‘Happiness’ seems to have peaked in 1820.  The next few years will determine whether it’s making a comeback, or continuing its downward trend.  Relative to the results of other queries, this is a smooth curve, which suggests that we can only see the change in frequency over long periods of time.  We don’t notice that ‘happiness’ is less frequent from one year to the next, but it is.

You can also plot multiple comma-separated words or phrases on an Ngram.  In this graph, we see that ‘good’ (blue line) fluctuates over time, while ‘evil’ (red line) is constant.  This suggests that if ‘good’ and ‘evil’ were investments (which in a way they are) good has more upside, while evil offers a low but predictable yield over time.

But then there’s this:  ‘Virtue’ is the blue line; ‘Vice’ is the red.  No doubt about what sells.

‘Improvisation’ shows a steady upward curve, with spikes up and down in the last 7 years.  Based on the 200-year trajectory, we are due for an even bigger upward spike in the near future.  Let’s ride that wave!

Here’s the Ngram link. Play with it!  NGrams are useful for observing how ideas fluctuate over time in terms of their significance and meaning.  When expressing your brand’s narrative, it is wiser to invest in trajectories than it is to take positions.  What’s trending today on Twitter is a position.  The events that led to the trend are its trajectory.

While you’re lacing up your Google running shoes, or in the vernacular of this future, your ‘Googs,’ you get an alert on your mobile that there’s a major drought looming in Tibet, which is on track to record its lowest snowfall ever.

You program your Googs where to send the 1,000 foot-pounds of energy you’re going to generate during your 6K run.  Around the world, millions of others who belong to the Himalayan Foundation like you do get the same alert, and trigger the same program on their Googs– and additionally via the movement generated by wearers of the 12 other shoe brands, two brands of workout machines, a theater seating company named Squirmigy, four flooring companies, and a wheelchair manufacturer–all of which the Himalayan Foundation has networked on the Donorgy platform.

For the next hour, the energy generated by the movement of the users of all these brands will be auctioned by the Himalayan Foundation and sold as futures on global commodity networks.  At the end of the hour, the contracts will be delivered and all bets get paid off.  With the money raised in a little over one hour,  the Himalayan Foundation will be able to fund a fleet of  gigantic solar powered cargo-cleaning blimps (known as Humptys) to pick up a billion metric tonnes of water from a flood in the Phillipines and clean and haul it to the farmers and communities of Tibet, who can now keep Buddha smiling for another season.

Okay, we’re not there yet, but we will be someday.

MEANWHILE…here’s what we got.  We run for causes.  The mechanism by which funds get transferred to various causes is to the aforementioned scenario what a Stanley Steamer is to a Lexus.  We’ve got a ways to go, but we work with what we’ve got.

Kevin Wall

TOMORROW, SUNDAY, APRIL 18…Kevin Wall and his band of Live Earthlings will stage a Run for Water that will channel money to a number of organizations who dig wells and provide clean water for poor communities in Africa.  It is the ‘opening act’ for the big concert Wall and Live Earth are producing to open the 2010 World Cup in Johannesburg in June.  Proceeds from that concert will also flow to social networks supporting economic development in Africa.

The cynic in me says this is sponsored by Dow Chemical.  Those Bophal people.  The thing is, it takes big money to solve big problems.  The waste and misallocation of the planet’s resources is a big problem, and Kevin Wall has a special genius for getting large organizations to direct big money at big problems.  movement.  Yea absolutely, the guy can  be a pain in the ass to work with.  Between him and Al Gore, there was pretty much no oxygen in the room on the Live Earth concerts (the plants were happy, though : )  That said, Kevin has a great heart, he is a master business improviser who causes a lot of unforeseen positive outcomes in the projects he does, and he deserves the support of anyone–from Tony Dow to Dow Finsterwald to Dow Jones to Dow Chemical to Daniel Dao–who wants to work on better ways of treating the planet.

And I will guarantee that when roller skates and skateboards start generating energy futures, Kevin Wall will be the first in line for that deal.

Until then…what are we going to do tomorrow?!…

If you run, or can walk 6K, and are in one of the many locations around the world where this run is happening, it will definitely be a good thing for you to do tomorrow morning.   Program those Googs and throw some foot-pounds at the problem, why don’t ya!

]]> http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/archives/1760/feed 0 http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/archives/706 http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/archives/706#comments Mon, 23 Mar 2009 06:30:11 +0000 admin http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/?p=706 GameChangers has a health care client, and because of that I am aware of this panel before my friend Josh Rose, head of digital media for Deutsch Advertising, who’s not attending SXSW this year, sends out a morning tweet asking his network if anyone’s planning to attend the ‘Social Media and Health Care’ discussion. I am grateful to Josh for the extra impetus, though, because this turns out to be my favorite discussion of the conference.  Nothing is resolved, no consensus gained, no conclusions reached.  But the quality of the questions posed, perspectives presented and the passion people bring to the subject are amazing and inspiring. 

People here represent insurance companies, big pharma, start-ups, physician networks, social networks built around various health concerns, and NGOs. There are several physicians in the audience, and one guy, Vik Duggal (www.konstructr.com) from the construction business who makes a remark on which, the way I see it, the entire conversation pivots.  Until Vik speaks, the focus has been on privacy issues.  And then Vik says, “All of these comments about patient privacy and the relationship between employees and employers assume the current model.  I’m in the construction business and I can tell you that everything about it is going to change in the next five years.  What’s true today will not be true in the future.”

It’s like Vik dropped a lit cigarette into a gas tank.  The room erupts in conversation that the moderator soon loses any chance of moderating. I had not planned to say anything, but when the moderator tries to calm things down by saying, “I’ve got to tell you, I’m not optimistic” I shout at him, just to keep things lively, “That’s your choice!”

A young physician from Brooklyn, Jay Parkinson, is launching his own social network, HelloHealth.  He says, “Doctors like patients who come in already educated about what’s wrong with them.  Education and prevention are the best medicines we have.”

Later I tell the story of how, at no cost to me, I healed myself of a case of Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (BPPV) using Google search and a YouTube video of a treatment known as the Epley Maneuver; and how my accountant had paid over $6,000 to ‘the health care system’ to get healed of the same ailment.  One guy jumps all over this.  “And who would you have blamed if it hadn’t worked?” he asks accusatorily.  “Myself!” I bark back at him over a whole chorus of people chiming in with anecdotes of their own.

At one point near the end of the session, a woman with an autistic child makes the following statement:  “I can tell you that the parents of an autistic child typically know more about autism than the average physician, and in my experience, the average physician welcomes what the parents know.”

Warm heart of Disney animation meets Steve Jobs’ cool tech to produce Pixar.

Choir songbooks plus moribund 3M R&D project yields PostIt notes.

Simplicity of a 32-word landing page plus complexity of human language brands Google.

Here’s a great example that surfaced this week on the BBC showing how improvisers resolve conflict to conjure up fresh ideas. Thanks to our friend James Dean Conklin (iconic actor meets bop on the head to shape a uniquely evolved human being) for calling it to our attention.

Phillip George, a designer from Australia, was ‘inspired’ by a series of riots on Sydney beaches in 2005, in which the Surf crowd attacked the Sufi crowd. George has produced a series of surfboards featuring beautiful Arabic designs that’s being shown right now in Australia as a museum exhibit. Right on, duddah!

In the Networked World, as the costs of producing media and other forms of intellectual property dwindle, and your blog about your dog has the potential to reach as many people as Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times, the big business opportunities for brands and entrepreneurs are not so much in the creation of content, but in creating and owning context. In other words, you can have the swellest piece of content — a great product, an incredible film, a breakthrough technology — but if no one can find you or your content does not connect in a meaningful way with your audience, your tree will fall in the forest and will not make a sound. In the Networked World, context is king. Context makes the falling tree mean something to the forest, gives it its sound, its flavor, its grain, its significance.Creating context has, in fact, become a whole new occupation, one that didn’t exist three years ago: the Pollinator. Pollinators are experts (or fast-becoming that way) in cobbling together social networks and communities of interest that connect brands with their audiences. Pollinators are skilled listeners, and know how to turn ’suggestions from the audience’ into productive brand behaviors. They understand a brand as a fluid experience for the customer, an experience that requires continual nurturing to evolve. Pollinators design the context in which these experiences can transpire. They are professional contextualizers.

YouTube and Google are the highest-profile examples of brands that create and own context. They do not create content or experiences, but give content a home and make useful experiences possible. Everywhere you turn these days, you see brands shifting their focus from static content to the fluid context that keeps their narrative lively and engaging.

Here are three other companies who are in the business of creating context:

Mochila is an application with widgets that let owners of content connect with distribution channels and advertisers in a win-win-win scenario. Mochila’s Chairman, Ben Chen, describes his company as a ’syndication engine’ that automates and simplifies what would otherwise be an enormously complicated process of defining relationships and revenue streams between large numbers of producers, distributors and advertisers. What had been difficult if not downright impossible for the average content-creator gets made easier by Mochila. The enormous 24/7 appetite of distributors gets fed. Advertisers can tie into channels and content that contextualize their brand.

Morf Mobile is a mobile content provider founded by Van Jepson, who created the well-known site, Hot or Not? That web phenomenon invited its audience to contextualize random photos. Morf, geared toward a young adult audience, contextualizes content by parsing it into mobile channels and communities of interest. It adds context by tying real world experiences to online ones. Impulses to buy, connect, alert, comment — action! — become more immediate options when mobility gets added to the mix. For further context, Morf enables its licensees to private label their channels. Your brand can use the Morf technology to create its very own context. For example, fans of Artist X can dial up the Artist X channel to share news and keep current with the community and its favorite performer. Artist X, meanwhile gets a channel that lets everyone at a concert become an ambassador for the brand, or buy Artist X’s music and merch before they leave the parking lot.

It’s not only newbie brands who are generating value via context. Procter & Gamble’s Connect + Develop site lets people outside the company have a shot at making money by developing new products and innovative ideas. Applicants can browse a list of P & G’s ‘Needs,’ which includes items like “Packing for Cylindrically Packaged Food,” “Pain Free Hair Removal From the Roots” and my favorite, a call for a “Unique In-Mouth Experience.” P & G calculates that there are 1.5 million people in the world who have engineering and product design skills comparable to the skills of its own engineering and product development staff of 7,500. Changing the context of its development process by opening it up to the world and incentivizing participation enables P & G to increase its potential development staff by 7,500x. They call them ‘Game-Changing’ deals, which is not a very unique in-mouth experience, but we are flattered by the imitation flavor ; )

Scene: Microhoogle. A strong player like Microsoft will usually dominate a scene with a weaker player confused about its identity like Yahoo is. By being the more aggressive player, Microsoft has painted Yahoo’s ‘character’ in their scene as, by turns, a ‘collegial acquisition’, ‘a hostile takeover’, ‘an unfaithful tart’, ‘an overpriced stock’ and, as of this week, ‘just friends who talk on the phone a lot but there’s nothing serious going on between us, swear…no seriously, you guys, swear!’ Yahoo tried to ignite a bidding war by introducing Google to the scene, but all it did was diminish Yahoo’s status in the eyes of the audience by reminding everyone that this scene is really about Microsoft vs. Google. The best Yahoo can do is control the timing and style of the edit (i.e. the selling strategy). When a confused player is onstage too long, an edit is inevitable.

Scene: Get It While You Can. What lines of work are the closest and most loyal friends of the Bush administration in? Oil and War. These friends have approximately 230 days before they get edited, and their way-too-cozy contracts go up for review. Variations of the ‘Get It While You Can’ scene will play out over and over and over again in that 230 days, to the chagrin of most taxpayers and increasing stress on the U.S. economy. Petroleum producers will lock up all the mineral and drilling rights they possibly can, and oil prices (and profits) will go as high as Big Oil can push them, drivers be damned. With amplification by their many friends in the media, the players in the war game will present countless worrisome scenarios and justifications for buffering national security, and will load up on inventory that will move off the shelves much more slowly if, God forbid, we’re not fighting at least a couple of wars somewhere in the world. The Scott McClellan book release is a variation of this scene. Mr. McClellan may be assuaging his conscience or getting revenge, maybe both; he is also getting it while he can.

Scene: Inherit the Windmill. On May 15, Mesa Power, an energy company run by longtime oil player, T. Boone Pickens, announced a $2 billion investment in GE wind turbines. Superior improvisers are able to play in the moment while at the same time seeing the big picture. For an oilman like Pickens to invest in the wind takes some improvisation skill, and this looks like an excellent initiation of a new scene for Mesa Power. He and his team are seeking transformation and acting on environment, both of which are fundamentals of good improv. Pickens is taking a long view, while at the same time seeing (and to a certain extent participating in) what’s happening in the next 239 days. Sensing how weary the audience is going to get with the ‘Get It While You Can’ scenes, Mesa is preparing to offer alternatives, not only wind, but natural gas, too. That’s good improv.

Scene: Coca Cola and Honest Tea. The online version of Inc. reports this week that after making an investment in Bethesda, MD- based Honest Tea, the Coca-Cola Company has offered its support to Bethesda Green, a community sustainability program sponsored by Honest Tea. As part of its support, Coke is buying 20 to 30 recycling containers that will be placed in high-traffic areas around the city. Honest Tea says that 300 people turned out to participate in the launch of Bethesda Green’s first container. The analysis: In improv theater, when a normally high-status player plays low-status — a pompous Dignitary gets brought low, or the Housekeeping Staff governs the Governor — the audience loves it. The same dynamic appeals to the marketplace. When a mighty brand like Coke assumes the low-status role of Trash Recycler, our very human reaction is to applaud the move, just like we do when a little brand like Honest Tea grows in status through its partnership with Coke. The other note here is that ‘giving gifts’ of support are the strongest moves an improviser can make. It is what we see Coke doing in this scene. It is a sweet move, with no corn fructose involved.

Scene: Ninety Percent Pessimism. Forbes.com reports this week that a May survey conducted by Reuters and the University of Michigan shows that consumers are feeling worse about the economy that at any time since 1980. 90% of American consumers, the survey says, feel that U.S. economy is in the tank. One of the first things you learn as an improviser is that negativity gets you nowhere. The very fact that you are judging your scene as being bad while you’re in it guarantees that your scene, will, in fact, be bad. Improvisers operate from a positive frame of mind, always. They greet setbacks or mistakes as opportunities to change direction, try new things, find more productive paths. The way a business improviser might see the Forbes survey is that 90% pessimism describes huge marketplace demand for optimism.

What’s not so obvious or lame is how Google’s culture is built on fundamental concepts of improvisation.

Here are some of those concepts:

Performances begin with suggestions from the audience. From search queries, on through the many ways the brand listens to the world’s voices and and participates its cultures, Google’s performance as a brand begins with input from its audience. Search queries are, in effect, suggestions. Results to queries have themes, and those themes have the potential to turn objective (”what I want”) into action (”how I get it”). And that, ladies and gents, is the essence of improv.

Conversational language invites dialogue. By looking for opportunities — often as subtle as a single well-chosen, perfectly-placed word — to bring the brand’s language into a friendly, colloquial style, Google encourages conversation. In Googletalk, email threads are, exactly that — ‘conversations’ . Those conversations are varying degrees of ‘old’. Phrases like “Still working…” “I’m feeling lucky” “Search for stuff to buy…” and “You don’t pay a nickel” pop up casually throughout Google’s dialogues with searchers. That apparentl casualness is not casual at all. It is an alchemy of art and science. They don’t overdo it, and they don’t do it in an effort to be linguistically hip or unique. They do it to create little points of commonality, wispy hints of relevance, that make interactions more friendly, easygoing and natural. Those traits are, very much by design, part of the brand’s character.

Dialogue works on multiple levels. Google’s language algorithm folks delve deeply into the meaning of language on the cosmetic, emotional and meta levels. What does a user really mean? What are the associations created by queries? What emotions are in play? How does code divine meta meaning from language? Is a dialogue about an ailing dog about the location of a nearby vet or the best way to treat the dog? An improviser pays attention to subtext, so does Google, and it’s no coincidence.

The company’s culture includes a great big playful streak. They like having people on the team who once worked for the WNBA, who play volleyball, swim, bike, run, Segway. The Googleplex is a warren of physical activity, of music and yoga poses and people sitting on their office floors bolting new trucks to their long skateboards or playing with slot cars. Franz Weber, who once the held the world record for skiing down a mountain, escorts company managers on extreme skiing trips. Google knows that physical activity is a productive counterpoint to all the time its employees spend in the metaverse. The reason Google gets the Gamey, however, is that it’s impossible to improvise without playing. The brand’s spirit of of play morphs naturally into the spirit of improvisation, and vice versa.

Poaching is allowed. Thanks to ‘Chief of Confusion’ John Seely Brown for pointing this out to me. Just as JSB allowed poaching — i.e. recruiting players from other teams to join your own — at Xerox PARC when he was Chief Scientist there, Google also allows it. This is a very nuanced line in the business improvisation code, and it goes like this: Your scene is only as good as the game you are playing. If you’re playing a productive game, in which everyone is content with his or her role, and objectives are being achieved, all is cool. If your game is unproductive, players will sense it, coaches will see it, and the scene will get an adjustment in the form of an addition or edit, at the very instant of recognition. If you play a game that’s so productive and so engaging that other players want to join in, joining in should be an option. Good games attract good players. It’s true in improvisation, it’s true in pick-up basketball, it’s true in business. That attraction holds immense performance potential, but it’s potential that can only be realized if those good players are allowed to play along.

The environment is well-defined. Improvisers pay careful attention to everything about the environments in which their scenes transpire, and so does Google. Everyone is familiar with the stark Google home page design with its 30-something word count and the themed artwork that often adorns the logo. Other pages have a similar clean aesthetic. Nothing is wasted or extraneous to the scene. The Googleplex, likewise is a distinctive environment, with all sorts of romping around going on at all times of day, and a creatively cluttered quality to the office areas. Meals are served, massages given, games are played non-stop. A couple of years ago, after doing some business at the Googleplex, I asked my host if I could stop at the company store and pick up a t-shirt. “We don’t have a company store,” she said.

“Where do you sell Google t-shirts?” I asked.

“We don’t,” she said. “Sometimes people have them made for conferences and occasionally they have some left over.”

“Where are those?” I asked, getting enamored with the idea of having a rare, hard-to-acquire Google-T.

She led me past an office hall where several engineers were inspecting the gears on a very expensive looking mountain bike, to a large amoire sitting in an otherwise-empty corridor. “If there’s anything left over from a conference, people usually stick it in here, but the stuff always disappears pretty fast.” She pointed to an ‘eye on the amoire’ webcam mounted on the ceiling, no doubt connected to some internal Google schwaghund network. “Word gets around,” she said.

The amoire, as you’d expect, was bare, but my host had given me a bigger gift. Our t-shirt/company store/cycling engineers/amoire/webcam scene had conveyed to me the very essence of the Google spirit. Word gets around and energetic action follows.

Exhibit A: In 1920, Father Julius Nieuwland creates the polymers that make synthetic rubber possible when he accidentally leaves a pot boiling on a stove.

Exhibit B: In 1928, Walt Disney creates Mickey Mouse when his partner in the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon series double-crosses him. Mickey gets his name because Walt’s wife, Lily, hates the name ‘Mortimer’ that Walt had given him.

Exhibit C: In 1975, Post-It Notes originate when one of its inventors, Art Fry, needs a bookmark for a church hymnal.

Exhibit D: In 1998, Dr. Taryn Rose begins designing shoes because her feet hurt when she wears other designers’ shoes.

The point here is that none of these 20th-century success stories, nor tens of thousands of others just like them, had a script, they were spontaneous, productive responses to the situations that life presented. Father Nieuwland made an apparent mistake and recognized that it moved the scene forward. To an improviser, mistakes are pure opportunity. As the flamenco guitarist Kai Narezo (who’s married to one of my teachers at I. O. West, Shulie Cowen,) says, “The good news about bad notes is that there’s always a good one right next to them.”

Walt Disney wasn’t aiming to create an iconic character that would launch an entertainment empire. He was a resilient businessman who’d gotten his franchise brand yanked by an unscrupulous distributor. His company needed a new product in the pipeline just to keep the doors open. He did what was needed in that particular situation. An improviser plays the scene, not the story.

To an improviser, turning the little things into big ones (and big ones into little ones) is part of the art. The Post-It dude simply wanted a better bookmark for his hymnal. Dude remembered a strange kind of adhesive that a buddy of his at 3M had invented. Dude stuck a bit of it on the back of some slips of paper. Yahtzee!

Taryn Rose’s family was aghast when she told them she was leaving medicine to go into fashion design. It was not a rational move, but it was a good one. An improviser doesn’t judge a scene while it’s in progress. She acts on instinct informed by knowledge, not governed by it. Knowledge (what Dr. Rose knew about the practice of medicine) will always be there, but the moment of opportunity (what Dr. Rose felt was possible) is fleeting and must be promptly and spontaneously acted upon. If you overthink it, the moment is gone.

When their scenes took an unexpected, unscripted turn, these players were prepared, and turned the ‘bad notes’ of: a) accident, b) setback, c) triviality and d) discomfort into the sweet music of success. This is the alchemy that’s possible with improvisation.

Today — with the vast opportunities and the commensurate challenges presented by the Networked World — the ability to improvise will be even more important to business success than it has been in the past. Moments of opportunity will come and go in much greater abundance, but they’ll be way more fleeting, too, and it’ll take more openness, trust and spontaneity on the part of players and especially organizations to take advantage of them.