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.”

What is the most improvisational (resourceful/agile/engaging) organization or individual you know, and how has this benefited them?

The most compelling response came from Jesse Silver, a visual effects artist who’s a friend of mine:

EMAIL #1

My candidate would be my nephew, Nate. After an A+ academic training, which included the Wharton School Of Business, he stepped away from the rarified world of international finance to pursue his love, baseball. Not as a player exactly, but as one of the most recognized authorities in the world on fantasy baseball. He’s a published author, writes a newspaper column, and is a partner in an online fantasy baseball site, which uses programming that he created to figure the various odds and combinations.

He’s also a professional poker player, and he does pretty well with that as well. After all, he’s an expert at figuring the odds!

I caught Nate on The Colbert Report this week, and sent sent Jesse an email saying how glad I was to see a gamechanger like his nephew getting some pub.

Jess wrote back:

EMAIL #2

Have you checked out his election forecasting site? it’s called fivethirtyeight.com. This is another of those improv stories. Nate’s dad (my bro) is the Chair of the department of Political Science at Michigan State, so I guess Nate got his interest in politics from his dad. Anyway, Nate decided to test his factoring software to see if it would function as well forecasting primary results as it did predicting the outcome of a game between the 1927 Yankees and the 1959 Dodgers. Nate started publishing his forecasts under a pseudonym, and his forecasts were more accurate than most of the pollsters. One of his baseball fans recognized the nickname and revealed who was making the forecasts. The attention was immediate with an profile in News Week, followed by mentions in TIME and other media. He was interviewd by Dan Rather and was asked to join his reporting team on election night. He’s also been interviewed by Keith Oberman. The interest in his work keeps on growing. Not bad for a kid who started out collecting baseball cards!

I have seen a lot of people in business spend a lot of time and waste a lot of money in quest of The Big Idea (aka The Killer App, The Market Maker, The Home Run). This process can become a highly subjective, ego-charged exercise. A gamechanger like Nate Silver knows that breakthroughs are often the synthesis of two existing concepts (that may be seemingly unrelated, e.g. baseball stats and politics).

In business, as in baseball, two doubles can result in a better situation for your team than a home run.

I wrote to Uncle Jesse saying I intended to blog about Nate on the GameChangers site, and also asked him what he thought about the prospects for a TRON2:

He responded:

EMAIL #3

Even Wonkette has mentioned Nate in her blog as every nerd girl’s “secret boyfriend”, so now poor Nate is in the hipster world’s gunsights. I told his dad that he’s going to be getting an avalanche of propositions…

As for TRON2, I’ve seen the pirated video of the teaser screening at Comicon and I think that the look is great. I hope that it’s done well, something different and NOT a remake. Digital Domain is rumored to be doing the effects. The whole TRON phonomenon is a bit of a surprise for me. At the time of its release, we all thought it was a failure, but it’s grown to cult status as the ancestor of CG. I look forward to seeing it when (and if) it comes out.

TRON is one of my favorite examples of how wealth gets generated in the Networked World. By combining two theretofore unrelated concepts–Hollywood feature filmmaking and computer graphics–TRON changed the CGI game, and a multi-billion dollar industry has risen on its back. Disney, which produced the original TRON, has subsequently realized more of the wealth generated by that industry (via its Pixar relationship/acquisition) than any other media company. By an Industrial Age definition, (e.g. the bottom line) Jesse’s right, TRON was a failure. As defined by the Networked World (e.g. a productive game), TRON may have struck out at the boxoffice when it was originally released, but it has been a big hitter ever since.

Perhaps no one is more responsible for making ‘TRON come true’ than Alan Kay — who, no coincidence, is married to the original TRON screenwriter, Bonnie MacBird. Kay consulted at length with the TRON filmmakers and MacBird named the character of Alan in the film (whose alter-ego was the Tronster himself) after her husband.

A graduate student who studied and collaborated with computer graphics pioneer Ivan Sutherland at the University of Utah, Kay was one of the legendary Xerox PARC geniuses who helped lay the foundation for the billions upon billions of dollars in new wealth spun out of Silicon Valley in the 1970s and -80s. His resume reads like a history of popular computing: PARC; Apple Fellow; Chief Scientist at Atari; Disney Imagineer; HP Fellow; created the Dynabook design that became the prototype for laptop computers and, years later, the model computer for Nicholas Negroponte’s One-Laptop-Per-Child project.

The way windows can overlap on your computer screen in what we call a Graphical User Interface (GUI)? That’s an Alan Kay trip.

The Object-Oriented Programming that underlies some of the most potent computing languages being used today, like Ruby, Python and Cold Fusion? Alan Kay and his collaborators at PARC and the Norwegian Computing Center created the language, gave it its name, and used it to build the operating system Smalltalk, which was then commercialized by Apple in its Mac computers. Good system.

Kay has won almost every major award given in the field of computer science, including the Kyoto Prize, the ACM Turing Award and the Charles Stark Draper Prize. He holds honorary doctorates from Georgia Tech, the Universita di Pisa in Italy, and the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.

He and his team wrote the open source language Squeak that became the basis for eToys.

Today, he teaches at universities all over the world and is founder and president of Viewpoint Research Institute, which got its start-up funding from the National Science Foundation. Viewpoint recently developed an open source 2D and 3D programming language called Croquet that is simple enough for children to use.

Kay has said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” That is a statement that can only have been made by a GameChanger.

So you’re saying, “Okay great for Alan Kay, but I’m no Alan Kay. He is inventing the future and most days I feel as if I’m a victim of it; most days I’m lucky to fight the future to a draw.”

Here’s the thing, though — Alan Kay has not cornered the market on inventing the future. Everyone has the potential to create his or her own future. To do it, you have to improvise.

Here are two significant ways in which Alan Kay improvised his way into the future:

1) He stayed with his themes. In the unmapped frontiers of the future, it is the exploration of a theme that guides a business improviser toward productive outcomes, and keeps one from losing one’s bearings and, if you’re in Silicon Valley, becoming just another VC whore. Two strong themes run through Kay’s work: ‘Learning’ and ‘Dawning of an Era’. His focus on the learning, especially learning by children, helped him stay emotionally engaged with his work. The ‘Learning’ theme gives Kay his mission, his sense of purpose. He’s not in the computer science business — that’s about cold circuitry. He’s in the learning business — that’s about human beings. You could say that TRON was one big fat learning project for the entire entertainment business. An industry (CG animation) that didn’t exist before TRON today stands on its back-lit shoulders. The second theme, ‘Dawning of an Era’ is what I call Kay’s perspective that we are in the primitive era of the networked world. This perspective gives him patience and tolerance for the painstaking process of invention, as well as an essential optimism that the best is yet to come.

2) He is an artist. It is not insignificant that Kay is an accomplished musician. Musicians (with the possible exception of lead singers in rock bands) understand the sharing of ideas, the give and take, the harmonics that create the distinctive sound. Business in the Networked World is the art of creating wealth. Of communicating with one’s audience. Collaborating with one’s peers. Expressing emotions that connect people to your brand, your song…your future.

I began my career as TRON’s publicist, telling the world stories about Flynn, Yori, the Recognizers, the Light Cycles, the MCP and the birth of something called “Computer-Generated Imagery” (CGI). Somewhat to my surprise, I’m still telling them. So are my friends and colleagues from the film. But I think all of us would agree that the telling of those stories does not matter half as much as the fact that we’re still living them. The TRON experience has informed and guided us throughout our careers. For me personally, GameChangers has a lot of TRON in its genetic code.

The film business is an ephemeral occupation. You come together with the objective of making a worthy motion picture, the focus — on the game of feature filmmaking — is intense, and the group mind arises from that focus. The focus wanes somewhat during post-production, as new players join the scene, editing out most of the original team. By the time the film premieres it has become a new scene altogether, focused on a high-energy game called “Opening the Film” that involves players from marketing and distribution, and only a handful of the film’s original team. The cast-and-crew screening is a celebration of the scene you shared. “How you doing?” “How’s your baby?” “What are you working on?” “Good to see you.” “Let’s keep in touch.” And then for the rest of your life, you never see those people again.

TRON was different. Many of those who shared the experience keep in touch. And the focus was so intense, the game so deep and new, that the effects reverberate 25 years later. The TRON artists became a who’s-who of animation directors that includes Roger Allers (The Lion King), Brad Bird (The Incredibles), Chris Wedge (Ice Age) Bill Kroyer (FernGully — The Last Rainforest) Jerry Rees (The Brave Little Toaster)…and of course it has been well-documented that John Lasseter got his first burst of CGI mojo in the TRON animation trailer before heading north to form Pixar with Steven Jobs. With contributions from great artists and technologists like Larry Elin, Richard Taylor, Harrison Ellenshaw, Judson Rosebush, Wendy Carlos, Moebius, Syd Mead, Peter Lloyd, Frank Serafine, John Scheele, Tom Wilhite and many others, the production howled with creative energy.

So what was it like to work on TRON? It was intense. It was focused. It was chaotic. It was tremendous fun, and terribly difficult, and wildly energetic. And ultimately, it was like the greatest improvised performance ever.

Director Steven Lisberger and producer Donald Kushner initiated the performance and got it funded with a compelling compilation of concept art, a script by Lisberger and Bonnie MacBird and a test shoot that electrified those who saw it. The performance’s themes — videogames, the dawn of CGI, the fight for control of intellectual property — were relevant and strong. The players who supported the scene each brought different talents and personalities to the performance.

The TRON team, from Lisberger, to Gabby the air conditioning guy on the film who turned out to be a whiz on Galaga, were GameChangers. They took up the new tools of technology and changed the game by improvising. There was no formula. It was 100% original, and yet still somehow ‘familiar’ to the audience because of the powerful metaphors in play. As Richard Taylor, who with Harrison Ellenshaw supervised the film’s visual effects, said at the time “It’ll remind you of something you’ve never seen before.”

For me, TRON marks (everyone has their own time stamp) the beginning of the Networked World in which business operates today. The reasons for its enduring popularity with a significant demographic and the wealth spun out of it — especially when you add up Pixar’s value to Disney — hold valuable lessons in improvisation for anyone in business:

Your brand’s themes are more important than its narrative. The story told in TRON was, umm…they kept hiring writers who kept fiddling with dialogue and tone, and the story suffered, in my opinion. But the film’s (read: brand’s) themes were so strong and metaphorical that the audience connected with it on a level that transcended narrative. When it comes to branding your business, narrative comes after the fact; themes, by contrast, get expressed moment to moment in largely unscripted scenarios, and for this reason should be top-of-mind for everyone in an organization.

The stronger the focus, the better the collaboration. With most business projects, you cannot break new ground like TRON did. But you can create focus by finding a game that’s fresh and engaging for players and audience alike.

Be patient. TRON did not set the boxoffice on fire upon its initial release, but its flame continues to burn bright for a generation of designers who regarded it as a call to action, and for fans who comprise the core audience for anything TRON-branded. The best improvisers I’ve seen — both onstage and in business — do not get antsy for a quick payoff, but spend their energy and talent laying the groundwork for bigger payoffs later in the performance. It’s a bonus when both happen, but a GameChanger knows not to get impatient, and that the first obligation is to engage the audience and bring them along for the ride. John Lasseter went along for the CGI ride because of TRON, and today Pixar is worth what to Disney? $5 billion? $10 billion? TRON, it turns out, is still one hell of a ride.