Back in January of this year, Barack Obama tossed out an aside at a coffee talk with a couple dozen senior citizens in Indianapolis, an aside that was probably lost on most of the audience listening in person: If he got elected, he and his team were going to re-design the White House web site to become more of a utility for citizens. I pointed out at the time what a brilliant initiation this was, with implications related to technology, jobs creation, art and design, and citizen activism, to name a few of the themes that could be explored as a result of it. (more…)
I’m hearing it from all over these days, so it must be official–the word ‘gamechanger’ has broken into the popular idiom. Why, I remember back in the day when it was just Pontiac Motors, A. G. Lafley of P & G, a few sportscasters, and me. Six weeks ago, William Safire wrote about the etymology of ‘gamechanger’ in his NY Times column. Now it’s everywhere, especially in politics. I must have heard the words ‘game’ and ‘change’ used together a dozen times last night in relation to the presidential debate.
This morning, my friend David LaPlante (if you want to read something beautiful, see his most recent blog entry) sent me a link to a CNN story and headline:
Here’s my response:
Candidates and media use the word erroneously, as CNN does in this story, when they refer to an EVENT as a gamechanger. A gamechanger is PERSON with the ability to change the game. Like you : ) A gamechanger can also be a brand, as in the focused, networked behaviors of a group of people who share business objectives. (more…)
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…)
ComputerWorld.com runs an interesting piece, Five Web 2.0 App Dev Lessons for Enterprise IT, this week by Heather Havenstain about how an agile approach to application development permits an almost constant evolution of feature sets that are in line with users’ needs and suggestions. Dynamic scripting languages like Ruby, Perl and Python (sounds like a hoochie-coochie act at the 1908 Chicago World’s Fair, don’t it?) short-cut long lines of code, letting developers be faster, more creative and more flexible with their work. ‘Permanent beta’ the article calls it.
The ComputerWorld article underscores yet again how vital improvisation is to business in the Networked World — after all, what is improvisation if not ‘agile development’? The article also shows how ‘performance’ in business does not refer solely to folks standing up and holding forth in front of other folks. Apps are performance for an audience, too. The Five App Dev Lessons cited by ComputerWorld are straight from the improvisers’ playbook. Here they are. Our comments are in italics: (more…)
June, 1985: At a conference on film financing, a banker from First Boston asks a crowd of film industry executives to name the most valuable thing in the movie business. None of them have the answer she’s looking for, an answer that was prescient at the time, and never more relevant than it is today. “The most valuable thing in the movie business,” the banker informs them, “is 52 weekends a year.” In the banker’s opinion, it is the film studios’ ability to capitalize on the 52 yearly opening weekends that determines their status in the marketplace. Not long after the banker makes this observation, the Weekend Boxoffice Report begins appearing for the first time in newspapers around the country. For better or worse, who ‘wins the weekends’ becomes a new metric for a film’s success, a new context for audiences to consider, and a driver of a film’s revenue in ancillary markets.
In the Networked World, as the costs of producing media and other forms of intellectual property dwindle, and your blog about your dog has the potential to reach as many people as Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times, the big business opportunities for brands and entrepreneurs are not so much in the creation of content, but in creating and owning context. (more…)
It’s only the most valuable brand in the world these days, so in one sense any kind of accolade, even one as prestigious as the GameChanger of the Month Award (”The Gamey”) with its winning prize of this blog post, is pretty obvious and lame.
What’s not so obvious or lame is how Google’s culture is built on fundamental concepts of improvisation. (more…)
Video clips from GameChangers workshops at Twelve Horses Interactive and an Executive MBA Class at Notre Dame. The Twelve Horses engagements typically have from 8 to 10 people participating. The MBA class had 65 people in it.
What do Jif Peanut Butter and the commedia dell’artes of the Renaissance have in common? Both are improvised performances that are informed by suggestions from the audience.
A suggestion is the word(s) or idea(s) given by the audience to an improv group from which the group develops themes for a performance. Suggestions are important to improvisation because they make the audience an active collaborator in the show. Watching a group springboard from a suggestion into an exploration of themes inspired by that suggestion is one of the most engaging aspects of an improv performance. It engenders a natural rapport between audience and performers, and gives the crowd a rooting interest in the outcome of the show. After all, if something is our idea, we want it to be good. (more…)
So 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…
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…)
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.
