Crossroads Dispatches

$650,000 grant drops in your lap, and you'd...

I received this totally spam email. Yet it contains a good question.

They want me to put to "good use" a sum of $650,000.

Great, let's play along with that. Could I put it to good use? What would I do? (The original headline/subject line was "About the Donation.")

What would you do?

And, being my birthday (not today--that day), I thought I'd check out the random daily Abraham quote for a year-long emphasis to embody:

"What anyone else has or does not have has nothing to do with you. The only thing that affects your experience is the way you utilize the Non-Physical Energy with your thought. Your abundance or lack of it in your experience has nothing to do with what anybody else is doing or having. It has only to do with your perspective. It has only to do with your offering of thought. If you want your fortunes to shift, you have to begin telling a different story."-- Abraham excerpted from the book "Money and the Law of Attraction: Learning to Attract Health, Wealth & Happiness"

The "About the Donation" offering of $650,000 email read (deleted the phone number in the signature):

Hi,

Sorry I haven't gotten back with you, daily activities has kept me busy with work as a private  air charter service consultant.  I contacted you on the internet while looking to support a non profit charity, rescue group or a  social worker and I am proud with the good work you do and happy to know that my sponsorship money goes directly to a good use.

 I am making these donations because the economic downturn has created seemingly insurmountable challenges for nonprofits - organizations that rely on the generosity of others for their financial viability.  I know that is is a critical time for nonprofit organizations.

I am making a cash donation of Six hundred and fifty thousand dollars which I inherited from my late grandfather who was an industrialist and international businessman. My late grandfather's heart was as big as all outdoors. It was from him that I learned the greatest joy in life comes from giving, not from receiving.  I trust that you are reliable, trustworthy , compassionate in order to handle these donations for a good cause.

Let me know how you can make use of the funds.

Regards,

John Hamilton

Now my response to the correspondence, which I wrote off the top of my head without thinking and analyzing and agonizing about it too much--heck this window of opportunity may not be around forever, so I responded promptly (in the new myth blog, not to the spammed email):

Dear Mr. Hamilton,

Thank you so much for your offer. I am sorry to hear about your grandfather's passing, and my thoughts and prayers are with you and your family at this time.

I obviously am not familiar with your intentions nor your late grandfathers. But I will tell you want I have in mind.

I will locate a fiscal agent in order to filter the donation through, and it can be a tax deductible contribution for you. This is one idea for the best use of funds. As you already indicated that your grandfather loved to give, this bodes well for the idea I'm about to present to you.

We can place the $650,000 into a microloan program for culture-makers that are focused on the imprint of giving.

We can give copies of Geshe Michael Roach's book, The Diamond Cutter, to those that do not have the resources to purchase it themselves. I checked, and online, it is available at Google eBooks (may be useful as we can have a 'group' reading and see what others are highlighting) for $11.99.

In addition, there will be a "lending library" of books such as by Florence Scovel Shinn, Joseph Campbell, Lewis Hyde, Rilke, James Carse, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, The Alchemist, etc. available.

There will be pop-up unconferences free and open to all (funded by sponsorships) available in different U.S. cities as well.

However, the bulk of the funds are used for microloans to artists pushing the edges of innovation in areas that are difficult to secure private or public funding precisely because they do not fit a known, established medium, genre or category. Emphasis will be given to arts and creative projects that push the edges iin terms of possibilities, i.e. telling new stories. (Using the word 'story' generically--in other words, showcasing brand-new options rather than portraying or fighting the status quo.)

Loans will range from $1000 to $75,000, in general although there could be situations where more is given, especially in a peer-to-peer arrangement. For instance, for larger loans, we may tap into a network of potential private individual loaners (they may use something simple like Loanback).

To emphasize, these are no-interest microloans and are payable back to the fund in order to keep it sustainable and circulating to new artists and organizations. This is not private equity, and no one takes a stake or stock in the ventures that are given loans. Neither are these donations. Part of the intent of making these "loans" rather than donations is that the artist/collective/company is committed to making a longer-term viable venture, rather than a one-off project (ala Kickstarter), and are in need of a modest amount of startup capital.

Of course, this model is really rather flexible and not set in stone as we are in the conception phases, and would welcome your feedback as we move forward with your grant of $650,000.

Thank you so much for your generosity,

Evelyn Rodriguez

p.s. This is not copyrighted. No rights reserved--please take this idea, and spread it like wildflowers. You are welcome to implement this idea. The more the merrier. Never can have too many microloan programs for cultural innovation, and renaissances and such.

ART CREDITS: Photo "Humble Gift" by marielliott; emerging fern unfurling (a.k.a. koru symbol) by ericinsf

seven years strong and still ticking... "If you're strong enough, there are no precedents." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

"If you're strong enough, there are no precedents." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Before I started this blog on February 6, 2004, I had thought about creating a blog for two solid years, ever since the O'Reilly P2P Conference. Personally, I knew a lot of technology bloggers--people far busier than I was that told me their secret is that they wanted to write what they wrote, share, and exchange it with others.

"When do you find time?" was my question. "You just do," they said, even folks that already did plenty of writing on deadline as journalists. I saw through my resistance and that "time" was my excuse to balk. In a nutshell, they were inspired, not motivated to blog.

I started a "technology and culture"-themed blog sometime in the early 2003. It didn't last very long. A combination of fear that people actually were reading it, and that I was spending my spring evenings after work in Milan typing behind a computer screen rather than enjoying the tangible interactive life on the cobbled streets with gianduia gelato strolling the square around the Duomo. (Or I might have been in Rome--either way I was consulting in Italy when I quit blogging the first time.)

I wanted to talk about Taking The Red Pill (a February 24, 2004 post), and other philosophical, existential, spiritual questions. My fear was that I'd be ostracized from the tribe.

Yes, this eventually happens(ed):"Spirituality?" my friend looks peaked. "I like what you write. But spiritual? That makes me think of...of Marin." (We're in Silicon Valley.)

Since a commenter asked a question on moais, I decided to go back to the original National Geographic story on longetivity where I first heard about the moai concept. The print article's not online, the video version of "The Secrets of Long Life" is (then, click on "Reason to Wake Up"). Okinawa, an island in Japan, is "home of the longest lived people on earth. The video zooms in on numerous people into their 100s leading healthy and active lifestyles--stretching, biking and offshore diving and fishing.

Moai, the National Geographic video continues: "the rough translation is that it's a group of friends who go through life together and help each other. And the energy and vitality they would get from that I think factored into the longevity equation as well."

The moai concept held a magical allure for a few years. Yet I've never witnessed it "in the field." And something seemed off.

An insight last evening helped coalesce why not. It was one of those evenings where everything swirled together into a collage (I was multitasking online, but then again I tend to bounce and surf and skim online so it's simpler multi-tasking than in real-life) that felt like puzzle pieces all falling into place.

One minute I'm watching, then rewinding the National Geographic video on Okinawan life and moai's, then next I'm downloading from a blog a free chapter of an e-book that just happens to be on The Alchemy of Relationship. I'm also bouncing back and forth reading a longer PDF (source forthcoming), and everything built upon each other in a smooth way.

First, in The Alchemy of Relationship (I've excerpted tiny part) Almine outlined the stages of relationship (and for my purposes here I'm thinking larger than groups of two or three) from dependence (describes my childhood and my family of origin) to co-dependence (quite a lot of cliques like this) to independence (common in USA--i.e. do you know your neighbor's name?) to interdependence: "These stages lead from uniformity to unity within diversity." 

The aha! was seeing that my the tech blogger community was a tribe/clique/echo chamber in stage 2, and many groups I've been part of in last couple of years are Stage 2 too (Portlandia "Dream of the 90s" kind of sums it up hilariously: "You're a little San Francisco right now."--thoroughly tribal).

Moai's as genuinely supportive as they seem are also a form of co-dependence. There's only so much you can veer from the "box" before you'd be outcast.

I saw I was veering backward to co-dependence (not necessarily in the Melody Beattie sense of that word), when I wanted to share and create with other people, rather than moving foward to interdependence from my stalwart independence. In the end, tribes have strict boundaries that tend to exclude, whereas interdependence is inclusive, whole, diverse, celebratory, and--the icing on the cake--exploratory: "Diversity produces more chances of exploring the unknown."  

"In the stage of unity within diversity [interdependence] the chances are maximized for individual growth to contribute to the growth of the group within a stable environment." - Almine

That was what I was trying for--interdependence--something rarely seen--being allowed individuality within a whole WHILE having the "stability" and "support" of a tribe. This interdependence I found best described in Scott Peck's The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace, where a group moves from psuedocommunity to community. The crucial shift (if it happens, some don't make the transition) in the stories Peck shared of actual groups involved a willingness to accept other people as they are without fixing, converting, or "offering advice" (usually forms of fixing and converting). In all honesty, I've seen this with the miracle partnerships, and also in some longer-term (versus one-evening) writing workshops--but that's about it.

Anyhow, I was bouncing between a few different materials, and copied the below into a newsletter I'm working on.

"And if you're operating as yourself, you can always take advantage of the program. And you know how to find the right allies. You follow your [inner] Strategy and Authority. That’s how you get the right allies in your life." - source forthcoming in a future post

Simultaneously, I hear, "All we had was each other, and we made it," streaming from my Mom's TV in the other room. Billy Crystal's voice in some movie in background as I cut and pasted the above about "right allies." That instant, I wondered then about the "center for possibility" (a nickname as the name hasn't formulated itself yet).

The "center at the edge" or whatever has been the back-burner the past month as I wasn't sure it was actually a project that the Universe was insisting I do. (I am not interested in pushing against life and the world. I work from inspiration, not external motivation.)

I shared recently that I use writing for exchange, and feedback on the fertile verge, and to keep pushing edge of ourselves. By "exchange," I don't interpret this in terms of letters, or email or Tweets. It's much deeper, more encompassing.

So, next, I decide to use the I Ching (my result) to confirm whether the "center" project should be pursued or dropped. At this point I was finally unattached to the outcome, just simply wanting what's best for all. I drew Hexagram 58, with no changing lines.

The online I Ching I use (above) interprets 58's symbol as Joy.

Joy's nothing to sneeze at.

"When it comes back to teach you
or you come back to learn
how half alive you've been,
how your ignorance and arrogance
have kept you deprived --
when it comes back to you
or you yourself return,
joy is simple, unassuming.
Red tulips on their green stems.
Early spring vegetables, bright in the pan.
The primary colours of a child's painting,
the first lessons, all over again."  - Thomas Centolella

However, my verymost favorite online interpretations always come from LiSe Heyboer. Here, Hexagram 58 is a symbol for Exchange, and Expansion.

Ah! Now we're are getting somewhere...

The actual Chinese letter (from what Lise shares) appears to represent "interdependent lakes", such as "Rice paddies or Wadi's, the perfect place for meeting each other and exchanging." I think that's also an apt symbol for a community--each of us are our own lake and reservoir of well-being and sovereign unto others, yet completely interlocking as well with every body of water as one body.

Here's a peek at an average "six impossible things before breakfast" gathering at the "center at the edge of possibility and ?":

"A cat is dangling by the screen door daydreaming of darting outdoors. Wood floors are soothed by warm rugs and vibrant colorful plush pillows piled by people. A circle of folks that one would rarely see gathered together is gathered around lounging on the floor, or sitting languidly on a deep couch.

There is laughter and unbounded hunches colliding and mingling. Someone says that they once read that art is ideas brought into form. The circle is itself enclosed in a complete circle of glass and screened doors on a ridge overlooking the gentle bosom of undulating hills.

It hardly matters that it's the crack of dawn, and Joey the rooster heralds another day as slats of light softly fleck the night sky and tinge the mountain silhouette. Heralding the fresh golden age, day by day."

Thanks to everyone who's been along for any step of this seven year journey. This blog, remarkedly, has outlasted any other group endeavor I've undertaken--be it a job, business start-up, dwelling arrangement, or marriage!

This is just me expressing like a seven year old my birthday wish. And blowing the candles with you.

HOW TO FUND Interdependence Projects like ye olde center at the edge of possibility: The old adage: "The answer to how is yes." I don't know how this will unfold yet. Walking into the unknown one step at a time...

Here are two models that might click, and that might be useful to your or other community projects as well.

A few years ago, I was hanging out with a friend in Pacifica, and because I'm always the one with plenty of time (I think it's just that I stress less), he sent me to Starbucks to get some coffee while he wrapped up some business e-mails from his home office. While there, I noticed an article facing up on a table that caught the corner of my eye on my way out of door. This is only significant in that I don't read newspapers unless I spot them in passing, and I didn't read the San Francisco Chronicle (I lived actually 50-60 miles south of SF.)

I've kept the original newspaper through many moves, and here it is online: "A Means to a Home." It outlines a cooperative financing model for buying homes that don't involve a traditional bank: "A key distinction with Ameen's form of finance is that, unlike a traditional mortgage company, the cooperative shares risk with the homeowner. If a home's value increases, they both profit. But if the home loses value, they both take a loss."

I also like Elizabeth Gilbert's organic banking concept: "Take my money out of the bank and fold it, instead, into my community."

"In the past few years, a couple of locals have surfaced with bright ideas to help revive our economy—for instance, by opening a bakery, like my friend Patricia. Or a coffee shop, a Pilates studio, or a pair of funky gift shops, like my friends Maria, Sarah, Kate, and Meg. These entrepreneurial women were talented and passionate. The only thing they didn't have was capital..." - "The Power of Organic Banking", Oprah Magazine

So Gilbert stepped up, and offered them all loans herself. 

p.s. I have an entire category in "footnotes" blog where I collect excerpts about true community and interdependence. You can subscribe via RSS to the feed, "Community."

BONUS: This was in my inbox today via Brain Pickings. Hmmm,....Center for Possibility... Museum of Possiblity... and love this: "...inviting visitors to share their dreams and visions for the future of the space."

"We love public space, that priceless petri dish of human interaction. It’s the lifeblood of any city, and the reason we left LA for New York. Unfortunately, much of it remains un- or underutilized, with cities failing to engage people in interacting with and in public space.

To prevent this disconnect when inaugurating its Quartier des Spectacles, the city of Montréal came up with an exceptionally inspired solution: The Museum of Possibilities — a wonderful daylong pop-up installation inviting visitors to share their dreams and visions for the future of the space by jotting down their ideas on pieces of paper and attaching them to colorful balloons."

BONUS 2: Peer exchange rocks. Check out the diagram in Beth Kantor's announcement of a peer exchange Salon for nonprofits learning social media. (Great way to exchange!) The diagram shows--for those not clicking through--Retention Rate of Lecture (5%), Reading (10%), Audio-Visual (20%), Demonstration (30%), Discussion Group (50%), Practice by Doing (75%), Teach Others (90%)

ART CREDITS: Outstanding in the Field (pop-up outdoor restaurant gatherings held at farms by artist Jim Denevan) photo via Seattle Met;  stiill captured from video by National Geographic's David McLain of an Okinawan moai;  Amish girls Flickr photo by Las-Initially; Jim Denevan's artwork--when it's not a group outing; Hexagram 58 rice paddy via my favorite I Ching site; 1934 photo of three kids and a cake by Conde Nast via Foxtongue on Flickr

Beermats, Web 2.0 and Thinking Agile

Multimillion dollar Super Bowl ad campaign for a beer commercial? Or how 'bout trying the concept on a beermat (thanks, Hugh for The Beermat Story)?

The beermat concept isn't just about marketing and advertising. It's widely applicable. Lately, I'm into thinking about (not idly) beermat biz models and organizational structures, for instance.

John Battelle, in his conversation with Mark Benioff, copped to The Industry Standard spending some $6 million on enterprise software back in the day. But he went on to note it was far from a lightweight business model. Now he's involved with BoingBoing, which has twice the readership The Standard had — and four people. "Now that's a lightweight business model."

[P.S.] On reflection, it's probably misleading to characterize BoingBoing as having only a four person "staff." As the direct result of how much people love and trust the site, some of the work is distributed to the hundreds (or more?) who submit links they deem Boing-worthy. - via Bag and Baggage

John's confession makes it easier to admit that with $1.5 million in seed capital the start-up I was CTO of (though not a founder) in 2000 "just didn't have enough money" to roll-out the full-out infrastructure and services we wanted to provide. So much was put off until our definitive next round of funding - never happened but that's a long story. Yeah, we'll do that when we get the next round. The most creative thinking I did that whole year was when things started looking shaky. It's obvious many of us have learned - a lot - from the dot-com years. Sometimes, as I've said before, having too many resources makes you stupid - creativity can go out the door when throwing money and bodies at problems seems like a solution.

Meetings with each and every software infrastructure and middleware vendor ended up discussing licensing in the six figures. We were selling our hosted software built on their infrastructure on a monthy basis so paying a big upfront licensing fee was highly undesirable - but sales reps weren't into yielding much then or thinking out-of-the-box in terms of revenue models. Just about the time we were shutting our doors JBoss emerged into its own; and this open source application server would have been a good enough replacement for the $40K plus (plus when you throw in development seats, maintenance, training...) each production license of BEA Weblogic app server costed. Data centers with managed operations were all the rage - and pricey. The outsourced data center darling Exodus last time I drove by still sat empty. It was nigh unto impossible to find potential employees who didn't reneg because they got a few thousands dollars more on another job offer. Java software programmers wanted more than 2x what the CEO was making.

It was insane.

Even in those insane days, the COO (a friend) and I talked a lot about productivity per employee. We wanted to be careful how we scaled the company and make sure we would leverage the people we had. And now I think more about leveraging everyone's passion, commitment, resources with a stake in the mission of the business whether or not they are employees.

Technology is a lever. It doesn't add; it multiplies. If the present range of productivity is 0 to 100, introducing a multiple of 10 increases the range from 0 to 1000.

One upshot of which is that the companies of the future may be surprisingly small. I sometimes daydream about how big you could grow a company (in revenues) without ever having more than ten people. What would happen if you outsourced everything except product development? If you tried this experiment, I think you'd be surprised at how far you could get. As Fred Brooks pointed out, small groups are intrinsically more productive, because the internal friction in a group grows as the square of its size.

Till quite recently, running a major company meant managing an army of workers. Our standards about how many employees a company should have are still influenced by old patterns. - What the Bubble Got Right, essay by Paul Graham, founder of Viaweb (now Yahoo! Stores)

Big for bigness' sake is still in vogue. Jory Des Jardins brilliantly juxtaposes the 30-day Supersized meal odyssey depicted in Super Size Me with a feast of Tom Peter's Re-Imagine.

I once wrote a travel piece on the Dutch Antilles and toured a number of hotels. Touring the restaurants and more "contemporary" facilities, hotel staff boasted at how large the bathrooms were to accommodate American guests. The rooms were big, but ugly, like the lounge of my grandparents' favorite early-bird-special spot in central Florida. Who really cares if one can hear an echo while on the john?....

I wonder why we even have to bother to get big at all. It seems like such a circuitous path to finding the real deal. But then, it's in our national/generational/egotistical DNA to get bigger, somehow. - Ask Your Local Corporate Behemoth: Is Mo Betta Mo Betta?, Pause, Jory Des Jardins

But there is a parallel universe:

At first glance, Socialtext doesn't look like a company running on a shoestring budget. Founded less than two years ago, it now has more than 50 customers around the world, including Walt Disney (DIS ) and Eastman Kodak (EK ), which use its Web software to help people collaborate online. Yet a peek behind the slick Web site reveals a truly virtual company: no offices, only 10 full-time people -- all working at home, and a chief executive who answers the phone himself. - Championing a Wiki World, Business Week, on CEO Ross Mayfield and Socialtext

(And this company of the future hires and markets by blog. This pioneering nimble structure of Socialtext garnered BusinessWeek's attention, but it won't be a newsworthy angle much longer.)

About three years, a group of "lightweight" software development methodology and practices gurus whom espoused their alternatives to the "heavyweight" - in other words, bloated - software processes esconed at software shops got together at Snowbird to discuss the common ground between them. They realized that "lightweight" wasn't great branding. It sounded well, lightweight. The Agile Manifesto was crafted and their concerted evangelism kicked into gear. So although Marc Canter and Jason Fried christened their Web 2.0 workshop "Lightweight Business Models" [other write-ups: 1 - 2], it seems more fitting to call these agile (or, better yet, disruptive) business models. Or beermat business models ;-)

I like Laurent Bervas' post on Climbing Mount Everest. He borrows from the Extreme Programming movement (the most popular methodology under the agile software development umbrella) as well.

The old way :
- Build a big team (Minimum one hundred people)
- Bring a ton of food and material
- Wait for months before reaching the summit
- Don't take risks

The new way :
- Small team with commando spirit (10 people is enough)
- The lighter the better
- Speed is the key factor
- Use latest technlogies

Pack light. Go far.
See you at the summit.

Networked Media Rewires Our Minds

Networked media marks a profound change in the relationship between creator and consumer. As [Marshall] McLuhan emphasized, the specific form of any widely adopted medium evolves human cognition; networked media is evolving human cognition in directions unfamiliar to programmers and producers of media product that have come before. In addition to the multiplicity of programming elements, and the increased complexity of the creative process they beget, our perceptions of how networked media effectively "rewires" our brains and behavior, in McLuhan terms, must be addressed. - Word of Mouse: The New Age of Networked Media, by Jim Banister

I saw an excellent presentation last Friday at the LA Futurists (affiliated with Bay Area Future Salon and also the Accelerating Change conference - just a reminder to use code AC2004-CROSS for discount) by Jim Banister, author of Word of Mouse: The New Age of Networked Media. (More comprehensive notes later this week, I'm stressing the cognitive changes and literacy needed in this post.)

Jim's lofty goal with the book was to develop a shared language and common framework so that Hollywood and Silicon Valley can have a conversation with each other. He's definitely a bridge-builder. And it's obvious from his presentation and his book that he truly understands "networked media", including the Internet although his background is in 'traditional' media having worked at Time Warner, Disney, BBC and Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah project.

From spending more time with his book since the presentation and reading up on Marshall McLuhan (I realize I never did truly understood the famous 'The medium is the message' statement - and it's worth understanding from any innovation angle as McLuhan defines anything from which a change emerges as 'media'.)

"[I]t is only too typical that the "content" of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium." (McLuhan 9) And it is the character of the medium that is its potency or effect - its message. - from essay from McLuhan Program Program in Culture and Technology, University of Toronto

We are undergoing cognitive and societal changes at widely differing paces as we make the transition from "programming" and "marketing" and "distributing" and "vending" and "producing" in traditional linear and interactive media to the networked media world. I think Banister's taxonomy and framework will be useful to explain why you cannot simply graft traditional media's business models and marketing practices and other processes onto networked media - it's a radically different beast.

"[I]t is only too typical that the "content" of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium." (McLuhan 9) And it is the character of the medium that is its potency or effect - its message. - essay from McLuhan Program Program in Culture and Technology, University of Toronto

I heard Tim O'Reilly at last year's Accelerating Change conference say he was invited on a tour of the extensive data center that MP3.com had built - back in the dot com heydays and pre-Napster - to host their services. Their thinking: We have all the songs. A college kid named Shawn Fawning had a different mindset - that of someone whose mind was shaped and influenced by the characteristics of networked media - and he had a different thought: I don't need to have the songs - all my friend's have the songs. (For Napster naysayers, Banister does include 'commerce' as part of the framework.)

Banister talks about the skills and literacy needed for this networked media age. He stresses that "programming" television versus the internet require a "different composition of literacy." Traditional media companies are also gearing up to train their workforces for the skill sets needed in an increasingly digitized and networked age, according to my sister whom I also visited while in L.A. (she works in training and development for a major media company).

The chapter that drew me the most in the book was titled "Symphonic Literarcy and the Feminine Touch" (excerpts below):

Eastern philosophies like Taoism and Buddhism maintain, among other things, that the way to intellectual, spiritual, and physical health is through a synthesis of the feminine and masculine - the ying and yang. But for thousands of years, civilization has been lopsided in favor of the masculine...

I must stress that the terms "masculine" and "feminine" are used here in their transcendental sense. Every human is a blend of this dual set of characteristics in varying compositions. "The masculine is sovereignty," St. Germain once said, "the crown upon your soul. Femininity is humility and unconditional love, the heart within the breast of your soul, and together they make the whole soul essence." These traits are applicable to media as well as to human beings...

I find it fascinating that the media itself and our interaction with it is evolving us as humans towards greater personal integration of the yin and yang, the receptive and the active. I thought it ironic that Jim's book publisher (in his taxonomy, books are a "static media" and not even in the same family as radio, TV or internet) had him remove the chapter on the feminine because "it was too woolly" and only on Jim's insistence put some of its content back in within the chapter, "Symphonic Literacy and the Feminine Touch."

McLuhan's "message" [as in 'the medium is the message'] is roughly equivalent to what in this book I call "programming," and I agree with his famous axiom, but with a critical difference. Corned beef is corned beef (the programming or the message), but it affects our taste buds differently oon rye bread (one medium) than on plain white bread (anotehr medium). The medium and the message have equal impact in reconfiguring human cognition; for linear and interactive mass media to date, McLuhan's tenet could read "the medium is the masculine message."

Contrast networked media like the internet with television: television is a masculine, paternal "take-what-I-give-you' medium; whereas the internet is nonlinear, interactive, and community-oriented, and infinitely deep and mysterious. Networked media like the internet are feminine in nature. Programming each requires a different composition of literacy. Networked media are shifting the balance back toward the feminine...

This evolution is reflective of a shift in the culture from the profoundly masculine to the sublimely feminine - a swing in the balance of power between the different halves of human nature, one that businesses and media programmers will have to heed, consciously or accidentally, to be prosperous in the networked age. The change has nothing to do with political correctness. It's something much broader and authentic. This shift in viewpoint will likely be as profound a human development as the transition from the Middle Ages to the Age of Enlightenment...

The advent of these new media is pulling society back to a more centrist position - a balance of the two sets of characteristics. Institutions would like to relinearize our behavior and relinearize media itself. It is in their nature to do so. They were born from a masculine template...

Networked media like the internet are capture (masculine) and nurture (feminine) media. In traditional media, for example, an oligarchy of sorts has controlled the programming. In networked media, oligarchies don't work. Networked media require programmers to listen to and engage humanodes [humans that are nodes in the network]... - Word of Mouse, by Jim Banister

Location, Location, Location, Teams, Teams, Teams

What's the equivalent of the "location, location, location" retailing success mantra in the realm of knowledge/creative and project-based work...done in an increasingly global marketplace where great talent is only an email (or Skype) away and international shopping a mouse click away?

I suppose it's no surprise to find out that who you know and how you interact is often at least as valuable as what you know.

The more I learn about social networks and social capital the more I realize there is an art to comprehending these networks and webs of interpersonal relationsips. And the more I learn about it the more I feel that understanding social networks and social capital creation is key in the creative/conceptual age.

I was fortunate to attend the morning portion of the KM Cluster's workshop on Enterprise Social Network Analysis last Friday given by Valdis Krebs, whom is famous in the blogosphere for his social network analysis on political-book buying habits.

And, of course, the marketplace is a social network too.

I'm going to be weaving in bits and pieces from that workshop over the next few days into posts. If you get a chance to see Valdis present - you simply must go. I've been thinking about social networks for a while but my interest level dropped off the last year - but Valdis rekindled it. And don't confuse social network analysis with Friendster, Orkut, Ryze, or LinkedIn. It has many applications as you will see well beyond online dating.

It is often assumed that in this "creative" or "conceptual" age (or perhaps the "connected age") - or whatever is the what's next after the information age - that's it is really the age of the individual star, the free agent, the soloist. During the dot-com years, HR departments were concerned with hiring the best-and-brightest in terms of expertise and latched on to 'human capital' as a vital resource for competitiveness.

Arent Greve at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration research shows that it's equally important to hire for both your expertise and your interpersonal relationships and social network.

Our study on employees' cooperation at GESTO finds that social capital contributes to productivity as much as human capital.

Projects aren't typically individualistic victories no matter what the reward systems may tell you.

Thirty years ago, everything was part of the assembly line. Today, though, we're in the project business. - Seth Godin, Do Less manifesto

When asked what led to a start-up failure where his mentor was called in at the eleventh hour to advise, Robert Kiyosaki in Rich Dad Poor Dad Retire Young Retire Rich relates:

Although the company had hired great people and paid them a lot of money, those people never became a great team. Successful entrepreneurs create great teams....A true entrepreneur cannot do what he or she needs to do by her- or himself. An entrepreneur must be able to pull together smart people from different disciplines and skills and have them work together to achieve a common goal. In other words, an entrepreneur builds teams that take on products that no one individual can do on his or his own. The reason most people remain small is because they solve problems they can solve themselves.

If you have a chance, go read the paper Managing the Connected Organization at Valdis' website. Here's a snippet:

One of the benefits of consulting with organizational network analysis is having leading edge clients. Not only are they open to new methods to improve their organizations, they usually end up teaching me quite a bit. One such client is Vancho Cirovski, Vice President of Human Resources at Cardinal Health. Vancho, an expert soccer player and coach, first noticed an interesting phenomenon on the playing field.

Teams that were more integrated and communicated well amongst themselves on the field, more often than not, beat a collection of individually superior players who were not interacting well on the field. I saw a similar phenomenon on my son's soccer team. They had good players, but were divided up into several cliques which did not get along with each other.

Vancho saw the same effect in project teams inside organizations. He has summarized these concepts of managing connected organizations using Einstein's famous formula:

E = MC²

M is the Mastery of each individual (human capital)
C are the Connections that join individuals into a community (social capital)
C is the Communication that flows through those Connections
E is the resulting Effectiveness of the team or organization

Sharing Recent Aha Reads

I'd like to share a bit about what I've been influencing me lately in terms of participatory marketing, self-sustaining systems and platforms of participation.

Rather than tie all these neatly together for you, it might be more enlightening and offer you more opportunity for creativity and innovation if I don't synthesize these. So in no particular order, I present to you some illuminating reading that has left an imprint on me.

Pierre Omidyar's commencement speech (via Fast Company blog) underlines my own thinking about self-sustainable scalable systems. Perhaps because I am lazy. Perhaps because I come from a 'product' mindset. Perhaps because I am fascinated by the concept of leverage. Perhaps because E-Myth and all my reading about complex adapative systems and emergence has made a great impact on me.

So people often say to me - "when you built the system, you must have known that making it self-sustainable was the only way eBay could grow to serve 40 million users a day." Well… nope. I made the system self-sustaining for one reason: Back when I launched eBay on Labor Day 1995, eBay wasn't my business - it was my hobby. I had to build a system that was self-sustaining… …Because I had a real job to go to every morning.

I was working as a software engineer from 10 to 7, and I wanted to have a life on the weekends. So I built a system that could keep working - catching complaints and capturing feedback -- even when Pam and I were out mountain-biking, and the only one home was our cat.

If I had had a blank check from a big VC, and a big staff running around - things might have gone much worse. I would have probably put together a very complex, elaborate system - something that justified all the investment. But because I had to operate on a tight budget - tight in terms of money and tight in terms of time - necessity focused me on simplicity: So I built a system simple enough to sustain itself.

By building a simple system, with just a few guiding principles, eBay was open to organic growth - it could achieve a certain degree of self-organization. So I guess what I'm trying to tell you is: Whatever future you're building… Don't try to program everything. 5 Year Plans never worked for the Soviet Union - in fact, if anything, central planning contributed to its fall. Chances are, central planning won't work any better for any of us.

Build a platform - prepare for the unexpected... …And you'll know you're successful when the platform you've built serves you in unexpected ways.

Jon Udell of InfoWorld's post on the Architecture of Participation is a short (meaning go read it, no snippets here) but powerfully thought-provoking piece.

And I mentioned Bruce Sterling's SIGGRAPH speech in passing (I think it's an excellent example of a manifesto) and although the intended audience is fairly geeky (I know, I've been to SIGGRAPH when I was a computer graphics software engineer), this is highly relevant must-read for business innovators and marketers. I've read it about three times now and I get something different out of it each time. It's hard to pull snippets from it - but here's an attempt.

If you're the kind of guy or gal who attends SIGGRAPH, then you are best described as an end-user of Gizmos. You're not here just to shop, to buy stuff in styrofoam blocks. You come here to participate in your industry. Your parents were consumers, back in the 1960s. But you are here to add value and advance the state of the art, so you are some kind of participant. Not a consumer. An end-user. An end-user is the historically evolved version of a consumer.

A Gizmo is not manufacturable by any centrally planned society. A Gizmo is something like a Product, but instead of behaving predictably and sensibly for a mass market of obedient consumers, a Gizmo is an open-ended tech development project.

In a Gizmo, development has been deputized to end-users.

End-Users, who are people like practically everybody in this audience, do a great deal of unpaid pro bono work in developing Gizmos.

The next stage is an object that does not exist yet. It needs a noun, so that we can think about it. We can call it a "Spime,".....The people who make Spimes want you to do as much of the work for them as possible. They can data-mine your uses of the spime, and use that to improve their Spime and gain market share. This would have been called "customer relations management," in an earlier era, but in a Spime world, it's more intimate. It's collaborative, and better understood as something like open-source manufacturing. It's all about excellence. Passion. Integrity. Cross-disciplinary action. And volunteerism.

When you shop for Amazon, you're already adding value to everything you look at on an Amazon screen. You don't get paid for it, but your shopping is unpaid work for them. Imagine this blown to huge proportions and attached to all your physical possessions.

By making the whole business transparent, a host of social ills and dazzling possibilities are exposed to the public gaze. Everyone who owns a spime becomes, not a mute purchaser, but a stakeholder.

From Tom Peter's Outsource-Proof Your Career slides

Organizations will still be critically important in the world, but as 'organizers,' not as 'employers. - Charles Handy

A bit of my own views about cocreative collaboration and participation from a past post for additional context below (what I referred to as 'agile marketing' below I'm now referring to participatory marketing):

We live in an age of information democracy ... some would say information anarchy. The old marketing tactics are like taking a sledgehammer into a painting studio. The new approach of "conversational marketing" is both subtler and more powerful. It speaks to the reality of consumers today and the environment they live and work in. Done properly, this kind of marketing is a powerful adjunct to strategic thinking", says Brian Johnson, strategy consultant of global management services organization, Accenture.

This newsletter item (source for the opening quote and Johnson's quote above) coins "continuous closed-loop marketing"[1] - I like that term - and it sounds like what I call agile marketing (an extension of agile development principles, see also the agile alliance manifesto). For me, agile marketing encompasses a continuous [and iterative] feedback loop where you collaborate with customers at every phase -- the conception, design and distribution/delivery of a product or service.

[1] Continuous closed loop marketing. "Edensilk has found that the answer to today's consumer and strategic reality is to abandon one-way marketing, while also not falling prey to the belief that the only alternative is interactive marketing. This better practice is called "continuous closed loop marketing" - which depends upon daily conversation and learning between organizations and their customers."

Leverage: What Carriers Can Learn From Microsoft

BoingBoing notes that consultants are advising telecommunications carriers to further clamp down on their networks lest any 3rd parties tag along on their typically proprietary networks. What?!

Carriers should be leveraging their networks more not less. This sounds like the classic entrepreneur's dilemma -- you try and do it all yourself (The E-Myth) whereas most successful entrepreneurs don't go it alone. Leverage other people's money, leverage other's talent, leverage other's creativity, leverage other's contributions, leverage other's own networks. The do-it-yourself model doesn't work for "digital" products.

One of the two characteristics that differentiate "digital" products from their analog counterparts, according to Momentum: How Companies Become Unstoppable Market Forces is that "digital products never stand alone." Never stand alone.

While I'm evangelizing co-creating value with customers, the reality is (in many industries) we're still at the stage where acknowledging a value chain exists (i.e. we're not the entire value?) is first order of business. Co-creating with anyone -- be it the value chain or value ecosystem -- is still a tough sell in some circles.

Most carriers think their network resemble a razor more than an operating system.

"A conventional, stand-alone product, the Mach3 works with on virtually any beard and with every kind of shaving cream. It is in Gillette's best interest, then, to keep the Mach3 technology proprietary and to build a distinct brand position for this razor that retains much of its value proposition for Gillette, and Gillette alone, as possible." - Momentum

Carriers should be a gateway for their consumer into a universe of services - no matter who developed the service - and develop a strong 'platform'. Can you imagine Microsoft disallowing 3rd party developers from creating for the Windows operating system unless Microsoft is the sole tollkeeper? As much as there's competitive tension between Microsoft's own team and external developers that write for the Microsoft platform -- they both know it's a symbiotic relationship necessary for their mutual survival. They are growing an ecosystem together that creates value for the Microsoft ecosystem, and much of it goes to the Microsoft platform.

“An open network exposes a platform on top of which anyone can extend, augment, or add function and services.” -- Greg Papadopoulos, EVP and CTO of Sun Microsystems

Last spring 2003, I heard Papadopoulos compare and contrast the Internet and mobile carriers' networks. While the Internet is an open network that encourages innovation from third parties most mobile carrier networks do not allow for extension or innovation from outside their company. As an example, he complained about the lack of choice for voice mail systems to use with his cell phone (there is no choice, you get the carrier's voice mail application) as well as the lack of advanced features such as speech-to-text conversion, filtering and sorting all because we have to wait for the telco themselves to conceive, design and roll out the features.

Now while I don't expect carrier networks to be as open as the Internet any time soon (mostly for cultural reasons not that it isn't feasible), perhaps a more viable short-term strategy is exemplified by Microsoft’s platform strategy. Microsoft provides the infrastructure (operating system and developer tools) that allows their own internal team in addition to third-party developers to create an entire ecosystem of products and services. If Microsoft had been the only company that ever developed for the Microsoft platform, their success would have been severely limited.

"Third-party support established in people's minds a tangible source of differentiation for a particular class of products; Microsoft and Intel built their strategic market positions on this support. The other big market share and investment winners in the Marketplace of Products - such as HP, Oracle, Adobe, Novell, Sega, Compaq, Nintendo, Nokia, EMC, Sun, and others - leveraged these third parties as brand extensions in support of a differentiated position with customers. In the end, the best and most important features of a product were defined not on a pure point capability, but on total capability.

As much as Microsoft, for example, tried to convince users that its software features were as easy to use and intuitive as the Macintosh's, third-party support did more to buttress and grow Microsoft's market share versus Apple than anything Microsoft did technically. It was no coincidence that when Microsoft or EMC or Nintendo introduced a new product, a raft of third-party supporters populated the entire purchase process - at the launch, in the store, in ads, and during financial briefings. Digital customers had begun to recognize this kind of support as a source of differentiation in the context of a particular product category. Even in 2002, after Time magazine featured a Macintosh computer on its cover, a reader's letter to the editor on the article echoed two decades of Microsoft's advantage over Apple: "The iMac is cute, but after cute, then what? At my local computer store, Mac-compatible software titles are vastly outnumbered by those for the PC." - Momentum: How Companies Become Unstoppable Market Forces

Now I understand why the carriers are nervous about Microsoft entering their territory... Microsoft figured out how to play the "leverage the platform" ballgame (and I know they don't always play nicely) while the carriers learned proficiency at protecting their prize baseball.