Back in 2002, when he was still the CMO for Procter & Gamble, Jim Stengel was pictured on the cover of an Advertising Age reprint that I happened to pick up while in the office of a client in Atlanta.
Jim Stengel
Before there was a GameChangers LLC, before one word of the book had been written, I read in that Ad Age article how Stengel had made what we know today as a GameChanger move: He banned all storyboards from first meetings with ad agencies on new campaigns. What a gift! Storyboards in a kickoff meeting, presume way too much. They hijack the process, and take it down a one-way, one-lane street. They imply a client/vendor relationship that prematurely assigns status and roles to the players and is therefore toxic to a truly organic process.
I give Jim Stengel a lot of credit for indicating that there is a need for improvisation in business. His storyboard ban created a vacuum that, by design I’m sure, required improvisation to fill.
In animation, where films are largely worked out on storyboards, presenting scenes that have been depicted on storyboards is called ‘getting the story on its feet.’ Stengel recognized that getting anything on its feet that was going to have legs needed to fall a time or two first.
Today, Stengel teaches at the Anderson School of Business at UCLA, and from his website it seems that he’s still got a unique perspective on the practices and processes of marketing brands. I hope he’s telling the future captains of industry about his P & G storyboard rule. It’s a good one.
We cannot emphasize enough how often the origins of the productive game rest not with actions of the first person to act, but with the person who defines the game by supporting and adding to what the first person is doing. The second person is the unsung hero of the game.
Ethan Bauley sent me a link that’s a perfect depiction of the ‘Unsung Hero’ idea. Take a look at this video shot at the recent Sasquatch Music Festival outside Vancouver:
The first dancer, Collin Wynter from Calgary, deserves credit for initiating well. He’s having fun, and he’s high energy, connecting with the music and the rest of his environment and not at all caught up in his own little world. He is acting on his environment (the hillside and the soft grass and the music) and as a consequence, the environment ‘acts on him’ as his dancing becomes infectious. But it doesn’t become a scene, it doesn’t find its game, until the second dancer joins. The second dancer adds and heightens, and from that point on, there’s no stopping this scene. First, he learns the second dancer learns the ‘rules of the dance’ from the first dancer, then he makes the dance even more playful by falling to the ground and crawling through the first dancer’s legs. It is the second person who embraces the rules of the game and plays the game in a way that others cannot resist joining. After the third person joins, the joining becomes a wave that lasts until the music ends. (And maybe beyond, that’s where the video cuts.)This same dynamic is characteristic of any productive game. A game played alone has finite potential, while a game that invites joining has unlimited upside. It is the second person to play who signals to the crowd that your game is worth joining.
It is worth noting that this article in the Calgary Herald celebrates Collin Wynter as being some kind of hero, but does not mention the second dancer, or even the existence of the unsung hero of the game.
A part of my work with the World Wildlife Fund for its Earth Hour event in Los Angeles on March 28, I helped organize a group of young musicians to perform at the event. My guitar teacher, Lonnie ‘Meganut’ Marshall, put together a group of kids who played drums on recycled plastic buckets they’d painted to fit the theme ‘Funeral for Fossil Fuel’.
The Life Drum Core, as Lonnie named the group, was a big hit. They got coverage on all the local TV stations, and on the night of Earth Hour, their four-minute performance was well-received. They ended up afterward jamming with the mayor, who grabbed his own recycled bucket and began banging out a beat. (He wasn’t bad.) (more…)
Nothing. And that is the precisely the point. When you want to change the game, one way to do it is change your environment.
The April 7 CBS Evening News with Katie Couric reported the story of Lynn Love, who for 22 years owned and operated a used car lot in Tampa. When the economic downturn hit the car business, Love liquidated his inventory and, with the last of his savings, bought a catering truck and began serving meals in his empty used car lot. He didn’t know anything about cooking, but he learned quickly (giving yourself problems to solve is a great way to learn) and the inexpensive, simple meals on his menu have been a hit with his customers, some of whom formerly bought cars from him. (more…)
Deep Patel, and the company he founded GoGreenSolar, prove that adding information is one sure way to heighten scenes and improve performance.
In 2005, while getting his Masters Degree in Business Finance at Boston University, Patel discovered that information about solar power and equipment was not easy for potential users to come by. He launched GoGreenSolar solely with the intention of providing useful information to his audience. When the audience for this information grew, he added an e-commerce component. By the time he got his graduate degree he was one of the solar industry’s most authoritative voices and had developed a brand that will sell over a million dollars of solar equipment online in 2009.
Patel is quick to point out that he launched GoGreenSolar.com with a) no intention of selling anything on the site; and b) with full commitment to educating the market (and himself) about solar.
Deep Patel’s number one obligation to his brand (and the move that he ties most closely to its success in the marketplace) is to add information. “I blog seven days a week,” he says. “No matter what.”
An ‘Adding Information Strategy’ like this produces all kinds of positive outcomes.
It keeps the brand customer-focused. There’s no better way to keep an audience engaged in your performance than telling them something they didn’t know.
It’s low-overhead. Adding information costs less than just about anything else you can boost a brand’s performance in the marketplace.
Adding information also keeps the brand narrative fresh. It is an evergreen move. The currency of the information added, a relatively easy standard to achieve in a fast-growing industry like solar, ensures that the brand is ‘alive’ in the minds of its audience.
It expresses confidence. In an emerging field like solar energy, there’s naturally a lot of uncertainty and ignorance in the marketplace that can be exploited by ‘first in’ players. Because its strategy is one of educating, not hyping, its, GoGreenSolar stays ‘manufacturer agnostic’, which makes the voice of the brand credible. This credibility translates into customer confidence in what is being sold on the site.
It demonstrates the importance of conversations. Deep talks to a lot of people, inside and outside his industry. Those conversations bring perspective and insight to the information he adds. Who is saying something (and where and when and why) are every bit as important as what is being said.
Conversations require good listening. Listening yields suggestions from the audience that can be woven into the brand’s themes.
Adding information creates context. That’s huge. By adding information, Patel dimensionalizes the products on GoGreenSolar, until they are more than products, they are essential elements in a larger brand narrative. In the Networked World where content is ubiquitous, context is king. It is our ability to make sense of information, to add emotional and meta meaning to cosmetic data, to find patterns in the complex tapestries of life and the marketplace, that set our brands apart and distinguish us as communicators and as human beings.
For the first time, we have two winners of the coveted Gamey in the same month. They are Ty’Sheoma Bethea, an eighth-grader from South Carolina and Leonard Abess, a banker from Florida, both of whom were recognized by President Obama in his state of the nation address last month.
Bethea wrote a letter. It was what she could do and she did it. In that letter, she maintained of she and her classmates, “We are not quitters!” And that letter changed the game.
Abess had $60,000,000 in the bank, proceeds from the sale of his company. He gave it away to 471 employees and former employees who’d supported him over the years. That gift changed the game, too.
She gave a small gift that became something big. With that one letter, she opened a thousand doors that would have not been open to her otherwise.
He gave a big gift that got bigger. The number ‘60,000,000′ didn’t change, but the potential for that ‘60,000,000′ to make things happen in the world increased overnight by a factor of 471.
We honor Ty’Sheoma and Leonard because they bookend three important elements of gamechanging.
Big gifts and small gifts are equally important to our scenes. That’s the first piece of what these gamechangers teach us. All gifts have the potential to inspire profound scenes.
Here is the second piece: Action flows from character. Beathea and Abess didn’t just wake up one day and shazaam!—in a puff of genie smoke, suddenly turn into the people with game.
She is a young woman who wants to learn, and doesn’t want to be held back from it. She is a writer of letters, and a righter of injustice. She is not a quitter.
He is a friend who values friendships that go all the way back to grammar school, a manager with employee relationships that extend beyond current staff, a player who recognizes that he owes much of his success to others on his team. He is not greedy.
They took actions that were consistent with their characters.
And here’s the third piece: We can never know for sure how the game will change. But if we bring what we can to our scenes…if we are consistent in character and action…we can trust that, as Ty’Sheoma Bethea and Leonard Abess showed us, the game will change, as unforeseen opportunities bloom into new and fruitful realities.
The extraordinary improviser, Paul Vaillancourt, gave me a list of sayings that have been compiled and passed around the improv theater community over the years. The legendary teachers, Mick Napier and Del Close, get some of the credit, though the exact origins of most of these are as hazy as the roots of any folk wisdom. Here is the fourth in a series of sayings from Vallaincourt’s List, with my notes following. As you go about your business, keep these concepts in play: (more…)
The most basic concept in all of improvisation is ‘Yes and’. If we are in a scene together and you make a statement, it is my obligation as an improviser to ‘yes-and’ your statement. By ‘yes-anding’ you, I not only agree to your reality, I add to it with perspective of my own. In this way, we can ‘triangulate’ on the problem to be solved, and also bring dimension, and new levels of collaboration to the scene.
The words ‘yes’ and ‘and’ do not have to be spoken literally, of course. It is the spirit of the phrase that matters. A common improv exericise invokes this spirit by having players begin every exchange of dialogue with those two powerful words, spoken literally.
If we are in a scene together and are ‘yes-anding’ one another, by the third line of the scene, it will not be about your reality, or my reality, it will be about our reality. Now we have the ability to work together toward an objective. It is the ‘and’ that makes all the difference. Anyone can say ‘yes’. It might get me a reputation as a being a positive person around the office, but it will not necessarily make me a productive player. (more…)
What a year. Wow. The best and worst of everything. The birth of the new and the collapse of the old. Yin and Yang.
On one hand, we had Obama, our wedding and the Brady Bunchiness of a new family, my book, Costa Rica, yoga, guitar lessons at Flea’s Silver Lake Conservatory, some fantastic clients and new conversations, and the ever-flowing love between us and the wonderful people in our lives.
On the flip side of the coin we minted in 2008 there was Bush and Cheney and their decrepit Industrial Age ‘war economy’ and the general malaise that came over and corrupted so much American business during their reign. At the end of the year, with Bush madly justifying his abhorrent stewardship of the country since 9/11, and Israel and Hamas burning through their munitions inventory like it’s a holiday sale at WarMart, we are gasping for air like we’ve been standing too long in a garage with a smoking Peterbuilt. One of 2009’s themes is going to be about getting out of that garage and breathing the fresh air of new narratives, new ideas for generating wealth in a networked economy. The engine has to run on something other than oil. (more…)
Their ad buy has obviously changed, because even though they’ve been on TV somewhere for most of 2008, all of a sudden, the Shamwow late-night TV spots are intersecting with our networks. In honoring the host of the Shamwow commercial, Vince Offer, with October’s ‘Gamey’, we honor a couple of great American traditions: Late night TV spots made on the cheap but with an aesthetic we have come to appreciate as its own kind of pulp genre…and the pitchmen moving the merch. The ginzu knife demo’ers and the guys who suck bowling balls with vacuum cleaners and Suzanne Sommers, and Richard Simmons, and Ron Popeil and Ed McMahon, and Vince McMahon and Jim McMahon — there should be a special wing in the TV Hall of Fame for these characters, and for their fictional counterparts like Willy Wonka, Willy Loman and Professor Harold Hill. Vince Offer, wearing the headset that is just as mandatory to a boardwalk hawker like him as a face mask is to a hockey goalie, is a classic of the breed. (more…)
The extraordinary improviser, 
The most basic concept in all of improvisation is ‘Yes and’. If we are in a scene together and you make a statement, it is my obligation as an improviser to ‘yes-and’ your statement. By ‘yes-anding’ you, I not only agree to your reality, I add to it with perspective of my own. In this way, we can ‘triangulate’ on the problem to be solved, and also bring dimension, and new levels of collaboration to the scene.