Over the holidays, our friend Dean Read, the national sales director for RedDot, loaned us his copy of Young@Heart, an outstanding British-produced documentary about a singing group of old folks from Massachusetts who inspire audiences by rocking out on young songs. Formed by its musical director, Bob Cilman, in 1982, the group originally sang lots of old standards, but has steadily gotten younger with its music over the years. In their concerts today, they perform numbers by the likes of the Talking Heads, The Clash, and Coldplay. The film deservedly got a lot of attention when it was released in 2008. (more…)
Archive for the ‘Initiations’ Category
Young@Heart
Sunday, January 11th, 2009Living the Map
Wednesday, December 17th, 2008Daniel Seddiqui, age 23, is on a mission to work 50 jobs in 50 states in 50 weeks.
A gamechanger identifies and plays a productive game. Focuses on preparation more than planning. Is more concerned with getting results than in producing specific outcomes. Seddiqui could not be playing this game if he hadn’t prepared. And he could not have imagined a particular outcome. (Note that his ’50/50/50 objective’ for the game is different from its ‘business outcomes’.) What Seddiqui trusted was that he was initiating a game that would produce results, and cause positive things to happen. New relationships would form. There’d be new experiences had. Skills learned. Insights gained. Possibilities awakened.
He is not sitting at home living the inevitable bad economy cliche, sending out job applications and getting rejected. Instead he created a game that generates acceptance in massive doses. David Seddiqui is creating a narrative in which he gets 50 job offers–and he’s going to accept all of them! Good story.
In Living the Map, Daniel Seddiqui is sending a three great big, important messages to the world:
1) All work is honorable. We should not judge a person by what it is they do, but by how they do it. Respect the work, respect the worker.
2) So what if you have 50 different jobs in your life? That’s a goal. Working in one place, at one job forever is drudgery. This is one generation telling another that it can stick the gold watch up its ass.
3) There’s work, lots of it, that needs doing. But you’ve got get out and find it, player. It is not going to find you.
The Wall Street Bailout Scene
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
I can’t possibly grasp the nuances of the current crisis and the bailout bill. There is so much data, so many opinions, so many experts weighing in. The problem of credit derivatives unleashed into the global markets by mad mathematicians is so complex it will take legions of sane mathematicians years to unravel and set right.
So I look at it like this:
The crisis is an Elephant, and everyone wrestling with it–you, me, Hank Paulson and Barney Frank–is a Blind Man of Hindustan. How we describe it depends on which part of it we’re feeling. And no matter how we describe it, it doesn’t help us figure out what to do with the Elephant. It’s just a very large animal standing there while blind people disagree about it.
So six blind men of Hindustan
disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
exceeding stiff and strong;
Though each was partly in the right,
they all were in the wrong! – John Godfrey Saxe
One of the benefits of improvisation in business is that it provides a lens, and a common language, through which we can see and learn from performance. This triangulates the problem and gives us common ground for solving it. Barney Frank sees the Wall Street problem from a Massachusetts legislator’s perspective. I see it from a small businessperson’s perspective. As a person the cameras are pointed at, Barney is probably feeling the tusk, so he describes the Elephant as being ‘like a spear.’ From my perspective, the Elephant ‘feels very like a wall’ between me and capital. If all we’re going to do is debate our differences, we’re never going to get anywhere.
But if Barney and I both speak improvisation…aha. We can find agreement in that language. Our disagreement about what the Elephant looks like is no longer important because now our dialogue can be about what to do with the Elephant!
Here’s an analysis of the ‘Bailout Scene’ seen through the lens of improvisation: (more…)
Vaillancourt’s List 3.0
Monday, September 15th, 2008
The extraordinary improviser and improv theater teacher, Paul Vaillancourt, gave me a list of sayings compiled and passed around the improv community over the years. 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 are a few of the sayings from what I call ‘Vaillancourt’s List’, with my comments following. As you go about your business, keep these concepts in play: (more…)
TRON Story
Monday, November 5th, 2007I had coffee on Friday with Michael Slane, a creative director at Exopolis, an uber-hip L.A.-based design agency, and the conversation got animated when the subject of TRON came up. Slane, like many artists of his generation, was profoundly influenced by the film. This phenomenon first came to my attention about ten years ago — 15 years after the film’s original release, when I casually mentioned to Mike Goeddeke of Belief Productions in Santa Monica, that I’d worked on TRON. You’d have thought I told him I had invented the internet, or Doc Martens. “You worked on TRON?” Goeddeke, himself a graphics genius, asked, getting all googley-eyed. “I love TRON.” From that day on, I’ve worn my participation in the film as a special badge of honor.
I began my career as TRON’s publicist, (more…)
GameChanger of the Month, October 2007
Thursday, November 1st, 2007So you’re a salarygirl from Tokyo and one Friday night after many rounds of beer and sake after work, you get off your train at the wrong stop and find yourself walking down a dark street in the city’s notorious Kabukicho neighborhood at two A.M. And then…a couple of blocks away, you see them. Young men coming your way. Twirling nun-chuks. Wearing black masks. They look like they’re up to no good. What are you, a mere green belt in karate, going to do?
Or let’s say you’re a third-grader on a school outing in Fukagawa and wander away from your group and are suddenly confronted by some big boys from the Sumo School. You know if they spot you they’ll eat your rice cakes, no questions asked. What will you do?
You’ll put on your Hiding Clothes of course…
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Tokyo fashion designer Aya Tsukioka, in an homage to the old Superman in the Phone Booth gag (well, half of it anyway — you go into the booth but don’t come out) has designed a line of clothes that convert into vending machines. The New York Times and photographer Torin Boyd broke the story in the U.S. in mid-October and it quickly went viral.
(more…)
Strong Initiation, Weak Initiation
Sunday, October 21st, 2007Initiations are the first significant actions taken by the players in a scene. A strong initiation defines the game being played, establishes the identities of the players, and informs the rest of the scene. It instantly alerts the audience to the scene’s intentions. A weak initiation, by contrast, lacks definition and energy, and leaves the audience disoriented and disengaged.
I once saw Sara Gee and Dave Hill of the great improv group King Ten perform a scene at the I. O. West theater in Los Angeles that began with Gee applying (make-believe) makeup to Hill’s face. After a couple of beats, Hill stood and announced, “I…am…a detective!” Their initiation launched a hilarious character that defined the rest of the show’s hilarious performance. A detective. And not just any detective. A detective in makeup. A theatrical detective. An Inspector Clouseau type character. For the next 45 minutes, all Hill had to do to get a big laugh from the audience was repeat the line, “I am a detective.”
The great King Ten. Sara Gee is far right; Dave Hill is third from right.
As always, there are parallels in business. Frank Wells, who had just become president of The Walt Disney Company, introduced himself to 3,000 Disney employees by rappelling down from the rafters of a movie sound stage in full mountain climbing regalia. Steve Jobs’ introductions of new Apple products are always strong initations that launch the performance of those products in the marketplace. Jobs’ energy, enthusiasm and theatricality resonate for a long time with media and customer audiences alike.
Strong Initiation
Michael Wolfson, founder of the web development company Rocket Fuel, once began a meeting about streaming concerts on the internet by having everyone in the meeting recall the first live concert they attended. This was a beautiful initiation that very naturally generated energy and enthusiasm. And it was an ingenious way for all 15 of us in the scene, many of whom were together for the first time, to get to know one another in a way that really meant something. Way better than the name/title/responsibility introductions that are typical of such scenes.
Wolfson
I generally avoid the subject of sports in GameChangers because it confuses the definition of ‘game’. In the book chapter on Initiations, I do, however, tell one sports story, about a football game between Notre Dame and USC in 1977, in which Notre Dame — to the complete surprise of the opposition, the media, and the fans in the stands — entered the stadium wearing green jerseys instead of their traditional blue. The emotional lift it gave the Fighting Irish and the crowd set the tone for a resounding Notre Dame victory that day.
Yesterday, 30 years later, Notre Dame wore green jerseys again in a game against USC. This time, though, it came as no surprise to anyone, because Notre Dame had announced in July that they were going to do it. Assuming that Notre Dame’s objective in the scene was to win the game (versus selling lots of throwback jerseys to their fans between July and October, let’s say) this was a weak initiation. It didn’t surprise anyone, generated no energy, no lift, and gave no new information to the audience. Perhaps predictably, Notre Dame got trounced by the Trojans, 38-0.
Weak Initiation
A strong initiation has an element of surprise to it. The audience should not see it coming. It should lend a sense of anticipation, not predictability, to your presentation. For these reasons, in most business scenarios I advocate not previewing your agenda. Telling your audience what to expect does not constitute a strong initiation, and yet how many business meetings begin this way? If your audience can see what’s coming, if you lose the element of surprise, you are ignoring an essential fundamental of improvisation.
One other business lesson inherent in yesterday’s game. No amount of improvisation can help you if you don’t have a competitive product. In 1977, Notre Dame had Joe Montana in one of those green jerseys. Yesterday, it was the Trojans who had the horses. The Irish could have initiated the scene by flying onto the field from a green blimp on shamrock-shaped parachutes. It would not have made a bit of difference.