The Vine

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for—in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”

[ Ellen Goodman ]

…………………………………………………………………………………….

Five years ago, Scott Mueller held an executive level position with a large homebuilding company. He was good at his job, respected by his peers, and well compensated. His wife, Alexandra, is beautiful, bright, artistic and similarly driven. They were the sort of couple that David Brooks likes to lampoon—young, successful, upwardly mobile, effortlessly photogenic, living in a nice house decorated a la Pottery Barn showroom.

But their lifestyle came with a toll: long hours, grueling commutes, mounting stress, and a gnawing sense that this treadmill would never let up, would never take them anywhere satisfying—that they were, in effect, running a race to nowhere.

And so Scott and Alex did something quite odd (by most people’s standards). They got off the treadmill.

“What we wanted was to break our insatiable consumption cycle and begin a new life,” Scott says. “We wanted more freedoms, and we wanted our time back.”

In 2008 they purchased land in a remote, pristine area of Eastern Washington, about an hour’s drive north of Spokane. In 2009 they installed a well and began construction of what would become their multifunction home, barn and workshop. And in 2010 they quit their jobs and moved to the property full-time, camping while they finished the project themselves.

The result is Moosicorn Ranch, what Scott and Alex call their “experiment in sustainable living.” They still work—Scott’s a web design consultant; Alex is pursuing a degree in wildlife biology—but they’re no longer tethered to stressful jobs in order to satisfy a hefty mortgage. They raise chickens, grow their own food, and are trying their hands at beekeeping.

More importantly, Scott and Alex are enjoying a lifestyle that feels purposeful and alive. Pre-Moosicorn, they lived next to a state park but rarely had time to visit it. Now they’re immersed in natural beauty, and the effect is invigorating and—for Scott in particular, who says of his previous work developing tract housing, “it sucked my soul”—cathartic.

It’s a life that seems storybook and yet at the same time ruggedly, determinedly grounded. Even the name derives from this mixture, a playful portmanteau of moose and unicorn. And it strikes me that this is how all creative endeavors are born—when playfulness and industriousness collide.

I asked them what community is like in a place where you can’t see your closest neighbors, and they described it as less densely connected but more deeply engaged. “These are all giving, caring community members,” Alex says. “We just meet our neighbors in a different fashion: they show up slinging guns and kindness instead of pre-packaged cookies and kindness.”

Plus, with its gardens, workshops and ample space for tinkering, Moosicorn itself is becoming a catalyst for community. “We’re slowly making it into our own ‘third place,’” Scott says. “We’re bringing people into our environment and engineering the kinds of stimulating exchanges we want to have.”

As Scott and Alex envision the future of Moosicorn, that’s a trend that will continue. Eventually the couple plans to build additional cottages for hosting eco-retreats, seminars and an artist-in-residence program, providing free room and board to help young creatives pursue their dreams.

I’ve known Scott from when he attended The Vine at our meeting in Napa, and I wanted to write this article for two reasons. To share a story worth celebrating, and to invite the stories of others. So I’ll ask, how have you (or your organization) simplified or reprioritized? What did you let go of? What did you gain? I hope you’ll use the comments below or send me an email.

You don’t have to go as far as homesteading in the wilderness to step off the treadmill.

You just have to question where it’s taking you.

Photos courtesy of Moosicorn’s Flickr photostream

While I heard a lot of fantastic presentations at PCBC, the most intriguing and enduring ideas came out of our dinner conversations. (Over a bottle of wine, with a lively hum of chatter all around us, nowhere near a convention center ballroom.)

At one of those dinners I mentioned a recent article profiling Indra Nooyi and her efforts to transform PepsiCo into a wellness company. A member of our party, whose firm does work for Pepsi, commented that Nooyi’s greatest obstacle is the company’s internal culture. The mindset of many of their employees is ‘We make sweet and salty snacks and drinks for people who enjoy them, and there’s nothing wrong with that.’ PepsiCo, like so many other organizations (and even industries), has a Scorpion and Frog problem—its intrinsic nature may prevent it from changing, even when failure to change threatens its existence.

Later that evening our discussion turned to homebuilding, in particular the industry’s glacial pace of innovation. (In 1950 we listened to music on phonographs and began building mass-produced, uniform, suburban housing. Today we have iPod Nanos and…mass-produced, uniform, suburban housing.) Which brings us right back to the topic of prevailing culture.

In its defense, homebuilding is an industry that, until recently, has had very little incentive to innovate. Homeownership has been prioritized—and aggressively promoted—as a social and cultural value since our nation’s founding. And from post-World War II until 2006 (give or take), it was held as a truism that home values could only increase. For more than 50 years, then, government subsidies and market forces conspired to make vanilla housing the safe, replicable way of doing business. And while it’s clear that’s no longer the case today—that fundamentally new approaches and new thinking are needed—50-plus years’ worth of prevailing culture takes a while to adapt.

Indra Nooyi is an ambitious and visionary leader for wanting to “healthify” the world’s second largest food and beverage company, and I sincerely hope she’ll be successful. But I’m skeptical that that organization—its people, its culture, its legacy—will let it happen. More likely it will be new players, ones whose cultures flow with (not against) their strategy, who ultimately own the healthy food space.

A similar dynamic is playing out in homebuilding. In the same way that PepsiCo recognizes the devastating implications of America’s obesity epidemic, builders now understand that drive-till-you-qualify development is dead (even if many of them lament its death). But prevailing culture—in companies and in industries—doesn’t change overnight, and many of the “new” builders are being formed with an awful lot of old institutional memory.

Housing needs a number of things to fuel its recovery—job growth, restored consumer trust, razing of Las Vegas and Phoenix (easy, easy, I’m joking). Perhaps most of all, it needs a culture shift, and that can only happen when new leaders embed new thinking in the very core of their organizations. Because when you try to graft it on later, you get Pepsi’s culture clash.

Brent Herrington speculates that the biggest players in homebuilding ten years from now will be names we haven’t heard of today.

Those are the ones my money’s on.

As Brent Herrington commented at PCBC last week—and Hugh MacLeod nails in the cartoon here—a team of the same people thinking the same thoughts shaped by the same shared experiences will doom any efforts to change.

I’ll tag on. If everybody in the room helped define your current strategy, platform, way of doing things, et cetera, you’re in trouble. (You’re emotionally vested in the status quo.)

If everybody in the room voted for the same presidential candidate (either side), you’re in trouble.

If nobody in the room watches movies (or listens to music, or reads blogs) that you’ve never heard of, you’re in trouble.

If nobody in the room is under 40 (30?), you’re in trouble.

If nobody in the room thinks you’re sometimes full of shit (and will call you on it), you’re in trouble.

Time to get some new voices in the room.

Jeremy Rifkin—economist, prolific author, and adviser to EU governments—offers this fascinating and promising view of a possible future.

As he reasons: If empathy is wired into our biology, and technology is fostering a new global awareness and identity, isn’t it possible to rethink the human narrative as a single race writ large in a single biosphere? (Witness, for example, the rapid worldwide outreach to Haitian earthquake victims.)

The cynical response would be to brush this off as Pollyanna, a well intentioned but sappy notion a la Esperanto and “We Are the World.” After all, scientists, philosophers and theologians have been exploring and debating the root of human nature for millennia, and yet we still fight wars.

But that would be missing the point. What Rifkin does so effectively here is help us see who we are—and who we might become. It’s well worth contemplating.

30% of New Year’s resolutions are broken within one week. By Valentine’s Day that figure jumps to 80%. All told, it’s estimated that 97% of NYRs are unsuccessful.

To be sure, a lot of those resolutions never had much resolve in the first place; they were simply stories we told ourselves to feel better about past behavior. But even when we pursue goals with the discipline of a monk, our efforts to change are almost always done in by one factor: They’re too complex.

Losing weight, for example, is not a singular process. It requires making changes in a number of inter-related and ingrained habits—not just diet and exercise, but also time management, shopping based on meal planning rather than impulse, turning off the TV and going to bed earlier, etc.—any one of which by itself is a challenge. Collectively, they can be daunting in the extreme. And when we don’t see immediate results, we get discouraged and give up.

In their forthcoming book, Switch, Chip and Dan Heath cite the success of two professors from West Virginia University who were trying to persuade people to eat a healthier diet. They realized early in the process that a campaign built around “eat healthier” was too ambitious, too vague, and unlikely to succeed—there were simply too many variables involved.

But as they continued to analyze the problem, the researchers kept circling back to milk, the single largest source of saturated fat in the typical American’s diet. Their calculations revealed something remarkable: By switching from whole milk to skim, most people would immediately drop to the USDA recommended levels of saturated fat.

Their public awareness campaign was then created with one simple, clear objective: Persuade more people to choose skim rather than whole when reaching for milk in the grocery store. Within six months, the market share of skim milk in their target study had doubled. By narrowing their focus to one key trigger variable rather than trying to solve the much larger (and probably insoluble) issue, they effected change through clarity.

The success story here is not their marketing (although it was well planned and executed). It’s the rigorous study that allowed them to say, with confidence, “We’re going after milk.” And, just as importantly, the guts to place their entire bet on it.

When taking on a goal that’s big and nebulous and hard to know where to even begin—like, say, creating community—narrow your focus.

Find your skim milk.

That’s where you’ll win.

When a remarkable group of thinkers collaborates to create a book of inspiration and provocation, you pay attention. Better yet, when they give it away for free as a downloadable ebook, you pay nothing.

What Matters Now is a collection of short pieces—things to think about and do—contributed by business leaders, bestselling authors, philanthropists, activists and academics. (Among them Seth Godin, Tom Peters, Guy Kawasaki, Dan Pink, Elizabeth Gilbert and Jacqueline Novogratz.) And its creators actively want you to take it, quote from it, and share it with others.

Arianna Huffington extols the virtues of sleep and encourages us to trade multi-tasking for uni-tasking (and sometimes even no-tasking). Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh reveals how everything he knows about running a business was learned from playing poker. Penelope Trunk offers a thoughtful perspective on being comfortable where you are and making the people around you feel comfortable too—all the more poignant considering she has Asperger syndrome.

Tim Sanders reflects on the origins of confidence. Mitch Joel urges businesses to behave more like communities. And Jason Fried and Gary Vaynerchuk simply want us to get better at saying “I’m sorry” and “Thank you.”

This entry from Gina Trapani might be my favorite.

Getting things done is not the same as making things happen.

You can…
…reply to email.
…pay the bills.
…cross off to-do’s.
…fulfill your obligation.
…repeat what you heard.
…go with the flow.
…anticipate roadblocks.
…aim for “good enough.”

Or you can…
…organize a community.
…take a risk.
…set ambitious goals.
…give more than you take.
…change perceptions.
…forge a new path.
…create possibility.
…demand excellence.

Don’t worry too much about getting things done.

Make things happen.

Sounds like a great resolution to me. New Year’s or any time.

Young & Rubicam’s John Gerzema shows the upside to our economic woes—the opportunity for positive change, as consumers recalibrate values and habits, and businesses and brands evolve to connect with them.

At the Urban Land Institute’s Fall Meeting a couple of weeks ago, I attended a dinner for one of the councils, a group of 100 or so homebuilding executives.

The conversations, for the most part, went something like this:

“How you doing?”

“Hanging in there. This market’s just brutal. You?”

“Yeah, brutal.”

“Yeah.”

I commented to one colleague that in times like this, my work actually gets more interesting. That’s not to say I enjoy the plunging revenues, slashed budgets and layoffs. But we’re now trying new things and moving in new directions that we never would have risked when the money was pouring in. And that’s a lot more interesting than simply riding the wave.

My colleague gave me a funny look and said, “You must be comfortable with ambiguity.”

I’m not sure he meant it as a compliment. But I sure took it as one.

 Here’s a great way of shaping the path…make it fun.

I scored an advance copy of Chip and Dan Heath’s next book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, due out Feburary 2010. (You probably know the Heath brothers from their previous bestseller, Made to Stick.)

I’ll honor the authors’ request to not quote or review the pre-release galley, but there’s one idea in particular I can’t resist exploring here:

What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.

In other words, we frequently conclude that people behave the way they do because it’s their fundamental nature—that’s just the way they are—when in fact behavior is largely influenced by circumstance or environment.

Case in point: roundabouts. Unlike the traditional, four-way intersection, which is regulated and stop-and-go, a roundabout is inherently cooperative. To drive through one, you have to be more aware and accommodating of other drivers. And while roundabouts don’t necessarily reduce the number of collisions, they dramatically reduce the severity of them.

Roundabouts don’t make us better human beings. But they do, apparently, make us better drivers.

I don’t mean to oversimplify change. It’s hard. But in many cases, the way to make it easier is by addressing the situation, not the person.

If you want to lead people to a particular outcome, shape the path that gets them there.

When the solution is someone else’s job, we get this.

From the Planetizen photo pool. Cartoon courtesy of packfan1996.

At The Vine ’06, physician Richard Jackson spoke about the effects of neighborhood design on health and wellness.

He argued (persuasively) that communities designed to promote driving rather than walking—thereby decreasing physical activity and increasing exposure to vehicle exhaust—are contributing to adverse health effects ranging from obesity to diabetes to asthma.

And he illustrated his point with a simple but eye-opening poll.

Growing up, how many of the attendees walked to school? Over half the room raised their hands.

How many of your kids walk to school today? No more than a handful.

Dr. Jackson has recently contributed to a new policy statement for the American Academy of Pediatrics, The Built Environment: Designing Communities to Promote Physical Activity in Children. While the planning concepts presented won’t be new to most readers here, the larger issues involved (medical and social) serve as an important reminder.

Another Vine speaker, Sir Ken Robinson, describes it this way: “We need the right conditions for growth, in our schools, businesses, communities, and in our individual lives. If the conditions are right, people grow in synergy with the people around them and the environments they create. If they are poor, people protect themselves and their anxieties from neighbors and the world.”

As community planners and developers, we can influence quality of life through the built environment.

And if we can, we should.

Photo courtesy of Pink Sherbet

In the video below, Douglas Rushkoff talks about his soon to be released book, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back.

It’s a fascinating perspective on community, civility and the institutions that disconnect us from one another. Influenced by corporations, we behave like corporations, not like humans.

These are, I would submit, largely unintended consequences. We don’t set out to create systems (social, financial, political or otherwise) that dehumanize us. Instead, we slide into harmful behaviors and choices by failing to think them fully through. After all, short-term decisions always seem right in the moment.

And that’s Rushkoff’s greatest contribution of all. Whether or not you agree with his prescriptions—Let all the banks fail!—he makes you think, he makes you reflect, and he makes you aware.

Thanks, Andrea, for sending this our way.

Life Inc. The Movie from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.

Here’s a five-minute video that will get your head spinning a bit.

And it further underscores the significance of the Data + Art project. Information is ubiquitous. Interpretation is scarce.

Hat tip to Howard and Link, both of whom recently pointed it out.