Posts Tagged ‘Chicago’
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
My longtime friend, Gary Stratman, an engineer for W. E. O’Neil Construction, and I got together in Chicago on Saturday for a beer at a bar near Soldier Field. Rich Erickson, the President of W. E. O’Neil, was there, too, and joined our conversation, and at a certain point, Rich and I found ourselves explaining to Gary the value of improvisation in solving technical problems. Rich came up with this excellent example of how improvisation solved a construction problem:
Several years ago, O’Neil had a job demolishing and re-constructing the interior of a large building outside Chicago. While doing the demolition work, they discovered that ground under the building was contaminated. Before they could re-build, they’d have to de-contaminate the soil. This would result in a delay of 3 months, pushing the work into the winter, and a budget overage of $150,000. The client balked. The $150K was not in its budget for the demolish/re-build. O’Neil and the client were at odds, facing what seemed guaranteed to become a no-win scenario, until Rich posed this question: “If the soil hadn’t been contaminated and the job were to be completed on the original estimated date, what would your winter heating bill for the building have been for the three months we’re going to be delayed?”
The answer to the question? $150,000. When the environment in which the problem took place was expanded to include not just the foundation but the entire building, and was not fixed in time but spanning a three-month period in the life of the building, the money was suddenly available. The client with no qualms, paid the overage out of its building maintenance budget.
Myopia is the enemy. To shed new light on a problem, expand the environment in which you’re looking at it. Remember that the problem isn’t the broken wing, the problem is that the bird cannot fly.
Tags: Budget, Chicago, Environment, Gary Stratman, Money, O'Neil Construction, Problem Solving, Rich Erickson, solutions
Posted in Agreement Principle, Problem Solving | No Comments »
Monday, February 16th, 2009
In 1993, William and Kathleen Lundin (pronounced lun-DEEN), business consultants, educators and community activists from Chicago, published The Healing Manager, one of a series of books they wrote during a prominent career working with business groups large and small on management, teamwork, productivity, and all-around organizational health. The Lundins trademarked a process they called Total Quality Relationships (TQR), which emphasized emotion-based relationships between employees as the key to organizational health and wealth.
The Lundins’ daughter, Carey, a TV and documentary producer (Citizen Kate)in Chicago, read my book recently and got in touch to tell me how many parallels she sees between her parents’ work and GameChangers. She sent me a copy of The Healing Manager. I’ve been reading it intermittently, and the more of it I read, the more, I am reminded of a favorite saying of, Derek Miller, one of my improv teachers. “The story is always happening,” he says, “before we’re here and after we’re gone. We’re here to participate in it for awhile.” Derek is talking about improv performances, but his words could apply to the work we do, or to life itself. The depth of Derek’s saying really hits home when I read the The Healing Manager.
Ideas about working together collaboratively, of setting ego aside for the good of the community, of honoring everyone’s contributions and developing ‘quality relationships’ with one another–these are nothing new. They’ve existed since the first six cave dwellers gave themselves a team name (Sabre Teeth? Fire Monkeys? Uggtopuss?) and assigned themselves roles and rules for hunting together. (more…)
Tags: Behavior, Carey Lundin, Chicago, Communication, Education, Emotion, Kathleen, Lundin, Organizational Change, Teaching, The Healing Manager, Transformation, William
Posted in Character, Coaching, Communication, Emotion, Environment, Issues | No Comments »
Saturday, December 13th, 2008
Last night (Tuesday) at the USC President’s Dinner, we sat next to the director of the USC School of Journalism and got into a discussion about the need (we agreed) for journalism students to improvise their approach to their careers because–well, they really have no other choice. Journalism as it used to be is over. Journalism as it will be defined in the future is just beginning. The end of one story is always the beginning of another. By the end of dinner, it was clear that this conversation will continue soon and will probably come to include those USC students next semester.
Today (Wednesday) at breakfast, we sat in Manhattan Beach with two guys named Rick, one from L.A., one from Chicago, and mapped out how the movie studios can change the game with distributed production models made possible by a new broadband network called Darkstrand that comes online in January and can move data at 40 gigabytes per second. Darkstrand is the newly-privatized network that until now has been the exclusive domain of the Defense Dept. and university research scientists. See, the two Ricks were literally describing how to turn swords into plowshares. Or Disney shares anyway.
Today, we hung out in a garage in East L.A. with a friend of ours from Florida, a Taiwanese-American entrepreneur living in Santa Monica and two mechanics from Colombia flown in by our Florida friend to install an Italian-made hydrogen fuel conversion system called JiffyGas in a car originally manufactured in Japan. All the players in the scene had connected with one another via Google. Later this week, the friend from Florida and the two Colombians will do a JiffyGas conversion on a test car for NASA.
Before the end of the day we introduced the friend from Florida to an acquaintance from Denver who is a partner in iCAST, which creates jobs for impoverished communities in the U.S. and abroad. Next week, our Florida friend will talk to iCAST about how to build a jobs-creation scene with gasoline-to-hydrogen conversions as the game.
And now here you are. Welcome. Feel free to connect and play along.
Tags: , Chicago, Darkstrand, Denver, Entrepreneurship, GameChangers, Games, Hydrogen Fuel, iCAST, Innovation, JiffyGas, Scenes, USC School of Journalism
Posted in Entrepreneurship, Games, Networked World, Scenes | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008
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…)
Tags: Barack Obama, Chicago, Economy, Follow the Follower, GameChanger of the Month, Hyde Park, Improvisation, Inauguration, Innovation, Lincoln, Listening, McCain, November 2008, Palin
Posted in Agreement Principle, Branding, Casting, Character, Communication, Creativity, Education, Entrepreneurship, Focus, Fundamentals, Group Mind, Innovation, Listening, Narrative, Networked World, Objectives, Themes, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
One of my favorite metaphors for the Networked World comes from a source I can’t attribute. I believe I came across it in Wired Magazine in the late 1990s. In the article, the writer cited a sci-fi story that describes a future in which game kiosks have been installed on busy street corners. The kiosks alert passersby when there’s some kind of rotten thing happening to the human organism — a famine, a war, a currency devaluation, a water shortage, etc. When the alert is issued, pedestrians take to the kiosks and play a massively multplayer game designed so that the playing generates whatever kind of energy or economies are needed to correct the imbalance in the world. (more…)
Tags: , Boyd, Chicago, GameChangers, Gamers, Games, Gaming, Good, Procter & Gamble, Spolin, Superstruct, Worlds of Warcraft, Yin and Yang
Posted in Communication, Education, Games, Networked World | 1 Comment »
Sunday, March 16th, 2008
When I was involved with the Live Earth project, I sampled some of the sustainable clothing — the hemp, bamboo and hybrid shoes and garments from prospective promotional partners that periodically floated through the production office. Live Earth’s chief of staff, Tom Feegel, called this stuff “smokable clothing.” It was mostly a big what-ev. I wasn’t feeling it.
Flash forward to last week. Our friend Shannon Porter shows me around Nau, the sustainable clothing store (men’s and women’s) in Chicago where she is one of the managers. (Nau is based in Portland.) The store where Shannon works is at 2118 North Halsted Avenue, smack in the heart of a great part of a great city. Shannon has a Wharton School degree and impeccable taste in music and friends and just about everything else, and so I want to think Nau is going to be cool before I ever set foot in it. But there is a shadow of a doubt in my mind. I mean, I’d had the unsatisfactory experience with the smokable clothes, and she did say a lot of their stuff is made from recycled polyester and, well, you know, the original polyester ain’t so great to begin with, so how could recycled — ??? (more…)
Tags: Chicago, Clothing, design, Environment, Halsted, Live Earth, mission statement, Nau, polyester, Shannon Porter, sustainable, Theme, Themes, Wharton School
Posted in Branding, Creativity, Environment, Innovation, Themes | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008
Ask yourself this question: Would you rather work or play? The answer is easy. If we could afford to, just about all of us would choose play over work because play, by definition, is much more fun. Playing (unless your idea of play is competitive eating, hydroplane racing, bounty hunting or something along those lines) relieves stress, improves your mental and physical health, and fills you with good energy.
Let’s pose the possibility that, through improvisation, work can take on the qualities of play. Imagine that you’re not going to work any more. You’re going to play! We are not glossing over the fundamental facts of business life here. Serious work must get done. Products pick-pack-shipped on time. Papers filed. Satellites launched. Deals closed. Stalls mucked. Connections made. Fires put out. Incomes earned. But how much more exciting would all of that could happen in the context of a game, with you as one of the its primo players? (more…)
Tags: Audience, Chicago, GameChangers, Games, Improvisation, Neva Boyd, Northwestern University, Paul Sills, Second C, Transformation, Viola Spolin
Posted in Games | 1 Comment »
