Our friend, T. H. Culhane, whom I wrote about in an earlier blog entry, is featured in the current issue of National Geographic. The magazine named T. H. one of its ‘Emerging Explorers.’ Check it out to see how T. H. and a generation of his fellow gamechangers are leading the way in discovering 21st Century solutions for 21st Century problems…
Congrats, T. H.!
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. (more…)
What a year. Wow. The best and worst of everything. The birth of the new and the collapse of the old. Yin and Yang.
On one hand, we had Obama, our wedding and the Brady Bunchiness of a new family, my book, Costa Rica, yoga, guitar lessons at Flea’s Silver Lake Conservatory, some fantastic clients and new conversations, and the ever-flowing love between us and the wonderful people in our lives.
On the flip side of the coin we minted in 2008 there was Bush and Cheney and their decrepit Industrial Age ‘war economy’ and the general malaise that came over and corrupted so much American business during their reign. At the end of the year, with Bush madly justifying his abhorrent stewardship of the country since 9/11, and Israel and Hamas burning through their munitions inventory like it’s a holiday sale at WarMart, we are gasping for air like we’ve been standing too long in a garage with a smoking Peterbuilt. One of 2009’s themes is going to be about getting out of that garage and breathing the fresh air of new narratives, new ideas for generating wealth in a networked economy. The engine has to run on something other than oil. (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.
The idea that two seemingly unrelated or conflicting points of view can be synthesized into a new and rewarding perspective is at heart of improvisation. The ability to resolve conflict by identifying and playing productive games is the secret to creativity, innovation and, ultimately, entrepreneurship.
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!
Our November GameChanger of the Month selection was a slam dunk. Barack Obama is going to be America’s first baller president, and he’s going to be its first Improviser-in-Chief.
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. (more…)
A year ago, the town of Newton, Iowa, population 15,000, was in the doldrums. In a pattern that is worth noting because it’s going to be repeated throughout the U.S. in towns large and small as the economy crawls toward new sources of productivity, the town’s largest employer, Maytag Washing Machines, closed its plant and officer there in October of 2007, costing Newton 1,800 jobs, 800 in management and 1,000 in manufacturing.
By early 2007, Newton had already seen the writing on the wall, and had begun mapping its evolution–from washing machines to wind machines, as it would turn out. Today, Newton is home to a manufacturing plant for Boston-based TPI, one of the country’s leading wind turbine brands. CBS Evening News covered the story last week. How Newton did it can serve as a blueprint for other similar-sized communities, whose fortunes (and mis-fortunes) are tightly tied to a single large employer. (more…)
Heather Champ, the Director of Community for Flickr, was the subject of Chris Colin’s Sept 29 On the Job blog on SFGate. Ethan Bauley, social networking entrepreneur for the online marketing company, M80, sent me the link, as he often does when business improvisation makes news.
Heather Champ and her team at Flickr improvise for a living. A big part of their job, according to the article is deciding whether certain photos belong in Flickr or not. The guidelines are not etched in stone. In fact, aside from a few Flickresque sayings like ‘Don’t forget the children,’ guidelines hardly exist at all. Rulings by Champ and her team arise more from the dialogue they have about an issue than from strict black-and-white policies. Policies are riffs on a theme; the rules of the game can change from scene to scene. (more…)
Sigh. The post about Paul Polak got swallowed up by WordPress (and I didn’t have it backed up). So if anyone out there saved the lost post in a file, please send it along and we’ll re-post.
Meanwhile, here’s the re-construction, in abridged form:
Paul Polak, founder of International Development Enterprises and the author of Out of Poverty, has been battling poverty in development countries for 23 years by helping poor farmers eke out a better living off the land. IDE operates on a local level, dealing with grass-roots problems and building markets for locally-manufactured solutions. This self-sustaining model has resulted in cleaner drinking water, better efficiency in agriculture, improved health and better standards of living for millions of people around the world. (more…)