Take a look at these two passages. The first written recently by a couple of anime fan/bloggers, Kiki and Lala, and the second written by the physicist/philosopher, Fritjof Capra, in his book The Tao of Physics, first published in 1975. 
The human experience has many faces, is described from many perspectives, in many languages, but it is ultimately the same story. There is no one in this world you can meet, no animal you eat, no plant you grow, no product you use, no adversity you encounter, no interaction of any kind you can have, of which it cannot be said, “We are in this together.”
Posts Tagged ‘Networked World’
Kiki, Lala and Fritjof
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010Over Under Sideways Down
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010One of the characteristics of networks is their flexibility. What our communication channels looked like yesterday may not be what they look like today. This, of course, can be an asset or a liability. The net that allows us to build new relationships, discover markets and expand our potential for taking productive action is the same one that swallows channels and markets like a singularity sucking down solar systems in nanoseconds. The global financial system, guaranteed, is right now teetering on the edge of such a debt-and-greed-spun vortex. Call it The Bank Hole.
In our crazy race to escape these kinds of vortexes, we can turn direction-blind. We pick a course of action, or someone picks a course for us, and in our all-out effort to escape a certain fate, we go heads down as hard as we can for as long as we can in that direction, like barn-sour horses galloping toward a distant barn. A strategy, as Umair Haque points out in his latest HBR post, can be just as bad as a locked-in direction, because it can confine or limit one’s options instead of liberating them.
What Haque advocates, and what we could not agree with more, is adopting a set of behaviors (he calls these behaviors ‘Wisdom’) that foster liberation of the ideas and the ethical actions that can deliver us from the Goldman-Sachs Singularity, and whatever else sucks. These behaviors have no time frame, because they are timeless. They cannot be quantified, because they are potentially limitless in number.
One of these behaviors (me, adding to Haque’s list) is to Envision. And by that I don’t mean Ayn Rand’s old Burt Lancaster-as-One-Of-A-Kind-Genius concept of vision but what I call ‘Viola Vision’, which consists of ’seeing and sharing what we see.’ This kind of envisioning expands our horizons, and gives us infinitely more options for escaping what sucks. So in your quest for solutions, don’t forget to:
Look over. It’s how you get perspective on a problem.
Look under. Play with the dynamic of concealment and revelation. Respect roots. Dig deep.
Look sideways. My friend, the animation director John Musker, talks about stories as ‘taking an unexpected left turn.’ A sideways move can shake up your narrative in a way that keeps you on your toes and your audience engaged.
Look down. Who needs help? Some days, this the only question worth answering.
Cyberhouse Rules
Monday, February 8th, 2010I speak occasionally to Steven Lisberger, who directed the landmark motion picture, TRON. Naturally enough, the conversation usually comes around to cyberspace and how, as Steven puts it, “TRON came true.” Lately, we’ve been talking a lot about the role of story and storytellers in the networked world. Steven has a way of boiling things down to their essence. Sometimes I call him Obi-Wan. Here’s some Jedi from our most recent conversation:
Lisberger and Me
“For most of mankind’s existence, our subconscious mind has been hidden. Now it’s on full display in the network. Everything you can dream of is there and accessible instantly. And the question is, what are we going to do with it?”
“People need a new way in.”
“If one aspect of work, access to information, has gotten infinitely easier, the laws of physics tell us that another aspect, one that maybe we don’t recognize yet, has gotten infinitely harder. We expect things to always get easier, but that’s not necessarily true.”
“On one side of the equation you have the swarm, the hive mind, whatever you want to call it. And on the other, you have all these tools, and this demand for productivity. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it will get revealed quicker. So you have to really know what you’re doing. The swarm has to be grounded in capability.”
“The network and the tools are amazing. If people learn how to use the network and the tools, they’ll be amazing, too.”
“One result of networks is the democratization of quality. When all content is pumped out and made accessible, it creates a kind of middling format. It leads to a common denominator effect. This is why elitism matters. Not just anyone can tell a good story, or create a good design.”
“Intellectual bullying perpetuates the wrong argument.”
“With improvisation, you can do a scene where one person plays the landlord and the other person plays the tenant who’s behind on the rent. Then those two people reverse roles, and from that process, you learn how to go about resolving the problem. In business, that never happens. No one switches sides or changes roles. If you play for the Blue Team, that’s the team you stay on. If you’re on the Yellow Team, you stay on that team, and you argue for that side. And you just keep on having the same argument, and it’s terrible, because nothing changes, and nothing ever gets resolved.”
“What you’re doing with GameChangers is fracturing and realigning the sides of the argument so that problems can get solved.”
“The subconscious mind doesn’t recognize time. It exists in a permanent state of ‘now.’ In this sense the subconscious mind is like a child, who doesn’t know anything but ‘right now.’ When the subconscious mind makes itself visible and instantly accessible in the network, and everything exists in a state of now, it breeds immaturity. We begin operating at the level of awareness of an 11 year old. Maturity is something you can only get to over time. It’s linear in that sense. The ethics and perspective that come with time and maturity are what’s missing in this environment.”
“Maturity comes from mastery in the physical realm.”
Tiger’s Unplayable Lie
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009Six years ago, after playing hooky from work on a Friday to watch The Best Golfer in the World play nine holes at Riviera Country Club, I wrote this about him for my company’s blog:
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?
Happy Fish Swim Day
Monday, November 30th, 2009(A RE-POST, SLIGHTLY EDITED, FROM A YEAR AGO ON THE DATE OF THE FIRST-EVER ‘CYBER MONDAY’)
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.
Managing the Disrupture
Thursday, June 18th, 2009
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. (more…)
GameChanger of the Month – May 2009
Monday, June 1st, 2009
Father Alberto Cutie of Miami has been in the news a lot lately. First, a Spanish language tabloid caught the handsome celebrity priest canoodling with a woman on the beach. Last week he made the mainstream news again when he announced in a press conference that he was changing his affiliation from the Catholic Church, with its rules on celibacy, to the Episcopal Church, where priests are allowed to marry.
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. (more…)
Flexible Essence
Monday, April 20th, 2009
Catherine Stephens, a Disney executive, coined this phrase last week in casual conversation when she and I were discussing the studio’s new eco-brand, Disneynature. I am captivated by the pairing of these words, because it describes perfectly the relationship between what a brand stands for, and what it has the potential to become. This tension between fixity and fluidity, between discipline and disruption, between predictability and opportunity, is at the heart of entrepreneurship and branding.
‘Essence’ defines the core of a brand. If brand is a tree, essence flows through its trunk. Essence, especially at the beginning of a brand’s life, is often rooted to the sensibilities of one person or a small group. For example, Steve Job’s appreciation of good design is at the heart of the Apple brand, Jimmy Buffet’s lifestyle is the essence of Margaritaville, and Tamara Mellon’s taste in shoes is the foundation for the Jimmy Choo brand. Essence can also be an institutional philosophy like you’d find at a Japanese auto company, or a fast-paced technology brand like Cisco. Either way, this is where a brand’s fire burns brightest, where vision is most needed, where a brand’s themes are distilled and defined. It is where the secret formula for Coca Cola, Martha Stewart’s personal style, Oprah’s reading list, and the ‘Honest’ in Honest Tea reside.
‘Flexible’ is what the improvisational brand has to be at the edges of its network. Continuing the tree analogy, flexibility is what you find in the tree’s outermost branches and leaves. For a business operating in the Networked World, the edge is where the action is. It is where creative disruption happens. Where innovation is most likely to find its inspiration. Most importantly, it is where a brand carries on conversations with its customers. This is where you find skunk works, social networks, and tweets. It is where buzz begins.
A brand needs both Essence and Flexibility to make a real impact in the marketplace, but it is interesting to note that a brand can be successful with a strong Essence and very little Flexibility, while the reverse is not true. We have a word for brands with little or no Essence and a lot of Flexibility. We call them doomed. During the dotcom era, I once heard a pitch from a group of university scientists who’d lost their funding for a robotic crop picker and had somehow morphed their idea into a a proposal for a 3D web browser. We in the audience failed to see the connection between the two ideas. Those scientists never should have mentioned the robotic crop picker. It may have demonstrated their Flexibility, but it revealed the absence of Essence. They were showing us a pile of leaves and calling it a tree.
The priority is crystal clear. Essence has to be the the first consideration. If you got no Essence, you got nothing.
SXSW #8 – ENERGY
Sunday, March 22nd, 2009To me, the most impressive thing about SXSW Interactive is the energy that radiates. Generally, the people attending this conference are focused, smart, creative and optimistic. They pose important questions and play the kinds of productive games that result in communication, learning and transformation. They dream, then do, and they are unfazed by failure. I have been part of this conversation, this tribe, since TRON. While I don’t know too many people here, or travel dozens deep like some of the bigger players, I feel very welcomed, and grateful for all the support GameChangers received during my four days in Austin, from too many people to mention. I hope all our paths cross again someday, and given the affordances of the Networked World, it is quite likely that they will.
SXSW #5 – TWEETING STAR WARS
Sunday, March 22nd, 2009It might be the geekiest thing I’ve ever done. And it was one of the more enjoyable and instructive experiences I’ve ever had online.On Day Two of SXSW, Jay Bushman (@jaybushman), an interactive storytelling consultant and the founder of the experimental narrative site, www.loose-fish.com, approaches me and asks if I’ll play Obi-Wan Kenobi in a tweet-up of the Star Wars Death Star scene he and a group of his friends are staging the next day. (Jay got the idea after an exchange of tweets with the actor and geek Wil Wheaton.) This little ‘game’ takes place concurrently with the SXSW keynote speech by Nate Silver and while we are doing it, ‘#swstarwars’ becomes the second highest-trending subject on Twitter, ahead of Silver’s keynote, behind only ‘#sxsw’ itself.
While it proves nothing, nor does it take into account the person-to-person interactions of the hundreds of people who attended Silver’s keynote, it does demonstrate the power of active participation over passive observation. People from all over the world begin playing along, in multiple languages. After an hour and a half, we finish tweeting the Death Star scene. The group following the thread picks up right where we leave off and begins tweeting scenes from The Empire Strikes Back. This game continues for at least five more hours, demonstrating the power of a productive game to take on a life of its own. This playful scenario conceived by Jay models how brands doing business in the Networked World have boundless opportunities for inviting participation in their narratives. For me personally, as only a Twitter dabbler, it was an education in the tweetswarming around subject matter that can take a game from unknown to known around the world in an hour on its platform.
You can follow the entire thread (63 pages worth of tweets!) beginning here. For the duration of the game of us who played a role in it replaced our Twitter profile pics with photos of the characters we were playing.
What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-fish?
What all men’s minds and opinions but Loose-Fish?
What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish?
What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish?
What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish?
And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?
- Moby Dick, Herman Melville