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A Hackathon to “Reinvent Business”

Can social technology enable companies and the people within them to make better decisions? Can it improve corporate behavior? Can it perhaps even help restore the social contract between business and society? These are just some of the questions to be tackled by the “Reinvent Business” hackathon – a collaborative, rapid ideation and programming workshop – to be held in San Francisco on June 9-10, Hosted by frog and LRN, in partnership with BSR, Carnegie Mellon University, Dachis Group, Net Impact, Silicon Valley Bank, Fast Company, and the World Economic Forum, the two-day event will bring together software developers, designers, gamers, film makers, writers, business leaders, and other creative minds to imagine, design, and build a more human and truly social enterprise. The goal is both simple and bold: to develop concepts and prototypes for innovative products and services that have the capacity to transform business from within.

The World Economic Forum formed a Global Agenda Council on Values in Decision-Making (of which I am a member) in response to the current economic crisis to realign our collective mindset and develop practical approaches for a more moral economy. It has developed an ambitious agenda to help organizations translate human values into practices and behaviors that strengthen our institutions and positively impact the state of the world. New challenges call for new approaches, and we hope that with this hackathon as the starting point, we can engage the tech and creative communities in an ongoing constructive dialogue on how technology, and especially social technology, can change corporate behavior.

This need for behavior change, for “reinventing business,” is an urgent one, considering the growing number of voices that observe a crisis of capitalism and demand its fundamental transformation. In an op-ed piece for the Huffington Post, “The End of Capitalism – What Comes Next?,” World Economic Forum Founder and Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab draws a clear line between the original, defensible idea of the free market economy and the worrisome decoupling of the financial system and value-creation that makes an overhaul of its technical aspects mandatory. But he also argues that simply correcting excesses is not enough – we need a more radical reset. Schwab reminds us of the Stakeholder Principle he introduced in 1971, which is now more relevant than ever, propelled by the rise of social technologies: “In an age when social networks are enabling greater participation and transparency, companies will only be able to achieve economic success if they can generate long-term benefits not just for their shareholders, but also for the common good.”

While most companies will subscribe to that point of view rhetorically, the disconnection between business and society (and, as studies show, between management and employees) is indisputable. From Occupy Wall Street to public resignation letters in the New York Times, the widening ‘trust gap’ between business and society can’t be ignored. In a recent column, The Economist contends that companies should worry less about their reputations and more about how they do business. And indeed, increasingly, consumers and citizens demand that companies match their words to their actions, far beyond just Mission Statements, Codes of Conduct, and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs. For today’s consumers and citizens, integrity means that a firm’s decisions and behaviors are fundamentally and consistently aligned with its values and principles as well as those of its stakeholders (which include society at large).

Yet the crisis of capitalism is not only a crisis of integrity, it is also one of meaning. “It is the job of companies to produce meaning,” writes management philosopher John Hagel, and with a growing number of consumers and employees expressing a strong desire for purpose beyond profits, and even the Harvard Business Review espousing happiness as a new economic paradigm, this appears to be a ripe time for reinvention. As the world becomes more interconnected and interdependent, the lines between the corporate and the social, the professional and the personal blur, and the younger generation of netizens in particular expects heightened levels of transparency, responsibility, and inspiration – both as consumers and employees. Being “In Search of Excellence” therefore no longer suffices; companies and their leaders now need to pursue significance.

Achieving this vision requires changes in two key dimensions of our economy: what we consider to be “value” and the values that guide how we create it. We need a more inclusive value definition that is respectful of all stakeholders’ needs, fully aligned with human values, and transcending the merely transactional; and we need inclusive models of value-creation that are inherently social.

At the national level, Bhutan’s Gross Happiness Index, as an alternative to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), has gained many admirers, and both the French and the UK governments have begun to emulate it. Moreover, there are supra-national organizations and NGOs such as the New Economics Foundation in the UK that have long proposed new indicators of economic progress grounded in the belief that we need a more holistic, integrated understanding of the economy instead of one that is purely based on financial terms.

At the corporate level, social media and networks have disrupted traditional paradigms of productivity and organizational behavior, and enabled participatory models of value creation that fully harness human potential by leveraging social technologies to maximize social capital (e.g. enterprise social networks, crowdsourcing). Consequently, the social enterprise of the 21st century recognizes social capital – in other words: talent, inside and outside of the organization – as its key asset. In his article, Klaus Schwab describes this as a significant paradigm shift:

“Capital is being superseded by creativity and the ability to innovate – and therefore by human talents – as the most important factors of production. If talent is becoming the decisive competitive factor, we can be confident in stating that capitalism is being replaced by ‘talentism.’ Just as capital replaced manual trades during the process of industrialization, capital is now giving way to human talent. I am convinced that this process of transformation will also lead to new approaches within the field of economics. It is indisputable that an ideology founded on personal freedom and social responsibility gives both individuals and the economy the greatest possible scope to develop.”

With the rise of “talentism,” the need for a real understanding of the common human values that connect organizations and individuals is becoming ever more important. Transparency, inclusivity, individual empowerment, and organizational responsiveness are crucial in nurturing businesses’ social fabric and facilitating empathy and collaboration. Yet, the challenge remains: How do we translate these values into day-to-day corporate behavior and into tangible, personal experiences? How can companies become open organizations that harness and build social capital both inside and outside of their institutional boundaries?

This is where our “Reinvent Business” hackathon comes in. Whether it is a mobile app that uses real-time peer feedback from social networks to help address ethical dilemmas, or a tracker that captures and measures alternative types of value, or a data visualization tool that illustrates the unintended consequences and the externalities of decisions, or an ‘empathy app’ that lets you see the world through someone else’s eyes, we hope for concepts that radically rethink the current business frameworks while at the same time offering practical solutions to business leaders and employees.

To be clear: We don’t expect this hackathon to produce any silver bullets, nor do we aim to “productize away” the deep and complex challenges of a moral economy and a more human enterprise. But we are poised to spawn a conversation by tackling concrete problem spaces that might inspire further-reaching, broader solutions.

Learn more about the "Reinvent Business" hackathon: http://www.reinventbusinesshackathon.com/overview.html

To participate in the "Reinvent Business" hackathon, apply here: http://www.reinventbusinesshackathon.com/apply.html

New Perspectives On The Work/(Life) Conundrum

My mom always told me “Make your passion your profession, and you’ll be a happy man.” She was right, and I am glad I followed her advice. Yet I appear to be part of a minority. In an article about growing disenchantment at work (“Hating What You Do”), this week’s Economist cites a survey conducted by the Center for Work-Life Policy, an American consultancy. It found that between June 2007 and December 2008 the proportion of workers who professed loyalty to their employers slumped from 95% to 39%, and the number voicing trust in them fell from 79% to 22%. Furthermore, the article refers to a more recent survey by DDI which found that more than half of the respondents described their job as “stagnant,” as in “nothing interesting to do” and “little hope of professional growth" within their current organization. Half of these “stagnators” said they were planning to look for another job as soon as the economy recovered. These survey findings are flanked by several recent cultural events in the US that indicate a shift in the way we negotiate the meaning of work, for example Michael Moore’s “Capitalism – A Love Story” and a whole New York Times Magazine issue on “Anxiety.”

And yet, Americans will be surprised to hear that the most dramatic manifestation of this apparent misery-at-work trend occurred in “socialist” France. A spate of attempted and successful suicides at France Telecom that occured over the past twelve months, many of them explicitly prompted by stress and dissatisfaction at work, forced the deputy CEO to resign and sparked an emotional national debate about life in the modern corporation.

“You are what you do,” German philosopher Immanuel Kant contended long before we started talking about Work/Life balance. Having always been an idealistic concoction most fervently promoted by those biased towards Life, this balance wouldn’t even need to be promoted if it were indeed a battle of equal powers. It isn’t. Work has invaded every single aspect of our lives, and it has infiltrated our society Mafia-style: controlling and demanding every hour of our lives without appearing to do so. Increasingly, Work is no longer visible as such and is instead embedded into Life, which makes its power even more frightening: If you do things that are work but don’t feel like work, then Work has ultimately prevailed.

With the advent of digital media, the relationship between Work and Life has again dramatically changed. Social computing has turned the workplace into the living room and the living room into the workplace. For the digital knowledge workers of the attention economy, it has become harder, if not impossible, to separate Work and Life. The concepts of live-to-work and work-to-live, often pitted against as a clash of American and European cultures, are too one-dimensional to truly capture the reality of most professionals today. Work is Life, and Life is Work, and there is not much in between. The question is no longer how we can balance our digital lifestyle with our professional lives, the question is: How were we able to get any work done before the digital era? And how did we have a life before Twitter?

The new digital work lifestyle has profound implications for one’s (professional) identity: What do you do when everyone else does everything all the time? With everything and everyone connected, the once clear contours of our existence give way to an indistinguishable maelstrom of stimulation: the story of our life is no longer a curriculum, it is a non-linear stream. You can go swimming, fishing, snorkeling, and sailing in it. You can choose to stay on the surface or take a deep dive. But you can never leave. And you can always drown. With Work and Life being the Big Blend, it is shocking but not surprising that for some the only way to take a break from Work is to take a permanent sabbatical from Life, as in the case of the France Telecom workers.

The borderless Work/Life experience creates agoraphobia, an anxiety about an indefinite space of self-actualization possibilities and one’s position within. As Alain de Botton, the philosopher for the knowledge worker, put it: “It’s perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living. It’s perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm and be free of career anxiety.”

The Economist suspects that companies aggravate this anxiety by a new, ill-conceived form of Taylorism: “Giant retailers use ‘workforce management’ software to monitor how many seconds it takes to scan the goods in a grocery cart, and then reward the most diligent workers with prime working hours. The public sector, particularly in Britain, is awash with inspectorates and performance targets. Taylorism, which Charlie Chaplin lampooned so memorably in ‘Modern Times,’ has spread from the industrial to the post-industrial economy. In Japan some firms even monitor whether their employees smile frequently enough at customers.”

These are all measures that will very likely deter Generation Y workers, the digital natives who have grown up with the Internet and expect organizations to provide them with much more ambiguity and empowerment than these were willing to give to their parents. For the Gen Y’ers, Work is no longer just what you do; Work is another way of Life – a meaningful life. It implies a Work-Life package that reconciles passion and profession, meaning and earning, impact and income. A good job is what you believe in – as long as you can abandon it at will. Sure, Work has become invasive, but so has Life, as work performance is being constantly disrupted by the micro-events in one's digital life feed (email, Twitter, blogging, social networks, etc.). Companies need to learn to convert this distraction into productivity. In fact, this might be the biggest management challenge for the next ten years: Learning how to leverage the tools of distraction to increase productivity – and happiness.

No matter where on the Work/Life continuum you’d place yourself, you will acknowledge the one premise that unites us all: how we are going to work in the future will determine how we’re going to live in the future. Consequently, the Berlin-based creative collective Palomar 5 believes that the best way to find out about the future of work is to let people from different backgrounds work together. Palomar 5 has therefore organized a six-week long Innovation Camp in Berlin that gathers, Big Brother-like, 30 handpicked uber-achievers under 30 to explore (and live together) a vision of work in the digital future. The Camp’s agenda and workflow have been carefully crafted and encompass various modules, guest experts (among them a team from the frog studio in Stuttgart), and collaborative creative assignments that tackle Work/Life as one big design challenge.

In a similar vein, The Internet As Playground and Factory: A Conference on Digital Labor will be held at the Eugene Lang College of The New School in New York City on November 12-14. An overview Introduction sets out the seminal questions arising “in the midst of massive transformations in economy, labor, and life related to digital media.” The conference is free, with advance registration required.

There’s no dearth of books on the subject either: If I had to pick two, I’d go with Alain de Botton’s The Sorrows and Pleasures of Work (with a poignant chapter on accountants) and Don Tapscott’s Grown Up Digital which provides a comprehensive overview of the aspirations and habits of the Gen Y workforce.

Oh, and last but not least, our next design mind issue will be dedicated to “Work/Life” – if you would like to contribute or submit ideas for articles and art, please contact us at designmind@frogdesign.com (we love our work so much we’ll even respond on weekends…).

SOCAP09 (Social Capital Markets) Conference Brings Together Social Innovators from Government and Business

The Social Capital Markets (SOCAP) Conference, a landmark gathering of top business and government leaders creating market-based solutions for social impact, is taking place September 1-3, at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center.

SOCAP brings together a unique mix of the world’s leading social innovators – traditional investors, impact investors, social entrepreneurs, philanthropists, new media, NGO’s and non-profits, wealth managers, development agencies, venture capitalists, MBA students and other groups interested in the growing opportunities of social capital — who are catalysts of change across the globe.

Last year’s conference gathered more than 650 leading global investors and entrepreneurs from 26 countries. This year’s conference from September 1-3 in San Francisco is sold out again and features speakers from the Skoll Foundation, Participant Productions, Food Inc, GRITtv, LINKtv, Invisible Children, Global Giving, the World Economic Forum, Virgance, Kiva, Change.org, Ushahidi, McKinsey, The Economist, and many others. The opening keynote will be given by Sonal Shah, Director of the White House Office for Social Innovation.

“SOCAP09 is the premier event that puts the flow of capital to social good into a context,” says Founder Kevin Jones. “In these turbulent times, social innovators in the public and private sectors, from foundations to social venture funds to development agencies to grassroots Web 2.0 activists, are working together to build a new economic foundation for the world. With our expert speakers, high-impact sessions and exciting networking events, SOCAP09 is an essential gathering for anyone interested in the burgeoning field of social capital.”

I will be there, too, and report. You can also follow the conference online via:

SOCAP09 Blog

Twitter: @socap09,#socap09

The Future of Capitalism in Five Minutes: Meaning-Driven Business in Fast Times

Never let a crisis go to waste! Inspired by the transformative impetus of the economic downturn, my employer, frog design, will soon be starting a series about “Meaning-Driven Business” that invites leading business thinkers as well as C-level executives to discuss alternative ways of doing business and creating value. The series is based on the assumption that the current crisis is also a moral crisis, a fundamental crisis of trust in business leadership. According to the Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index from April 8, trust in business has reached unprecedented lows, with only 10% of Americans now saying they trust large corporations. The “future of capitalism,” it seems, is at stake.

All this serves as a clarion call for business as unusual, and new ideas and values are in high demand. We believe this is an important conversation, and with “Meaning-Driven Business” we would like to provide a forum in which our guest contributors (some of them our clients) can present their ideas – from different backgrounds, different industries, and different corporate functions. Obviously, we‘re not the only ones exploring new horizons for business, nor are we the first. Some distinguished scholars and thought leaders have staked the claim and produced some great thinking around this topic.

Let’s start with an unlikely expert: the Catholic Church. The New York Times reports that Pope Benedict XVI is worried about global capitalism going awry. In “Charity in Truth,” his first papal encyclical on economic and social matters, he posits that Roman Catholic teachings can help reign in Western economics by encouraging social justice (which always means solidarity with the poorer and weaker) and closely regulating the market. In the same article, the Times cites German archbishop Reinhard Marx, a close advisor to the pope, who has written a best seller titled “Das Kapital” (“The Capital”), in a not so subtle reference to his more famous namesake. Obviously inspired by the success of the German post-war model (and the European welfare state philosophy in general), the archbishop calls for a universal “global social market economy” but is prudent enough to acknowledge its limitations, quoting Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg: “I approve of the notion that Europe sees itself, unpretentiously, as a model for the world, but the consequence of that is that we would have to constantly change that model because we are not the world.”

Like the pope and his archbishop, economist Umar Haique argues that we need to re-boot capitalism. And like Reinhard Marx, he focuses on a re-definition of “capital.” His concept of “constructive capitalism,” however, is more radical than the social market economy solution Marx proposes. Haique demands that 21st century economics fundamentally rethink “what capital isn’t – and what capital really is.” “The value equation of industrial-era capitalism was toxically imbalanced. Why is industrial era business so destructive – why does it slash and burn rainforests, endanger entire species, vaporize culture and community, marginalize the poor and disadvantaged, and erode our health and vitality? Because none of those have value in an industrial economy: none are capitalized. So the bean counters of the world are free to plunder and ruin them – because, economically, they actually don't exist. 20th century capitalism, in other words, marginally valued pure financial capital too highly, while marginally valuing human, natural, social, and cultural capital at zero – or, at the limit, negatively." One example of the “capital deepening” Haique envisions are carbon assets: “Once they're capitalized, they become next-gen assets: assets that can be traded, hedged, remixed, tweaked, open-sourced, or shared. The difference is that they're assets with intrinsic, durable, human value – not the lemons Wall St was in the business of hawking. It is only by capitalizing the things we really value that the spark of value creation can be lit again.” As another example of really valuable capital Haique refers to Rypple, an ad-hoc social network that provides simple, direct, anonymous, and ongoing customer and employee feedback: “Rypple’s economic engine is powered by human and social capital – Rypple taps the connections people have with friends, colleagues, bosses, and mentors, to help them get smarter and more productive.”

Former Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff would agree with Haique. She is the author of The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism, and in her recent BusinessWeek article “The Old Solutions Have Become the New Problems,” she proposes companies charter what she calls the “i-Space”: “Business is no longer just about the product. Now it’s about solutions for the individual. Economic value is hidden in consumers’ unmet needs and is released by providing people with the means to fulfill those needs. But in order to release new value, you need to get out of organization space and into the subjective space where individuals live. I call it ‘I-Space.’ This means shedding the ‘us-them’ mentality. Now everyone is an insider.” To succeed in i-space, companies “must federate and collaborate to compete:” “You can't do it alone because the needs of individuals don't conform to existing organizational and industry boundaries. This means learning how to manage what you don't control or own. These economies of trust are becoming even more important than economies of scale. (…) Amazon’s marketplace and eBay's webs of buyers and sellers are early prototypes of these federated networks. Apple and Facebook are struggling to understand the rules of engagement that should govern relationships with their applications developers. You can see them climbing a new learning curve through trial and error as they figure out how to build and sustain economies of trust.” Zuboff is wary of the old paradigms still taught in business school and calls all previous “compasses” obsolete: “You're in a new place. The bad news: There are no maps. The good news? You are the mapmaker.”

Similarly, Jeff Jarvis' concept of the "Share Economy” and Chris Anderson’s notion of the “Free Economy" are both based on the assumption that there is no viable business in markets in which information and content are abundant (i.e. the news industry) unless you add the value of aggregation, create artificial scarcity, or give away those abundant assets (i.e. music recordings) that drive attention to assets that are truly scarce (the live concert experience). Or as Kevin Kelly puts it in "Better than Free": "When copies are free, you need to sell things which cannot be copied."

Richard Edelman from Edelman PR believes we are entering a new era of “Mutual Social Responsibility,” in which “people (formerly labeled as ‘consumers’ by marketers!) contribute to society’s sustainability and well-being in partnership with business, government and non-governmental organizations. But they demand a seat at the table and real voice in the discussion.”

Noah Robischon from Fast Company coined the new, chic term “Ethonomics:” “We live in a world that's resource-constrained but ingenuity-rich. So an upstart generation of entrepreneurs – and innovators within the world's biggest companies – are founding businesses that are good for the world as well as the bottom line. They are practicing social change through urban revitalization, sustainable agriculture, green IT, alternative energy and online community-powered investing. Any business that claims to be truly sustainable and innovative should be increasingly efficient with energy and natural resources, transparent and accountable, and good on balance for people and other living things.”

Speaking of social, there are many who would argue that the future of social is indeed the future of business. This trend even extends to the world of finance – arguably the one industry sector that has suffered most from excessive short-term innovation and is in greatest need of real transformation. Social innovation platform Volans calls for a "WeBank" and asks: "Are people replacing institutions?" As an example of alternative micro- and real-time financing models it refers to Zopa, the world’s first online social finance company:”With no middlemen, less overhead, improved rates for lenders and borrowers, and a sense of transactions between ‘real people,' it creates trust and shared interests between lenders and borrowers.”

Peter Kim, together with Jeff Dachis, David Armano, and other partners, has launched “the first social business firm,” Dachis Corporation, and developed a "social business design framework" for "understanding and applying social constructs to business.” Social business design is “a mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive way of considering how a corporation, business unit, or project can create and capture value from today's emerging technologies and evolving operating environment. The social business design framework captures ecosystem (community), hivemind (culture), dynamic signal (collaboration), and metafilter (content). Putting these into play creates improved business outcomes as well as emergent outcomes. Measurement provides the backbone to the entire framework, as driving change requires proof.” The most interesting archetype of Social Business Design to me is the Dynamic Signal, “the concept that every activity and action is recorded and made available, that every piece of data goes from being a database entry and is instead an event. An event which can be managed, shared and collaborated on by all of those in the organization,” as Dachis partner Jevon MacDonald explains. This concept resembles the familiar vision of the “Real Time Enterprise.” Rypple – mentioned before – offers real-time, ongoing customer and peer feedback, acknowledging that “Real-time business is inherently social – there is no real-time without social."

Yet the accelerated transactions and interaction cycles on the Real-Time Web need to be balanced with sustainable thinking. Quick decisions are easier to make if they’re grounded in a long-term perspective' agility requires stability; and the prerequisite for openness is a strong (and tight) community. It is it ever-more important that companies have a stable foundation, rooted in a set of shared of values and beliefs. At least that’s Charles Handy thinks: “....what enables a corporation to succeed in the longer term is a wish for immortality, or at least a long life; a consistent set of values based on an awareness of the organization's own identity; a willingness to change; and a passionate concern for developing the capability and self-confidence of its core inhabitants, whom the company values more than its physical assets. I suggest that those conditions are best met when organizations live up to the literal meaning of the word company –‘the sharing of bread’ – and regard themselves as communities, not property.....in time, the laws governing corporations will change to reflect (this) new reality." ("Looking Ahead," HBR September 1997).

For former Procter & Gamble chairman and CEO A.G. Lafley “Balancing present and future” is one of the key responsibilities of CEOs: “Don't allow the short-term interests to take precedence over the company's long-term objectives," he warns in a recent article for the Harvard Business Review (“What Only the CEO Can Do”). He describes the CEO as the only person in an organization who can link the external with the internal perspective. “It’s a job that the CEO must do because without the outside there is no inside.” You could argue, of course, that the real-time, hyper-transparent social web has made that distinction obsolete anyway: Inside and outside are congruent; they are one and the same.

There are numerous other thinkers that envision a faster and yet more sustainable, social business as the future of capitalism, and you can browse through articles and blogs post without end. Some recurring themes emerge though the more you read: On the organizational, delivery side, these themes are "social,” “real-time,” and “micro.” And on the cultural, the leadership side, they are “authenticity,” “generosity,” and “empathy.” If you combine the two layers, you get an interesting matrix – let's call it the "Meaning-Driven Business Matrix.” This is the playing-field in which all product, service, and business model innovation will take place from now on – but that’s a topic for a whole series (coming soon).

frog design Unveils “Power” Issue of design mind Magazine

I'm very happy to announce that we just released the latest issue of our design mind print and online publication. The new issue, the third print edition and tenth overall, focuses on the theme of "Power."

As the global recession has altered the economic landscape, and digital technologies continue to challenge conventional hierarchies, design mind explores new definitions of influence and power. Who has it, where can you find it, how is it being used, and what happens if you lose it?

Highlights of the new issue include an interview with Philip Zimbardo, the Stanford psychology professor, TED speaker, and Abu Ghraib expert witness known for his infamous 1971 Prison Experiment, in which he recruited students to play prisoners and guards in a mock jail until the project took on a disturbing life of its own.

frog founder and legendary designer Hartmut Esslinger offers readers an exclusive sneak peek of his new book "A Fine Line: How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business." The book, to be published by Wiley imprint Jossey-Bass on June 29th, delves into frog's iconic work for global powerhouses including Apple, Disney, Lufthansa, SAP, and Sony.

Other features in the new issue include:
- "Wanted: Chief Meaning Officer": How the new social power of marketing can transform business.
- "Power Up": Ten innovative clean-tech and energy startups to watch.
- "In Search Of": Seven design researchers write about their unusual and wonderful discoveries on the job.
- "Design with Intent": How designers can influence behavior.
- "The Appearance of Influence": Do you have to look a certain way to be powerful?
- "The Napoleon Effect": Why small and simple ideas sometimes bring the most success.
- "The Art of the Unfriend": When social networking becomes social stress.

Written by frog designers, technologists, and strategists, design mind provides the design and innovation community with perspectives on industry trends, emerging technologies, and global consumer culture. The magazine is published three times per year and features interviews with high-profile thought leaders along with contributions from external writers, designers, and photographers. The print edition is currently available for purchase online at designmind.frogdesign.com; in San Francisco at Alexander Book Company and Farley’s; in New York at St. Mark’s Bookshop; and in Shanghai, China, at the 100percent design store. Readers can also access select content from the magazine online along with additional Web-only features including a video series, a blog network, and interactive content from frog’s exclusive speaker series events.

The premier print issue of design mind launched in July 2008 and was widely recognized by the design and business community as well as by publications such as BusinessWeek, Forbes, The San Francisco Chronicle and Core77, which called it "a tightly designed, thoughtful tool." The magazine was selected as a winner for 365: AIGA Annual Design Competitions 30, STEP magazine’s STEP Inside Design 100, and Creativity + Commerce, Print magazine’s International Business Graphics review.

This summer, frog design has been invited to produce a special design mind issue in conjunction with the upcoming TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, UK (July 21-24).

next09: The Seven Rules of the Chief Meaning Officer

(c) next09

I just came back from the next09 conference in Hamburg, one of Europe's leading digital/creative/marketing forums that stands out in the conference circuit because of its unique German-international focus (bilingual program, 80% international attendees, many international speakers). This year's theme was "Share Economy," and the 1,300 attendees comprised of European VCs and angel investors, web 2.0 entrepreneurs, media, creative agencies, and execs from leading German companies (from BMW to Deutsche Bank to Deutsche Telekom).

In talking to many German attendees, my impression was that the German creative community shows no signs of a downturn. The German start-up scene in particular, if that is any indicator, is alive and kicking. There are many new promising web 2.0 firms run by smart entrepreneurs (many of them funded by entrepreneurs who made a fortune during the dot com heyday), and there is a lot of money to go around. Notwithstanding this newly found confidence, however, Germans still look to the US, and in particular to Silicon Valley, for technology trends and innovative business models – this is nothing new but next09 was a stark reminder of how powerful the Valley myth still is. Consequently, there was a large contingent of social media folks from the Bay Area.

I met several great people including Lane Becker, the founder of Adaptive Path and co-founder and president of Get Satisfaction (the "people-powered customer service" that seems to be everybody's darling these days), Natasha Friis Saxberg, the founder of Mentory, a web-based mentoring network, Daniel Reckling from Neckermann.de, Germany's largest online retailer, Stephan Loyen from Simyo (a German discount telco), Darius Miranda from Wells Fargo (which appears to have a pretty sophisticated social media B2B strategy), and many others.

In conversations with Jackson Bond and Johannes Haus from Xing, the European equivalent to LinkedIn, it became evident that for social networks and other web players 'conversations' are the next big frontier. The business world is ready to embrace an enterprise Twitter, and many business communities (social networks and intra-company networks alike) are working on proprietary internal micro-blogging services – micro micro-blogging, if you will, that can be better customized and controlled. Yammer for everyone. In one of the main stage sessions at next09, Stowe Boyd ("Unmarketing") presented the Open Enterprise 2009 study, which predicts that in a few years 80% of knowledge-based tasks in corporations will be happening outside of formal organizational boundaries and be open-sourced, crowd-sourced, social, and conversational.

In this vein, I was invited to speak about "The Shrinking Brand – Marketing in a Small World," a talk I had given before at the eMarketing conference in San Francisco. But after listening to Jeff Jarvis' terrific key note on "The Great Restructuring," Umair Haque's pledge for "Constructive Capitalism," and Andrew Keen's passionate rebuttal of both, I felt the need to change the focus of my talk and approach it from a broader view. It was also more fun to present something new. And so I came up with the "Seven Rules of the Chief Meaning Officer" (I know, I know, ten would have been better, but sometimes there are only seven...), based on a concept I've been blogging about over the past few months. This was the first time I ever shared it at a public forum.

My key points, in a nutshell: As brands face an unprecedented level of competition, transparency, and consumer empowerment on the social web, 'meaning' is becoming the new powerful currency that connects brands with their brandholders in the 'share economy.' The new marketing leader, the Chief Meaning Officer, is a strategic activist, social media entrepreneur, constant innovator, and integrator. The Chief Meaning Officer has the potential to transform business through meaningful marketing – marketing that consistently creates added social value, not as an afterthought but a sine qua non. While marketing has always been the art of turning friends into customers and customers into friends, it is now the art of finding, befriending, and activating the like-minded for a common cause, for the common good – and for profit. Brands that have a reason to exist, an argument to win, will be more appealing than ever.

The Seven Rules:
1. Listen and converse (and converge)
2. Atomize your brand
3. Activate your customers
4. Think and act like a media company
5. Give more than you take
6. Be the change
7. Be yourself

Here are the slides:

Tim Leberecht@NEXT09: The Seven Rules of the Chief Meaning Officer

View more presentations from Frog Design.

More about the other next09 talks – and the emerging 'Share Economy' (that you may also call a "Twitter Economy") – in the next couple of days…

White House Launches Social Innovation Fund

The non-profit world is buzzing about the White House's Social Innovation Fund, a new $50 million fund to "identify the most promising, results-oriented non-profit programs and expand their reach throughout the country." The fund is tasked with efforts to enlist individuals, non-profits, social entrepreneurs, and corporations in an attempt to promote and improve civic participation and national service through new media tools.

From the White House press release:

"The White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation will coordinate efforts to enlist all Americans - individuals, non-profits, social entrepreneurs, corporations and foundations - as partners in solving our great challenges. Located within the Domestic Policy Council, it will:

- Catalyze partnerships between the government and nonprofits, businesses and philanthropists in order to make progress on the President's policy agenda;
- Identify and support the rigorous evaluation and scaling of innovative, promising ideas that are transforming communities like, for example, Harlem Children's Zone, YouthVillages, Nurse-Family Partnership, and Citizen Schools;
- Support greater civic participation through new media tools;
- Promote national service.

"The idea is simple: to find the most effective programs out there and then provide the capital needed to replicate their success in communities around the country that are facing similar challenges," First Lady Michelle Obama will say Tuesday at the Time 100 Most Influential People Awards in New York City, according to her prepared remarks. "By focusing on high-impact, result-oriented non-profits, we will ensure that government dollars are spent in a way that is effective, accountable and worthy of the public trust."

Marketing with Meaning: How KLM Activates Dormant Social Networks

I wrote earlier that 'marketing with meaning' has the ability to 'activate' customers. An effective way to activate customers is by activating the dormant social networks they inhabit (often without even knowing it). While social networking has visualized the so-called 'six degrees of separation,' all business transactions have a social component and can be seen as expressions of the underlying social micro-universes, 'the worlds within worlds,' in which – shifting time and place – individuals travel and interact. As marketers face the daunting challenge of connecting with fragmented audiences that are increasingly split into billions of social atoms populating myriad micro-networks, activating dormant social networks is their foremost task.

KLM's Africa and China Clubs, launched in 2007 and 2006 respectively, provide an interesting case study. The Dutch airline offers business customers the opportunity to meet fellow travelers who do business with or in either of these two regions – before take-off or during the flight, online and in person. KLM plays the role of the matchmaker and adds value to the otherwise somewhat value-free hours frequent travelers spend at airport lounges. It is the principle of the social networking site Dopplr, applied to the exclusive crowd of business or first class travelers: Connecting travelers who share the same connections. KLM pre-filters the club members so that travelers who sign up for the exclusive network are warranted a certain quality of contacts.

The clubs are a win-win-win: Trade groups and business offices from the travel regions are provided with a highly targeted way to advertise their services; travelers benefit from a true value-add and a richer travel experience; and, lastly, the clubs bolster KLM's reputation as an airline that cares about its customers. Of course, these networks already exist – they're just dormant. KLM does not make immediate revenue but it generates "social wealth" as long-term equity.

The KLM clubs exhibit all the characteristics of 'meaningful marketing' (see chart below):

- Social: The clubs help people connect.
- Personal: The clubs are relevant for the people they serve, and the service is exclusive and highly personalized.
- Storytelling: The clubs make sense of disparate information, perspectives, and events. They facilitate crossing paths by creating – quite literally – a common goal and therefore a joint narrative.
- Disruptive: The clubs disrupt the usual travel routine; they make it comfortable for business travelers to leave their comfort zone and go 'off the beaten path' to meet new people.
- Responsible: The clubs generate social capital by bringing together business people in pursuit of related goals. The KLM Club Africa, in particular, has helped African entrepreneurs to get in front of influential business executives (investors) conducting business in Africa.

Business, Ethics, Barcelona: Doing Good When You’re Not Doing So Well

I just returned from Barcelona (where every tourist now seems to be tracking the path of Woody Allen's Vicky and Christina…), attending a few sessions of the Doing Good and Doing Well Conference organized by IESE Business School and Net Impact, an organization that connects MBA students interested in social responsibility.

That a leading business school is dedicating an entire student-run conference to the topic of responsible business is remarkable (HEC Paris will do the same soon in May, also in collaboration with Net Impact) but not an isolated phenomenon. In the past few years, several top business schools, such as Yale, Duke, Harvard, and Stanford, as well as pioneers such as the Presidio School of Management in San Francisco and the Bainbridge Graduate Institute in Washington State have begun to offer tailored programs to MBAs who want to marry traditional business skills with innovative approaches to solving social problems. Different from nonprofit curricula, which typically provide the fundamentals of fundraising and grant writing, these specific business school programs combine the finance and management training of a traditional MBA with electives that cover everything from how to get venture capital and invest in emerging markets to building sustainable energy sources. But conferences like IESE's indicate that social entrepreneurship is not yet fully integrated into all business school curricula and that it still needs the extra limelight. As long as not all business is social business, business that is not social will still find a safe harbor.

Business and ethics have of course been intertwined since the days of the Greek polis. Adam Smith, the spiritual father of the homo oeconomicus, wrote a "Theory of Moral Sentiments" before he wrote "The Wealth of Nations." And yet, business that is good for society has always been in need of being extrapolated through catchy labels (business ethics, CSR, corporate citizenship, social innovation, social entrepreneurship, etc.), invariably heralded as the Next Big Thing and slowly moving up the food chain from a window-dressing PR tool to a truly integral strategy driver. Recently, Fast Company coined the new, chic term "Ethonomics" and even made it one of the key pillars of its relaunched web site:

"We live in a world that's resource-constrained but ingenuity-rich. So an upstart generation of entrepreneurs – and innovators within the world's biggest companies – are founding businesses that are good for the world as well as the bottom line. They are practicing social change through urban revitalization, sustainable agriculture, green IT, alternative energy and online community-powered investing. Any business that claims to be truly sustainable and innovative should be increasingly efficient with energy and natural resources, transparent and accountable, and good on balance for people and other living things. Ethonomics is a hybrid of technology, design, and social responsibility, and at Fast Company we believe it is the future of business."

In Barcelona, this young upstart generation of entrepreneurs and innovators shared its ideas, seeking advice from those who had been in the field for some years. For example from Kyle Zimmer, the president and co-founder of First Book:

"Whenever you hit a point at which you feel you have no idea what you're doing (and if you don't reach that point quickly, you’re not moving fast enough), make a list with the ten most acclaimed experts able to answer your questions. And then call them one by one even if you have never met them or your list includes Bill Gates. It doesn't matter. Tell them your story and ask them for help. Some won’t call you back. In fact, I can pride myself with not having been called back by some of the most accomplished people in the world. But you’d be surprised how many will."

Jessica Jackley Flannery, co-founder and chief marketing officer of micro-lending marketplace Kiva, was another one of the veterans present, and her talk made most of the MBA students in the audience beam. Social entrepreneurs are simpaticos, of course, and you'd be hard pressed to find a MBA student these days who would not want to be a social innovator. Wall Street fame is so yesterday. Flannery epitomized the case for a new 'meaning' and emphasized the power of storytelling: "If we all understood each other's stories, the world would be a better place." Stories create empathy, and empathy breeds the solidarity needed for taking action. In light of the dire economic situation in developed countries, Flannery half-jokingly said she wouldn't be surprised if a young entrepreneur in Uganda were soon to lend money to a job-less banker in Manhattan. Globalization in reverse. In any case, innovative banking such as Kiva's is no longer only focused on helping developing economies. New web-enabled finance 2.0 models and infrastructures attempt to overcome the financial crisis in the US.

Entrepreneurs and innovators may be much needed these days, but "how can you be doing good when we are not doing so well?" the conference asked. With almost 14% unemployment in Spain, it was brutally aware of the need to discuss the creation of "Sustainable Value in a Downturn." Aside from the assumption that recessions can hold tremendous opportunity for any entrepreneur (as Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek point out), social entrepreneurs in particular seem to weather the current investment pullback rather well. The Skoll Foundation is currently conducting a survey, to be presented at the Skoll World Forum in March. Preliminary results indicate that most of the social entrepreneurs have been affected by the economic downturn in some way or other, but only 10% of the respondents say that they have been severely affected.

"A crisis is a terrible thing to waste," Paul Romer (now famously) said, and hopefully the current recession will not lead to a Great Depression but a "Great Disruption" (Paul Gilding) that requires us to build the foundation of our economy from the ground up. In his brilliant post on "How To Be a 21st Century Capitalist," Umar Haique writes that "Capital deepening is the foundation of next-generation value creation." By that he means "assets with intrinsic, durable, human value – not the lemons Wall Street was in the business of hawking. It is only by capitalizing the things we really value that the spark of value creation can be lit again." He predicts that "next-generation businesses will be built on next-generation assets:" "Yesterday's businesses were built on cash, factories, and IP - financial, physical, and intellectual capital. Next-generation businesses are built, instead, on human, social, natural, and cultural capital – to name just a few."

LIFT09: The Future in Permanent Beta

Getting there

I've been conference-hopping through Europe for the past two weeks. In Berlin, I discussed new "quality of life" concepts for Germany, and in Geneva I listened to speakers who held utopian visions from an earlier era accountable for what could have been but wasn't. My own personal well-being was more mundane. I schlepped two big suitcases with me and saw the sun shine only twice. When you travel so much, you start to feel like Tyler Brule: Quality of life is defined by the quality of the airports you pass through, the quality of the WiFi connections, the quality of the hotel room showers, the quality of the food in the random restaurant next to your hotel, and the quality of the casual human interactions along the way. Really, it's that simple. Travel, as we know, makes the human all too human, bringing to the forefront the five basic human desires that David Rose described in his LIFT09 talk: the desire to know, the desire to protect, the desire to heal, the desire to communicate, and the desire to travel.

Indeed, life is basic when you travel, yet I am frustrated with my inability to process the complexity of everything I hear and see on the road. I know I should blog about all the panels I've attended but I can't even decipher my notes anymore because they're a week old and life has changed. "We must write the story before we forget," as CERN's James Gillies noted in his LIFT09 talk about the origins of the Internet. We live in the now and here, and there is no there there.

Not impressed

Mindful of this preamble, the LIFT09 conference, dedicated to discussing the social implications of technology, came with a special twist this year. Bypassing the here and now, it attempted to directly link yesterday and tomorrow: "Where did the future go?" was the big question during the two days in Geneva, and the program was carefully designed to draw lessons from "a history of the future" in order to develop more enlightened concepts for tomorrow. Re-booting the future, so to speak.

In keeping with the current grim economic mood, the conference bemoaned the shallow glory of sci-fi future visions that, to date, haven't lived up to their promise. What is worse though? Dystopian visions that have become real or utopian visions that haven't? For Patrick J. Gyger, a Swiss historian, curator, and writer, it is clearly the latter. He revisited former notions of the future and investigated what became of them: "What happened to the flying car?" Well, it actually made it to market, like many other product aspirations, yet without much fanfare. Or as Gyger dryly remarked: "The future is here and we're not impressed." Instead, a profound disillusionment with technology-driven visions of a better life has kicked in (space travel, end of poverty, the smart Internet, anyone?), and free-market capitalism has betrayed the idea of sustainable prosperity.

Nicolas Nova applied this retro-skeptical view to the world of business, walking the audience through "the recurring failure of holy grails." He presented a nonchalant history of product flops (from the picture phone to the smart fridge to location-based services), which were in his judgment all hampered by "over-optimism," "lack of knowledge," and "blind faith in the Zeitgeist." Yet I found his definition of product success flawed as it was obviously based on the principle of mass adoption – a questionable proposition in times of increasingly fragmented audiences and micro-markets. Which new product – besides maybe the iPod and the iPhone – has really gone mainstream in the past ten years? Many of the products and technologies Nova stigmatized as "failures" have found their audience in some form and created significant value both for their inventors and consumers. Yet we simply fail to recognize their success since it occurs in market niches and communities.

Both Nova and Gyger heralded a more pragmatic model of future-oriented thinking. But I'm not sure if I share their skepticism towards grand visions. What if the future has arrived, however – to paraphrase William Gibson – it is so widely distributed (that is, buried in fragmented micro-markets) that we don't notice it?

Lives in the open

In any case, for a no-show, the future was still suspiciously present at LIFT09. Matt Webb (co-author of "Mind Hacks") described "the pleasure of watching things unfold" and recommended a "narrative" process for invention and creation (of which his Olinda radio prototype is a brilliant example), highlighting in particular the role of writing in the context of design: "Design is a way of walking over the landscape of possible worlds."

Clive van Heerden, senior director of design-led innovation at Philips Design, showed some of Phillips' PROBES videos that explore 'emotional sensing' – from electronic tattoos to skin dresses to food creation.

Fabio Sergio, creative director at frog design's Milan studio, laid out the power of "design thinking for the future." He used the case study of Project Masiluleke (a large-scale initiative that leverages mobile technologies to combat HIV/AIDS in South Africa) to illustrate a model of design that "is not about creating compelling visions of perfect futures but rather shaping betas of presents of a future we want to live in." Quoting an Italian bus customer ("In the past you had to stamp the ticket. Now you simply have to caress the machine."), he spanned the arch from 'form follows function' to 'form follows emotion' to 'form follows meaning' (design that resonates with people's value systems). Empathy, technology as "material to sketch with," people-centered user experiences, and social impact – these are, according to Sergio, the characteristics of "meaningful design."

Empathy, in particular, is not only the foundation for meaningful social innovation projects (pro-bono or for-profit), it is also the very prerequisite for every act of human cooperation. Sympathy creates compassion, empathy breeds solidarity. However, solidarity does not always mean consensus, as UCLA's Ramesh Srinivasan pointed out. He suggested the indigenous use of digital objects and called for systems that "celebrate difference" instead of eradicating it.

Finally, Bill Thompson's vision of the future was optimistically fatalistic or pessimistically upbeat, depending on your point of view. He rocked the house with a provocative obituary. "Privacy is dead," he argued passionately, "get over it!" Instead of complaining about this, Thompson pledged we should embrace the new freedom that comes with radical transparency. The abstract of his talk is so succinct that I simply want to repost it here verbatim:

"The enlightenment idea of privacy is breaking apart under the strain of new technologies, social tools and the emergence of the database state. We cannot hold back the tide, but we can use it as an opportunity to rethink what we understand by 'personality', how we engage and interact with others and where the boundaries can be put between the public and private. Those of us who are ahead of the curve when it comes to the adoption and use of technologies that undermine the old model of privacy have much to teach those who will come after us, and can offer advice and support to those who might be unhappy to have their movements, eating habits, friendships and patterns of media consumption made available to all. But every Twitterer, Tumblr, Dopplr or Brightkite user at Lift is sharing more data with more people than even the FBI under Hoover or the Stasi at the height of its powers could have dreamed of. And we do so willingly, hoping to benefit in unquantifiable ways from this unwarranted - in all senses - disclosure. I'll argue that we are in the vanguard of creating not just new forms of social organisation but new ways of being human."

This new post-privacy era is not without risks: Thompson conceded that "some will suffer, some will even suffer imprisonment." But that wouldn't release us, the digital avant-garde, from our responsibilities. His mandate for the creative tech community assembled at LIFT09 was in fact a moral obligation: "You need to act as mentors for everyone living their life in the open."

I have, I do, I will.