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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.

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…

The Future of the City / New Cities Summit in Paris

Accelerated innovation and adoption of ubiquitous computing, mobile devices, and rich sources of data are changing how we live, work, and play in urban environments. Increasingly, a digital landscape overlays our physical world and is expanding to offer ever-richer experiences that augment—and in some cases, replace—the physical experience: “The city is the platform, the network, the sensors, and the interface,” as frog creative director Rob McIntosh put it in a recent talk.

Many metropolitan regions and infrastructure players have joined forces and announced ambitious projects, and the (pop-)cultural debate is zooming in on it: See Cisco’s strategic initiative with the city of Barcelona, this film by Ericsson on “Thinking Cities”, or Gary Hustwit’s new documentary “Urbanized.” TED awarded its 2012 TED Prize to “The City” (for the first time it didn’t go to a person), and The Atlantic devotes an entire section to it.

I attended the New Cities Summit in Paris a couple of weeks ago, the inaugural annual conference of the New Cities Foundation. The New Cities Foundation (NCF) is a new global platform for innovation and exchange on the future of urbanization. NCF’s membership base includes GE, Cisco, Ericsson, Orange, GDF Suez, Citynove – Groupe Galeries Lafayette, the Ford Foundation, Metropolis, NYU, the SENSEable City Lab at MIT, CITRIS, HEC Paris, the Urban China Initiative, the Climate Group, and USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, and, my company, frog. The Summit in Paris brought together thought leaders in technology, infrastructure, architecture, energy, transport, national and local government, the media, academia, and the non-profit sector from all regions of the world.

As part of frog’s partnership with the NCF, we published a special online issue of our design mind magazine, devoted to “The Future of the City." Online magazine The Urban Times is republishing the issue as a series of articles this week.

design mind: http://designmind.frogdesign.com/articles/series/the-future-of-the-city

Urban Times: http://www.theurbn.com/2012/05/the-future-of-the-city-1/

Hope for the Quantified Self

The fate of the ‘moral economy’ lies squarely in the hand of software engineers – all the more reason to appreciate intangible value.

This month, the emerging Pirates party in Germany was able to garner 8.2% share of the votes in elections in the rural German state of Schleswig-Holstein. It was the latest manifestation of the broader civic protest sentiment sweeping through the West. Like Spain’s Los Indignados and Occupy Wall Street, the Pirates are a largely leaderless movement that has a shared purpose but no clearly articulated agenda. It is absorbing general dissatisfaction amongst citizens, but also, for the first time, asserting ‘transparency’ as a democratically legitimatized political platform. Four years after the Obama election, Hope has become a bottom-up vector. The Generation Meaning is assuming places of power but still has to figure out what exactly it is looking for.

At any rate, the moral economy is in popular demand: With debt and inequality undermining social contracts and eroding social capital worldwide, citizens and consumers alike expect more inclusive models of decision-making, higher standards of integrity, and fairer mechanisms of creation and redistribution of wealth. The various protest movements are self-organizing themselves and seeking to demonstrate the very values-based behaviors and organizational principles they find lacking in their institutional counterparts. At the corporate level, alternative forms of ‘doing business’ are burgeoning – from the social entrepreneur to the social intrapreneur, the hybrid for/non-profit to the B Corp, from Gary Hamel’s Management Innovation XChange (MIX), Ashoka’s Corporate Change-Makers, to frog’s Reinvent Business hackathon – in a quest to rethink business from within, ‘socialize’ corporate gain, and yield ‘shared value’ (Michael Porter), or ‘thick value’ (Umair Haque), instead of maximizing shareholder value as the ultimate moral obligation of business.

Value

All of these alternatives, at their core, aim to renegotiate the definition of value. Technology publisher and social web godfather Tim O’ Reilly suggests that the quintessential moral challenge for the 21st century enterprise might be to ensure that those who capture value are the ones who create it. It may never be the perfect congruence, he cautions, but the closer the proximity of these two positions on the ‘values continuum,’ the more beneficial the outcome. Ideally, companies (and economies) “create more value than they capture” so that they can nurture the communal ecosystem that is their lifeblood. “If you have too small of a group capturing value, then the whole ecosystem breaks down,” he contends.

Of course the prerequisite for this is that really all value is externalized, captured, and properly recognized – in particular the value that may not be readily qualified within the canon of current business accounting and not yet exploited through the capture of Big Personal Data on the web and on Facebook, the network that shapes the digital uber-narrative of the stories of our lives. Think of the vast amounts of social capital created by other, perhaps smaller, online networks that may be harder to monetize and yet strengthen the fabric of civic society. Think of the social value YouTube generates by virtue of offering a free platform for the dissemination of educational content. Think of investigative journalists, the hard work of parents, teachers, and others whose contributions to society are generally undervalued. Think of books, movies, dance, plays, or other pieces of art and cultural artifacts that make people happy and thereby contribute to the well-being of societies, but typically represent an asymmetrical economic relationship between value-creator and benefactor.

And even within companies, why is it that numbers always favor the ones with the numbers while there are no numbers to measure the social value created by those whose contributions are outside of the common ROI vocabulary? The sales person who has missed his targets but is popular amongst his colleagues, and widely seen as integral to team morale in the workplace. The CEO who inspires and instills hope for thousands of employees but has failed to meet the board’s growth expectations. The manager who shares the credit for a completed project with her team but has gone over budget in delivering it. Why is being a good person, why is character, not considered an economic asset in a time when trust and reputation are widely heralded as crucial assets, as competitive advantages for companies?

Integrity

It is striking that the apparent growing desire for purpose and meaning does not yet correspond with companies’ mental models of their customers and employees. Companies turn people (data) into products, segment individuals into uniform clusters, create services for the ‘Quantified Self,’ and conduct elaborate ‘employee engagement’ studies on why their employees (don’t) like them. On the employee side, in particular, this myopic belief in data may distract businesses from what really matters. Instead of winning the ill-named ‘war for talent,’ Dov Seidman, the author of the book How, suggests companies should focus on trust and integrity, on employing the full and true selves of the people who make up their organizations. If they succeed, they will be rewarded with employees who don’t withhold anything; who put their full selves at work, with all their passions, beliefs, and vulnerabilities. Matching internal and external character, purpose and action, words and deeds, these whole selves will no longer tolerate a chasm between idealism and pragmatism, between principles and practical reasons. As hyper-connectivity and social networks tear down the boundaries between professional and private lives, only those who are complete are able to compete.

Integrity is the only sustainable position in the modern business world, and trust is both its enabler and result. Trust is an act of believing, which means not (really) knowing. Paradoxically, the entire enterprise seems to be convinced that more effective knowledge sharing might unleash a more social, a more human enterprise, when it is in fact the sharing of intimate beliefs – an exchange of trust – that facilitates human interaction and enables the concept of the company as an intricately woven, sympathetic community of purpose-driven individuals and their ideas and passions. We like to be in good company when we pursue our ambitions. What we need then are not knowledge workers but trust workers, and instead of knowledge management, trust management. An organization with high trust levels is made up of people who not only believe in the organization’s values but, more importantly, believe in each other; and only then it is believable – credible – to the outside world.

This is not to be underestimated. Credibility, the scarcest resource in the information age, is the only real differentiator in a marketplace saturated with efficiency and excellence. With credibility you can sell anything, except that you no longer have to. When your credibility is strong, when people believe (in) you, in spite of their (lack of) knowledge, then your character, your ethos becomes your most powerful – your only – product.

Medicine

The importance of ethos is also the main theme of Jonathan Harris’ wonderful essay Modern Medicine, in which he draws an analogy between software and medicine based on their dual capacities to heal and to hurt. Given the power that software designers are presently wielding over the masses, he argues that “software engineers” should be considered “social engineers“:

“Through the software they design and introduce to the world, these engineers transform the daily routines of hundreds of millions of people. Previously, this kind of mass transformation of human behavior was the sole domain of war, famine, disease, and religion, but now it happens more quietly, through the software we use every day, which affects how we spend our time, and what we do, think, and feel.”

Their technology is addictive:

“In its capacity to transform the behavior of people, software is a kind of drug — a new kind of drug. As there are many kinds of drugs (caffeine, echinacea, Tylenol, Viagra, heroin, crack), so are there many kinds of software, feeding different urges and creating different outcomes.”

When Harris proposes engineers be trained to grasp the full social implications of their work, inferring “the ethics of code,” he directs attention to the externalities of our online behaviors. What we consider to be “of value” is a question of social engineering, a question of software design. Our moral compass is (in) the code. The actions of future generations are determined by today’s networked interactions. The moral economy lies squarely in the hands of software engineers. As companies are transforming into software companies, Harris, imagines a new role for them – to serve as “medicine men for the species”:

“A medicine man company would observe a given community, society, or even a whole civilization, and try to sense what's ailing it. Then, it would create technological interventions to counteract those ailments. It would use software as a kind of medicine, traveling into the world and subtly altering the behavior of people. A medicine man company would become a new kind of healthcare provider, helping people heal.”

The medicine man’s biggest value is the ability to offer empathy, intimacy, and compassion, and to inspire behavior change for the better. And this indeed is the very challenge for software engineers, or social engineers, amidst a sea of data and outcome-oriented, financial metrics.

Anticipation

To capture and reward the value of ‘the modern medicine men,’ we need to identify metrics for those intangible assets that have the capacity to ‘heal’ us; metrics that measure the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual benefits of our products and services. In light of research showing that activities rather than possessions enrich our memories and give our lives significance, we need to appreciate experiences over material goods, access over ownership, essence over form, and the journey over the destination.

The travel industry is uniquely positioned to do so. A pioneering effort is American Express’ Nextpedition service, launched earlier this year, which relies on serendipity to create meaningful experiences for consumers. Instead of a fixed itinerary usually provided by conventional travel sites, Nextpedition offers a succession of surprises that highlight the open-ended nature of the trip. The service does not tell the user where he is going until the last minute, and information is given just in time. The set up reminds of the film The Game – nothing is what you think it is. An envelope appears, pushed under the door of the hotel room, or a message alerts the user from his smartphone. The experience is full of deviances from the norm – and hence meaningful.

In his analysis of Nextpediton in a recent Harvard Business Review blog post, Grant McCracken, the author of the book Culturematic, explains why the value proposition of serendipity is so strong:

“Standardizing production was the great objective of the second industrial revolution. It almost always made the product or experience better because in those days, randomness was enemy of consumer satisfaction. But as consumers, it turns out, we are totally ungrateful. No sooner do we get perfection, sometime in the mid-20th century, than we tire of it. Enter Joe Pine's mass customization and eventually Etsy. Now it feels like we are on the verge of another revolution. Call it the Culturematic revolution. Now we want not just customization, but noise in the system, things that emerge (apparently) in real time, and the world to resist expectation.”

He concludes that “This may require a new kind of manager. Managerial capitalism asks everyone to leave randomness at home and come to work as a hard-headed pragmatist, a heat-seeking problem solver. But managing, creating, and delivering randomness means living with variation. It means asking people to get in touch with their differences instead of asking them, as we usually do, to converge on a shared facsimile of selfhood.”

From serendipity it is only a small step to anticipation. When violations are constantly broken, anticipation grows stronger. In other words: The level of anticipation is inversely proportional to the predictability of outcomes.

This is a powerful design principle, and the travel industry is not the only one taking advantage of it. Other consumer-facing sectors, such as online retail, are beginning to design products around anticipation. The UK-based start-up Fantasy Shopper, for example, has introduced the idea of a virtual social wardrobe: Consumes who sift through online stores can select clothing items and other goods they find attractive, and add them to a virtual wardrobe they can share with their Facebook friends. In effect, users indicate what they intend to buy, start a conversation on the virtual purchases with their friends, and then decide whether they want to buy the items at all. The Fantasy Shopper service effectively moves the purchase decision to the stage of anticipation, and it allows consumers to socially validate their purchase decision before they actually make the purchase (in fact, even if they never will).

Hope

The social status derived from the virtual acquisition of a product turns into a powerful intangible asset. The Self becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Buying without buying is the epitome of the ‘anticipation economy’ where the mere declaration of intent replaces action, and what could happen becomes infinitely more important than whatever eventually happens.

There is a name for it: Hope.

[image credit: Judith Horstman]

A Hackathon to “Reinvent Business”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Passion" - The New Design Mind Issue

I'm very proud of the latest issue of the design mind magazine, the award-winning publication of global design and innovation firm frog that I help curate.

The new issue, devoted to the theme of "Passion," explores the subjects, materials, concepts, and ideas that inspire and motivate us with original articles, poster-sized infographics, and interviews with technology and cultural luminaries. These range from the quest to balance work and life interests, to understanding the aesthetics of ugliness, to exploring how fashion relates to invention, to coping with a devastating personal health crisis, to helping our cities evolve and improve, to discovering what communities have high rates of innovation-and more.

This issue was written, designed, and produced by frog's designers, strategists, and technologists, with special contributors including innovation expert and thought leader John Hagel and cognitive psychologist Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman.

The magazine features a rare behind-the-scenes look at what ideas motivate and inspire frog's creative directors, innovation experts, engineers, and designers, from a very personal angle-and how these passions relate to and inform frog's award-winning work for the world's leading companies, including Disney, GE, Microsoft, MTV, Intel, and numerous other Fortune 500 brands.

Check it out!

Reinvent Business - A Special Hackathon

From Occupy Wall Street to corporate breakup letters in The New York Times, the widening “trust gap” between business and society can’t be ignored. Almost half a decade of financial fallout has diminished companies’ social capital while dramatically redefining the challenges they face. As we grow more interconnected and interdependent, the lines between the corporate and the social blur. Still, despite countless social responsibility pacts and codes of conduct, businesses continually make decisions disconnected from society’s needs.

In this crisis of corporate meaning, the need for a real understanding of the common human values that connect business and society grows increasingly significant. Transparency, inclusivity, individual empowerment, and organizational responsiveness are crucial in restoring trust between civic society and business. Yet, the challenge remains: how do we translate these values into day-to-day corporate behavior? What are the tools necessary to transform business from within?

On June 8-9, Reinvent Business, an interdisciplinary hackathon, will harness the power of social technology to fully realize the human potential within business. We’re challenging software developers, designers, academics, gamers, film-makers, writers, leaders in business and other clever problem solvers to imagine, design, and build a truly social enterprise.

Join us.

Walking Like Senna

I walked a Formula One race track last fall in Abu Dhabi, in the blistering evening desert heat. The city of Abu Dhabi opens the track a couple of days a week for bikers and joggers. I, however, was walking, due to a lack of appropriate sportswear, gasping for air, and happy to make it through even just one round. It was a surreal experience, not only because I was the odd outlier amidst hundreds of bikers and joggers, but also because it turned the purpose of the race track on its head – as my own private 'slow movement' against the race of the machines, fundamentally opposing the design intent of the venue. It felt like a meditation that turned the split seconds which typically frame the Formula One drivers’ quasi-automated blink decisions into an extended once-in-a-lifetime moment.

It took me an hour to complete the lap, and I relished every single minute of it. 'Going against the grain,' walking a Formula One track, turned out to be a fitting mental model violation, an almost situationist rebellion against time and space, and therefore a meaningful experience, a trance-like crescendo of happiness.

Speed, like happiness, is relative. Motion, on the other hand, is happiness’ absolute requirement. Motion is what holds it all together. Nations, cultures, organizations, relationships – and bodies. As the wonderful book of the same title suggests, the heart – the quintessential mechanism of motion – is a Sublime Engine, the enabler and ultimate jury of all life: it can stop anytime, for no rhyme or reason, and when it does, there is no more moving on.

It remains a mystery at what point motion becomes speed; perhaps when it exceeds the perceptional comprehension of the human sensory apparatus, when it becomes too fast to be felt, to be made sense of.

A couple of months later, on board an 800 miles per hour sky-rocketing 747 aircraft over the Atlantic, I was watching the documentary, Senna, about the legendary Brazilian Formula One race driver Ayrton Senna. True to its subject, the movie never slows down, and instead of a voice-over narrating the driver’s moved life, it simply races from frame to frame while slowly uncovering the essence of the story: the heart and soul of a passionate genius, a ‘man on a wire,’ full of concentration and determination, and of a fervent passion that’s always on the verge to its dark side, obsession. The devoted Christian Senna was a fanatic who raced to stand still and “just couldn’t quit” until he, as he put it, became a “complete man,” in perfect tune with God; a soul-searcher who touched those close and far from him with his humble but assertive heart that was beating so much faster than most others.

The documentary shows the last moments of Senna’s life, viewed from his car’s onboard camera, the painful elegy of a life that is about to pass every second (generally as professional risk and literally in this very sequence), a slow-motion blues that ends with an abrupt and absurd accident when Senna’s car fails (the exact reasons are unresolved to date) and crashes like a projectile straight into a wall. His death was as fast as his life.

Senna was a one-of-a-kind rebel, and he epitomizes the allure of the contrarian way of doing things your way: walk when others run, stay silent when others talk, be absent when others pursue presence by all means, disappear when others enter. Maybe that’s the ultimate differentiator in our fast-moving, over-loaded, hyper-charged, and ultra-saturated markets, for brands, companies, organizations, and leaders alike: to determine that it’s game over before it has even begun. Reclusiveness as the ultimate exclusivity. And maybe that is the very difference between being smart and being wise: Smart organizations and leaders are highly adaptive and thrive on constant feedback. Smart is fast. But wise is slow. Wise organizations and leaders need time and take it. Time for pause, for reflection. Time for not doing anything. Time to be quiet. Time to find the signal amid all the noise. Time to be the signal.

From Linda Stone’s “continuous partial attention” to FOMO (the Fear-of-Missing-Out) to Jonathan Harris’ long-form storytelling that propagates a “deeper, more reciprocal means of communication than shouting into a disconnected social media void,” from Speed-Dating to Slow-Dating, the Slow Books Manifesto, the Slow Food Movement, Slow Design, Slow Travel, Slow Money, Slow Living, Slow Brands. Motion may enable happiness, speed may accelerate it, but it is the counter-movement that grants us significance – and that, at the end, is the difference between a meaningful life and a life lived in vain.

[image credit: Forbes]

Hindu Business Line: "Marketing without Marketing is the Best"

The Indian business daily Hindu Business Line interviewed me for its CMO Corner column:

My most memorable marketing initiative

The launch of the Aricent Group brand last year. We honoured the Aricent brand's legacy — which goes all the way back to Hughes Software Systems — and yet managed to reinvent and elevate it with new values and a fresh identity. It was a challenging initiative with many stakeholders and a short amount of time. I will always remember the passion of everyone involved, and the enthusiastic response from our employees when it launched. There's nothing more powerful than an aspirational brand story to shape a company culture of inspiration and excellence.

My most exciting digital marketing project

My most exciting digital marketing initiative has been the award-winning design mind platform I helped create for the design and innovation firm frog — an online portal featuring articles, blogs, and videos at the intersection of business, technology, and design. Augmented through social media distribution, it became a popular and very effective vehicle to softly market our thought leadership without hard-selling our services. We indeed live in the age of conversations, and only if you have something meaningful to say, will you have dialogue with your constituents. Marketing without marketing is the best marketing.

My first product launch

My first product launch was a 3D visualisation for Deutsche Bank I worked on during my time as concept developer for an Internet agency in Berlin (during the heyday of dotcoms). Everything interactive was ‘hot' back then — and now it's taken for granted. What has not changed, though, is the importance of storytelling. The more data you deal with, the stronger the need for storytellers who make sense of it all. Perhaps, that's the biggest value marketers can bring to the table.

A great idea that never took off

A few years ago, inspired by Twitter, I came up with the idea of launching a service that would ask users: “What are you going to do?” Basically, a micro-blogging tool that predicts the future by aggregating user's intentions. I lacked the time and focus to develop it, and just last week at the SXSW conference in the US, I saw the app Forecast, which does exactly what I had envisioned. I guess the key lesson from this is: Just do it! Don't overthink your ideas, don't get hung up on too much diligence, move fast, experiment, prototype, and see if your idea sticks.

A setback I have learnt from

I haven't had a major setback (except maybe for a failed music career when I was young) — knock on wood — but there are minor setbacks every day. They keep you humble … and motivated.

My marketing idol

In theory: Peter Drucker, the brilliant management thinker. In practice: Beth Comstock, the CMO of GE, who has proven that marketing can be an innovation force in large organisations; and on stage: the band Radiohead, because it's constantly exploring new marketing formats for music and keeps re-inventing itself.

Where I get my insights from

Travel to new places, serendipitous encounters at conferences, books, movies, and moments of quietness. I also find blogging very inspirational. Only by writing something down one really starts to think.

How much has B-school helped me in my career?

Well, I never went to business school, and my biggest takeaway is that I still don't know if I should have gone ...

How will a marketer have to prepare for 2020?

Marketers will need to be fully immersed in the latest technology. Ideally, they will be software developers with a passion for driving behaviour change. At the same time, technology and big data will be useless if they are not made sense of by a creative, imaginative mind that can synthesise, empathise, and galvanise. The marketer of 2020 will be a Chief Meaning Officer — someone who can inspire employees and customers alike by charging marketing with purpose.

Humanity in the Code

My South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) experience began on the “nerdbird” – the flight from San Francisco to Austin. At high altitude and in even higher amplitude, the techies sitting a row behind me were speed-outsmarting each other, jumping from database mining, the UX challenge of creating a human-friendly pixel resolution, the myth of interferences for avionics, to the “stupid-smart Nathans” in their lives (sorry, guys, it was hard not to eavesdrop). I first listened with intrigue (because these guys were really, really smart, and I might as well just transcribe their conversation into a comprehensive SXSW summary post), but after a while I began to resist the unsolicited expertise, and browsing through the conference program I couldn’t help but think of my two favorite session titles this year: “Co-Founder Speed Dating” and “The Evolution of the Douchebag in Modern Cinema.” Giving up on my way-too-thin headphones, I craved an enclave that would offer asylum from the forced intimacy of all the power-chatter, a simple switch-off that would disconnect me from verbal deluge and provides some kind of digital refuge from the very human analogue conversation. With all the new services that enable ‘controlled serendipity,’ it seems ironic that social filtering assumes we constantly want to meet people. I wanted to un-meet. Now. And there was no app for that.

Obviously, the signs of the times are different. Social discovery was a main theme of SXSWi this year. Start-ups from Uberlife, Sonar, to Crowded Room were vying for the pole position in the race to become the de-facto in-situ connectors. The winner, I would submit, will be the one service that manages to balance the need to “find the like-minded” (predictability) with the desire to “discover the unexpected” (serendipity). The path between the two is where true meaning occurs. Being a social utility is not enough – the best matchmakers understand that their job is to put on a great game, not to predict its outcome.

Another theme was the browser vs. OS war, extending the conversation from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that had preceded SXSWi. In light of the emergence of HTML 5 and Mozilla’s recently announced, much gushed about Open Web Devices (OWD) partnership with Spanish carrier Telefonica, the browser-OS web apps vs. native apps showdown drew a lot of attention. As Wireless Watch writes: “HTML5 is coming close to delivering the same quality of experience for web apps as native ones, and with its cross-platform nature can, theoretically at least, break the ties with the OS and allow non-platform owners such as operators or web service providers to create their own brand and distinctive offerings for any device.” My colleague Scott Jenson, creative director at frog, and a speaker at SXSWi, expects this trend to deliver on the promise of “just-in-time interaction,” allowing a far more seamless, personalized, and localized user experience than the super-fragmented native apps ecosystem can deliver today.

SXSWi was bigger, noisier, and messier than ever, and it was hard not get frustrated by the abundance of options and the scarcity of seats. But while there were some pleasant surprises (e.g. a session with “Catch Me If You Can” con artist Frank Abagnale), some panel topics are apparently evergreen. You could still find panels on crowdsourcing and branding in a social media world. The tone, however, was distinct this time: the digital literacy has increased exponentially, far beyond the tech in-crowd. The confidence and techno-swagger were staggering. And everyone, I mean, really everyone, was in town – hardcore digerati, outliers, cultural observers, and more and more business bigwigs. Location matters, and there is no place like SXSWi. Somewhere between hubris and pragmatism, the tech pilgrimage to Austin forms a unique geekipedia, a vast knowledge library, a mega-download of the future to come.

Speaking of which, the “Future of Work” was subject of a dedicated program track this year, and strikingly, eight years after the release of Thomas Malone’s seminal book, the main takeaway from the sessions was that the Future of Work may have already arrived – without us noticing it and indeed not evenly distributed. This became most apparent in a panel on “Decentralized Organizations - Do They Work?” with representatives from Zappos, Burning Man, Second Life-founder Philip Rosedale’s new company Coffee & Power, a marketplace for “small jobs”, and Malone himself. After several failed attempts to get a discussion going beyond just sharing anecdotes, a simple show of hands by the audience made clear that the session title was a rhetorical question. Of course decentralized organizations work. At least for a crowd like SXSWi, for which job title is oh-so-yesterday and even the online social status seems antiquated. The new currency is your latest venture.

Most of the people in the room appeared acutely aware of what Malone described as the historic opportunity in front of us: “For the first time we can combine the benefits of large organizations with the benefits of decentralized individual decision-making.” Indeed, if you combine economies of scale with the value of intimacy, you yield the “Economics of Emotion,” as Alan Zorfas coins them. In his recent article, he references a recent IBM survey poll of 1,700 CMOs who emphasized that building an enduring emotional connection with consumers is fast becoming a top business imperative.

Ironically, the very emotional bond, the very humanity we espouse as value in organizational designs, may be threatened by the technology we create: “True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence,” the ever witty philosopher and writer Alain de Botton poignantly tweeted during the conference (perhaps during a date gone awry).

Keynote speaker Baratunde Thurston (The Onion) heralded the power of “laughter against the machine,” the importance of “artful ridicule,” of “comedy in the code”, and presented examples from various countries – from China to Afghanistan, Iran to Egypt. Not just coding or decoding, aggregating or analyzing, but “reading the world,” he argued, was an ever more important task in this day and age of big data, and as both institutions and experts experience an erosion of their authority, he demanded comedians step in as the new sense makers, the new interpreters who laugh off the tragic with humor. Thurston cited an Old Roman proverb, and his points were not breaking new ground by any means. But his humble and genuine delivery captivated the audience and was touching. As history has told us, it is the fools who speak the truth and foresee the future. Or you can just use Forecast, a social tool that asks “What are you going to do?” and thus captures a valuable aggregation of the likely future based on intentions.

Aside from all that, another key insight from SXSWi this year was that, as with every human enterprise, the effects of horserace politics have begun to kick in. It is now the Super Bowl for tech marketers. From political theatre to tech theatre – the backstory has become the actual story: Egos, plots, gossip, and campaigns trump the actual program. This year’s most controversial “meta-story” was BBH Lab’s Homeless HotSpots campaign – a “social experiment” that had been launched before SXSWi but reached a broader and more critical audience here that was quick in dismissing it as a ludicrous exploitation of homeless people. It is interesting to read The Atlantic’s analysis of how the public’s reaction went through all of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' five stages of grief, but whatever you think of the appropriateness of the idea, the HotSpots campaign presented a welcome counterpoint to the dominant techno-optimism at the show – a gloomy and inadvertently comical question-mark amidst all the exclamation points. The same audience that had laughed about Baratunde Thurston’s irreverence was irritated by the absurd theater of the Homeless HotSpots, and the discomfort expressed in many blogs represented an underlying sentiment that may have gotten lost otherwise at SXSWi: social technology has invaded our lives, but it may not be the great socializer. Or as a colleague admitted over dinner: “Here I am with 17,000 like-minded souls and a dozen of social discovery tools, but when I wander through the halls, I couldn’t help but feel lonely at times.”

[image credit: Digital Journal]