So obvious, it’s funny–no one gets to Carnegie Hall without a ton of practice. It is usually the most ‘talented’ performers who practice most diligently. The talent onstage in Carnegie Hall is, as much as anything, a talent for practicing. A love of the hard work and focus that it takes to master one’s craft.

Rob McNamara writes in Integral Life about ‘The Necessity of Practice.’ Practice, notes McNamara, is preparation. What we are seeing and hearing onstage at Carnegie Hall is a performance informed by preparation. It is the preparation that elevates and defines the quality of the performance.

Everyone has a Carnegie Hall, a place or ideal they’re trying to get to. A vision for the future. And then, quite often, something happens. We get sidetracked. Distracted. Too busy to practice. We stop off at the Carnegie DELI and call it Carnegie HALL. Our ego tells us we have arrived. That’s when the unproductive patterns–sameness, repetition, redundancy, stagnation, smugness—set in. That’s the point where our performances become cyclical, begin to repeat themselves, and our audiences get bored, and begin wondering why they paid their money.

McNamara defines the act of practicing as ‘Engagement.’ The GameChangers Orchestral Model™ identifies six practices that generate productive outcomes in the world. Engagement is one of the six. The other five are:

Heeding (listening, paying attention, observing actively). In the Orchestral Model™, this practice precedes Engagement. As the social media doyenne, Sally Falkow, (@sallyfalkow) says, “You don’t go right up to people having a conversation at a party or social event and just start talking. First you have to hear what conversation is about, and then can you be part of it, and engage with people in a meaningful way.”

Learning. What is revealed to you as a result of your interactions with others, and with your environment? How does your network inform you? How do you turn learning into solutions? All this takes practice.

Creating. How does what you do make a difference? How does it make you unique? How do channel creativity toward innovation?

Performing. What are your criteria? What is your Carnegie Hall? Is it a seven or eight digit number? A place? A whale of a client? A standard you have set for yourself, or that others have set for you? How does your performance differentiate you?

Deciding. How consistent are you? What values do you represent? How clear and shareable are your decisions? What themes are important to you? Who and what influences your behaviors? If your deciding practices are weak, Big Trouble soon come.

Performing and Deciding are what we call the core practices. If you are not good at these–if you don’t have a clear vision of where you’re going, or if you are indecisive and wishy-washy along the way—the rest of the practices will not matter, because you’ll be too busy zig-zagging toward a mirage, rendering meaningless decisions in service of illusory goals.

So call the whole thing Engagement, yes, definitely! Practice it! Be engaged! Be present! Pay attention! Notice! That’s a good first step. Then refine your practices into the six different areas of the Orchestral Model™, like an athlete working on muscle groups or a musician working through different progressions.

And when call comes from Carnegie Hall, you’ll be ready.

People get lucky in all sorts of ways.  I’ve always been lucky with teachers.  My teachers, it always seemed to me, performed at a high level.   They inspired me.  How?  They had great energy, and enjoyed what they were teaching.  Their senses of humor were intact.   They connected the gifts they gave us to a larger world, they cracked open doors that many of my friends and I eventually walked through.

I recite the names of my K-12 teachers to myself, like a person might go over the names of relatives in a family tree or a litany of saints to invoke a certain kind of contentment about one’s path:

Lena Bonifer (my grandma), Sister Francille, Evangeline McDaniel, Henrietta Allen, Sister Augusta, Henrietta ‘Sparrow’ Spink, Ken Dudine, Emil Dischinger, Dimp Stenftenagel, LINDA ROHLEDER (especially Linda Rohleder!), Sister Aloysius, Barry Bird, Gene Keusch, Vincent Arvin, BILL BASSLER (especially Bill Bassler!), Hershel Zehr (”I can solve the time zone issue.”), Del Steinhart (”This is how a brick wall moves during an earthquake.”), Cabby O’Neill (’We don’t live in a democracy, we live in a representative republic!’), Pete Gill, Dave Leuking, Ray Minton, Jerry Brewer, Jack ‘Bulldog’ Leas, Don Hayes, Mary Ann Hayes (favorite historical character:  Eleanor of Aquitaine, wtf??!!), Mel Menke, Ed Schultheis, Rex May, Ray Cox, Ed Haller, Don Gamble, Paul East, Aloysius Mathias Alonzo Curabin Schuler–and can’t forget our school bus driver for eight years, Harold Diddleburger (Bus #3 Ruled!)  I have funny stories and loving memories of you all, God bless you wherever you are!

About the CAPITALIZED:

Linda Rohleder, my sixth grade teacher, wanted great things for us.  She was always bringing up and getting us involved in learning that had to do with the Astronauts, Vietnam, the Optimist Club Speech Contest, the County Spelling Bee, Fast Food, Fashion, Charles Dickens, Indiana State University and a hundred other ideas about the world that cracked doors.  Never mind the finger, she did not permit her students to even give one another a thumbs-down gesture.  Rumor was that she and Don the Bookmobile Driver had a thing going on.

Bill Bassler was my high school Latin teacher for three years.  He showed me how there’s life in everything if you know where to look, even in a supposedly dead thing like the language of ancient Rome.  When he was guiding us through The Aneid or Julius Caesar, a Coca Cola ad written in Latin, or a Roman kid calling out to his buddy to come play, (“Yo, Publius, what are you doing?!”), you were there, living it right along with him.

My lucky streak continues to this day, with my teachers in improvisation, music and the various languages of new media.  Jason Pardo, Aaron Krebs, Sarah Gee, Lonnie ‘Meganut’ Marshall, Craig Cackowski, VIRGINIA KUHN (especially Virginia Kuhn!) and a dozen others have given gifts I’ll be a lifetime repaying.   I’d rather have the good fortune of knowing and studying with these people than win a hundred lotteries.

I was thrilled to find this photo online, taken last year, of some of my high school teachers. From left: Bill Bassler; Aloysius Mathias Alonzo Curabin Schuler and his wife, Rosina; Mary Ann Hayes behind the ribbons; Don Hayes; Del Steinhart

Arvai’s presenation rambled all over the place.  He seemed to have no one particular point he was driving at.  Frequently, he’d turn his back to the audience, look up at his Prezi projected on a large screen, scratch his head, and navigate around the Prezi until he found the next thing he wanted to talk about. Sometimes he got a little lost as to where in the Prezi he could find what he was looking for.

On top of the seeming incoherence of his story, Arvai, as a Scandanavian by upbringing, isn’t what you’d call an animated personality type.  His voice has a pleasant, sing-songy quality, like small waves lapping at a dock on a lake. His performance style doesn’t have that build-build-build-bada-bing! quality that TV packages into bites like Nabisco packages cookies.

Afterward, outside the room, I heard people panning the presentation.  “Boring.” “You’d think he’d have it more together.”  “I can’t believe that guy’s the CEO!”

The people who were disappointed were looking for a particular form or style from Arvai, and probably looking to be entertained for an hour by a showman, a pitchman, a visionary, a clown, or a pundit.  None of that materialized, so waaaah!  They were like children who didn’t get the toys they wanted for their birthdays.

These people, I think, missed the gift Arvai gave them:  He showed himself learning! It was one of the most interesting and disarming games I’ve ever seen a CEO play in a presentation.  To show the audience how one uses Prezi, he was willing to get himself lost in it.

In a totally unforced and improvisational way, Arvai showed how putting Prezi to best use means working with themes, chipping away and shaping them to a narrative, purposefully getting lost in the material so that you can find meaning in it, as if the information you put on the Prezi screen is a stone and your narrative is a sculpture.

I thought it was brilliant.  Another thing I liked about his presentation is that it was conversational, which was good for the relatively small room we were in.  Arvai showed that ‘always-on’ doesn’t have to mean always being the center of attention.  You can be ‘always on’ if you step onto the stage as if a conversation were taking place before you got there and you’re joining it.  That way of ‘always performing’ is more genuine and easier on the life of your batteries than if you have to crank up the voltage every time you step in front of a group of people to talk about your product.

Our friend Barbara Groth, CEO of the design company, Big Buddha Baba, put something on her Facebook profile earlier today that seems to applie to Arvai’s prezi:

“Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting.”
— Haruki Murakami

Weinstein’s video demonstrates brilliantly how our perceptions shape our opinions.  That’s the obvious learning.

There are other, subtler ideas expressed in this video, too, which is why I really dig it.  It has lots of subtext:

The absence of knowledge makes perceptions more malleable. Because Weinstein is unknown to his subjects, slight adjustments in his appearance seem to cause wild fluctuations in perceptions (the edits themselves also shape perception, but I’ll comment only with subjects’ behavior here).  Anyone or any brand that seeks to limit knowledge?  This is why.  Manipulation of perceptions.  In a business environment where knowledge is so easily shared and transferred, limiting knowledge in order to manipulate perceptions is not good business.

Consistent character encourages learning. Weinstein’s character, a slightly bemused, inquisitive observer of human nature, seems consistent throughout.  As a storyteller, he uses this truth to get honest reactions from his subjects—that is, because he’s consistently in character, we can be pretty sure the subjects’ reactions are their own, and not something he has manipulated them into doing   Imagine if, instead, he’d played different characters in the interviews—aggressive, stupid, coy, flirty—we would not have been half as interested in or trusting of what his subjects had to say.  He and we would not have learned half as much.

Interrogation is not dialogue. The questions all go one way.  Weinstein does this to control the narrative and make a point.  Generally, however, dialogue is much more productive than interrogation.

This is what a lot of market research looks like. Like market research, Weinstein’s film is a series of snapshots.  It is an interrogation of the audience, not a dialogue.  Because of the way the interviews are conducted, the audience’s multi-faceted responses are nearly all flawed.  It doesn’t matter how much data you have if its facets are flawed and unrelated.  Many facets do not a diamond make. It is the interrelationship of the facets, their connection to one another, that illuminates the stone.

Admit your ignorance. Nearly everyone in the video is willing to guess about Weinstein’s identity, and in doing so they accept a ‘rule of the game’ that underscores their ignorance.  This is a fine storytelling device for Weinstein’s video, but it’s a toxic game in business.  For some managers, however, this is THE  game.  A conversation consists of them waiting for a ‘gotcha’ moment, when they can prove you wrong, ignorant, or both.  People pretending to know what they’re talking about are just as much to blame for this game as those who expose them.   Beware of games designed to show up anyone’s ignorance!  Admitting your ignorance is a first step toward learning.  Guessing, or faking knowledge, is not.  Ultimately, Weinstein’s video delivers the goods in the form of questions answered, but not before he demonstrates just how elusive the goods can be.

This is an appreciation.

John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison’s new book, The Power of Pull–How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, describes the business environments most of us are living in these days:  fluid, complex, generative, with networks, not machines, as their framework.  The book itself reflects this.  Its structure mirrors the structure of a network.  Its concepts are expressed as a matrix.  This gives the Power of Pull depth and perspective that asks quite a bit of the reader.  I had to go through the book twice to even begin to grasp its concepts and their implications to business.

The reading expands as you’re reading, as if you could stop at almost any page in the book and use it as a lens to zoom in on some aspect of business in the 21st Century.  What will it be like?  How will it change us? How can we change it? Who will prosper? What will hold us back? What’s the relationship between chaos and control? Between core and edge? It’s a lot to ponder.  This is not some fluffy recipe for feeling good about the future.  This is an important assessment of the work to be done.

The Power of Pull labels this evolution ‘The Big Shift.’  Make no mistake, The Big Shift is a life-altering change of game.  It is the tornado to Oz.  It is the jump to hyperspace.  It is the event that turns everyday turtles into Ninjas.  Prepare to be transformed by what you read.

Here’s a small sampling of the many concepts expressed the book that can make the difference between survival and prosperity in the networked era of business.

Push vs. Pull. ‘Push’ business models are (the GameChangers term for it) ‘Industrial Age’ models.  They are machine-like, hierarchical, heavily scripted, and emphasize planning over preparation. As one manager told me recently, “We are supposed to plan for every contingency, but you can’t plan for every contingency.  It’s impossible.”  ‘Pull’ models, by contrast, are dynamic, nimble, and emphasize preparation over planning.  In the Pull model, plans are designed to evolve, and deviations from the norm are seen not as failures but as opportunities to learn and grow.

Stocks vs. Flows. Push models treat knowledge as a scarce commodity.  A stock.  A ‘Push’ manager says, “I know but I can’t tell you.”  Pull models treat knowledge as an abundant resource.  A flow.  A Pull manager says, “Here’s what I know that can help solve the problem.”

Fast Learning. Push models called for standardized institutional learning.  Everyone worked off the same playbook.  In the networked world, there’s no time to transfer knowledge from edge to core, have it interpreted, codified and re-distributed to the edge as institutional dogma.  By the time the core has reacted, the opportunity to put the knowledge to use has been lost.  Because they treat knowledge as abundant and not as a scarce commodity, Pull models are free to direct flows of knowledge not just to the core, but to wherever in the enterprise there is a problem to be solved.  This is a far more efficient way for a company to apply its knowledge than the old Push model.

Small Moves. As improvisers we learn that the little things can make the biggest difference to performance, because the little things that have the ability to expand into big things, and the audience loves this.  Big things, by contrast, can only get so big as to be unmanageable, or be broken down into manageable chunks.  The small moves have manageability built into them. Networks are designed to knit together small moves into significant phenomena.  When communication is significant, markets move.   And when markets move, money gets made.

Serendipity. (I neglected to include this in the original post, and it’s important.)  Serendipity is an unforeseen positive outcome.  Because networks contain infinite potential for serendipity, it is essential to take it into account in the Pull model, as Hagel III et al certainly do.  Improvisation can influence serendipity in two ways:  First, because unforeseen positive outcomes are what improvisers intend in every scene, it invites serendipity; second, it is a process for turning the unforeseen events into positive outcomes.   Push models automatically regard what is unforeseen as negative.  Pull models (and improvisers) greet what is unforeseen as an opportunity to make something positive happen.

What JSB, Hagel III and Davison describe in The Power of Pull is a kind of magnetism.  The cover of the book shows iron filings aligning along magnetic fields.  This is my one quibble, what I’d call a slight disconnect in their narrative:  If The Power of Pull is, in fact, meant to describe magnetism, then the concept of Push can’t be discounted or discredited quite so much as the authors seem to want.  Magnetism involves both Pull and Push, attraction and repulsion.  There is a relationship between the two.  Just because we are divorcing Push to marry Pull doesn’t mean we’ll never deal with Push again.  We had kids with Push.  We built some wealth together.  As the authors themselves point out in the book, without a core there can be no meaningful edge.  Push will never be entirely out of the picture.

There is a whole new language coming into existence to describe business in the networked world.  This language invokes new rules, like the 140 characters rule; and defines new ways of collaborating, like the crowdsourcing game.   The Power of Pull freshens the lexicon by describing how and why business is changing, must change, to prosper in the new realities made possible by networks.  If, as I believe, this is magnetism we’re talking about, the work of realizing the new realities will consist in equal parts of rejecting the negative, attracting the positive, and not messing with the in-betweens.   Push, Pull or Get Out of the Way!

Marc was, to my knowledge, the best auto mechanic on campus.  He’d wheel his Low Boy under a car chassis, listen to an engine, or spider around under the hood and demonstrate that while you might have had the supposedly functional eyes, you couldn’t look at a car with the skill that he could.

He was one of the best students at Notre Dame.  And a party animal.  And a ladies man.  He had a great sense of humor.  In Sorin Hall, where Marc and I lived, nobody thought of him as handicapped.  Quite the contrary.  He was gifted.  By comparison, most of us were lazy, ignorant slugs.

I have not stayed in touch with Marc over the years, but I have kept tabs on him.

A few years ago, for example, Disney planned to release a feature film based on the sight-impaired Mr. Magoo cartoon character.  At first I heard the rumors coming out of Disney’s film marketing department.  “Someone in Washington representing blind people is causing trouble.”  And then I heard the name Marc Maurer, and I had to smile, because I knew it was game over, a mismatch from the get-go.  Dr. Maurer, who today is President of the National Federation of the Blind, chewed up the Mouse and spit it out.  Making fun at the expense of the sight-impaired is a mistake Disney will never make again.

Later this week, I will be conducting a GameChangers workshop for Executive MBA students at Notre Dame, and I intend to mention Dr. Maurer.  In researching him, I came across one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard.  In keeping with the character of the Marc Mauer I knew at Notre Dame, the speech is by turns intelligent, inspiring, and hilarious.  Take the time to listen to it.

Some of the beautiful ideas Dr. Maurer expresses in this speech:

If we let a single characteristic become the identifier of a person, it ensures that our estimate of them will be wrong.  Value is measured not by a single characteristic, but by the aggregate of those possessed by each individual.  Each characteristic contributes to the whole, and each may strengthen or hinder the person possessing it.

We live in a society in which blindness is thought to be a condition to be repaired.  Eyes that cannot see are broken.  However, it is false to say that the person who owns them is broken.

We, the blind, do not need to be fixed.  We are fine the way we are.  We can find our meaning and our purpose without modification or alteration.

I do not believe that blindness and helplessness are synonymous.  I carry the cane because it is a tool that helps me travel.  It is a tool of my independence, not a badge of my helplessness.

Learning should not be limited to what trains the mind, it should also train the spirit.

Your life belongs to you!

Note that it’s Federation OF the Blind.  Not FOR the Blind.  It’s not about what we can do for blind people.  It’s about what blind people can do for themselves, and if we’re lucky, for us.  Yeah, Dr. Marc Maurer is blind.  And his vision is just fine.

Vineet Nayar Leads With Modesty

Nayar’s ‘employees first, customer second’ philosophy aligns with a basic concept of improvisation:  Take care of yourself first.  Mick Napier hits this hard in his book, Improvise:  Scene from the Inside Out.  If you wait for the other people in your scenes to have an idea, to initiate, you’re making yourself powerless, and you leave your scene partners and the audience hanging.  And if the other person in your scene waits on you, you’re lost, and so is the audience.  Nayar’s point is the same:  HCL can only be as good to their customer/audience as its employees are to one another.  These behaviors cannot be separated.  You cannot be one way to your scene partners and another to the audience.  It is all part of the same space-time continuum.  And productive action can only begin with you.

Other quotes by Nayar that are consistent with improvisation, and my notes in italics:

“I did not know where I had to go, and I was projecting as if I knew. I assume that you expect me to know where I am going, and you will respect me for that, and the day I tell you both of us are in the same boat, we would fail. That was a very big learning for me.”  Pretending is not illusion  if it is a step on the path to being.

“If you see your job not as chief strategy officer and the guy who has all the ideas, but rather the guy who is obsessed with enabling employees to create value, I think you will succeed.”  Support, the giving of gifts, is the most powerful tool in the improviser’s repertoire.

“How do I communicate to employees to not look up to me, but to look within, to communicate that I’m one of you, to destroy that hierarchy? So I decided I’m going to go into this big gathering of employees dancing to a very famous Bollywood song. And I can’t dance for nuts, right? I was dancing in the aisles with these employees and making lots of noises. What happened? It completely destroyed the gap.”  When you want to communicate something important, use more than information to do it.

“The failures are far in excess of successes.”  Failure is not defeat if it is a step on the path to understanding.

“I don’t want people who are coming here and teaching me something or teaching the organization something. I don’t want teachers. I want people who are not only charged up because they like it, but because they will learn from this experience. I’m looking for people who see experience as a continuum and not as an end in and of itself.”  Improvisers are not teachers.  We are builders of  environments in which communication, learning and transformation can happen.

IMPORTANT FOOTNOTE!

When we tried linking to the HCL URL with Mozilla Firefox 5.0, we got this message:

We noted this ‘FAIL’ in the post.  Within minutes of publishing the post, an HCL employee, Aruj Kapoor, wrote to say he was sorry they’d been down, that they’d fixed the bug and the site was restored.  And not only that, he ‘yes-anded’ by asking what specific information we were seeking when the site went down.  Aruj’s awareness of what my experience must’ve been when I hit the dead link–frustration, confusion, puzzlement–led him to offer his support to the scene I’d initiated with HCL. Be sensitive to your environment and it will tell you what you need to know. By yes-anding, Aruj converted a mistake into an opportunity to extend the dialogue between the HCL brand and me.  Nice move.  Every mistake is an opportunity to do something useful.

My aim was to learn what kind of strategies these men use to get hired.  After all, what could be a more honest scene than one that has to be productive if a player wants to eat that night?  When lives literally depend on one’s behavior, how does one behave?  This is obviously far from scientific.  I draw no firm conclusions from it, and neither should anyone else.  But everything, even five minutes talking with day laborers outside a Home Depot, is a learning opportunity if you are open to it.

In my brief and chaotic encounter with the day laborers on the sidewalk in front of the Home Depot, here’s what I learned:

The loudest and most aggressive get the attention first, but the best communicators get the attention that lasts.  Communication that day begins with a surge of attention and energy coming my way in a ragged five-foot-six sweatshirted and baseball capped wave.  The wave has no shape, it’s pure cacophony as nearly every one of the 40 guys on the sidewalk clamors for attention.  The wave breaks and dissipates when I begin asking questions most of them don’t understand, and it becomes clear I’m not there to hire.   The multi-lingual players move front and center and focus fiercely on understanding what the tall gringo in the black fedora wants.

“Why do people hire you?  Who is the best at getting hired?  Why?  What do you tell people that gets you the job?  Do you work alone or in teams?”

A few of the men, younger than most of them, comprehend.  At this point, a minute in, the scene centers on three or four people, with the rest of the guys either walking away or lurking nearby to see where this is going.   Skill sets come up.  Yes, the young men in front say, knowing how to do many jobs is a plus.  They begin to recite all the skills they have…painting, dry wall, concrete, plumbing, floors, landscaping…”

One of them, name of Jose, stands out.  He is the most articulate and the one most capable of engaging in a dialogue.  He says that to get work it helps to speak English and Spanish, do many jobs well, and have friends who will bring you along when groups get hired.  And a business card, he says.  Here is my card.  He is the only one with a card.

I slip Jose twenty dollars and tell him to buy breakfast for an old guy standing near us, who looks like he’d be the last one out of this big group to get hired for the day.  Which means he has almost no chance of getting hired.

Getting hired for a day by a contractor to plaster walls in Echo Park has more in common than most of us would like to believe with finding work in the Networked World.   In a swirling, shifting job market, employment opportunities move like empty vans into a Home Depot parking lot.  The vans are not empty long.  We’d better be ready to attract a contractor’s attention, and when we have it, hold it.  A player needs a strategy, and a player must be prepared to improvise.

Here’s what I learned (or was reminded of) that day:

It helps to throw off a lot of energy at first, but that doesn’t last long.  Okay, so you made a big entrance, or delivered a killer initiation for the scene.  Now what?  Once you have an audience’s attention, what are you going to do with it?   What skills do you have that will expand and heighten the scene, and captivate your audience?  In a Home Depot parking lot and in the Networked World, it helps to have many skills.  If you’re in media, can you write, produce, direct, shoot and edit?  If you’re in law, can you arbitrate, negotiate, adjudicate, argue, defend, file…and market yourself?  If you’re in HR, are you versed in psychology, human sexuality, labor law, hiring practices?  If you’re working a staff job you hate can you navigate into doing something you love without missing a beat?

It helps to speak many languages, and I don’t necessarily mean spoken languages, though that certainly helps, especially if it’s Chinese.  (Chinese students are learning English at a way faster rate than American students are learning Chinese.  It cannot help but expand their opportunities for employment in the next 10-12 years.)  Humor is a language.  Programming obviously includes many languages.  Cloud Computing has its own lexicon, as does Sustainability, and almost every industry.  Golf can be a language you and a potential employer speak.  Or gaming.  Or travel.  Food.  Music.  The point is, always be adding to your vocabulary.  It will give you a broader audience.  It will help you engage in more productive dialogues with more potential employers.

In To Have and Have Not, Ernest Hemingway wrote, ‘A man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance.’  I think the boys in the Home Depot lot would understand that, and so should you.  When you’re part of a team, a tribe, an emotionally-bonded group (with the Home Depot boys it’s probably their hometowns in Guatemala, Nicaragua or Mexico that bind and define them), your opportunities are increased exponentially.  When your homie makes a connection with a contractor who ‘needs four for drywall,’ homes will bring you along on the job, and vice versa.  Your team gives you an opportunity to be of service to others.  In life, in work, in improvisation, supporting others is the strongest move you can make.

Lifelong employment with one company has pretty much dodo birded, which is to say it’s kaput, gone, extinct.  Work in the Networked World will be more project-based or brand-based than it was in the Industrial Age.  These days, a person can have five or six, or ten or twelve ‘careers’ in their working lives.  Nothing wrong with that.  It can lead to rich and rewarding experiences.  It can also be hugely disruptive, especially when young families are caught up in it.  The people who navigate these swirling waters best, those who are captains of their own destiny,  communicate best.  And they never stop learning.

Here is Jose’s business card.  If you’re in the L.A. area and need someone to do Painting–or Drywall or Taping or Linoleum or Roofing or Gardening or Plaster or Sprinklers or Stucco or Block or Hardwood Flooring or Cement or Ceramic Tile–give him a call.

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.