Actually, Jonathan did the presentation. He told all the stories. I designed a game that engaged the audience with the material in a way that it would not have if Jonathan had used the standard format of ‘45 minute speech + 15 minute Q&A.’

Jonathan Franklin in conversation with Disney Animation

The game was called ‘15 Themes in 45 Minutes’. Here’s how it went:

I dumped images from the Chilean Miners’ rescue that we have permission to use (abt 90 of them) into Prezi.

Then I arranged the images by Theme. We settled on a number of themes, 15, that divided evenly into 60, because that would give structure to the hour.  (10 would have worked just as well, or 12) The Themes were ideas like, ‘Extreme Conditions,’ ‘Top Drill,’ and ‘Flexible Vision’  which I know, from knowing him and reading his  book, Jonathan can illuminate with great story after great story.

Then I added animation to the images, which is super easy to do on Prezi and showed some respect for the animators in the Disney audience. A presentation with no movement is an insult to animators.

So now we had three of the four elements of what we call the ‘ERGO’ structure for a game: Environment (Disney Animation Theater, Prezi); Roles (Storyteller, Audience, Prompter); and Objective (explore 15 themes). We still needed the ‘G’ in ERGO: Guidelines. I gave the game three:

1) Audience member can at any time request a description of an image (by calling “Caption”)

2) Audience member can, at any time ask a question (by calling “Question”)

3)  Audience member can, at any time, request a new Theme (indicated by calling “Scene”)

For most audiences, I would have added another guideline or two, to encourage editing by everyone in the Audience, not just a few people, but because these were professional storytellers, there was no need to do this.

It was an excellent experience for all of us. The game took 55 minutes to play, which left 5 minutes for a few follow-up questions.  Our time together had a much better flow, it was more of a conversation with the Audience, than if everyone had tried to save their question for a 15 min. Q&A at the end.

In exploring the 15 Themes, the conversation danced through subjects like President (of Chile) Pinera’s leadership strategy, NASA technology, the physics of hard rock drilling, Chilean culture, post-traumatic stress psychology, blow-up dolls, chocolate, tactical news leaking, the saving grace of humor, the fickle nature of celebrity and similar stories of people  trapped underground or underwater (Ace in the Hole, Jessica McClure, the Soviet Sub,  Kursk). The ideas for what to talk about belonged as much to the Audience as to Jonathan. And even though we were free to explore in all directions, we did it within the structure of the game.  We never lost track of where we were because we always knew what Theme we were in.

I made a couple of adjustments to the game while we were playing it. Initially the role of Prompter (mine) was only to explain the game structure to the audience and click through the Prezi images. Once or twice, when I felt the editing by the audience was lagging relative to the time we had left, I’d call ‘Scene’ myself.

Jonathan, his wife, and their six daughters, are in Southern California for two weeks, courtesy of Oakley, who is returning the favor Jonathan did for them when (without any kind of quid pro quo) he got Oakley to design and donate the sunglasses for Los 33 to wear and protect their eyes from the severe reaction they’d have to daylight when they were freed from mine last October.

Five of the Franklin girls–Fancisca, Kimberly, Amy, Susan and Maciel–accompanied Jonathan to Disney. Afterward, the director, John Musker (”Little Mermaid,” “Aladdin,” “Princess and the Frog”), along with Howard Green, Stephanie Morse and Kelsi Taglang of Disney, treated us to lunch in the ABC commissary and a tour of the Disney Animation studio. John drew little sketches of characters from his films for each of the girls.

A good game was had by all.

Legendary Disney Animation director John Musker draws for the Franklin girls

In exploring this theme with him, we came up with eight Empty Arguments that suck up bandwidth and limit a company’s potential to innovate, adapt, and act quickly on opportunity:

1.  Who’s in charge.

The quest for, and maintenance of, one’s status is one of the most prevalent and profligate business behaviors there is.  It results in wasteful games like that old standard, “Kissing The Boss’s Ass.”

In the improvisational model, who has high status in a scene depends not on one’s job title or institutional pedigree, but on the circumstances of the scene.  Leadership does not always have to come from the top.  It is as likely to emanate from the center, in the form of rapid consensus-building, or from the rear, in the form of decisive and enthusiastic support for a scene, a player or a productive game.

2.  Scapegoating (a.k.a. The Blame Game, a.k.a. It Wasn’t Me, a.k.a. I Never Got Your Email)

This Empty Argument is another classic time-waster, a purely political game that’s a huge drag on productivity.  In the improvisational model, teams succeed and fail together.  Everyone is in charge, everyone accepts credit, and everyone shoulders blame.

Just look at how much time and effort BP is spending on assigning blame for the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.  President Obama made a good move yesterday by accepting full responsibility, a move designed to clear the air of this Empty Argument.  Edit. Done. Move on.  Whenever you, as a manager, sense any energy being devoted to scapegoating, edit the scene and move on.

3.  The Big Idea (a.k.a. The Killer Concept, a.k.a. The Gamechanger, a.k.a. The Moby Dick)

The quest for a Big Idea can turn into an Empty Argument in a three ways:  1) Stalking, capturing and processing a Big Idea can blind your team to other opportunities (this was an okay game on a whaling ship in the 1840s, not so much in the networked business environment of today); 2) so many people inside and outside the organization have to weigh in on a Big Idea that its original intention and power gets watered down or lost; and 3) the Big Idea will inevitably get divvied into a series of Little Ideas, so why not simply start with Little Ideas?—all of which will have the potential to morph into Big Ideas! Start small and build, don’t begin big and diminish!  Enhance, don’t dilute!

Focus on purpose and all your Little Ideas will align themselves with Big Themes.  Focus on process and Big Ideas will emerge organically.  Focus on people, because Big Ideas don’t change the game quarterly, people do, on a daily basis.  Big ideas come and go.  Purpose, process and people are the stars you can steer the ship by.

4.  The research.  Research is a snapshot taken in the past.  It can tell you a lot about where you’ve been but very little about where you’re going. It is a dial on the dashboard but is not a way of charting your course or predicting what the weather will be like in the future.  Research can inform a scene, but it should almost never be what the scene is about.

5.  How to spin a story. Scripting, editing, re-writing, getting bottlenecked on approvals, and then spinning a narrative for your audience is a really Empty Argument. As much as I abhor her politics and her prideful ignorance, Sarah Palin gets a lot of credit as an improviser. The reason she can stay relevant and a beat ahead of the news cycles is that, unlike John McCain and most other politicians, she’s not scripting or trying to spin anything, she is relating to her environment in real time, in her own authentic way.  It drives the liberal news spinners crazy.  (President Obama does the same to the righties.)  Nosy neighbor?  Build a fence!  When Palin makes notes on the palm of her hand during a speech, the Ivy League-educated (I do not include Brown grads in this) grademaking machines in the liberal media try to spin it as “Doesn’t do her homework.”  Palin, however, knows intuitively that 90% of the people who see this image will have it made this move themselves.  We can relate.  The lesson:  Living your narrative is more effective than trying to live up to a narrative you’ve scripted, then convincing others to buy into it, too (see Woods, Eldrick “Tiger”).

6.  Labeling. In the Networked World, curation is an essential skill.  The ability to provide context for ubiquitous content is important, and should be an area of constant focus.  The Empty Argument here begins with the notion that everything has to fit into the known universe of the organization or brand, that there will be an institutional meme to deal with every anomaly.  In a networked environment, there are so many anomalies that this is an impossibility.  Don’t waste time arguing about how to label everything. This dampens originality and creative energy.  Approach every situation as its own anomaly.  Act first, label later.

7.   The platform. This is one of the newer Empty Arguments that have gone viral in large organizations.  Decisions about which technology platforms to use has become a high-stakes game that often involves tens of millions of dollars and countless hours of discussion and debate.  Here are a couple of reasons why platform Arguments are often Empty:  1)  There are too many platforms to assess with any certainty, thousands of them.  No one can be an expert in all of them.  For this reason, decisions about platforms often as not come from a personal agenda, and not from any qualified assessment of all the options.  2)  The platform is secondary to the narrative.  By arguing about platforms, a company is pulling focus from its narrative.  This is putting the cart ahead of the horse.  Performance has very little to do with platforms.  Great design is great design whether it’s computer-generated, hand-drawn or modeled in clay.  Narrative first, platform later.

8.  Who’s right and who’s wrong. When you script your narrative, there’s only one ‘right’ way to deal with a problem and every other way (see ‘Labeling’ above) is, by definition, ‘wrong.’ Improvisers understand that there’s always more than one way to solve a problem, and that the ability to collaborate and come up with original solutions to original problems is far more effective than arguing about who’s right and who’s wrong in any given scene.  Improvisers focus on whether or not behaviors are consistent or inconsistent with themes and environment.   This liberates all sorts of possibilities that aren’t present when the argument centers on right vs. wrong.

So…let’s put a cost estimate on these Empty Arguments:

The organization where our friend works, a relatively well-run company by American standards, employs 120K people around the world.  Figure 10K of them are managers who have a say in the direction of the company and its brands.  Our friend estimates that a third of a typical manager’s day (call it 3 hrs/day) is spent engaged in Empty Arguments.  That’s 30K management hours a day across the enterprise.  At an average cost per manager of $100/hr, that’s $3M a day, which equates to approximately $270M worth of wasted time per quarter!

Improvisation gives employees the ability to see and minimize the Empty Arguments listed here, and many others, too.   If the managers at my friend’s company can spend one less hour per day on Empty Arguments, it will save the company $1M per day, or $360M per year in resources that can be  put to better use.

That’s a lot of Empty.

The theme of Farming is a strong one, especially in the context of a post-industrial city like Detroit.  It’s interesting that urban gardeners who farm quarter-acre plots of land in Detroit have come out against Hantz’s plan.  The anti-Hantzers are, according to the article, seizing on their own themes:  Racial Bias (Hantz and most of his team are white; Detroit’s population is 92% black) and Big Business vs. the Little Guy.

Comment:  We don’t have time or energy to spend on being racially or economically divided, it doesn’t matter what color the finger being pointed is or the size of the rock on the ring it’s wearing.  Themes can help us find the agreement that transcends race, religion, income level and personal history–all those things that divide us–thereby liberating new avenues for communication, learning and growth.  John Hantz and the urban gardeners of Detroit can unite around the theme of Farming to be productive and move the ‘Saving Detroit’ scene forward.

It has never been more important than it is on July 4, 2009, that we remember the founding of the United States of America as a Revolution, an overthrow of a distant ruling elite that had lost touch with the people.

Because today we need another Revolution.

We need a revolution against the kinds of businesses the U.S. has invested in way too heavily for the past 125 years, the businesses that sustained the oil-and-war economy built by people like George W. Bush’s granddad, businesses that President Eisenhower in the 1950s labeled the military-industrial complex.  Today the news media is complicit in the complex.  After all, what is more likely to keep you glued to the feeding tube than something scary happening right outside your front door?

We need a new kind of independence, from the feeding tubes of fear and oil and war and baseless celebrity.  Freedom from businesses built on killing, sensationalizing, alarming, manipulating, dividing, litigating, politicking, vilifying, dominating, acquiring, misdirecting, clouding, hiding, looting, destroying, drugging, bribing, hoarding, imprisoning, poisoning, torturing, hedging, lip-servicing and ass-licking.

These bad businesses are designed to extract wealth without replacing it.  Designed to accumulate money without earning it.  Designed to exploit labor without honoring it.  Designed to get better than they give.

In fact, businesses that generate wealth and well-being over the long haul are those that give better than they get.  Focusing on short term gains (we now measure our windows of transactional opportunity in milliseconds) cripples our potential for long-term growth.

We need another Revolution.

A revolution to free ourselves once and for all from the fear-based agendas of the distant and disconnected Bush Leaguer elites.   The Bush presidency was a validation of everything gone wrong with America.  Of myopia and mediocrity.  Of arrogance and bullying.  Of the toxic confluence of Church and State.

Here’s something that offers a strand of hope: fools like George W. Bush yield their own brand of wisdom.  He and his administration became like a compass needle that pointed in the exact opposite direction of the one we need to be going in.  This July 4th, we are in a race to heal the planet before the planet decides it’s going to heal itself.   Of us.  Which is why the Revolution needs to be Green.

The divisive ideologies and nonstop claptrap of talk show hosts, pundits, our so-called political leaders and even futurists only preserve the status quo. Obama is not getting the kind of energy and leadership he needs from Capitol Hill—from timid funeral director types like Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid, whose only apparent talent is soft-talking to the aggrieved, or from status-obsessed players like John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi, who always look like they’re counting the minutes to cocktails at the club.  These people stand in the way of progress.  We need legislators who can support a narrative other than their own.  Today, there’s only one narrative that matters when it comes to the federal government, and that’s.  the story of America.  It’s time for an uplifting twist to our story.  A ray of hope shooting through the economic gloom.  Not only do we need the sun to shine, we need it to generate electricity.

Which is why we need another Revolution.

Due in large part to the Bush Leaguers’ misadventures in the Middle East, we have racked up debts—monetary, environmental and political—that we’re going to be paying off for generations.  We have lost our touch for the extraordinary invention, the breathtaking breakthrough.  We have lost our appetite for industry.  Today, the touch that matters most to our economy, and, sad to say, defines us to a lot of the world, is the touch of bullets from an M2 50-caliber machine gun, the touch of a Wall Street banker to a politician’s wallet, or the touch of a camera lens on a dead celebrity.  Something is way, way off about that.  180 degrees off, to be exact.

Just as the Bush compass points due South, you can define the kinds of businesses we should be in as the polar opposites of the games we’ve been playing.  We need businesses made resilient by renewable energy and by peacemaking.  Business guided by themes like healing, educating, building, seeding, coaching, communicating, inspiring, bridging, liberating, converting, restoring, preserving, designing, connecting, transporting, sharing, growing, clarifying, creating.  And let’s not forget remembering.  These new kinds of businesses are our only hope for growing our way out of a malaise brought on by eight years of the reign of Prince George that didn’t add anything of value to the economic equation.  In fact it subtracted value.

It’s time for another Revolution.

The people who revolted against an out-of-touch elite to create the United States, and the people who have come here from around the world in the 233 years since then have literally put their lives on the line because they had an appetite for change and faith in their dreams   The U.S. political and banking systems exist to enable dreams of Americans, not leverage them to their own advantage by playing the kinds of insider games that turn those dreams into a mirage.  Mediocrity and myopia, arrogance and bullying,  mixing religion and politics, these are supposed to be the enemies of the American brand, not its trademarks.

This weekend, we remember the Revolution that became America.  Next week, let’s keep the spirit of that Revolution alive.  It’s the most American thing we can do.

Happy Independence Day!

The gamechanger in this narrative is Bob Cilman, who initiated the productive game that has given such huge gifts to its players. (And they to it.) The improvisation in Young@Heart points the way for anyone looking to initiate productive games in their own lives, or their own lines of work:

“Location, location, location” has become “Community, community, community.” In the Industrial Age, location was everything. It was important to be physically adjacent to the highway. In the Networked World, everyone has access to the highway. One day you’re a couple of kids from China wearing Houston Rockets jerseys and lip-syncing hip-hop, the next day you’re stars. So the question is, what do you build? Cilman laid the foundation for a worldwide community by simply giving elderly people around Northampton, Massachusetts, something worthwhile and important to do. Little by little, this community interfaced with larger communities–the Northampton Arts Council where Cilman became the director in 1989, Talkng Heads fans, David Byrne, the music and film communities. Young@Heart has performed with Cambodian choirs, hip-hop dancers, and, in a revue entitled Flaming Saddles, a gay men’s chorus. Their location did not did not matter nearly as much as the remarkable community they built there.

Design games, not outcomes. In the Industrial Age, games were often designed by reverse-engineering outcomes. Doing this in the Networked World is just plain idiotic.  Why narrow the window of opportunity to a single outcome when networks offer so many possibilities for positive outcomes?  Commitment to a good game opens the window of opportunity to many different positive outcomes. Let’s imagine that instead of committing to the ‘rockin’ seniors’ game, Bob Cilman had instead reversed engineered a game to achieve a particular outcome: Let’s say that outcome was meeting one of his heroes, David Byrne of the Talking Heads. The narrative may have resulted in Bob Cilman meeting David Byrne, true, because Bob Cilman is a determined guy, and he probably could have made that happen. But look at all the other positive things–the tours of Europe, the albums, the DVD, the music videos, the donations, the film at Sundance, the enduring friendships–that never would have transpired if they’d locked into a single outcome. In fact, since it’s almost a certainty that none of the seniors had any personal interest in meeting David Byrne, the game probably would have lost energy and commitment from its players early on.

A theme is the glue of the game. Cilman identified a theme, ‘music as the spirit of youth,’ that has fueled the Young@Heart game for 26 years. When you have identified a compelling theme to underpin your game, communities organize, ideas become action, decisions become easy, crises become manageable. When, in the course of making the documentary, several tragedies befell the group, they never lost their determination to carry on. The spirit of youth is resilient in the face of tragedy.

Commit to the moment. No one is more in the moment than a 93 year old woman performing The Clash’s Should I Stay Or Should I Go?. No one is more aware than a group of seniors belting out James Brown’s I Feel Good that tomorrow is not promised to us. (I feel good now. Tomorrow? Who knows?) What’s promised us is now. The Young@Heart singers are in their 70s, 80s and 90s. Many are feeble. Some are near death. But all of them are as alive as a human being can be when they’re pouring everything they’ve got into a song.

Do what you love. Breakthrough could happen in a day. It might take a lifetime. Bob Cilman and his senior singers were playing this game for a long time before world outside Northampton took notice. There is absolutely no way of knowing. The first quality of a productive game is that you love playing along. Love the process and the product will come.

Bob Cilman has made a difference in people’s lives. His journey has been rewarding and fun. It all came about because he never deviated from the game, or from his reasons for initiating it. In an interview on the web site PopSyndicate, Cilman says, “We’re not there to make people feel good, we’re there to make people work on something that will make other people feel like – Wow! I’ve been inspired by what you do, that’s a whole different process.”

Flash forward to last week. Our friend Shannon Porter shows me around Nau, the sustainable clothing store (men’s and women’s) in Chicago where she is one of the managers. (Nau is based in Portland.) The store where Shannon works is at 2118 North Halsted Avenue, smack in the heart of a great part of a great city. Shannon has a Wharton School degree and impeccable taste in music and friends and just about everything else, and so I want to think Nau is going to be cool before I ever set foot in it. But there is a shadow of a doubt in my mind. I mean, I’d had the unsatisfactory experience with the smokable clothes, and she did say a lot of their stuff is made from recycled polyester and, well, you know, the original polyester ain’t so great to begin with, so how could recycled — ???

And then I crossed the Nau threshold, and within minutes, my experience with sustainable clothing had changed, just the way the brand intended.
The clothes are fantastic. The material, the design, the concept, the technology, the emotion. Everything works. The store experience guides you through the brand’s narrative with a constant sense of discovery and appreciation.

The bathroom has the mission statement posted. Given this environment, any scene set in here is almost guaranteed to explore a theme one could describe as ‘Reflecting on One’s Brand at a Time One Normally Would Not’. (A GameChanger changes the game whenever and wherever the opportunity presents itself.)

Nau stores are, in effect, showrooms. They carry minimal stock, reducing the needed retail space and the carbon emissions associated with shipping from warehouses to stores. Savings are passed along. Ordering directly from the warehouse saves you 10%.

To learn more about an item, you take a card from a holder where the item is hanging and scan it.

To order an item, you wave that same card at a different scanner.

5% of every purchase you make goes to a cause you choose at checkout.

From the conscious designs of buttons on the clothing to the quality of the video on the Nau web site, every choice made by the brand resonates with heart and reeks with aesthetic wonderfulness.

I bought lots of clothes for spring, donated 5% to Kiva in the process, and was kicking myself by the time I got back to L.A. that I did not buy more. Oh well. Nau’s L.A. store opens in April, and I’m sure that will be a good time, too.

To improvise is to heighten and expand the discoveries in the moment. I call this process leapfrogging. An idea is only as good as our ability to add to it, delve into it, expand on it. Leapfrog it. This is especially true of brand strategies. To the improvisational brand, a strategy is a call for a continuous exploration of the themes and ideas the brand represents.

Everything is important. Everything matters. In the Networked World, our fates and fortunes are interconnected as never before. The multipliers are intense. It is ultra-important to be consistently aware and respectful of even the tiniest details, because today’s incidentals become tomorrow’s headlines. Ask Eliot Spitzer.

Surrender unto the loss of control. Give up; it’s ok to be confused. If you give yourself permission to wade into the unknown, you are engaging in a process of learning, knowing, creating. Industrial Age behaviors were about the fight for control. In the Networked World our success depends on our ability to create cosmos — consensus, clarity, definition, constellations of meaning! — from chaos. Accept your confusion. Work toward understanding.

Follow the process and the product will come. I was a speaker this week at the Horizons High Performance Computing Conference in Palm Springs. One of my fellow speakers was Tom Lange, Director of Modeling and Simulation for Procter & Gamble, who gave a very engaging presentation on the uses of high performance computing in his company’s manufacturing processes. Among his observations was this: “We don’t sell soap, we sell ‘clean.’” This is a very improvisational concept. Improvisation is a process for exploring themes, and it is the exploration of the theme that yields the performance, i.e. ‘product’.

Realize that the next best thing to perfection is being damn good at whatever you do. Amen.

My Notre Dame classmate Mike Berg, who’s in the medical business, told me about PSS and that sometimes PSS employees do wild n crazy things, like dress up as turkeys on Thanksgiving. This caught my attention, sounded like a gamechanging kind of company. And sure enough —

Turns out PSS is a hugely renowned company in their field, which is the delivery of supplies and all-around services to physicians and their practices in the U.S. Kelly, who was raised in a foster home in North Carolina and at one time had a job handing out weapons of some sort during a hitch in the military, established themes of speed and attention which in my estimation became the foundational traits, the genome, of the company. In honor of the PSS theme of speed, and how well they improvise on that theme, I’m going to write this post as fast as I can trying not to make any typos. A post normally takes me about an hour to write. I’m going to do this one in ten minutes.

Here are some ways that PSS improvises:

They have no ‘rule’ book. There’s no set of company guidelines about how to behave, no doctrine from the top. Instead, the GAME they play, a highly productive one based on the THEMES of SPEED and ATTENTION — among many others, I’ll get to those in a second — establishes and sorts out the rules as it evolves. There’s no way to write a script for how a company goes from 13 to 13,000 employees. It can only happen if the organization improvises. It takes balls, and apparently this Kelly dude has ‘em aplenty. He goes to war again and again with the bankers and with The Street, all in honor of PSS employees, and their right to own a large chunk of the company under its ESOP (chk spelling) stock (chk rdundancy) plan.

Early in its history, PSS’s bankers felt, in that know-it-all way bankers have, that Kelly’s company, then five (chk #) years old in 1993 (chk yr), was growing too fast, and not feeding enough value back into the stock price. They told him the growth he envisioned for the company could not be managed. Kelly knew better. In the old, Industrial Age way of thinking, perhaps the bankers would have been right. The rigid structure of business organizations would get all out of whack when they got assembled too quickly. But this was the dawn of the Networked World, and a fella needed a new way of building an organization, a way Kelly was onto.

(Phone call. Time out.)

That way was to improvise. To literally make it up as they went along, and in every scene, every situation, every encounter, they would find a way to express one of their themes. Those of you who are into calling these themes ‘values’ may do so. Kelly does. But that, in terms of improvisation, is a loaded word, and mis-expresses the lexicon that is so important to understanding how and why improvisation works.

The several dozen employees of PSS at the time this happened created an equity pool that let PSS continue growing at a rate of 60% a year until it is where it is today, with those several dozen employees now very rich. This gave them a rich new theme to explore, one of employee ownership. I have a lot more to say, but my time is up. To learn more about PSS, you can read Kelly’s book, Faster Company, which I plan to do soon myself, if only to tout them in more detail as to their improvisational chops.

So these employees staged a mock funeral in Kelly’s backyard, with a real casket, and buried their bankers, symbolically. When one of those in attendance asked why they didn’t take a big boat out off the coast and dump the casket at sea…Kelly supposedly responded, “We never know when we might have to dig him up and kiss his ass again.”

What a beautiful summation of the art of improvisation in business. We never know. Bring your shovel.

If our themes are rich with possibility, we can operate confidently, knowing that we’re true to the brand, the relationship, the mission, and we don’t need a rule book to do it. Day in and day out, year after year, PSS proves it.

Here, lifted from Kelly’s book, are the values PSS espouses. Note that, in the lexicon of improv, these values blend the concepts of ‘themes’ and ‘productive behaviors’. Nevertheless, everything on the list, is very much in line with the improv concepts and techniques…

1) SERVICE all our customers like they are the only one we have

2) RECOGNIZE our people as our most valuable asset

3) ALWAYS communicate without fear of retribution

4) ENCOURAGE ideas and creativity at all levels

5) ENCOURAGE self-development and individual entrepreneurship

6) ALWAYS strive to share the wealth

7) ALWAYS promote from within first

EARN profits and value for entrusted shareholders

9) PROVIDE an environment of trust and honesty

10) MINIMIZE excuses and maximize getting the job done

11) INVOLVE family in all social aspects of the company

12) ENCOURAGE and develop pride and esprit de corps

13) ENCOURAGE all PSS people to be shareholders

14) TREAT all company assets like they are your own

15) SUGGEST and encourage better ways of doing things

16) MINIMIZE paperwork and memos

17) BE professional at all times

18) ANTICIPATE and capitalize on market needs

19) DO what’s best for all PSS

20) RECOGNIZE PSS as a family that cares

Okay, now that I got your attention by initiating with the the smart funny American TV sitcom chick and the dashing Brit billionaire with the brilliant hair, here’s the game…

A month ago, Carleen Hawn, the editor of Found/Read, asked me to write a post about improvisation for business, which I did. She gave it the catchy headline above. This is the gist of it…

Four (of Many) Benefits of the Improvisational Business Model

1) SPEED. In the Industrial Age, wealth moved in sync with men and machines. However fast you could make stuff and get it to market, that was how fast your money could move. In the Networked World, the movement of wealth has become unhinged in time from the physical movement of goods and services. Today, money has the potential to move nearly at the speed of thought – recklessly fast, it turns out. As a business discipline designed to operate at the speed of thought, improvisation enables players to operate in sync with the datastream and the money that moves through it without losing their balance or focus.

2) DECISION-MAKING. All it takes is one bad move like a sub-prime hedge fund and your company loses $8,000,000,000. In one quarter. The flip side is that you can make a carload of dough in that same amount of time. With improvisation, not only do decisions get made faster, players and teams gain the skills to make instinctive moves that align with positive themes and productive games.

3) THEMATIC ACTION. Who reads instruction manuals? Like, uh, no one? The gamer generation learns the game by playing it. By working with themes and conceptual ideas instead of literal behaviors, improvisational companies get richer and more authentic contributions from their employees, and employee satisfaction improves, too. It’s win/win that way. Flex time and social networking are two areas where a shared understanding of a concept or theme is just as essential as any set of literal guidelines can be.

4) FOCUS. Out-sourcing, virtual teams and cross-cultural collaboration are three of the many challenges to communication for a company operating in the Networked World. Skilled improvisers know how to create the focus that is essential to the group mind, which in turn yields clear communication and the potential for breakthrough performance. Whether that performance takes place on the set of television’s “30 Rock” or in Virgin Group’s video conference rooms around the world, whether you are Tina Fey or Richard Branson, the principles are the same.

I have known the folks at Highlights for a long time. Kent Brown, grandson of the company’s founders and the magazine’s editor-in-chief, has been a friend for over 20 years and advised me on the publication of GameChangers. I’ve met several times over the years with Kent and the Highlights editorial team headed by Christine French Clark, usually about expanding the brand into video. There was always a lot of interest from my Hollywood associates — at Disney, then Paramount, then New Line and Viacom. At one point, I pitched a Goofus and Gallant movie with Haley Joel Osment playing both roles. We discussed doing The Timbertoes as an animated series, and Find the Hidden Pictures as a videogame. We explored the possibility of a Highlights direct-to-video series, which Viacom execs assured me they could sell like eggs on Easter.

Not a ton of business came of it, but the process was always fun and instructive for everyone involved.

The editorial offices in the picturesque town of Honesdale on the Pennsylvania-New York border are housed on a small campus of large, converted private homes. I stayed and had meetings in Kent’s pre-Civil War home on his 1200-acre farm. The discussions of the potential of video were not frivolous, but were serious and focused. The editorial staff sought to understand how its mission of getting children to read is affected by the abundance of video and internet content at their little fingertips. I became a kind of guide for the company’s periodic sorties into the juvenile media jungle.

On one occasion, Kent took me to meet the company’s educator emeritus, an elderly gentleman I nicknamed “The Perfessor,” a pleasantly offbeat Christopher Lloyd type. “Do you know what my favorite Highlights story is?” asked The Perfessor in a tremulous voice. “It’s a story we published seven or eight years ago called ‘Ben Can Do Ten.’” He explained that the story is about a boy named Ben who thinks he has no talent and suffers from low self-esteem until he discovers that he has a knack for doing the trick where you place quarters on the back of your forearm and catch them in your hand. Ben could do ten. The Professor and I pulled change from our pockets and spent the next five minutes playing the game. (He and Me Could do Three.)

Not long ago, I saw a Highlights-branded magazine called High Five in the supermarket checkout newsstand that looked as if was selling. It so happens that under the leadership of its new CEO, Kent Johnson, Highlights, Inc. has, over the past couple of years, begun changing its game, aggressively extending the brand into newsstand sales with High Five, and expanding its product line with books of games, puzzles and compilations of the magazine’s more popular features like Find the Hidden Pictures. They now produce CD-ROMs and web sites. And their Zaner-Bloser textbook division contributes significantly to the bottom line.

Any brand that has been in existence for as long as Highlights must, on some level, be improvisational. Here’s a GameChangers analysis:

They do not alter a productive game. As a family-owned business, they have been able to create continuity between four generations of leadership and four generations of subscribers. While they respect and listen to overtures from multimedia types like me, they have not strayed from a print publishing model. They recognize that their game moves at its own tempo. They do not allow advertising within their editorial. (”We’re old-fashioned,” says Kent Brown. “And we kind of like it that way.”)

Their themes are strong and unwavering. Their values center on reading and education. They understand that in a constantly-changing world, there is value in consistency. The cosmetics of the brand — ethnic makeup of characters, cultural diversity of content, lexicon, art direction, character design, etc. — have changed considerably over the years along with the subscriber population, but the emotional and metaphorical components are rooted as deeply as a 60-year-old tree.

They have a casting philosophy. The descendants of Dr. Garry Cleveland Myers and Caroline Myers protect and direct the brand and that is how the game is played. The new CEO, Kent Johnson, is their great-grandson. Conversations frequently invoke ‘The Founders’. When I first met them, I reminded Kent Brown and Garry Myers III, the previous CEO, of a cousin of theirs, which is why they sent me to have tea with Kent’s mom in Chautaqua, New York, and, with her approval, began doing business with me.

They listen well. While they are extremely deliberate, and their editorial offices are remote, they are also open. They want to know what’s happening in all media, in all of education, in all of publishing. They understand the ramifications of the choices they make (or choose not to make), on both the business and editorial sides of the company.

They edit effectively. When Garry Myers III died unexpectedly in 2005, Johnson, at the time the company’s Vice-President of Strategic Development, hit the ground running in his new role and began making aggressive business moves. When Kent Brown ceded editorial control of the magazine to Clark in 2002, he immediately turned his attention to other scenes related to the company’s educational mission.

They seek eclectic knowledge and work at the height of their intelligence. Part of this comes from editorial content that runs the gamut from science to the arts. Beyond that, they recognize that a broad knowledge base is healthy for the brand. The CEO, Johnson, for example, has a background in biotechnology. In the company’s culture of learning, no form of knowledge goes to waste.

Coincidentally (or not) the Highlights motto, ‘Fun With a Purpose’, echoes the educational theories of Viola Spolin, the godmother of modern improvisation. While the notions of having fun and doing business do not always jibe, neither do they have to be mutually exclusive. No matter who you are or what your situation is, there is always the potential for having fun, and for that fun to have a purpose, and for that purpose to be learning.