Posts Tagged ‘GameChanger’
Thursday, June 18th, 2009
As natural as change is, there’s no getting around the fact that it can be painful. Especially when it happens to you and is not authored or initiated by you. ‘Disruption’ is a word that some managers toss around in a pretty cavalier way as a desirable state or productive path for businesses and their employees. Disruption (from the Latin ‘dirumpere,’ meaning to break or burst asunder) is not, however, always such a pleasant thing. The past can collide with the future in an agonizing present. Disrupting an unproductive pattern of behavior is not the same as disrupting a hardworking family’s way of life, and we are seeing entirely too much of that these days.Try telling residents of a small Midwestern town that just lost its largest employer in the auto industry downturn that disruption is cool, and nobody’s going to be buying you a beer anytime soon. In this kind of economy, we often greet disruption with the same enthusiasm we welcome a rusty nail disrupting the bottom of our foot. (more…)
Tags: , Change, disruption, GameChanger, Goodbye, Growth, Hello, Industrial Age, Networked World, The Disrupture
Posted in Education, Fundamentals, Innovation, Networked World | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
I’m hearing it from all over these days, so it must be official–the word ‘gamechanger’ has broken into the popular idiom. Why, I remember back in the day when it was just Pontiac Motors, A. G. Lafley of P & G, a few sportscasters, and me. Six weeks ago, William Safire wrote about the etymology of ‘gamechanger’ in his NY Times column. Now it’s everywhere, especially in politics. I must have heard the words ‘game’ and ‘change’ used together a dozen times last night in relation to the presidential debate.
This morning, my friend David LaPlante (if you want to read something beautiful, see his most recent blog entry) sent me a link to a CNN story and headline:
Here’s my response:
Candidates and media use the word erroneously, as CNN does in this story, when they refer to an EVENT as a gamechanger. A gamechanger is PERSON with the ability to change the game. Like you : ) A gamechanger can also be a brand, as in the focused, networked behaviors of a group of people who share business objectives. (more…)
Tags: Additions, Agreement, Barack Obama, CNN, David LaPlante, Debate, Edits, Energy, GameChanger, Heightening, John McCain, Media, Timing
Posted in Additions and Edits, Agreement Principle, Games, Issues, Listening, Movement, Objectives, Scenes, Suggestions From the Audience | No Comments »
Thursday, June 19th, 2008
The extraordinary improviser, Paul Vaillancourt, gave me a list of sayings that have been compiled and passed around the improv theater community over the years. The legendary teachers, Mick Napier and Del Close, get some of the credit, though the exact origins of these are as hazy as the roots of any folk wisdom. Here is the second in a series of sayings from what I call Vallaincourt’s List, with my extrapolations in italics: (more…)
Tags: Action, Blank Canvas, Detail, Email, Environment, Folk Wisdom, GameChanger, GameChangers, Gifts, Improvisation for Business, Management, Preconceived ideas, Preconceptions, Producitivity, Sayings, Talk vs. Action, Vaillancourt
Posted in Agreement Principle, Coaching, Communication, Environment, Focus, Fundamentals, Gifts, Objectives, Themes | No Comments »
Monday, March 3rd, 2008
When I saw CBS promoting a 60 Minutes interview with a Pentagon official who called something a ‘”gamechanger,” I went to the CBS website to see what was up. Minding the brand, dontcha know.
Turns out the Pentagon offical is Sue Payton, the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, and the gamechanger she’s talking about is a ray gun, a weapon the military calls the Active Denial System (ADS). I have read enough comic books and seen enough Star Trek to know that any kind of ray gun (or phaser) is automatically a gamechanger. No questions asked. When a ray gun shows up in the scene, something is going to change soon. So I agree 100% with Sue Payton. (more…)
Tags: 60 Minutes, Active Denial System, ADS, CBS News, Character, GameChanger, GameChangers, Marketing, Mutal of Omaha, Mutual of Omaha, Pentagon, RAM, Ray Gun, Remote Area Medical, Steve Irwin, Wild Kingdom
Posted in Character, Communication, Emotion | No Comments »
Friday, December 14th, 2007
COACH JOHN WOODEN PASSED AWAY TONIGHT AT THE AGE OF 99. THIS IS AN UPDATE OF A POST WRITTEN TWO YEARS AGO.
Coaching is one of the most honorable professions there is. A few money- and headline-grabbing exceptions distort the fact that the fast majority of sports coaches are motivated by factors other than money. No team can reach its potential without good coaching, and no coach brought more teams closer to realizing their potential than John Wooden, the best basketball coach, and one of the best coaches of any game, who ever lived.
Wooden’s teams changed the the sport of basketball, from a polite Hoosiers-style half-court square dance, to a baseline-to-baseline rampage of disruptive defenses and extreme athleticism., and they have the championships to show for it. As someone who grew up in Indiana like Wooden did, I always related to how The Coach used basketball as an allegory for life. That’s how it was for a high school kid in Indiana. Basketball was life.
Coach Wooden’s teams showed how the game, and not just the game of basketball, any game, should be played. He was an educator who just so happened to use a basketball court as his classroom. The players who had the good fortune to play for him got gifts that lasted long after their playing days were over. Here are some of Coach Wooden’s fundamentals: (more…)
Tags: basketball, Bill Walton, Coaching, Educator, Fundamentals, GameChanger, John Wooden, Lew Alcindor, Life, Success, Teaching, Teamwork, UCLA, Winning
Posted in Coaching | No Comments »
Thursday, November 8th, 2007
A GameChanger sees every business scenario as an opportunity for improvisation, and improvisation as the key to a successful outcome for the scenario. The current Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) has gotten lots of media play — it’s a media story, after all. It has already been sliced, chopped and processed like fois gras in Ratatouille’s kitchen. But this, right here, is the only place where players in a business story like this one get graded on their ability to improvise. It’s still early in the scene, but let’s analyze it to this point in terms of some fundamentals…sort of like scoring Kristi Yamaguchi for her compulsories…
SUGGESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE
In business, a ‘Suggestion From the Audience’ consists of data from the marketplace. The big suggestion in this scene is clear: the audience is migrating from a couple of entertainment formats to many — or to one ubiquitous web-enabled metaverse, depending on how you look at it. Either way, it ain’t just about your TV and your motion pictures any more. Money is being made elsewhere, lots of it, and both sides are angling for their slice of the new pie. (more…)
Tags: Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Film and Television, Fundamentals, GameChanger, Hollywood, Larry David, Strike, Veoh, WGA, Writers Guild
Posted in Fundamentals | No Comments »
