Culture or Tradition?

Like with so many things here in China, it is often hard to determine where tradition ends   and culture begins.  This seems to be the case with my most recent learning experience.  It all started when I decided that I needed to try to change the company (and maybe the country) culture to be able to inspire creativity and innovation.  Now this may seem like an impossible job, and I must say that I agree.  So this issue has consumed much of my waking thoughts and I have recently come up with some tangible / creative ways to try to do this.  I believe that to be able to inspire creativity, the people have to see it in there everyday life.  Now this is so far from reality that it becomes difficult to envision how to start.  As Tommy may remember this was also my topic of discussion at Kalamazoo College when I asked the question of the facility: how do you teach passion and creativity; two values which I believe set people apart from others.  As you can imagine; there fell an eerie silence for what felt like eternity until finally the president uttered some meaningless crap about setting high standards for achievement.  But to their credit they took this comment to heart and within one year they had revised the curriculum to enable students to follow their passion more effectively.  So what does all this have to do with my situation in China, well I am trying to answer the same question that the faculty of Kzoo college faced all those years ago, What is creativity and how does it become part of ones DNA? 
So off I headed to the board of directors meeting to convince them that this was the primary principal need for the transition to a creative, sustainable, organization.  Now I had to make it look like I knew the answer to this and more other perplexing questions because after all, this is why they hired me.  So my game plan was this, as simple as it may seem, Make Innovation visible in the employee’s everyday life.  My approach was simple, put unique examples of innovation where every employee had to experience it; yes;;; revise the lobby to add an innovative centerpiece on which we can display things from everyday life that go against normal thinking.  And with this in mind we should also be able to transform the impression of visitors from OH WHAT A NICE LOBBY to WOW THIS COMPANY THINKS INNOVATION.  So I have gathered a couple of examples that help display this lateral thinking and innovation and the next step is to make the lobby transition happen.
So by now (if you are still reading) you are wondering where all this is going.  Well my issue actually buts itself head-on with tradition and the unique teachings of Buddha.  OK you give up? How can this be? And no we don’t have a Buddha statue in the lobby.  But what we do have is a wall which goes almost all the way across the lobby in front of the elevators.  The problem is that this wall will need to move in order to transform the lobby.  But this as I am finding out, goes against tradition.  Come to find out, this wall is a necessary part of every office building and not because it is structural but rather because it "prevents the money from flowing out of the company".  How does this happen; well that is a mystery of the Buddha tradition.  The reasoning seems to have been lost in the generations but the belief is alive and well.  This becomes even more unsettling when we realize that although there are many Buddha temples in the country, the vast majority does not practice any known religion. But nevertheless, the tradition is an important part of office life.
Seeing that this intrigued me, I decided to explore this a bit further; and lo and behold, these types of features seem to be part of the fen sway china culture.  We find that these features, feature predominately in the architecture of the traditional Chinese house.  As you enter the house, it is bad if you can see from the front door through to the back door.  In addition, it is also not appropriate to be able to see the actual toilet when you open the bathroom door.  We find yet another example of this in the bedroom where you should not be able to see the bed when you enter the room.  So surveying our place, it is very evident that we do not live in a traditional Chinese house as none of these architectural features figure predominately in our flat's architecture.  But then it really does not offend us but we really don’t have good fen sway. 
So tradition lives on in Shanghai even though outward signs have now all been replaced by huge skyscrapers and sprawling suburbia.