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. (more…)
Last night (Tuesday) at the USC President’s Dinner, we sat next to the director of the USC School of Journalism and got into a discussion about the need (we agreed) for journalism students to improvise their approach to their careers because–well, they really have no other choice. Journalism as it used to be is over. Journalism as it will be defined in the future is just beginning. The end of one story is always the beginning of another. By the end of dinner, it was clear that this conversation will continue soon and will probably come to include those USC students next semester.
Today (Wednesday) at breakfast, we sat in Manhattan Beach with two guys named Rick, one from L.A., one from Chicago, and mapped out how the movie studios can change the game with distributed production models made possible by a new broadband network called Darkstrand that comes online in January and can move data at 40 gigabytes per second. Darkstrand is the newly-privatized network that until now has been the exclusive domain of the Defense Dept. and university research scientists. See, the two Ricks were literally describing how to turn swords into plowshares. Or Disney shares anyway.
Today, we hung out in a garage in East L.A. with a friend of ours from Florida, a Taiwanese-American entrepreneur living in Santa Monica and two mechanics from Colombia flown in by our Florida friend to install an Italian-made hydrogen fuel conversion system called JiffyGas in a car originally manufactured in Japan. All the players in the scene had connected with one another via Google. Later this week, the friend from Florida and the two Colombians will do a JiffyGas conversion on a test car for NASA.
Before the end of the day we introduced the friend from Florida to an acquaintance from Denver who is a partner in iCAST, which creates jobs for impoverished communities in the U.S. and abroad. Next week, our Florida friend will talk to iCAST about how to build a jobs-creation scene with gasoline-to-hydrogen conversions as the game.
And now here you are. Welcome. Feel free to connect and play along.
One of my favorite metaphors for the Networked World comes from a source I can’t attribute. I believe I came across it in Wired Magazine in the late 1990s. In the article, the writer cited a sci-fi story that describes a future in which game kiosks have been installed on busy street corners. The kiosks alert passersby when there’s some kind of rotten thing happening to the human organism — a famine, a war, a currency devaluation, a water shortage, etc. When the alert is issued, pedestrians take to the kiosks and play a massively multplayer game designed so that the playing generates whatever kind of energy or economies are needed to correct the imbalance in the world. (more…)
(STORY NOTES: When we left my cousin, Rich, he was trying to get the (fictional) ‘MasterPro’ company’s Customer Center to retrieve the SuperChief Pro with Herculon they’d mistakenly delivered to his home and replace it with the SuperDeluxo with Fabulon, the model he had, in fact, ordered.
Nearly three weeks after he’d ordered the product, things are more confused and further from resolution than ever.
Those of you who enjoy the ‘Scream’ movies or novels by Franz Kafka about characters caught in nightmarish bureaucracies in Eastern Europe in the 1920s, are going to love this. Customer Center = Corporate Communists? Now there’s a concept that deserves some dialogue.
Like Kafka, we have assigned algebraic values to the names of the MasterPro characters, who, as you’ll see, are neither masterful nor professional.) (more…)
(STORY NOTES: My cousin, Rich, manages Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, one of the best designed and operated athletic facilities of any size that I have ever experienced. Conseco’s architecture combines the intimacy and nostalgia of the old Hoosiers-style high school gyms with the seating capacity, comforts and luxury accommodations expected of modern arenas. Likewise, the Conseco staff expresses both friendly, Hoosier-style hospitality, and the sophistication that is required to manage large and diverse crowds on a regular basis. Like all good designs, Conseco works from the big picture down to the tiniest details.
When Rich wrote me this week to describe a recent unhappy ‘customer service scene’ in which he was a player, I knew to pay close attention. First of all, Rich is a very even-tempered guy. It takes a LOT to agitate him. Second, nearly every customer service experience pales in comparison to Conseco’s, so I knew that for him to write to me about this one experience in particular, it must have been extra bad, and that there’d be a lot to learn as a consequenc. In fact, there is so much to learn that it’s a two-parter. A mini-series of customer misery.
The names of the company, its staff and its products have been changed to protect these goofballs from themselves. Those of you who grit your teeth as a habit may want to go get the mouth guard or pop a couple of sticks of Wrigleys before reading.) (more…)
To introduce her students to the concept of improvisation, Viola Spolin, the godmother of modern improv, used to summon half a dozen students onto the rehearsal stage, and then say nothing to them. Literally nothing. No direction. No reason for them to be there.
Nothing.
Nothing…
Still nothing… (more…)
At lunch the other day at a new sushi restaurant called Sugarfish, my friend, Josh Rose, a creative director at Deutsch Advertising, told me about watching the legendary improviser Christopher Guest (Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman, et al) essentially rip up the script Deutsch had given him for a series of DirecTV spots, and tell its creative team he and his cast were going to improvise everything instead. Guest promised the agency team they’d get ten usable spots worth of material, far more than their contract called for.
He delivered, to excellent effect. The series of commercials starring Guest, who also directed, memorably distinguish DirecTV’s product from that of a fictional blowhard cable company.
Josh took the position that, well, yes, you can get away with something like that if you’re Christopher Guest. And if you’re not Christopher Guest, maybe improvisation isn’t going to be so beneficial.
I wish I had responded by holding the albacore sushi drizzled with ponzu sauce between my chopsticks and said to him with a Kung Fu master’s equanimity, “Yes and Christopher Guest is no Chef Nozawa.” That would’ve been deep. I didn’t. I took the more mundane position that there is improvisation in every business process, and that, while its place in the process may vary–most TV commercial shoots, for example, cannot withstand the amount of improvising that a Christopher Guest brings to a set–there is always an opportunity somewhere in every business process where improvisation is possible, and in most cases, required. As long as you’re going to do it anyway, why not do it well? And as far as the fuss Guest stirred up, who ever said birthing originality was easy?
Josh chewed on his yellowtail for a sec, and I wish I could say he nodded like an eager Chef Nozawa apprentice, accepting every word I said as doctrine. He did not. He told me that he is a ‘plug-n-play’ guy, meaning he carefully measures the opportunity afforded, and calibrates performance to it. Improvisation, he said, can feel too loose and unpredictable.
Maybe that’s when I should have stood and slapped him across the face and and told him to wake up and smell the wasabi. I did not. Instead, I calmly explained that recognition of an opportunity for what it is, and responding accordingly, is good improvisation. The Networked World, I explained, is filled with new opportunities. New plugs that require new plays. This continually-evolving business environment demands improvisation. (more…)
CNN ran a good story this week, part of its Real Simple series, about the benefits of improvisation in our personal and work lives. We, of course, could not be more in ageement.
As CNN says, improvisation in based on a few simple concepts. And as the story also points out, the idea that improvisation can change your game in a few easy-to-follow tips, belies the complexity involved. Practice is required. (more…)
This is a sketch I saw Tammy Tso doing during a recent GameChangers workshop, and afterward asked her for a scan of it. Tammy is a 23 yr-old artist and hip-hop crewster from Atlanta, who works as a graphic designer for ignition, an experiential marketing company there. What I found most interesting about the sketch is that Tammy envisioned steps leading to doorways. (more…)
A couple of months ago, Mitsubishi North America awarded its $185 yearly advertising account for strategy, creative and interactive to an agency called Traffic. This item would not necessarily be gamechanging news, except that Traffic is a start-up agency that did not exist before 2008. It was formed specifically for the purpose of winning the Mitsubishi account. (more…)