iPlot

Ingenue

The video to Thom Yorke’s (his solo-cum-collaborators project also goes by the name Atoms for Peace) new single “Ingenue” is cracking with beauty. Choreographed by British dance avantgardist Wayne McGregor, it is a moving meditation on loneliness and our desire to connect. On a sparse theater stage, Yorke surprises us with unusually disciplined movements that – typical for McGregor – combine constraint with free floating improvisations. In this case, Yorke’s monologic stream of consciousness, his whimsical expressions of introspection, are temporarily mirrored, accompanied, inspired, shadowed, eclipsed, caressed, and ultimately abandoned by female dancer Fukiko Takase, who appears on the scene out of nothing and disappears into nothing. In the end, the genius remains alone.

Davos Debrief: In Resilience We Trust

“What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power,” novelist Michael Ondaatje writes in The Cat’s Table, and it was a strange coincidence that I came across this enigmatic line on the descent down from Davos, the Swiss ski resort that had just convened some of the world’s most powerful men and women for the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum.

Power circles

The paradox of Davos is that it is both highly public and highly secretive. Relationships and business transactions are on show, as much as they are taking place in back room meetings and private encounters on the peripheries, far away from the glitz and glamour and where the buzzing doesn’t need buzzwords. Davos is the great equalizer and the great divider at the same time. The hierarchies are both formal and explicit (manifest by the color of your badge), as well as situational and subtle, with small smart mobs forming around the most sought-after, both on- and offsite (“one minute you’re in, the next you’re out”), in emotional roller coaster, funicular, and shuttle rides between recognition and rejection, belonging and alienation.

I came for the second year, and for the second year I was badge-less, attending as a member of my boss’s, Doreen Lorenzo, entourage (full disclosure: I also serve on the Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Values). I observed the program from the sidelines, with the humble but notable privilege of being able to partake in many of the social functions. The only way to bridge the inevitable gulf that opened at the beginning of each encounter, each conversation, was with a condensed version of “my story,” because, unlike that of regular attendees, it wasn’t printed in large letters on a white badge that would have instantly legitimized my identity and affiliation. But I suspect I wasn’t the only one feeling vulnerable. Everyone does in a setting like this, and only those who feel at ease with high levels of social discomfort and fully open up to the sway of serendipity will experience the most meaningful “Davos moments.”

Of which there were many, both fleeting and lasting – from private dinners on the Schatzalp, a mountain top that allegedly inspired Thomas Mann’s famed ‘bildungsroman’ The Magic Mountain; to adventurous bus rides with militant skiers and mildly tolerant locals; and silent periods of total exhaustion, shared with dozens of strangers, leaning over laptops in collaborative pop-up office spaces along the ‘Promenade’ (the village’s main street that serves as a catwalk for all of the Davos cast and colorful characters).

Davos is full of stories, of course; it is a multi-layered conversation desperately trying to keep pace with the constantly evolving memes and shapes of our economies and societies, relying on a lingua franca that is dominated by technology and management jargon, as well as a stubborn belief in rationality and in balanced multi-stakeholder solutions. Only recently has it broadened its vernacular and vocabulary to include the language of art (heart), and to juxtapose our biggest societal challenges with a more personal quest for meaning, understanding that the two are as interwoven as the circles of power in Davos.

Magic mountains

While the session titles of the Annual Meeting program hinted at these greater philosophical questions, they were only the tips of the icebergs. Yet in the best case, when the fault lines from business, technology, science, politics, religion, and culture converged, they revealed another sort of “magic mountain,” simultaneously elusive and concrete, rich with ambiguity and friction. The best sessions created spaces where avant-garde thinking was rooted in popular demand, elevation balanced with grassroots concerns, and profound knowledge was paired with an unshaken and perhaps naïve belief in “betterness” (Umair Haque) and in positive transformation.

Major themes that emerged during the week were those of the “circular economy” and “resilience,” the latter of which had inspired this year’s Annual Meeting’s theme of “Resilient Dynamism”. The ‘circular economy’ seeks to decouple growth from resource constraints by introducing reverse logistics and heightened consumer awareness. It is not a new concept, but due to the mysterious moods of the Zeitgeist and the vocal presence of evangelists such as Ellen McArthur of the Ellen McArthur Foundation, it garnered significant traction in Davos as a new economic innovation for the business mainstream.

Somewhat related, the rise of “resilience” (propelled by widespread acclaim for Andrew Zolli’s and Ann Marie Healey’s book of the same title, whose release uncannily coincided with Hurricane Sandy and therefore immediately received a lot of media play), describes a set of alternative, systemic ways of rebounding to the whim of forces beyond our control. It signifies a new school of economic thinking that favors nimble, highly adaptive systems over more robust, ‘sustainable’ ones, in a response to irrationalities and externalities that elude traditional categories of strategic planning and management. These systems, according to the economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb, amount to a situation of “anti-fragility,” tolerating just enough inherent fragility to quickly recover from “black swans”, or highly improbable external disruptions. In a similar vein, Said business school professor Rafael Ramirez advocated a more “pluralistic” notion of strategy (reminiscent of Stuart Evans’ model of “super-flexibility” that views strategy as a portfolio of ever-changing planes and gears).

Moreover, among many other topics, there were panels on China’s soft power, on meditation, decision-making, “mindfulness,” “transformative art,” “beliefs that bond,” the “culture of economics,” smart cities, “digital norms”, the “art of leadership,” the “happiness factor,” the “moral economy,” and “objects of culture.” There was also a wonderfully optimistic session on the future of online education that impressed on the audience that we are indeed witnessing a revolution – the impetus is radical, the outcome is unclear. The three big “revolutionaries” in this space – Coursera, Udacity, and edX – were represented, but the true star of the panel was 12-year old Pakistani girl Khadija Niazi, who was interviewed by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and shared how online classes on Udacity had changed her life.

Civil society and "beautiful organizations"

The broad variety of issues illustrates the Forum’s holistic view of our global economies, understanding them not only as financial markets but as arenas for sympathetic interactions that foster the very social fabric of our societies. This mindset was further bolstered by the ostentatious inclusion of additional and often marginalized constituents: While there were still only 17% female participants (the same quota as in 2011), women leaders such as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, and IMF managing director Christine Lagarde counted as the most distinctive voices in the program. The Forum’s Young Global Leaders (leaders under 40) and Global Shapers (leaders under 30) communities were strongly involved in the program (encouragingly, 50% of them are women). And the civil society communities all played a prominent role – for good reason. PR firm Edelman’s 2013 edition of its influential Trust Barometer that surveyed more than 31,000 respondents in 26 markets around the world, released during Davos, indicated that civil society actors enjoy higher trust levels than business and politics when it comes to tackling some of society’s most pressing challenges. NGOs, labor organizations, faith groups, and a range of other emerging actors discussed a comprehensive report on “The Future Role of Civil Society” that the Forum presented in Davos; and the Arts communities, represented by such diverse figures as John Maeda (Rhode Island School of Design), Paulo Coelho, and Eric Whitacre, among others, countered economic logic with creativity and intuition.

With business leaders such as GE’S Beth Comstock they explored how companies can incorporate the arts in their leadership and decision-making frameworks, and whether our economies should expand their definitions of value-creation not just by categories of prosperity, happiness, and well-being (all of which legitimate concerns and arguably viable indicators of economic progress, and as such popular topics in Davos), but also those of aesthetics and transcendence. In this vein, Rafael Ramirez suggested we build “attractive organizations” that create beauty, and proposed an “aesthetical view of management” that is based on Aristotle’s concept of phronesis, which is often translated as “practical wisdom.” He asked civil society organizations, in particular, to create positive visions rather than merely providing efficient solutions to problems, and he called upon them to serve as arbiters of meaning.

Meaning 

Apropos meaning. Emerging as a major theme at Davos, it was mentioned by CEOs, NGO and religious leaders, and academia throughout the five-day program – in sessions on values, civil society, and faith. Elif Şafak, the Turkish bestseller author, made a passionate case for ambiguity and doubt to avoid “living in a polarized world.” She heralded the power of the “grey zone” and suggested we add more commas to our identities (“I am a mother, I am a Christian, I love traveling, etc.”) instead of exclamation marks (“I am a Christian!”). Microfinance pioneer and Nobel prize laureate Muhammad Yunus reminded the audience that education must always include an education of the heart, an education sentimentale, and that rather than just acquiring new skills in pursuit of a career, we ought to learn to grow our capacities as human beings in pursuit of a common purpose, or “the meaning of life.”

It is perhaps no surprise that meaning and spirituality enjoyed such prominence this year in Davos, against the backdrop of a fragmented connected age so volatile that it seems to even lack the one historic watershed moment, the one crisis to agree on (as was the case in previous Davos meetings). In uncertain times, all we have is faith. Both religion and the “faith of the faithless,” the non-institutional spirituality, can serve as major individual and societal transformative forces with the capacity to combine private and public lives. Several panels viewed spirituality as part of our human dignity and demanded we reconcile our predominantly rational systems of politics, science, and business with a “sense of wonder” and a new appreciation of “the divine” in order to improve the state of our world. If spirituality imbues respect for “the other,” empathy, and mutual understanding, then it can indeed help foster our economies’ greatest resource in the connected age – collaboration.

Gianpiero Petriglieri, associate professor of organizational behavior at business school INSEAD and chair of the Forum’s Global Agenda Council on New Models of Leadership, consequently spoke in religious terms when he recommended we embrace “devotion” over the much gushed-about “passion.” Devotion stands for a lasting commitment to a conviction, cause, or belief that is less transient in nature and more grounded in a sense of identity and belonging.

And indeed: “What kind of a person do I want to be?” asked theologian Fr. Christopher Jamison in an Open Forum session on “Is Religion Outdated in the 21st Century?” – it will remain the main question for each of the over 2,500 official attendees, the assembled young and seasoned global leaders, far beyond Davos. Constantly reflecting on it may warrant that we follow these leaders, the so-called “Davos Men and Women,” not only to the next management paradigm or the ups and downs of (ir)rational exuberance, but to the creation of a global economy that is resiliently human and engages our complete selves, with head, hand, and heart.

It makes sense then that an artist, the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho, was the most retweeted attendee, and in one of his tweets he truly nailed the overall sentiment with practical wisdom: “Davos: either too hot (indoor) or too cold (outside). Like love.”

Image credit: Forumblog

What Innovators Can Learn From Artists

Andy Warhol knew it all along: “Good business is the best art.” And lately, a number of business thinkers and leaders have begun to embrace the arts, not as an escapist notion, a parallel world after office hours, or a creative asset, but as an integral part of the human enterprise that ought to be woven into the fabric of every business—from the management team to operations to customer service.

John Maeda, the president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and author of the book Redesigning Leadership, predicts that artists will emerge as the new business leaders and cites RISD graduates Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, co-founders of Airbnb, as prominent examples. The author William Deresiewicz heralds reading as the most important task of any leader. John Coleman makes a compelling case for the role of poetry in business. Intel named pop musician will.i.am as director of creative innovation. And the World Economic Forum has been inviting arts and cultural leaders to its events for several years and this year added the ‘Role of the Arts’ to its Network of Global Agenda Councils.

Indeed, the “art” of business becomes ever more important as the “science” gets ever more ubiquitous. Against the backdrop of our hyper-connected economies and as Big Data and sophisticated analytical tools allow us to maximize process efficiencies and standardize best innovation practices worldwide, intuition and creativity remain as the only differentiating factors that enable truly game-changing innovations. Like any “soft asset,” they cannot be exploited, only explored. And like artists, innovators must develop a mindset and cultivate creative habits in order to see the world afresh and create something new.

How do artists think and behave? Here are twelve traits any individual aspires to make his or her mark on the world would do well to emulate:

1. Artists are “neophiles.” They are in love with novelty and have an insatiable appetite for finding and creating new connections, for inventing and reinventing, even themselves. Art means changing the meaning of things or creating new meanings. That’s exactly what innovation is all about. Like artists,great innovators seek to create “black swans.” They know that variance, through the deliberate disruption of mental models and behavioral routines, creates that rare combination of awe that is characteristic of groundbreaking innovations.

2. Artists are humanists. They are experts of the “human condition” and observe human desires, needs, emotions, and behavior with a sharp, discerning eye and a high degree of empathy. As the archeologists of human vulnerabilities and as genuine ethnographic researchers, they can feel with and for others, which should be every innovator’s distinct strength as well.

3. Artists are craftspeople. They “think by making” and unite the “hand and the head,” as sociologist Richard Sennett describes it. Like art, every innovation combines excellence withsignificance. It has both a physical dimension (exhibiting mastery in craftsmanship) and a meta-physical dimension (connecting a new product, service, or business model with the broader zeitgeist and cultural climate). Nike’s Fuelband, for example, masterfully integrates software and hardware, while also being an expression of our society’s growing demand for self-managed, preventive healthcare embedded as a fun, positive activity into our everyday lives.

4. Artists are like children. “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up,” Pablo Picasso famously said. Artists retain a child’s unique sense of possibility and wonder. Innovators should, too. It may sound paradoxical, but innovations are always nostalgic. The most meaningful of them, although seemingly all about novelty and the future, reconnect us with a basic human quest or even our childhood dreams (think of the iPhone and our desire to touch, or sharing sites such as Facebook or Pinterest which can be viewed as modern, digital versions of former trust-based tribal economies and cater to our innate urge to share).

5. Artists rely on their intuition. It seems counter-intuitive but intuition is ever more important in the age of Big Data, because it is the only feature that is faster and deeper than the massive flow of real-time information. Nothing comes close to intuition as innovators seek to anticipate trends and make decisions swiftly. Data is knowledge, intuition is pre-emptive knowledge. Like artists, innovators trust their intuition, and then constantly experiment and prototype to validate it.

6. Artists are comfortable with ambiguity. By design, they deal with things that are not measurable and can’t be easily quantified. Innovators, too, should value what may not be easily captured in quantitative terms. In stark contrast to more mechanistic models of management, they must be able to tolerate uncertainty and open-ended questions, hold two opposing truths in their mind, and appreciate the beauty of the “and.”

7. Artists are holistic, interdisciplinary thinkers. Art can stimulate and challenge our understanding of the world around us and within us. Artists are masters of lateral thinking who can connect the dots and take things out of their original context. Likewise, innovators contextualize and re-contextualize, mash up and remix, and embrace the new insights and ideas that magically spark at unexpected, unlikely, and often serendipitous intersections (the most famous examples of such “accidental innovations” may be the pacemaker or 3M’s post-it notes).

8. Artists thrive under constraints. They often have to work within very structured formats and meet scarce resources with ingenuity and resourcefulness. In fact, these constraints might even stimulate their creativity. Inspired by the phenomenon of “Jugaad” in India, innovation gurus like Navi Radjou have now popularized and globalized the concept of “frugal innovation” as a polycentric and improvisational mindset that can inform various product and business model innovations (e.g. the mobile SMS disaster response platform Ushahidi or the portable “roll-on” hospital hand-sanitizers SwipeSense). Frugal innovation has become the new hallmark for the art of creating maximum value with minimal resources.

9. Artists are great storytellers. They tell a story with their art but also often tell the story of their art. The same holds true for meaningful innovations. The connected age requires products to have “aura” again. Great innovators design experiences that spawn (social media) conversations. Just look at ideas funded on Kickstarter: The product is also the story of the product.

10. Artists are conduits and not “masters of the universe.” Most artists – painters, sculptors, writers, film makers, or musicians – will admit that they derived their inspiration from a spiritual sphere that transcends their own individual creativity and skills. This applies to innovators, too. Whether they’re spiritual or not, a new humility suits them well as the social web and its wave of crowd-based collaborations have rendered the myth of the lone genius obsolete. Great innovators transmit memes, they nurture ecosystems of ideas and co-create with employees, customers, and even competitors. They recognize that their new playing-field extends the institutional boundaries of their organization as their products themselves are becoming multi-purpose and involve multiple sectors and disciplines.

11. Artists are passionate about their work. In fact, their work and life are impossible to separate. That doesn’t mean that innovators need to be workaholics, but basing their ideas on deep beliefs and fervent passions is crucial. Innovation is a leap of faith, and innovators need to be believers. Like artists, they will often face rejection, but if an idea is not worth fighting for, it might not have been the right one in the first place. Strong innovations are always the product of strong convictions.

12. Artists are contrarians. Artists can see the “cracks through which the light gets in,” as the old adage goes. Likewise, great innovators come up with solutions to problems because they see what is missing. They are eccentric, which means they literally view things from the fringes – and that’s typically where the best ideas come from. Both artists and innovators see the world as it is not (but could be). They look upon our world, as Proust would say, with “fresh eyes.” You might also call that vision. They are always “initially wrong” to be “ultimately right” as Kathryn Schultz wrote in her book, Being Wrong. They are the fools who speak the truth, have “insane” ideas, and make change happen.

Like art, true innovation has the potential to make our lives better. It stretches our souls and combines the exploration of possibilities with action. It connects and reconnects us with deeply held truths and fundamental human desires; meets complexity with simple, elegant solutions; and rewards risk-taking and vulnerability with lasting value. However, businesses must refrain from making art a disciple of innovation—and they must refrain from designing innovation as a mere process. That is perhaps the golden rule artists and innovators have in common: only if they allow ample space for new things to happen that could happen, will they happen.

This post was first published by CNNMoney/Fortune and MIX (Management Innovation Exchange)

Image credit: Komonews

Shaping the Values of our Connected World

When more than 800 leaders from business, academia, civil society, and government convene at the World Economic Forum’s Summit on the Global Agenda in Dubai next week, the Global Agenda Council on Values, of which I am a member, hopes to serve as the glue between the more than 80 Councils that are addressing the most pressing issue of our time. By engendering a cross-Council dialogue, the Council on Values can act as a bridge between the public and private sector, between different industries, faiths, cultures, and generations - and different sets of values.

In light of the financial crisis, growing social divides in many countries, and deepening mistrust in business, a multi-stakeholder dialogue on values is more important than ever. In our hyper-connected world, the consequences of our actions are more transparent and dramatically amplified, and the gap between values and behavior is increasingly open to public scrutiny and subject to systemic effects. Consumers and citizens demand more transparent, collaborative and inclusive models of value creation that produce well-being, happiness, and meaning as much as profits. However, it appears that even well-articulated and broadly supported moral principles are difficult to translate into day-to-day decision-making and into the behaviours observed by suppliers, dealers, customers, and employees, with their varying and often conflicting value systems.

Values are what connects and divides us as human beings. As deeply held beliefs and personal truths, shaped by tradition and collective experience, they determine how we engage with others, what we identify with, what we value, what we love, and what we deem worth fighting for. They are at the core of consensus and conflict, and they bring out the best and the worst in us. They affect our everyday lives and are yet believed to transcend life’s volatilities. And while research suggests that they converge with increasing levels of modernity, income parity, and globalization, they also remain extremely divergent and reflect the diversity of our cultures.

This dialectic is reflected in The World Values Survey, a large-scale research project conducted by The World Values Survey Association that has been monitoring and analyzing people’s values and beliefs since 1981. The survey classifies values into the opposing pairs “traditional vs. secular-rational values” and “survival vs. self-expression values.” The first pair describes the tension between authority, family, and nation-centric beliefs as opposed to a more science-based set of “modern” values that emphasize freedom, reason, and individualism. The second pair describes the shift from an industrial society to a knowledge society, from a focus on subsistence to human agency.

So in 2012, which key universal values do we share, and which principles do we promote to make our global economy more humanist, just, and sustainable? The mission of the Council on Values is to develop not only a new mindset, but also a new toolset for a more ethical economy.  

We are tackling this complex challenge with a three-pronged approach:

First, we aim to expose the values that underpin our attitudes and behaviours and to better understand how they influence our decision-making at the regional, industry, and global level. We are beginning this exercise in our own front yard, so to speak, by conducting a cross-Council study that examines the values underlying all Global Agenda Councils. Our goal is to map out correlations between values that can yield relevant insights for society at large.

Second, we intend to clearly articulate the values for the global economic system and create a participatory framework for all stakeholders. To that end, the Global Agenda Council on Values has drafted a “social covenant” based on a new set of shared values in order to realign the private and public sector on the role of business in society. A first draft of this framework was shared in Davos this year, and we plan to refine it further in Dubai.

Third, the Council will focus on how digital technology, especially mobile and social computing, can help make moral principles tangible through social networks, gamification, situational awareness, and smart devices, with particular focus on the younger generation of “netizens." We are keen on involving the tech community because software appears to have great potential (and moral responsibility) as it enables most of our actions and interactions, and transports values either explicitly or implicitly. As a first direct outcome, the Council on Values, in partnership with frog, LRN, BSR, Carnegie Mellon, Net Impact, and other partners, organized the “Reinvent Business” hackathon in June this year. More than 150 software developers, designers, academics, gamers, filmmakers, storytellers, and business leaders came together in San Francisco to design and build innovative products and services that have the capacity to change corporate behavior from within. Based on the belief that social technology and design present a unique opportunity to drive higher levels of transparency, empathy, and self-governance within companies, participants created concepts and prototypes for software applications that translate values into concrete interactions and experiences at the workplace.

The Summit on the Global Agenda in Dubai is expected to weave all these three tracks together, as well as spark new insights and ideas.

Identifying and promoting shared values is important, but the real litmus test for a moral economy is the respect it can afford for the values of others. This is particularly true for our ever more connected world where the other is just one click away and we are all neighbors. If the Values Council can help articulate what we have in common while appreciating what distinguishes us, then we will have made a small but meaningful contribution to improving the state of the world.

A shortened version of this post was first published on the World Economic Forum Forumblog.

[Image: REUTERS/Pawan Kumar]

 

The H(app)athon Project

Happiness and well-being have entered the business mainstream as new indicators of economic progress. Bhutan pioneered the Gross National Happiness Index, the UN issued a Happiness Resolution, and the Harvard Business Review recently devoted a special report to the topic. A growing number of companies are looking into creating Big Data-enabled products/services that measure and enhance happiness/well-being, and a growing number of companies are beginning to leverage the potential of Quantified-Self-apps to improve workplace wellness (and productivity).

On behalf of frog, I was invited to serve on a committee for the “H(app)athon Project” launched and spearheaded by author John C. Havens, who wrote a seminal piece on “The Value of a Happiness Economy” earlier this year, as well as a recent piece on Mashable, “How Big Data Can Make Us Happier and Healthier.” John is also working on a book, H(app)y - The Value of Well Being in the Digital Economy.

The H(app)athon Project's ultimate goal is to create a common taxonomy for happiness/well-being that can be measured by mobile/digital means, as well as an Open Source Happiness Platform (OHSP), a global, comprehensive, and evolving tool that assimilates and aggregates existing metrics of well-being. The project will comprise of three elements: a hackathon-style event at the Hub Culture space in London in the spring of 2013, a conference in the fall of 2013 in New York, and an experiment to be launched at the conference.

The H(app)athon Committee will help guide the project. Committee members include J.P. Rangaswami, chief scientist at Salesforce.com; John Clippinger of MIT’s Media Lab; William Hoffman, director of the World Economic Forum Telecommunications Industry Group; Laura Musikanski, co-founder of The Happiness Initiative, Ernesto Ramirez, community organizer, Quantified Self, and others.

 The initiative will formally kick off in January, and I look forward to sharing more details soon.

[image credit: Big Think]

 

 

“Brands in the Connected Age” Event in Dubai, Hosted By Sandbox

I'm delighted to participate in the event below in Dubai, curated and organized by my friend Sagarika Sundaram. Looking forward to a hopefully animated discussion!

Press Release

Sandbox Invites Global Leaders of Innovation and Design to Examine “Brands in the Connected Age”

 Gathering Brand and Design Thought Leaders for a Panel Discussion on the Eve of World Economic Forum in Dubai

Dubai-UAE: 31 October 2012 -- A day before the World Economic Forum (WEF) Summit on the Global Agenda takes centre-stage in Dubai, Sandbox, an exclusive global community of entrepreneurial spirits, will bring three members of WEF Global Agenda Councils and the Managing Director of brand consultancy Wolff Olins together in a panel discussion to address the changing dynamics of business and branding.

The panelists will include Tim Leberecht, CMO of global design and innovation firm frog (WEF Global Agenda Council on Values); Brian Collins, chairman and chief creative officer of COLLINS in NYC (WEF Global Agenda Council on Design Innovation); Sujata Keshavan, chairman and executive creative director of The Brand Union in Bangalore (WEF Global Agenda Council on Design Innovation), and Charles Wright, managing director of Wolff Olins in Dubai, UAE.

The thought-provoking discussion will take place on Sunday, 11 November at The Pavilion Downtown Dubai on Emaar Boulevard. Sagarika Sundaram and Fereshteh Amarsy, Sandbox ambassadors in Dubai, will host the evening.

Sundaram, who is a creative strategist at Wolff Olins, will moderate the panel discussion. She says, “Businesses need to get over standardisation – been there, done that. What’s next though? In a world where online peer reviews are the only true advertisements, brands need to genuinely touch a consumer’s heart. Paradox and ambiguity challenge and excite humans, and it’s time for brands to embrace these qualities in order to earn trust. We’re honoured and excited to have pioneers and opinion-makers from across the world explore whether this holds true in different geographies.”

Amarsy, founder of Community Cinema and Director of Special Projects at Meydan IMAX theatre, will introduce members of the first Dubai Sandbox class that evening.

For more information on the event, please visit http://goo.gl/8X2jz

Chief Meaning Officer: Valuing the Immeasurable

 The following is a slide-by-slide transcript of my short talk at DLD Tel Aviv last week (October 23, 2012).

1

Isn’t it ironic? We live in the age of hyper-connectivity, but business seems to be more disconnected than ever from the people it serves. According to a recent survey, some 27% of bosses believe their employees are inspired by their firm. However, in the same survey only 4% of employees agreed.

2

Employees and consumers feel increasingly disenfranchised. Trust in brands and institutions are at all all-time low. Moreover, there is a growing sentiment that the “market society” is invading and commercializing all aspects of our lives, and secularizing even those spaces that we once considered sacred.

3

This identity crisis of capitalism has raised some fundamental issues about the role of business in society. Is it time to measure what really matters? Many leading business thinkers believe so and propose new definitions of value. One of them is happiness. Bhutan introduced the Gross National Happiness Index. The United Nations issued a Happiness resolution. And next Spring the world’s first ever Happathon will take place in NYC.

4

But perhaps. rather than measuring a different kind of value, we ought to start valuing what is not measurable. What if markets were indeed sympathetic communities for social exchange, as this quote by the economist Robert Solomon suggests?

5

What if it were business’ primary responsibility to make meaning, not money?

6

I believe that it is no longer sufficient to be efficient or excellent – today's companies need to be significant to attract and retain talent and customers. They need to embrace “meaning” as the new currency. Their leaders need to become curators and producers of meaning: Chief Meaning Officers. But how exactly do you produce meaning? What makes an experience, a brand meaningful?

7

I would argue that meaning is constituted by three pillars: Scarcity, communality, transcendence. An event, an experience is meaningful when it is unique, deviates from the norm, the routine, when it is a disruption, or simply exclusive. It is meaningful when it can be experienced or shared with others, when it creates a sense of belonging and community. And lastly, something is meaningful when it elevates the people involved, when it points to a collective vision, a purpose greater than the action or transaction itself. This is the element of transcendence. Let’s look at some examples.

8

The travel service Nextpedition turns the trip into a game, with surprising twists and turns along the way. The service does not tell the traveler where she is going until the last minute. This is interesting. Traditional business wisdom holds that trust is earned by predictable behavior. But when everything is consistent and standardized, how do you create meaningful experiences? Nextpedition’s answer is serendipity. Serendipity is scarce and thus meaningful. Unpredictability is the new consistency.

9

Collaborative Consumption business models combine all three principles of meaning production. Let’s take Airbnb as example: Renting your apartment to complete strangers definitely represents a disruption that unleashes the forces of controlled serendipity.  But it also capitalizes on and fosters social capital inherent in dormant, trust-based networks and humanizes and personalizes travel And collaborative consumption services make all parties feel they are serving a greater purpose, in this case, sustainability, saving natural resources.

10

The musician Beck released his new album exclusively as “sheets of music” without recording any of the new songs himself. Instead, Beck invited his community to record them and share them online. By doing so, he created artificial scarcity: Beck’s own performances of his songs would remain exclusive to concertgoers. He literally redefined what the value of music means in the digital age. Scarcity, communality, transcendence.

11

In a somewhat radical stance against consumerism, outdoor clothier Patagonia placed a “Don’t Buy This Jacket” advertisement during the peak of shopping season. Patagonia may have jeopardized short-term sales – but instead built long-term loyalty and a customer community based on shared values.

12

Catalan football club FC Barcelona prides itself with the motto “More than a club.” Its values of fairness, freedom, and human rights are shared as universal values by supporters all over the world. The club has become a symbol of the beautiful game. It embodies that sometimes losing in style can be more rewarding than winning by all means.

13

This brings us to art. If we want business to be more human, then it is time for the humanities to design our businesses. It is time to find a place for mystery and delight in business. It is time for management not to be a science, but an art.

14

This, by the way, also spurs innovation. Innovation means changing the meaning of things. That’s what art does. Entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs are like artists, too. As the author Kathryn Schultz puts it, they are always initially wrong, by empirical measures. They “see the world as it is not,” but could be. In other words: they have a vision. They are the fools who speak the truth, have “insane” ideas, and make change happen. They are the Chief Meaning Officers. We need more of them.

Internet Heartbreak

(Twitter, October 12, 2012): 

@timleberecht I love the Internet. The Vice-Presidential Face-Off, GIF-ified

@Internet_Speaks: @timleberecht I'm a series of tubes and wires and am thus incapable of love. Sorry, Tim. -Internet

H(app)y?

John C. Havens, who wrote a seminal piece on “The Value of a Happiness Economy” earlier this year, has a new piece out on Mashable today – “How Big Data Can Make Us Happier and Healthier" – that is equally worth reading.

Here’s an excerpt that captures his position on the topic:

“How do you quantify yourself? We’re in the midst of an era where sensor technology and the maturation of smart phones means data is being collected about your actions in ways that have never existed before. There are no universal privacy and identity standards, which means your unwilling contributions to Big Data are being shaped by forces you can’t control.”

The good news – getting familiar with Quantified Self applications will provide the benefits of self-awareness along with communities who are focused on your similar interests. You’ll understand how to better shape your identity in this new virtual economy and learn the quantitative metrics that will derive their fullest context when seen through a qualitative lens.”

I was happy (pun intended) to be interviewed for his article, and following our initial phone call John and I had a wide-ranging lunch conversation in San Francisco about the potential and pitfalls of quantifying our lives, in which he shared some great insights. It’s extremely encouraging to see the Happiness movement gather momentum and to know that there are advocates out there like John who are not only passionate about this topic but also extremely diligent and knowledgeable.

John is working on a book - H(app)y - The Value of Well Being in the Digital Economy - and is organizing the world’s first H(app)athon in NYC next spring. I am very honored to be part of his "H(app)athon committee," along with J.P. Rangaswami, chief scientist at Salesforce.com; John Clippinger of MIT’s Media Lab; William Hoffman, director of the World Economic Forum Telecommunications Industry Group; Laura Musikanski, co-founder of The Happiness Initiative, Ernesto Ramirez, community organizer, Quantified Self, and others.

Let’s be h(app)y!

On TED.com: “3 Ways To (Usefully Lose) Control Of Your Brand”

I am super-thrilled that my TED University talk from this year’s TED Global conference that took place in Edinburgh in June made it onto the TED.com homepage this morning. It’s very flattering and, like being on the actual TED stage in person, also a bit nerve-wrecking.

Titled “3 Ways To (Usefully Lose) Control Of Your Brand,” the 6-minute talk explores – as much as that is possible in such short amount of time – how companies can respond to evermore demanding customers and employees who are empowered by hyper-connectivity and the ‘radical transparency’ of social media. Popular belief holds that commitment is fickle, reputation volatile, and loyalty scarce. In short: Companies have lost control – over their workforce, their customers, and as a result, their brands.

But have they really? In my talk, I argue that companies have never been in control, and that they actually have more control over the loss of control than ever before – in fact, they can design for the loss of control…

Also see this great summary on the TED Blog.

...and a related, longer article on design mind (republished by Rotman Magazine)

...as well as a brief reflection on my experience at TEDGlobal…

How To Nurture Your Company’s Rebels, And Unlock Their Innovative Might

“Choose your enemies carefully, 'cause they will define you Make them interesting 'cause in some ways they will mind you They're not there in the beginning but when your story ends Gonna last with you longer than your friends. -- U2, “Cedars of Lebanon”

We know that opposition is an integral part of the creative process. But sometimes opposition itself can be a creative act. Beyond common tactics (listed on this Community Toolbox site as “deflect, delay, deny, discount, deceive, divide, dulcify, discredit, destroy, deal”), it can manifest itself as craftsmanship and art--whether it be street art by Shepard Fairey or satire like these recent Mitt Romney campaign spoofs Venn diagrams.

As Make Shift’s editor, Steve Daniels, observes in the current issue, the nature of resistance is changing. Case studies ranging from Occupy Wall Street to neighborhood activism in Port-au-Prince illustrate that a combination of social technology and street-level ingenuity is producing new tools, techniques, practices, and skills for vocalizing opposition. And these in turn drive boycotts, counter-movements, and insurgencies, as well as opposition at a more mundane level, in day-to-day interactions.

With regard to business, numerous acts of creative opposition abound, from product hacks (e.g., hackers of IKEA products and Microsoft’s Kinect) to Beck’s decision to release his new album only as “sheet music” to be recorded by his fans. The entire maker and crowdfunding movements, as well as “innovation communes” such as The Glint, the Rainbow Mansion, and the Memento Factories can be seen as fundamental acts of creative resistance to business as usual.

All of these trends made me think about creative opposition within companies--about employee activities that are counter to the top-down policies without crossing the line into the unproductive and illegal. From passive disengagement, noncompliance, and disobedience to passive aggression, covert sabotage, and overt conflict, which tactics are appropriate, legitimate, and effective? How much resistance from its fringes can an organization endure before it is threatened at its core--and stops being an organization altogether? And most important, why would fostering creative opposition even be beneficial to companies?

In his book The Opposable Mind, the management guru Roger Martin argued that the ability to hold opposing truths was a critical quality for business leaders. Or in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The mark of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in its mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” If it is true that tension is a hallmark of our complex society and requires complex solutions, and that the “most enduring institutions” are contradictory, as David Brooks contends in a recent New York Times column about the Olympics, then creative opposition inside companies is nothing but the tangible manifestation of it. With a strong and self-organized in-house opposition, companies can cover the entire breadth of their corporate character. It allows them to acknowledge that they are complex and multipolar, that they have multiple truths, and that, through this tension, they can become capable of stretching themselves, expanding, and realizing their full potential.

There are other, more practical benefits to cultivating internal opposition. Today’s Millennial employees value freedom (and opposition might well be the most obvious act of freedom), and in that sense encouraging creative opposition among young employees, rather than squashing it, can serve as an important engagement (and retention) strategy. Moreover, companies that fail to allow internal opposition may be caught off guard and slow to respond when they face external opposition. Perhaps most important, resistance can serve as a catalyst for innovation. Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips, authors of the upcoming book The Misfit Economy, posit that the “black, gray, and informal economies,” with their underground entrepreneurs (“pirates, terrorists, computer hackers, and inner city gangs”), are underappreciated sources of new business models and products.

Similarly, I would argue, the contrarians and rebels, the people on the fringes of organizations who question and deviate from the status quo, which so often leads to inertia and inflexibility, are huge assets for any organization. Those who disagree with the present often see the future more clearly. This applies to hiring, too. Many business leaders, at least those who are forward-looking, essentially seek to hire “change agents”--individuals who are both creative and persistent in bursting a straitjacket of outdated practices and processes.

Ashoka Changemakers, a global network of social innovators, and others have adopted the term “social intrapreneurship” and aim to equip contrarian employees with best practices and tools to self-organize more effectively. They also hope to raise executive-suite awareness of the potential of empowering social intrapreneurs. The Rebels at Work initiative has created a community hub for connecting corporate renegades, identifying “good rebels” as those “who feel compelled to create ways to improve, change, and innovate,” who ”stand against the prevailing mindset of the organization and argue for a better way.”

Companies are beginning to realize that opposition is vital and a certain amount of conflict healthy. Some have even launched internal disruption units that can drive radical innovation from left field (e.g., Anheuser-Busch’s Beer Garage or Google X). As an alternative, companies may also bring in agencies and consultancies--hired opposition--with the mandate to disrupt conventional thinking and overcome groupthink and organizational myopia. The caveat here is that these outside interventions can lead to changes that fail to become a part of a company’s cultural fabric for the long term.

So what else can companies do to make internal opposition productive? Here are a few possible actions to consider:

1. Create safe spaces

Safe space does not necessarily refer to a formal group like an employee council but rather a practice of tolerating contrarians and mitigating their fears of retaliation or discrimination. It doesn’t mean that companies simply open-source all decision-making, flatten hierarchies, and initiate only grassroots projects. In fact, it might be more effective for companies to continue introducing new initiatives and policies from the top down but at the same time factor in enough space for oppositional voices. Every company campaign, policy, and product that is developed functions as wave that generates undercurrents, and like every movement, it inevitably breeds a counter-movement. It is often this counter-movement that holds the insight for the next stage in the process.

2. Make sure that internal opposition is constant

Executives may be tempted to believe that inclusiveness (by way of crowdsourcing and other participatory designs) eliminates, or at least minimizes, resistance. That is certainly effective for the conceptual and rollout stages of a new initiative or policy, but many companies then fall short of allowing resistance after the rollout, thereby threatening to undermine the strength of the initial support they had garnered. Alignment is a moving target, and the window for resistance should always be open.

3. Embrace passive and active opposition

On the more passive (and sometimes passive-aggressive) side, employees increasingly find creative ways to sidestep policies and protocol. Take the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon, propagated by professionals who simply bypass IT approvals to bring their own preferred mobile devices to the workplace. According to a recent survey by Forrester Research for Trend Micro, 78 percent of businesses have implemented BYOD programs--and 70 percent of them cited increased productivity as the main reason.

Creative opposition, in this sense, means raising the accountability for each and every employee. Employees as innovators strive to find better ways of doing business instead of just following the business-as-usual manual. This may result in the traditional corporate functions giving up authority and shifting from being owners to enablers. It’s certainly not an easy transition, but one that pays off in the long term.

Companies could even go a step further and adopt and actively support formats such as House of Genius, a brainstorming session/idea incubator in which participants are anonymous. Why not institute an employee council with members whose identities are not disclosed? They could meet regularly to discuss important company matters and make recommendations, maybe even directly to the board, bypassing the management team. Or launch live-work communes that bring together employees and customers to develop antitheses to the company’s vision and policies? Or conduct internal brand hijacks or product hacks that challenge top-down initiatives and may become powerful counter-movements that prompt a rethink or perhaps even a reset?

In conclusion, it’s important to remember that incorporating creative opposition begins with asking the right questions. What is your company’s “black market”? What is its “underground”? Who are your misfits, your hackers? Who are the people who might want to “occupy” your company? Who is seeing the cracks in your organization and seeking to attack them? Invite them to do so before they invite themselves (and others along with them). Make sure your internal opposition has ample safe space to self-organize, is always close, and utterly creative. Resist the temptation to squash resistance. Bring the renegades into the mix and not into the fold. And remind yourself that occasional disloyalty might be the strongest form of loyalty.

[image credit: Shutterstock]

This post appeared first on FastCo. Design.

Innovation as the Human Enterprise

Innovation was the overarching theme of the World Economic Forum's (WEF) Annual Meeting of the New Champions (AMNC) 2012 in Tianjin this week. As a representative of a design and innovation firm and as a member of the WEF Global Agenda Council on Values, I was delighted to see that many panels and conversations approached innovation from a holistic perspective. That meant not contextualizing it solely as technological disruption or process optimization, but as a deeply humanistic endeavour that connects consumer and producer, along with other stakeholders (increasingly in hybrid roles), in a creative act. Innovation, after all, is a human enterprise.

When we talk about enablers of innovation, we essentially talk about enabling forces that help us to unleash our very humanity. Innovation brings us to life because it connects our vision, our ideas of a better future, with our enormous ingenuity and capacity for proactive change. More innovative business means more human business. The WEF Tech Pioneers and Social Entrepreneurs who were awarded in Tianjin, as well as the remarkable social technology start-up founders and employees I had met in Beijing just before the AMNC, all exemplified this spirit.

As several sessions looked at enablers of innovation, they examined what China can learn from Western-style innovation, but increasingly also what the Western world can learn from China (which, for example, is creating the world’s largest market for mobile learning).

One enabler of innovation, relevant worldwide, is a more effective link between academic research and business in order to overcome what William Green, chairman of Accenture, called the “Innovation Trap” in the session on smart growth and smart economies. While the benefits of knowledge arbitrage may have become obsolete in our hyper-connected world, silos still exist in our societies and organizations. To eliminate these silos, we need to fundamentally rethink human capital and put people at the center of our enterprises, not as employees that we cater to but as human beings whose desires we design for. Intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs need space to “make change” and shape their businesses’ agenda.

Another enabler is to promote cultures that honor failure as an integral part of learning and a prerequisite of entrepreneurship. A lively panel explored rewards for risk-taking and how to increase tolerance for “fast failing.”

Moreover, innovation is the answer to the urgent need for sustainable consumption. Propelled by digital technologies, new business models such as Collaborative Consumption materialize the idea of a “circular economy,” appreciating social interaction, reputational capital, and meaningful experience over conspicuous consumption and its focus on the possession of instantly gratifying, status-granting material goods. In this context, it made perfect sense that a session on Sustainable Consumption identified Chinese millenials, with their widespread adoption of social media and their growing quest for values such as meaning and happiness, as a key demographic that has the power to shift consumer behavior at large scale.

To enable these new forms of collaboration, both in innovation and sustainable consumption, high levels of trust are paramount. This idea brings us back to the themes of human behavior. It was great to see that the AMNC program was rich with sessions on art, culture, and spirituality—sessions that looked beyond the larger contexts of private and public sectors, and at the individual. What motivates us? How do we learn? What makes us happy? What are our human rights in the digital age? How much of our lives do we want to share? How does Big Data influence our decisions? Only if we better understand our personal behaviors and simultaneously cultivate our shared values, can we create trusted environments that foster creativity, community, and collaboration – three keys to improving the state of the world.

This post was first published on the WEF Forum:Blog.

Picture: Tianjin Museum via Every China

Homecoming

Last week’s issue of The New Yorker contains two magnificent profiles on two famous German speakers: Austrian writer Stefan Zweig and German solo violinist Christian Tetzlaff. The piece on Zweig – besides being a profound character study of the writer – includes a beautiful paragraph on how the suffering of a whole existence can be condensed into a travel itinerary, and the Tetzlaff profile is rich with quotes that just want to make you listen to music.

Like these:

“Performing music is the job that has the most to do with the belief in the existence of a soul.”

“Music, even at terrible moments, can make you accept so much more – accept your dark sides, or the things that happen to you. Maybe it’s just because you see that this is a common trait for all of us. You see that we are not alone.”

“And that’s what the concert situation is about for me, when I’m sitting in the hall and also when I’m playing myself. It’s about communication – I almost want to say ‘communion.’ As a player, you really don't interpret anymore. You listen, together, with the audience."

"Reinvent Business" - Report & Video

In early June 2012, global design and innovation firm frog and LRN, a company that helps businesses develop values-based corporate cultures, came together to create a forum for envisioning a more human and social enterprise. With the support of Blumberg Capital, BSR, Carnegie Mellon, Cue Ball, Dachis Group, Fast Company, Net Impact, Silicon Valley Bank, and
the World Economic Forum, they organized a two-day “hackathon” called Reinvent Business.

More than 150 change-makers gathered in San Francisco on June 9–10 to rapidly ideate, design, and build software concepts and prototypes with the potential to transform business from within. Two days of dedicated work by creative minds from across design, technology, business, and
academia culminated in twenty concepts that reimagine business’ relationship with both external and internal stakeholders.

This report (Download PDF) explores key failings of “business as usual” and details how
the Reinvent Business hackathon illustrated the potential to unleash the
humanity inside organizations.

You can also watch this video:

TEDGlobal 2012: Out in the Open

“All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone,” the 17th century philosopher Pascal famously said. Four centuries later, however, research asserts a direct correlation between openness and happiness. It turns out man is a social animal, after all. “Openness is the freedom to be one’s self,” one self-help blog states, representative of common belief. I concur. In my life, openness has been a prerequisite for almost anything good happening to me – from moving to the US to meeting my wife to, most recently and fittingly, speaking at a TED conference focused on the theme of “Radical Openness.”

The talk I gave at TED University (TED U), the pre-program to the TEDGlobal conference a month ago in Edinburgh, was based on an article called “Openness: Designing for the Loss of Control” that I had written two years ago. From open-source to open innovation to open leadership, comfort levels and standards around openness have significantly changed since then, so that I had to rethink and overhaul my content.

Many organizations have come to realize that embracing openness is key for cooperation as an effective defense mechanism in the reputation markets. But not only that: Openness is now also recognized as a main driver of collaborative value-creation. Later in the conference, on the TEDGlobal main stage, Rachel Botsman, one of the most popular advocates for the business models of ‘Collaborative Consumption’ (taken to market by start-ups from Skillshare to Task Rabbit) heralded reputation as the new capital in the 21st century. Openness, in her eyes, serves as the foundational attribute of the ‘share economy’ in which resources are pooled and leveraged collectively for greater ‘social’ value – based on reputation and trust.

I must have practiced the opening lines of my TED U talk at least 200 times. I gave my talk – to my wife, my two year old, my colleagues (very special thanks and eternal gratitude to Till Grusche!), and mostly just to myself - at airport lounges, in the shower, in the car, on airplanes, during strolls, for weeks and weeks, until my body had internalized every single word and I could simply focus on the performance, on creating a connection with the audience by intonating the non-verbal (for more insights into the psyche of a TED talker and the preparation rituals, read this recent New Yorker piece).

I was the first speaker on the second day of TED U. After waiting for 20 minutes backstage, it was time, and a friendly staff member pushed me on stage, as is the custom. It was a not-so-subtle nudge to now open up and accept that I needed to embrace my own vulnerability in the limelight of the TED stage. The comfort of strangers is not only a refuge, I thought afterwards, but a necessary force towards initiation. He who meets strangers who push him out into the world is a lucky person.

Openness is a function of time and space, and the economy of a TED talk is a stark reminder that intensity does not necessarily correlate with density. In other words, leaving things open, creating open, uncharted space, is an essential luxury when it comes to making meaning. It is stunning how much content you can condense into a six minute talk (the format of TED U). What you decide to exclude is as important as what you decide to include, to paraphrase Chris Anderson, the curator of TED. In the same spirit, composers and music producers know that adding another track on a recording does not expand the sound, it reduces it. The richest and most intense recordings you can conjure are those with a single instrument and a voice. That’s the beauty and power of Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, and Johnny Cash’s American Recordings. The expansion of a soul – its vision –is deeply rooted in solitude (for a much more elaborate and eloquent view on this, read this wonderful piece by William Deresiewicz on “Solitude and Leadership”). You can see, hear, and feel it in any public performance.

This is true for TED Talks, too. The most popular ones, the genre-classics, are the talks that are radically open by being radically restrained. They create something out of nothing. Sir Ken Robinson, Alain de Botton, and Malcolm Gladwell, to name just a few, did away with slides, movies, or other props, knowing that there’s nothing more persuasive, more powerful than the intimacy of the human voice, in perfect harmony with the body it inhabits. The speaker exposing himself to the audience, with no fall-back, no safety net. A trust-based act of cooperation, an implicit contract with those out to judge him: You will accept me as whom I am if show you who I truly am. This is the principle of inspiration – and leadership. When you give more than you receive, you begin to lead.

It is your vulnerability, your putting yourself on the line that earns you trust, respect, and admiration. Authenticity means uniqueness: “What is interesting about you is you.” (Alonzo King). The iconic red circle that marks the TED speaker’s spot on stage serves as a symbol of reduction and expansion at the same time. It is you and the very idea of you “worth spreading.” It is others’ idea of you, and how you both confirm and overcome, perform and transform it. If you stay within that circle – literally and metaphorically – you are not only safe, you are powerful.

Photos: Duncan Davidson / TED

Aspiration/Inspiration: Find Your Greatness, Find Your Object

Nike’s new “Find Your Greatness” campaign, launched during the Olympics, is meaningful marketing at its best: passionate storytelling that puts the human at its center and yet points to a greater purpose.

“The Weight of Objects” is not a campaign, but what Priya Parker calls a “passion project.” Ramsay de Give and Kristen Joy Watts created a series of portraits of individuals and an object important to them – a wonderful documentation of finding meaning in the seemingly mundane.

 

Images: Ramsay de Give, Kristen Joy Watts

Branding, Berlin

Spotted in Berlin-Mitte, June 2012

Sinnfabriken, Berlin

In January this year, on the eve of the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, I wrote an op-ed for Germany’s leading daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung titled “Sinnfabriken” (which you can roughly translate as “meaning factories”; also see this interview on the Werteindex blog.). The title was meant to be catchy, but my thesis was more earnest: Revisiting milestones of the history of brand theory, I argued that brands can now evolve from enablers of sales to arbiters (and in fact, producers) of meaning. The underlying thought experiment was to posit that we have entered the “meaning economy” in which the mission of business is no longer just to create profit and jobs, but to create meaning – spiritual, intellectual, and emotional experiences that help connect the individual to society and vice versa. Transcendence instead of transactions, simply put. Along with this, I tried to make the case for an appreciation of intangible assets, the “soft power” of companies, with their brand as the most tangible factor.

I received some very positive, encouraging responses to the article, but of course not everyone agreed. Why should, of all societal actors, companies bear the responsibility to recharge a largely secularized society with spirituality and meaning? Isn’t that just another cynical trick of the “masters of persuasion” to lure consumers into buying stuff they don’t need? Well, maybe it is, but the reality is that the power of brands is undisputable. What we buy reflects (and even determines) who we are, and most of us spend the majority of our lives at work. So when it comes to meaning, why not start with the institutions that have the strongest influence on our everyday lives?

The question also came up in an interview I gave to German public television (ZDF) in Berlin a couple of weeks ago, and the interviewer insisted on the dangers of entrusting companies with our spiritual and intellectual well-being. These are legitimate concerns of course and the risks are real, but if we manage to change the nature of the game and create new parameters of success in business, perhaps we can truly change companies’ behavior over time. If we make business leaders aware of their responsibility as “chief meaning officers,” if we give them the tools so that their companies can create an added value of meaning with every single traditional transaction they make, then we can maybe indeed generate a completely new business paradigm (and a critical mass of adopters) that can very well deal with a few free riders. Other questions I faced ranged from how to distinguish meaning from CSR and whether Europe’s humanist heritage might present more fertile ground for this new notion of business. I could tell the ZDF-reporter wasn’t fully satisfied with my answers, and neither was I. My jet-lag aside, it was one of those interviews that raised more questions than answers, and it is always humbling (and motivating) to realize the power of an idea but also the gulf that still exists between this idea and a cohesive philosophical framework. I have my work cut out for me.

Later that day, I gave the closing keynote at the Annual Congress of the Federal Association of German Market Researchers (BVM), as part of a session with the fantastic Michael Braungart (of the EPEA Institute) and Erich Joachimsthaler (of Vivadi Partners). Titled “Meaning Factories,” it presented my key theses in 20 minutes, and I was delighted that the audience seemed very attentive (especially given that the German national soccer team was to kick off its Euro quarterfinal a couple of hours later). If you’ve been to Germany, you will know that Germans are notoriously glass-half-empty people. A deep mistrust in all-too-smooth plausibility and in all-too-simple formulas is the companion to most public debates, mixed with a lust for the argument and for revealing self-acclaimed truth-tellers as impostors. If you are an emperor without clothes, a German audience will make you feel really, really naked. I am glad to report that I left the stage with my clothes on.

Here are the slides from my Berlin talk (in German):

Sinnfabriken – Marken als Produzenten von Moral und Bedeutung

Two Days to Reinvent Business

How can technology and a group of creative minds help build a more human and truly social enterprise that is designed for the 21st century world and restores trust between business and society? That was the big question tackled by the interdisciplinary Reinvent Business hackathon – a collaborative, rapid ideation and software programming event – we recently hosted our San Francisco studio.

Co-developed by frog and LRN, and in partnership with Blumberg Capital, BSR, Carnegie Mellon University, Cue Ball, Dachis Group, Fast Company, Net Impact, Silicon Valley Bank, and the World Economic Forum, Reinvent Business brought together a diverse group of 150 software developers, designers, gamers, filmmakers, storytellers, and business leaders to design and build innovative products and services that have the capacity to change corporate behavior from within. Based on the belief that social technology and design present a unique opportunity to drive higher levels of transparency, empathy, and self-governance within companies, our goal was to create concepts and prototypes for software applications that translate values and principles into concrete interactions and tangible experiences at the workplace.

The event began on Friday evening with a private reception for participants hosted by Blumberg Capital. The next morning, the official contest kicked off with a rousing speech by LRN founder, chairman, and CEO Dov Seidman (also the author of the book How), who framed the hackathon challenge in philosophical terms and stressed the urgency of creating more humanist businesses: “We need to cultivate the humanity inside of our organizations, deepen the connections between business and society, and shape the kinds of positive behaviors we need in a more interconnected and interdependent world.” “True reinvention can only happen with multiple stakeholders contributing to the solution, sharing their ideas from the bottom up and not just the top down. We believe in the power of convening. Our hope is that by bringing together some of the brightest minds and passionate leaders we can create sustainable ideas for shaping organizations capable of thriving uniquely in the 21st century,” he said.

Inspired by Seidman’s words, frog then facilitated a 45-min immersion activity along five main themes that helped the participants translate a somewhat abstract challenge into a series of specific opportunity areas around which to form teams. Subsequently, the teams (with 7-8 members each) were organized to brainstorm, sketch, design, and code their concepts. A group of frog mentors helped them shape their designs, ensuring the greatest levels of quality, adoptability, and potential for positive impact.

At the end of an intense two days in an extremely crowded San Francisco studio, all 20 teams presented their final concepts to the jury, which comprised of Brian Behlendorf (CTO and Managing Director, World Economic Forum), Alexa Clay (Director, Social Intrapreneurship and New Economy, Ashoka Changemakers, and author of The Misfits Economy), Kathleen Edmond (Chief Ethics Officer, Best Buy), Jim Fruchterman (CEO, Benetech), Ted Howes (Director, Consumer Products and Innovation, BSR), Raj Kapoor (Managing Director, Mayfield Fund), Peter Kim (Chief Strategy Officer, Dachis Group, and author of Social Business By Design), Liz Maw (CEO, Net Impact), Ebele Okobi (Director, Business and Human Rights Program, Yahoo!), Kal Patel (Executive Committee Member, LRN), Joe Werner (Silicon Valley Bank), and Nick de la Mare (Executive Creative Director, frog).

The winning team (which had worked on a web-based platform called SkillCloud) received a $5,000 cash prize from Silicon Valley Bank and a free all-day workshop from frog and LRN to further refine their idea.

The outcome of the hackathon by far exceeded our expectations: We were overwhelmed by the turn-out (we had a long waitlist, and some of the participants had flown in from Mozambique, New Zealand, and Romania for this event), the passion and commitment of everyone involved, the amazing spirit throughout the event, and the enthusiastic feedback afterwards.

Pictures

Facebook Day 1
Facebook Day 2
Twitter: @reinventbiz, #reinventbiz

Five Keys To Building A Business That Doesn’t Bury The Humans At Its Core

As business leaders speak of the “Human Age” and claim that capitalism is being replaced by “talentism” -- defined as access to talent as a key resource and differentiator -- many companies have embarked on initiatives to “unleash their human potential.” Those are big words and noble ambitions, and naturally they seem worth striving for. But as one of the hosts of a hackathon in San Francisco this weekend, which invites developers, designers, and other creative minds to “reinvent business,” I have been wondering: What is a “human” business, anyway?

You might argue that the notion of a human business is a category error. Organizations are bureaucracies at their core, and it is hard to think of any formalized collective human endeavor, and especially any business, as being free of rules, structures, and processes. After all, these factors are what ultimately makes corporations (and nonprofits alike) reliable and trustworthy, and grants them their authority. Consequently, there appears to be a fundamental chasm between individual human behavior -- which is expansive and multifaceted, ranging from the rational to the wildly irrational, sentimental, and unpredictable -- and the design of organizations: rational, practical, results oriented, and engineered to perform consistently.

And yet, companies are made up of people who are loving, caring, generous, forgiving, and wildly creative at their best, and incoherent, inconsistent, moody, selfish, arrogant, aggressive--and yes, even violent at their worst (not coincidentally, the corporation, when contextualized as a “person,” has been diagnosed a psychopath in a popular 2004 documentary). Inarguably, every corporation under the sun (well, maybe except for Foxconn’s robot-powered manufacturing lines) is made of and run by humans, and quintessentially based on human relationships. So how can any enterprise not be human?

I prefer the term humanist business. “Human” describes what we are, “humanist” signifies what we want to be. A business might be human because it best caters to the actual, realistic human needs (articulated, for example, by Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs but it becomes humanist only by aspiring to a greater purpose that enables the ideal human condition through its very pursuit.

Humanist businesses offer a community of sympathetic individuals a unique collaboration model to realize what I would consider the five categories of distinctively human potential. They also reflect five qualities that are necessary for any organization looking to redesign how they operate to be more productive and prosperous. These are:

EMPATHY

Empathy is the ability to put oneself into someone else’s mind, to truly feel with and for them. And indeed, if we humans are neurologically “wired to care,” as Dev Patnaik asserts, then organizations need to be wired to care, too. This requires an emotional understanding of the sentiments, dreams, desires, and ambitions of their employees and customers. Amidst a flood of explicit “big data” and confronted with the constant urge to quantify human relationships, empathetic enterprises preserve and refine their intuition -- an appreciation for the implicit and the opaque. Patnaik points to Harley-Davidson and IBM as examples of “open empathy organizations.” The New York Times writes of a recent study suggesting that giving employees occasional altruistic tasks increases their sense of overall productivity. Design Research, the methodology of the creative ethnographer, is helping companies “bond” with their employees, partners, and customers by understanding their daily lives. Empathetic businesses can sense mood shifts early on and readily adapt to new behaviors, long before intuition becomes knowledge.

CULTURE

From “wired to care” to “wired for culture:” With empathy as the foundation, the evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel contends that we owe our success as individuals and as a species to our “social mind,” defined by our ability to form cultures. He considers it the vehicle for social learning and cooperation with strangers in the context of “mutual aid communities.” These communities are based on trust and like-mindedness, that is, familiar mores, traditions, and customs as well as shared values. Culture is key for collaboration, which is why it is such a fundamental asset to every company. The online retailer Zappos says it “competes on culture,” and Nike, Starbucks, and Virgin have all created distinct narratives and tribal identities that turn their brands into movements. Grant McCracken even demands a chief culture officer in every organization, and companies such as Google, Eileen Fisher, and Affinity Lab already have one in place.

MORALITY

Morality is the ability to act in accordance with moral principles, concepts of good and bad, right and wrong. As hyper-connectivity and radical transparency expose all of our behavior in broad daylight, integrity is the only sustainable position in today’s business. Dov Seidman (who is a fellow host of the upcoming “Reinvent Business” hackathon) contends that in our more interdependent world, questions of “how much” matter much less than the question of “how” (how we think, behave, lead, govern, operate, consume, engender trust, and relate to others). As a result, moral businesses match internal and external character, purpose and action, words and deeds, and they no longer tolerate a gap between idealism and pragmatism, between principles and practical reasons. In fact, morality becomes their most powerful product, forging a lasting connection with constituents by “out-behaving” (Seidman) their competition. Case in point: Outdoor clothier Patagonia encouraged potential buyers to check out eBay for its products and to resole their shoes before purchasing new ones. In an even more radical stance against consumerism, the company placed a “Don’t Buy This Jacket” advertisement in The New York Times during the ‘Black Friday’ shopping frenzy. Moral businesses don’t do things right; they do the right thing.

CREATIVITY

Humans create--not only positive things like ideas, things, relationships, stories but also confusion and chaos. Traditional business wisdom holds that trust is earned by predictable behavior. But as most process efficiencies have been exploited over the past decades, variation trumps standardization. To counteract boredom, the “new work stress,” as CNN defines it, successful creative businesses constantly reinvent themselves. For Virgin’s Richard Branson, for example, everything is an experiment. Others vary their marketing presence, guerrilla-style: UK-based Interflora monitored Twitter to identify users who needed cheering up and then sent them a free bouquet of flowers. Similarly, Dutch airline KLM launched a “surprise” campaign, seemingly randomly handing out small gifts to passengers. Amex’s travel service Nextpedition relies on serendipity to create open-ended, custom “mystery trips.” All of these creative enterprises embrace unpredictability as the new consistency. Their leaders are not measured by how much uncertainty they can eliminate but how much of it they can tolerate. Moreover, such enterprises crowdsource the creation process and invite their employees and customers to co-create -- from Dell’s IdeaStorm to Wikimedia’s five-year strategic plan. They are hyper-social organizations but also ones that create space for solitude, moments for the individual to be alone with their thoughts. Original ideas are very lonely, at the end of the day. Or as the choreographer Alonso King once put it: “What is interesting about you is you.” As trite as it may sound, creative businesses give people time and space to be themselves.

You may have noticed that while I have mentioned creativity, I have avoided the term “innovation.” It is because I agree with Bill Taylor when he writes in a recent Harvard Business Review blog post that people don’t want to innovate. They want to dream, empathize, bond, do the right thing, and create. In doing so, they may end up innovating (or as Tim O’Reilly says, “Innovation starts with people having fun”) but what truly drives them is something different.

ASPIRATION

This can be characterized as the quest to work toward a unique mission, whether it is individual advancement, spiritual enlightenment, or social progress. The prerequisite of aspiration is imagination, and its immediate product is hope. Only an organization with vivid imagination, both individual and collective, can envision a bigger and brighter future--and thus provide a sense of hope, the lifeblood of any human endeavor. Aspirational businesses are constantly changing, and they treat their employees as entrepreneurs or “social intrapreneurs,” as autonomous decision-makers and leaders who are inspired (and not just motivated) to act as changemakers across all levels of the organization. (I always ask job candidates: “What is it that you want to change?”) This requires a different kind of alignment--not the traditional one between goals and execution, but one between organizational aspiration and employee passions. At frog, we have established loosely structured “centers of passion,” wary that a too formal setup might stifle the very informality in which passions thrive.

Humanist businesses provide the community and resources for realizing the key human potentials of empathy, culture, morality, creativity, and aspiration. As the new millennial workforce demands meaning over money, and prefers employers that are different by making a difference, humanist businesses shift their organizational rationale from productivity to impact, from excellence to significance.

[image: Janaka Dharmasena]

This post was first published by Fast Company.