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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

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.

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

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]

Embracing Openness

Rotman magazine, the print and online quarterly of the Rotman School of Management, has just released its new (Winter) issue, devoted to the theme “Open.” Openness has been a buzzword for a while, ever since Henry Chesbrough wrote his seminal book on Open Innovation, but, to apply Gartner’s Hype-Cycle terminology, now it seems as if Openness has finally reached a plateau of productivity after going through years of troughs of disillusion.

The Rotman issue is thus timely, and it is wise to (re-)frame the topic as “culture (and economy) of sharing,” as the foreword does:

“The fundamental rules that govern how relationships work between organizations and stakeholders are being rewritten: computation, storage and communication capacity – the basic means necessary to produce information, knowledge and culture – are now in the hands of every connected person worldwide (30 per cent of the world’s population of seven billion people.) The result: a culture of sharing powered by ubiquitous access to information that empowers stakeholders and demands radical transparency.

Unfortunately, many business leaders remain flummoxed in the face of stakeholders empowered by new tools that once seemed unimaginable: blogs, Facebook and Twitter, to name a few. Make no mistake, as your stakeholders become more adept at using these tools, they will demand that you become more open about your activities, and that you engage them in conversations that matter. With one billion new middle-class consumers set to enter the global economy in the next decade, the more you understand the new culture of sharing, the better off you and your organization will be.“

Amongst other contributions, the Openness issue features articles from management guru and Rotman dean Roger Martin and Wikinomics author Don Tapscott, as well as interviews with Charlene Li, founder of the Altimeter Group and author of Open Leadership, and Linus Torvalds, the godfather of Linux. (Full disclosure, it also includes an article I originally wrote for design mind, “Openness or How to Design for the Loss of Control”).

Only if you’re open, you can share and be shared with. And if you share, you shall receive the greatest benefit, the greatest gift of all – someone else sharing something with you: their knowledge, their networks, their passion, their ideas. It is worth noting that the TEDGlobal conference 2012 – committed to sharing “Ideas Worth Spreading” – in Edinburgh will be held under the theme Radical Openness: “The world is becoming increasingly interconnected and open. Radically open – manifesting itself in open borders, open culture, open-source, open data, open science, open world, open minds. With the loss of privacy that it implies, openness carries its own dangers. But it breeds transparency, authenticity, creativity, and collaboration.”

My company, frog, is embracing Openness, too. We share our thinking with more than 330,000 followers on Twitter; more than 60% of our employees engage on Yammer in conversations that range from water-cooler topics to crowdsourced insights research firms would kill for; and design mind, the outlet you’re reading, is an open forum for all of our employees to publish their thoughts. We also recently launched SpeedMe, our own ‘speed-dating’ activity, to faciliate the bonding between new hires and ‘old frogs.’ In the words of our NY-based Associate Creative Director Dino Sanchez: “frog has grown quite a bit over the past year and with all our busy schedules it’s been difficult to keep up with new hires. Creativity is something that hinges on critique and in some cases brutal honesty, so knowing your colleagues and being comfortable with them is essential to a productive process.” Openness needs to be designed for.

At a the recent i7 Innovation Summit near Paris, frog ran a session at the beginning of the conference where we asked the conference attendees to break out into pairs and interview each other based on a questionnaire that we had prepared. Questions spanned the professional (e.g. “When was the last time you fired someone?” or “What was your biggest failure with the greatest learning?”) and the more personal (“What is your favorite movie?” – “What was your biggest lie”? etc.). The pairs had to fill in the answers in poster-size sheets which were subsequently mounted to a huge wall in the lobby, as a sort of “physical Facebook.”

David Rowan, editor of Wired UK, ran a similar exercise at WPP Stream in Athens, and in both instances the exercises were true ice-breakers for the attendees, forcing them to experience the implications of Openness first-hand: How open do I want to be? At what point does Openness become uncomfortable? What do I consider private in public? How much do I have to give in order to receive? Rowan argued that this kind of interactive, public data-mining would benefit any gathering as social interactions are typically more valuable when they’re facilitated by even a basic level of familiarity and trust among strangers. (On a related note, I’ve begun lately to ask job candidates to fill out the Proust questionnaire. Sure, professional qualifications matter the most, but at the end of the day you want to know who the person is you hire because chances are you’ll spend more time with them than with your own family.)

Yet pretending that Openness is just like any other business initiative that you can plan and execute would be disingenuous. It is a massive cultural change and requires a whole new mindset. The real challenges await the advocates of Openness after the first glitch, when things, very openly, go awry, and the conservative minds quickly come out of the closet to stigmatize one-time errors as systematic flaws. With every failure of Openness, the power of those who prefer Control rises exponentially. There is no doubt about it – openness, true, radical openness, hurts. It makes you uncomfortable, vulnerable, weak, and deprives you of the subtleties that came with control – but the benefits are huge. Pick the moments of Openness carefully: they will be your worst enemies and your best friends.

Futurist CMO Conference: Unpredictability is the New Consistency

 

A lot has been written lately about the changing profile of the CMO, a role which faces an increasingly complex set of stakeholders and expectations (“10 Great Expectations: What CEOs Want From Their CMOs”) as it is engulfed by empowered consumers, big data, digital media pervasion, and accelerated technology innovation cycles. While CMO tenures have slightly increased to an average of less than four years, the role remains a hot seat. Technology savvy, analytics prowess, and strict ROI measurement are almost unanimously heralded as the key attributes of a successful marketing leader. The CMO is expected to be a business strategist, innovator, and change agent, while at the same time also acting as the brand evangelist, inspirational communicator-in-chief, and cross-functional collaborator. Tough one. How can today’s CMO succeed in times of hyper-connectivity when long-held beliefs are shattered, audiences are transient, and “software is eating the world” (Marc Andreessen)?

The Futurist CMO conference, hosted by former Wipro CMO Jessie Paul and her indefatigable team in the high-tech cluster of Gurgaon, near Delhi, last week, discussed this very question. Paul Writer, the name of Jessie’s venture, is devoted to fostering the Indian marketing community, and provides online and offline forums for a lively exchange on emerging marketing trends. Their newsletter is a fantastic resource for marketing professionals worldwide, and the equally sophisticated conference gathered some of India’s brightest marketing minds (from brands such as Coffee Day, Citibank, Essar, Reliance, Godfrey Phillips, NIIT, Aircel, Makemytrip.com, IBM, and Capital Foods) for an exhilarating two days of thought-provoking presentations and panels.

In my presentation in Gurgaon, I took a slightly contrarian view, outlining the idea of Smart Brands to debunk the four big marketing myths of strategy, control, consistency and data. I proposed a super-flexible portfolio of readily adaptable initiatives instead of a single-strategy approach, argued for understanding marketing as a state of permanent crisis only to be tackled with a deliberate design for the loss of control; made the case for unpredictability as the new consistency, and contrasted Big Data with Big Intuition. My talk spurred an animated debate. One attendee objected: “If we follow your advice, we will never have a seat at the table.” But which table do you want to have a seat at, and at whose mercy? Our expertise runs broad not deep, and by the nature of our role we are comfortable with ambiguity and paradox, can make sense of disparate information, and turn data into meanignful stories. We are the "air traffic controllers" of the connected age, as Pinstorm’s Mahesh Murthy aptly put it. It’s time for us marketers to determine our own fortune and capitalize on our unique strengths: insight, intuition, and imagination.

Here's my deck on Slideshare: 

For a comprehensive write-up of the conference, check out this blog post by my colleague Mitali Darbari Prakash.

Photos from the conference (by Naina)

Press: 'More than 60 Percent of Google Searches Are From Rural Areas'

Image credits: AP (above), Naina (CMO conference)

Social Media and Good Design (Telecom TV)

Smart Brands in the Connected Age

Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn yield unprecedented actual or virtual valuations. Social media empower and propel social revolutions such as the ones we are witnessing in Arab countries (yes, Malcolm Gladwell, you were dead wrong). Enabled by broadband technologies and mobile devices, entire industries are connecting with customers – and each other – in entirely new ways. Clearly, the Connected Age has arrived. A world population connected through ubiquitous, real-time, and social computing, and through more than 50, 75, or even 100 billion devices. A world where every thing is connected with everything.

Connectedness has become a cultural and business meme. Clay Shirky’s seminal Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age sparked it, and several authors elaborate on the concept. Peter Merholz has repeatedly written about it, and he cites other voices such as Dave Gray’s musings on the “Connected Company” and Social Business Design, or Tiffany Shlain’s new film, Connected, a documentary that explores “the visible and invisible connections linking major issues of our time” and relates them to personal interconnectedness.

The internet of things with its unprecedented level of connectivity does not only catalyze the rise of “social” but also the rise of “smart.” And smart means complex. Increasingly, products and services are multi-functional, multi-layered, and connected to a broader ecosystem of services, serving as a platform for added-value applications. Companies, across industries, are beginning to develop smart solutions – from smart phones, smart energy, smart healthcare, smart housing, to smart mobility, and more. Smart ecosystems have emerged as the lynchpin of innovation – as the holy grail for user experiences that brands can truly own.

But what about the brands themselves? What do the new paradigms of “connectedness” and “smart” mean not only for the products and services companies bring to market but for the way they behave and interact as brands with their constituents, employees and customers alike? What if “connectedness” was a new modus operandi for brands and required them to be “smart brands”?

By textbook definition, smart systems are self-organized systems with built-in feedback mechanisms and the ability to constantly reorganize themselves in order to adapt to their ever-changing environment. They are capable of describing and analyzing a situation, and taking decisions based on the available data in a predictive or adaptive manner, thereby performing smart actions.

How can brands do that?

Here are some initial thoughts:

Networks: In the networked economy, marketing’s value lies in identifying and activating valuable connections, in networks inside and outside of the organization. These networks include other brands, which constitutes a whole new type of B2B marketing: brand-to-brand. Marketers need to ask themselves the question: Which brands’ company do we want to keep? Which halo do we want? Which brands should we market to (both for partnerships and talent)? In the business-to-business space, and in particular in professional services, this kind of lateral marketing is almost as if not more important than the typical buyer-targeted marketing. And the concept of brand-to-brand goes even further: brands must not only treat other brands like partners, they must also market to consumers as if they were brands. Consumers have their personal brands to project and cultivate, and the image rub-off, the brand value transfer they earn by interacting with a brand is as important a motivator as any material or utilitarian gain. Smart brands map out the “network of brands” of which they want to be part, and it doesn’t necessarily include only competitors. Smart, connected brands reach out beyond their own industry, constantly, to forge unlikely alliances at the fringes of their own networks, because today’s edges are tomorrow’s core. Or as Allison Fine, author of Social Change in the Connected World, puts it aptly: “It is counterintuitive but true; the more decision making we push away from the center, the more powerful our social networks become. That’s the power-to-the-edges concept.”

Social intelligence: Connected brands are social brands, and if they are smart, social for them means to be “socially intelligent.” The term “intelligent” comes from the Latin “intelligere,” which literally translates to “to connect” or “to interlink.” Social intelligence, in the most wide-ranging definition, is the capacity to “get along with people in general, social technique or ease in society, knowledge of social matters, susceptibility to stimuli from other members of a group, as well as insight into the temporary moods or underlying personality traits of strangers.” Applied to brands, social intelligence can be interpreted as the art of detecting the most subtle cue in understanding an individual’s behavior, and the ability to not only receive constant feedback but to convert it into changed behavior. The socially intelligent brand can link the social desires and motivators it identifies in the “Other” and respond to them with its own palette of social interaction modes and stimuli. Isn’t marketing all about the “Other,” understanding “Otherness” in order to be different(iated)? The socially intelligent brand is empathetic, trained in detecting behavioral cues, and has what I call the “network affect” (yes, with an “a”). It can identify and easily join conversations, and therefore recognize, activate, and move networks through its behavior.

Platform: I know it’s become a cliché, the notion of “being a platform,” but most clichés are truths that recur. And it is definitely true that smart brands need to be not only trusted but also built upon, in other words, be a platform. If you are a platform, you have the “power of pull,” and the evolutionary forces work in your favor. This means opening up for outside influence, and it means sudden directional shifts if necessary. This means that your service is a utility others can leverage to create their own assets. The line here is fine, as you can imagine. Being a mere utility is the opposite of being a brand. Smart brands provide just enough value to the ecosystem to defend their position in it, but they also make sure to retain the very source code of their value.

Super-flexibility: Smart brands operate like software organizations in the way they structure themselves and operate, shifting from a linear, static, and robust model of planning and executing on strategy, to a more fluid, non-linear, agile, and distributed approach that allows knowledge, the capital of the 21st century, to quickly flow through their networks. Stuart Evans, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and Homa Bahrami, a professor at Berkeley Haas School of Business, have coined the term “super-flexibility” to pinpoint this new set of capabilities and define it as “the capacity to transform by adapting to new realities, underpinned by the ability to withstand turbulence by creating stable anchors.” They propose that instead of thinking about strategy as a single best approach, “developing super-flexible strategies involves switching between a portfolio of initiatives.” Smart brands ‘maneuver’ their strategic trajectory, like changing gears in a car.” Further: A super-flexible brand is “multi-polar, with several centers of gravity. Today it is white, tomorrow it is black. It is not the form that matters, it is the substance. It is much like a living organism with multiple brains, but these move in the same direction, like a flock of birds or a school of fish. Just like an individual, a super-flexible brand has “three core building blocks: the ‘anatomy’ (the accountability and reporting structure), the ‘personality’ or its culture and identity, and most important of all, its ‘circulation’ or how people interact and how information moves throughout the organization. The biggest challenge in a dynamic world is to monitor and synchronize the three building blocks, and make appropriate adjustments as priorities evolve.”

Presence: Sherry Turkle coined the term “Distributed Presence” in her 1995 book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, describing a multi-channel, always-on marketing strategy to reach target audiences. Subsequently, marketing shifted from broadcasting to narrowcasting, from mass communications to social distribution, from prime time to real time, from paid media to earned (or increasingly) owned media, and from awareness to engagement. With the burgeoning age of hyper-connectivity, it may evolve further: Presence is now the non-plus-ultra of all marketing efforts. Brands that are highly connected are able to be at the right time at the right place as they are omnipresent not only because they deploy multiple channels but also because they are able to cover all their relevant networks. They are like a rubber band stretching in multiple directions while not breaking. This concept of presence allows brands to master what my colleague Adam Richardson calls “preemptive knowledge management” – the awareness of knowledge inside or outside of the organization before it becomes externalized. This gives them a crucial competitive advantage: Smart brands are “in the know” about the lives of their customers, but in a different way than before. It used to be that knowledge was power. In the connected age, the real power comes from fast knowledge, faster than real-time. Presence, in this case, is the absence of visibility, it is all intuition.

Unpredictability: Smart brands are also good at dealing with events that are unpredictable. As Peter Merholz writes: “Businesses must grapple with the messiness of humanity, because when people are freer to interact, unpredictability occurs. And the decentralized networks that form the substrate of the Connected Age lead to emergent properties that, by their very nature, are also unpredictable.” Unpredictability is the new brand consistency. Good brands stay unpreditable and help their organizations embrace the unknown. Management performance shall not be measured by how much uncertainty it can eliminate, but how much uncertainty it can tolerate.

In summary: Is your brand adaptable, connectable, and sociable? Can it be easily upgraded? Does it, like a smart system, bring together interdisciplinary approaches and solutions in an “integrated design”? And does it have the courage to ignore the formulas offered by analytics? It seems counter-intuitive but the Connected Age is not the Age of Data. Smart brands remain ephemeral for they know that brands, despite the deluge of data at their disposal, are more substance than form, more chaos than structure, and more intuition than knowledge. They are viral because they are driven by passionate people, and their passion spreads through the connections they activate. They make a lasting impression because they have the ability to connect people with people, people with brands, brands with brands, stories with people, stories with brands, and stories with stories, all the while constantly evolving their repertoire of interactions based on their intuition and the real-time feedback they receive from the members of networks they own, activate, or join. Hyper-connected, hyper-social, and omnipresent, they can anticipate desires, sense mood shifts, pre-empt knowledge, and quickly direct attention to significant events and conversations – because whenever something happens or is being talked about, they are already there.

A final note: You may wonder why I don’t give any examples of smart brands. Rightly so. I don’t know of any. If you do, please comment below. I am more interested in the concept at this point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are the slides from my presentation:

What B2B Marketers Can Learn from Design-Driven Innovation