One night when my son, Alex (who’s leaving tomorrow for a job in NYC) was five years old, we watched the movie

“E.T. had to go home,” I said. “To his family, on the planet where he lives.”

“I didn’t want him to go. I wanted him to stay with Elliot.”

“E.T. and Eliot were sad about it, too. But they love each other. And as long as they love each other, they’ll never really be apart. In their hearts, they’ll always be together.”

A pause, as Alex ponders.

“So you and I will always be together?”

“Yes, Son, you and I will always be together.”

Of all the motivational sayings used in business my least favorites express the idea that  ‘Life is Short.’

Because you see, Life is not short. Life is long. Our own lives are short, for sure. Birth, fornication and death—as the poet Ogden Nash so succinctly put it—are the facts when you get down to brass tacks. A human being’s life—or a whale’s or a bacterium’s—is a tiny spark in the night of eternity. But to say or act as if life itself is short generates the kinds of  hurrying and worrying that can cause us to miss much of what life actually is, or can be.

Life is long like the love a parent has for a child. There is nothing short about that. Nothing hurried. Time ceases to matter when we are proving our love.

Life is long like the warmth of a fire on a cold night. We are warmed as much by an experience as old as humankind as by the fire itself.

No matter what mountain we have chosen to climb, or what sudden twist of fate confronts us, when we behave as if life is short, we begin to hurry, and that’s when mistakes happen. As the basketball coach John Wooden said, “Be quick, but don’t hurry.”

My wish for 2012 is that we all find ways to appreciate the idea that life is long…

That the reason we make footprints on the planet is to mark a path for who comes after, and that it’s not the size of the footprint that matters, but the direction of the path.

That we are patient with one another, and not short, abrupt, rude, inconsiderate, unkind—all the stuff we do intentionally or not, when we get impatient, when we are driven by the ticking of an internal clock that no one else can hear.

That we embrace the notion that our Success is inevitable, and so is our Failure.

That the Birth-Fornication-Death thing is fleeting, but poetry endures.

That we remember that nothing of value was ever harmed by the taking of time. (I thought Abraham Lincoln said it, but can’t find the citation. What’s likely is that even if Abe Lincoln did say it, someone said it before Abe. Because life is long.)

That we see growth not as something that takes time, but as something that transcends time, because growth is happening now and always has been. What can take time is our own ability to see and make sense of it. The Disney animator Ken Anderson once pointed out to me, about the great old California Oak trees in Descanso Gardens near his home in Flintridge, CA, “The trees are dancing. If you could look at them over a long, long time you would see them dancing.” Life-is-short sees a tree. Life-is-long sees a dance.

That while our time here is limited, our ability to love one another is not. And that as long as we act out of love, our footprints will mark a path worth following.

Have a lively 2012! Don’t be the Tree, be the Dance!

He’s an observant man, so the observations come tumbling out of him in a 17-minute torrent, from why coffee shops were important to the Enlightenment, to the debunking of ‘Eureka’ moments.  If you want the full effect, step into the Johnson waterfall and view the video.

If you’re looking for a summing up, well, there’s a one-word answer to the question, ‘Where do good ideas come from?’ The answer is ‘Improvisation.’  Good ideas come from improvisation.  Check this out:

Johnson says, “Don’t protect ideas, share them.” This is precisely the concept behind of yes-anding.  Instead of scripting, blocking, denying, judging or yes-butting–all anathema to innovation–add to the ideas of others.  Walt Disney used to call this “plussing,” a phrase that has been adopted by Pixar Animation Studios.  In doing so, Pixar yes-anded Disney.  That’s how it works.  Ideas evolve.  And when you yes-and by sharing, they evolve faster and more purposefully than if you don’t.

Johnson says, “Ideas are a network.” This equates to the Group Mind of improvisation, where ideas belong not to any one individual, but to the group, and the scene.  Ideas are not isolated phenemona.  They always exist in relationship to other ideas, and other people.  An apple falling on Newton’s head was not his idea.  It was a connection between a number of ideas that described the physical world at that time.  Johnson says, “Chance favors the connected mind.”  He might just as well have said, “Chance favors improvisers.”  It was because he was able to connect it to other phenomena that the chance occurrence of an apple falling on his head became meaningful to Newton.  This is no different than what a good improviser does in a scene.  He or she turns chance into meaning by making connections.  That’s the work.  It’s not easy.  It is a practice that takes study, discipline and time.

Johnson says, “Ideas are a slow hunch.” This equates to the patience some of the best improvisation groups have for finding the game in a scene. My favorite example of this from improv theater is the L.A.-based group, Dasariski.  Those guys take their time about finding the game, this discovery arises organically–though quite predictably–from conversations, and it is a beautiful thing to see.  Good ideas are the equivalent of productive games in improvisation.  They often arise from anomalies or even mistakes.  They’re generative, that is, they led to other ideas.  Even though it makes for better anecdotes, ideas are not like a single frame from a movie, a frozen image—apple hits man on head!—they are montages of images, and jumps back and forth in time.  Ideas are narrative.

Johnson says, “Ideas are a product of environment.” Yes and this, too, is one of the most fundamental ideas of improvisation:  Environment fuels performance.  This is why Belina Raffy conducts improvisation classes in Europe that are based on Biomimicry, where performers mirror biology to help their innovation process.  Today, thanks to our connection with Belina (ideas are a network, remember?) we are beginning to play with biomimicry at GameChangers.   As Viola Spolin said, “Act on environment and enviroinment will act on you.”

A minority in the Senate is standing in the way of giving our small-businesspeople an up-or-down vote on the jobs bill. That’s a shame. We need to decide whether we’re willing to rise above the election-time games and come together—not just to pass a jobs bill that is going to help small businesses hire and grow but al…so to rebuild our economy around three simple words: “Made in America.”

While we wholeheartedly support a jobs bill that will help small businesses like ours, ‘Made in America’ is an Industrial Age idea that has very little resonance in the Networked World.  Nothing substantial can be built around anything as meaningless as that statement.  Here’s why…

The problem is that making stuff is not what America does any more, not exclusively to ‘Brand America’ anyway.  Stuff gets made all over the world.  What’s the most ‘American’ brand you can think of.  Disney?  Coca Cola?  Nike?  ‘Made All Over the World’ is the truth of these brands, and the same is true for any other brand vibrating on a network frequency.  The Budweiser Clydesdales are Belgians now.  Deal with it.  In light of these new truths, ‘Made In America’ becomes just another piece of empty political rhetoric, designed to dampen disagreement rather than to foster any large-scale agreement around a new economic narrative.

What we need is an idea that will generate new narratives, and new ideas about how to stimulate the economy.

One of our favorite American companies, ABRO Industries, based smack dab in the heartland of America, South Bend, Indiana, with 25 employees and projected 2010 sales exceeding  $150M, does over $40M of sales a year in Nigeria alone with products it manufactures in South America.  Most of ABRO’s products are made outside America, and yet most of the wealth it generates comes back to this country.  How?  It originates the business cycle and the brand.  It creates networks to market its products around the world.

“Made in” is no longer an differentiator for American business.  ‘Created in’ still is.

What makes American business unique, what we can count on every time, is Creativity.  The true American brew isn’t Budweiser,  it’s the idiosyncratic brew of cultures and personal histories that make the American narrative unique in the world.

What matters about Disney is not where it’s made.  After all, its primary product, happiness, can be conjured up anywhere in the world.  What’s unique and irreplaceable about the Disney brand is that it was created in America, born out of the imagination of a Scotch-Irish Socialist-Farming Depression-Era Cartoon-Making Hollywood-Bound Space-Racing Commie-Fearing Polo-Playing Chain-Smoking Family-Loving Chili-Eating Anti-Semitic Dandy From Kansas City Who Dreamed He Was a Mouse.

Making stuff means replicating it, and that means commoditizing.  Anybody can do that.  Originating stuff–growing Walt Disneys and Apples and Pixars and Lady Gagas and ABROS–that’s what America still does best.

Marc was, to my knowledge, the best auto mechanic on campus.  He’d wheel his Low Boy under a car chassis, listen to an engine, or spider around under the hood and demonstrate that while you might have had the supposedly functional eyes, you couldn’t look at a car with the skill that he could.

He was one of the best students at Notre Dame.  And a party animal.  And a ladies man.  He had a great sense of humor.  In Sorin Hall, where Marc and I lived, nobody thought of him as handicapped.  Quite the contrary.  He was gifted.  By comparison, most of us were lazy, ignorant slugs.

I have not stayed in touch with Marc over the years, but I have kept tabs on him.

A few years ago, for example, Disney planned to release a feature film based on the sight-impaired Mr. Magoo cartoon character.  At first I heard the rumors coming out of Disney’s film marketing department.  “Someone in Washington representing blind people is causing trouble.”  And then I heard the name Marc Maurer, and I had to smile, because I knew it was game over, a mismatch from the get-go.  Dr. Maurer, who today is President of the National Federation of the Blind, chewed up the Mouse and spit it out.  Making fun at the expense of the sight-impaired is a mistake Disney will never make again.

Later this week, I will be conducting a GameChangers workshop for Executive MBA students at Notre Dame, and I intend to mention Dr. Maurer.  In researching him, I came across one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard.  In keeping with the character of the Marc Mauer I knew at Notre Dame, the speech is by turns intelligent, inspiring, and hilarious.  Take the time to listen to it.

Some of the beautiful ideas Dr. Maurer expresses in this speech:

If we let a single characteristic become the identifier of a person, it ensures that our estimate of them will be wrong.  Value is measured not by a single characteristic, but by the aggregate of those possessed by each individual.  Each characteristic contributes to the whole, and each may strengthen or hinder the person possessing it.

We live in a society in which blindness is thought to be a condition to be repaired.  Eyes that cannot see are broken.  However, it is false to say that the person who owns them is broken.

We, the blind, do not need to be fixed.  We are fine the way we are.  We can find our meaning and our purpose without modification or alteration.

I do not believe that blindness and helplessness are synonymous.  I carry the cane because it is a tool that helps me travel.  It is a tool of my independence, not a badge of my helplessness.

Learning should not be limited to what trains the mind, it should also train the spirit.

Your life belongs to you!

Note that it’s Federation OF the Blind.  Not FOR the Blind.  It’s not about what we can do for blind people.  It’s about what blind people can do for themselves, and if we’re lucky, for us.  Yeah, Dr. Marc Maurer is blind.  And his vision is just fine.

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.

‘Solar Paneling the Hollywood Sign’ exemplifies what we at GameChangers call a productive game.  Here’s how the game has played out before today…

In mid-January, as part of my work with Brand Neutral and the World Wildlife Fund on March 28’s Earth Hour event in L.A., I proposed the idea to the staff of the Sustanability Dept. for the City of Los Angeles.  They told me that anything to do with the Sign has to go through L.A. Councilman Tom LaBonge, in whose district the Sign sits.  I asked their blessing to pursue the idea as a ‘private citizen.’  They gave me their okay, and said that if I could get LaBonge’s backing, Mayor Villaraigosa would support such a project.

That evening I started the group ‘Solar Panel the Hollywood Sign’ on Facebook.  This proved to be a strong initiation, as hundreds of people, in and outside my own network, signed up pronto, many of them writing to tell me what an inspiring idea they found it to be.

Soon after that, I was able to schedule a meeting with Tom LaBonge and his Chief of Staff, Renee Weitzer.  Renee is a member of the Hollywood Sign Trust, and has a long history of defending the integrity of the Sign’s appearance from all kinds of assaults and appeals by commercial interests (and dealing with court injunctions by residents of the neighborhood beneath the Sign to keep it from being illuminated at night).  She took an understandably defensive position.  But LaBonge’s interest was piqued, and he suggested to Renee that we be allowed to ‘continue the conversation’ with the Trust.  Today is the first meeting of the Trust since then.

Meanwhile, as productive games do, this one invited all kinds of participation, and players from around the world continued to step up and offer their support.  Among them:  local L.A. radio legend Pat ‘Paraquat’ Kelley; Brian Sirgutz, the CEO of CauseCast; KevinWall, the founder of Live Earth; Terry Nunn of the rock group Berlin; Brooke Gardner Fedro of Andre Agassi’s foundation; T. H. Culhane of Solar CITIES, recently named by National Geographic as one of its ‘Emerging Explorers’; and Maria Menounos of Access Hollywood  who will soon be hosting a show called Hollywood Green.  The group on Facebook now numbers nearly 1,000.  (We’re hoping to hit that # by 1:30 today!)

One of our most valuable players has been Deep Patel, founder and CEO of GoGreenSolar, a major online resource for solar technology.  Deep stepped up early in the game, and has brought immense depth of knowledge and legitimacy to our quest.  This project would not be where it is today without his support.  Another important player has been Rafael Quezada, an L.A.-based architect and designer who has probably done more photography of the Hollywood Sign than anyone.  He has received permission from the Trust to sell his photography of the Sign, and is intimately familiar with the terrain, both geographic and political, on which the Sign sits.

A productive game gets results.  Even before today’s meeting with the Trust, and no matter what the Trust has to say about our ideas, this is a win for us.  I can’t possibly detail all the positive outcomes in the time I’ve got before our meeting, but here are a few:

Prashant Kamat, a chemistry professor at Notre Dame who’s working on nano solar technology is meeting with Kevin Wall to discuss a possible multi-million dollar investment in the technology, that will enable paint to generate solar energy.

Wall has retained GameChangers to help him develop a keynote speech and advise him on the production of the World Cup opening ceremony, which he is producing in 2010.

I introduced Deep Patel to a group of environmentally-conscious Disney executives.  Deep is submitting a bid to Disney this week to put solar paneling on the roof of its El Capitan Theater in Hollywood.

My friend Paraquat Kelley, who suffers from MS, has gotten some of his legendary mojo back by playing the game.  He can’t really get out of the house much, but he’s our ‘consigliere,’ and advises the group on the politics, the history and the real estate implications of Solar Paneling the Sign.

Ron Roecker, who does PR for the Grammys, has volunteered to guide PR around this game.  As a result of his involvment, he and I are putting together a GameChangers curriculum geared specifically to PR professionals.

After I cited ‘SPHS’ in our GameChangers workshop at UC-Irvine last week, Chris Abbamonto, the Campus Energy Manager for UC-Irvine who was in the workshop, introduced himself and asked that we stay in touch regarding future opportunities.   David Obstfelt, whose MBA class hosted the workshop, calls ‘SPHS’ a perfect model for how to generate business in the Networked World.

Photography Myra Vides is doing a photo essay on our quest.

Videographer Joe Greczkowiak is shooting footage for a documentary about our quest.

And just now, ten seconds ago, Ted Leonsis got in the game.  WooT!

All of us involved in the project have built great relationships that we didn’t have before the game began.  And this is only the beginning!

On with the show!

‘Essence’ defines the core of a brand.  If brand is a tree, essence flows through its trunk.  Essence, especially at the beginning of a brand’s life, is often rooted to the sensibilities of one person or a small group.  For example, Steve Job’s appreciation of good design is at the heart of the Apple brand, Jimmy Buffet’s lifestyle is the essence of Margaritaville, and Tamara Mellon’s taste in shoes is the foundation for the Jimmy Choo brand.  Essence can also be an institutional philosophy like you’d find at a Japanese auto company, or a fast-paced technology brand like Cisco.  Either way, this is where a brand’s fire burns brightest, where vision is most needed, where a brand’s themes are distilled and defined.  It is where the secret formula for Coca Cola, Martha Stewart’s personal style, Oprah’s reading list, and the ‘Honest’ in Honest Tea reside.

‘Flexible’ is what the improvisational brand has to be at the edges of its network.  Continuing the tree analogy, flexibility is what you find in the tree’s outermost branches and leaves.  For a business operating in the Networked World, the edge is where the action is.  It is where creative disruption happens.  Where innovation is most likely to find its inspiration.  Most importantly, it is where a brand carries on conversations with its customers.  This is where you find skunk works, social networks, and tweets.  It is where buzz begins.

A brand needs both Essence and Flexibility to make a real impact in the marketplace, but it is interesting to note that a brand can be successful with a strong Essence and very little Flexibility, while the reverse is not true.  We have a word for brands with little or no Essence and a lot of Flexibility.  We call them doomed.   During the dotcom era, I once heard a pitch from a group of university scientists who’d lost their funding for a robotic crop picker and had somehow morphed their idea into a a proposal for a 3D web browser.  We in the audience failed to see the connection between the two ideas.  Those scientists never should have mentioned the robotic crop picker.  It may have demonstrated their Flexibility, but it revealed the absence of Essence.  They were showing us a pile of leaves and calling it a tree.

The priority is crystal clear.  Essence has to be the the first consideration.  If you got no Essence, you got nothing.

THE QUESTION: How do you feel about your career?

In June 2000, I felt incredibly “not good” about my job working as account manager for a firm voted as one of the 50 best managed firms in Canada. Even though I was surrounded by wonderful coworkers and supported by the best boss I ever had, I felt intuitively, without being able to explain it, that I was not in my “right” place.

So I committed what could only be called “career suicide” and began an exciting journey to find my true self. Took me 5 years to figure out I truly wanted to become a creative knowledge writer!

What I’ve learned is that one’s inner guidance (which is mostly emotional) cannot fail. Hence, my question above.

If you wish to answer, these words could be helpful in identifying one’s states: worried, bored, hopeful, optimistic, overwhelmed, content, frustrated, discouraged, angry, enthusiastic, happy, eager, passionate, joyous, empowered.

I would be interested also to know WHY you feel as you do.

Feel free to respond privately if you wish. Thanks!

Peter Nguyen
Editor in Chief
CareerKnowledge.net

MY ANSWER:

The part I like best about your statement is when you describe how our ‘inner guidance’ cannot fail. I agree with this wholeheartedly. As the first person in my family to graduate from college, I felt as if I needed to have a ‘legitimate’ job after graduation to show for my degree. So I went to work for a very large (Fortune 100) company that stuck me in the town of Effingham, Illinois, where I was miserable. After eight months, I decided to quit listening to my head, quit acting on what I perceived, rightly or not, as the expectations of others, and instead to follow my heart, and I’ve never regretted it for a second.

I began by doing something I loved. Telling and writing stories. I wrote a humorous history of Notre Dame football. I used my book and my freelance writing samples to get a job in the marketing department at Disney, where I was the publicist on TRON, among many other films.

I started a production company to produce media for the entertainment business. During this time, I wrote and directed films and television and traveled the world for my clients. I got into the internet and produced the web site for Toy Story and many other Disney films, which became the genesis for production company to produce web sites. This, in turn, got me gigs as the creative director and head creative exec for a series of ever-larger dotcom companies.

When the dotcom bubble burst, I made a film about my father’s life story entitled Finding Bill Murray (you can see it on YouTube as 187 separate clips) that we showed to my father the week before he died, projected on the side of our barn in Indiana for an audience of 200.

In making the film, I connected with a friend who was starting a streaming media company, and became a co-founder and head of creative for that company, which then became the springboard for the Live Earth concerts in 2007, for which I was the Chief Storyteller.

Meanwhile, I began studying improvisation, and realized the deep and pervasive connections between improvisation and our ability to maneuver and succeed in the Networked World. I wrote a book about it and started an education company to help clients achieve their business goals.

One of the realizations that came to me through the study of improvisation is precisely what you stated — that we all have an inner light guiding us that cannot be wrong. When we are young and flexible of mind and body and our spirits are unfettered, the light is strong. As we get older and more weighed down by expectations, responsibilities, the weight of the world, we can lose sight of it. But it’s still there. With focus and disciplined effort, we can keep it stoked and ourselves along with it.

There is no predictable trajectory, no rational map, to explain how I got where I am today. I have, in fact, improvised my career. I know where it matters, in my heart, that where I am today is the right place for me, and that all my life and work experiences, and whatever knowledge I have accumulated on my journey and the friends I have made along the way will come into play. All because many years ago, I began making choices with my heart instead of my head.

Knowledge will always be there for us, but what the heart senses can be fleeting, and we should act on it whenever we have the opportunity. The rewards for these choices cannot be known ahead of time, but they will be there and they will be substantial. Thank you for asking the question.

PETER’S RESPONSE:

Mike, your story is just amazing! Your success story validates age-old wisdom at the heart of aphorisms such as “follow your bliss” (by famed mythologist Joseph Campbell). Your multifaceted experience of a (breathtakingly!) prolific career is an uplifting and inspiring testimony to the creative powers we all have within, powers that are often stifled by external influences with our unwitting collaboration. You are the proof that as a person follows his bliss, bliss will soon follow him everywhere he goes. Thank you for leading by example!

It is no surprise that the Culhane boys are born performers, a couple of very animated characters.

Once, as part of a story John did for the New York Times Magazine, he and the boys enrolled at Ringling Bros. Clown College in Sarasota, Florida, and T. H. and Michael became the youngest clowns ever to perform with Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey big show.

T. H. graduated from Harvard. He taught for four years at Jefferson High School in South Central L. A., where he championed learning games like ‘Dumpster Theater’ for a science class he taught there. He and his students converted an unused dumpster sitting on campus into a stage. Dumpster Theater performances consisted of rapping about science.

With a $6,000 grant from PepBoys, T. H. and a group of mechanically gifted students at Jefferson built a hovercraft.

I once sat in on one of T. H.’s classes at Jefferson High. I couldn’t even begin to tell you what subject he was supposed to be teaching. One group of kids was in the back of the classroom silk-screening t-shirts for a small business they were running out of the high school.

He had turned a large storage closet into a computer room. Half a dozen geeks sat in there with the door closed, hacking away at code to build some kind of game or animation.

Another group of students huddled around a desk blueprinting the hovercraft. The kids who weren’t interested in participating, didn’t. Some girls gossiped and toyed with each others’ makeup, some kids put their heads on their desks and slept. T. H. ignored them. They weren’t in the scene. I didn’t realize it at the time, but T. H.’s educational methods were pure improvisation. In the improvisational model, teachers don’t ‘teach.’ They create environments and games in which learning has to occur for the players to achieve their objective. You cannot build a hovercraft, for example, without first doing your physics homework.

Today, T. H. his wife, Sybille, and their 16-week old son, Kilian, reside in Essen, Germany, the home base for their organization, Solar Cities, which helps install solar power in poor neighborhoods in Cairo (when’s the last time you saw a solar panel in a poor neighborhood in the U.S.?). T. H. spends a lot of time with the people of those Cairo neighborhoods, acting as a kind of pied piper of solar paneling. In his ’spare time’ he’s completing a doctorate in Urban Planning from UCLA.

From 2004 to 2008, with funding from the U. S. State Dept., Sybille, T. H. and Michael toured the Middle East with Michael’s band, Circus Guy, promoting solar energy and other alternative fuels. For daytime performances, they powered their amps with solar panels. T. H. played guitar while unicycling back and forth across the stage. A documentary about their tour, Environmental Circus, directed by their friend James Dean Conklin, will premiere later this year.

There is a difference between the roles we play and our essential character as human beings. We all play many roles in our lives. The challenge is to play them through our character as human beings, through the truth of our authentic selves.

T. H. Culhane’s range of characters–circus clown, singer in the Harvard Krokodiloes, cultural anthropologist, high school teacher, Guatemalan breadnut developer (did I mention that?), alternative energy advocate, doctoral student–is plenty impressive. But that’s just a playlist. What matters is is how a player plays it.

What’s inspiring, what stirs the world around him to action, what changes the game, is the character of T. H. Culhane:

Bridge builder.

Science nut.

Avant-garde educator.

Bringer of water and happiness.

Perhaps no one is more responsible for making ‘TRON come true’ than Alan Kay — who, no coincidence, is married to the original TRON screenwriter, Bonnie MacBird. Kay consulted at length with the TRON filmmakers and MacBird named the character of Alan in the film (whose alter-ego was the Tronster himself) after her husband.

A graduate student who studied and collaborated with computer graphics pioneer Ivan Sutherland at the University of Utah, Kay was one of the legendary Xerox PARC geniuses who helped lay the foundation for the billions upon billions of dollars in new wealth spun out of Silicon Valley in the 1970s and -80s. His resume reads like a history of popular computing: PARC; Apple Fellow; Chief Scientist at Atari; Disney Imagineer; HP Fellow; created the Dynabook design that became the prototype for laptop computers and, years later, the model computer for Nicholas Negroponte’s One-Laptop-Per-Child project.

The way windows can overlap on your computer screen in what we call a Graphical User Interface (GUI)? That’s an Alan Kay trip.

The Object-Oriented Programming that underlies some of the most potent computing languages being used today, like Ruby, Python and Cold Fusion? Alan Kay and his collaborators at PARC and the Norwegian Computing Center created the language, gave it its name, and used it to build the operating system Smalltalk, which was then commercialized by Apple in its Mac computers. Good system.

Kay has won almost every major award given in the field of computer science, including the Kyoto Prize, the ACM Turing Award and the Charles Stark Draper Prize. He holds honorary doctorates from Georgia Tech, the Universita di Pisa in Italy, and the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.

He and his team wrote the open source language Squeak that became the basis for eToys.

Today, he teaches at universities all over the world and is founder and president of Viewpoint Research Institute, which got its start-up funding from the National Science Foundation. Viewpoint recently developed an open source 2D and 3D programming language called Croquet that is simple enough for children to use.

Kay has said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” That is a statement that can only have been made by a GameChanger.

So you’re saying, “Okay great for Alan Kay, but I’m no Alan Kay. He is inventing the future and most days I feel as if I’m a victim of it; most days I’m lucky to fight the future to a draw.”

Here’s the thing, though — Alan Kay has not cornered the market on inventing the future. Everyone has the potential to create his or her own future. To do it, you have to improvise.

Here are two significant ways in which Alan Kay improvised his way into the future:

1) He stayed with his themes. In the unmapped frontiers of the future, it is the exploration of a theme that guides a business improviser toward productive outcomes, and keeps one from losing one’s bearings and, if you’re in Silicon Valley, becoming just another VC whore. Two strong themes run through Kay’s work: ‘Learning’ and ‘Dawning of an Era’. His focus on the learning, especially learning by children, helped him stay emotionally engaged with his work. The ‘Learning’ theme gives Kay his mission, his sense of purpose. He’s not in the computer science business — that’s about cold circuitry. He’s in the learning business — that’s about human beings. You could say that TRON was one big fat learning project for the entire entertainment business. An industry (CG animation) that didn’t exist before TRON today stands on its back-lit shoulders. The second theme, ‘Dawning of an Era’ is what I call Kay’s perspective that we are in the primitive era of the networked world. This perspective gives him patience and tolerance for the painstaking process of invention, as well as an essential optimism that the best is yet to come.

2) He is an artist. It is not insignificant that Kay is an accomplished musician. Musicians (with the possible exception of lead singers in rock bands) understand the sharing of ideas, the give and take, the harmonics that create the distinctive sound. Business in the Networked World is the art of creating wealth. Of communicating with one’s audience. Collaborating with one’s peers. Expressing emotions that connect people to your brand, your song…your future.