“Why’s that?” I asked, immediately more interested in this Wells dude than in the others the publicist listed.

“You never know what he’s going to write. He can’t be controlled,” the publicist said.

Wow.  Now I was really interested.  A few high profile critics aside, entertainment journalists had been, historically, notorious shills for studios and PR agencies, faithfully adding spin to the narratives they were sold.  This ensured them steady access to the all-important star interviews, along with lots of free meals, expenses-paid junkets, and invitations to review screenings and the occasional gala premiere.

That a player like Wells dared to leave this comfort zone said a couple of things.  First, the guy had to have guts, and confidence in his game.  Second,  entertainment journalism, like all journalism, was changing.  The very fact that my friend, the publicist, was forced to confront his concern about a blogger with a mind of his own was a revolution of sorts.  Very soon after speaking with the publicist, I took a look looked at Jeffrey Wells’ site, Hollywood Elsewhere, for the first time, and haven’t really looked away since.

Nothing of importance in the film business goes unobserved by Wells.  He is plugged into its zeitgeist.  His well-written commentary, his obvious passion for the cinema, the reliable frequency of his posts, and the broad spectrum of  sources he cites, make Hollywood Elsewhere a singular visit.  The hilariously-neurotic personal experiences he writes about and the commentary by a smart, often-vicious pack of readers are the icing on the cake.

I don’t work in the entertainment business any more, so I don’t need a lot of industry chatter, what I find useful is to get an early heads-up on films that can impact the industry, its key players, the marketplace, and popular culture.  Wells knows how to separate the story from the hype.  While I don’t always agree with his opinions or his perspective, they are always solid.  A reader can triangulate a position, a point of view, from them.

Jeffrey Wells is the GameChanger of the Month for October because he practices fundamentals that journalists and businesspeople in general can use to succeed in any changing business environment:

Cause change.  It is always better to change the game of your own volition than to have your game changed against your will by forces beyond your control.  Wells left the melting icepack of print journalism for the expanding tundra of online media before the people left on the icepack began pushing one another off like they are today.

Prepare to struggle. The path to any breakthrough is unpaved.  Gamechanging does not guarantee an easy road to fame and fortune.  It is, rather, a methodical series of steps taken in order to learn, adapt, and discover new avenues for productivity.   Hollywood Elsewhere struggled early.  At one point Wells had to solicit donations from his readers to keep the site alive. It now seems on healthier footing financially, but Wells has a penchant for drama, so you never know what kind of bind he’s getting himself into just so we can all enjoy watching him work his way out of it.

Have a point of view. Wells’ take on the business isn’t the fanboy gush of Ain’t It Cool News, or the studio commissary talk you get from Nikki Finke, it’s uniquely his own.  Visiting HE is like sitting in on conversations about films and current events, and panel discussions with lots of film clips at a neverending film festival with Wells as the lead moderator.  If you dig movies like I do, this is invariably a good experience.

Embrace distributed narratives.  In the networked world, narratives are distributed, never piped down a single channel to their audience.  In addition to the overlapping nature of the conversations between the blogger and his readers, Hollywood Elsewhere’s narratives transpire on multiple media platforms.  They link out to other journalists and web sites.  They also unfold differently over time.  Some of the site’s narratives may consist of a single post; others may continue for a year or more.

In the Networked World,  you cannot control the conversation between brand and audience.  The objective, whether you’re a one-person shop like Hollywood Elsewhere or a behemoth brand like Disney, is to add to the conversation.

Act on environment, and environment will act on you.  Patrick O’Connor acted on his environment by building a place that expressed his appreciation of a game, a team, a place.  It was an invitation for friends and family to gather.  That environment has, in turn, acted on many, many others, and moved them to take action.  Since its construction, wiffle ball tournaments held at Little Fenway have raised $717,800 for charity, including $215,000 raised for the Travis Roy Foundation in a tournament in August of this year.

The game is wiffle ball.  The change is that, thanks to Patrick M. O’Connor, now you can play it in Fenway.  The result, which could not have been predicted,  is awesome.

Mona Hoffman is August’s GameChanger of the Month because her brand is an exploration of themes that matter.  One of her responsibilities at her former company was sustainability, and the company, though appreciated as a major employer in the community where it’s headquartered, was not committed to moving in that direction (its major product lines are made of wood).   Another of her passions is craftsmanship, the ability to turn readily available materials into something extraordinary.   In transforming herself into an artisan who works with concrete, she combines the themes of sustainability and craftsmanship.  The exploration of these two themes creates and informs the Rough Edges brand narrative.

Mona Hoffman is the GameChanger of the Month, because in forming her new company, she acted on what she is passionate about, yet she didn’t leap before looking.   Rough Edges Design is grounded in diligent study and immersive apprenticing in the craft of concrete-shaping.  The transition from cushy-and-corporate to rough-and-tumble is not one to make without a lot of preparation.   Preparation is the key to a successful journey.  Preparation gives you the ability to improvise in a way that a plan, no matter how meticulous and thought-through it is, cannot.   A GameChanger prepares.

Works like The Unknown Craftsman, by Soetsu Yanagi informed Hoffman’s education.   Yanagi’s words, though originally written in another language about artisans from a different culture, described a world familiar to her, one in which everyday objects and materials become sources of what Yanagi calls “calm and friendly beauty.”

Having spent her professional life in a world of zero-tolerance manufacturing and super-repeatable processes, Hoffman has created a brand where the production process, by design, yields unexpected results, where “flaws” are in fact an artifact of the human touch on the material, and are embraced as part of the product’s charm.

Mona Hoffman is the GameChanger of the Month because she interacts with the familiar in a way that makes it new and remarkable.   This is the alchemy of improvisation.  With its artful line of lamps, Rough Edges Design literally turns heavy material into objects of light.  And if that ain’t changin’ the game, we don’t know what is.

Tanya Flemister, a photographer based in Los Angeles, looked at this same scenario and saw beauty in the form of a business opportunity.  Those untold thousands of old wallpaper sample books getting tossed into the trash are filled with richly-textured designs that might be out of date as wallcoverings, but have the potential to become brand new in a different context.   Wallpaper sample books became the inspiration and provided the content for Flemister’s fledgling company, Off The Wall Greeting Cards.

Off The Wall features material originally designed to cover our grandparents’ dining room walls transformed into high-touch backing for an exquisite series of note cards.

The principles of improvisation expressed via Ms. Flemister’s brand, make her the GameChanger of the Month for July:

What is stale in one context becomes fresh in another.  Creativity does not have to be, and is, in fact rarely, the act of bringing something brand new to life, it is most often the act of reinvigorating what has lost its energy.  New rules can transform an old game, and yield a performance the marketplace has never seen before.

The nerve endings the network are human.  The high-touch quality of Off The Wall’s product gives a buyer something with which the senses can engage.  The brand is more than an idea or an intention.  It is human and real.  You can feel the craft that went into these cards.  Sense the history.  Experience the artistry that went into these designs.

Perhaps most importantly, emotion underpins the brand.  The narrative of how these wallpaper samples have been rescued from the trash heap, how something lost has been found, is nothing less than a story of rebirth.  This is one of the most profound and compelling narratives in all of human experience.  Off The Wall conveys emotion before a note has been written inside one of its cards.  That is a powerful elixir upon which to build a brand.

Finally, Tanya Flemister initiated this game with the confidence that it would be productive in ways she cannot necessarily foresee.  Off The Wall does not yet have a working web site.  It is looking for representation in the marketplace.  It is a business in the process of being born.  If you want to be a player in the Off The Wall game, maybe there’s a role for you.

Where others see destruction, a GameChanger sees the opportunity to be creative.  It is no wonder that Shiva is the Hindu god of destruction AND creation.  The two go hand in hand.   In the ashes of destruction, the seeds of creation are found.

You don’t have to love vampire stories to appreciate the artistry that went into the 91-second sequence.  The imagery and sound work on every level, and establish the tone of the series with perfect pitch.  The title sequence speaks to the subconscious like it can read our minds.  It seeps and bleeds into  into every shadow of the stories that follow.   It informs a viewer’s understanding of the show’s characters.  It keys the soundtrack.   There’s a lot to be learned from this title sequence.  And not just how to build title sequences, either.

Digital Kitchen demonstrates this essential of gamechanging:

Innovative processes yield innovative products.

This is one of the most basic concepts in creative design and yet, on our obsessive quest for the killer app or the market-making product, is too frequently ignored.  Is there a manager alive who does not count on their brand to produce innovative products?  Whose brand does not promise its audience a steady stream of better/faster/cheaper?  It seems only rational to focus on the product, the product, the product.  The audience, after all, sees product.  They pay for product.  Why should managers focus on anything but product?   Here’s why:

Innovative processes yield innovative products.

And this corollary:

Poor process yields poor products.

Poor process comes in two genres:  Opaque and Heavy.  These are the vampires and werewolves of good design.

Opaque processes can result in skulduggery on the scale we’ve seen with the big banks.  A few evil offspring of Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan play an opaque insider’s game and get too rich for anyone’s good including their own.  As a result, the rest of us have to wallow in the bilious swamps of their poorly-designed debt.

Heavy processes, as defined in John Thackara’s brilliant book, In The Bubble:  Designing in a Complex World, result in environmental stresses that drain the planet of its life’s blood.  The book contains this shocking statistic:  “Only one percent of the material flows in the U.S. economy ends up in, and is still being used within, products six months after their sale.”

That is some really ugly process right there, y’all.

For a quick perspective on what a light, transparent and innovative process looks like, check out Digital Kitchen’s own case study on its True Blood titles.  In particular, note these quotes:

“…had mostly to do with setting aside our own prejudices of the subject matter as well as so-called ‘professional’ production practices…”

Have an open mind.  Do things differently than the way you’ve done them before.  Break your habits.  Wean yourself of your go-to-moves, even if you think they’re money in the bank.  If you normally put on your right shoe first in the morning, put on your left shoe first for a change.  These things matter.  (I love the phrase “so-called professional.”  It suggests a lot.  Dare to be a so-called amateur.  Make mistakes.  Learn.  Improve.  Make more mistakes.  Keep going.)

“…we knew that the best way—the only way—to create a powerful introduction to True Blood was to insert ourselves into the swamps of Louisiana and found out (sic) what happens, unmannered and unvarnished.”

Act on environment and environment will act on you.

“…don’t show vampires.”

An unruly process is not the same as an undisciplined one.   An innovative process needs rules.  Rules and constraints create focus, liberate performance, and engender the group mind that’s essential to good collaborations.

There are other fundamentals of gamechanging, too, that informed the Digital Kitchen process:  Don’t be afraid of playing multiple roles, or of changing your status from scene to scene.   Don’t be afraid of letting things be messy at first.  Don’t be afraid of collaboration.

Most of all, don’t be afraid of what scares you.  Down that dirt road and through that dark swamp, your breakthrough is a-waitin’.

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.

Over lunch at the Iron Wood Barbecue at SXSW in Austin a couple of weeks ago, my friend Dean McBeth, who has participated in several GameChangers workshops, told me how much I would dig the Zappos brand because they and their CEO, Tony Hsieh (pronounced SHAY), are so improvisational in their approach to their business.

I knew that Dean, who is friends with a lot of the Zapponians, would not be mistaken about it, and that the awarding of the March, 2009, ‘Gamey’ to Zappos and Hsieh was a foregone conclusion.  And so here we are.  All I had to do is dip a toe in the Zappos brand to see how it’s a Gamechanging experience.

To begin with, Zappos is well-known for its ten core values.   Here are three of those values, and how they jibe with the GameChangers model:

#4.  Be adventurous, creative and open minded.  This value captures the spirit of improvisation.  It is the spirit of play.  The rules define the game, but within those rules, within the structure of the game, there are endless opportunities for exploration and expression.  For learning and growth.  True for the individual.  True for the team.

#6.  Build open and honest relationships with communication.  There it is again, that word ‘open’.   Openness is important to relationships because it allows them evolve and deepen, become more personal and meaningful.  Openness keeps them from getting stale or stagnant.  It helps them recover from setbacks and misunderstandings.  Communication is always the key.  If you’re talking, and if what you’re saying is honest, your relationship cannot help but blossom.  If, on the other hand, you are ‘closed’, if your mind is made up about something, if you conceal instead of reveal, or if you’re trying to follow the script you’ve got running through your head, communication will not flow freely, and the relationship will suffer.  True for customer-brand relationships.   True for employee-employee relationships.

 # 8.  Do more with less.  The less able improviser goes looking for big ideas, yearns to make hero moves, seeks to build category killers.  Great improvisers, by contrast, take the little things and turn them into great big deals (and vice versa).  This is where a performance, be it by a brand in marketplace or an actor onstage,  finds the most opportunity for extension, growth, evolution.  This is ‘more-with-less’ dynamic presents a very favorable cost-benefit ratio and reveals opportunities for growth across the organization.

Zappos has a company life coach named Dr. Vik, who blogs every day on the Zappos site.

The reception area of the company’s Las Vegas HQ has a throne where Zappos visitors are reminded who’s royalty.  They are!

Zappos recognizes that it’s the edges of the network where life happens, and that these edges–where the Zappos network intersects with others–offer the most fertile ground for growth, innovation and connectedness to its audience.  The brand intentionally blurs the line between life and work.  In fact, there is no line.  How Zapponians play is how they work, and vice versa.  The lives and interests of the people who work for Zappos ARE the brand.  Interestingly, Hsieh says he doesn’t care whether Zappos employees care about shoes or not.  What they have to care about is engaging productively with one another and with the Zappos audience.  In other words, what they have to care about…is improvisation.

PFNC stands for ‘Por Fin Nuestra Casa,’ Spanish for ‘Finally, a Home of Our Own.”  Founded in 2007 by Brian McCarthy, Pablo Nava and Mackenzie Bishop, the for-profit company converts used shipping containers into low-cost housing for poor families in Juarez Cuidad and other Mexican border communities.  Each PFNC unit costs around $10,000 US.

This is how you change the game.  You follow your heart.  McCarthy, Nava and Bishop grew up in El Paso and Albuquerque.  They’d seen the awful poverty in which the families of the maquiladora towns lived, and it had moved them.  After acquiring needed experience in the homebuilding business, they acted on their feelings.  When you wake up in the morning and there’s no roadmap for where the business might take you that day, you can still be confident that you’re going to be productive and going to get results, as long as you follow your heart.  When you invest completely in every minute of your day, you don’t stress so much about where you’re going to be at the end of the month.

I like that PFNC is in business to make money.  I also dig the fact that it’s not the only thing they’re in it for.  In pursuing a ‘triple bottom line’ of responsible profits, social impact, and environmental  sustainability, PFNC follows a model of social entrepreneurship that absolutely must become the norm if we are to grow our way out of the bad game we’re stuck in now, when too much of business centers around the idea of maximizing profits at the expense of the other two items in the triple bottom line.

We have become servicers of debt in this country.  We pay the vig for a living.  PFNC demonstrates how the new game can be both socially responsible and entrepreneurial in the classic free market sense.  There’s a need for this kind of housing in Jaurez, where an estimated 25,000 families live in substandard or dangerous conditions.  PFNC has identified a need in the market and filled it.  It doesn’t get any more Business 101 than that.

The GameChangers are usually not looking to change the game.  They’re looking to express how they feel about the world.  Act on their passions.  Support their scene partners.  Make the most of the gifts they’ve been given.  And then one day they and everyone else realizes they are playing a brand new game.  Finally, a Game of Their Own.

Taylor Davidson had a good job as a product developer and strategist for one of the large financial services institutions that didn’t get swamped by the ‘Butchers in Crazy Town’ scene that characterized many such companies in 2008. His employer did everything in its power to get him to stay. Flex time. More money. They gave him the license to work from anywhere he wanted. But finally, he knew he had to hit the road. There were too many conversations, too many sights and inspirations that he would not experience if he confined himself to the role he was playing. So in November, with no particular route in mind, and a general idea of arriving on the West Coast, Taylor changed the game. He left the safety net of Richmond, Virginia, for the uncertainty of gallivanting cross-country.

Ethan Bauley and I had a chance to meet Taylor when he was in Los Angeles at the end of December. Like Ethan,
Taylor is one of a new breed of social entrepreneur who are changing the way business gets done in the Networked World. They are equal parts artist and businessperson. They bring elements of creativity and improvisation to business processes that have grown stale, scripted, predictable and, in many cases, downright execrable over the past eight years. Taylor’s primary business web site, Unstructured Ventures, explores ideas that are going to be vital to resurrecting and restructuring the U.S. economy in the next few years.

In 20 days, upon Obama’s inauguration, a generation of gamechangers like Taylor will be prepared to take the stage and begin shaping the new narratives.

The generation of gamechangers are generators of wealth. Not extractors or manipulators of it.

They collaborate on the narrative, and contribute to it. They don’t look to control or dominate it.

They don’t limit themselves to one role. That would be boring.

They don’t read instructions or follow formulas. They learn by playing, with the goal of finding new directions, new ways of doing things.

They are not afraid of failure. They know it is a source of wisdom, and that as long as you don’t let it cripple you, it will help you get better faster.

They don’t script outcomes. They design strategies that yield results.

When we have the conversations with these gamechangers, improvisation is the language we will speak.

His and his team’s ability to improvise their way to an election victory against rivals who were, initially, much better funded, more networked and more familiar brand names proved beyond any doubt how skillful improvisation can change the game. Obama is the epitome of what it means to be a gamechanger.

Because they improvised instead of slaving themselves to a script, Obama and team were quicker to act on opportunity. They consistently made better, faster and more authentic decisions than their rivals. It is one thing to be smart, but what difference does it make if you don’t act smart? Obama and team showed how improvisation marries intellect with action. This resulted in breakthrough processes for organizing and raising money, and creative solutions to whatever problems they faced along the campaign trail.

It is no coincidence, to me, that Obama lives in the same Hyde Park neighborhood in Chicago where modern improvisation was born in the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression. In Chicago, improvisation isn’t just some thing the artsy-fartsy folks do, it’s a way of life, a fixture in the cultural firmament. A lot of people taking improv classes in Chicago at Second City or I.O. or Comedy Sportz treat it like night school, almost like it’s getting an extra degree that will help them in whatever their walk of life. Obama is one of the best examples ever of how improvisation works outside the confines of theater comedy–how it improves job performance, and has the power to transform the status quo.

Obama listens and communicates on multiple levels, which makes his message extra resonant for his audience. He changes status depending on the scene he’s in without ever losing his essential character, what makes Barack Obama Barack Obama. When he’s with generals he’s leaderly, when he’s with children he’s fatherly, when he’s on the court he’s lefty, and it’s always through the truth of who he is. He’s not posing, acting, or going for effect, or a photo op, or a big move. He’s doing the best he can with what the scene has to offer. That’s improvisation.

He acts on the reality of the scene he’s in, not on some fantasy scenario he’s trying to make come true (see ‘Mission Accomplished’). When, on a blistering summer day in North Carolina during the presidential race, a woman in the audience fainted from the heat during one of his speeches, Obama took one look at what was happening, stopped his speech, and with no hesitation called it to the security team’s attention then reached into his podium for his water bottle and tossed it to the crowd to give to the woman. “They’ll be okay,” he said, in a reassuring voice. It was the most genuine, most helpful thing anyone in his position could have done in that situation. It was not a big deal. It was just the best possible move at that particular moment. That’s is how an improviser rolls. It is not a big deal. It is a lot of little deals, done consistently, with 100% focus and commitment. And these have the potential to add up to a big deal. A really big deal in the case of Obama’s election.

During his campaign he staked out huge and momentous themes–Hope, Change, Equality–and then liberated his team and the voters themselves to explore those themes in as many ways as possible. This meant that Brand Obama could deliver a much livelier narrative than the McCain Brand, which lurched from one lame scripted event (Palin) to another (ride to the rescue on the bailout plan), confusing the audience and the candidate alike.

After January 21, the Obama administration’s ability to riff on big themes will continue to liberate good ideas and innovative thinking to the benefit and betterment of the U.S. and the world. Economic transformation on the massive scale it’s needed cannot be scripted like some Olympic Opening Ceremony. It must be improvised.

They are off to a banging good start in naming people to his team, a ‘team of rivals’, it has been called, echoing what Lincoln said about his own cabinet. The cluckers are already clucking about how hard it will be for Obama to ‘manage’ such strong and independent personalities. To an improviser, it is the most natural thing in the world. Synthesizing different, often radically different, points of view to achieve an objective is what improvisers do.

There is a saying in improvisation, Follow the Follower. This is what Obama means when he says to voters that he’s representing their will, embodying their energy, pursuing their happiness. Pundits have described this as a new kind of leadership, but I believe it’s more accurate to say that Obama’s got outrageously good listening skills. Sometimes it’s necessary to lead, but the best improvisers, like Obama, are the best at following. They raise the level of their own game by raising the level of everyone’s.

On the emotional and meta levels, the levels of communication that matter most, there was only one campaign promise made by Barack Obama. It was not a plank in his platform, but it was implicit in everything the campaign said and did. It was a promise that Americans will all become a little better, a little stronger, a little more improvisational in our own ways for having him as President. We believe it has already happened, is happening, and will continue to happen on an ever-broadening scale, as more and more people — not only in the U.S. but all over the world — get attuned to the new game and start playing along.