Archive for the ‘Gifts’ Category

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Making it Go as We Up Along

Tuesday, March 20th, 2012
Drew Coolidge

Drew Coolidge

Most of the credit for this post goes to Drew Coolidge, an exquisitely gifted improviser I’ve had the fun of watching many times in action with his group Cartel, and before that in a group called Spank Drew (draw your own conclusions about what that team thought of him). On USSRocknRoll.com he writes about his three favorite improv teachers, and the gifts each of them gave him.

Here’s a summary of Drew’s post and my take on its applications to business:

From Eric Hunnicutt, he learned how to deal with fear. “Just be present. It’s not about getting rid of fear, if you’re present, fear has no room to exist.” Hunnicutt taught him.

When it comes to business, or life in general for that matter, who among us doesn’t have fears? A speech. A parent. A spider. A client. Hunnicutt’s advice to Drew about performing onstage is just as legit in any other context: don’t work at being fearless. That’s like treating fear as some kind of virus and yourself a victim in need of medication. Don’t go there with your energy. Instead, practice being present. If you’re completely absent, begin by focusing on your breathing. Your senses, all of them, and the space around you, all of it. Go from there. By giving 100% of your attention to everyone and everything around you, fear ceases to become a factor in your performance.

(The basketball legend, Larry Bird, once said about playing in an NBA championship game against the Houston Rockets that, while running a fast break, was he aware not only of where all ten players were on the court, he was aware of every fan in the first 20 rows of the arena. If someone was sitting down with a box of popcorn, or leaving their seat, Bird saw it while sprinting down the floor. We normally think of players confining their awareness to the court, but when our senses are 100% engaged, a line painted on a floor is just one more thing we notice. It does not define the limits of our awareness.)

From Dave Hill, Coolidge got insight into what improvisers call the group mind. The group mind is when all the players on a team tap into and share the flow of a performance. They are all on the same page, they are one organism, evolving in realtime right before our eyes. “It’s the product of individuals making strong choices and completely supporting the moves of the other players,” is how Drew boils down Hill’s gift. It naturally follows Hunnicut’s note. If you’re present, you can do this.

In business, everyone talks about teamwork, but dishearteningly few understand what Dave Hill taught Drew: Every player on a team can make the strongest, boldest, ballsiest individual move she or he is capable of making, and support those moves by their fellow players, and have all of it be consistent with good teamwork. (Oh, and group mind is not the same thing as groupthink. The two concepts are completely at odds with one another.) Agree on the game your team is playing and you’re on the way toward discovering the group mind.

From David Pasquesi, Drew received this gem: “The scene is already occurring, it’s our job to allow the scene to reveal itself to us. The tools for doing that are: 1. Listening (or Paying Attention) 2. There is no two.”

We call Lstening (or Paying Attention) ‘Heeding.’ In business, we can get so focused on the desired resolution to our ‘scene,’ that we forget to heed what’s happening in the moment, which is the only chance we have to improve our odds of success. Heeding results in opportunity recognition. Forget to heed, fail to recognize opportunity.

I’ve evolved the headline from Drew’s post a bit. He made it go, I heeded, and that’s how we up along. Spanks, Drew!

Posted in Additions and Edits, Agreement Principle, Coaching, Communication, Education, Environment, Games, Gifts, Group Mind, Issues, Listening, Objectives, Scenes | No Comments »

Jam For Japan

Saturday, March 10th, 2012

Sometimes simple games are the best way to engage in complex problems.

The Musicians Institute, or, as we like to call it, ‘Rock ‘n Roll U.,’ in Hollywood, is a trade school with 1,500 aspiring professional musicians from around the world as its students, and super-skilled music pros on its faculty. It is owned by Mr. Shibuya from Japan. Mr. Shibuya’s daughter, Coko, is president of the school. It is a very cool space. One of my favorite places to hang out when I’m in Hollywood. Musicians on every corner, in and every hallway, talking shop. Classes where the teacher sits at a drum kit on a riser, and the students all have drumsticks and pads at their desks. Guitarists jamming under stairwells between classes. People sharing beats over lunch. Interact with this environment and you cannot help but feel better for having done so.

Because the Musicians Institute has its roots in Japan, last year’s earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster shook the school, especially Coko and Mr. Shibuya, like the hand of God. Ever since the day of the disaster, March 11, 2011, it has been MI’s clear intention to raise money for the relief effort.

But how?

There had been a lot of talk about what shape a fundraiser might take. A concert?—the obvious idea. But still a lot of questions and vagueness. And then we came up with a game. We called the game Jam For Japan. The objective: Raise money to buy music instruments for children who ‘lost their music’ the Great Disaster. Give relief in the form of music. Donate happiness, in the form of a guitar, a saxophone, band uniforms, teaching, to the children who had been visited by so much sadness in the past year. 18,000 people died in a single day, remember. The tornadoes back near my hometown in Indiana killed 39 people last week. Imagine 460 such tornadoes hitting the same area in the same day, you get an idea of just how much sadness there has been, and how the region was devastated.

With the game defined, the project took off. Relief International soon joined Jam For Japan as our charity partner. We invited lots of talented people to play along.
We set a date: March 10, 2012.JamForJapan_tee3_crop

The Jam For Japan concert is today! 4 to 8:30 PM at the Musicians Institute in Hollywood. We have already raised over $50K, which is double the $25K goal we’d set, so we have made the concert free, though you really should reserve a seat via EventBrite iif you plan to come.

We’re kicking it off at at 4 PM with a taiko drum core, Kishin Daiko, performing on Hollywood Blvd. Later, Elan Atias is going to play on the main stage. In between, there will be lots of cool stuff, including a work of 3D pavement art by Tracy Lee Stum and a children’s music workshop conducted by the Lil Big Ups Rubba Band Band Man, Lonnie Marshall.

#sxsw peeps, buzz it up, please!!!!! Clint! Jay! Scott! Leora! Taylor! Sloane! Shira! Do your things.. Domo arigato!

Posted in Branding, Emotion, Environment, Games, Gifts, Narrative, Networked World, Problem Solving, Social Media | No Comments »

Five Ways Jeremy Lin Changes the Game

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

JeremyLin1It’s too obvious not to bring it up: the global interest in the Jeremy Lin narrative underscores again how fast and dramatically the game can change…and how a player like Lin–or you—can create the change and benefit from it when it happens.

First, it’s important to point out (again) that people—not events, products, strategies or tactics—are gamechangers. Only people have the power to change the game in each and every moment. Everything else is either fantasy or history.

Here are five ways Jeremy Lin changes the game…not has changed…not will change. Changes. Now. A gamechanger is always in the now.

Emphasize preparation over planning. It’s good to have a plan, but plans are subject to a lot of forces beyond our control. Our preparation, however, is something we can control. When Lin’s chance came, because his team’s plan to have other guards playing ahead of him did not pan out—a situation entirely out of his control—he was prepared. He was in shape to play a full game, even though he’d only played a few minutes at a time prior to that. Because he had studied and practiced his coach’s offense, he was able to execute it in game conditions. Lin understood that in the NBA, the planning is the area of concern for coaches, owners, trainers, schedulers, the Commissioner, and that what a player needs to do is prepare. As the great John Wooden once counseled my son about his own basketball playing, have faith that your chance will come. In the meantime, work at being ready for when it does.

Be willing to change your role and your status from scene to scene. Lin has changed his role to fit the needs of his team, both situationally within a game, and from game to game. In Lin’s first games as a starter, the Knicks needed scoring, so he played the role of a scorer. When they needed a change in momentum or tempo, he created it. When the team got too passive, he got aggressive. Now that the team’s acknowledged stars, Amare Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony, have returned to the lineup, we see Lin changing his game to accommodate and include them. He understands that changing one’s role or status within the game does not change the essential nature of one’s character. He is same person today, in the glare of the global spotlight, as he was when he was sleeping on his brother’s couch, before the spotlight hit. He will be the same player whether he’s scoring 31 points in a game, or scoring three points, with 14 assists.

Embrace your mistakes. That doesn’t mean making more of them, it means seeing them as an opportunity to improve your game.  Accept mistakes as pointing the way toward an improved standard of performance. Lin made too many turnovers in several of his early games as a starter. He made it a point of focus and his performance has since improved in this area.

Add vocabulary. Before I’d ever seen him bounce a basketball, I saw this clip of Lin and Knicks teammate Landry Fields doing an elaborate pre-game handshake. I call it the You’ve Got the Yin I’ve Got the Yang Dust Off Confucius 3-Point Binocular Pocket Shake. In the history of sports handshaking, this was a new one. It was the first indication that we were looking at a gamechanger. This isn’t the kind of handshake a person makes up on the spot. This is a move Lin and Fields had to have worked up before Lin got any playing time. It wasn’t a response to celebrity, a personal signature, or a religious statement. It was a couple of smart people (Lin a Harvard grad and Fields a Stanford grad) adding vocabulary to the lexicon of their profession.

Make your teammates look good. Giving support is the highest form of gamechanging. At first, I thought Stoudemire and Anthony, who have been in the spotlight for most of their careers, would resent the attention Lin was getting. Now I’m thinking this won’t be an issue, because they see that Lin is going to help the stars of the team shine brighter, not dim them. No matter what game you’re playing, making your teammates look good is always a winning way. And a recipe for happiness.

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Posted in Character, Coaching, Focus, Fundamentals, Games, Gifts, Leadership, Narrative, Roles, Status | 1 Comment »

Objectives vs. Outcomes cont’d

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

Tuesday night, we staged an invitation-only workshop for 25 friends, acquaintances and interested folks to let them experience the marvel that is GameChangers. After reviewing our performance, the GameChangers team’s consensus is that on this particular night we were not marvelous. We started 15 minutes late, got slow in the middle and rushed at the end. We felt that the experience was, at times, less than riveting for our audience.  A couple of people spent an inordinate amount of time on their mobile devices, and we know for a fact they were not tweeting about how great it all was.

Specific notes:

- After cautioning the audience at the beginning of the presentation about long monologues as a means of communicating, I wrapped up the presentation with a long monologue.

- Our direction was soft on a couple of the exercises. This resulted in a kind of sponginess in the middle of the two-hour session, with drawn-out explanations by Antonio and me, less focus by the teams, and a rushed ‘third act’ in the last 15 mins.

- As any improviser can tell you, you have to work on pieces of the process at a time. You cannot drop everything you know on your audience all at once. In my explanation of what we call ‘the orchestral model’ of business communication, and the concept we call ‘quantum narrative,’ I got into more detail than the audience was able to absorb in such a short window. ‘Too clever by half,”as they say in Blighty. ‘Ten pounds of potatoes in a five pound bag,” as they say in Boise.

- The teamwork that usually happens during our workshops was not so much apparent in this one. Things stayed more individualized, and less knit-together than we would like.

- The tempo at which we conducted the session was inconsistent. If I had been conducting a piece of music, it would have been in about 20 different time signatures, with me conducting at least part of the performance with my back to the orchestra. Missing cues. Dynamics roller-coastery instead of scenic.

These notes are related to our business objective for the workshop, which was to explain GameChangers and give attendees a sampling of what we do with our clients. At achieving this objective, we give ourselves a 50%. We were only about half as effective as we believe we’re capable of being.

So why are we not upset?

Two reasons: One is that because our process lets us see so clearly where the issues are, we have already taken steps to remedy them before the next open workshop.

The other, bigger, reason is that the outcomes of the session have been extraordinary, better than the outcomes of many workshops where our performance was actually  much better than it was Tuesday. A lot of credit for this goes to the people who were in attendance. One of the points we make in these introductions to GameChangers is to distinguish between objectives of the game, and the outcomes of the game, and wow, has that been our experience since Tuesday.

These are some of the outcomes:

- Our friend Ron Finley, the ‘renegade urban gardener’ connected with our friends Jenna and Adam from TakePart, who were in attendance. TakePart is the digital division of Participant Media. They are going to do a story about Ron.

- Erin Reilly, the creative director of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, spoke yesterday to her faculty committee about having us do a one-day workshop there in March.

- Marcy and Strath Hamilton of Tri-Coast Studios, which is producing a lot of e-books, met a Ruby on  Rails coder named Patrick Maddox, who was in attendance Tuesday.  They’ve been looking for a coder. Now they’re talking to Patrick.

- T.H. Culhane and David Groder, who are working on a robotics education program funded by the U.S. Naval Research Dept., are making a presentation today (Wednesday) at Washington High School in Los Angeles, and are being joined by Ron Finley, who is a Washington High graduate. This is happening as a result of them connecting on Tuesday night.

- T.H. and Groder will soon get introduced by GameChangers associate Jamal Williams, who was in town from D.C. for the Tuesday workshop, to Nii Simmonds, the ‘Nubian Cheetah,’ a Ghanian-born D.C. resident and former investment banker who funds a program called Afrobotics, a robotics competition for African schoolchildren.

- Kevin Wall, who is producing the opening ceremonies and concert for the 2014 World Cup in Rio, was in attendance. Kevin learned for the first time that Fernando Godoy, who used to be an intern in at one of Kevin’s companies, is today a successful internet entrepreneur in Sao Paulo and is a partner in Spirit of Football 2014. Kevin and Fernando are going to meet the next time Kevin is in Brazil.

- Tri-Coast Productions and GameChangers are meeting this coming Monday to discuss two projects–a GameChangers ebook and a video series that would be produced and performed by people from our network of world-class improvisers.

- Andy Sternberg has since Tuesday introduced us to two friends of his whom he believes will be interested in our work.

- We were able to continue a conversation with Nicholle McClelland Betelier, a marketing officer from IdeaLab, that began at a yoga retreat in December.

- A crypto-hipster named Som showed up uninivited, and asked some of the best questions and offered some of the most thoughtful comments of the evening. Thank you, Som, whoever and wherever you are! Please stay in touch!

- My favorite outcome of the evening came about thanks to a ‘gift’ from David Groder. At the very end of the session, after my long-winded closing monologue, Groder asked if we could go around the room and have everyone introduce themselves. All 25 people introduced themselves and described the work they’re doing. It was really remarkable, not only because it completely subverted the normal order of things—introductions at the end instead of the beginning!—but also because the people in attendance are doing brilliant things in the world. Attendees are working in robotics, social media, community development, urban gardening, fashion, cause-related marketing, transmedia storytelling, architecture, criminal law, venture capital, entertainment, academia, e-books, tech, watercraft stabilization, app development, etc. etc. etc. Introductions at the end became a very enjoyable kind of reveal. Almost everyone stayed and talked for half-an-hour or more after the session, and I believe most of that conversation would not have happened if not for David’s gift to the scene.

Never get objectives confused with outcomes. Objectives are what we use to assess and improve our performance. Outcomes happen as a result of having performed. Objectives are finite. Outcomes are unlimited. Objectives create focus. Outcomes generate value.

Post-event conversations were the most productive part of the evening

Post-event conversations were the most productive part of the evening

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Posted in Coaching, Communication, Education, Fundamentals, Games, Gifts, Issues, Narrative, Objectives, Problem Solving, Scenes, Social Media, Suggestions From the Audience, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

The Origin of the Drum Bucket

Thursday, October 6th, 2011

My guitar teacher, Lonnie ‘Meganut’ Marshall (@meganut) teaches music to a lot of young people. One of the themes he always gets across to his students is that you can make music out of almost anything. Sometime he puts together groups of young musicians who play instruments made out of recycled materials. The Lil Big Ups (featuring a dinosaur named Nervous Rex, and a character named Sample Simon, who has a beatbox for a head) play on instruments made of recycled cardboard boxes and rubber bands. The Life Drum Core plays on drums made of recycled 5-gallon plastic paint buckets that the kids design by repainting and adding neck straps made of bungee cords.

Lonnie with the Lil Big Ups at the Hollywood Farmer's Market (Sample Simon can be seen in back)

Lonnie Marshall (l.) and the Lil Big Ups performing on their 'Rubba Boxes' at the Hollywood Farmer's Market

A couple of years ago, we got the Life Drum Core invited to perform as part of the World Wildlife Fund’s Earth Hour celebration at L.A. Live. A few weeks later, the kids gave me a couple of their hand-painted buckets, autographed by the group, as souvenirs. Naturally I kept one. Off and on for the past two years, I’ve been trying to make a meaningful gift of the second bucket. L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa jammed with the kids after they’d performed for Earth Hour, and a number of people in the Mayor’s office have told me since then that he ‘would love to have the bucket,’ but no one from the Mayor’s office acted on it, so after a series of slow phone call volleys, I moved on.

Next, I tried to give it to an executive at AEG who’d arranged for Lonnie’s kids to get a dozen sets of drumsticks from the Grammy Hall of Fame gift shop. After the L.A. Live show, the exec said to me, “I want one of those buckets for my office.” He was always too busy, however, to actually accept the bucket. “Leave it in the lobby,” was the word finally relayed by his assistant. Didn’t do it. Leaving it in the lobby would have turned a meaningful artifact into just another hunk o’ schwag on the non-stop schwagathon of gift baskets, food, wine, comp tickets, and sports and music memorabilia sent to an office with that exec’s title on the door. No, this gift was too sacred to be left to the lobby gods and processed through the AEG gift-receiving system like just another gourmet cheese wheel. The rule was that it had to be presented in person and accompanied by its story.

Life Drum Core plays drum buckets at L.A. Live

Life Drum Core plays drum buckets at L.A. Live

Today  I took a couple of bags of groceries to the young people camping outside L.A. City Hall as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement. As I was leaving my office to get the groceries, the Life Drum Core bucket caught my eye. I was using it as a stand for a guitar amp. I took it. Put the groceries in it. Handed it off to members of the movement standing along Temple Street in front of City Hall.

Groceries delivered in drum bucket signed by Life Drum Core, today, Occupy Wall Street at L.A. City Hall.

Groceries delivered in drum bucket signed by Life Drum Core, today, Occupy Wall Street at L.A. City Hall.

Into the bucket I dropped a couple of business cards on which I’d written, ‘I’ll blog about the the origin of the drum/bucket.’ This is the blog. I hope that whoever discovers this story keeps it going. And I don’t mean repeat the story I’ve told here. This is just the beginning. Build on it. Bang on the bucket until its story becomes your own. Keep its beat alive.

Posted in Character, Gifts, Narrative, story, Themes | No Comments »

What is Leadership?

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

Last week, Forbes ran a column by Glenn Llopis that poses the question, ‘Is Leadership Irrelevant?’  The unwritten follow-up question probed though not fully answered in Llopis column, is, ‘If leadership is irrelevant, what can take its place?’  This is an issue that comes up all the time in conversations with executives. People understand that their model of leadership is broken, yet they don’t really know what can take its place.

'A Captain of Industry' by Graham McKean

'A Captain of Industry' by Graham McKean

I don’t think it’s a matter of anything ‘taking leadership’s place.’ What are we going to do, remove the word from the dictionary? Are we all going to wait around for someone else to make the first move? (Oh wait, that’s what happens now.) What leaders can do is adapt to a business environment that is different than the one that shaped the textbook definitions of leadership. This environment moves faster, with more, and more fleeting, opportunities for a generation of restless, tech-savvy players entering the global workforce. To prosper in this environment, leaders and the companies under their guidance must adapt. This is not a one-time only thing, adaptation is not a new program that that can be taken off a shelf and ‘acquired.’ It’s a way of life.

We call this new model of leadership Flexible Vision. Naturally it is informed by the principles of improvisation, among them:

Take care of yourself first. This is a phrase popularized by Chicago improvisation master, Mick Napier. It doesn’t mean be selfish, as in ‘get your golden parachute packed, and don’t worry about where the plane is going because you’re jumping off before it gets there.’  Not that. It means come prepared. Have a take. Be someone. Stand for something. Rock your style. What your style is doesn’t matter nearly as much as whether or not you rock it.

Begin with listening. How can you contribute to the conversation if you don’t know what the conversation is about?

Follow the follower. This is a Viola Spolin concept. The narrative was going on before you entered the scene, and it will continue after you’re gone. Don’t ‘try to make things happen.’ Connect with what’s already happening.

Let go of status. In the old leadership models, status followed a person from scene to scene. If you were the CEO that was your role, and you played it in every scene you were in. This model forced a lot of managers into a mode of pretending to know more than they actually did, to feign authority in subjects with which they were not familiar, just to preserve their status. These ‘false narratives’ are a big inefficiency in any organization clinging to old leadership models. Improvisers, by contrast, change roles and status freely from scene to scene. Though your title is ‘The CEO,’ your roles can be ‘Student,’  ‘Fearless Explorer,”Arbitrator,’ ‘Cheerleader,’ etc. Adaptive leaders adjust their role and status to fit the scene, not the other way around. And the higher a person’s rank in the company (however that is gauged), the more adaptive that person can be, because the range of roles he or she can play is wider than that of a lower-ranked person, e.g. a new employee.

Give gifts. This is the phrase improvisers use for supporting one’s scene and one’s fellow players. In improvisation, giving gifts is the most productive move there is. Those who do it most consistently? Those are our leaders.

'Made for Each Other' - Graham McKean

'Made for Each Other' by Graham McKean

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Posted in Environment, Gifts, Issues, Leadership, Listening, Narrative, Networked World, Scenes | No Comments »

Red Shoe State

Monday, September 26th, 2011

A good friend of ours grew up in a big family in the Midwest, the Middle Child of nine children. Five of Nine. As happens with Middle Children, he got the least attention of all the children, except when he did something out of the ordinary, or when the Oldest Boy needed someone to pound on after their dad had pounded on him.

Being extraordinary became a way of life for our friend. To this day, it doesn’t matter what scene he’s in, it doesn’t have to be world-shaking, it can be as simple as taking a walk in a park, he will find a way to make that walk unlike any other walk through any other park. Today, he and his family live in a beautiful home on Mullholland Drive overlooking Los Angeles, he is a millionaire many times over, and a philanthropist with a giving heart, especially for people who get pounded by life.

Earlier this year, I met the Oldest Boy, now a middle-aged man who still lives in the Midwest, who struggles to keep their old family business alive, and exudes disappointment and alcohol. He told me a story about the Middle Child:

“My parents and I went to visit him after he’d moved to Los Angeles,” said the Oldest Boy, “He and [his wife] had no money. They pretty much didn’t know where their next meal was coming from. He didn’t even have a decent pair of shoes to wear. So my parents said, ‘Let’s go get you a pair of shoes anyway,’ and we took him to a shoe store and let him pick out a pair of shoes, and he picked out a pair of red shoes! Red shoes! The guy’s going to have one good pair of shoes and he picks out red ones?!’ The Oldest Boy laughed at this as if the Middle Child had done something incredibly stupid, something that was still worth teasing him about, maybe even pounding him for.

Back when it could have changed his life, the truth was right there in front of the Oldest Boy, and he missed it. What he missed was his younger brother’s knack for doing things that were out of the ordinary. Our success comes from consistently making extraordinary choices. Those choices do not have to change the world to be extraordinary, they only have to change the game. When you can only pick one pair of shoes, pick the red ones.RedShoes1

Posted in Character, Creativity, Entrepreneurship, Gifts, Metaphor, Relationships, story, Themes | 2 Comments »

Why Arianna Is Only Half a Player

Wednesday, September 21st, 2011

She sold her HuffPost to AOL for $315M, and didn’t offer as much as a thank you note, forget about any money, to the people who, like myself, had posted most of the content that created the value behind her brand.

Today, the HuffPost ran this headline:HuffPostGameChangers1

GameChangers LLC owns the trademark ‘GameChangers’ in 17 different trade categories, including business education, seminars, improvisation for business, training, etc. I’m not going to say that HuffPost’s repeated use of the phrase ‘Game Changers’ in its editorial violates our trademark (though I implied it in a snarky comment on her story today). And I don’t know for sure, the difference, litigationally speaking, between ‘GameChangers’ and ‘Game Changers’ with the words spaced. We don’t own the phrase, didn’t coin it, and lots of people use it–including every sports announcer who ever lived, and the Bloomberg Network, which DOES for sure tromp on our trademark (but how are we going to sue or even slow down a billionaire politician’s billion-dollar company in the legal arena? If you’ve got ideas, let me know.)

I do know that last year my HuffPost producer, Willow Bay, brought up to Arianna the HuffPost’s use of the ‘Game Changers’ branding and proposed a conversation between the two of us about a possible collaboration. Nothing. Zippo. We shouted into the maw and got nary and echo.

In improvisation, we honor taking. You’ve got to take strongly, and politeness has nothing to do with it. Be aggressive. Play hard. Go for it. Claim turf. ‘Take care of yourself first,’ in the words of the legendary teacher, Mick Napier.

The thing is, we honor giving, too, and if anything, we honor it more. Yes-and. Connect. Make others look good.  Share the narrative. Give gifts.  Politeness, the consideration of others, has a lot to do with it.

One without the other makes you only half a player.

This is just my experience speaking, it does not represent any kind of larger dataset, for all I know Arianna has given $314M to Sloan-Kettering Hospital since February. It is pretty direct experience, though, so it must mean something. What it means to me is that Arianna is Half a Player. She’s fantastic at taking, and needs to work on her giving.AriannaHuff1

Posted in Agreement Principle, Branding, Character, Education, Entrepreneurship, Gifts, Issues, Leadership, Narrative, Press | 1 Comment »

Walking Western Avenue

Monday, June 6th, 2011

We live and work in what you’d call the northern edge of South-Central Los Angeles, in one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, West Adams.  Western Avenue, the main north-south artery nearest us, is one of my favorite streets in Los Angeles. If you want to get a feel for this city, there’s no better way to do it than to travel the length of Western Avenue.  From the exclusive girls school up in the hills on its northern end to the hustle and flow of the ‘hood in the south, and every immigrant dream in between, Western is a ribbon of culture lining the belly of this beast of a city.

PFFlyers1I’m doing a photo essay on Western Avenue for a client of ours. In walking Western yesterday, I had all kinds of rewarding encounters. A street poet named Ron shared a poem he wrote, called Shine that was amazing; a restaurant owner grilling chicken on the sidewalk shared stories of his adventures in the real estate biz; a beauty shop owner opened the door after hours to pose for a photo; a kid showed me his python; another kid getting a tattoo showed me his cool shoes–PF Flyers, a brand I used to wear when I was a kid!; a clothing entrepreneur named Prince confided his strategy for pumping up slow sales; a dude named Noon and I had a half-hour discussion on privacy issues, the school system, the prison system, and the relations between the police and the people of South Central–all because he wouldn’t let me take his picture.

No matter how deeply we dive into virtual worlds and other dimensions of reality, walking around and having conversations with folks is still the best way to learn something you didn’t know.

As Viola Spolin said, “Act on environment, and environment will act on you.”

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Posted in Communication, Creativity, Dialogue, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Gifts, Issues, Listening | No Comments »

Rory’s Story Cubes

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

Recently, Reyne Rice of Toy Trends gave me this wonderful gift, a game created in Ireland called Rory’s Story Cubes. It’s super simple to play and endlessly complex in terms of its outcomes. I don’t know what makes a better game than that. And at $7.30 a set, how can you NOT?IMG_3940

The game consists of nine dice, each die with six different icons, 54 in all. Players roll the dice, line up the nine icons they’ve rolled, and tell a story the icons inspire. There are of course all sorts of variations on this version of the game. When Reyne gave me the Story Cubes at lunch she rolled her dice and told a story that involved her background in improvisation and theater. When my turn came, we changed the rule to be: one person rolls the dice, we take turns putting them in order, and then take turns telling the story, with our turn telling the story coming on the dice the other person has placed in the queue.

A couple of days after Reyne gave the gift, I was with a friend who was working through some difficult career choices. I still had the Story Cubes in my bag. I handed them to the friend, and suggested he roll the dice and tell a story about the next year of his professional life. The story he told was amazing and inspiring. What was muddled in his mind became suddenly very clear. What was clear was not the story itself. What was clear is that no matter what kind of roll of the dice he gets, he will have ability to author his own story. And it can be a good one.

Games are a device for exploring narratives. Good games yield good stories like Ireland grows shamrocks. Thank you, Reyne!  Roll on!StoryCubes1

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Posted in Games, Gifts, Narrative, Problem Solving, story | No Comments »

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