Our November GameChanger of the Month selection was a slam dunk. Barack Obama is going to be America’s first baller president, and he’s going to be its first Improviser-in-Chief.
His and his team’s ability to improvise their way to an election victory against rivals who were, initially, much better funded, more networked and more familiar brand names proved beyond any doubt how skillful improvisation can change the game. Obama is the epitome of what it means to be a gamechanger. (more…)
Lesley Stahl did a report last night on 60 Minutes about the development of electric cars in Silicon Valley and by the American auto industry in Detroit. That was the cosmetic level of the story.
On the more meaningful, emotional and meta levels of communication, Stahl’s piece depicts a clash between two mighty cultures, and ultimately between two different ways of conducting one’s business. One of them is highly improvisational. The other is rigid, scripted, dogmatic. Over the past 30 years, Silicon Valley’s ability to improvise has enabled it to lead the world in the development of new technologies and the markets for them. The heavily-scripted and stage-managed Detroit performance has for the most part been a multi-car pile-up on the Interstate, like a series of scenes from Gone in Sixty Seconds. (more…)
On the radio, the reporter is talking to a first-time high school principal of a new charter school in New Orleans…
As I’m always on the lookout for scenes that demonstrate improvisation at work, the story gets my attention. The woman is starting a job she’s never done before, yet clearly with the confidence that she is prepared for the experience. That’s an improviser talking. I turn up the volume…
The subject of the story is Channa Cook. Her age is 28. She and Kristin Leigh Moody are the co-founders of Sojourner Truth Academy in New Orleans, a new charter school that opened to its first class in August (then had to close its doors for awhile to let Hurricane Gustav blow through, but is now open again). (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…)
Physicians Sales and Service, headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, yearly revenue around $1.3 billion if I remember correctly, workforce around 13,000, again quoting from memory, perhaps faulty, founded by a character named Patrick Kelly, who has the same name as my friend Patrick “Paraquat” Kelley, the legendary L.A. deejay, and about a hundred Patricks and Kellys and Kelleys and Kelly Patricks I have known, many of them via my association with the Irish of the University of Notre Dame.
My Notre Dame classmate Mike Berg, who’s in the medical business, told me about PSS and that sometimes PSS employees do wild n crazy things, like dress up as turkeys on Thanksgiving. This caught my attention, sounded like a gamechanging kind of company. And sure enough — (more…)