William Gibson

Where trajectories of fashion, business, government and technology will someday intersect, William Gibson is already there, reporting back in mindbending detail.  His novels are, for me anyway, like books of code, densely-clued mysteries about the near future, that challenge a present-day intelligence to unravel them.  Here is one clue that gets dropped over and over again in Gibson’s newest novel, Zero History:

In the future, improvisation is a must-do.

Page 135:  “Doing it, as a pickpocket had once advised him, as if it were not only the expected but the only thing to do.”  The improvisation:  When you invest in your scene, the scene makes choices for you.  ‘Doing what’s expected’ is someone else’s script for you, it’s a voice in your head that’s not even your own.  ‘Doing the only thing to do’ is the feeling that you are in tune with everyone and everything around you.  It is acting on the clarity of one’s intuition instead of  obeying the voices stored in the RAM of one’s rational mind.  Just don’t be using your new-found powers to pick pockets.  Not all improvisation is put to work for the good of the team.  Beware the bad game!

Page 171:  “THE ORDER FLOW” (Chapter title.)  Gibson’s characters talk about “the inability to aggregate the order flow”—the sum of everything being bought and sold around the world at any given moment in time—as being the dynamic that keeps markets alive.  “Stability’s the beginning of the end,” says the character of Milgrim, a high-level intuitive, quoting an even more intuitive base jumper named Garreth.  “We only walk by continually beginning to fall forward.”  The improvisation:  Always fall forward, never stand still.  Turn fails immediately into positives.  Embrace flow.  Stasis—a static state—is the enemy.  Harness chaos with structure.  Subvert structure with flow.

Page 202:  Garreth talking about whether a phone call that’s crucial to their fates will happen or not:  “Either way, we’ve moved it forward.”  The improvisation:  ‘Something happening’ and ’something not happening’ are both opportunities to move your scene forward.  Don’t worry about what will or won’t happen, do something with whatever happens.

Page 225:  “You’re just doing this to see what happens,” says Milgrim.  The improvisation:  Do something and see what happens.

Page 234:  “…some kind of London PR hive-mind thing,” says a character named Heidi, a biker chick who uses taser-tipped darts as her weapon of choice.  “Wires are hot but there’s no actual signal.  Kind of subsonic buzz.”  The improvisation:  This is a description of the group mind.  Nothing perceptible is communicated.  What the group needs to know is simply, without ever being consciously transmitted, already there, waiting to be shared.

Page 319:  “Follow the accident.  Fear the set plan,”  says Garreth.  “I thought you loved plans,” says Heidi.  “Love planning.  That’s different.  But the right bit of improv makes the piece.”  The improvisation:  Think of your process as a series of scenes, in Gibson’s lingo, ‘pieces.’  Preparation is more important than planning.  Planning goes out the window in the first few beats of your scene, but preparation will be there for you throughout.

Zero History also has juicy insights into the future of marketing and brand strategy, which I’ll post separately.

Now go do something to see what happens.

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.

Turns out the Pentagon offical is Sue Payton, the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, and the gamechanger she’s talking about is a ray gun, a weapon the military calls the Active Denial System (ADS). I have read enough comic books and seen enough Star Trek to know that any kind of ray gun (or phaser) is automatically a gamechanger. No questions asked. When a ray gun shows up in the scene, something is going to change soon. So I agree 100% with Sue Payton.

The story reported by 60 Minutes is that the Pentagon isn’t spending much on the ray gun project. As my friend, Michael Wolfson, likes to say, “No bucks, no Buck Rodgers.” Even though its potential to edit dangerous scenes peacefully can, in Peyton’s opinion, save huge numbers of lives, she says there are political concerns in Washington that, especially if deployed in the Middle East, the ADS may be perceived as some kind of torture device.

The improvisation lesson: All three levels of communication, Cosmetic, Emotional and Meta are ‘readable’ in this well-produced piece. On the Cosmetic level is the factual information about the funding of the ray gun, the politics, the technology, the effect it has on its targets, etc. On the Emotional level is the story of Ms. Payton, the project leader, Colonel Hymes, and Lance Heal, who used to head the Pentagon’s non-lethal weapons projects, all of whom advocate ardently for the military to fund this program. On the Meta level, the ‘targets’ in a test of the ray gun shown in the segment are a group of American guys waving homemade protest signs that are all about peace, love, and ending war — a subtle but tangible suggestion that to the Pentagon, peace is the enemy. War is what it’s all about. Saving lives is not the business they are in. It would be interesting to know the backstory behind the mock protesters and their signs. Whose payroll are they on? CBS’ or the Pentagon’s? Who cast those roles and composed the messaging on their signs? It’s a little meta-riddle lurking in the background of the story.

A second 60 Minutes story this week also holds lessons in improvisation. It is the story of Remote Area Medical (RAM), a volunteer organization that provides medical treatment to tens of thousands of needy people in the Americas every year, every year more and more of them in the southern U.S. The initiator (i.e. founder) and central character in the RAM scene is Stan Brock, a native Brit and world adventurer in the spirit of Phineas T. Fogg, someone you’d see as a costume character inside the Adventurer’s Club on Disney World’s Pleasure Island. Jaunty chap. Can-do spirit. As a young man, he earned a living as an Amazon cowboy featured on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, one of the first television shows to mix it up with exotic, often dangerous, animals, and a classic pairing of content with marketing. Brock got paid to do things like get chased by water buffalo, which in turn led many people to want to buy Mutual of Omaha Insurance.

Brock still plays that character — leather aviator jacket, military shirt with epaulets, still flies his own World War II vintage DC-7. Hello, then, let’s get on with it, shall we? Pip-pip! We’ve got pythons to wrestle!

The improvisation lessons: First, strong characters make for strong scenes. CBS gave time to this story because of its colorful central character. Second, know the difference between playing a character and having character. One gets you noticed, the other gets things done. Britney Spears gets noticed. But to what end?

ENVIRONMENT: A Southwest Airlines 737 going from Salt Lake City to Reno/Tahoe. Full flight. Early evening.

ROLES:  My friend Martin Gastanaga and a Southwest Airlines flight attendant.

RULES:  Normal commercial airline procedures apply (Martin’s not already drunk, he’s of legal drinking age, etc.)

SCENE: Martin asks for a Heineken.  The flight attendant hands him the beer.  He offers her a twenty.  She doesn’t have change.  Without hesitating, without missing a beat, she keeps wheeling her cart up the aisle and says,”This one’s on me.”

What a great gift that flight attendant gave on behalf of the Southwest brand! Think about it. How many of the typical things could she have said or done? “Give it to me and I’ll go get change.” “Can you see if your friend has change?” “I don’t have change, hold onto it and I’ll come back.” She could’ve gotten on the plane’s P.A. and asked if anyone had change. Any of these responses would have been perfectly reasonable and expected, but would not necessarily have been productive moves where the scene was concerned. In fact, when you factor in the time of the people involved, the imposition on players who aren’t in the scene and the zero-effect on brand equity, those moves could conceivably be unproductive and not even worth the margin Southwest gets on the sale of the beer.

But the flight attendant didn’t do any of that. Instead she gave a little gift that had big implications. Not the beer, the beer was not the gift, it was only a prop. The gift was friendliness. “This one’s on me” is something you say to a friend. It’s personal. By giving this little gift on behalf of Southwest, the flight attendant reminded Martin that the airline is a passenger-friendly brand.

With four simple words accompanied by an action — the zero-hesitation movement of the cart up the aisle — she touched on themes of the Southwest brand.

Notice she did not tell Martin that the drink was “on Southwest” or “on us.” She didn’t say “Don’t worry about it.” Those moves would have been less personal, less of a gift.

And notice that of all the moves she could have made, this one was the most economical. This too, was the flight attendant channeling the brand, and another way in which a little gift like this one gets big returns on the investment. It was a message to Martin and to all of us within earshot that Southwest makes things easy for its passengers. In so doing, she expands the meaning of “economy” communicating to her passenger that to Southwest, economy not only means low cost, it means ease of movement, too.

Finally, this little gem of a gift was a very effective “Yes and” statement. The attendant yessed the beer transaction and added her friendliness to it, further defining her character and her (and her organization’s) relationship with her scene partner. The friendliness of the exchange implies that not only is there an existing relationship between the players, but that the relationship will continue next time they encounter one another. The implication to Martin is that the next one is on him. Martin will continue to fly Southwest, and if he’s on a flight with that same attendant anytime soon, I guarantee you he’ll pay her back for the Heine. The cost to Southwest’s food services department of giving away the beer might very well turn out to be no cost at all.

I wish I had gotten this flight attendant’s name. She has some kind of genius going for her. And because of that, so does Southwest Airlines.

Southwest does an absolutely brilliant job of casting players with the ability to give gifts like this one in their scenes. It is no coincidence that as one of the most improvisational companies in America over the past 30 years, they have also been one of the most successful.

(THE UPDATE:  A couple of days after this was posted, I got an email from Brian Lusk, head of public relations for Southwest, asking me for the date of the flight on which the above scene took place.  My conversation with Lusk eventually led him to invite me to tour Southwest’s Dallas headquarters.  Two months later, I got an envelope in the mail from Lusk’s office.  It was the paper trail that led from Lusk, through several managers, to a commendation for the flight attendant and the crew that had worked the ‘Heineken flight.’  Imagine!  All that effort to honor a flight attendant who’d given away a beer!  Most companies only expend that kind of energy on an employee when they to fire her.  Bravo, Southwest!)