Our methodology was to ask six exceptional communicators who work with all sizes of organizations in a lot of different verticals what metaphors they hear most often in their business scenes.  Those surveyed included a financial analyst, an academic, an artist, a social media director for a large tech company, a brand strategist and someone I’d describe as a ‘narratologist,’ who coaches organizations on storytelling. We limited the focus of the survey to internal communication for two reasons:

1) External communication like PR, advertising and social media, is how companies represent themselves to the rest of the world.  In this context, metaphors are frequently used as a means of persuasion, and are often more about what a company or brand wants to happen than what is actually happening. Because these metaphors serve a different purpose and have a different trajectory, they have to be analyzed separately.

2) Internal communication, by comparison, describes a company’s process, environment and character.  The metaphors used internally reflect reality, because they are used to initiate or define action.  For this reason they often represent an underlying ethos, and describe how the people in an organization go about their business.

A few of the respondents’ observations:

“Maybe this would change with a few female managers, but most men I work with are all about ‘playing offense’, ‘launching a counterattack’, ‘leading from the front’,  and ‘winning the battle but losing the war’.”

“Way heavier on war references or warlike verbs:  Insert, manage, acquire, degrade, demand, battle, launch, attack, defend…”

“I also wonder as more women get into biz if the primary metaphors change.  Meaning, less sports and war, more family and home metaphors?  Especially if this whole social thing works out? (tongue firmly in cheek)”

“Think of the top headlines, of any ‘this product is killing this product’, ‘death of X’, etc.”

“Sports also present…anything that’s zero sum and can be ‘won’ lends itself.”

“I also hear (more recently) about scientific references like ‘if you observe it, you change it’.”

‘I do hear a bit about chess and board games, typically in terms of ‘looking at the whole board’, ’sacrificing your queen’, and ‘thinking through the endgame’.

The business opportunity is clear.  Over two-thirds of all business communication relies on only two metaphors—war and sports.  Not only have we worn them out, they do not address the voracious appetite of a networked business environment for fresh narratives and new ways of relating to the world. To do that, we need fresh metaphors.  They are out there in the world, and in abundance.  Games are beginning to have their day.  And there have always been organizations that see themselves as Family.  The most upside, I believe, lies in the ‘Other’ category.  Big, expressive, thematically rich subjects—music and dance, cooking, biology, quantum mechanics, farming, to name a few—can invigorate your organizational vocabulary.  They help transform your narrative from the mundane and predictable to the artful and unexpected.  And that’s what you want in a story, any story.  So start planting, and see what grows!

(A coda to this post in light of what happened yesterday in Arizona, when a mentally disturbed gunman killed six people during his attempt to assassinate Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords: The metaphors of war—and the violence they glorify—have polarized the U.S. politically to a dangerous degree. Yesterday’s events add a raw and desperate urgency to the quest for new ways of seeing and engaging with one another. The metaphors of war attract fear-driven fringe characters looking for absolutes, either-ors, and final solutions, to the problems confronting us. To these people, nothing says final like the end of a gun barrel. The narratives of war trample on the tender shoots of new ideas, and marginalize people participating in the new narratives, people like Congresswoman Giffords, who champion peaceful co-existence, believe in yes-and, and who understand that yesterday’s solutions don’t work in today’s world.)

It has never been more important than it is on July 4, 2009, that we remember the founding of the United States of America as a Revolution, an overthrow of a distant ruling elite that had lost touch with the people.

Because today we need another Revolution.

We need a revolution against the kinds of businesses the U.S. has invested in way too heavily for the past 125 years, the businesses that sustained the oil-and-war economy built by people like George W. Bush’s granddad, businesses that President Eisenhower in the 1950s labeled the military-industrial complex.  Today the news media is complicit in the complex.  After all, what is more likely to keep you glued to the feeding tube than something scary happening right outside your front door?

We need a new kind of independence, from the feeding tubes of fear and oil and war and baseless celebrity.  Freedom from businesses built on killing, sensationalizing, alarming, manipulating, dividing, litigating, politicking, vilifying, dominating, acquiring, misdirecting, clouding, hiding, looting, destroying, drugging, bribing, hoarding, imprisoning, poisoning, torturing, hedging, lip-servicing and ass-licking.

These bad businesses are designed to extract wealth without replacing it.  Designed to accumulate money without earning it.  Designed to exploit labor without honoring it.  Designed to get better than they give.

In fact, businesses that generate wealth and well-being over the long haul are those that give better than they get.  Focusing on short term gains (we now measure our windows of transactional opportunity in milliseconds) cripples our potential for long-term growth.

We need another Revolution.

A revolution to free ourselves once and for all from the fear-based agendas of the distant and disconnected Bush Leaguer elites.   The Bush presidency was a validation of everything gone wrong with America.  Of myopia and mediocrity.  Of arrogance and bullying.  Of the toxic confluence of Church and State.

Here’s something that offers a strand of hope: fools like George W. Bush yield their own brand of wisdom.  He and his administration became like a compass needle that pointed in the exact opposite direction of the one we need to be going in.  This July 4th, we are in a race to heal the planet before the planet decides it’s going to heal itself.   Of us.  Which is why the Revolution needs to be Green.

The divisive ideologies and nonstop claptrap of talk show hosts, pundits, our so-called political leaders and even futurists only preserve the status quo. Obama is not getting the kind of energy and leadership he needs from Capitol Hill—from timid funeral director types like Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid, whose only apparent talent is soft-talking to the aggrieved, or from status-obsessed players like John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi, who always look like they’re counting the minutes to cocktails at the club.  These people stand in the way of progress.  We need legislators who can support a narrative other than their own.  Today, there’s only one narrative that matters when it comes to the federal government, and that’s.  the story of America.  It’s time for an uplifting twist to our story.  A ray of hope shooting through the economic gloom.  Not only do we need the sun to shine, we need it to generate electricity.

Which is why we need another Revolution.

Due in large part to the Bush Leaguers’ misadventures in the Middle East, we have racked up debts—monetary, environmental and political—that we’re going to be paying off for generations.  We have lost our touch for the extraordinary invention, the breathtaking breakthrough.  We have lost our appetite for industry.  Today, the touch that matters most to our economy, and, sad to say, defines us to a lot of the world, is the touch of bullets from an M2 50-caliber machine gun, the touch of a Wall Street banker to a politician’s wallet, or the touch of a camera lens on a dead celebrity.  Something is way, way off about that.  180 degrees off, to be exact.

Just as the Bush compass points due South, you can define the kinds of businesses we should be in as the polar opposites of the games we’ve been playing.  We need businesses made resilient by renewable energy and by peacemaking.  Business guided by themes like healing, educating, building, seeding, coaching, communicating, inspiring, bridging, liberating, converting, restoring, preserving, designing, connecting, transporting, sharing, growing, clarifying, creating.  And let’s not forget remembering.  These new kinds of businesses are our only hope for growing our way out of a malaise brought on by eight years of the reign of Prince George that didn’t add anything of value to the economic equation.  In fact it subtracted value.

It’s time for another Revolution.

The people who revolted against an out-of-touch elite to create the United States, and the people who have come here from around the world in the 233 years since then have literally put their lives on the line because they had an appetite for change and faith in their dreams   The U.S. political and banking systems exist to enable dreams of Americans, not leverage them to their own advantage by playing the kinds of insider games that turn those dreams into a mirage.  Mediocrity and myopia, arrogance and bullying,  mixing religion and politics, these are supposed to be the enemies of the American brand, not its trademarks.

This weekend, we remember the Revolution that became America.  Next week, let’s keep the spirit of that Revolution alive.  It’s the most American thing we can do.

Happy Independence Day!

At lunch the other day at a new sushi restaurant called Sugarfish, my friend, Josh Rose, a creative director at Deutsch Advertising, told me about watching the legendary improviser Christopher Guest (Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman, et al) essentially rip up the script Deutsch had given him for a series of DirecTV spots, and tell its creative team he and his cast were going to improvise everything instead. Guest promised the agency team they’d get ten usable spots worth of material, far more than their contract called for.

He delivered, to excellent effect. The series of commercials starring Guest, who also directed, memorably distinguish DirecTV’s product from that of a fictional blowhard cable company.

Josh took the position that, well, yes, you can get away with something like that if you’re Christopher Guest. And if you’re not Christopher Guest, maybe improvisation isn’t going to be so beneficial.

I wish I had responded by holding the albacore sushi drizzled with ponzu sauce between my chopsticks and said to him with a Kung Fu master’s equanimity, “Yes and Christopher Guest is no Chef Nozawa.” That would’ve been deep. I didn’t. I took the more mundane position that there is improvisation in every business process, and that, while its place in the process may vary–most TV commercial shoots, for example, cannot withstand the amount of improvising that a Christopher Guest brings to a set–there is always an opportunity somewhere in every business process where improvisation is possible, and in most cases, required. As long as you’re going to do it anyway, why not do it well? And as far as the fuss Guest stirred up, who ever said birthing originality was easy?

Josh chewed on his yellowtail for a sec, and I wish I could say he nodded like an eager Chef Nozawa apprentice, accepting every word I said as doctrine. He did not. He told me that he is a ‘plug-n-play’ guy, meaning he carefully measures the opportunity afforded, and calibrates performance to it. Improvisation, he said, can feel too loose and unpredictable.

Maybe that’s when I should have stood and slapped him across the face and and told him to wake up and smell the wasabi. I did not. Instead, I calmly explained that recognition of an opportunity for what it is, and responding accordingly, is good improvisation. The Networked World, I explained, is filled with new opportunities. New plugs that require new plays. This continually-evolving business environment demands improvisation.

I imagine Christopher Guest could have walked into Sugarfish at that instant, looked our way when he overheard us use the words ‘improvisation’ and ‘DirectTV’ in the same sentence, and, having heard, come over to our table to support my argument. He did not.
My lunch with Josh Rose did not result in a decisive win for the art of improvisation in business. Josh is an intelligent and reflective person, with his own well-honed ways of working. He sells way more than he buys. He was not in any hurry to introduce Deutsch to what they’d no doubt perceive as more headaches like the ones Christopher Guest gave them. That would not be the plug-n-play thing for Josh to do.

Our debate about the merits of improvisation in business was the agreed-to game. The objective was to reconnect after not having seen each other in a couple of years. The result was a productive lunch scene, at which Josh and I discussed business, families, photography, the evolution of journalism in the Networked World, the role of social networking on behalf of brands, Dr. Pepper, Big Red soda, Costa Rica, the Great Apes (Josh’s dad is a primatologist who lectures all over the world), Chef Nozawa’s sushi, gonzo multimedia – and Christopher Guest’s DirectTV work.

It was not the lunch that might have been. It was the lunch that was. Likewise, none of us are the players we might have been. We are the players we are. We all – Christopher Guest, Chef Nozawa, Josh Rose, you, me – have the potential to realize our own particular form of greatness. To realize it, we have to travel our own paths, accepting and acting on the gifts we are given along the way.

Knowing how to improvise is like having an experienced Sherpa along on your climb, versus following a map and seeking advice from random climbers down at base camp. For the best chance at reaching the summit, especially if the climb is challenging (and whose isn’t?) gather all the information you can and retain the Sherpa.

Scene #2: Battle of the Video Microblogs. Web Worker Daily reported last week on the fairly fresh phenomenon of video microblogging. Sites like Seesmic, Phreadz, Utterz (tagline for its blog: “Be Herd”), and ViddYou let uploaders pop short personal videos from webcams and phones into online channels. Analysis: Like every other app, one or two of this genre will break away from the pack to become established brands. These brands’ potential, beyond the fact that this is how a certain number of people are willing to spend a certain portion of their time, cannot be honestly quantified. Early in the life of scenes like these, only two things matter: 1) Has a productive game (the ‘vision’) been identified? and 2) How strongly do players commit (with patience, stamina and money) to it? Give me commitment over vision any time. If the commitment is there (and players are good in their roles) the vision can be improvised into existence.

Scene #3: InBev Buys Annheuser-Busch. After months of posturing by both sides, Belgian brewer InBev acquires the American beverage giant, Annheuser-Busch Co., for $52 billion and change (pending approval by Annheuser’s Mexican partner, Grupo Modelo). Analysis: This is big news in St. Louis, home of Anheuser-Busch, because it means a fast-playing team of Europeans are going to be giving a team of slower-moving midwesterners their new objectives; the rest of the world has bigger concerns. Besides, cheap beer will always be a staple of the marketplace, and InBev certainly didn’t acquire the company to see Budweiser pull up lame. InBev’s fast ponies (Stella Artois, Bass, Brahma, et al), brands more in sync with the evolving tastes of the global marketplace, beat the big horse to the wire. It is an ever-more-familiar scenario: A company designed for the fluid economics of the Networked World out-performs one whose approach to business is rigid and Industrial Age.

Scene: Microhoogle. A strong player like Microsoft will usually dominate a scene with a weaker player confused about its identity like Yahoo is. By being the more aggressive player, Microsoft has painted Yahoo’s ‘character’ in their scene as, by turns, a ‘collegial acquisition’, ‘a hostile takeover’, ‘an unfaithful tart’, ‘an overpriced stock’ and, as of this week, ‘just friends who talk on the phone a lot but there’s nothing serious going on between us, swear…no seriously, you guys, swear!’ Yahoo tried to ignite a bidding war by introducing Google to the scene, but all it did was diminish Yahoo’s status in the eyes of the audience by reminding everyone that this scene is really about Microsoft vs. Google. The best Yahoo can do is control the timing and style of the edit (i.e. the selling strategy). When a confused player is onstage too long, an edit is inevitable.

Scene: Get It While You Can. What lines of work are the closest and most loyal friends of the Bush administration in? Oil and War. These friends have approximately 230 days before they get edited, and their way-too-cozy contracts go up for review. Variations of the ‘Get It While You Can’ scene will play out over and over and over again in that 230 days, to the chagrin of most taxpayers and increasing stress on the U.S. economy. Petroleum producers will lock up all the mineral and drilling rights they possibly can, and oil prices (and profits) will go as high as Big Oil can push them, drivers be damned. With amplification by their many friends in the media, the players in the war game will present countless worrisome scenarios and justifications for buffering national security, and will load up on inventory that will move off the shelves much more slowly if, God forbid, we’re not fighting at least a couple of wars somewhere in the world. The Scott McClellan book release is a variation of this scene. Mr. McClellan may be assuaging his conscience or getting revenge, maybe both; he is also getting it while he can.

Scene: Inherit the Windmill. On May 15, Mesa Power, an energy company run by longtime oil player, T. Boone Pickens, announced a $2 billion investment in GE wind turbines. Superior improvisers are able to play in the moment while at the same time seeing the big picture. For an oilman like Pickens to invest in the wind takes some improvisation skill, and this looks like an excellent initiation of a new scene for Mesa Power. He and his team are seeking transformation and acting on environment, both of which are fundamentals of good improv. Pickens is taking a long view, while at the same time seeing (and to a certain extent participating in) what’s happening in the next 239 days. Sensing how weary the audience is going to get with the ‘Get It While You Can’ scenes, Mesa is preparing to offer alternatives, not only wind, but natural gas, too. That’s good improv.

Scene: Coca Cola and Honest Tea. The online version of Inc. reports this week that after making an investment in Bethesda, MD- based Honest Tea, the Coca-Cola Company has offered its support to Bethesda Green, a community sustainability program sponsored by Honest Tea. As part of its support, Coke is buying 20 to 30 recycling containers that will be placed in high-traffic areas around the city. Honest Tea says that 300 people turned out to participate in the launch of Bethesda Green’s first container. The analysis: In improv theater, when a normally high-status player plays low-status — a pompous Dignitary gets brought low, or the Housekeeping Staff governs the Governor — the audience loves it. The same dynamic appeals to the marketplace. When a mighty brand like Coke assumes the low-status role of Trash Recycler, our very human reaction is to applaud the move, just like we do when a little brand like Honest Tea grows in status through its partnership with Coke. The other note here is that ‘giving gifts’ of support are the strongest moves an improviser can make. It is what we see Coke doing in this scene. It is a sweet move, with no corn fructose involved.

Scene: Ninety Percent Pessimism. Forbes.com reports this week that a May survey conducted by Reuters and the University of Michigan shows that consumers are feeling worse about the economy that at any time since 1980. 90% of American consumers, the survey says, feel that U.S. economy is in the tank. One of the first things you learn as an improviser is that negativity gets you nowhere. The very fact that you are judging your scene as being bad while you’re in it guarantees that your scene, will, in fact, be bad. Improvisers operate from a positive frame of mind, always. They greet setbacks or mistakes as opportunities to change direction, try new things, find more productive paths. The way a business improviser might see the Forbes survey is that 90% pessimism describes huge marketplace demand for optimism.

So how does a business improviser improvise online?

While I write and say a lot about the themes inherent in that question — uses of technology, focus, group mind, levels of communication — I don’t think I have ever answered it in one fell swoop before. It is only right that I improvise an answer, right?

So right here…right now…on this stage…ladies and gentlemen…THE BEATLES!

The Beatles?

Yes, the Beatles. They have not performed together in 38 years, but they are alive and well in the metaverse. The brand still generates big money. ‘Gen Why?’ discovers and embraces the music in significant numbers.

In the Networked World, we all have the potential to live our own version of the Beatles myth. If our talent is large and our love is strong, we might hit the mother lode like they did, or like Sherry Schmetzer, who started Jibbitz in 2005 when she crafted some adornments for her daughter’s Crocs, and today the brand’s doing $12 million a year in sales, thank you very much.

Or we might simply make a living and enjoy ourselves doing it. Either way, we’re money, baby. We are so money.

GameChangers (Improvised) Principles for Improvising Online:

1. Put your talent out there, because in the Networked World, wealth comes to us as a return on talent, and the opportunities for expressing it have never been better. We can open more doors and meet more people than all of our ancestors, combined, did in all their business lifetimes. So play the game assertively. Make strong choices that ripple out across your networks.

1A. If you don’t have a talent, get one. As Ray Bradbury says, name your loves and prove your loves. Naming what you love (”I love music.”) is the easy part. Proving it (”I love music so I got together with three of me mates, but then we got rid of our drummer because Ringo was better than Best, and we changed the name of the band from the Rutles to the Beatles, and for years we played in piss-and-beer basements in Liverpool and then we started getting big in Germany where everybody knew the words to our songs but no one knew what they meant… “) is the part that tests us.

2. Pool talent in a cross-disciplinary way. In the Networked World, many of the most successful lawyers (choose your profession) will not be one of 35 lawyers in a pool (i.e. firm), but will be one lawyer working with a pool of 34 people with complimentary disciplines. The Beatles were each unique in their own right, that’s one of the things that made them so compelling as a group.

3. Focus your technology. What social networks do you use? What kind of quality do you get with your videoconferencing? What blog software? The temptation is to go too broad, which will cause you and your network to lose focus. Don’t turn into an app slut (”So much software…so little time…”). Every day on Lifehacker and Web Worker Daily, you can find 20 new widgets and apps. Facebook must have a thousand apps. Did the Beatles play 20 different instruments? No they did not. Guitars, keyboards, drums, vocals. The difference is not in our instruments, but in ourselves.

4. Dialogue. Talk about improvisation, my friend, Marie-Claude LaPalme just now called from Montreal, and during our conversation, reminded me of this important improvisational skill. “Too much business communication is limited to exchanges of information. There’s no dialogue,” she says. She is so right, and she is especially right when it comes to online communication. We get in the habit of exchanging pronouncements, punch lines, judgments — all of which are antithetical to good dialogue. Far more wealth is created from a synthesis of familiar ideas into fresh ones than from the inevitable genius of a stand-alone idea. Synthesis can only occur through dialogue. Thanks, Marie-Claude!

5. Create and own intellectual property. This one’s not for everyone, but we should all be mindful that in the Networked World, good ideas that are strongly branded can generate lots of wealth over time. Competition is fierce, just like it was back in the basements of Liverpool, just like it has always been in business, but that does not diminish the reality of the possibilities that exist. And remember the act of creativity is at least as important and filled with potential as what you end up creating. Otherwise, why would Paul still be writing music?

6. The nerve endings of the Networked World are human. Compelling as our online exchange might be, as sharp and life-like as our videoconference pictures are, there is no substitute for the human touch. The Beatles’ music preceded them to America, but it was the live teenybopper hysteria at the Ed Sullivan Show, Shea Stadium and the Hollywood Bowl that completed the circuit. The human touch fully dimensionalizes the brand.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Exhibit A: In 1920, Father Julius Nieuwland creates the polymers that make synthetic rubber possible when he accidentally leaves a pot boiling on a stove.

Exhibit B: In 1928, Walt Disney creates Mickey Mouse when his partner in the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon series double-crosses him. Mickey gets his name because Walt’s wife, Lily, hates the name ‘Mortimer’ that Walt had given him.

Exhibit C: In 1975, Post-It Notes originate when one of its inventors, Art Fry, needs a bookmark for a church hymnal.

Exhibit D: In 1998, Dr. Taryn Rose begins designing shoes because her feet hurt when she wears other designers’ shoes.

The point here is that none of these 20th-century success stories, nor tens of thousands of others just like them, had a script, they were spontaneous, productive responses to the situations that life presented. Father Nieuwland made an apparent mistake and recognized that it moved the scene forward. To an improviser, mistakes are pure opportunity. As the flamenco guitarist Kai Narezo (who’s married to one of my teachers at I. O. West, Shulie Cowen,) says, “The good news about bad notes is that there’s always a good one right next to them.”

Walt Disney wasn’t aiming to create an iconic character that would launch an entertainment empire. He was a resilient businessman who’d gotten his franchise brand yanked by an unscrupulous distributor. His company needed a new product in the pipeline just to keep the doors open. He did what was needed in that particular situation. An improviser plays the scene, not the story.

To an improviser, turning the little things into big ones (and big ones into little ones) is part of the art. The Post-It dude simply wanted a better bookmark for his hymnal. Dude remembered a strange kind of adhesive that a buddy of his at 3M had invented. Dude stuck a bit of it on the back of some slips of paper. Yahtzee!

Taryn Rose’s family was aghast when she told them she was leaving medicine to go into fashion design. It was not a rational move, but it was a good one. An improviser doesn’t judge a scene while it’s in progress. She acts on instinct informed by knowledge, not governed by it. Knowledge (what Dr. Rose knew about the practice of medicine) will always be there, but the moment of opportunity (what Dr. Rose felt was possible) is fleeting and must be promptly and spontaneously acted upon. If you overthink it, the moment is gone.

When their scenes took an unexpected, unscripted turn, these players were prepared, and turned the ‘bad notes’ of: a) accident, b) setback, c) triviality and d) discomfort into the sweet music of success. This is the alchemy that’s possible with improvisation.

Today — with the vast opportunities and the commensurate challenges presented by the Networked World — the ability to improvise will be even more important to business success than it has been in the past. Moments of opportunity will come and go in much greater abundance, but they’ll be way more fleeting, too, and it’ll take more openness, trust and spontaneity on the part of players and especially organizations to take advantage of them.

And while I question how strong one actually has to be while going to college in San Diego and living in a place with your buds down on Pacific Beach…

It does not detract from the wisdom of the advice. My father, the single best improviser I’ve ever known, had a way of boiling things down to their essence. He was a teacher who often had no idea what he was teaching. He was just living his life, going about his business, sharing what he discovered along the way. And one of the things he shared to great effect was the idea of being strong — in character, in focus, in action — in everything you do.

Which is why, in studying improv at I. O. West, when the teachers would stress the importance of making strong choices, there was a sense of deja vu about it all. Aha, right! I knew this, sure I did.

My father: When you dig a post hole, dig the living daylights out of it. Give me that post hole digger and let me show you how. (Cue violent attack on earth with hand digger by man wearing straw cowboy hat.)

My improv teachers: If your group is playing the teeth in someone’s mouth, and you are a molar, show us your molar-ness! Grind! Ache! Masticate! Get pulled! Vote in elections!

Which brings us to…

GameChangers: When doing business in the Networked World, you have to make strong choices. Why? Because if you don’t, nothing else matters. Because the game will pass you by.

Characteristics of strong choices: They are made on instinct informed by knowledge. They can often arise from, or be accompanied by movement (e.g. getting on a plane, running up the stairs, making an investment, digging a post hole). They deal in emotional truths, not just cosmetic ones. Strong choices bring new and useful information to your scenes. Supporting your scene partners and giving them opportunities to shine is one of the strongest choices any improviser can make. (Note that ’strong,’ in the parlance of improvisation, does not mean the same thing as ‘dominant.’ Dominating a scene and your scene partners with the choices you make is not a sign of strength. It is a show of ego.)

Strong choices bring ultra-clear direction to your scenes and focus to your team. They demonstrate commitment to the brand, the cause, the organization. And whether you’re a bedouin or a webpreneur, you know that there’s too much data in the datastream for you to just daintily stick a toe in and take the temperature. If you do that, the opportunity or anomaly (leading to opportunity) you spot out there in the datastream will go sailing past and you’ll never catch up with it. You gotta jump into a scene like a base jumper going off the Tokyo Tower. If you don’t go when you get the chance, Security will tase you, bro.

All this contrasts with the more deliberate, machine-like behaviors of the Industrial Age, when wealth moved in sync with the physical activities of workers and manufacturing. With factories up and running, no one had to make strong choices. They didn’t have to make choices at all. Why bother? You could only get the smelters to smelt so much steel in a day. Workers became human lubricants in the gears of industry. Frictionless behaviors became the norm. Strong choices were dangerous, they could throw a monkey wrench into the whole works. Better to have a nice big fat lunch and a martini or two instead.

Today, wealth has the potential to move, sometimes recklessly, at the speed of thought. However fast wealth moves in your particular industry, it has definitely become unhinged in time from the physical realm. My money gets into Amazon’s account way before my merch arrives. Sometimes, unfortunately, a monkey wrench in the works can seem like the only option for slowing things down. But there’s good news for GameChangers: One of the singular benefits of improvisation is that it, too, moves at the speed of thought. Improvisation is the only business discipline that can keep up with the datastream!

Social networking creates opportunities for strong choices, for letting your fellow players know where you stand. So take it upon yourself to be like Nick O’Neill, whose self-funded, soon-to-launch new venture, Social Times, I just happened to link to today — and now my trademark lawyer will be attending his launch party in D.C. and the network will extend, and new wealth will surely ensue. It happens just like that when you make strong choices. They have a magnetic effect on your audience, including those who will someday become your customers.

Oh, and just for the record, I think my both my sons — and all my father’s grandchildren — will take his advice to heart, and be strong, and prepared for anything that may come their way. I am very excited about the possibilities presented by the Networked World, partly because I know they are, too.