Archive for the ‘Character’ Category

Amber Magic

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

Last week, I went to see a friend’s band play at a club in Hollywood, and got there to discover that they were third on the bill.  I had some time, so went across the street to Starbucks, where I read the paper and drank a cafe mocha.  The colorful characters are always present along Hollywood Boulevard, and a number of them were streaming in and out of the Starbucks, so I amused myself by tweeting about them.

One of them was a teenaged girl lugging a big suitcase. Her cheeks were painted in glitter. She looked tired. She ordered a water, then got a book out of a suitcase that looked to be crammed with rave clothing, smelled the book, and began reading.  On occasion, as she was reading, she would laugh out loud.

I figured I had the story.  Practically a cliche.  Underage girl, probably a runaway, goes to Hollywood rave, crashes with people she meets there, and when everyone is no longer amused, they kick her onto the street.  Now she was headed back to San Bernardino or Topeka, or wherever.

To confirm all this, I initiated a conversation with her.  It turned out that her name is Amber.  She works with a group in the Bay Area called Magic Princess that does party performances.  A couple of days earlier, they had gotten a phone call from the Make-a-Wish Foundation in L.A., and Amber happened to be in the office when the call came.  An eight year old girl from Los Angeles with a terminal illness had made a wish to see a fairy.  Amber volunteered to play the fairy.  She rode a bus for 12 hours from Oakland to L.A., spent the afternoon being the little girl’s fairy and was waiting for the bus, to ride 12 hours back home.

The light of Amber’s beautiful story exposed the wrongness of my pathetic preconception. How often do we do this? We perceive things to be a certain way because we see them from the perspective of our own experiences, when in reality, our own experiences are a very narrow lens, like trying to see the world through a pinhole camera. When we manage to put down that lens and really look around, we discover that every interaction holds the potential for something new and wonderful.

It is only when we let go of our own narratives, our scripts for what we think we want our lives to be, our prejudices preconceptions and fears, that we can truly experience the beauty of what life actually is. We don’t have to make the magic. It’s all around us. And if we’re open to it, it will happen.AmberFairy1

Letter from an Angry Mother

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

Dear Children,

I know you are busy with your lives and your careers and such, and you know I’m not one to meddle or nag.  Live and let live, that’s my motto.  But as your Mother I’ve got to tell you that your behavior lately has been hurtful to me, and to the rest of our family. You seem to have forgotten that I am a living, breathing being, with real feelings. And right now my feelings are hurt. Badly.

I held you in my arms.  Fed you.  Gave you a nice home. Helped you grow into the people you are today. I guess I have failed, because the people you are today have wounded me.  I want to scream.  Sometimes I do scream.  Of course you don’t hear me, you only hear what’s coming out of your own mouths. How about listening for a change?

I made it possible for you to get an education, so you can do whatever it is you do for a living (I still don’t understand it!???) and yet you take me for granted.  Like I am nothing to you.  This is the treatment I deserve?  This is your response to a lifetime of love?

I do not ask for your thanks.  A Mother’s job is a thankless one.  I accept that.  Spare me the holidays.  Show me some appreciation, that’s all.  I will not be ignored! I will not go gently into the night!!!

How about I cut off your inheritance? You have no idea how close I am to doing it.  You’ve already blown through most of what I intended to leave you, anyway.  Take, take, take, and never give back, that’s you.

If you’re not going to show me respect, I promise you I’ll start taking back what’s rightfully mine.  How did you like it when I took back that piece of Japan last month? That hurt, didn’t it?  You felt that, didn’t you?  It is just the beginning of where this thing is headed unless you get your act together.

At one time, the family owned a million or more varieties of apples, did you know that?  What are we down to now?  Six?  Seven?  It took me ages to save up my precious minerals collection.  You walked off with it, and you’re not bringing it back, you think I don’t notice? It took me 10 million years to build the family oil business, and you’re going to blow through it in a couple of measly centuries?  Some nerve.  Frack me?  No, frack you!!!

The Dodo was my favorite tsotchke , you probably didn’t know that, did you?  Of course you didn’t, because it’s always all about you.  I loved that animal, it made me laugh every time I looked at it, and then you broke it.  I miss my Dodo.  It was one of a kind.  It cannot be replaced.  Too late for an apology.  Don’t even try.  I’m not forgiving you for that one.

Mustard gas?  That any children of mine would make such a thing is one of my greatest heartaches.  Agent Orange?  First of all, I resent like hell that you named it after one of my favorite fruits.  Second, I still have a rash in Southeast Asia, one of the most beautiful parts of my body (one of the few I have left) because of it.  Asbestos?  Awful stuff.  Zylon B? If only it were the bad science fiction it sounds like, instead of the awful reality it was. Still gives me nightmares. And then to top it all off, you take innocent little hydrogen, and turn him into a weapon?!! Honest to Gaia, where do you learn such things?  Who are your friends?

Chernobyl?  Nuclear reactors and vodka? That was a bright idea. First, you poison me with  radiation, then you invite tourists to see the results?  Why?  So you and your kids can laugh at the featherless geese?  Have the geese not been humiliated enough?  (Yes, they have!)

Is anyone ever going to take responsibility for the mess you made in Bophal? Someone did it, and someone is going to clean it up, and we are going to wait right here until that happens, I don’t care how long it takes. And if one of you doesn’t own up to it, all of you will.

How is that cancer thing working out for you? Nobody had cancer before you brought it home, we didn’t even know what the stuff was. Now we can’t get rid of it. What’s the matter with the genes I gave you?  Nothing is ever good enough for you, is it? You’re weaving a tangled web, that’s all I can say. What are those hard red things you call tomatoes, anyway?  The corn was just fine until you came along. What is so bad about four teats on a cow? Why must you try to make six? Stop meddling with my DNA! It’s my responsibility. Keep your noses out of it!

PlanetEarth2Another thing—my air conditioner isn’t working. Why? Because I have you for children, that’s why. You broke it with your incessant smoking, and I don’t see you offering to fix it. Fine! Tell the police they’ll find my body in the kitchen, propped against the open refrigerator, where I went to get one last breath before my lungs turned to ash.

My water!  What has happened to my beautiful water? I turn my back for a minute, and you’ve dumped so much of your crap into it that all I hear is complaints from the other family members. The dolphins and whales won’t shut up about it. The salmon don’t spawn like they used to.  The octopi are pissed.  I’m not even going to go into what the plants have to say. I’ll say it for them. Thanks for nothing!!!

Have you no idea how much pain I am in?  I’m sick.  Last year I had a leak in my gulf that didn’t let up for months, and my turtles and birds are still hurting.  I get the cold sweats.  I cry for no apparent reason, until I can’t cry any more. The doctors don’t know what’s causing the vomiting, which I do with awful regularity.  My nausea is the only constant of my existence.

You have hollowed me out.  Drained me.  The only feelings I have toward you are angry ones.  Maybe venting like this is what it will take to get your attention, or make me feel better anyway.

Don’t make me lose my temper!  The last time I lost my temper, I killed the dinosaurs, you know.  That was me.  Boom!  Just like that. Gone in a heartbeat. It was an accident.  The Creator slugged me and I slugged back, and the poor dinosaurs got in the way.  I am not a cruel woman, as you often claim (don’t tell me you don’t, I’ve read your diaries!!!)  Anger can be a cruel thing, though, the reason being you never know who’s going to get hurt by it. The dinosaurs happened to get caught in the middle of a quarrel between me and the Creator and that was that.  You do not want a repeat of that scene, I promise you.  Or maybe you do.  Maybe we’re going to find out.  That’s how angry I am.  Your behavior is a slap in my face, and don’t think I won’t slap back. I will. Promise.

You’re the only species that has made a practice of killing your own kind, did you know that?  The rest of the family are disgusted by this. To make matters worse, you glorify it in your games and your stories like it’s a good thing.  I hang my head. When I think that children of mine are doing this, I want to die. I do.

You cannot leave your spent rods and your empty drums and your plastic gyres lying around the house like it’s the morning after a frat party and not expect to suffer the consequences!

You cannot not pump me full of your potions like I’m some daft heiress you’re poisoning for her dowry and expect to get away with it!

You cannot not take what is mine and pretend it is yours without waking up someday to the reality that you are a generation of thieves!

Here’s an idea for you.  Leave!  Move out of the house!  If this is the way you’re going to treat me, take your smokestacks off the roof and your jet skis out of the driveway and get out!  The rest of us can use the room. The coyotes would be happy to have your bedroom.  Do you think the trees care whether or not we have cable?  Probably not.

You are my Children, and this should not have to be our relationship. Truly, though, I am at my wits end, at a loss for what to do about the horrible way you are treating me.

Please do better.  There’s still time to heal these wounds, but not a lot.

Love,

Your Mother

My Grandmother Was a Witch…

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

Back in the Dotcom era, I’d often get asked to speak on panels about this new thing called the Internet.  The moderator’s final question to the panel would always be something like, “Where’s it all going?”  When my turn came, I’d begin with the line:

“My grandmother was a witch…”

It would get everyone’s attention, for sure.  After a beat filled with lots of blinking eyes, I’d explain that my grandmother knew how to dowse for water with the forked limb of a peach tree, and when I was seven or eight years old I’d asked her one day when she was burning trash in the rusty barrel behind her house how she did it, and she said, by way of explanation, “I’m a witch.  Didn’t you know that?”

After she put it like that, I noticed things about her that, to my young and fertile imagination, seemed like total witchcraft:  How her flowers and vegetables grew to enormous sizes–chrysanthemums like volleyballs and corn on the cob as long as your forearm.  How she would talk to her animals, her hens and her cats, and how they’d talk back.  And how the same voice that could chat with cats could throw off the pitch of an entire congregation singing a hymn in church on Sunday.

I’d tell the audience that I had come to believe that what my grandmother knew was just a tiny part of a whole body of folkways and connections to the Earth that must have, at one time, been whole.  I suggested that centuries of science, rationality and organized religion had shattered and scattered this body of knowledge to the ends of the earth, but that it still existed, as little slivers and remnants, like what my grandmother knew.

I said that what I thought would happen is that the people who are the keepers of these little pieces would be able to use the internet to find one another, and re-connect what they know, and reassemble those slivers in beautiful new ways, and that maybe these new ways would be what saves the planet.

I’d get nothing from the audience.  Blank looks.  Crickets.  Maybe one older woman in the audience nodded in understanding, but that was about it.

And then someone  else on the panel would say something like, “I think e-tail is going to be driver for growth in the tech sector in the foreseeable future…” and you could almost hear the audience sigh with relief as the talk got back to terra cognita.

Today, when I get asked to speak about social media, I will sometimes tell this same story, about My Grandmother the Witch.

Today, almost everyone in the audience nods in understanding.

Next chance you get, plant a peach tree or something.  We’re going to need it.DiviningRod1

Sevanne

Monday, February 28th, 2011

On February 20 in New York City, Jonathan Franklin, author of 33 Men, the new book about the rescue of the Chilean Miners, and I rehearsed Where Are You Stuck?, the new GameChangers program based on our shared observations of the rescue.  His observations are anecdotal, and chronicle the story of what happened before and during the rescue.  Mine are technical, and cite the way in which improvisation informed the process.

The WAYS? menu consists of 15 game-oriented activities inspired by the rescue.  A half-day WAYS? workshop will be comprised of  eight of these 15 activities, of which the client chooses six; two activities, the first and last, are ‘requirements.’  Our first WAYS? engagement is March 2 in Miami, for 120 executives from a large manufacturing company that is restructuring its processes on a global scale.

Because we had only one day to rehearse in person prior to March 2 (Franklin is currently on a worldwide book tour), we hired a coach, Sevanne Kassarjian, to guide and focus our work in New York.  Two ‘applied improvisers,’ Zohar Adner and James Tossone, along with Heather Soldania, a Masters student at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication who happened to be in NYC last weekend, joined us for part of the day.  Jonathan’s wife, father and three-year-old daughter, Zoey, also sat in for part of the day at the Ripley Grier Rehearsal Stages where we were rehearsing.  Zoey even participated in one of the activities, in which her job was baking cakes in a high-speed oven.

It was a good day.  We made huge strides toward getting the program ready.  Sevanne is terrifically focused.  She relentlessly probed and pondered the experience from every perspective.  Her work demonstrates how an improviser can play many roles in quick sequence, always through the essential truth of one’s character.  During our collaboration, she played the roles of Gentle Encourager, Stern Critic, Logistics Manager, Playful Mom, Erudite Intellectual and Fellow Improviser, to name just a few of the hats she wore.  Through it all, she was always the brilliant individual we now know as Sevanne.

Sevanne’s work is itself a microcosm of why improvisation is an essential skill for managers in a Networked World.  A job title is just that, a title.  Sevanne’s job title last week was ‘Coach.’  That title did not define the many ways in which she supported us.  Simply put, she did what was best for the scene, in each and every moment.  Given the gift of improvisation, so can you and your organization.

Play on!

Sevanne Kassarjian (Jonathan Franklin in b.g.)

Sevanne Kassarjian (Jonathan Franklin in b.g.)

Where Are You Stuck?

Friday, February 18th, 2011

WAYSScreenShot1This is a demonstration of how connections are made in the Networked World.  And some observations about how Creativity and Destruction go hand-in-hand.

WAYSScreenShot2Because GameChangers followed and contributed (seven blog posts) to the narrative of the Chilean Miners…because we were curious about how the 33 miners happened to be wearing Oakley sunglasses when they emerged from the mine after their 69-day ordeal…because we made a connection with Jonathan Franklin, the correspondent for The Guardian, who was the only print journalist with complete access to the rescue site in Copiapo, and was responsible for the Oakley connection…because Penguin Press has just published Franklin’s book, 33 Men, the definitive account of the miners’ ordeal…and because a lot of companies are asking him to share his experiences and insights…

We have co-created a new GameChangers program inspired by Franklin’s observations during the 69 days at Copiapo.  The program will be offered in the U.S. and Europe.  We will present it for the first time on March 2, at a Global Leadership Conference sponsored by Diversey, Inc.  We are rehearsing it this Sunday in New York City, when Jonathan Franklin and I will meet for the first time in person.

We cannot stress this enough:  Narratives are the ultimate organizing principle in the networked economy.

33 MEN - 3dTraditional news reporting and the internet made us aware of ‘Los 33.’  Social media–Facebook, Twitter, this blog, etc.–helped us track and participate in their story.  Skype, email and telephone made personal conversations and collaboration between us and Jonathan Franklin possible.  The Applied Improvisation Network helped us extend the program to Europe.  Geo-locating apps–I can’t even tell you what they were– helped us locate and provide directions to our rehearsal studio in NYC.  I used a virtual concierge to book my travel.  And of course personal relationships made things possible that no technology or platform could.

Through it all, it was the narrative that guided us.  With a narrative as your guide, the choice of platforms becomes an objective process, a series of consistently logical decisions.  How best to participate in a narrative is an entirely different, and more productive, discussion from how best to deploy a platform.  Choose narrative!

Interestingly (and typically) the mainstream media, beginning with 60 Minutes last Sunday, have focused on the more sensational aspects of the ‘Los 33′ narrative—on the fact that in their darkest hours, when they had no idea if they’d ever be found, a few of the miners began to think about cannibalism, or that since their rescue they’ve been suffering from PTSD (this is news because?…).  In Where Are You Stuck? we focus on the positive aspects of the rescue.  On the heroic qualities of the miners and their rescuers.  Teamwork.  Altriusm.  Sacrifice.  Leadership.  Creativity.

In every crisis there is opportunity.  In every crisis, there is destruction.  For something to be created, something must be destroyed.  Doors open and close in unison.  Shiva is the god of creation AND destruction.  Productive change entails creative destruction.

When the times are a-changin’, getting stuck can become a chronic problem, because individuals and organizations get frozen deciding (or avoiding deciding) how to respond to the changes they are experiencing.  The challenge confronting anyone looking to get ‘unstuck’ is all about focus.  Will your focus be on the creative or the destructive aspects of the change?  Will you see the opportunity, or obsess on the loss?  Will you bang on closed doors or walk through open ones?  Will you cling to the status quo until you realize, perhaps too late, that what worked in the past isn’t necessarily what will work in the future?  Interestingly, this is the challenge facing the Miners today.  Working deep underground isn’t an option any more.  That is a closed door.  What got them out of the mineshaft isn’t the same process that will get them out of the ‘mindshafts’ in which they find themselves trapped today. When context changes, everything changes.  Including the nature of heroism.

What made the Miners heroic in the eyes of the world is still within them, but like anyone else, they will have to change their game to suit their new situation.  This time, unlike the 69 days they spent in the mine, they have a choice.  Choosing to move consistently in the direction of creativity, opportunity and the newly-opened door is a challenge each of them will have to confront in his own way.

Check out the Where Are You Stuck? program, and fill out the response form to let us know how we can best help you.

improvgroupon

Monday, December 13th, 2010

GrouponLogo1This from the business section of the Dec. 6 2010 LA Times website (it was in the print newspaper on Dec. 7) about how Groupon, the geo-couponing company, turned down a buyout from Google estimated to be worth $5-6 billion.

Groupon CEO Andrew Mason is known for his quirky sense of humor, which is evident in the company’s e-mailed daily deal notifications and its office decor.  Many member of the sales and writing staff have backgrounds in improvisational comedy.

Groupon which is expecting 2010 sales of $2 billion, is described by one investor in the article as “…one of the fastest-growing venture-backed companies ever in terms of revenue ramp.  They have plenty of options.”

Of course they do.  They’re improvisers.  The group mind makes the decisions at Groupon.  What more do you need to know?

Remixing Your Metaphors

Friday, December 10th, 2010

Prompted by a question from a friend of ours, GameChangers conducted a flash survey to identify the metaphors used most frequently in business communication.  The results are no surprise:MetaphorGraph3

Our methodology was to ask six exceptional communicators who work with all sizes of organizations in a lot of different verticals what metaphors they hear most often in their business scenes.  Those surveyed included a financial analyst, an academic, an artist, a social media director for a large tech company, a brand strategist and someone I’d describe as a ‘narratologist,’ who coaches organizations on storytelling. We limited the focus of the survey to internal communication for two reasons:

1) External communication like PR, advertising and social media, is how companies represent themselves to the rest of the world.  In this context, metaphors are frequently used as a means of persuasion, and are often more about what a company or brand wants to happen than what is actually happening. Because these metaphors serve a different purpose and have a different trajectory, they have to be analyzed separately.

2) Internal communication, by comparison, describes a company’s process, environment and character.  The metaphors used internally reflect reality, because they are used to initiate or define action.  For this reason they often represent an underlying ethos, and describe how the people in an organization go about their business.

A few of the respondents’ observations:

“Maybe this would change with a few female managers, but most men I work with are all about ‘playing offense’, ‘launching a counterattack’, ‘leading from the front’,  and ‘winning the battle but losing the war’.”

“Way heavier on war references or warlike verbs:  Insert, manage, acquire, degrade, demand, battle, launch, attack, defend…”

“I also wonder as more women get into biz if the primary metaphors change.  Meaning, less sports and war, more family and home metaphors?  Especially if this whole social thing works out? (tongue firmly in cheek)”

“Think of the top headlines, of any ‘this product is killing this product’, ‘death of X’, etc.”

“Sports also present…anything that’s zero sum and can be ‘won’ lends itself.”

“I also hear (more recently) about scientific references like ‘if you observe it, you change it’.”

‘I do hear a bit about chess and board games, typically in terms of ‘looking at the whole board’, ’sacrificing your queen’, and ‘thinking through the endgame’.

The business opportunity is clear.  Over two-thirds of all business communication relies on only two metaphors—war and sports.  Not only have we worn them out, they do not address the voracious appetite of a networked business environment for fresh narratives and new ways of relating to the world. To do that, we need fresh metaphors.  They are out there in the world, and in abundance.  Games are beginning to have their day.  And there have always been organizations that see themselves as Family.  The most upside, I believe, lies in the ‘Other’ category.  Big, expressive, thematically rich subjects—music and dance, cooking, biology, quantum mechanics, farming, to name a few—can invigorate your organizational vocabulary.  They help transform your narrative from the mundane and predictable to the artful and unexpected.  And that’s what you want in a story, any story.  So start planting, and see what grows!

(A coda to this post in light of what happened yesterday in Arizona, when a mentally disturbed gunman killed six people during his attempt to assassinate Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords: The metaphors of war—and the violence they glorify—have polarized the U.S. politically to a dangerous degree. Yesterday’s events add a raw and desperate urgency to the quest for new ways of seeing and engaging with one another. The metaphors of war attract fear-driven fringe characters looking for absolutes, either-ors, and final solutions, to the problems confronting us. To these people, nothing says final like the end of a gun barrel. The narratives of war trample on the tender shoots of new ideas, and marginalize people participating in the new narratives, people like Congresswoman Giffords, who champion peaceful co-existence, believe in yes-and, and who understand that yesterday’s solutions don’t work in today’s world.)

Kroyering

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

Our friend, @InvisibleWork a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and UC-Irvine’s MBA school, tweeted last week to ask my definition of creativity.  I responded:  “the systematic elimination of everything not conducive to creativity.”

She tweeted back: “<= like this; like going through the process from the other end.”

Bill Kroyer

Bill Kroyer

The animation director Bill Kroyer taught me this game, which I call Kroyering.  It goes like this: To solve a problem look 180 degrees away from the problem. If you can define the problem’s opposite, you will have targeted the problem with just as much accuracy as if you were confronting it head-on.  This ‘exploration of opposites’ makes Kroyering a useful process, especially when you need to come up with an original solution, a creative breakthrough.  Why is this a cool tool?  Three reasons:

First, it gets out of creativity’s way. Like everything that’s natural in the world, creativity wants to happen.  Left to its own devices, it will happen.  If we clear out what gets in its way, creativity will express itself like a plant will find the sun. As Viola Spolin said, “Act on environment, and environment will act on you.”

Second, because a breakthrough is, by definition, something that didn’t exist before, it is not really possible to say what creativity is, or what form it will take, until it actually happens.  It is often more efficient to target what creativity is not.  For this reason, Kroyering offers a disciplined and cost-effective path to innovation.

Third, Kroyering makes institutional memory a positive force instead of an impediment, as it often is (At Disney, where I worked for many years,  the best way to stop any idea dead in its tracks was to say anything that began with, “Well, what Walt would have done…”  It’s why John Lasseter left Disney and ended up with Pixar.  Too many people at the time were telling him what Walt would (or wouldn’t) have done.)  A study by Dusya Vera and Mary Crossan (Organization Science, Vol. 16, May-June 2005, pp. 203-224) reveals that the best problem-solvers in an organization are those with the longest institutional memories, because they are more likely to disregard or subvert institutional memory to solve a problem. In other words, people with long institutional memories are in the best position to see and understand that a system that created a problem cannot be the same one that solves it.  Kroyering helps you identify what you can do differently by getting you out of the attic of your company’s history and into emptier space, where there’s room to expand your vision.

Here are a few qualities that, in my experience, are not conducive to creativity and can be eliminated from your working environment with help from the Kroyering Game:

Randomness; free association; outside-the-box thinking. Creativity craves intent, specificity and structure. Don’t try to get outside the box. Quantum physics tells us that there’s unlimited energy stored inside whatever box we’re in. Or…get yourself inside a different box!

Rigidity, dogma. Whatever creativity is, it’s the opposite of frozen, stuck in place, or with one unyielding position.

Aggression, destruction, violence. The harder you look for it, the harder it is to find.  The next new thing has to be teased and seduced from wherever it’s hiding.  Creativity does not send out invitations, but if we throw a party, Creativity is almost sure to come.  Creativity can’t resist a good party.  Just know that when the fighting starts, and well before the cops arrive, Creativity will be outta there.

Divergence. It is not the separating but the joining of ideas and people that results in innovation.

Dignity, manners. Creativity is impudent. It can be wildly messy. It’s like the weather that way.  Dress appropriately.

Hollowness, heartlessness, lifelessness, cold bloodedness. Sssss.

Eliminating these and other ‘non-conducive’ elements from your environment will help your creativity flow.  When you’re stuck for an idea, your process bogs down, or you can’t seem to get to the heart of a problem, try Kroyering.

Gaga Got Game

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

Gaga2GagaYoutTube1The former Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta seemingly arrived on the scene fully formed as Lady Gaga and ever since girl found her game, she has played her heart out.  Music bloggers and critics compare her to Madonna, or call her Cher-esque.  Tabloids warn Christina and Mariah that there’s a fresh queen of pop on the block.  Elton John annoints her his new goddess.

And yet none of these analyses, nor all of them in the entirety, do justice to the gamechanging quality of Lady Gaga’s appeal, and the attraction she has for her fans, whom she has dubbed The Little Monsters.  Calling her the next Oprah would be closer to the mark, because she’s on her way, if she’s not there already, toward becoming a cultural phenomenon the likes of which her generation has not yet seen.

Here’s why:  Better than perhaps any pop culture persona of our time, she understands that her narrative belongs to her audience.  Instead of giving the Little Monsters an iconic persona they can imitate–as popstars like Madonna, the Beatles and Elvis did–Lady Gaga gives her fans a window to their own identities. Her repertoire is so dense with meta meaning, she evolves so persistently–getting on a plane playing one role, for instance, and getting off the plane playing another role–that her narrative is always fresh, she is continually being reborn before our eyes.

Fluent in the universal languages of spirituality, music, fashion, design, choreography, makeup, theater, fame, humor, honesty, hard work, sisterhood, branding, myth, equality, and improvisation, she speaks through all of them, often through many of them simultaneously, to connect with her  her audience.  What she says to them through these many languages always boils down to this:  “Look at me and find yourself.”

This is why the University of South Carolina teaches a course entitled Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame. It is why senior citizens, hotel workers, Russians, college students and young people all find her captivating.  We are all Little Monsters in search of ourselves.

Brands and organizations can learn a lot from Gaga:

Be true to your essential character, and you can play a thousand roles authentically.  Choose big themes and explore those themes energetically.  Express yourself in all kinds of languages, the more the better.   Always keep your narrative moving and evolving.  Don’t try to define what you are supposed to mean to your customers.  Instead, shimmer with meaning, just like Gaga, and let your customers know that in your brand they will discover some new part of themselves.

Los Mineros, Part Seven: “And…Scene!”

Thursday, October 14th, 2010

The ‘Los Mineros’ scene ended in Chile this week with a worldwide swelling of joy at the safe rescue of all 33 trapped miners.  They survived for a total of 68 days 2,300 feet under the earth’s surface, the longest anyone is known to have been trapped underground and lived to tell about it.ChileanMinerRescue1

We have been analyzing the scene here since shortly after the miners were discovered alive.  One of the most instructive aspects of the ‘Los Mineros’ scene is that it has very little spin.  The cave where they were trapped was truly a no-spin zone.  Events were not manipulated or interpreted to someone’s economic or political advantage.   There were no conspiracy theories.  No, this was as unadulterated as a media narrative can be.

During their 68 days in the darkness, the miners had time to ponder their lives in ‘the normal world,’ as Joseph Campbell would call it.  Many, if not all, seem to have been enlightened by the experience, emerging with a newfound clarity about themselves and the world they are re-entering.  “I have been with God and I have been with the devil.  I seized the hand of God,” said one, Mario Sepulveda.

“I have changed.  I am a different man,” said another, Mario Gomez.

Here is a post-by-post summary of the GameChangers series about  the ‘Los Mineros’ scene:

PART ONE:  THE TRAPPED CHILEAN MINER GAME (August 26)

Lesson: Don’t be defined by your circumstances.  Be defined by how you behave in those circumstances.

PART TWO:  LEVELS OF MEANING (August 31)

Lesson: Narratives communicate on three levels of meaning:  Cosmetic, Emotional and Meta.

PART THREE:  YONNI’S WAITING PARTY (September 2)

Lesson: Rules of the game must be known to all players.

PART FOUR:  ESPERANZA! (September 17)

Lesson: Additions can heighten a scene emotionally.

PART FIVE:  SUPPORT FROM THE WINGS (September 28)

Lesson: Additions are generative.

PART SIX:  ACT THREE BEGINS (October 10)

Lesson: End energetically.