People get lucky in all sorts of ways.  I’ve always been lucky with teachers.  My teachers, it always seemed to me, performed at a high level.   They inspired me.  How?  They had great energy, and enjoyed what they were teaching.  Their senses of humor were intact.   They connected the gifts they gave us to a larger world, they cracked open doors that many of my friends and I eventually walked through.

I recite the names of my K-12 teachers to myself, like a person might go over the names of relatives in a family tree or a litany of saints to invoke a certain kind of contentment about one’s path:

Lena Bonifer (my grandma), Sister Francille, Evangeline McDaniel, Henrietta Allen, Sister Augusta, Henrietta ‘Sparrow’ Spink, Ken Dudine, Emil Dischinger, Dimp Stenftenagel, LINDA ROHLEDER (especially Linda Rohleder!), Sister Aloysius, Barry Bird, Gene Keusch, Vincent Arvin, BILL BASSLER (especially Bill Bassler!), Hershel Zehr (”I can solve the time zone issue.”), Del Steinhart (”This is how a brick wall moves during an earthquake.”), Cabby O’Neill (’We don’t live in a democracy, we live in a representative republic!’), Pete Gill, Dave Leuking, Ray Minton, Jerry Brewer, Jack ‘Bulldog’ Leas, Don Hayes, Mary Ann Hayes (favorite historical character:  Eleanor of Aquitaine, wtf??!!), Mel Menke, Ed Schultheis, Rex May, Ray Cox, Ed Haller, Don Gamble, Paul East, Aloysius Mathias Alonzo Curabin Schuler–and can’t forget our school bus driver for eight years, Harold Diddleburger (Bus #3 Ruled!)  I have funny stories and loving memories of you all, God bless you wherever you are!

About the CAPITALIZED:

Linda Rohleder, my sixth grade teacher, wanted great things for us.  She was always bringing up and getting us involved in learning that had to do with the Astronauts, Vietnam, the Optimist Club Speech Contest, the County Spelling Bee, Fast Food, Fashion, Charles Dickens, Indiana State University and a hundred other ideas about the world that cracked doors.  Never mind the finger, she did not permit her students to even give one another a thumbs-down gesture.  Rumor was that she and Don the Bookmobile Driver had a thing going on.

Bill Bassler was my high school Latin teacher for three years.  He showed me how there’s life in everything if you know where to look, even in a supposedly dead thing like the language of ancient Rome.  When he was guiding us through The Aneid or Julius Caesar, a Coca Cola ad written in Latin, or a Roman kid calling out to his buddy to come play, (“Yo, Publius, what are you doing?!”), you were there, living it right along with him.

My lucky streak continues to this day, with my teachers in improvisation, music and the various languages of new media.  Jason Pardo, Aaron Krebs, Sarah Gee, Lonnie ‘Meganut’ Marshall, Craig Cackowski, VIRGINIA KUHN (especially Virginia Kuhn!) and a dozen others have given gifts I’ll be a lifetime repaying.   I’d rather have the good fortune of knowing and studying with these people than win a hundred lotteries.

I was thrilled to find this photo online, taken last year, of some of my high school teachers. From left: Bill Bassler; Aloysius Mathias Alonzo Curabin Schuler and his wife, Rosina; Mary Ann Hayes behind the ribbons; Don Hayes; Del Steinhart

When Bird was 12 years old, she and her older brother, Cam, were playing with a group of children in a park at the foot of the remote mountain in Colorado where they lived.  A gang of men appeared out of nowhere and abducted Bird at gunpoint.  Cam escaped and made it back up the mountain.  Bird’s abduction was all over the news, but she could not be found, and after awhile, everyone assumed she never would be.

For three years, the gang held her hostage.  She was made to do menial labor and was raped repeatedly by men twice and three times her age.  The gang eventually sold her to a Canadian man who was in the fur business, and wanted her for his mistress while he was on business trips.  At the age of 16, she was pregnant with the Canadian’s child.

She named the baby Jay-Bee.

When Jay-Bee was six months old, Bird accompanied the Canadian to a business conference in Iowa, where he crossed paths with Bill and Lewis, managers of a real estate syndicate acquiring and developing raw land west of the Mississippi.  The Canadian could sense that Bill and Lewis were major players, connected at the highest levels of government and the intelligence community.  He also sensed that they were enamored of Bird, who it turns out had a gift for languages and knew a surprising lot about raw land west of the Rockies.  The more Bird contributed to the conversation, the better Bill and Lewis liked the Canadian.  So he let her talk.  And sure enough, they invited the Canadian to join their company.

The Canadian turned out to be a miserable employee, capricious, and ill-suited to the relentless pace of the real estate business.  On top of it, he was a raging alcoholic.  Worst of all, he abused Bird and the baby.  When Bill caught a glimpse of this behavior one day in the company parking lot,  he fired the Canadian on the spot.  Lewis, a lawyer, arranged for Bird to get a divorce.  After the divorce, she got her real estate license, whereupon, to her surprise, Bill and Lewis invited her to join the company.

She brought Jay-Bee to work with her every day, and he soon became the company pet.  Bill, who at that time had no children of his own, took a particular shine to the boy, and nicknamed him ‘Pompous.”  She never told anyone about her life before the Canadian.  She couldn’t.  She had no memory of it.  Somewhere, during the time she’d been held hostage by her abductors, she had perfected her ability to forget.

A number of years later, Bill and Lewis asked Bird to join them on a business trip.  They didn’t tell her where they were going.  They took the Gulfstream, landed on a private field at night, got into a waiting limo and checked into their hotel.  In the morning, when Bird looked out the window of her hotel, her heart fluttered like it had wings.  There, in front of her, like a childhood dream remembered, was the mountain where she had grown up.

Still numb, Bird went with Bill and Lewis to a meeting of local officials, and at the meeting, representing his town council, was her brother, Cam.

It took them a second to recognize each other, but the instant they did, she flew across the room to him and they  hugged and cried.  The meeting wasn’t much of a meeting after that.  It was, instead, a celebration that didn’t end for two days, a big dance around a brother and sister and members of their clan who couldn’t stop crying and smiling at the same time.  Bird’s memories of her happy childhood came back to her during those two days.  She remembered that when she was a child, her very favorite thing was to look at a flower, a bird, anything beautiful, and ask of it, “Who made you?”, and that this is what she had been doing when she wandered off from the other children on the day she got abducted from the park.

Bill and Lewis made a killing on their real estate deals, of course, and Bird played an important role in their success.  Lewis went on to become governor of Louisiana and Bill and his wife, Julia, moved to Washington, where he held a number of high-ranking positions in government.  My suspicion is that Bird and Bill were in love.  We will never know for sure.  What we know is this:

We know that Bird gave away whatever money she’d made to charities that supported the poor rural community on the mountain where she had grown up.

We know that on the ten-year anniversary of its founding, Bill invited everyone who’d ever worked for their real estate company  to join him in Washington, D.C. for a big party.

We know that Lewis, driving alone from Louisiana to D.C. for the anniversary party, stopped at a motel in Tennessee, put a gun to his head and killed himself.

We know that Bird, who was living in Iowa at the time, brought Jay-Bee, who was twelve years old, with her to D.C. for the anniversary party.

We know that during this bittersweet trip, Bird visited Bill and Julia at their large home on the Potomac and ask them to let Jay-Bee live with them and their son, Lewis (named after Bill’s partner) and take care of his education.  We know that Bill and his wife raised Jay-Bee as their own son, and that Jay-Bee himself became a prominent player in Washington, advocating for his mother’s causes.

We do not know for sure what happened to Bird.  Some stories say she died of a broken heart soon after returning from D.C..  Some say she died an old alcoholic, alone, broke, and on the streets.  Some say she lived to an old age, doing social work for her community until the end of her days.

We know that today she is commemorated on a gold American one-dollar coin and that her given name was Sacagawea.

And we know that whoever made the flowers and the birds and anything in beautiful in nature, made her, too.

Vineet Nayar Leads With Modesty

Nayar’s ‘employees first, customer second’ philosophy aligns with a basic concept of improvisation:  Take care of yourself first.  Mick Napier hits this hard in his book, Improvise:  Scene from the Inside Out.  If you wait for the other people in your scenes to have an idea, to initiate, you’re making yourself powerless, and you leave your scene partners and the audience hanging.  And if the other person in your scene waits on you, you’re lost, and so is the audience.  Nayar’s point is the same:  HCL can only be as good to their customer/audience as its employees are to one another.  These behaviors cannot be separated.  You cannot be one way to your scene partners and another to the audience.  It is all part of the same space-time continuum.  And productive action can only begin with you.

Other quotes by Nayar that are consistent with improvisation, and my notes in italics:

“I did not know where I had to go, and I was projecting as if I knew. I assume that you expect me to know where I am going, and you will respect me for that, and the day I tell you both of us are in the same boat, we would fail. That was a very big learning for me.”  Pretending is not illusion  if it is a step on the path to being.

“If you see your job not as chief strategy officer and the guy who has all the ideas, but rather the guy who is obsessed with enabling employees to create value, I think you will succeed.”  Support, the giving of gifts, is the most powerful tool in the improviser’s repertoire.

“How do I communicate to employees to not look up to me, but to look within, to communicate that I’m one of you, to destroy that hierarchy? So I decided I’m going to go into this big gathering of employees dancing to a very famous Bollywood song. And I can’t dance for nuts, right? I was dancing in the aisles with these employees and making lots of noises. What happened? It completely destroyed the gap.”  When you want to communicate something important, use more than information to do it.

“The failures are far in excess of successes.”  Failure is not defeat if it is a step on the path to understanding.

“I don’t want people who are coming here and teaching me something or teaching the organization something. I don’t want teachers. I want people who are not only charged up because they like it, but because they will learn from this experience. I’m looking for people who see experience as a continuum and not as an end in and of itself.”  Improvisers are not teachers.  We are builders of  environments in which communication, learning and transformation can happen.

IMPORTANT FOOTNOTE!

When we tried linking to the HCL URL with Mozilla Firefox 5.0, we got this message:

We noted this ‘FAIL’ in the post.  Within minutes of publishing the post, an HCL employee, Aruj Kapoor, wrote to say he was sorry they’d been down, that they’d fixed the bug and the site was restored.  And not only that, he ‘yes-anded’ by asking what specific information we were seeking when the site went down.  Aruj’s awareness of what my experience must’ve been when I hit the dead link–frustration, confusion, puzzlement–led him to offer his support to the scene I’d initiated with HCL. Be sensitive to your environment and it will tell you what you need to know. By yes-anding, Aruj converted a mistake into an opportunity to extend the dialogue between the HCL brand and me.  Nice move.  Every mistake is an opportunity to do something useful.

Because have I history in the entertainment business, I have witnessed a lot of (and produced my share of) cosmetic excitement, and I have built up a kind of immunity to hyperbole.  How could this Hurd character possibly live up to the reputation that preceded him?  After all, the bigger they come the harder they fall.  “Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy,” is how F. Scott Fitzgerald described the inevitable drowning of our ideals in the immutable tide of our humanity.  “It is never a good idea to meet your heroes.  Earl Monroe and Groucho Marx are the only two I’ve met who didn’t disappoint me,” says Woody Allen.

That Brian Hurd made such a good impression is all the more amazing in this light.

Impression:  He did not assume his role.   In other words, he was unassuming.   Our ‘lunch scene’ dictated what his role would be.  This created a wider range of possibilities for what could be communicated and learned in the course of our conversation than if he had insisted on playing the role of, let’s say, ‘The King of Solar.’  We talked very little about anything that had to do with his high status in the solar industry, and barely touched on any of the data points on his web site.    No talk about  the employment opportunities he’s created, the curricula he’s designed, the news he’s made.  Secretary Solis’ name didn’t come up once.  The role that he defined for himself during our lunch scene is one you could call ‘Education Booster.’

Impression:  He gives gifts.  Deep Patel and I are collaborating with a team of talented community activists on Solar The Sign, a movement to ithe world-famous Hollywood Sign with solar power the night of the 20111 Academy Awards.  Brian is a big fan of the project.  “If you can solar the Sign, you can solar anything,” is how he puts it.  Before we’d been served our food, Brian had given us ten good ideas for how to move the project along.  In addressing the problems to be solved, his ideas came at us from all kinds of angles and perspectives, he is a high-powered generator of ideas.  Political!  Technical!  Environmental!  Community!  Workforce!  Education!  Deep and I did not have to ask for these gifts, and they were not imposed on us.  They combusted spontaneously from the conversation.

Impression:  He adds information to the discussion.  Facts, figures and numbers about sustainability pour out of Brian Hurd like a second language.  The average size of an home solar installation (3200 watts).  The trees saved yearly by that installation (1 acre).   The yearly carbon displacement of that installation (198,000 lbs.)  A good online resource for straw bale construction (The Canelo Project).  How strawbale houses are cooled (water channeled through ridged concrete under floorboards).  An experiment that restored the grouper population to a one-square mile area of the Gulf of Mexico (his marine biologist brother-in-law, Chris Koenig’s experiment, that’s whose).   I should have used a dictaphone, because I was scribbling notes so fast I could barely read my writing afterward.

Impression:   He is an educator.  He made it clear that while the Obama administration’s heart is in the right place about creating jobs in the renewable energy sector, it cannot happen without aggressive funding for education and jobs training.  Transformation, as Hurd expresses passionately, begins with education.  “There’s a lot of money for sustainability in the Stimulus bill, but they’re shotgunning it out, and hoping it does some good,” he explains.  “That’s not going to work.  We need more players in the game, and that can’t happen without education!”

Impression:  Despite the dismaying stats leaking from the economy these days like crude oil from a grounded tanker, he is an optimist.   He understands that before we can do it, we have to believe it.   He has faith that sustainable industries can become the economic engine to turn things around, and that the city and people of Los Angeles can become pivotal players in the turnaround.    “Anything,” says Brian Hurd, “is possible in Los Angeles.”

Jimmy Lifton

Lifton deserves accolades for this move because it expresses the ‘Three E’s’ of Gamechanging–Emotion, Environment and Education–and also because until we put a lens on the Unity Studios scene, there was no such thing as a ‘Three E’s of GameChanging.’ So thank you, Jimmy, for that.

Here, minty fresh, are the Three E’s, as expressed by Jimmy Lifton:

Emotion.  Nothing expresses heart any better than a person who returns home to help folks out.  You can look at It’s A Wonderful Life, when George Bailey postpones his honeymoon to stave off a bank run in his hometown of Bedford Falls; you can look at Michael Moore and the city of Flint, Michigan, in Roger and Me, the documentary that put Moore on the map; and you can look at Unity Studios, which is getting built in Allen Park outside of Detroit, where Jimmy Lifton was born and began his career as a studio musician and recording artist.

Environment.  The Unity Studios scene acts on a Wayne County, Michigan, environment that is in such a state of upheavel it is as receptive to innovation as newly-plowed earth is to plant seeds.  Real estate prices are low.  The labor pool is large, with high unemployment, which means the cost of labor is low.  The state of Michigan, its Governor, Jennifer Granholm, and the Michigan Film Commission have been very aggressive about courting film and TV production in the state, with $50 million in incentives given to producers in 2008.  The Film Commission says it expects $250 million to be spent on film and TV production in the state in 2009.  Finally, there’s the cinematic ‘abandoned factory/bombed out neighborhood’ look that characterizes much of Detroit City, making it ideal for any kind of post-apocalyptic story on Hollywood’s production schedule.  One person in our Facebook network made this semi-facetious suggestion a few weeks ago:  “The Obama administration should introduce a bill in Congress that for the next two years, all post-apocalyptic films must be shot in Detroit.”

Education.  Unity Studios will include the Lifton Institute for Media Skills.  This qualifies the new facility for federal and state education funds for retraining people from the automotive sector who need to find new lines of work.  By including the LIMS in the design for Unity Studios, Lifton supports the idea that learning is the gateway to transformation.  Always has been.  Always will be.  Nothing is more certain to improve one’s scenes than the introduction of new and useful information.

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.

Human beings have always known how to communicate on the emotional level the Lundins describe in The Healing Manager and that I write about in GameChangers.  Our most ancient ancestors had it in them to share important information with honest emotions–the beauty of cave wall drawings, the shamed slouch of a homo erectus shunned by the tribe, the alarmed howl of a sentry announcing an unwanted visitor.

And so I am given this great gift by Carey Lundin, an eloquent reminder written by her parents that we are forever seeking the same truths.  Following the same instincts.  Living the same story.  And that our obligation as human beings is to seek and express the best aspects of what we can be, and to make happiness always a possibility, even in the midst of the sadness we must inevitably encounter along the way.

Words from The Healing Manager by William and Kathleen Lundin:

“Ever since the industrial revolution employees and managers have been compelled to live a cultural myth that says emotions and feelings should not exist at work.”

“People change.  They find capacities they didn’t know they had.  They find their voices.  They look and sound brighter.  They begin to believe that values such as affection, mutual trust, and support have an important role to play at work.”

“While the big conflicts make headlines, the little, scratchy ones make the difference between profit and loss.”

“The ground rules (of the Lundins’ TQR sessions, my note) do not recognize status levels, and all employees are intermixed.  That’s the going-in bargain.  Confidentiality is agreed upon.  What people see or hear is no one else’s business.  No one can do or say anything that is judged to be wrong or stupid.  The sessions are so outlandishly different–breaking many of the usual taboos of work relationships–that they become hyper-reality.  They are powerful workplace theater.” (their itals)

“Trust is based upon discovery, of which there are two kinds.  There is the discovery of new ideas and feelings about oneself and there is the discovery of favorable attributes about others.  Employees will trust only those events of which they are part, not hearsay”

“There is potential for chaos as cultures change.  There is also potential for personal and corporate growth.  Know that culture change is a dynamic event, not always smooth.  Some former heroes will prove to be shams.  Some previously unnoticed people will become the new heroes.”

Other books by the Lundins:

When Smart People Work for Dumb Bosses

 Working with Difficult People

Farming on a small family farm can be a very cyclical way of life. A ten-minute hailstorm can wipe out a year’s worth of work. Cycles are 12-18 months, and can stretch into a 24-30 month downturn with two years of bad weather in a row. I draw the analogy to the current economic downturn as this–it’s the weather.  In bad-weather scenarios, the wisest path can often be to dress and act accordingly.

In my experience, farmers (I include my mom, Fern, who’s 82 and still living on my family’s farm back in Indiana, still going at a pace that would be considered ‘active’ for someone half her age) are some of the most improvisational people you’ll ever meet. Here are three ways that family farmers typically deal with or hedge against the down cycles:

1) Improve infrastructure. There’s always a fence that needs mending, an implement that could use some re-tooling, an out-building in need of paint.

2) Diversify the portfolio. The farms that best weathered the bad weather had multiple revenue streams: A range of crops and livestock; they produced non-farm income by taking jobs that helped support and maintain the family farm lifestyle. Could mean doing mechanics’ work; could mean playing with a dance band, or auctioneering. I never knew a farmer that didn’t have multiple ways of earning money.

3) Education. The farmers that are most resilient were always learning. Reading, networking, experimenting with new (and old) agri-tech, expanding their horizons — those were habits. One’s mind, like everything else on the farm, had the obligation to grow.

In what seems like a lifetime ago, I worked on the film Country, which stars Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard. It was interesting in a clinical kind of way to be on location outside Waterloo, Iowa, helping tell a story about a family farm that was floundering and doomed. As part of my work, I did video interviews with half a dozen Iowa farmers, some of whom had lost their farms, others who’d figured out a way to survive and and, in some instances, thrive during an economic downturn that put the squeeze on them like other business sectors are getting squeezed today. Along with observing Lange and Shepard, who were falling madly in love at the time, canoodle steamily on exterior sets where the winter temperatures were well below zero, the farmer interviews were the most compelling part of my Country gig.

What I learned about those farmers was an affirmation of what I already knew: The farmers who survived and thrived were nimble, flexible, idiosyncratic in their approach to their business. They were not bound by scripted behaviors–doing things the same way their folks and grandfolks had done it. The farmers who stuck to the old script? Those were the ones who lost their farms. The farmers who got creative and responded to the changing times by changing their behaviors are the ones who lived to farm another day.

I remember talking about this with Wilford Brimley, an actor who was just coming into his own at the time Country got made, at age 65, after many, many years of effort to succeed in his chosen profession. Forty years of taking bit parts, working odd jobs like blacksmithing, and dealing with a level of rejection that most businesspeople cannot even fathom let alone tolerate, had steeled Brimley to the point where he had little sympathy for family farmers or anyone else who gave up–on anything. “These people losing their farms,” he said to me at the time, “are the same ones who’d be losing the dry cleaning store if they owned that.”

Brimley made two points with that statement. First, that a good part of success is simply never giving up. In Iowa, where ‘they’re so by-god stubborn they can stand touching noses for a week at a time and never see eye to eye’, the survivors and thrivers at the time were just as all-around relentless as Wilford Brimley. Second, Brimley’s statement highlights how there are qualities inherent in businesspeople who can navigate through the turbulent waters of a down economy that set them apart from those who get swamped. It doesn’t matter whether your profession is farming, acting or dry cleaning. These qualities can all be grouped under the rubric of…(guess what?)…improvisation.

My friend Jerry, who for a white farmboy originally from Valparaiso, Indiana, bears quite a resemblance to Spike Lee, teaches music to high school kids in Nashville. Jerry is also a fantastic jazz drummer. Here’s his description of how improvisation begets learning…

You asked me to explain how teaching beginning jazz improvisation connects to teaching beginning spoken word improvisation.The above 8 measures are part of a 24 measure form or song I passed out the first day of class. Most of these kids had a good idea of how to play their respective instruments which to me means getting a full, round, in tune, sound. As I handed out this music I mentioned the “I” word (Improvisation). This sent shock waves throughout the room and you could feel it. I then explained all of the exits were locked and there was no way anyone could escape.

To settle things I begin my spiel:

The first five to seven minutes is me doing what I do to make students feel they are in a safe non-judgmental environment and that this is a place they can feel comfortable in. (If you need details I will be happy to explain all of this).

The act of improvising — creating and editing simultaneously — comes from doing. In the beginning, if you are truly creating, there is no time for judging. I assure these kids this will come quite easily down the road. For now the doing is the most important thing.

I then continue with:

Looking at the musical example at the top we see eight measures and eight whole notes. All eight of these notes in any order and any rhythm will sound good over the Fm7 chord. (Lines 2 and 3 are simply a voicing for piano along with some rhythmic ideas on the Fm7 chord.) I will explain the “why” later. The freedom of expression and enjoyment that comes from improvisation is more important than the “why” at this point. DO NOT THINK just have fun; listen to how each note relates emotionally to the underlying Fm7 chord. Do some notes create tension? Do some notes give a sense of home (release)?

We then add the complete rhythm section, bass, guitar, and drums and play a medium tempo bossa nova (Latin) feel and begin grooving on the Fm7 chord. I first instruct everyone to play only the written whole notes. We then play the entire 24 measure tune or form which looks like the following:

When this becomes comfortable (which doesn’t take long) we then play half notes, then quarter notes and finally eighth notes. We also play the notes in order and even though I have told the kids to play exactly what I have asked them to do I can hear people beginning to experiment. The kids are growing bored and because the tools needed to begin exploring this 24-bar tune are in their hands and minds and most importantly their EARS, the magic and wonder of improvising has a grip on them, a grip so strong this new independence can not be stopped. They begin BEGGING me to allow them to experiment!

One of the most important fundamentals of improvisation is creating tension and release or question and answer or hot and cold or out of the box and in the box or soft and loud and so on. Create tension and leave it out there and when you’re ready, release it (let it go). The most famous example would be DUT DA DA DUT DUT…(beat)..DUT DUT. (’Shave and a haircut, two bits’). The release or answer is what non-improvisers lack.

The reason you are onto something with GameChangers, is that games create tools that give business answers. Business craves left side of the brain employees. These folks are analytical, smart, and get things done. If you can introduce these leftsiders’ minds to even a thimble full of right side stimulus you get analytical, smart, free thinking, creative, out of the box thinkers who get things done.

Any mind that expands to accept a new idea never returns to its original size.

Jerry Steinhilber

Percussion Performance, Composition, Education
drumstein@comcast.net
January 27, 2008

I have known the folks at Highlights for a long time. Kent Brown, grandson of the company’s founders and the magazine’s editor-in-chief, has been a friend for over 20 years and advised me on the publication of GameChangers. I’ve met several times over the years with Kent and the Highlights editorial team headed by Christine French Clark, usually about expanding the brand into video. There was always a lot of interest from my Hollywood associates — at Disney, then Paramount, then New Line and Viacom. At one point, I pitched a Goofus and Gallant movie with Haley Joel Osment playing both roles. We discussed doing The Timbertoes as an animated series, and Find the Hidden Pictures as a videogame. We explored the possibility of a Highlights direct-to-video series, which Viacom execs assured me they could sell like eggs on Easter.

Not a ton of business came of it, but the process was always fun and instructive for everyone involved.

The editorial offices in the picturesque town of Honesdale on the Pennsylvania-New York border are housed on a small campus of large, converted private homes. I stayed and had meetings in Kent’s pre-Civil War home on his 1200-acre farm. The discussions of the potential of video were not frivolous, but were serious and focused. The editorial staff sought to understand how its mission of getting children to read is affected by the abundance of video and internet content at their little fingertips. I became a kind of guide for the company’s periodic sorties into the juvenile media jungle.

On one occasion, Kent took me to meet the company’s educator emeritus, an elderly gentleman I nicknamed “The Perfessor,” a pleasantly offbeat Christopher Lloyd type. “Do you know what my favorite Highlights story is?” asked The Perfessor in a tremulous voice. “It’s a story we published seven or eight years ago called ‘Ben Can Do Ten.’” He explained that the story is about a boy named Ben who thinks he has no talent and suffers from low self-esteem until he discovers that he has a knack for doing the trick where you place quarters on the back of your forearm and catch them in your hand. Ben could do ten. The Professor and I pulled change from our pockets and spent the next five minutes playing the game. (He and Me Could do Three.)

Not long ago, I saw a Highlights-branded magazine called High Five in the supermarket checkout newsstand that looked as if was selling. It so happens that under the leadership of its new CEO, Kent Johnson, Highlights, Inc. has, over the past couple of years, begun changing its game, aggressively extending the brand into newsstand sales with High Five, and expanding its product line with books of games, puzzles and compilations of the magazine’s more popular features like Find the Hidden Pictures. They now produce CD-ROMs and web sites. And their Zaner-Bloser textbook division contributes significantly to the bottom line.

Any brand that has been in existence for as long as Highlights must, on some level, be improvisational. Here’s a GameChangers analysis:

They do not alter a productive game. As a family-owned business, they have been able to create continuity between four generations of leadership and four generations of subscribers. While they respect and listen to overtures from multimedia types like me, they have not strayed from a print publishing model. They recognize that their game moves at its own tempo. They do not allow advertising within their editorial. (”We’re old-fashioned,” says Kent Brown. “And we kind of like it that way.”)

Their themes are strong and unwavering. Their values center on reading and education. They understand that in a constantly-changing world, there is value in consistency. The cosmetics of the brand — ethnic makeup of characters, cultural diversity of content, lexicon, art direction, character design, etc. — have changed considerably over the years along with the subscriber population, but the emotional and metaphorical components are rooted as deeply as a 60-year-old tree.

They have a casting philosophy. The descendants of Dr. Garry Cleveland Myers and Caroline Myers protect and direct the brand and that is how the game is played. The new CEO, Kent Johnson, is their great-grandson. Conversations frequently invoke ‘The Founders’. When I first met them, I reminded Kent Brown and Garry Myers III, the previous CEO, of a cousin of theirs, which is why they sent me to have tea with Kent’s mom in Chautaqua, New York, and, with her approval, began doing business with me.

They listen well. While they are extremely deliberate, and their editorial offices are remote, they are also open. They want to know what’s happening in all media, in all of education, in all of publishing. They understand the ramifications of the choices they make (or choose not to make), on both the business and editorial sides of the company.

They edit effectively. When Garry Myers III died unexpectedly in 2005, Johnson, at the time the company’s Vice-President of Strategic Development, hit the ground running in his new role and began making aggressive business moves. When Kent Brown ceded editorial control of the magazine to Clark in 2002, he immediately turned his attention to other scenes related to the company’s educational mission.

They seek eclectic knowledge and work at the height of their intelligence. Part of this comes from editorial content that runs the gamut from science to the arts. Beyond that, they recognize that a broad knowledge base is healthy for the brand. The CEO, Johnson, for example, has a background in biotechnology. In the company’s culture of learning, no form of knowledge goes to waste.

Coincidentally (or not) the Highlights motto, ‘Fun With a Purpose’, echoes the educational theories of Viola Spolin, the godmother of modern improvisation. While the notions of having fun and doing business do not always jibe, neither do they have to be mutually exclusive. No matter who you are or what your situation is, there is always the potential for having fun, and for that fun to have a purpose, and for that purpose to be learning.