Posts Tagged ‘Emotion’
Monday, February 16th, 2009
In 1993, William and Kathleen Lundin (pronounced lun-DEEN), business consultants, educators and community activists from Chicago, published The Healing Manager, one of a series of books they wrote during a prominent career working with business groups large and small on management, teamwork, productivity, and all-around organizational health. The Lundins trademarked a process they called Total Quality Relationships (TQR), which emphasized emotion-based relationships between employees as the key to organizational health and wealth.
The Lundins’ daughter, Carey, a TV and documentary producer (Citizen Kate)in Chicago, read my book recently and got in touch to tell me how many parallels she sees between her parents’ work and GameChangers. She sent me a copy of The Healing Manager. I’ve been reading it intermittently, and the more of it I read, the more, I am reminded of a favorite saying of, Derek Miller, one of my improv teachers. “The story is always happening,” he says, “before we’re here and after we’re gone. We’re here to participate in it for awhile.” Derek is talking about improv performances, but his words could apply to the work we do, or to life itself. The depth of Derek’s saying really hits home when I read the The Healing Manager.
Ideas about working together collaboratively, of setting ego aside for the good of the community, of honoring everyone’s contributions and developing ‘quality relationships’ with one another–these are nothing new. They’ve existed since the first six cave dwellers gave themselves a team name (Sabre Teeth? Fire Monkeys? Uggtopuss?) and assigned themselves roles and rules for hunting together. (more…)
Tags: Behavior, Carey Lundin, Chicago, Communication, Education, Emotion, Kathleen, Lundin, Organizational Change, Teaching, The Healing Manager, Transformation, William
Posted in Character, Coaching, Communication, Emotion, Environment, Issues | No Comments »
Monday, January 26th, 2009
One thing I always notice when I’m in a scene with Mark Johnson–the founder and President of JiffyGas and HConverters, complementary brands in the business of converting internal combustion engines to run on alt energy (hydrogen, nat gas, biofuels)–is how observant he is. He notices everything. When you’re speaking, he watches your hands, he glances at your feet, he looks you in the eye, he focuses on your thoughts even as they’re still taking shape in your mind. When he speaks, he speaks with much more than the words coming out of his mouth. Mark Johnson’s kind of communicating transcends spoken language. Yes, words communicate, but only on the Cosmetic level. It’s what accompanies those words on the Emotional and Meta levels that has the power to change the game.
When Mark visited Los Angeles last month, and I got to watch Edwin and Armando, the whiz-bang mechanics he’d flown in from Colombia, convert a six-year-old Lexus to run on hydrogen, spoken language was maybe the least effective communications tool they used during the two days it took to do the conversion. There were four languages being spoken in that shop in Alhambra–English, Spanish, Chinese, and Italian if you count the Italian narration on a DVD promo for the converter kit that Edwin ran for us on one of his computers. Sure, some spoken language was required. But what made the scene go–what got the team on the same page–in improvisation terms, what created the Group Mind–were the elements of communication that transcended words. Here’s where Johnson’s genius as a communicator was clearly in evidence. (more…)
Tags: Alhambra, Alt, Alternative Fuels, Armando, Cars, Communication, Conversion, Cosmetic, Edwin, Emotion, Emotional, Energy, HConverters, Humor, JiffyGas, Listening, Mark Johnson, Meta, Transportation, U.S.
Posted in Communication, Dialogue, Emotion | No Comments »
Sunday, November 16th, 2008
I sometimes answer business-related questions on LinkedIn that can be addressed with the principles of improvisation. This is one in a series of responses that was deemed ‘Best Answer’ by the questioner…
THE QUESTION: I have to run a workshop for a top management team that has recently adopted a new highly matrixed structure. As a result, there is a challenging amount of interdependence and ambiguity. While they have an understanding of the structure, very little work has been done on how it will operationalize, what operationalizing it will mean etc.
One of the activities I want the group to undertake is a scenario building exercise where they will build potential scenarios that will arise in the future, and then based on the scenarios, evolve in advance, an appropriate response to the scenario.
I have never run a Scenario Building activity before. Would appreciate if you could share:
a. A process for how to run it
b. Tips/Techniques
c. Do’s/Don’ts
d. Any other advice/input
Thanks in advance!
Gurprriet Siingh
THE ANSWER: The ‘highly matrixed structure’ you describe, Gurprriet, is in fact one small subset of a much more complex environment in which this management team will perform — and that is the Networked World. Because of the fluid, incredibly complex nature of these networks-within-networks, it is both impractical and impossible to run scenarios that can accurately predict any particular outcome. By the time you have created the scenario, run the scenario, analyzed the outcomes, then ratified and codified the outcomes, the environment will have changed, rendering the results irrelevant and passe’. (more…)
Tags: Best Answer, Business Education, Communication, Cosmetic, Emotion, Emotional, Gurprriet Singh, Improvisation for the Theater, LinkedIn, Management, Meta, Teamwork, Viola Spolin
Posted in Coaching, Communication, Education, Fundamentals, Networked World | No Comments »
Monday, November 3rd, 2008
Their ad buy has obviously changed, because even though they’ve been on TV somewhere for most of 2008, all of a sudden, the Shamwow late-night TV spots are intersecting with our networks. In honoring the host of the Shamwow commercial, Vince Offer, with October’s ‘Gamey’, we honor a couple of great American traditions: Late night TV spots made on the cheap but with an aesthetic we have come to appreciate as its own kind of pulp genre…and the pitchmen moving the merch. The ginzu knife demo’ers and the guys who suck bowling balls with vacuum cleaners and Suzanne Sommers, and Richard Simmons, and Ron Popeil and Ed McMahon, and Vince McMahon and Jim McMahon — there should be a special wing in the TV Hall of Fame for these characters, and for their fictional counterparts like Willy Wonka, Willy Loman and Professor Harold Hill. Vince Offer, wearing the headset that is just as mandatory to a boardwalk hawker like him as a face mask is to a hockey goalie, is a classic of the breed. (more…)
Tags: Commercials, Complexity, Depth, Emotion, GameChanger of the Month, Heightening, Movement, October 2008, Scientology, Shamwow, television, TV, Vince Offer
Posted in Additions and Edits, Character, Communication, Emotion | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
I sometimes answer business-related questions on LinkedIn that can be addressed with the principles of improvisation. This is one in a series of responses that was deemed ‘Best Answer’ by the questioner…
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. (more…)
Tags: Career, Disney, Emotion, film, Finding Bill Murray, Heart, internet, Live Earth, Networked World, Stories, Storytelling, television
Posted in Character, Emotion, Entrepreneurship, Networked World | No Comments »
Saturday, September 6th, 2008
On the radio, the reporter is talking to a first-time high school principal of a new charter school in New Orleans…
As I’m always on the lookout for scenes that demonstrate improvisation at work, the story gets my attention. The woman is starting a job she’s never done before, yet clearly with the confidence that she is prepared for the experience. That’s an improviser talking. I turn up the volume…
The subject of the story is Channa Cook. Her age is 28. She and Kristin Leigh Moody are the co-founders of Sojourner Truth Academy in New Orleans, a new charter school that opened to its first class in August (then had to close its doors for awhile to let Hurricane Gustav blow through, but is now open again). (more…)
Tags: Accountability, Channa Cook, Charter Schools, Commitment, Emotion, Environment, Fundamentals, Katrina, Kristin Leigh Moody, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Objective, Sojourner Truth Academy
Posted in Education, Emotion, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Fundamentals, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
A business scene staged by an Industrial Age organization likely as not involved a dispassionate analysis of the data, a detailed identification of the opportunity, and the thoughtful mobilization of resources necessary to capitalize on that opportunity. The absence of emotion was a characteristic of such scenes, and in fact the presence of emotion was usually viewed as a weakness in someone’s game. Players were expected to approach things with the cold, hard squint of Clint Eastwood eyeballing a punk at the receiving end of his .44, or Nicklaus lining up a putt to win the Masters.
Networks and business in the networked world do not work that way. Companies can no longer afford to eliminate emotion from their lexicon. Here’s the big reason why: Networks thrive on meaningful dialogue, and most of the meaningful dialogue between human beings happens on the emotional level. (more…)
Tags: Branding, Cosmetic, Dog, Emo-shun, Emotion, Fear, GameChangers, Industrial Age, Meaning, Meta, Networked World
Posted in Emotion | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008
For the past three years, Geico Insurance has advertised its product in a series of commercials featuring celebrities of a certain demographic ilk ‘interpreting’ the stories of Geico customers. These celebs have included Charo, Vern “Mini-Me” Troyer, Little Richard and Peter “Airplane” Graves, among others. A new series featuring Peter Frampton, James Lipton, Michael Winslow and Joan Rivers, began airing in Q4, 2007.
These ads, created by The Martin Agency of Richmond, VA (more…)
Tags: Advertising, Cosmetic, Emotion, Geico, Insurance, Levels of Communication, Meta, Richmond, Sales, Spots, The Martin Agency, TV Commercials, Virginia
Posted in Communication | No Comments »
Friday, November 30th, 2007
My friend, Corey McAfee, a young player in the Nashville music scene, called TuneCore to my attention. It is a service that places music with online retailers and returns an unprecedented royalty to artists. Here is a brand that senses how to play the music game in the Networked World. When it comes to outstanding improvisation, TuneCore is right up there with Tina Fey.
Let’s break it down. (more…)
Tags: Branding, Character, Corey McAfee, Emobyte, Emotion, Gifts, Information Architecture, Logo, Making Money, Meta Communication, Music Business, Nashville, Site Design, TuneCore
Posted in Branding, Character, Themes | 1 Comment »
