As you go about your business today, wielding a sword forged by your your authority, your education, your responsibility, your intelligence and experience, don’t think of this sword as a severing device that you use to slice, dice, and eviscerate. Don’t go medieval on anyone’s ass, or be chopping off  heads to generate fear among the populace. Instead, think of this sword of yours as a de-severing device, a weapon of compassion, one that joins–

the fire of purpose with the steel of structured action;

the art of entrepreneurship with the craft of leadership;

the genius of others with your own;

your history and your future;

your intuition and your intellect;

your character and your role;

your brand and your customers.

A weapon of choice isn’t the same thing as a choice of weapons. How you choose to use your weapon is way more important than what weapon you choose to use.

The extraordinary improviser, Paul Vaillancourt, gave me a list of sayings that have been compiled and passed around the improv theater community over the years. The great teachers Mick Napier and Del Close get some of the credit, as do Viola “The Godmother” Spolin and ImprovWorks’ Sue “Pond” Walden, though the exact origins of most of these sayings would be pretty hard to trace. What’s clear to anyone who explores improvisation is that the the meaning behind the sayings originates from the same place that accounts for such profound ideas as jazz, the Dao De Jing, Johnny Appleseed and Pixar Animation.  Here is the fifth in a series

Play against cliches. First, play with the cliches of your business.  You all know what they are.  Name them.  Call them out.  Have some fun with them.   And then go against them.  There is a lot of movement in playing against cliches.  Just doing this one thing can transform your scene into something delightful.

Think of the environment as a six-sided sphere, of which the audience is a part. What a brilliant way to determine your marcomm budget!  It’s 1/6 of your total operating budget.  Done.  Next.

The environment also has an outside and an inside. This is a good way of thinking about how your brand’s environment travels with the communication that represents it in the networked world.  Think of your network as a place.  What is that place like?  Who is walking the halls?  How is it lit?  What kind of art hangs in its offices?  What does it sound like?  All these concepts should be consistent and play off one another in virtual space and in reality. A friendly atmosphere in the office extends to the social graph.  Artfulness will be apparent in reality and in virtual space.  Clutter is as clutter does.  Etc. etc.

You don’t have to try to be funny, laughter will happen just by being human.  Being human is funny enough. A common misconception we battle all the time at GameChangers is that improvisation is all about being funny.  So not true!  Improvisation is about communication, learning, and transformation.  It is only by a quirk of genetic fate—Viola Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, brought all the games Viola had conceived with him when he and Bernie Sahlins co-founded Second City—that we in the U.S. associate improvisation so strongly with comedy.  Comedy is just a sliver of the output improvisation is capabl of generating.   It’s like saying all ice cream Praline Pecan.  Taint so.

Playful, direct, co-developed ideas, informations, and dreams will always be far hipper than one person’s alone. This is just a basic human algorithm.  The best ideas of eight people will always be better than the best ideas of one person.  Spare us your genius, and bring us something else.  Your work ethic.  Your brain.  Your smile.  Your song.  Your sense of smell.  Your experience.  But spare us your genius.  Because, you know…our stuff will always be far hipper than yours alone ; )

‘Happiness’ seems to have peaked in 1820.  The next few years will determine whether it’s making a comeback, or continuing its downward trend.  Relative to the results of other queries, this is a smooth curve, which suggests that we can only see the change in frequency over long periods of time.  We don’t notice that ‘happiness’ is less frequent from one year to the next, but it is.

You can also plot multiple comma-separated words or phrases on an Ngram.  In this graph, we see that ‘good’ (blue line) fluctuates over time, while ‘evil’ (red line) is constant.  This suggests that if ‘good’ and ‘evil’ were investments (which in a way they are) good has more upside, while evil offers a low but predictable yield over time.

But then there’s this:  ‘Virtue’ is the blue line; ‘Vice’ is the red.  No doubt about what sells.

‘Improvisation’ shows a steady upward curve, with spikes up and down in the last 7 years.  Based on the 200-year trajectory, we are due for an even bigger upward spike in the near future.  Let’s ride that wave!

Here’s the Ngram link. Play with it!  NGrams are useful for observing how ideas fluctuate over time in terms of their significance and meaning.  When expressing your brand’s narrative, it is wiser to invest in trajectories than it is to take positions.  What’s trending today on Twitter is a position.  The events that led to the trend are its trajectory.

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.

Over 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 18^th green and told him that he had violated a rule by grounding his club in a hazard along the 18^th 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.

This story broke in the L.A. Times a couple of days ago

There are three elements of gamechanging at work in Carroll’s United Breaks Guitars song (with two other ‘complaint songs’ to follow, according to Carroll):

1)  The first is that productive games like this one spin off wealth in unexpected ways.  The game does not pursue wealth, wealth follows the game.  Who knows how much revenue and brand equity Carroll and the Sons of Maxwell are going to generate because of this?  More than the value of the broken guitar, that’s for sure.  Generating wealth was not Carroll’s objective.  The objective was to tell the world his broken guitar story.

2)  The second bit of learning is that emotional and meta meaning trump cosmetic meaning.   It seems as though United Airlines kept its communication with Carroll strictly cosmetic, that is, strictly by the manual and on the surface.  No one accepted responsibility.  No one apologized, or related to the anguish of a traveling country musician without a guitar.  No one stepped outside their corporate role and expressed any kind of personal character.  Instead, the United employees stonewalled, hid, delayed, obfuscated.  They counted on Carroll simply giving up after enough time had passed.  But Carroll never lost his emotional connection to what had happened, and never quit upping the emotional stakes.   In his song, the broken neck of his Taylor guitar serves as a metaphor for all the pissed-off travelers out there.  The emotion and the meta-meaning expressed in Carroll’s song overwhelm the empty rhetoric of the airline.  How can an audience not cheer and share Carroll’s sentiments?

3)  A third gamechanging aspect of Carroll’s song is that it tells the same story in a new genre.   The song is essentially the same story Carroll had been telling for six months. By telling the story again, and doing it in song–with harmony, melody, wit, style and fake moustaches–it took the game to a whole new level.  Stakes were raised, emotions heightened, and the productive game came into existence.  Genre generates games.

Next time you want to communicate anything business-related, first imagine how you’d sing it as a country song, a hard-rock anthem, a hip-hop beat, or whatever your favorite musical genre is.  You’ll discover news ways of expressing your story, and connect with your audience by creating meaning and context that doesn’t exist in the flat data.  When your communication ’sings,’ so does your brand.

If the whole is going to be art, the parts must strive not to be.  If we strive to make everything we do precious and perfect and just-so.  If we deliberate and debate the appropriateness of our actions.  If we measure every move.  Craft and eddit every response.  The sum of the parts of what we CrEaTeToGeThEr.  Is.  Surely.  Going.  To be.  Yes.  Oh yes most indubitably and beyond repudiating to the level of a statistical certainty will most definitely be…(Say it!)  A pompous load of crap.

Always bring a brick, not a cathedral into a scene.   We know a businessperson who had built a well-deserved reputation for dropping big ideas on meetings.  That was his thing.  People were in awe of how inspired and forward-thinking his ideas were, by the compelling scenarios he painted for them with his words and emotions.  He liked this role, and didn’t do anything about changing it.  Why would he?  People called him a genius.  A visionary.  What usually happened, though, is that his big ideas died on the vine, or failed to live up to their promise.   His ideas were so big, so singular, that people had trouble adding their own bricks to his architecture.  In our friend’s mind, the cathedral had already been built, all there was for his admirers to do was worship at his altar.  We gave the genius an ‘adjustment’.  All we said was, ‘Don’t be the guy with the big idea.  Be the guy who makes other people’s ideas big.’  This has made all the difference in the world.  He has learned that it’s more satisfying and a lot less stressful to make his scene partners look good, and to not worry so much about proving his own genius  It turns out he’s just as talented at sharing his talent as he is at showing it off, and sharing has proved to be a much more productive way for him to behave.  Today, his reputation is for getting big things done.

Make the strange familiar, the familiar strange.  This is a great philosophy for keeping your brand’s culture lively.  Every business culture benefits from a flow of ’strange’ (i.e. alien to that culture) situations, environments and characters.  Likewise, if we get too familiar with our environment, our process and our fellow players–and most tragically if we quit surprising ourselves–our performance is going to get stale.  When every day is the same we lose our sense of anticipation.  If we dont’ think we’re going find anything, we quit looking, and the flow of new ideas drys up.  It is good to introduce some outside strangness into the workaday mix; it is even more potent to rediscover the strangeness within ourselves.

Don’t prolong the agony of a scene that is slowly dying.  Infuse it with the momentum it needs to end on a positive note.  There are a lot of business scenes ’slowly dying’ these days.  Meetings with HR end in pink slips.  Start-ups lose their funding.  Towns lose their biggest employer.   Often in these situations, the only feasible move is to end the scene quickly and move on.  It makes a huge difference to the rest of your performance if the bad scene ends on a postive note instead of a downbeat one.  A town that greets the news of losing its biggest employer with some kind of community celebration is already on the road to recovery while a town that gets busy telling lots of sad stories to the news about how they got screwed is going to be staying in the doldrums for awhile.

All masks are empty until they are put on and inhabited by the actor.  The same is true with job titles.