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Is Social Useless?

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

A response to Spencer Fry of Carbonmade, who recently posted a blog entry entitled: “Down With Social–Social is Immeasurable and a Waste of Time.”

Quantum1ASpencer, I agree to this extent:  The phrase ‘Social Media’ is so amorphous as to be essentially meaningless.  In fact, all media are social.  It’s like saying Wooden Tree, or Feathered Bird.

The most social medium is sexual intimacy, followed (if we’re talking relevance; preceded if we’re talking chronology) by meaningful face-to-face conversations, scaling out from there, and eventually reaching the nebulous netherworld of thoughtless Likes, meaningless Tweets and snarky YouTube comments.  Noise.  Cosmetic data with no emotional or meta resonance.

What’s usually ignored in conversations about Social Media platforms is the Science of Narrative.  Narrative is the force that makes media meaningful.  Narrative may not make the world go round, but it describes for us why and how it does.  It provides context for information that would otherwise appear as random.  The reason social messaging echos and evaporates is that it’s not connecting with a narrative.  (A hashtag or a mention does not a narrative make!)

The most relevant aspect of Social Media will turn out to be the lens it afford us with which to perceive narratives.  We are, I believe, at a stage in the history of narratology that parallels where physics was at the turn of the last century, when the science moved from the Newtonian to the Quantum.

Marketers who use social media as you have described it, as a fashion statement, are doomed to keep firing blanks at a target they cannot see.  They are using Industrial Aged models to engage in a Networked environment.  It’s like trying to split an atom with a pendulum.

Those who use it as a lens on narrative, will be able to direct ‘particles of meaning’ at the quantum narrative made visible by social technologies and capture the massive energy predictably released by these interactions.

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Posted in Communication, Emotion, Issues, Narrative, Networked World, story | No Comments »

JetBlue Scene

Monday, August 30th, 2010

Jeremy Redleaf, one of the new physicists of the narrative form and the creator of this brilliant siteOJN1initated the scene when he sent me this emailJBJeremy1

about this JetBlue adJetBlue1

which is anchored by copy that saysJBJeremy2In my role of Commentor On All Things About Improvisation in Business, I responded to Jeremy’s email with this GameChangers postJBGameChangers1in which i point out that ‘the first rule of improv’ if there even is such a thing, which itself is debatable, is not to say ‘yes’ but to say ‘yes and.’   ‘Yes’ is a state of mind.  ‘Yes and’ is action.  The most fertile ground in the world is useless until it’s planted.  ‘Yes’ is the ground.  ‘And’ is the seed.  My blog post inspired Jeremy…JBJeremy2C

Posi-ffiti!  Yes!  I love threads like this.  As usual, I’d tweeted a link to my blog post. I decided to yes-and Jeremy by calling JetBlue’s attention to its error with a Tweet.  I was able to Google their CMO, Marty St. George and find his Twitter account.  JBTweet2To Marty’s credit, he tweeted back within 15 mins.  This already puts @martysg and JetBlue way ahead of most CMOs in brand narrative game.  It also tells me that this is one vigilant, sensitive cat.  Dude’s running it like Ochocincomartysg1

here @martysg commits the improvisation error of denying.  He does this by being vague–what does “if you said ‘no quotation marks’ I might be with you” mean, anyway?–and acting as if I’d accused him of misquoting ‘John’, and seems to be saying that the mistake is not theirs, but mine, for calling them out on the wrong thing.  I responded by suggesting the ‘Posi-ffiti’ gameJBTweet3

and further suggested how to initiate the game…JBTweet11

@martysg blocks the game… martysg2By acting as if I’d said something I hadn’t–that ‘The Posi-ffiti Game’ would have to be played without ‘John’s’ permission–Marty kills the scene.  This was probably his intention.  He also implies that quoting people without their permission is MY style.  In one statement, he refuses my gift and pimps my character.  Nice.  This is classic old school management style, a familiar corporate game I call, “Parry and Thrust.”  It’s played  by stalling, and staying non-committal (”Hm…if….I might…”) and then landing a knockout blow (”Do something unethical?  Not us.  YOU maybe.  Not us.”)

Look, everybody understands that a CMO like @martysg will not alter an ad campaign because some nitpicker tweets him about the word ‘and’ in an ad.  Like I said, he gets credit for being open enough to have the conversation in the first place.  This is more responsiveness from a tweet than you’d get from 90% of all the CMOs in the world.  It is, however, short of the kind of action a person would get from an improvisational brand like Southwest Airlines.  Furthermore, what happened when @martysg did respond is precisely the point of my blog post.  The conversation didn’t go anywhere because Marty St. George ‘yessed’ and he did not ‘and.’

How might Marty have yes-anded?  Anyone who’s gone through a GameChangers workshop can give you a dozen games that would be more productive than ‘Parry and Thrust.’

The good news coming out of this exchange is that all is not lost.  Jeremy Redleaf has a new job description for OddJobNation: “Posi-ffiti Artist.”

To an improviser, Lost is just the first step on the way to Found.

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Posted in Additions and Edits, Agreement Principle, Branding, Character, Communication, Dialogue, Games, Gifts, Initiations, Issues, Listening, Narrative, Scenes, story | No Comments »

GameChangers Glossary, O to Z

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

Adapted from GameChangers–Improvisation for Business in the Networked World, by Mike Bonifer:

Objective–The desired outcome of a scene; the focus of a scene; the business goal of a scene; one of the four elements of a Game

Opening–An ‘overture’ prior to a scene or series of scenes in which a player or a group develops the themes for a performance; usually begins with a suggestion from the audience

Organic Opening–A style of group opening in which a ‘stream-of-consciousness’ dialogue and/or actions identify the themes for a performance

Organizational Environment–The overall physical presentation of a business to its audience; the ’stage’ upon which a business performs; includes exteriors, interiors, wardrobe, lighting, transportation, ambient noise, air quality, etc. etc.

Pandering–A performance-related problem that occurs when a player appeals to an audience’s basest instincts; in improv comedy, this is known as ‘going for the easy laugh’

Performance–The actions taken by a player or group to achieve an objective; a scene or series of scenes designed to earn the audience’s approval and achieve an objective; participation in a game; the object of analysis  (by a coach/manager and/or audience) of a group’s effectiveness; an improvised scene or series of scenes; the effectiveness of a brand’s narrative in the marketplace

Pimping–A performance-related problem that occurs when a player makes an unreasonable demand or sets unreasonable expectations of other players; setting up a scene partner to look bad; asking a scene partner to perform in a way that conflicts with the scene partner’s role and/or character.

Play–Participation in a game; spontaneity; full engagement with one’s environment and scene partners; a design for achieving positive outsomes from unforeseen circumstances; performance; the enjoyable, shareable and scaleable pursuit of an objective; (see Improvisation)

Player–Anyone who plays a role in a scene; one who collaborates with others to achieve an objective; one whose work is informed by a sense of play; improviser

Quantum Narrative–The flow of experience, perception and communication–both conscious and unconscious–in which all living things participate;  a thematically-connected definition of these experiences, perceptions and communication; the material from which linear (i.e. ‘Newtonian’) narratives get produced

Role–The set of job-related responsibilities and duties for a specific player within a scene; unlike Character, roles can vary from scene to scene, and can also vary in terms of status; playing a role is often colloquially referred to as ‘wearing a hat’; one of the four components of a Game

Scene–Any interaction between two or more players who share an objective

Scene Partner–Anyone with whom a player interacts during a scene; a teammate

Scenic–Description of an environment that is rich with visual information and objects of inspiration

Scripting–A performance-related problem that occurs when a player plans how a scene will go beforehand; the imposition of one player’s narrative on the other players in a scene; dogmatic then sticks to the ‘script’, even if unforeseen events within the scene call for actions different than those planned

Scripter–A player who goes into a scene with his or her mind mind up about what the scene should be; a player who imposes his or her narrative on other players; the worst thing you can call an improviser

Spolin, Viola–An educator, community activist, author and theater director (1906-1994), who, along with her mentor, Neva Boyd (1876-1963), established the game-based theories and practices upon which GameChangers, and much of modern improv theater, is built; ‘the godmother of modern improvisation’; the author of the seminal textbook, Improvisation for the Theater (1963; U. of Chicago Press); Spolin’s son, Paul Sills (1927-2008), used his mother’s techniques to modernize and commercialize comedia del arte as ‘improv comedy’ through his work at the University of Chicago as co-founder of the Compass Players and as the co-founder and original artistic director of Second City Theater

Status–The level of authority associated with a player’s role in a scene; in Industrial models, status did not change from scene to scene, the CEO, for example was high status in every scene he or she (oh wait, we said Industrial, make that just ‘he’) was in; in the Networked Model, the CEO’s (or anyone else’s) status can range in status from scene to scene.

Status Games–A genre of usually unproductive games in which defining and preserving status is the objective; includes games such as ‘Kissing Ass,’ ‘Who’s Going to Tell Him He’s Wrong?  (Not me!)” and “I’m The Decider”; these games usually need excessive follow-up, as reality must catch up to the fictions generated by managers who focus on status instead of objectives that can be shared by the group

Story–The historical artifact that emerges from the playing of a game; the arc of a scene or performance, often said to consist of Beginning, Middle and End; the ‘Newtonian narrative’ that results from interaction with a Quantum Narrative; a snapshot in time of narrative flow; narrative history; an artifact produced by engagement with one’s art; the historical record of a player or group’s interaction with its environment

Suggestion From the Audience–Any idea or piece of information given to a group prior to a performance by those who will judge the effectiveness of that performance; includes market research, customer relationship management, results of spidering and other listening technologies; organizational imperatives; brand statements; directions from manager/coach, etc.

Symbolic Movement–Meta communication that moves a narrative forward

Theme–An idea inspired by a suggestion from the audience and generated in an opening or first scenes in a performance; the idea whose exploration provides the conceptual and narrative ‘glue’ for a performance; that provides the inspiration and foundation for a scene or performance

Upstaging–A performance related problem that consists of of stealing focus or negating the contributions of another player to make yourself look better; trying to good at someone else’s expense; blocking the audience’s view of another player in a scene

Yes and, Yes anding–Accepting a scene partner’s reality or declaration, then adding useful information or contribution of your own in order to arrive at a new idea or reality shared by the group; a shorthand phrase that describes the most fundamental concept of improvisation, the agreement between players that results in transformation

Zone, in the–see ‘Group Mind‘

THIS IS A LIVING LIST; PASS IT ALONG AND ADD TO IT, AS WE WILL CONTINUE TO DO HERE AT GAMECHANGERS.

Posted in Communication, Education, Issues, Networked World, Objectives, Problem Solving, Scenes, Themes | No Comments »

GameChangers Glossary, H to N

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

Adapted from GameChangers–Improvisation for Business in the Networked World, by Mike Bonifer:

Heighten–To build emotional involvement and energy in a scene

Improv–See ‘Improvisation‘

Improvisation–spontaneous communication designed to generate positive outcomes from unforeseen circumstances; interpersonal and group communication that is instinctive and informed by experience, knowledge, serendipity and respect for environment; improv, as performed in theaters, such as with improv comedy; a conversation with the community; the pedagogy, philosophy and process defined by Viola Spolin in her 1963 book, Improvisation for the Theater; a games-based methodology for generating communication, learning and transformation

Initiation–The first meaningful words or lines spoken during a scene; in this case, ‘meaningful’ refers to anything that directly involves the group’s progress toward achieving the scene’s objective(s).

Interrogation–A performance-related issue, often arising in interviews or employee reviews, that arises when one player only asks questions and never acts on the information revealed by the answers;

Invention–A performance-related issue that occurs when players work with speculative or subjective information instead of the reality of the scene.

Invocation–An exercise that lets players examine a subject from the third-person (”It is”), second-person (”You are”) and first-person (”I am”) perspectives in order to identify themes for a performance.

Issue–Any performance-related problem which can be remedied by better execution of GameChangers business communication techniques.

Judging–A performance-related problem that occurs when a player subjectively assesses a scene while the scene is taking place.

Justifying–A performance-related problem that occurs when a player self-consciously explains his or her (or their team’s) actions in a scene, especially when the behavior does not align with the GameChangers principles.

Liminal–relating to the threshold of perception that players break through by participating in a game; relates to perceptions of one’s own abilities and to what one’s perceptions of what is generally possible; transcending the status quo

Meta Communication/Meaning–A symbolic or allegorical representation of ideas and concerns that exist on a societal, cultural or archetypal scale; the symbolic representation of a macro trend, widely held belief, or aspect of the human condition; (See ‘Cosmetic Communication/Meaning‘ and ‘Emotional Communication/Meaning‘)

Monologue–A speech given by a single player in a scene; a speech shared amongst multiple players in the course of a scene or presentation.

Narrative–A flow of thematically-connected events that can be related after the fact as a story; organizational memory and vision of the future that inform scenes performed in the present; a purposeful alignment of ideas and events, such as for a brand.

Negativity–Traits, ideologies and behaviors that halt a scene’s progress through skepticism and a disagreeable inclination to oppose, deny and/or resist the ideas or involvement of other players; pessimism; the antithesis of the attitude required for productive collaborations.

Network–The communications matrix of an organization, brand or individual; those who are connected by a communications matrix or belong to an organization; defined by John Seely Brown, John Hagel et al as consisting of ‘core’ and ‘edge’

Networked World–The highly communicative, internet-supported global stage on which business gets conducted

Objective–The desired outcome of a scene; the stated purpose of playing a game; the business goal of a scene; one of the four elements that comprise a Game

Opening–An ‘overture’ prior to a scene or series of scenes in which a player or a group develops the themes for an upcoming performance; usually triggered by Suggestions From the Audience

Organization–The manifestation of a business or brand to its audience; the operational structure of a business or brand; a company or group with a shared mission and business objectives (see ‘Network‘)

TO BE CONTINUED…

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Posted in Branding, Communication, Dialogue, Emotion, Environment, Fundamentals, Initiations, Issues, Narrative, Objectives, Themes, Uncategorized, story | No Comments »

GameChangers Glossary, A to G

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

Adapted from GameChangers–Improvisation for Business in the Networked World, by Mike Bonifer:

Addition–Entering a scene in progress for the purpose of contributing immediately to the team’s performance; contributing to a scene; giving a gift

Agreement, The Agreement Principle–A principle of improvisation, characterized by players’ openness towards each other and an organization or communications network’s openness at its edge; the group consensus around a game or theme that informs a scene

Audience–Those within and outside of an organization whose reactions and opinions will determine the success of a scene or performance

Audience, External–People outside an organization or network, including customers (and potential customers), competitors, bloggers, users, fans, viewers, etc. whose reactions ultimately determine the value of a performance or narrative

Audience, Internal–People inside an organization or network, whose judgment acts as a kind of filter on scenes and narratives before they reach the External Audience

Blocking–A performance-related problem that occurs when players impede the progress of a scene by refusing the gifts offered them by their teammates

Callback–The act of recalling information that was stated by a player earlier in a scene or in a previous scene.

Cast–Players who share the same business objective; also called a Group or Team; can also refer to the employees of an entire division or organization (Disney, for example, refers to all employees as ‘cast members’)

Casting–The process of selecting players who will comprise a business team

Character–Traits that make a player unique as an individual and consistently valuable to his or her team

Close, Del–Credited as one of the originators of longform improvisation, and one of its most influential teachers, Close (1934-1999) created ‘Harold,’ probably the most-performed structure for group improv theater performances; his proteges include Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, John Belushi, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey; legend has it that he willed his skull to the Goodman Theater in Chicago to be used in future productions of Hamlet, in which he was to be billed as playing the role of Yorick

Coach–A person who casts a team; an objective observer and critic of a team’s performance; one who establishes game-based strategies and standards of preparation and performance in directing a team toward its objectives; manager; director

Cosmetic Communication/Meaning–The surface level of communication within a scene, primarily through spoken dialogue; data; information. (See ‘Emotional Communication/Meaning‘ and ‘Meta Communication/Meaning‘)

Crazy Town–A performance-related problem that occurs when players indulge in fantasies, magical thinking, or egoistic behavior, until the scene becomes un-moored from any actionable reality.

Denying–A form of blocking in which a player repeatedly contradicts or ignores other players, confusing the audience and fellow players; refusing to recognize another player’s reality

Edit–The action of making an entrance for the purpose of shifting the scene’s focus, or to begin a new scene; edits usually occur in concert with other players exiting the scene

Emotional Communication/Meaning–The most dynamic and meaningful level of communication in a scene. conveying its players’ passions and desires, where reactions (both positive and negative), and reinforcements/alienation are strongest

Energy–The pitch at which a player or group performs (and modulates) its performance; an umbrella term for the level of activity and intensity the audience observes in the group, and that players in the group experience in one another

Entrance–A player’s first appearance in a scene

Environment–The setting in which members of team collaborate to achieve their objective; any place where players interact; more expansively, any place where an audience experiences a brand; the overall business climate in which an organization operates, shaped by factors such as regulatory agencies, competitors, geopolitical factors and the desires, attitudes and beliefs of customers

Exit–A player’s departure from a scene

Fantasizing–A performance-related issue that occurs when players build outlandish, or wildly fictitious scenarios that do not acknowledge or act on the real world environment or the businessa; magical thinking; (see ‘Crazy Town‘ and ‘Invention‘)

Flatlining–A performance-related problem that occurs when players show no energy or life, impeding or halting a scene’s progress

Game–Rules, roles, environment and objective(s) defined; an exploration of a theme; a strategy used to achieve a business-related objective; games fall into two broad categories – productive and unproductive

GameChanger–A player who has mastered the art and practical techniques of business improvisation; a manager/coach or player with the ability to identify and support productive games and quickly change or edit unproductive ones

Gift–A move that supports the scene and the players in it; ‘giving gifts’ is one of the most powerful and effective moves a player can make

Grandstanding–A performance-related issue that occurs when a player wastes time and effort trying to contribute something ‘heroic’ to a scene; holding back for effect instead of engaging in the moment; habitually swinging for the fences or reaching for the ‘Wow Factor’; going for a home run when a single would better serve the scene

Group Mind– The tangible web of connectivity between players that achieved through a shared focus on a game and the exploration of a theme; the collective unconscious; not the same as ‘Group Think‘

Group Think–Rubber-stamping; going along to get along; consensus for its own sake; agreement that does not involve a game or theme; behavior that is not intended to achieve the objective, but rather to reinforce status; uncritical or unquestioning support for a political agenda, ideology or hierarchy

TO BE CONTINUED….

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Posted in Additions and Edits, Agreement Principle, Branding, Casting, Character, Coaching, Communication, Dialogue, Emotion, Entrances, Environment, Fundamentals, Games, Gifts, Group Mind, Issues, Narrative, Objectives, Scenes, Themes | No Comments »

Fools With Rules

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

This one’s for the golfers…

I used to joke with our neighbor back in Indiana, Euline Kieffner, that the reason she and I loved golf so much was that there was nothing more alluring to folks who’d grown up on farms like we had than a mown field with no manure in it.  Until four or five years ago, I was enchanted by the game of golf, and literally could not get enough of it.  I played and practiced it religiously, at one point working my way all the way down to a four-handicap, which is pretty damn good.  I could play.

Golf is a great game that can teach a person a lot about patience, persistence, imagination, focus, character, and the difference between trying to force positive outcomes and letting positive outcomes emanate from an open mind.  As my business focus has changed, so has my relationship with the game.  Today, I play rarely, maybe two or three times a year, and only on social occasions.   The romance is gone.  Occasionally, my Taylor-Mades and I stare wistfully at one another across a crowded garage, and remember how it used to be between us.

What fascinates me most about the sport of golf today, sad to say, is the wreckage to its most visible brand experience–the PGA Tour.  We’re talking multi-vehicle pile-up. Its shiningest star has lost most of his luster and its TV ratings have tanked in tandem with the Tiger brand.  The Tour’s newcomers have apparently had no life experiences to differentiate them from one another–all they know is golf.  Its core demographic is aging.  Its most interesting personalities have retired.

Last Sunday, while I did a little work in the office, more out of habit than anything, I had the PGA Championship—the last of the four ‘majors’ of the season—on the TV in the background. It held no inherent interest for me. And then, all of a sudden, it did.  Several of the game’s young lions—Rory McElroy from Scotland(?), a long-hitting lefthander with high follow-through named Bubba, a cool German named Kaymer I’d never heard of before, and Dustin Johnson, who hits it insanely long, were all fighting for the lead, along with a caddyshacker named Wen-Chong from China, who learned to play on that country’s first golf course, which was built only 20 years ago.  All of a sudden, it was a story worth following.

DustinJohnson1Over the last five or six holes the tournament’s drama became palpable.  None of the young guys were holding back, no one was playing not to lose, they were all winding up, letting it rip, and playing for the win, and it was riveting.  The tournament came down to a tie between two players, Bubba and the German, Kaymer, with Johnson playing the final hole of the tournament with a chance to win it.  He missed his par putt to win.  We were looking at a three-player, three-hole playoff for the championship.

And then, all of a sudden, we weren’t.  A PGA Tournament official pulled Johnson aside as he walked off the 18th green and told him that he had violated a rule by grounding his club in a hazard along the 18th fairway, one of the 1000+ sand bunkers that lined the course.

I’m not going to get into the specifics here, except to say that technically the officials were correct—Johnson had, in fact, let his club touch the sand prior to making his second shot.  Narratively, however, the PGA people blew it like I’ve never seen a call blown in a lifetime of watching sports.  There was no possible way for Johnson to know that the spot where his ball sat—a spot that had been trampled by tens of thousands of people during the tournament, and was tightly framed by hundreds in the gallery as he made his swing—was a hazard.  Besides that, if there had once been a border to the sand bunker, that border had been erased by the week’s crowds to the point where it no longer existed.  Given this, there was no way for the PGA officials to know for sure from looking at a replay whether the ball was ‘in’ a bunker or not.

This wasn’t some snap judgment in the heat of the moment by a referee or ump.  This was a deliberation.  A review.  A consideration.  And then, a horrible decision that took all the life out of the story.  Johnson was penalized two strokes, and eliminated from the playoff.

The tragedy of this decision goes way beyond any personal setback to Mr. Johnson.  The PGA brand desperately needed this story, needed the drama to keep building with the playoff between three of its new stars.  They had it.  It was happening.  The audience was engaged.  There was real enthusiasm from the broadcasters.  It was turning into the most interesting finish to a tournament in years.  All the PGA officials had to do was stay out of its way.  Instead, they committed the golfer’s most grievous mistake: they over-thought the shot.  And then they shanked it.

This was not the behavior of people concerned about what’s best for the game of golf, about supporting their brand’s narrative, or about nurturing the next generation of golfers.  This was vainglorious meddling by middle-aged men desperate for attention and fearing nothing as much as their own impotence.

Oh yeah, Kaymer won the playoff, but who cared?  Nobody outside of Kaymer’s girlfriend is talking about it.  All the fan conversation is about the idiotic ruling.

We see this a lot in business.  A compelling narrative begins to unfold, or an idea seems to be gathering momentum, and then, from out of nowhere, an expressionless manager with a rule book derails it.  It sucks for everyone involved except the person with the rule book.

If the rules don’t support your brand’s narrative, don’t change the narrative, change the rules.  If your managers, like those PGA officials, aren’t nuanced enough to understand what it takes to support your narrative, change managers.  This is what the PGA needs to do, pronto, to get its ailing game back on track.

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Posted in Branding, Character, Focus, Games, Issues, Narrative, story | No Comments »

Quoteworthy

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

Our friend Christian Wach, one of the founders of Spirit of Football, sent us this quote:

“Paying attention to the last ten years means we need to realize that nonproprietary, distributed production is not the poor relation of traditional proprietary, hierarchically organized production. This is no hippy lovefest. It is the business method on which IBM has staked billions of dollars; the method of cultural production that generates much of the information each of us uses every day. It is just as deserving of respect and the solicitude of policy makers as the more familiar methods pursued by the film studios and proprietary software companies. Losses due to sharing that failed because of artificially erected legal barriers are every bit as real as losses that come about because of illicit copying. Yet our attention goes entirely to the latter.”ChristianWach1A

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Posted in Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Issues, Leadership, Networked World | 1 Comment »

The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Game

Friday, August 6th, 2010

FROM THE HUFFINGTON POST…

In tangling with a subject that’s loco, one runs the risk of going loco oneself. It’s probably why I’ve been struggling with this post, to the point of being driven crazy by it, for a week. Here we go, this time for sure, hoping that some semblance of sanity awaits you and me on the other side of the exercise.

The ‘Wall Street Game’ is destroying the economy. The end? Okay, on the chance that it’s not, that there’s still hope for dealing successfully with the godzillagram knocking on our door, let’s, just for the torture of it, keep going…

The game played by Goldman Sachs and all the predatory satellites in its system goes beyond crooked. It’s criminal. And worse than criminal, it is a crime that can’t be prosecuted. Here’s why: The game has been designed so that it cannot be played by human beings. It can only be played by programs. In milliseconds-long synapses of electrons that can be parsed only by machines, programs perpetrate crimes with no witnesses, no fingerprints, no conscience, no heart. The humanity, and along with it, the culpability, has been bred out of these programs. They are pure, unassailable, law-unto-themselves, math. Data for data’s sake. Programs designed to interact with other programs without any of the patience, tolerance or thought that will give a human being pause.

WebOfDebt1The originators of these programs are as guilty of their crimes as Smith & Wesson are of the next murder committed with one of their handguns, which is to say they cannot be held accountable. “That’s just the way the game is played,” say the originators. Exactly. This does not mean, however, that the way the game is played is any good, or helpful to the 95% of U.S. households that, together, control as much wealth as the top 1% do. What the programmers call ‘innocence,’ and ‘what no one could have anticipated,’ and ‘God’s work,’ is actually ignorance by design. What comes across as confidence is actually just a con. On Wall Street, nobody really knows anything. The machines are in control. So don’t bother asking.

Here is a good explanation by Ellen Brown of how the Wall Street game is rigged. Brown, author of Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free, does an excellent job of unmasking the mechanics of the game that swings advantage toward the casin–errr–banks. She points a finger in particular at High Frequency Trading (HFT) software (I didn’t know its code originated with the Hollywood Stock Exchange of the dotcom era. Interesting.) that gives Wall Street’s traders the ability to make money in thousandths of a second with programmed trading.

I call this game ‘Global Owning without Local Consent.’ Go Loco, for short. It’s just that crazy.

Because it relentlessly seeks victims to separate from their money like hustlers of a quantum three-card monte game, Go Loco systematically destroys the potential of money to be productive. Money is too busy changing hands and getting hustled to be put to work any other way. In this game, money talks only to itself, like a patient in an asylum.

We see the outcomes of this insanity all around: Foreclosures on every block; constant and permanent erosion in the jobs market; crippling household and national debt; crumbling infrastructure; broke education systems; a dispirited class of permanently unemployed. The game saps entrepreneurship of its passion by punishing risk-taking. It smothers human creativity with machine rationality. Because it is based on consumption, it regards sustainability as an enemy. Because it is pure data, it has no resonance as a narrative. No soul. It is a cousin to the game played by people who sit under a mountain in Utah and fly drones that blow up villages halfway around the world. Hey, it’s all just a game, right? Yes, it is. A terrible, horrible, no good, very bad one.

At GameChangers, we define a game as consisting of Rules, Roles, Environment and Objective(s). Here’s a breakdown of the Go Loco game in terms of these four elements:

Terrible Rules: The rules of a productive game are known by all its players. This is not the case with Go Loco. Far from it. Its rules are so opaque and complex that no one holds an entire playbook. Its most significant rules are programmed like a virus (with no known antidote) to infect every significant, or anomalous, movement of money across the networks that carry financial data. The rules do not determine or care where the money is going, any more than a rattlesnake cares where a mouse is taking a kernel of corn. They are designed only to sense movement like the snake senses the mouse, then, like the snake, strike with blinding speed. The rules are machine-enabled executions of that old business bromide, “Follow the money.” With the added instruction: “And when you catch the money in an unlit alley, jack it and get some.”

Horrible Environment: Viola Spolin, the godmother of modern improvisation, said, “Act on environment, and environment will act on you.” Because the environment for the Go Loco game is ‘inside machines,’ those who ‘act on’ the game naturally begin behaving like machines themselves. The tasteless offices in which they work, the sameness banality of their attire, their fear of creative disruption, and their relentless calculating for advantage, all reflect the electronic latticework across which these players crawl like spiders on crack. Because players’ insides have a machined sameness to them, extra emphasis is placed on surface labeling, on cosmetics and appearance. How you appear becomes much more important than how you actually are, because how you actually are is so…unremarkable. All you talk about is money. Give a man a billion dollars and try talking to him about anything but the billion dollars. It can’t be done.

No Good Roles: Wall Street’s game is to business what pornography is to sex. Don’t for a second believe it has anything to do with love, or with having a relationship. It’s all about volume, baby. It’s as real as reality TV. What do we have that we can sell? How many units can we move? When the autistic boy who senses the world at different frequencies than you and me puts his hands to a machine running a program playing the game, the voice he hears will be saying, “Faster, pussycat, kill, kill!” Is it pure coincidence that Lawrence Fishburne’s daughter sold herself to the Matrix? Or did she hear the voice, too, and simply obey its instructions?

Very Bad Objectives: In improvisation, a game’s objectives are win/win. All the players benefit from the communication, learning, and transformation that result from playing. The Go Loco game is, by contrast, win/lose. Bigtime.

A lot of people will tell you winning and losing is inherent in the nature of trading, someone wins and someone loses, and the objective is to win more than you lose, and that this dynamic drives markets. There are two problems with excusing the Go Loco game for this reason: 1) It ignores the power of collaboration, which is where most of the growth potential exists in the networked business environment; and 2) in this game, the winners win so much (when’s the last time you made $28,000 in milliseconds? For doing nothing?) and the losers lose so much, the game produces extreme cycles of bubble-and-burst, of richer-and-poorer, that only promise to get more extreme, because the more the Go Loco programs eat, the hungrier they get. It is a zero sum game they play, and they will play it until the sum of all accounts not controlled by the programs is zero.

Now what? The big problem we have now is that in one breath we can find agreement that the current game is rotten, in the next breath we will be arguing over what to do about it, and as long as we’re arguing, the rottenness persists. The way to break through this dilemma is to quit worrying about what the new game should be and focus on changing the old one. One way to begin changing the old game is by changing the conversations we have:

From being about money, to being about how money is put to work.
From consumption to sustainability.
From fast food (or fast anything) to local food (or local anything).
From destination to journey.
From connecting the dots to connecting.
From owning the story to sharing the story.
From programmed to human.

Make moves that programs cannot see, with a gait that describes the glorious, inchoate lurching of love! Trust your intuition! Express what’s in your heart instead of your head for a change. Howl with your dog! Prove that it is we, and our beautiful gift of a planet, and not the programs, who are truly alive! Change the game!

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Posted in Agreement Principle, Creativity, Education, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Games, Initiations, Innovation, Issues, Movement, Narrative, Networked World, Objectives, Problem Solving, Relationships, Speed, story | No Comments »

Sweet Spot

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

GolfBallTee1I used to play a lot of golf, and the game taught me a lot.  One bit of wisdom came my way one Sunday afternoon from a golfer named Jim Bishop, while he and I were playing the classic old Wilson Course at Griffith Park in Los Angeles.  He told me that one reason he plays golf is that it that offers a person the chance to experience perfection.  “Every now and then,” he said, “you make a perfect swing.”  As any golfer who took the game seriously would, I understood exactly what Bishop was talking about.

On occasions, something amazing happens in the game of golf, when you transcend the conscious boundaries of all your prior experiences with the game, let go of your expectations, and become a passenger on the boat of your own brilliance.  You experience the patient takeaway, the coiling in the hips, the shoulders in perfect orbit around the spine, your back leg buttressed like a telephone pole, until you are behind the ball and then, your entire being uncoils through the ball, not swinging at it as much as passing a wave of energy through it, and in immortal words of Carl Spackler, “Cinderella story. Outta nowhere.”  There it is.  You feel it for just an instant.  Perfection.

A golfer pays a price to get there, because most often golf is crap and collapse, frustration, bad behavior and the sudden and unexplainable disappearance of one’s powers.  In other words, it’s a lot like life, which why everyone should play golf at some point in their lives.  It teaches you a lot about how to persist in the face of adversity.

Like the game of golf, the work we do requires a lot of patience and, like golf, work is all about managing adverse events.  The professional golfer, Frank Beard, once said that he hit exactly the same good shots an amateur golfer hits, he just hit more of them.  The same is true with our work.  Success looks the same for everyone.  You make money.  You enjoy the interactions.  You go home happy.  It is the consistency of our game, and the ability to manage adversity, that distinguishes the real players from the weekenders.

It doesn’t matter how great a player you are, there are times when you just have to take an unplayable lie, stroke and penalty, or when you find yourself out of bounds and have to hike back to the tee and start all over, stroke and distance.

Then there are times when work comes together like the perfect swing.  When your biggest client calls to thank you for solving a couple of problems, your oldest client makes things new again, and your newest client signs the contract.  When a friend makes news for doing something cool and funny.  When you begin a journey that is going to take four years and promises no end of excitement.  When you get to study with one of your favorite teachers for two hours.  When you have tickets with friends for a great concert tonight.

This is one of those days for me, and I wish you all the same.  Because we all know that soon enough we’ll be hooking them deep into alligator country again, trying to locate our ball in places where, as Lee Trevino once said, “there’s things with no shoulders living in there” and be asking ourselves why in the hell we put ourselves through it.

We put ourselves through it because we are promised times when perfection smiles on us, and we experience the satisfaction of seeing ourselves and the games we play in a new light, when we are capable of doing, in the context of the game, what we had only dreamed about before.

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Posted in Coaching, Creativity, Focus, Fundamentals, Games, Innovation, Issues, Problem Solving | No Comments »

Apparatus and Apparition

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

Observing the interwebs abuzz today about the long (up to an 11-hour wait in L.A.!) iPhone lines, and the lines already forming (three days ahead of the first screening!) for the next Twilight sequel, I am reminded of this scenario:

Piaggio1A friend of ours who works in sales gets honored often as a leading performer at his company, a large and established organization which is one of the 87 current members of the S&P 500 that have been members since its inception in 1957. The honoring happens at lavish banquets attended by the company’s top managers and featuring a pricey speaker.

Understand that our friend is a madman, who rides his three-wheeled Piaggio motorcycle with the governor of the state where he lives, has 28 tattoos— including one on his (hairy) chest of a man pushing a lawnmower, next to which he shaves a smooth swatch as if the tattooed lawnmower has mowed his chest; and as a hobby he spent a couple of years performing standup comedy as a Catholic priest (he’s Jewish).  None of the tattoos is visible outside our friend’s business suit. Nobody at his company knows he does stand-up under a stage name while wearing a Roman collar.   He plays the company game, but it is far from the only game he plays.

Our friend told us that the speaker at a recent banquet where he was honored as his division’s Salesperson of the Year gave a speech about ‘Finishing First.’ About how nothing else would do. About how a person has a choice between finishing first and being a loser. How in sales, there is no prize for second place, first place is the only place that matters. You either make the sale or you don’t.

Our friend approached the speaker after his speech and struck up a conversation that went like this.

FRIEND: Nice speech.
SPEAKER: Thank you.
FRIEND: What’d you get for it? Forty thousand dollars?  Am I close?
SPEAKER: Uh..that’s in the ballpark.
FRIEND: You know, our first choice for a speaker was Colin Powell, but he wanted two-hundred thousand dollars and we couldn’t afford it.  So it looks like finishing second worked out pretty well for you, didn’t it?

“When I saw the look on his face I felt bad for saying it,” says our friend. “But I couldn’t resist.  It was such an obviously lame premise.  There are all kinds of situations where finishing first has nothing to do with your success.”

So you’re waiting in line for the iPhone or the Twilight.  Cool.  It’s a happening.  A social event.  Remember, though, that meaningful transactions happen in the line, with other people, not at the end of it, with an apparatus or an apparition.

Enjoy the ride and you won’t ever have to worry about whether you’ll be the first to arrive.

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Posted in Games, Initiations, Issues, Leadership, Networked World, Relationships, Sales | 2 Comments »

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