It does, however, get a lot more complex, and in a hurry.  Here’s why:

In selling scenes, the customer plays two roles:  Audience and Scene Partner.  You, as a seller, co-create your selling scene with your customer as your scene partner.   He or she will then, stepping into the role of your audience, pass judgment on your performance.  Thumbs up or thumbs down?  Worth the price of admission or not?  Good collaboration or rocky relationship?  Will you generate positive word of mouth or negative reviews?  Your earnings depend on how your performance is received.

There’s no script for these scenes–at least not one your customer is going to be memorizing and reciting verbatim anytime soon.  You’re going to be improvising.  And this is a fact:  The best salespeople are the best improvisers.

Here are some ways in which good salespeople collaborate with customers on scenes that get a thumbs-up from those same customers:

They keep their scenes lively. They keep the dialogue moving along at a productive tempo.  They yes-and promptly.  They heighten by upping the tempo, the emotional pitch, or both.  They add useful information.  They perform with the awareness that a ‘dead spot’ in the scene now will be judged harshly by the customer-as-audience later.

They make their customer the hero of the scene. An improvisational salesperson is a Sherpa to the customer with some kind of allegorical mountain to climb.  The sales Sherpa has useful knowledge.  Charts a practical course to the summit.   Reads the weather.  Calculates the odds.  Comes well-equipped.  The sales Sherpa gives the gift of support, and in doing so, makes the customer look good.  The role of the sales Sherpa is not the same as playing a second-banana, a sidekick, a best friend, a wing man, a femme fatale or a fall guy.  These are Hollywood movie roles.   The sales Sherpa is exactly what the name defines: a Sherpa.  It’s a Himalayan thing.

They listen. Wow, do improvisers listen.  They hear things the casual listener doesn’t.  They remember the nuances, and use the throw-aways.  They know that the most important conversation of the day may happen on an elevator ride between the first and sixth floors before a sales presentation begins.  They listen with more than their ears.  They observe with all the senses.   And then, maybe then…they speak.   They understand that being silent and being mute are two completely different things, and that sometimes one sees more with one’s eyes closed than with them open.

They respect environment. In selling scenes, you, the seller, are usually a visiting performer in someone else’s theater.  In many ways, the ‘theater’ of a customer’s company is like any other theater.  Theaters have traditions and history that must be respected.  They are influenced by politics and patronage and star players with competing agendas.  They are invariably facing some kind of financial threat.  They are only as good as their last hit, and they have ridiculously high hopes for the next project.  They can be half-looney with romantic intrigue.  The improvisational salesperson sees and respects the arena in which the customer operates.  When performing at the Apollo, touch the Tree of Hope.  When visiting Ireland, kiss the Blarney Stone.

They build relationships. Relationships are the basis of all improvisation.  The relationships between players, between players and environment, and between players and audience, are all intertwined.  The best way to move toward a sale, to generate positive outcomes regardless of the circumstances, is to build and nurture these relationships.   Relationships will see you through the kinds of adversity, and capitalize on the opportunities, that no scripted sales program can predict or anticipate.

In selling scenes, the networked customer is a more potent player than ever.  He or she often knows as much about your product as you do.  Relationships with customers are frequently more sensitive, more fluid and more demanding than they were in the Industrial Age.  Customers use social media to converse frequently amongst themselves in scenes to which you, the seller, are not invited.  You can no longer impose your narrative on the customer, you’ve got to earn an invitation to participate in the customer’s narrative.

So be a Sherpa.  Know the mountain, and your customer will see that the climb is impossible without you.

A friend of ours who works in sales gets honored often as a leading performer at his company, a large and established organization which is one of the 87 current members of the S&P 500 that have been members since its inception in 1957. The honoring happens at lavish banquets attended by the company’s top managers and featuring a pricey speaker.

Understand that our friend is a madman, who rides his three-wheeled Piaggio motorcycle with the governor of the state where he lives, has 28 tattoos— including one on his (hairy) chest of a man pushing a lawnmower, next to which he shaves a smooth swatch as if the tattooed lawnmower has mowed his chest; and as a hobby he spent a couple of years performing standup comedy as a Catholic priest (he’s Jewish).  None of the tattoos is visible outside our friend’s business suit. Nobody at his company knows he does stand-up under a stage name while wearing a Roman collar.   He plays the company game, but it is far from the only game he plays.

Our friend told us that the speaker at a recent banquet where he was honored as his division’s Salesperson of the Year gave a speech about ‘Finishing First.’ About how nothing else would do. About how a person has a choice between finishing first and being a loser. How in sales, there is no prize for second place, first place is the only place that matters. You either make the sale or you don’t.

Our friend approached the speaker after his speech and struck up a conversation that went like this.

FRIEND: Nice speech.
SPEAKER: Thank you.
FRIEND: What’d you get for it? Forty thousand dollars?  Am I close?
SPEAKER: Uh..that’s in the ballpark.
FRIEND: You know, our first choice for a speaker was Colin Powell, but he wanted two-hundred thousand dollars and we couldn’t afford it.  So it looks like finishing second worked out pretty well for you, didn’t it?

“When I saw the look on his face I felt bad for saying it,” says our friend. “But I couldn’t resist.  It was such an obviously lame premise.  There are all kinds of situations where finishing first has nothing to do with your success.”

So you’re waiting in line for the iPhone or the Twilight.  Cool.  It’s a happening.  A social event.  Remember, though, that meaningful transactions happen in the line, with other people, not at the end of it, with an apparatus or an apparition.

Enjoy the ride and you won’t ever have to worry about whether you’ll be the first to arrive.

Tiger hit one shot that I will remember for a long time, one of the best I’ve ever seen.   220 yards from the green after an errant drive, out of deep rough, he hit a high draw inches to the right of a big tree ten yards in front of him, inches to the left of two bigger trees 30 yards farther up, a couple of feet over a bunker fronting the green, to within ten feet of the pin.  People in the gallery ooohed and aaahed and applauded, then gathered around the divot he made in the rough like so many TV cops peering down at a murder victim.   “Look at how long it is,” they muttered of the divot.  “Look how wide he took his swing path.”  “Did you see how hard he went down after it?  Damn!”

And…

His focus is the most intimidating thing about his game.  There is an unshakeable calmness to him that you don’t see in the other pros.  Earl named him well, because he plays golf like a big cat stalking its prey.   The confidence he has in the inevitability of his success is absolute.

And…

And yet…and yet…it’s strange to stand near another human being and not sense any more humanity in him than you would in a thoroughbred in the paddock at Santa Anita.   What makes us vital—all that brawling, longing, laughing, crying, hurting and loving—all that bitching and moaning and mucking around most of us do on a daily basis–is bad for a person’s golf game.  And so none of it seems to be part of Tiger’s make-up.  He is, on the golf course anyway, inhuman.

The Scripted Narrative

Today, the Eldrick “Tiger” Woods story, scripted for him by his father, Earl, since before he was born, is falling apart quicker than a 20-handicapper’s swing on the back nine of the club championship.  In two weeks, Tiger has gone from paragon to pariah, and has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that a brand can no longer script the humanity out of its narrative and expect the world to play along.  In the billion-channel cosmos of the Networked World, sooner or later reality will outflank any brand’s ability to script and control its story the way brands could when there were three TV networks and a couple of major newspapers to be reckoned with, and story material was limited to what happened inside the ropes at Riviera.

As this is written, the Tiger Woods brand burns out of control like a California wildfire, and embers from Tiger’s Inferno have landed on the roofs of Nike, Gatorade, Gillette and Accenture, and they’re in flames, too.  Buick’s house of straw (did anybody ever really believe Tiger drove a Buick?) is probably burned beyond salvaging.

What’s fueling this fire isn’t the the commonplace tabloid fodder of marital infidelity, it’s not about whether you side with a justly aggrieved wife or forgive a superstar his transgressions.  This story is much bigger than that.  It is a story as old as Achilles, the story of a hero’s fall from grace.

It’s in our nature to want to see a story completed.  Tiger’s story will hold the audience’s attention at least until the downfall is assured, the disgrace complete.  The light at the end of Tiger’s tunnel—and the hope for any brand that has lost its way—is that the journey does not have to not end with the fall from grace.  It may be impossible for the audience to turn away from a tragedy, but what the audience turns to of its own volition, and embraces more fervently than anything, is the hero’s return.  As Joseph Campbell chronicles in Hero With A Thousand Faces, ‘falling to the Temptress(es)’ is one of many twists in the journey toward true heroism.  Tiger Woods can redeem himself in the eyes of his audience, but he’s got to want to be an authentic hero, not one playing a role that has been scripted for him.

The Networked World Defies the Script

Here are five productive moves he (or any other burning brand) can make in that direction:

1.  Accept the Unplayable Lie.

For you non-golfers, a Lie is Unplayable when the ball is in a position where not even Tiger Woods can take a productive swing at it.  At that point, you’ve just got to accept the penalty and play on.  This is the situation in which Tiger finds himself today.  There is no excuse that will satisfy.  No spin that can put the scandal to rest.  He’s got no swing at this one.  He’s got to cop to being a pig and a dog and apologize with more than words for whatever hurt his family, and get on with whatever’s next.  Too many brands waste time talking about how or whether to play the unplayable lie, instead of quickly agreeing that it’s unplayable.  They will consult with caddies and seek ruling from judges.  They will pull different clubs out of the bag.  They will check the wind.  They will roll up their pants legs and walk into the hazard.  Sometimes, they will even go all Van De Velde (for you golf fans) and take a stupid swing at the ball and make things much, much worse.   And all along, the best thing would’ve been to simply accept the penalty and play on.

2.   Be entrepreneurial.

I always thought Tiger missed an opportunity when he signed with Nike for so much of his gear.   Nothing against signing with Nike for the clubs, shoes and whatever, but giving them the clothing line, too, turned him into their mannequin.  Nike dresses him like a second grader in a private school.  His golf clothes are billboards with swooshes.  He could be wearing clothes designed by people like Bill Johnson’s Transient label in D.C., or eco-friendly brands like Nau or Vital Hemptations. Small businesses of all kinds need help these days, and Tiger is just the guy to give it to them.  He can help take a small minority-owned solar energy company national.  He can sign with up-and-coming companies as sponsors, and not charge them a dime.   Instead, he can own equity in them.   This will have the added benefit of re-energizing the fan base, as pulling for Tiger will mean that you are pulling for a host of deserving upstart companies, too.  The hero’s journey requires allies along the way.

3.   Embrace your Cablinasianism.

Tiger has made a big deal about being what the brand calls ‘Cablinasian.’  Caucasian-Black-Indian-Asian.  Okay cool.  But the scripted Tiger only explores a very narrow strand of that, the strand that is privileged, plays a lot of golf, owns a yacht and apparently hits on anyone carrying a cocktail tray.   All brands can tap creative energy by exploring their multiculturalism.   Tiger’s ethnic makeup is one thing besides being a great golfer that can differentiate the brand, but he has to show the audience what Cablinasian means beyond the clever cosmetic of a made-up word.

4.   Be a supporting player for a change.

From the time he was born, Tiger Woods has seldom been in a scene in which he was not the star.  His father basically abandoned his other children to focus on young Eldrick.  By age two, Tiger was on national television hitting golf balls.  When he was a junior, he played with the grown-ups, when he was in college, he played with the pros, as a pro, he plays against the history of the game itself.   That is a pretty lonely path.  He needs to focus on sharing the narrative with others for awhile.  This does not mean going into hiding.  It means consciously taking a backseat in someone else’s scene.  Raise your children.  Work with your charities.  Find a protégé to coach.  In the Networked World, we are measured every bit as much by what we contribute to others as by what we amass for ourselves.  No brand is an island.

5.   Get better at something you’re bad at.

We all develop go-to moves.  If you are good at something, and receive a ton of approval and money for doing it, what is your motivation for doing anything else?   Here is your motivation:  In the Networked World, the narrative is not only multi-channel, it is multi-dimensional.  Relying on your go-to move has the effect of limiting your brand’s value, because it limits the dimensions of the brand that have the potential to improve and grow.  When you have won the Masters by 12 strokes and the U.S. Open by 15 and are probably The Greatest Golfer Who Ever Lived, golf is not an area of growth.  It is a flat line at best.  The growth areas are the dimensions of the brand that have not yet been explored.   For Tiger Woods, this could probably mean just about anything other than playing golf and getting girls’ numbers.  What does it mean to you?

I only had to glance at the feed headlines this morning to see that ‘Cyber Monday’ is getting pushed as the big online holiday shopping day by the mainstream media like some kind of suspicious-smelling Santa whose lap our parents are insisting we sit on.

Well, peeps, here’s what The Ol’ GameChanger has to say about that…

First of all, Monday will unfold as it gets performed for the first time ever, not according to a script written by someone we’ve never met, into which we have had zero input. It is going to be a day you and I create together, collaboratively.  We do not have to shop today to make today a success.  And if we do shop today, will that be the measure of our success?  Today there are a lot of people trying to convince the marketplace that the metric of our success is one particular number or set of parameters they expect to be generated over a designated 24-hour period.  Maybe this is true for you, maybe it’s not.  Chances are, it’s not.  So the idea of marking to market on a so-called Cyber-Monday is, in fact, pure fabrication.  It’s a one-way ticket on the train to Crazy Town.  Whether the headlines tomorrow about Cyber Monday are good or bad, they will most assuredly be bullshit.

Second, asking the cyberculture to shop on Monday is ludicrous, because a netizen has the ability to shop anytime, anywhere.  We can shop (or work or communicate or whatever) when we’re in line for coffee, we can shop on Cape Cod while we’re sunning ourselves in Capri, we can shop for Lakers-Celtics tickets while we’re at a Spurs-Mavericks game, we can even shop while we’re taking a piss, an experience for which there is no brick-and-mortar equivalent, except maybe for the super-rich.  You can probably get a cappucino  in the restrooms at Goldman Sachs.  I wouldn’t know.  What I do know is that asking a netizen to transact on Monday is kind of like asking a fish to swim.  We transact every day.  When the fish swims, it’s news because..?

My friend Tricky Kid, one of the most on-the-pulse people I know, tweeted me Thanksgiving evening from his car after driving past a store where people were camping out overnight so they could get in there the instant it opened on Friday morning. “Pathetic,” wrote Tricky.   The reason Tricky Kid found the overnight line pathetic is that the whole concept of the line — and the linear in general — is an Industrial Age design, and we are living in a non-linear world.  Always have been, really.

The architects of Cyber Monday might as well push headlines that say ‘Online Merchants Promote Cyber Whatever’ or ‘Fish Expected to Swim on Monday’.

A GameChanger names the day after the fact, by what has been created on that day, not ahead of time, as advertising for whatever he or she is expected to consume.

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.

When there’s so much natural disruption in the workplace, there’s no need to go looking for it, or fomenting it.  It’s going to happen no matter what.   What GameChangers realize is that times of change are also times of immense opportunity.  When the ground is in upheaval, it’s time to plant.  The same is true with the business environment.  Players who are ’sowing  seeds’ during the disruption are those most likely to benefit when the seasons change.  That doesn’t mean it’s easy, or without its pains and stresses.  But there is a productive path, there is always a produtive path, and a GameChanger is in the best position to make the choices that lead in that direction.

Participating in and managing disruption requires an understanding of what is at the root of it.  You cannot manage your own situation if you don’t understand the larger context in which your situation is happening, and the forces that are in play.  The biggest change, when it comes to the business environment, the single biggest source of disruption, is that we are moving on a global scale away from Industrial Age business models and organizations to models and organizations built to operate in the Networked World.  This shift is so profound that it deserves its own name.  Call it The Disrupture.

Understanding The Disrupture gives you the opportunity to see it, act on it, and benefit from it.

To help you on your journey, here’s a crib sheet.  Here are some characteristics of business in the Industrial Age, and what is going to replace them in the Networked World.

Rigid—>Fluid

Predictable—>Capricious

Controlled—>Liberated

Owned—>Shared

Cosmetic—>Authentic

Market Research—>Trend Analysis

Scripted—>Improvised

Nation Building—>Community Building

Released—>Discovered

Repetitive—>Progressive

Pushed—>Invited

Monologue—>Conversation

Prima Donna—>Team Player

Status—>Happiness

Hierarchy—>Tribe

Doctrinaire—>Heuristic

Memorized—>Understood

Domination—>Support

Advertising—>Narrative

Planning—>Preparation

Ideology—>Reality

Who—>How

Consumer—>Customer

Stakeholders—>Audience

Money—>Wealth 

Greed—>Generosity

Dogmatic—>Karmic

Group Think—>Group Mind

Destiny—>Serendipity

The Big Idea—>The Good Idea

Right—>Consistent

Wrong—>Inconsistent

Move away from the Industrial Age qualities  like they smell bad, because they do, they reek of decay and demise, like a rusted-out steel mill in Wilkes-Barre or a Tennessee slough suffocating with coal sludge.

The characteristics of Networked World, by contrast, smell like Monterey Bay, a farm field in Indiana in the spring, or a forest full of Oregon evergreens after a rain.  It is the smell of new growth.  Be guided by this aroma, it will not steer you wrong.

Father Alberto Cutie of Miami has been in the news a lot lately

Forget for a second that this scene has anything to do with religion.  It’s not really what the scene is about, anyway.  The scene is about is faith and  faithlessness.  It is about reputation and disrepute.  It is about a tug of war between one’s own personal brand and values, and the brand and values of an organization.

In other words, it is a scene that is completely familiar to anyone who’s ever had to make a career decision that involves profound personal choices.  Which means it’s about all of us.

By making his Catholic-to-Episcopal ‘career move,’ Father Cutie (it’s pronounced COO-tee-ay, sorry to disappoint the anthropomasticians among you) went from being a pariah in one organization to a valued member of another.  By choosing the person he loves over the organization to which he belonged, Cutie affirmed the bona fides of his personal brand.  Known for giving relationship advice to young Spanish-speaking people (he has a radio show and a book on the subject) in South Florida, he gained more cred than he lost.  After all, it only makes sense that someone in a relationship giving advice about relationships comes across as more authentic to his audience than someone who’s celibate, or professes to be.

In the Industrial Age, organizations defined the roles of their employees.  Those employees, like parts of a big machine, were interchangeable.  If your role defines you, then what matters is not who you are, but what you are, i.e. how well you play your role.  This explains how the Catholic Church has gotten itself in such a twist, in terms of its brand, with the seemingly-endless public litany of the sexual misdeeds of its clergy.  As long as a priest played the role, the Catholic Church overlooked who was playing it.  You can be faithful to an organization and still wreak havoc in your community.

Organizations in the Networked World, by contrast, resemble their employees more than their employees resemble them.  They are more biological than mechanical.  Who you are is more important that what you are.  You are only as good to your brand as your are to your community, and it is impossible to uncouple the two.  

By changing the game, Father Cutie went from being a faithless priest to a faithful human being–faithful to the woman he loves, the God he believes in and the community he serves.  He will likely be a strong addition to the Episcopal team.

Nothing.

Nothing…

Still nothing…

Nothing yet…

Nothing…

Maybe now?

Nope.

Nothing…

Even more nothing…

Nothing…

Nothing…

Not a thing…

Silence.

Followed by silence.

Followed by silence.

And then…

Nothing…

Followed by nothing…

Followed by nothing…

And more nothing…

Until –

– the people standing onstage and those in the audience would get uncomfortable, they’d giggle and stew in self-consciousness. When she had everyone squirming, Spolin would finally give the people onstage a simple task to perform, like counting the floorboards. This would break the tension. Given something to do, the group would find focus. The audience, meanwhile, had something to watch, and hold its attention.

Spolin would then note the change.

For the group onstage, the game (’Count the Floorboards’) defined the objective and created focus. It made the difference between productive behavior and wasted time. Given a game to play, the group would go from aimless, nervous and unfocused to focused, purposeful, confident.

For the audience, the activity generated by the game provided multiple points of interest, posed and answered dramatic questions, and helped define the characters of the people on the stage.

This is the simplest explanation I know for how improvisation works: A game focuses a group’s otherwise aimless energy on the objective, and gets the audience involved.

Last year, early in the existence of GameChangers, the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) of Reno-Tahoe generously (the teaching at that time was as raw as green strawberries) invited me to conduct a GameChangers workshop for 40 of its members in the plush auditorium of the Reno Arts Museum

To introduce the workshop, I used the Spolin exercise described above, and something very revealing happened because of it. Within 30 seconds, the six entrepreneurs I’d invited to take the stage began lining themselves up according to height. Then they reversed the line. Then they re-aligned according to age. In other words, they created their own game!

I was writing my book at the time, and the event in Reno inspired me to polish passages like this that were already in draft form:

The future…belongs to the flexible, the free-spirited, the open-minded, the entrepreneurial. It belongs to people with heightened powers of observation, who excel in teamwork and creativity; to people who can adapt in a changing business environment. To people who don’t plan as much as they prepare. Who don’t cling, they let go.

Entrepreneurs improvise. They start their own engines. They do not wait for directions or for permission before they take action.

Waiting for directions, or for approval up and down a chain of command, or for permission from a committee, and even that old standard called Biding Your Time Until Someone Else Makes a Decision for You (After Which You Can Blame Them When Things Go Bad), are all behaviors calibrated to the rigid, hierarchical, mechanized structures of Industrial Age organizations.

In the fluid, networked, neo-biological business environment of the global economy, these behaviors from a bygone era can sap a brand like Colony Collapse Disorder can disappear a hive of honeybees.

Networked organizations thrive on entrepreneurship at every level. They invite personal initiative, objective coaching by management, productive games with clear rules, distinctive voices harmonizing as the ’sound of the brand’, and spontaneous yet informed decision-making aligned with agreed-to themes, values and mission.

In a word…

Improvisation.

Good improvisers always pay attention to their physical appearance and presence.

Improv theater rehearsals sometimes focus almost exclusively on communication through one’s physical movements and attitudes. Players, for instance, will walk randomly back and forth across the stage as their coach calls out directions that alter their walks. The directions do NOT suggest a physical response (”Your left foot hurts.”) but an emotional one (”You just won the lottery!”) to be reflected in the walk. Each player responds in his or her own way. One player who ‘just won the lottery’ might skip; another will add some bounce to the step or glide to the stride; still another may walk around in a happy daze.

There is no one correct response to the emotional state. Rather, the focus is on players responding as their authentic selves. The question posed by the coach that each player ‘answers’ with a distinctive walk is “How would YOU do act if YOU won the lottery?” Distinctive repsonses by each player make the group portrait a compelling one. There is ‘a lot going on’ in such a performance, it presents many perspectives and avenues of exploration. When every response is the same (’We’re all skipping because we won the lottery’), there is only one thing going on.

Walking is one of many ways players express an emotional state or an attitude. All aspects of appearance, movement, posture, attitude and presence are considered by an improviser. An improviser has no tic, no mannerism, no way of standing or sitting or looking that does not reflect the emotional life of the role being played. Coaches ask players to consider the angle of their spine, their tempo, their chin, and how they use their hands, continually guiding them toward an awareness of a spirit of animation, literally, the movement of life.

By comparison, how many people in business, Bill Gates among them, are stunted in this area of communication? Many. We adopt one posture, one tempo, one way of dressing, and that, for all practical purposes, is our identity. Bill Gates has the classic geek slouch going. He leads with his head. You can tell he spends a lot of time reading or hunched over a computer or slouched on a couch playing videogames. This posture puts a lot of strain on his lower back. It gives him a belly — more strain on the back — that he would not have if he stood up straight. His body is like a fist forming around his heart. His posture and profile are so familiar that they ‘read’ in silhouette. It is his role, one he has obviously played brilliantly, to be the head brain, the leading thinker, the guy with the vision, the trillionnaire tycoon. The posture is in no way out of character, and aside from the healthiness aspect, you can’t argue with it.

It is no coincidence that Gates’ posture perfectly mirrors that of Montgomery Burns of The Simpsons. They’re essentially playing the same role, the only difference is that Gates is somewhat more conniving and malicious than Burns. (j/k, maybe)

The important point about Gates’ posture is this: His edit of his Microsoft scene, and his eventual entrance onto a new stage, present him with an opportunity. Making a move like Yoga can literally change his posture and open his heart. It will give Gates a new characterization for his next scene, one keeping with his new role as philanthropist and all-around do-gooder who leads with his heart.

Industrial Age organizations demanded consistency of behavior. Players danced a dance choreographed by corporate. It was a marching band, a Busby Berkeley MGM Musical.

Today, in the Networked World, players write code in one scene and become international media sensations in the next. No longer do we play one or two roles in a career. We play ten or twenty or thirty. It’s a mashup mentality. It’s Stomp at your neighborhood theater, performed by your neighbors. Players dance their own dances, and if it’s smart, corporate figures out how to dance along.

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.

Emotions are what move and motivate us. They define our relationships with one another. They inspire (or discourage) us. Recent breakthrough research by scientists like Drs. Hanna and Antonio Damasio show us that emotions are evolutionary triggers. They reward (”feels good”) productive behaviors and punish (”feels bad”) unproductive ones.

Let me give you a very simple distinction between different levels of meaning conveyed in our dialogues with one another. We have a brand. Let’s call it ‘Dog’.

There is cosmetic meaning associated with the brand, the purely factual information about it: ‘Four legs’, ‘Fur’, ‘Canidae Family’, ‘Dog year = Seven Human Years’, etc. etc. etc.

There is meta meaning associated with it, the symbolism used to convey the brand’s role in the world: ‘Lassie’, ‘His Master’s Voice’, ‘Hunter’, ‘Seeing Eye’, ‘Man’s Best Friend’, etc. etc. etc.

And layered into all of the above like oil between deposits of sandstone is the emotional meaning: ‘Loyalty’, ‘Fearlessness’, ‘Friendliness’, ‘Excitement’, ‘Playfulness’ ”Danger’, ‘Love’, etc. etc. etc.

We can say a lot of things about our brand over unlimited numbers of channels, but the things that matter most to the world, that maintain the most vitality, move our audience, and have the potential to grow more meaningful as they traverse our ‘Dognet’, are those aspects of the brand that we convey with emotion.

None of this is to say that emotions are easy to manage or inject into institutionally ingrained processes. This is combustible stuff we’re talking about. Stuff that can sink you just as dramatically as it can elevate you. Let too much emotion seep into a scene with players who view it as a weakness and it will destroy that scene in a heartbeat. Let negative emotions go viral and they will have the same effect on your brand that dogfighting did on Michael Vick.

This, then, is an area where improvisational ability becomes vitally important to business in the networked world. Improvisers understand that productive scenes always involve emotional communication, and they are adept at keeping those emotions positive and focused on the objective. Improvisation provides the discipline and the objectivity necessary to work with the inflammable matters of communication that can bless your brand or mess it up bigtime.

To improvise is to heighten and expand the discoveries in the moment. I call this process leapfrogging. An idea is only as good as our ability to add to it, delve into it, expand on it. Leapfrog it. This is especially true of brand strategies. To the improvisational brand, a strategy is a call for a continuous exploration of the themes and ideas the brand represents.

Everything is important. Everything matters. In the Networked World, our fates and fortunes are interconnected as never before. The multipliers are intense. It is ultra-important to be consistently aware and respectful of even the tiniest details, because today’s incidentals become tomorrow’s headlines. Ask Eliot Spitzer.

Surrender unto the loss of control. Give up; it’s ok to be confused. If you give yourself permission to wade into the unknown, you are engaging in a process of learning, knowing, creating. Industrial Age behaviors were about the fight for control. In the Networked World our success depends on our ability to create cosmos — consensus, clarity, definition, constellations of meaning! — from chaos. Accept your confusion. Work toward understanding.

Follow the process and the product will come. I was a speaker this week at the Horizons High Performance Computing Conference in Palm Springs. One of my fellow speakers was Tom Lange, Director of Modeling and Simulation for Procter & Gamble, who gave a very engaging presentation on the uses of high performance computing in his company’s manufacturing processes. Among his observations was this: “We don’t sell soap, we sell ‘clean.’” This is a very improvisational concept. Improvisation is a process for exploring themes, and it is the exploration of the theme that yields the performance, i.e. ‘product’.

Realize that the next best thing to perfection is being damn good at whatever you do. Amen.