Take a look at these two passages. The first written recently by a couple of anime fan/bloggers, Kiki and Lala, and the second written by the physicist/philosopher, Fritjof Capra, in his book The Tao of Physics, first published in 1975. 
The human experience has many faces, is described from many perspectives, in many languages, but it is ultimately the same story. There is no one in this world you can meet, no animal you eat, no plant you grow, no product you use, no adversity you encounter, no interaction of any kind you can have, of which it cannot be said, “We are in this together.”
Archive for the ‘Dialogue’ Category
Kiki, Lala and Fritjof
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010Power and Powerlessness
Friday, March 5th, 2010
This is from a blog post by our friend, Nilofer Merchant, author of the new book The New How: Creating Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy:
The challenge with people feeling powerless is this: we don’t see how we can contribute to solve problems. We believe it is “someone else’s” to own rather than something any of us can contribute to. Powerlessness leads to apathy on global issues and disdain on local issues.
Now check out this from Mick Napier’s classic book, Improvise: Scene from the Inside Out:
Two people…staring at each other and wondering who’s going to make the first move. Two people being nice to each other and allowing the other to start doing something. In that short amount of time, two humans have created themselves as powerless…Who has time? The audience is waiting. They don’t care about your support. They care about what you do. What you do now.
These two statements, made miles and years apart, reflect the timelessness of the concept: Do something! Participate! Add to the conversation! When you’re just getting started don’t worry about what the solution will be, or where the scene will take you. No one knows, and your audience doesn’t care. The most important thing is to bring to the scene whatever you’ve got.
The saying in improvisation is ‘take care of yourself first.’ This is not the same as being selfish. It is, rather, the recognition that making the first move, even if we are not always the one to make it, is always our responsibility.
‘The President’s Question Time’ Scene
Saturday, January 30th, 2010There’s a great tradition in British government that, if you’ve never seen it, you ought to. It’s called The Prime Minister’s Question Time, and it is wonderful political theater. Watch some of this.
Quite a difference.
The first is improvised.
The second is scripted.
Improvisation is active. It is alive. Members of Parliament are energetically engaged in the conversation about the matter at hand, supportive of, but not bogged down by, their various ideologies and positions. Their actions and reactions are immediate, emotional and visceral. This honors the problem. American politicians dishonor a problem, and obfuscate it, when they use it as a foil for politicking, which is how almost every problem faced by the federal government is regarded now. An excuse for campaigning.
This is the big point President Obama underlined yesterday in his meeting with the Republicans. That 66-minute conversation may be the best thing that’s happened in American politics since the Watergate hearings. Obama changed the game by calling out the current political game for what it is. Let’s call the current game “Our Way or No Way.” It is played by Democrats and Republicans alike, with equal vigor. This game is toxic. Limiting. Stultifying. Divisive. And ultimately it’s unproductive. This is not about blaming one party or the other. The bad game is to blame.
Yesterday, Obama not only called out the current game for the quicksand pit it is, he suggested a better, more liberating, more productive game. You might call the game he’s proposing, ‘Part of a Pie is Better Than None.’ In other words, the invitation to the Republicans (Dems, you’re next!) is to find an area of agreement and agree on it. Do it knowing that some, but not all, and probably not not 80% of what you’ve got scripted, will come to pass. Don’t be greedy. Be generous instead. Don’t place blame. Accept responsibility. Don’t point fingers. Shake hands. And then come out fighting. Let’s relish the good fight, one where we fight together to solve the problem, not the bad fight, where we fight over who’s right and who’s wrong about how to solve it. Let’s pick battles we can win instead of battles we can make the other guy lose.
Cheers to the GameChanger in Chief for changing the game once again. Our political discourse needs more of the kind of energetic, intelligent, articulate, performances that the Brits demonstrate in their ‘Question Time With the Prime Minister” and Obama and the Republicans staged yesterday. It will be a healthy transformation. And it’ll make great TV. Nothing we Yanks like better than that!
Do not get locked into your script for success. Be prepared, instead, to improvise your way there. Remember that other people have scripts, too. As I can tell you from working in the entertainment business, when all we do is fight over whose script we’re going to follow, the show does not go on.
Stengel’s Storyboard Ban
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010Back 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.
Hurd is the Word
Monday, July 13th, 2009
For months before we met for lunch last week, I had been hearing about Brian Hurd, mainly from Deep Patel of GoGreenSolar. Deep claims that Hurd is one of the sharpest tools in the shed. Has more experience than just about anyone in the solar industry. Knows as much as anyone in the world about the state of solar technology. Started the solar installation program at the East L.A. Skills Center, where he has trained more certified solar technicians than anyone in the U. S. Helped write the State of California certification tests for solar installers. Is a protege of Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, the former Congresswoman from California who admires the work he’s done to create jobs in the community. The web site for the company he founded, Hands On Solar, and the Google results page for ‘Brian Hurd Solar Technology’ bear out all this and more. (more…)
Flexible Essence
Monday, April 20th, 2009
Catherine Stephens, a Disney executive, coined this phrase last week in casual conversation when she and I were discussing the studio’s new eco-brand, Disneynature. I am captivated by the pairing of these words, because it describes perfectly the relationship between what a brand stands for, and what it has the potential to become. This tension between fixity and fluidity, between discipline and disruption, between predictability and opportunity, is at the heart of entrepreneurship and branding.
‘Essence’ defines the core of a brand. If brand is a tree, essence flows through its trunk. Essence, especially at the beginning of a brand’s life, is often rooted to the sensibilities of one person or a small group. For example, Steve Job’s appreciation of good design is at the heart of the Apple brand, Jimmy Buffet’s lifestyle is the essence of Margaritaville, and Tamara Mellon’s taste in shoes is the foundation for the Jimmy Choo brand. Essence can also be an institutional philosophy like you’d find at a Japanese auto company, or a fast-paced technology brand like Cisco. Either way, this is where a brand’s fire burns brightest, where vision is most needed, where a brand’s themes are distilled and defined. It is where the secret formula for Coca Cola, Martha Stewart’s personal style, Oprah’s reading list, and the ‘Honest’ in Honest Tea reside.
‘Flexible’ is what the improvisational brand has to be at the edges of its network. Continuing the tree analogy, flexibility is what you find in the tree’s outermost branches and leaves. For a business operating in the Networked World, the edge is where the action is. It is where creative disruption happens. Where innovation is most likely to find its inspiration. Most importantly, it is where a brand carries on conversations with its customers. This is where you find skunk works, social networks, and tweets. It is where buzz begins.
A brand needs both Essence and Flexibility to make a real impact in the marketplace, but it is interesting to note that a brand can be successful with a strong Essence and very little Flexibility, while the reverse is not true. We have a word for brands with little or no Essence and a lot of Flexibility. We call them doomed. During the dotcom era, I once heard a pitch from a group of university scientists who’d lost their funding for a robotic crop picker and had somehow morphed their idea into a a proposal for a 3D web browser. We in the audience failed to see the connection between the two ideas. Those scientists never should have mentioned the robotic crop picker. It may have demonstrated their Flexibility, but it revealed the absence of Essence. They were showing us a pile of leaves and calling it a tree.
The priority is crystal clear. Essence has to be the the first consideration. If you got no Essence, you got nothing.
GameChanger of the Month – March 2009
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
Over lunch at the Iron Wood Barbecue at SXSW in Austin a couple of weeks ago, my friend Dean McBeth, who has participated in several GameChangers workshops, told me how much I would dig the Zappos brand because they and their CEO, Tony Hsieh (pronounced SHAY), are so improvisational in their approach to their business. (more…)
SXSW #7 – SOCIAL MEDIA AND HEALTH CARE
Sunday, March 22nd, 2009GameChangers has a health care client, and because of that I am aware of this panel before my friend Josh Rose, head of digital media for Deutsch Advertising, who’s not attending SXSW this year, sends out a morning tweet asking his network if anyone’s planning to attend the ‘Social Media and Health Care’ discussion. I am grateful to Josh for the extra impetus, though, because this turns out to be my favorite discussion of the conference. Nothing is resolved, no consensus gained, no conclusions reached. But the quality of the questions posed, perspectives presented and the passion people bring to the subject are amazing and inspiring. 
People here represent insurance companies, big pharma, start-ups, physician networks, social networks built around various health concerns, and NGOs. There are several physicians in the audience, and one guy, Vik Duggal (www.konstructr.com) from the construction business who makes a remark on which, the way I see it, the entire conversation pivots. Until Vik speaks, the focus has been on privacy issues. And then Vik says, “All of these comments about patient privacy and the relationship between employees and employers assume the current model. I’m in the construction business and I can tell you that everything about it is going to change in the next five years. What’s true today will not be true in the future.”
It’s like Vik dropped a lit cigarette into a gas tank. The room erupts in conversation that the moderator soon loses any chance of moderating. I had not planned to say anything, but when the moderator tries to calm things down by saying, “I’ve got to tell you, I’m not optimistic” I shout at him, just to keep things lively, “That’s your choice!”
A young physician from Brooklyn, Jay Parkinson, is launching his own social network, HelloHealth. He says, “Doctors like patients who come in already educated about what’s wrong with them. Education and prevention are the best medicines we have.”
Later I tell the story of how, at no cost to me, I healed myself of a case of Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (BPPV) using Google search and a YouTube video of a treatment known as the Epley Maneuver; and how my accountant had paid over $6,000 to ‘the health care system’ to get healed of the same ailment. One guy jumps all over this. “And who would you have blamed if it hadn’t worked?” he asks accusatorily. “Myself!” I bark back at him over a whole chorus of people chiming in with anecdotes of their own.
At one point near the end of the session, a woman with an autistic child makes the following statement: “I can tell you that the parents of an autistic child typically know more about autism than the average physician, and in my experience, the average physician welcomes what the parents know.”
How to Get Hired When Your Life Depends on It
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009I’ve noticed it, and if you’ve driven past a Home Depot lately, you’ve probably noticed it, too: A surge in the number of day laborers looking for a gig. On the occasional morning I drive past the Home Depot at Sunset and St. Andrew Street., I see 40 or 50 men waiting outside the the entrance to the parking lot, hoping to get hired for the day. One day last week, I stopped to talk to them. It was sort of an unintentionally mean trick on my part. They of course wanted me to hire them, and that was not my aim.
My aim was to learn what kind of strategies these men use to get hired. After all, what could be a more honest scene than one that has to be productive if a player wants to eat that night? When lives literally depend on one’s behavior, how does one behave? This is obviously far from scientific. I draw no firm conclusions from it, and neither should anyone else. But everything, even five minutes talking with day laborers outside a Home Depot, is a learning opportunity if you are open to it.
In my brief and chaotic encounter with the day laborers on the sidewalk in front of the Home Depot, here’s what I learned: (more…)
Speaking the JiffyGas Language
Monday, January 26th, 2009
One thing I always notice when I’m in a scene with Mark Johnson–the founder and President of JiffyGas and HConverters, complementary brands in the business of converting internal combustion engines to run on alt energy (hydrogen, nat gas, biofuels)–is how observant he is. He notices everything. When you’re speaking, he watches your hands, he glances at your feet, he looks you in the eye, he focuses on your thoughts even as they’re still taking shape in your mind. When he speaks, he speaks with much more than the words coming out of his mouth. Mark Johnson’s kind of communicating transcends spoken language. Yes, words communicate, but only on the Cosmetic level. It’s what accompanies those words on the Emotional and Meta levels that has the power to change the game.
When Mark visited Los Angeles last month, and I got to watch Edwin and Armando, the whiz-bang mechanics he’d flown in from Colombia, convert a six-year-old Lexus to run on hydrogen, spoken language was maybe the least effective communications tool they used during the two days it took to do the conversion. There were four languages being spoken in that shop in Alhambra–English, Spanish, Chinese, and Italian if you count the Italian narration on a DVD promo for the converter kit that Edwin ran for us on one of his computers. Sure, some spoken language was required. But what made the scene go–what got the team on the same page–in improvisation terms, what created the Group Mind–were the elements of communication that transcended words. Here’s where Johnson’s genius as a communicator was clearly in evidence. (more…)