows fail to acknowledge it even exists. The most noticeable exception would probably be Downton Abbey, where the 1918 pandemic conveniently serves to kill off the hypotenuse of a love triangle. But the thing is, for all films love to highlight the horrors of war and the needless loss of life involved, the flu pandemic killed more than the Great War — or the Bubonic Plague, or any other pandemic in recorded history. For many people living in the US, well away from any actual battlefields, the real horror wasn’t WWI, but what came right after.

While there is a film to be made there — disaster movie is a genre in itself, after all — that’s not the type of potential film I want to highlight. While the history of medicine is, by nature, one that involves death and suffering, it also features some tales of incredible success. The eradication of smallpox, I would argue, is one of our greatest achievements as a species, and yet it has never been featured in a film. The value of featuring science in films, as I have discussed before, goes well beyond matters of scientific accuracy. As Heather Berlin writes in a special science communication issue of Trends in Immunology:

“Incorporating scientific themes into films, whether accurately or otherwise, has the potential to open up new audiences to scientific ideas and inspire them to engage in a broader discussion of science itself, which is invaluable.”

One of the great things about Hidden Figures is that it’s the sort of film, with it’s PG rating and upbeat tone, that a little girl could go see and come out thinking “now that’s cool” or “hey, maybe I could do something like that.” We need more of these kinds of films. It’s not about indoctrinating kids into becoming scientists and mathematicians and engineers — just letting them know that those options are out there. In a peculiar sense it’s almost a Chicken-and-Egg question: do so many little girls want to be princesses and the like because they want to be, or because most of the female characters they are exposed to are princesses? I attribute a lot of my interest in microbiology and immunology to the PBS American Experience documentaries “The Polio Crusade” and “Influenza 1918,” and I know people pursuing STEM careers who reminisce fondly over childhood memories of watching movies like Apollo 13.

Last but not least, Hidden Figures exemplifies how a STEM story can also be so much more. It’s a story about racism and adversity and the many guises in which they present themselves. It’s also a film takes, as others have noted, the foundations of a traditional “genius” narrative but instead looks at the individual in the context of their community, which adds depth and differentiates it from the typical “lone genius” perspective. While what makes Hidden Figures successful cannot be exactly duplicated, it’s basic formula of “STEM genius narrative plus” is something that could easily be adapted. Hopefully, in light of Hidden Figures’ box office success, it just might be, and to a variety of STEM fields.

[jb4lord]

There’s an elephant in the room when it comes to "innovation." And it’s an ironic elephant given that we're all so hooked on data analytics, a/b testing, and getting metrics for anything and everything. Yet we all throw around terms like creativity, breakthroughs, and disruptive innovation. Companies eat up this stuff--they're fully on board. Innovation is going to shape the future. Sure--if we track and shape it.

According to McKinsey, more than 70% of corporate leaders tout innovation as a top three business priority, but only 22 percent set innovation performance metrics.

The gap is problematic. Why aren't more companies measuring innovation? Because innovation is nebulous. Definitions differ. Expectations vary.

Garbage in, garbage out. Nothing in, nothing out

If you believe in the age old adage “garbage in, garbage out” then the scope of the problem becomes painfully poignant. Nothing in, nothing out. If you don’t measure innovation, are you still getting it? Not in any systematic way you're not.

Some might argue that the very act of measuring anything “creative” stifles it out of the gate, or that innovation is just plain impossible to quantify. (They're wrong.) More importantly, do you really want to leave the future up to creative chance? It's not exactly a viable strategy.

Measuring innovation is a combination of art and science, which is precisely why it’s tough to do. If you go too far--like 3M did when they applied the rigorous Six Sigma model to its creative process--you might actually get less of what you really want.

The most innovative organizations carefully consider what goes into the innovation process, but also consider what should come out of it. They focus on different types of measurements, and include both the quant side of the business (hard numbers) and the qualitative side (say, leadership behavior).

Articulate the end game: Define the outputs.

Most companies zero in on bottom line basics--top line revenue and overall profitability--when it comes to gauging success. Many also focus on their net promoter score. These high-altitude metrics are indeed important, but they have limited value when it comes to measuring--and driving--innovation. Why? They're numbers. They don't take in what people want. And they don't inspire action around specific goals.

Yum! Brands, owner of fast food chains KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, wanted to innovate its offerings in foreign markets--to increase its overall proportion of international revenue. Their goal--to radically increase international profits--required a fundamentally different approach. Yes, they had to create new products that would result in revenue (numbers), but they couldn't get a big enough jolt by simply tweaking the supply chain or through standard (McKinsey-style) efficiency measures. In a market where finger lickin’ fried chicken was about as foreign as apple pie, the company had little choice but to explore unfamiliar customer needs, test out new products, and build new business models.

And so the company looked at what Chinese customers would want, rather than what KFC was already good at. They introduced Youtiao, a traditional “street food” snack and other localized dishes at its Chinese KFC locations. Rice bowls are also now a staple on Chinese KFC menus. Thanks to Yum's realization that there was money in innovating around the Chinese palate, Yum’s corporate profits from international sales skyrocketed from 20% to 70%.

In short, you need to disrupt the business-as-usual mindset. From a quantitative perspective, here's what you can innovate around.

Percentage of revenue or profit coming from international versus domestic markets

Revenues from new products or services introduced in the past X year(s)

Revenues from products or services sold to new customer segments

Percentage of existing customers that trade up to next-generation products or services

Percentage of revenue coming from services versus products (or vice-versa)

Royalty or licensing revenue from intellectual property

Innovation-savvy organizations frame their end game around such goals as those above. The value of the innovation is measurably tied to the output--not to some dreamy notion of "creativity." You still have to come up with new ideas, but at least you have goals and a way to measure them. And you should measure them.

You can continue to read the full article but what I want to show you the element of creativity illustrated by KFC, not mentioned in this article is from its website in China:

http://www.kfc.com.cn/kfccda/breakfast/index.html

Watch the dancing video, see how KFC use American rap hip-hop street dance to image its breakfast. The theme is how to wake up and make a fresh morning on the way to work, starting from crossing the road, at the rail station to the cafe (of KFC), totally refresh!

At the end, it said, upgrade the Chinese breakfast set (small size) to the American breakfast set (medium size). 

That is how a good fusion of culture means for an American fast-food chain. Businesses do tailor made customers’ food tastes but at the end of the day, the brand IS STILL AMERICA-that’s the essence of branding the image.

Something else I also like:

http://www.kfc.com.cn/kfccda/dinner/index.html

In promoting their dinner sets, in the middle of the screen, they selected some well night wishes theme on incidental/casual coming across friends, lovers and families when they dine out, netizens can choose the best wish to share on social media, expecting more wonderful expectations.

This is the one I picked:   “33场偶遇，101次媚眼，矜持，并不是我的强项。我认输！一起吃饭吧！ Two people come across each other 33 times, flying the exchange of love glances 101 times. “I am not good in restraining my feelings. Ok! I surrender. Shall we eat together?” 

Is it a very sweet opening to invite your secret admired love or a long time admired person to have a date? <3