iPlot

Push to Pull

In light of the Arab Spring and the rise of India and China, and propelled by social technologies, the concept of ‘soft power’ (the phrase was coined by Joseph Nye in his 1990 book, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power; defined as “the ability to obtain what one wants through co-option and attraction”) is ever more relevant. Or, in marketing terms, Push is out, Pull is in. If an idea, aspiration, product, goal, ideology, culture, narrative, or national identity is attractive to its constituents, it minimizes the need for constant reinforcement and regulation – whether that is advertising, promotions, and other persuasive efforts, or bureaucracy, command-and-control, and coercion. Pull is powerful (as John Hagel illustrates in his riveting book The Power of Pull). It has a lot of Pull (pun intended) because one doesn’t have to push. It saves energy that can be invested otherwise, for example, in whatever “it” is that creates Pull. No surprise then that individuals, organizations, societies, and entire nations wish they could rely on it more.

But how does one create Pull? Even the most ardent Pull apostle will admit that Pull doesn’t just emanate from nowhere. How much hard power do you have to leverage to create soft power? How much Push is needed to generate Pull? I conducted a mini-poll on Facebook asking that exact question, and the responses ranged from “the answer to this you can only feel” to “a lot.” I sketched a diagram for myself to better understand the forces at work between this power couple, and I came up with three Push-to-Pull ratios that may help you get your “Pull-Push balance” right.

- Positive push-to-pull ratio: If you deploy more Push strategies than the Pull that they generate, then you over-invest in Push and inevitably create an undercurrent, a backlash that can even decrease the current amount of Pull you have. You risk dissolving the entropy of the overall system. Your idea, your narrative, your brand will be seen as intrusive, and in the worst case, as spam.

- Neutral push-to-pull ratio: If your Push and Pull energy levels are in balance, then you achieve the perfect equilibrium. You don’t generate any incremental Pull but you also don’t lose any. You need to be vigilant not to overdo your Push efforts, or you compromise your Pull. One could also say that the very point at which Push threatens to exceed Pull is the demarcation line between ‘cool’ and ‘uncool.’

- Negative push-to pull ratio: The last and ideal state is have Pull exceed Push. This happens after a long period of Push when the scale of Push needed to create Pull decreases. Or when the idea, aspiration, narrative, and culture is so strong that it sustains and amplifies itself. If that’s the case, your job is to simply enable connections for the “idea” (in this case, refering to brands, you can speak of “brand ideologies” or “intrinsic brands” such as IKEA, Nike, Apple, or Starbucks).

These three relationships sit along a continuum, and perhaps it makes sense to consider them to be stages in the evolution of organizations. Fledgling start-ups will rely more on Pull (for they often lack resources to invest in Push), but as they mature, they will inevitably explore means to amplify their intrinsic Pull with Push. Eventually they are so established that they can rely solely, or mainly, on Pull, however now with far bigger impact than the one they were able to achieve as start-ups. There are two critical junctures on this continuum and corresponding decisions: When exactly, in the early stage of an organizational or brand development, do you start to invest in Push? And at what point do you decrease the level of Push so you don’t “push too hard,” over-reach, and jeopardize the valuable Pull you’ve generated? (Ever come across an ad from a brand that you adore and disappointed that the company had to advertise in the first place?)

Pull is a function of cultural power, of the routines and rituals, of the energy that is flowing through an organization. Energy here translates to intensity: not only the level of activity (knowledge flows, productivity, social interactions), but also the tension between actors, the battles between conflicting ideas. If your organization experiences tension, then it is “intense.” An intense organization is always stretched, intellectually and resource-wise, and it is constantly operating at capacity of what it is able to imagine and execute on – it is in a state of emergence, a permanent crisis, with a heavy dose of ambiguity, uncertainty, and even paranoia. This is a good thing: the fearful are paralyzed, the paranoid are proactive (and creative).

Pull comes from an original idea, a compelling story, a contagious meme. Astrophysicist and philosopher David Deutsch defines a meme as "an idea that is a replicator." “A rational meme replicates because people find it valuable,” he writes in The Beginning of Infinity. “An anti-rational meme replicates by disabling its holder's rational thinking so that one has no choice but to spread it.” That’s the difference between Pull and Push, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, empowerment and enforcement, creativity and bureaucracy. Brands, countries, and movements that are built on rational memes have real Pull – and almost infinite staying power. The others will be pushed out sooner or later.

[image credit: timmonsandcompanyblog.com]

The Opposite House

Otherness and other pillars of a new moral economy

“So, what is the reason for your existence?” the German professor at a Chinese business school reception in Shanghai asked me, to start a conversation. I felt like ad man Don Draper in the TV series Mad Men when his false identity is unveiled. Who are you really? Caught off guard, I answered: “I’m a marketer.” The conversation moved on, others had wittier sound bites to contribute, and my unease continued. It had been weighing on me since I had put my foot on Chinese soil a few days earlier, and here in this beautiful mansion, confiscated by the government from the corrupt former mayor of Shanghai, it was a steady companion.

You may think that the homogenized cosmopolitan settings of the tier one cities Beijing and Shanghai would seem familiar and comforting to a seasoned Western business traveler like me, but this time the glitzy, uber-capitalist façade did not alleviate my profound sense of dislocation and alienation. I was a stranger and everything was strange to me. This sentiment was exacerbated when I checked into the Opposite House, a chic designer hotel in Beijing’s Sanlitun village district that literally comprises of two opposing halves, each housing generous rooms, connected through a vast space underneath, which is used as both art gallery and lobby. Designed by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma and catering to the ‘global soul,’ it was meant to make you feel at home in an open, accessible space of kindness, but it did the opposite to me. It manifested the Otherness of my being here, in the heart of this strange city, with other strangers, who, like me, probably had no clue and so, like me, just marveled at the strangeness of it all.

It occurred to me that the Opposite House was a metaphor for some of the issues I had been pondering for the past few months. “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, and while his words were infinitely wise, I thought that a more intelligent mind than mine may very well hold the two opposites, in Beijing or anywhere, but perhaps even the most intelligent mind would not necessarily be happy in doing so. It’s hard to be happy if you are denied a happy ending, and it’s an unpleasant, arduous task to withstand the temptation to reconcile dual or multiple truths. We are hardwired to believe – and to believe in one truth.

Having just worked through the intricacies of integrating a marketing function and harmonizing two brands (and very different business cultures), I know how exhausting it can be when there is always ‘the other side of the story.’ This ‘other side’ can be the externalization of effects (responsibility), or it can mean putting yourself in someone else’s shoes (empathy). What the other side rarely appreciates is how hard you have worked to be on yours, and how much effort it has been for you to truly believe in it. Whatever it takes then to make you switch sides (or at least recognize the opposite one), it must include some kind of reimbursement for the intellectual and emotional work that went into asserting and upholding your one truth. The grass may or may not be greener on the other side of the fence – the path there, the ‘empathy dividend,’ better be worthwhile. This is true for conflict management at the individual, institutional, societal, and international level: Israel and the Arab world, Shiites and Sunni, Pakistan and India, China and the US, North and South Korea, Occupy Wall Street versus the 1%, and the list goes on – the world is conveniently framed by antagonisms, by dualities that stubbornly resist both reconciliation and the parallel truths that Fitzgerald heralded.

China resolves dualities by grasping Yin and Yang as complementary, interconnected forces, and its defiance of dichotomous moral judgments is not always easy to accept for the Western mind. Henry Kissinger’s views On China are a notable exception to the many books (e.g. Martin Jacques’ When China Rules the World and James Kynge’s China Shakes the World) that have recently examined how an ascendant and increasingly confident China could affect the rest of us. Kissinger seeks to understand China’s place in the world from the conditions of China’s complicated history and rich culture, not through the lens of Western morale. Kissinger does not portray China as hegemonial power but as an introverted nation that aims at protecting its ideal of a ‘harmonious society’ by making calculated offensive moves. He compares them to the Chinese board game Weiqi where the onus is on strategic encirclement rather than the black and white of absolute victory or defeat. Morality, essentially, deals with the question of how we treat the Other – the one who is not identical with us. Empathy, or even sympathy, is its foundation. With respect to China, this raises the question: To what extent can you leave your comfort zone, your moral center of gravity, to understand the Other before your absolute truth becomes relative, your ethical behavior situational, and your moral compass rudderless?

Moreover, a concept of morality based on Otherness presumes the Cartesian continuum of Ego and Self. But what if the line between Self and Other is fuzzy? In his writings, the British moral philosopher Derek Parfit (who became famous through his teleporter thought experiment and was recently portrayed in this stunning New Yorker article) rejects the integrity of personal identity and instead proposes a reductionist view of human life that renders the Kantian concept of the Self’s moral autonomy obsolete. If parts of your brain cells were to be transplanted into another body, he wonders, what would that do to yours and the other body’s personal identity? Who would be you? Parfit claims there would be two Selves (or none). Consequently, morality, in his view, is meta-personal and non-relational, and can only be derived from universal truths. To him, the loss of the concept of a separate Self is liberating, which puts him him in close proximity to Buddhists, who identify and recognize themselves in the Other:

“My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness... [However] When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.” [Derek Parfit]

Sam Harris’ latest book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values covers reductionist terrain as well, albeit from a very different vantage point. Harris seeks to constitute moral relevance from the alleged objectivity of scientific findings. But do we really want to entrust science all of our moral decisions? Science is not an authority on morality; it is its very subject. The moral landscape is not as flat as Harris wants us to believe. Or to riff on William Gibson: “Morality is here, it is just not very evenly distributed.”

Steven Pinker, in his recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, argues that the spread of literacy led to a “circle of empathy,” propelled by many rights movements of 20th century that brandished immoral behavior as anti-social and by doing so accomplished to largely ban it from Western societies. If you look at the Occupy Wall Street movement – as nascent as it may appear – one wonders if we may see a similar social norm-shifting phenomenon emerge in the corporate world. Writer and Techonomy conference curator David Kirkpatrick wrote a poignant piece on how the new social power we witnessed in the Arab Spring may lead to a corporate revolution, and indeed one may wonder: Will the American Fall usher in the demise of the corporation as we know it?

Trade is an arbiter of peace, as Pinker argues. Collaboration and inclusion produce morale, an effect that is amplified by the tremendous amount of social capital generated by social media and in particular through the principle of reciprocity at work on social networking sites. Facebook, through this lens, can be viewed as the biggest morale producer of our times, not in the sense of giving to charities or supporting causes one click at a time – the so-often-derided ‘clicktivism’ – but through rich interactions and an appreciation and experience of Otherness that is made possible through the voyeurism emanating from the transparency of individual behaviors at public display.

On the other hand, hyper-connectivity may yield the opposite effect: When everything and everyone is connected all the time, will the individual moral Self be neutralized by a seamless collective that absorbs Otherness into Sameness? In this vein, Eli Pariser argues that the Social Web is a self-selecting Filter Bubble, and that rather than experiencing the Other, we’re just experiencing an increasingly narrow projection of ourselves, so that our social graph, based on our web history of purchases, clicks, friends, and likes, will ultimately become congruent with the social universe of One. Then our lives and the lives of others will be identical, and even with our identity spread beyond our Selves, it will not occur in the way Parfit envisioned it.

This debate on the Other is the main debate we ought to have in light of the crisis of our economies. A ‘moral economy’ puts the Other at the center of all its activities, and if it truly does, it will no longer need the qualifier ‘moral.’ However, our largely secularized and rationalized economy is struggling to restore its moral and spiritual acumen (see Umair Haque’s musings on The Meaning Organization and my own piece on the Chief Meaning Officer), and simply borrowing best practices from religion as proposed by Alain de Botton’s “Atheism 2.0” (see a good rebuttal here) won’t suffice when what we are really lacking is not a practical “god-free” tool kit but an idealistic and spiritual vision, a social contract that is meaningful at the personal level. Economist Robert C. Solomon described it aptly: “Markets systems are justified not because of efficiencies and profits but because humans are first and foremost social and emotional beings, and markets provide a sympathetic community for social exchange.” Consequently, Brad McLane, in a recent Huffington Post article, makes the case for the role of a “Chief Community Officer,” a leader who can reconcile individual interests with the satisfaction of trusted cooperation (research has shown that trust and trustworthiness produce oxytocin, the “hormone of love”).

Embracing Otherness has been the foundation for business since its inception – business serves the Other, as in the customer, or the stakeholders of today and tomorrow (future generations), but it has gained new relevance. Another, perhaps more important side to it is innovation. Otherness is the very source of innovation. The deviation from the normal, the conventional, and the routine is how new and different ideas are born – ideas that change the world for the better, which at the end of the day is the entrepreneur’s fundamental moral obligation. This is the legacy of Steve Jobs and other “fools” who “saw the world as it is not” – and changed it.

The new moral leadership starts with business school education. Harvard Business School professor Rakesh Khurana therefore asks for a “reprofessionalization of the manager,” so that he can overcome the self-interest-driven homo economicus, the self-inflicted Machiavellian mechanisms of competition and short-term gain, and instead focus again on his true task – to build and nurture long-term cooperative relationships that allow an economy, a plurality of interactions and transactions between trusted and trusting Others guided by shared values, to thrive.

Back to the initial question: what justifies my existence? As a marketer, it is my responsibility to understand the Others and connect them through many parallel truths – even if it’s just for a moment, a flickering desire, a shared passion and experience, or a common purpose. I am an engineer of trust, and I enjoy communicating for the very act of communicating. I can create and cultivate “sympathetic communities” that rely on “woven interactions” rather than “vector communications.” In the best case, I can help build a house of opposites on the basis of the social capital and goodwill generated by meaningful brands that serve as moral stewards, embrace paradox, and balance the dialectic forces of competition and cooperation, codified behavior and open-ended innovation. I am not here to generate impressions; I am here to reward attention with lasting value.

(c) picture by Coolhunting

Disrupt and Disrupted - Notes from The Great Indian B2B Marketing Summit

I had the great pleasure of speaking at The Great Indian B2B Marketing Summit in Bangalore yesterday, organized by Jessie Paul, the former CMO of Indian outsourcing juggernaut Wipro, author of the book “No Money Marketing,” and founder of Paul Writer, a marketing consultancy cum hub that runs an influential online CMO Roundtable and other formidable programs to facilitate the exchange amongst the Indian marketing community. The program was quite an eclectic mix of topics, ranging from social media and digital marketing trends, to market development, to marketing leadership, to personal branding.

The two latter topics appeared to be the most popular, based on the audience’s response. Jessie herself provided a good overview of the main tenets of personal branding, and her session was a great reminder of the importance of creating a “personal brand map” to identify (following models by Geert Hofstede and Jim Collins) one’s “values, heroes, symbols, and rituals,” and derive one’s unique brand promise at the intersection of “passion, excellence, and profitability.” In addition to establishing personal thought leadership platforms tailored to the respective career level (entry-level execs may want to focus on processes, best practices, and creation; mid-level execs on opinions, forward-looking statements, HR issues, and organizational vision; whereas CXO execs typically address industry frameworks as well as macro-economic and policy issues), Rajeev Suri, CEO of Liqwid Krystal, offered some helpful advice for aspiring marketing leaders: 1. Stay close to the leadership; 2. Stay close to the money; 3. Never get into cruise control.

None of those are easy, and I can certainly empathize with Sangeeta Sundaram, head of marketing and communications at Capgemini India, who remarked that “marketing is notoriously over-stretched and under-resourced.” But then again, as Kiran Mani, head of industry sales for Google India, pointed out in his presentation: “Effective marketing does not have to cost much.” Jessie, with her penchant for “No Money Marketing," would agree, and ad agency executive Jon Bond goes even one step further, as quoted in a recent Fast Company article: "Marketing in the future is like sex. Only the losers will have to pay for it."

While that is a perfectly viral line from a Twitter and SEO viewpoint and might cheer up some CMOs in light of dwindling marketing budgets, it of course posits an existential threat for advertisers and other marketing services firms. "Creating more work for less money is the big paradox," says Matt Howell, president of the Boston agency Modernista, in the same Fast Company piece that depicted a rather gloomy scenario for today’s Mad Men (“Mayhem on Madison Avenue”). Both client and agency side are facing a more and more strenuous battle for attention and engagement in the light of fragmented media usage, always-on connectivity, and social media: "The irony is that while there have never been more ways to reach consumers, it's never been harder to connect with consumers," explains Brad Jakeman, now chief creative officer at Activision, the gaming company.

No wonder new models are popping up left and right. Forrester calls for “Adaptive Marketing,” and the Harvard Business Review (HBR) recently ran a comprehensive report on “Social Media and the New Rules of Branding." In one of the report’s articles, McKinsey’s David C. Edelman suggests that marketers need to respond to today’s more nuanced customer journeys. Far from systematically narrowing their choices, Edelman argues, today’s consumers take a much more iterative journey of the three traditional customer journey stages: consider, evaluate, buy, and spend more time in the additional stages of enjoy, advocate, and bond. Edelman’s main revelation: If the bond becomes strong enough, consumers enter an enjoy-advocate-buy loop that skips the consider and evaluate stages entirely.

That all makes sense, but it strikes me as unlikely that tomorrow’s marketing innovation will come from reading a McKinsey piece in HBR. These days, domain expertise ages quickly, and doing is replacing saying. Marketers increasingly have to develop added-value ancillary products, services, and apps in order to sell their core offering. Traditional marketing is disrupted by disruptive marketing, which itself is disrupting interruptive advertising. Yet - in the best tradition of Clayton Christensen’s “innovation dilemma" - yesterday’s win can become tomorrow’s burden as disruptive viral campaigns are quickly absorbed by an army of me-too’s. Benchmarking, best practices, and new theoretical frameworks often just eclipse a lack of imagination, a lack of customer empathy, and a lack of courage to be creative: “There is no one to copy, no one to follow,” says Richard Branson.

And yet here I was at a marketing conference sharing my own playbook. Jessie had invited me to present on “What B2B Marketers Can Learn from Design-Driven Innovation for B2B,” and I definitely enjoyed my role as the somewhat eccentric outlier in the line-up. I was surprised how many people in the audience knew frog when I conducted a mini brand audit at the outset of my presentation, and I was flattered by their interest in frog. I took the attendees through a quick overview of frog’s history, philosophy, and approach, before elaborating on the seven design principles that I thought might be applicable for B2B marketers. The subsequent Q&A yielded some incisive questions, although, as usual, I wasn’t able to answer the “ROI of design” one satisfactorily. If anyone can, drop me a note. Oh well. Sometimes you just need to believe (or have a stellar sales team).

Here are the slides from my presentation:

What B2B Marketers Can Learn from Design-Driven Innovation

 

 

 

(Good) Movies and The Three Dimensions of Meaning

I haven’t seen The Social Network yet. But the recent debate about the movie that, characteristical of a successful product, quickly transcended the original artifact and evolved into a broader cultural discourse (a “third meaning”), made me think about how dramatically my own movie experience has changed over the past 30 years. I’ve been fascinated with movies ever since I was a young boy. At the age of 10, I completely immersed myself into films such as Jungle Book, watched them again and again, learned the dialogues by heart, and accumulated an encyclopedic knowledge of the characters. A couple of years later, I became obsessed with the Bond series (I still know the entire filmography in and out). Films were my reality, and my life took place in a parallel universe for the most part.

A few years later, after watching more and more films, and learning more about the arts at school, I began to appreciate films from a different perspective. I now watched them as a wanna-be expert, recognizing the craftsmanship and the many subtle narrative and cinematographic twists and tweaks that I had not noticed before. I began seeing films with the eyes of a filmmaker. I co-created them, re-enacted them, and even wrote screenplays myself that were more or less overtly inspired by the movies I had watched; some of which I turned into Super-8 movies (the most notable one was “Battle in the Universe,” in which my poor brother had to play a deranged alien; you may easily guess which blockbuster this one was based on…).

And then, as a student of cultural sciences at college, I finally saw movies in a whole different light, examining philosophical questions of authorship and identity, and reflecting on political and social issues that were part of the movie’s cultural fabric. Hitchcock’s films were emblematic of all three stages of my movie experience: Rear Window for example, was first a captivating whodunit thriller to me, then a brilliantly directed masterpiece playing with time and space, and then a thoughtful study on issues of privacy, identity, and gender. And so were the movies by my other great filmmaker hero, Francois Truffaut: charming and light initially and on the surface, highly (self-)referential and contextual for connoisseurs, and yet eye-opening, literally, as cultural commentary and timeless statement on the “human condition.”

Today, however, as I am writing this, I seem to have abandoned the ability to embrace even just one of these three dimensions, and I wonder if the innocence, naiveté, and passion with which I experienced movies when I was young, the adventurous spirit with which I adopted them into my own creative ventures later on, and the intellectual fervor with which I explored the cultural “big picture” are irretrievably lost. It seems as if I have regressed back into something even simpler than being the mere viewer I was at age 10. I now only consume movies – and do so mostly on planes (the absolute lowpoint was watching Avatar lately on a tiny little screen on a flight from Doha to Beijing). I feel entertained by movies, I sometimes blog about them, but I no longer co-opt them or consider the movie experience to be a portmanteau of things to be discovered, explored, and spun further. Movies have become less meaningful to me. They are no longer the disruptive, life-changing events that challenge my world view the way they did before. They are now neither escapism nor intellectual discourse. I don’t analyze them anymore, and I don’t discuss them with friends (I used to spend entire evenings arguing over certain scenes). They have just become flat to me, and it’s probably not because movies are not as good as they once were, but because I lack the ability to make as much sense of them as I could when I was younger.

I realize that’s a severe loss. Without your own imagination (your “Eyes Wide Shut”), there’s only so much to see. The creation of meaning is a two-way street, a creative act that involves both creator and viewer. But it needs stimulation. True masterpieces combine all possible viewpoints into one’s experience, all at once: the fully immersed literal view (me as young boy), the analytical “how did they do it”-view that spurs creative co-option (me as an adolescent), and the meta-view that understands and plays with the broader cultural connotations (me as a young adult). This applies not only to movies. Any meaningful art, pop culture, marketing, design, and branding always encapsulates all these three dimensions of meaning: the literal, the analytical, and the philosophical. They need to be effectively designed, staged, and communicated. We, the masterminds of meaning in business – the innovators, designers, and marketers – have the great responsibility to create brands, products, and services that engage the “audience formerly known as the audience” as consumers, co-creators, critics, and philosophers – anything else is just a B-movie, easily consumed and easily forgotten.

The Economist and the Human Potential

If TED is about “Ideas Worth Spreading,” then the Economist’s Ideas Economy conference series is – as the title would suggest – about ideas worth monetizing. It’s the Economist, stupid! The venerable publication, a notorious late adopter, has realized that despite solid market standing it must reinvent itself to survive, both through a suite of new digital products and by branching out into the conference business. The focus on Innovation (as in “a commercialized original idea,” as the excellent moderator Vijay Vaitheeswaran defined it in his opening remarks) is a natural fit: The Economist has always stood for liberal economic policies and liberal social values – which is typically the kind of fabric that innovation thrives in.

The most recent event of the series took place last week in New York: With the theme “Human Potential,” 250 business leaders, entrepreneurs, politicians, and academics discussed for two days how to foster and tap into the creativity and intellect of their employees, stakeholders, peers, and students. The cynic could object and ask “Do we indeed have potential?,” inferring that the term “potential” implies progress and betterment – but are we, humans, even good? And if so, can we get better?

According to Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, the answer is a clear yes. He presented a “history of violence,” arguing that violence is on the decline, which, as he readily admitted, appears to be somewhat counter-intuitive, knowing that there has not been a single day without war in the history of mankind. Attribute this to a recording bias: The magnifying effect of mass media makes violence more visible than ever before. Yet, Pinker cited empirical studies showing that the amount of actions which cause physical harm has steadily decreased over the past centuries. Despite the many atrocities it saw, the 20th century was not the most violent century in terms of absolute numbers (compared to the total world population), and acts of terrorism, Pinker pointed out, can only be described as (statistically) “insignificant.” Clearly, Pinker commented, the US overreacted in response to the 9/11 attacks. Before you cheer about the rise of human enlightenment and moral reasoning, however, consider that the way violence is committed may have become more subliminal, and that, more pressingly, weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a few rogue individuals (or states) can arguably do more harm nowadays - that is, cause ‘ultimate violence' - than ever before. Additionally, it remains difficult to project future trends based on historical data so that an overly optimistic, non-violent concept of human potential might be flawed because of a bias of retrospective. In fact, the Rational Optimist's great blind spot is that it cannot look into the “heart of darkness,” that it has no means to explain or forecast truly irrational behavior.

On top of that, it is, of course, particularly hard to assess the human potential when you are human. Is human potential limited to humans? Can humans really fully unleash their own potential or will it take artificial intelligence to do so? Were the attendees in New York able to realize human potential or rather its impediment? The conference, for the most part, stayed away from such provocations. Notwithstanding the occasional excursion into macro-economic or philosophical debate, most of the program was devoted to more pragmatic topics such as employee motivation, knowledge management, institutional and non-institutional learning, and creative thinking.

Like Pinker, Richard Florida struck an optimistic tone in his opening keynote, in which he heralded creativity as the essential resource of our societies. According to Florida, one third of the US workforce is employed in the creative sector, generating 50% of the overall wages. The unemployment rate has only gone up by 5% during the economic downturn, much less so than in other market sectors. Creativity, says Florida, is the key to economic recovery and the main catalyst of the “Great Reset” that he proposes. Asked about what he would tell the citizens of Detroit, he said “harness the creativity there,” claiming that “if we could turn 60% of services jobs into creative job we would boost the economy.” While that stood uncontested, his insisting on the metropolitan region as the hub of the “creative class” provoked more audience dissent in the subsequent Q&A. In the connected age of virtual worlds and social networks, the physical density of “idea people” seems to have lost some of its relevance. This is not to argue the importance of geographical talent clusters, but increasingly, innovation overcomes boundaries of space and happens whenever, wherever people meet (online). Geography is no longer destiny, and no longer does human potential start in cities, as Florida claims.

My colleague Robert Fabricant, VP of creative at frog design, who spearheaded a “social experiment” at the conference (more about that in another post soon), offered a less class-centric view on creativity. For him, creativity does not exist so much exclusively within an individual as it does between two entities: “Because that which is created needs a response to bring it to life.” He used the analogy of the old Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons to illustrate this collaborative creative interaction that is at the center of innovation.

The relationship between creativity and well-being, values and value, social purpose and money, self-actualization and economic success was the main theme of the conference. Jim Clifton, the CEO of Gallup, shared some remarkable insights, based on his institute’s annual survey on “what does the whole world want?” This time, the majority of respondents said: “A job” – in stark contrast to previous years when the answers had ranged from “a happy life,”and “family,” to “health.” The responses this year shifted the focus to the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid. Why is that? First of all, the inequality between the rich and the poor is growing, and it is no surprise that many living in developing countries consider “finding a job” an existential need. Secondly, the growing middle class (in India and China, and other emerging markets) has become much more aware of its possibilities and views employment as the main enabler of a brighter future for themselves and their families, one that often includes better education and increased consumerism. And then, well, there was the recession in the developed world - and its lasting implications.

So are we seeing a renaissance of materialism? Does money beat meaning? The final debate of the conference, conducted in classic Oxford-style, looked at this conflict through the veneer of employee motivation. Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute and entrepreneur Lynn Tilton, CEO and principal of Patriarch Partners, contended that “money motivates more than social purpose.” The two were facing formidable opponents in Clay Shirky (author of Cognitive Surplus) and Dan Ariely (author of The Upside of Irrationality), who argued that social purpose was the more powerful motivator. The pro faction – albeit perhaps exhibiting more passion – ran out of arguments soon and could eventually only help itself by evoking the Nazis (Godwin’s Law posits that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1. In other words: all discussions - regardless of topic or scope - inevitably end up being about Hitler and the Nazis.") Brook and Tilton’s mechanistic concept of human behavior was easily rebutted by Shirky and Ariely, who insisted that money is always only a substitute of meaning,refering to Wikipedia, Lego, and other examples of meaning-driven engagements. “Money can motivate your employees to show up,” Ariely said, but if you want them to not just show up but commit with their full creative and intellectual potential, you need to motivate them with non-monetary incentives.”

This view was echoed by Cristóbal Conde, president and CEO of IT services company Sungard, who endorsed transparency and called “creating a platform for collaboration” the most important task of today’s business leader. It didn’t matter that he almost literally borrowed his own words from an interview with the New York Times earlier this year – they still rang true. “Collaboration is one of the most difficult challenges in management. I think top-down organizations got started because the bosses either knew more or they had access to more information. None of that applies now. Everybody has access to identical amounts of information.” Conde said further: “The answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart. And it actually is not a question about monetary incentives. They do it because recognition from their peers is, I think, an extremely strong motivating factor, and something that is broadly unused in modern management.” Conde: “Micromanagement doesn’t scale because it spirals down, and you end up with below-average employees in terms of motivation and ability.” Sungard uses enterprise micro-blogging service Yammer to enhance internal knowledge sharing: “It has given our employees a voice.”

With CEOs like him, the company is not a 20th century idea: “The more I teach, the more I learn," Conde said. Humility, openness, and collaboration are the hallmarks of a new kind of humanistic organization, led by humane leaders. That’s an idea worth spreading – and monetizing.

Re:Publica 2010: "Innovation By 10"

My talk from the Re:Publica 2010 conference in Berlin is now live. Titled "Innovation By 10," it presented 10 observations, provocations, insights, and questions on the elusive topic of innovation, based on 40 years of frog design and my 4 years with frog design. Note: it's in German.

Naked Germans + Disruptive Innovation + Cloud Computing, #ashtag Style

This has been a strange week.

First of all, I had the pleasure to speak at re:publica in Berlin, perhaps the most political of all web conferences. The gathering, now in its 5th year, has evolved from a forum on digital governance to a somewhat unique and truly German hybrid of deep philosophical discourse (about the role of the individual in the digital space) and hands-on advice for practitioners. It felt a little bit like going back to college while working in a start-up. Intellectualism with street cred.

No wonder What Would Google Do-author Jeff Jarvis (a skeptical German newspaper called his thoughts “radical but not always sound” – ha!) was in his element. In his keynote – “Privacy, Publicness, and Penises“ – he elaborated on the “German Paradox,” wondering how a society that embraces mixed-gender saunas (and titles such as the one of his talk), even given all historical reasons, is still so utterly fixated on the defense of privacy on the web (going after Facebook and Google Street View; enabling convicted killers to expunge their names from Wikipedia; vehemently objecting to airport body scanners, etc.). In his eyes, “the issue is not privacy but control: We have a right to control our information and how it’s used. But all this talk about privacy could make us withhold more than ever; it could make us downright antisocial.” He argues that a collective revealing, with transparency as the norm, is the prerequisite of value creation: “In the company of nudists, no one is naked.” Value comes from sharing. It is not privacy, it is the public we must defend.

Of course, Jarvis, the Google fan boy, is way too smart to overlook the Achilles’ heel of his argumentation: Yes, the issue is control, not privacy, but how much privacy is there left to control if Google – granted, as the big enabler of publicness – owns our data? Thus, the big question for Jarvis and the rest of us is not so much “What Would Google Do?” but “What Will Google Do” (with all our data)?

My own talk, as part of a session titled “Innovators by the Fire,” was more mundane. Asked to illustrate the transformational power of design, I shared ten deliberately critical observations, insights, provocations, and questions on innovation, citing cases from the inevitable Apple (which just ranked again at the top of Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s 50 Most Innovative Companies) to Cirque du Soleil. I defended the thinking behind design thinking while arguing against its all-too-catchy "magic formula," and linked disruptive product innovation to viral marketing (more on that in another post soon).

What I was not aware of on stage was the irony of the moment. As I was talking about disruptive innovation, the real-time world had, just minutes before, plotted a disruption of historic proportions, a highly original twist that overshadowed the digital landscape, quite literally, with a very physical cloud. In fact, the volcano eruption in Iceland made the conference theme – “NowHere” – appear more timely than intended. With the air traffic over Europe coming to an abrupt halt and thousands of travelers stranded, the vision of “anytime, anywhere” suddenly seemed nostalgic. No one was going anywhere anymore. At least, the digerati, limited in their usual nomadism and stuck at airports all over Europe, gave Cloud Computing a new creative dimension, coming up with “ashtags” and other memorabilia proving that humor indeed means laughting in the face of the catastrophe – which is all the more valuable, to Jarvis’ point, if it’s shared to mutual comfort.

At least the Norwegian prime minister restored our trust in innovation and digital technology’s omnipotence as he rose to Internet fame by demonstrating how to swiftly govern his country from his iPad.

Strange days – but that’s why we’re here for anyway, no?

Here's my deck:

Innovation By 10

View more presentations from frog design.

“It's Been Like Walking Into a Forest With a Match”

For Wired UK’s “Work Smarter” issue (just released), I had the pleasure to speak with John Winsor, co-founder and CEO of Victors & Spoils (V&S), the world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles. You can find a shortened article in the Wired UK magazine. Here’s the interview in full length.

Q: V&S launched a few months ago. How is it going so far? How many clients do you have, and can you share some of the work that you are doing?

It's going really well. We're working with a half dozen clients and have done a dozen projects, thus far. We've been doing everything from brand strategy work, to developing digital tools, to design projects. We've just started working on a couple of TV spots and an industrial design project. It's been a fast three months. You'll see the work start rolling out the door in the next few months.

Q: I guess it's one thing to have a bold idea like crowdsourced advertising and another to actually do it. What made you believe that this might be a viable business model?

I think what we're doing is bigger than just crowdsourcing. The rise in digital connectivity has fueled new ways to use co-creation, mass-collaboration and open-source innovation as powerful tools for business. I've been a firm believer in these disruptions since I wrote my first book about co-creation, Beyond the Brand, in 2004.

Likewise my career has benefitted from several disruptions. First, the rise of desktop publishing allowed me to start a publishing company, Sports and Fitness Publishing. Without the revolution that Apple started with the Macintosh, along with Quark and Adobe's help, I would have never been able to afford to go into the magazine publishing business. Likewise, the rise of other digital technologies allowed me to build Radar Communications, by combining the worlds of anthropology and journalism to provide a new way to do brand strategy and market research. And now, Victors & Spoils wouldn't even be possible without the communities of talented people that are aggregating online.

Of all the disruptions I've had the opportunity to build businesses upon this is the greatest opportunity in my career.

Q: With Starbucks, Best Buy, and other big brands launching crowdsourcing platforms, some industry observers seem to believe that crowdsourcing has jumped the shark. Is V&S the logical end of the line or are we going to see more crowdsourcing, across other creative disciplines?

I think we're seeing a bigger and deeper change going on in the way we work. Every time a new technology disrupts an industry, there are those who try to protect the current way of thinking. While this current digital disruption might seem like a new and frightening trend to those how hold on deeply to the current paradigm.

Just look at history. During the Renaissance, in the middle of the 15th century, there was a similar disruption happening that was shaking the pillars of the then current media world. The methodology of using movable type on a printing press, developed by Johannes Guttenberg, was spreading like wildfire, making books more accessible throughout Europe, allowing a whole new generation to have the tools that only a few held. At the time, books were produced by an elite group of monks in a few monasteries. These scribes were the media elite of their day. As it became more obvious that the new disruptive technological changes produced by the printing press some felt the need to turn the page back. In 1492, Johannes Trithemius, the Abbot of Sponheim, a well-known monastery, wrote, In Praise of Scribes. In it he wrote, "We must preserve the old order at any cost." Yet, he had a problem. If he used scribes to produce the book it might take too long to stop the tide of the disruption caused by the printing press. Instead, he used a Guttenberg press to print In Praise of Scribes, only accelerating the change.

The same thing is going on now. Agencies are trying desperately to protect the old way of doing business while bigger cultural trends are shifting the sand below their feet.

Q: If the crowd turns out to be more creative than specialized professionals, will that be the end of the creative industry?

It's only the beginning. How much creativity was there when only monks could write books? Likewise, Apple and Adobe have ushered in a new age of democratization of creativity. The current trends of mass-collaboration, co-creation and crowdsourcing, based on mass connectivity are only further democratizes creativity. Just look at You Tube. When digital tools become cheap enough everyone can gets involved. Now, it's a question of what's good content and what's bad content. But often, that's a matter of personal taste.

Q: Some people say that your radical crowdsourcing approach might just be a PR stunt to get some publicity around the launch but that V&S will eventually become a more traditional creative shop or at least a hybrid of crowdsourced and expert services. What do you tell them?

For us, it's been unbelievable. It's been like walking into a forest with a match. Sure, we wanted to start a fire and build a business. The cultural conditions have been right for something much bigger. We've gotten calls from several of the most progressive CMOs in the world. They are tired of paying too much money for too few good ideas. They want change.

It used to be that creative quality and price were diametrically opposed. The more you paid, the better quality you could get and vice versa. It was an "or" relationship. You could get quality or price. Certainly, that's been the way the current advertising and design world works. What we're seeing is the opposite. Two things are happening. First, with our own projects and with projects like Unilever's Peperami's crowdsourced scripts project on Ideabounty, talent rises to the top and wins. Our contention has been that in truly free markets, the best work produced by the most talented people rises to the top. It's not blocked by internal politics or hierarchical competition that can smother the best ideas inside big organizations. And, it's only accelerating, many of the most talented creatives and strategists are starting to play around and do work on the new digital networks that are emerging. We've also found that in an apple to apple comparison with the projects we're working on, clients typically save 75% in their creative fees for the same quality. Projects that used to cost $100,000 now can cost $25,000 (or $1,000,000 is now $250,000) for the same quality. We're seeing that with the same strategic and creative direction, results are very similar. Clients are telling us they want to leverage the power of "and." They want the best creative work and pay the best price. That's what we're trying to do. We're using the latest digital tools to provide the best creative product for the best price. Crowdsourcing is only one of the tools to accomplish that goal.

Q: How do you hire, and how do you manage the crowdsourced creative department? Is it limited to a submission of "big ideas" or do contributors collaborate on projects from start to finish?

The first thing we've noticed is that there are lots of different ways to use co-creation and crowdsourcing to solve marketing and product design problems. We've run projects on Crowdspring, 99designs and GeniusRocket. All of these platforms are good for different things. They get a lot of people involved in a project. But it's easy to get overwhelmed by the number of entries. And, Sturgeon's Law, that only 10 percent of any large group of creative output is good, definitely applies. In these large community crowdsourcing projects it takes a lot of creative direction. One of our core principles is "Victors" instead of "Victor" or paying many winners instead of just one. We do this with every project we run.

Another way we've been using the community for projects is by selecting small groups of people from our 500+ strong creative department, a global network of some of the best creatives and strategists in the world. In these projects we've been inviting 50-100 folks to participate in a project, selecting between 6 and 12 finalists to compete. In these cases, the finalists get a fee for participating. There is then another fee for the winner of the competition. These smaller, swat team efforts have been working well with all kinds of projects from more complicated design projects to strategy and brand platform projects. One of the advantages has been the ability to keep projects more tightly controlled confidentiality and the ability to creatively direct more complicated projects. But, unlike the larger public projects, the sheer number of ideas is more limited. There are lots of tools in the toolbox and surely more are coming.

It still comes down to the strategic and creative direction to make sure the work produced by any crowd, either internal or external, pushes the work forward in the right direction to accomplish a client's objectives.

Q: How do you pay your crowd(s)? Do they receive a percentage of the client fees? Are there several layers of contributors with varying payment levels? Do contributors have any influence on V&S' strategic decisions?

Yes. We have many different payment models, as described above, and are constantly developing new ones. People in our creative department have a ranking based on their reputation. And, we constantly ask the department to participate in decisions. This space is bigger than all of us and is constantly evolving.

Q: You previously worked at Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CP+B), a legendary firm with a distinct brand. With V&S, how can you develop a creative identity over the long term when your creative is crowdsourced? How do you maintain your quality standards?

Working with guys like Alex Bogusky and Chuck Porter was an honor. Alex and Chuck are fearless the way they approach work and life. The attitude is the key ingredient of making CP+B what it has become. Quality and consistency of the V&S brand comes from great strategic and creative direction. My two partners, Evan Fry and Claudia Batten, are two of the best. The three of us spend a lot of time developing the V&S brand. So far, we feel like it's going pretty well.

Q: You write on your blog that "Brands need an alternative to current ad agencies and crowdsourcing platforms. One that offers the strategic direction, engagement and relationship management that agencies deliver today but one that also delivers engagement, connectivity, creativity, and ROI that crowdsourcing platforms have the potential to deliver." How does V&S measure ROI?

We believe that marketing and product design should be judged on how it affects sales and profits for our clients. At the end of the day, that's what they're being judged on. We do work with clients to develop goals for every project. Each project has a different ROI metric. That said, when clients are saving 75% on their creative investment to start with they can achieve their goals much more easily. They also have the ability to try a lot more creative ideas.

Q: At CP+B you launched a product innovation group, and now you have set out to innovate the entire creative industry. In your opinion, what are the biggest barriers and challenges that stand in the way of organizations becoming more innovative?

When Alex Bogusky and I were doing research for our latest book, Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses that Market Themselves, we noticed that the biggest stumbling block to being more innovative for most companies were the internal silos that have been created. Marketing is a silo. Product Design is a silo. Innovation is often its own silo. To be more innovative companies must knock down the internal silos and start to get everyone working together.

Q: What business innovation are you still waiting for?

I'm really looking forward to even more collaborative digital tools, especially video conferencing technology.

[photo credit: David Sykes for Wired UK)

Lift10: Connected People

Describing itself as "a series of events built around a community of doers and thinkers who get together in Europe and Asia to explore the social consequences of new technologies," Lift is definitely one of the best conference networks out there. Laurent Haug, Lift founder and curator, is a wonderful host and has managed to maintain a strong sense of community despite continued growth. In addition to numerous satellite events with partners, Lift organizes conferences in France and Korea, as well as the annual Lift conference in Switzerland as its main hub.

Lift10 will take place from May 5-7, 2010 in Geneva and welcome 1,000 participants from 40 countries to "explore the most overlooked aspect of innovation: people. Known in the techno-parlance as users, consumers, clients, participants, prosumers, citizens or activists, people ultimately define the success of all technological and entrepreneurial projects. They adopt or refute, promote or demote; embrace, reject, or re-purpose. Their approaches are unique, influenced by cultural and generational diversity. A decade after the rebirth of user-centered design and innovation, it's time to explore the myths and uncover the reality behind the 'connected people.'"

Check out some of the Lift10 speakers that have already been confirmed.

The early-bird deadline just got extended to January 31 – you can register here.

The World's First Crowdsourced Creative Agency

It’s always good to be the first, and while crowdsourcing, the trend, may have jumped the shark, a fully crowdsourced creative agency is a bold creative experiment and still news. Two Crispin Porter + Bogusky alumns, John Winsor and Evan Fry, together with Claudia Batten, the founder of Microsoft-acquired video game advertising shop Massive, have launched Victors & Spoils (V&S), “the world's first creative agency built on crowdsourcing principle.”

V&S says it will “provide businesses with a better way to solve their marketing, advertising and product-design problems by engaging the world’s most talented creatives.” The press release promises that “perceived crowdsourcing flaws will be addressed through world-class creative direction delivered through the use of the reputation-ranked Victors & Spoils crowd” but stays mum on how exactly the crowdsourced creative department will operate.

In any event, V & S is eating its own dog food. The first line you notice on its web site (after the humble “Welcome To Victors & Spoils. Let’s Change An Industry”) is “Why does this site look so plain, Jane?” and the answer is: because the site design, the look and feel, and even the logo are being crowdsourced.

Whether crowdsoucing yields better creative results – who knows. It certainly is a differentiator. V&S COO Claudia Batten twittered that she got calls from five Fortune 200 CMOs in the first five days since launch. We will follow this one closely.