Arvai’s presenation rambled all over the place.  He seemed to have no one particular point he was driving at.  Frequently, he’d turn his back to the audience, look up at his Prezi projected on a large screen, scratch his head, and navigate around the Prezi until he found the next thing he wanted to talk about. Sometimes he got a little lost as to where in the Prezi he could find what he was looking for.

On top of the seeming incoherence of his story, Arvai, as a Scandanavian by upbringing, isn’t what you’d call an animated personality type.  His voice has a pleasant, sing-songy quality, like small waves lapping at a dock on a lake. His performance style doesn’t have that build-build-build-bada-bing! quality that TV packages into bites like Nabisco packages cookies.

Afterward, outside the room, I heard people panning the presentation.  “Boring.” “You’d think he’d have it more together.”  “I can’t believe that guy’s the CEO!”

The people who were disappointed were looking for a particular form or style from Arvai, and probably looking to be entertained for an hour by a showman, a pitchman, a visionary, a clown, or a pundit.  None of that materialized, so waaaah!  They were like children who didn’t get the toys they wanted for their birthdays.

These people, I think, missed the gift Arvai gave them:  He showed himself learning! It was one of the most interesting and disarming games I’ve ever seen a CEO play in a presentation.  To show the audience how one uses Prezi, he was willing to get himself lost in it.

In a totally unforced and improvisational way, Arvai showed how putting Prezi to best use means working with themes, chipping away and shaping them to a narrative, purposefully getting lost in the material so that you can find meaning in it, as if the information you put on the Prezi screen is a stone and your narrative is a sculpture.

I thought it was brilliant.  Another thing I liked about his presentation is that it was conversational, which was good for the relatively small room we were in.  Arvai showed that ‘always-on’ doesn’t have to mean always being the center of attention.  You can be ‘always on’ if you step onto the stage as if a conversation were taking place before you got there and you’re joining it.  That way of ‘always performing’ is more genuine and easier on the life of your batteries than if you have to crank up the voltage every time you step in front of a group of people to talk about your product.

Our friend Barbara Groth, CEO of the design company, Big Buddha Baba, put something on her Facebook profile earlier today that seems to applie to Arvai’s prezi:

“Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting.”
— Haruki Murakami

Painting by Bill Schenck www.schencksouthwest.com

“You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour. Now you must go back and tell the people that this IS the Hour.  And there are things to be considered:  Where are you living?  What are you doing?  What are your relationships?  Are you in right relation?

“Where is your water?  Know your garden. It is time to speak your Truth.  Create your community.  Be good to each other. And do not look outside yourself for the leader.

“There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid.  They will try to hold on to the shore.  They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly. Know the river has its destination.  The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open and our heads above the water.

“And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate. At this time in history we are to take nothing personally, least of all, ourselves.  For the moment we do, our spiritual growth and journey comes to a halt.

“The time of the lone wolf is over.  Gather yourselves!!  Banish the word struggle from your attitude and your vocabulary.  All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.

“We are the ones we have been  waiting for.”

Then he clasped his hands together, smiled, and said,  “This could be a good time!”

In our crazy race to escape these kinds of vortexes, we can turn direction-blind.  We pick a course of action, or someone picks a course for us, and in our all-out effort to escape a certain fate, we go heads down as hard as we can for as long as we can in that direction, like barn-sour horses galloping toward a distant barn.  A strategy, as Umair Haque points out in his latest HBR post, can be just as bad as a locked-in direction, because it can confine or limit one’s options instead of liberating them.

What Haque advocates, and what we could not agree with more, is adopting a set of behaviors (he calls these behaviors ‘Wisdom’) that foster liberation of the ideas and the ethical actions that can deliver us from the Goldman-Sachs Singularity, and whatever else sucks.  These behaviors have no time frame, because they are timeless.  They cannot be quantified, because they are potentially limitless in number.

One of these behaviors (me, adding to Haque’s list) is to Envision.   And by that I don’t mean Ayn Rand’s old Burt Lancaster-as-One-Of-A-Kind-Genius concept of vision but what I call ‘Viola Vision’, which consists of ’seeing and sharing what we see.’  This kind of envisioning expands our horizons, and gives us infinitely more options for escaping what sucks.  So in your quest for solutions, don’t forget to:

Look over. It’s how you get perspective on a problem.

Look under. Play with the dynamic of concealment and revelation.  Respect roots.  Dig deep.

Look sideways. My friend, the animation director John Musker, talks about stories as ‘taking an unexpected left turn.’  A sideways move can shake up your narrative in a way that keeps you on your toes and your audience engaged.

Look down. Who needs a helping hand?  Some days, this the only question worth answering.

And then this article by Errol Morris in the New York Times came across the network this morning, the hook being a quote from Walt Disney (”I only hope that we don’t lose sight of one thing — that It Was All Started By A Mouse.“) as its headline. I’d already seen the link a couple of times when Howard Green from Disney Studios called to invite me to a tribute for Walt’s recently-departed nephew, Roy Disney, on Sunday at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood.   Suddenly the universe was in my ear bigtime, whispering that I had to click on the link to the Morris article. Something was there to be discovered….

The article itself is a photo essay and dialogue with photojournalist Ben Curtis about the forensics of war photography, the context of image vs. imagemaker, the technological challenges and dangers that come with altering photos to create propaganda or enhance a certain point of view. The kind of stuff in which Morris specializes. After I got the context, I began skimming. But I kept coming back to a photo by Curtis that led off the article:

In seeing the photo, I found what had been missing over the holidays. I might have decided to be resolute, I was still waffling on a theme, what, exactly I’d be resolute about. This photo resolved that. I wrote the following Comment on the Morris piece:

Errol

As our old friend Onosko, who worked at the House of Mouse for many years, might have said, you’re making it more complicated than it is. Focusing on the cosmetic level of communication–the toy itself, the shards of glass, the smoke, the interaction between imagemaker and image–is a fascinating narrative, and yields neverending complexity, but this complexity obscures meaning instead of bringing it to light. How Mickey got there is not nearly as important as the meta and emotional levels of the communication: War’s awfulest tragedies are its children.

Until we begin thinking of children first–begin with the Mice!, that what Walt would’ve done–War will be an adult theme park where children get crippled, grow old and perish before their time.

And so, finally, thanks to Howard and Errol and Ben, I have it — my New Year’s theme — the thing I can be Resolute about:  Be Nice to the Mice.

Hit it, Kid!

I am at our local hardware store on Vermont Avenue in L.A. where I’ve recently been spending a lot of time and money on our fixer-upper, when I see one of the store’s employees give another one a pat on the back.  It makes me smile because it’s something I don’t see too often in the workplace these days: generous, a gesture of appreciation — for what, exactly, I cannot tell.   A favor returned?  Encouragement?  A conflict resolved?   Good news?   A joke?  All I can tell for sure is that it’s a connection between two people who, in that instant, are enjoying their scene.

We earn our money by learning from the Past and by being correct more often than not about the Future.  But we do our living in the Now, and nothing says Now like a pat on the back.

And yet, there’s a problem with this, at least where the workplace is concerned.   Touching is a vital element of communication, but between the computer culture and the corporate playbook, it is being systematically eliminated from the game.

To get the complete picture, I phone Martin Ett, an HR consultant with ObsessiCom Outsourcing Services, and ask him to interpret a pat on the back like the one I witnessed in the hardware store.

“It depends,”  says Ett.

“On?”

“A lot.  Was it a display of affection?  If so, was it sexual in nature?  What was the duration of the gesture?  We recommend a three-second limit on casual contact, including handshakes, conversational touching, hair or clothing adjustments, and lint-plucking.  Back-patting falls under the three-second rule.

“There’s also the nature of the contact itself to consider,” Ett went on.  “Was there rubbing involved or was the contact static?   Was it hand contact only, or was it of a hugging nature so that bodies were touching?  This is an important distinction, because hugs are becoming increasingly problematic in the workplace.  Many employers prohibit what we call ‘full frontal clutching’ while still allowing what we call ‘casual side-to-side linkage.’   We’re seeing strong anti-clutching trends across the corporate landscape.

“I’d want to talk to each of the employees separately,” Ett continues, “to determine both intention and interpretation, an ‘I-to-I Analysis,’ we call it.”

“Eye-to-Eye? I ask.  Misinterpreting.  “Is that like a 360?”

“You mean a 720?  Uh, no.  It means was there alignment between the patter’s Intention and the pattee’s Interpretation of the incident?

(Incident?)

I get where this is going but there’s no stopping him now.  I put the phone on speaker and tend to my Farmville on Facebook as Ett continues: “Did the pat make the pattee defensive or uncomfortable, or imply some kind of future obligation?  Also, what was the proximity of the parties? Was one of the parties backed into a corner, or was there space for the pattee to avoid the pat if it was unwelcome or unwarranted?”

“It happened in the hose aisle,” I say.  “It’s cramped in that store.  Space is tight.”

“Hose aisle,” repeats Ett, gravely.  “That could be an issue.  Context is key.  I’d need to know more about what exactly goes on in the hose aisle.  Is one of the parties the hose manager, or is that aisle considered neutral space?  Was there actual hose involved?  Because that’s a whole new kettle of worms…

Kettle of worms? When did a pat on the back turn into a scene from a Wes Craven movie?

“Also what, specifically, was ‘the back’ being patted? I’d want to know that.  Was it in the region of the upper, or Cervical, vertebrae?  If it was on the upper back it was probably okay, assuming of course, it didn’t last for longer than three seconds and no rubbing was involved.  Middle, or Thoracic vertebrae, are a gray area, especially numbers T-One through T-Four.  You find HR people very divided about this, and there are no clear guidelines, so my advice is to steer clear of the Thoracic region entirely, just to be safe.  The lower, or Lumbar region, is a definite no-no.  And a pat on the Sacrum will get you a visit from Security, no question.

“Was one of the employees the other one’s superior?” continues Ett.  “If so, the gesture could be taken as intimidation or harassment.  Was the patting public or did it happen in private?  Was this an isolated incident, or was it part of a pattern?”

“I don’t know,” I say, feeling a bit harassed myself now, for even bringing it up.  “They just seemed like a couple of guys enjoying a moment.”

“Couple of guys, eh?  We’re seeing a big increase in same-sex sexual harassment these days.”  Ett says it with the ominous satisfaction of an exterminator describing a cockroach invasion in the building where you live.

“What about giving myself a pat on the back?” I ask.  “Do you have a rule against that?”

“Are you making fun of me?” Ett replies.  “If you are, you’re barking down the wrong well, buddy.  There are rules about that.”

Next time I see them, I’ll warn the guys over at the hardware store they’re skating on some very thin skin.

The problem with rules of the game like those cited by (the fictional) Martin Ett is that they define workplace interactions in the context of the Past or the Future while minimizing the impact of the Now.   Because of this they tend to suppress rather than expand our ability to communicate in a productive, meaningful way.

In this kind of sanitized environment, we may be making our money and limiting our liability, but it has very little to do with how we’re living our lives.

OYF Panel Discussion with Intel's Zabel (second from r.), Nike's Dodge (third from r.) and the State of Oregon's Gardner (second from l.)

I am blown away by the work being done by Julie Huffaker, Gary Hirsch, Brad Robertson and OnYourFeet, with clients like Nike, Intel and the State of Oregon.  The scope of their engagements, the value they create, and their ability to collaborate with their clients and speak the client lexicon is easy to see.

Karl Zabel (who today works with Nike but was a product manager at Intel at the time) hired OYF to train presenters for an Intel conference in Vegas in which lead engineers present new products to audiences of their peers.  The program paid off with positive results for Zabel and his product team.  Scores the audience gave presenters who’d had improvisation training left those who didn’t in the ditch.  (my word for the outcome; he had Intelspeak for it…4.2 to 4.7 positive variance, e.g.)

One presenter, says Zabel, got up in front of the audience and impulsively tossed his entire PowerPoint presentation aside at the last second in favor of  improvising his pitch.  An audience numbed by days of PowerPoints loved the move, and this was reflected in scores that were well above the conference norm.

Interestingly, Zabel changed the game to help OYF’s work reflect its real value.  Previously, scores for these presentations had been an aggregate number.  They included a score for the catering, a score for the air conditioning, a score for the quality of the audio and projection…and oh yeah, a score for the actual presentation, let’s throw that into the mix, too, why not?  Zabel convinced the scorekeepers to separate the presentation scores, which meant that weak presenters couldn’t compensate with good sushi.  Improvisation for business offers objective criteria for performance, kudos to Karl for seeing it, and clearing the way for Intel to see it, too.

Shelly Dodge, head of Gobal Learning and Development for Nike, says that value creation for her training programs is “largely anecdotal.”  This is an brand that knows itself and trusts its instincts.  Dodge says OYF’s training helps bridge cultures within the company, particularly with many of its Asian employees, for whom improvisation can be a means to communicate more openly and get more in tune with the ‘just do it’ vibe of the brand.  (Note to all orgs that want to be like Nike:  Cross cultural communication is yet another area in which improvisation can bring immense value to a brand.)

Lucy Gardner, head of employee training for the State of Oregon, says that given all the layoffs and cutbacks the state government has experienced of late, OYF’s work gives people a much-needed time when they can laugh about something, and also keeps them engaged and thinking positive when there’s a lot of negative news in the network.  Cheers to Lucy for understanding the good ROI the state gets on its investment in improvisation.

Any story that begins, “For the price of one television commercial…” has the potential to become a success story for improvisation in business.

Exercise in the OYF Workshop

After losing 42% of their value between 2005 and the end of 2007, publicly traded newspaper stocks lost 83% of their remaining value during 2008.

Most surveys show that 13,000+ U.S. newspaper jobs vanished in 2008.

In 2007, 70% of college Communication and Journalism majors had jobs six months after graduation.  In 2008, 60% did.

No doubt about it, the print journalism profession as we’ve known it is fading fast, and its future is as hazy as the crystal ball of a boardwalk fortune teller.

So why put stock in university students who, in these uncertain times, choose to major in Journalism?—as opposed to, say, the point of view expressed in Sarah Lacy’s smug, self-congratulatory April 09 TechCrunch story that disses journalism schools and anyone majoring in journalism these days.

Here’s why we ought to be bullish on Journalism majors:

1.  They’re optimists.  Feeling good about the future is the first step toward making it so.

2.  They’re self-reliant.  They realize there’s no ready-made career track waiting for them at the end of the diploma.  Their career will be one they carve out for themselves.

3.  They’re creative.  They’re putting themselves in a position where they have no choice but to be creative.  Some of the most creative people I know have used this strategy throughout their careers to grow and prosper.

4.  They’re following their fear.  Garrison Keillor, the writer and radio host, once told me that he built his career by “doing the thing that scared him most.”  Majoring in Journalism is a bold move in the face of a fearsome job market.  On the other side of your fear is potential you cannot discover until you do the thing that scares you.

5.  They’re entrepreneurial.   An entrepreneur sees opportunity where others do not.  Something in these Journalism majors relishes the wave of negative news coming from the marketplace, because it means they can position themselves at the bottom of the market to ride it up.

Educators at the University level, many of them celebrated veterans of old school journalism, share their students’ appetite for the unknown:

Kevin Klose, Dean of the University of Maryland Journalism School, admits he doesn’t know where people will get their news in coming years. “It’s like the early days of radio,” he says. “There was a tremendous amount of feverish invention, trial and error that went on in the 1920s and 1930s.  The outlets or platforms are unclear now — they’re being invented.”

Klose describes himself as a “participant in an ongoing experiment” to find formats for independent journalism.

Geneva Overholser, a Pulitizer Prize-winning editor and journalist, who today is director of the School of Journalism at USC, says, “We seem to feel the only way we can work is to work the way we’ve always done it.  That’s just not true. We will ride these yearnings for the past right down the tube.”   She sees her work as an exploration that will lead to “a reinvention of journalism that is richer and better than the old.”

Raymond Roker, founder and publisher of URB, a print and online publication dedicated to hip-hop and urban culture, believes that the calling of journalism is the one constant in a changing business environment.  “The allure,” he tweeted in a 137-character response to my question, “is wht it’s always bn–regardless of the dramatic changes in the economy of media–to develop, explore & lead the conversation.”

Roker tweet #2:  “The quality of our journalism, in whatever form it takes in a post-print world, will remain a barometer of how informed we are as a society.”

Any brand would be wise to include journalism majors in its conversations about What’s Next and Whom to Hire.  There are lot of reasons why these students, in particular, will be productive players in the changing game.

Prezi can change all that. Take a look at this amazing Prezi done by @happyseaurchin. 

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.

Like anyone participating in the Networked World, we get our share of spam at GameChangers.  Here are some stats on the last 99 pieces of spam we’ve filtered:

54 of the spams were sex or porn-themed.

8 mentioned Paris Hilton.

16 claimed to have photos of Miley Cyrus Naked.

28 peddled pharmaceuticals.

20 of those peddling pharmaceuticals were related to male sexual potency.

2 were in Russian.

26 had grammar mistakes or misspellings in their messages.

11 promised hacks, cheat codes or online solutions like SEO and affiliate marketing platforms.

7 offered deals on travel.

8 were selling hard merchandise like electronics and machine guns.

12 offered music links.

14 associated nonsensical strings of words with their links.  In most of these, I couldn’t tell what they were for.

15 were hybrids, offering combinations of the above characteristics.

No big surprises here.  It’s the Cosmetic data you’d expect. What’s interesting about spam is the Emotional and Meta levels of communication.

On the Emotional level:

- A very strong overall theme in the 99 spams is male potency.  On an emotional level, the idea of gaining powers, much like one would when playing an online RPG.  Healing.  Weaponry.  Secrecy.  Travel.  Sexual prowess.

- There is a code to spam, a kind of language that gives it an insider’s appeal.  This is language that speaks straight to the hearts of hackers, geeks and gamers everywhere.

- It all has a semi-illicit quality, as if the Russian mob might be running the show out of Brighton Beach by way of Kiev.  What might one discover here that one might tell one’s friends?  Spams are an invitation to explore the back alleys and sewers of the metaverse.  And as we all know from tons of other media, some really interesting shit goes down in back alleys and sewers.  Even if on a voyeuristic level, these environments have their appeal.

On the Meta-meaning level, here are some things the spam game conveys:

- However unconsciously, Disney abets the porn business with its Miley Cyrus brand.

- If you think straight,  gay and bi are the only three designations we have for sexual preferences, you got another thing coming.  Cross-dressing anime-themed transgendered Siberian nymphos are people too.  Apparently.

- 13-15 year old males, 25-40  year old gamer geeks who live with their parents and dysfunctional middle-aged married men with erectile issues are the spammer bullseye demos.  In terms of their sexual and emotional maturity, these demos are nearly identical.

- Soon we’ll be able to buy a lot more pharmaceuticals and other health services online.

-  A generation of cyber criminals is out there cutting its hacker teeth, playing with toys that will one day become real weapons.

- The longer the tail, the less likely that the originator of the content is collecting rents from the ends of it.  As we’ve seen with some musical acts like Prince, Pearl Jam and Radiohead, maybe that’s the idea.

-  Paris Hilton’s star is fading.  She is the new Pam Anderson.  Look for Paris to announce her engagement to a fellow celeb or two within the year.

- Entrepreneurs take note:  There is a global need for English lessons.

- Randomness is its own kind of language that speaks to the naturally curious.

- Your own network exposes itself to spam via other networks you belong to.   At these intersections of networks, new lists get created.  In the Networked World lists beget other lists on a biblical scale.  Choose your networks wisely.

- A reformed and knowledgable spammer would make a good network marketing strategist for any brand.

And oh, yes, one more piece of meta-communication, this one encoded not in the spams themselves, but in my reading of them and writing about them.  There is NO WAY I was going to go through 99 spams and parse them out in the detail that I describe above.  It would have driven me mad.  That is not who I am.  Not my game.  I’m not Josh Silver or Bill James or my son, Adam, who has eaten most of the breakfasts in his life using the sports stats pages of the newspaper as his place mat.

My game was this:  I read through first 25 of the 99 spams, clipped four images, got an overall sense of what they were about, assigned categories, picked a number and multiplied by 4, then randomized that multiple up or down in some cases.  The whole thing took maybe 15 minutes vs. the hours it would have taken me if I’d actually sorted through all 99.  I suppose I could have called this post’25 Pieces of Spam on the Wall.’  But that would not have been me, either.  For one thing, there were actually 99 spams in my spam folder, which is where I got the idea for the post.  I wanted to honor that fact, as well as the drinking song, and my second-favorite Andy Kaufman routine (after ‘Mighty Mouse’) of all time, which involved him singing 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, and stopping with one Bottle left on the Wall, which drove audiences mad, and had the power to cause small riots in the clubs where he performed it.  But that’s just me.  Make your own games, with your own rules, and come to your own conclusions.