In a number of countries, some people think it is necessary to spend large sums of money on constructing railway lines for very fast trains between cities. Others believe the money should be spent on improving existing public transport. Discuss both these views and give your own opinion.

For Robert B. Cialdini, Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University, one reason that companies don’t succeed as often as they should is that

innovation

starts with recruitment. Research shows that the fit between an employee’s values and a

company

’s values makes a difference to what contribution they make and whether, two years after they join, they’re still at the

company

. Studies at Harvard Business School show that,

although

some individuals may be more creative than others, almost every individual can be creative in the right circumstances. One of the most famous photographs in the story of rock’n’roll emphasises Ciaidini’s views. The 1956 picture of singers Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis jamming at a piano in Sun Studios in Memphis tells a hidden story. Sun’s ‘million-dollar quartet’ could have been a quintet. Missing from the picture is Roy Orbison’ a greater natural singer than Lewis, Perkins or Cash. Sam Phillips, who owned Sun, wanted to revolutionise popular music with songs that fused black and white music, and country and blues. Presley, Cash, Perkins and Lewis instinctively understood Phillips’s ambition and believed in it. Orbison wasn’t inspired by the goal, and only ever achieved one hit with the Sun label. The value fit matters, says Cialdini, because

innovation

is, in part, a process of change, and under that

pressure

Add a comma

,pressure

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we, as a species, behave differently, ‘When things change, we are hard-wired to play it safe.’ Managers should

therefore

adopt an approach that appears counterintuitive -they should explain what stands to be lost if the

company

fails to seize a particular opportunity. Studies show that we invariably take more gambles when threatened with a loss than when offered a reward. Managing

innovation

is a delicate art. It’s easy for a

company

to be pulled in conflicting directions as the marketing, product development, and finance departments each get different feedback from different sets of people. And without a system

which

Correct pronoun usage

that

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ensures collaborative exchanges within the

company

, it’s

also

easy for small ‘pockets of

innovation

’ to disappear.

Innovation

is a contact sport. You can’t brief people just by saying, ‘We’re going in

this

direction and I’m going to take you with me.’