One night when my son, Alex (who’s leaving tomorrow for a job in NYC) was five years old, we watched the movie

“E.T. had to go home,” I said. “To his family, on the planet where he lives.”

“I didn’t want him to go. I wanted him to stay with Elliot.”

“E.T. and Eliot were sad about it, too. But they love each other. And as long as they love each other, they’ll never really be apart. In their hearts, they’ll always be together.”

A pause, as Alex ponders.

“So you and I will always be together?”

“Yes, Son, you and I will always be together.”

Of all the motivational sayings used in business my least favorites express the idea that  ‘Life is Short.’

Because you see, Life is not short. Life is long. Our own lives are short, for sure. Birth, fornication and death—as the poet Ogden Nash so succinctly put it—are the facts when you get down to brass tacks. A human being’s life—or a whale’s or a bacterium’s—is a tiny spark in the night of eternity. But to say or act as if life itself is short generates the kinds of  hurrying and worrying that can cause us to miss much of what life actually is, or can be.

Life is long like the love a parent has for a child. There is nothing short about that. Nothing hurried. Time ceases to matter when we are proving our love.

Life is long like the warmth of a fire on a cold night. We are warmed as much by an experience as old as humankind as by the fire itself.

No matter what mountain we have chosen to climb, or what sudden twist of fate confronts us, when we behave as if life is short, we begin to hurry, and that’s when mistakes happen. As the basketball coach John Wooden said, “Be quick, but don’t hurry.”

My wish for 2012 is that we all find ways to appreciate the idea that life is long…

That the reason we make footprints on the planet is to mark a path for who comes after, and that it’s not the size of the footprint that matters, but the direction of the path.

That we are patient with one another, and not short, abrupt, rude, inconsiderate, unkind—all the stuff we do intentionally or not, when we get impatient, when we are driven by the ticking of an internal clock that no one else can hear.

That we embrace the notion that our Success is inevitable, and so is our Failure.

That the Birth-Fornication-Death thing is fleeting, but poetry endures.

That we remember that nothing of value was ever harmed by the taking of time. (I thought Abraham Lincoln said it, but can’t find the citation. What’s likely is that even if Abe Lincoln did say it, someone said it before Abe. Because life is long.)

That we see growth not as something that takes time, but as something that transcends time, because growth is happening now and always has been. What can take time is our own ability to see and make sense of it. The Disney animator Ken Anderson once pointed out to me, about the great old California Oak trees in Descanso Gardens near his home in Flintridge, CA, “The trees are dancing. If you could look at them over a long, long time you would see them dancing.” Life-is-short sees a tree. Life-is-long sees a dance.

That while our time here is limited, our ability to love one another is not. And that as long as we act out of love, our footprints will mark a path worth following.

Have a lively 2012! Don’t be the Tree, be the Dance!

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Kevin Wall

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

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

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

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

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

]]> http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/archives/1760/feed 0 http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/archives/1428 http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/archives/1428#comments Thu, 21 Jan 2010 02:03:47 +0000 admin http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/?p=1428 I have a special place in my heart for animation and animators, especially for the artists who draw it by hand. There are only a few of these people in the world. Some say hand-drawn animation is doomed, swamped and marginalized by CGI and the ‘illustrated radio’ that is TV animation. I say there have always been only a few of these people in the world, which makes them all the more rare and valuable, and that there will always be hand-drawn animation, even if it won’t be drawn with lead pencils on sheets of paper.

One of the greatest gifts of my professional life has been the opportunity to hang out and work with people who draw Disney animation. They are exceptionally gifted observers, and experience the world from their own unique space-time perspective. (Once, I was walking through Descanso Gardens in L.A. with the legendary Disney artist Ken Anderson and he pointed up at the huge California Oaks overhead. “Most people see these trees as standing still,” he said. “If we could observe them over time we’d see that they’re really doing a beautiful dance.”) Disney animators inhale life’s experiences deeply like that, and breath it out through drawings that show movement in 1/24th of a second increments, every drawing a work of gallery-worthy art, fed back to us in waves through the twin lenses of character and narrative, as a movie.

“The Princess and the Frog” may not get my vote for the best movie title ever, but it is a positively heroic comeback for hand-drawn animation at Disney, which has, in true fairy tale fashion, awakened, dusted itself off and gotten back in business after being rendered dormant by the Dark Prince, Michael Eisner, and left for dead by many.  And…it features an African American girl as its main character, a first for a Disney animated feature.  We have come a long way since the days of Uncle Remus and Br’er Rabbit. We still have a long way to go.  But if we are like animators…patient, observant, and aware that there is opportunity in every 1/24 of a second…we might just get there someday.

Offer, an actor, comic and Scientology apostate who first came to fame in around May of this year on the Canadian Home Shopping Network, changed the Shamwow game. Analyzed as improvisation, here’s how he does it:

1) Energy. Vince Offer is ‘on’, and there is not a millisecond of his performance where that energy drops off. To the contrary, it builds. It is the kind of energy that commands attention. I mean, he is selling what is basically an inert object. It doesn’t do anything that’s visually or emotionally compelling, like catch fish, or have any emotional resonance like weight loss formulas do. And it’s not like all of us haven’t seen a product that soaks up spills before. Nothing new there. No, the Shamwow has only as much energy and compelling-ness to it as Vince Offer can give it. He knows that the scene is about him and his relationship with the audience, and he claims it strongly, with 100% conviction.

2) Movement. Vince is one of the most animated characters you’re going to see in any medium. There is always something moving with him. Eyebrows, hands, shoulders, mouth–all of it is in play. Your eye is drawn from one beat to the next. He’s quick. “You getting this, Camera Guy?”, the most memorable line in the spot, is there to underscore just how quick he is. Offer’s movement leads the camera and the eye. This gives the Shamwow spots a kinetic quality that borders on Japanese TV commercial style.

3) Depth and Complexity. This is a nuanced point that maybe only experienced improvisers will appreciate, so the rest of you please bear with me for a sec, or skp to #4. Vince Offer has an edge to his character that can only come from the life happening outside the confines of his pitch. Call the quality he brings to the pitch ’sincere bullshit’. Call it whatever you want, because it is open to interpretation that way. Dennis Hopper once explained to me that what made James Dean such a great actor was that Dean ‘used everything’. Hopper said Dean once told him that the world in which he acted did not end at the periphery of the camera’s range, that everything was in play, right down to something the script girl might do, like smoke a cigarette, just out of the camera’s range. Dean, said Hopper, would let that affect him in some way, and become part of his performance. Though the audience would have no idea what stimulated Dean’s reaction, it added a dimension to his performance that they sensed and appreciated. The same thing is true of Vince Offer. From what I can see, this guy has led a pretty interesting life, and you get the sense he’s bringing it with him to the Shamwow show. Note that some people are put off by Offer’s performance, and that the complexity of his character is different from the Industrial Age emphasis on ‘likeability’ embodied by a pitchman like Ronald Reagan and has more to do with the Networked World imperative of ‘authenticity’ embodied in a character like Richard Branson.

4) Heightening. All good improvisation heightens as it goes. What is casual becomes intense. What is low key becomes high pitched. Slow becomes quick and trivial becomes significant. In the hands of skilled improvisers no scene diminishes, ever. The ability to heighten can make the difference between an audience who sits up in its seats, and one who slacks back and checks text messages. Offer treats the audience’s attention like a dog treats a bone. It is his, and he is not about to give it up. Heightening ensures that the audience stays along for the ride.

These four principles–energy, movement, depth and heightening–should be in play in your sales scenes, or in any other business scenes that require a high level of engagement with your audience.

You don’t have to have Vince Offer’s commodity-trader’s kind of energy. But be a presence in your scenes by focusing on the objective and the underlying game.

However you move, be aware of that movement and use it for emphasis.

Experience your life in a way that informs your performance.

And heighten. The transformative experience for your audience can only come about when you take them somewhere they’ve never been before, or show them the mundane (like a chamois cloth) in a new light. You can only do that by moving the scene forward. Expanding it. Exploring its themes. Adding information. There are a thousand ways to do it, and it all comes under the header of heightening.

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.