The notion of culture as community.

IDEO’s general manager Tom Kelley spoke about the significance of an organization’s verbal language vs. body language. (And it holds just as true for communities.) Your verbal language is what’s on your website, how you describe your company, and what you say you value. Your body language is how you behave, and it shows up in the way you treat customers, employees, partners and the community around you. When your verbal and body language are incongruous, people will notice—and the body language is what they’ll interpret as the “real” you.

John Foster, head of talent and organization for IDEO, paraphrased Marshall McLuhan in reminding us, “You are the message.” All of us, as individuals and as organizations, can be incubators (or inhibitors) of community through behavior. If you are the message, what message are you sending?

Systems designer Patrice Martin then observed that great organizations (or brands, or causes) attract personality with personality. This starts with being distinct and genuine, to be sure, but it goes beyond that. It also requires the willingness to polarize and the guts to declare, “We’re not scared to lose you.”

The common thread running through these messages would appear to be authenticity…and that’s certainly at the heart of it. But underlying authenticity, I believe, is alignment. It’s being clear in the what, and grounded in the why, of all that you’re trying to accomplish. Everything else flows from that.

Thank you, IDEO, for two stimulating and mind-expanding salons. Thank you James Hardie and Target for sponsoring them. And thank you to everyone who participated and brought them to life.

A new series of salons is in the works. More to come.

Violinist Rebecca Jackson (top, in 2006) and actress Claytie Mason (below, in 2007) have contributed some of The Vine’s most memorable, soul-stirring moments.

Rebecca opened our hearts with not only the richness of her music, but even more so the deeply personal and moving story of her grandfather’s influence on her life. Claytie (along with Annalisa Derr and Alissa Mortenson) portrayed the poignant, at times haunting, life stories of “The Secret Ruths of Island House,” reminding us how much of our cultural wisdom and heritage is simply bottled up in retirement communities.

These two remarkable talents are now collaborating on a new project — a theatrical adaptation of the ballad “The Wind and Rain.” The official write-up is below.

Performances will run from April 8th through May 1st (Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights) at San Francisco’s EXIT Theatre, famous for its intimate, cabaret atmosphere and cutting-edge experimental works.

Tickets can be purchased here.

Hope I might run into you at one of the shows.

THE WIND AND RAIN

Produced by EXIT Theatre as part of Divafest 2010

“There were two sisters of County Claire, Oh the wind and rain. One was dark and the other was fair. Oh the dreadful wind and rain…”

Two sisters in a small mill town on the brink of extinction, a mysterious stranger with a fiddle made of bones, a river that runs dangerously high. Based on the well known ballad The Wind and Rain, come see this age old tale about sisters, love, jealousy, revenge and the consequence of change. Created in collaboration with acclaimed physical performers Brynna Jourdan and Jenna Bean Veatch, live music and original compositions from renowned concert violinist Rebecca Jackson (Völs String Quartet, San Francisco Opera), visual delights from esteemed illustrator, painter and whimsical engineer Molly Millar (Phantom Galleries L.A.’s Emergence Enchanted, 2009 TED Conference), and award winning playwright Claytie Mason (The Secret Ruths of Island House). This tragic tale comes to life with the humor, whimsy, magic, and terror only live theatre is capable of. Produced by EXIT Theatre, cutting the edge for almost 30 years and still slicing so much tasty theatre on the fringe berry pie.

*Performed by Rebecca Jackson, Brynna Jourdan and Jenna Bean Veatch

It’s richer and fuller, it has more texture, and you pick up subtleties that you might not hear through speakers. And oftentimes it’s those subtleties that evoke a deeper, more emotional response to the music, beyond just ‘It has a nice beat and I can dance to it.’

The same holds true for many other types of encounters, particularly highly experiential retail ones. When people interact with your product or your brand — that is, when they try on your headphones — will they notice the texture and subtlety beneath the surface?

You experience this in landscaping that appeals to multiple senses and feels, somehow, like a garden. Or in a streetscape that makes you want to take a stroll, even if you can’t put your finger on precisely the reason why.

In a model home complex, I want to see books on the bedstand that tell me I belong here, not just whatever the merchandiser picked up from a used bookstore. With all due respect to Ernie Hemingway, Mysteries of Pittsburgh and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius send very different signals than For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Let’s bring this back to music. The tunes piped through the model home sound system could be a generic satellite feed (or, worse, a local radio station). Or they could be personalized to my taste by Pandora. Or even curated by an audio architect from Muzak.

You could argue these are toppings on the sundae and what matters most is the ice cream.

And I would say you’re right, sort of.

But what is it you’re marketing…a rich, gooey chocolate sundae…or a bowl of vanilla ice cream?

[ NB: For readers who don't know me by sight, no, that's not me dancing. I'm nowhere near that hip. ]

Randy is president of StoneBridge Properties, the residential development arm of Teichert, a 125-year-old, family owned and operated construction materials producer here in my hometown of Sacramento. (To most Sacramentans, Teichert is synonymous with rocks. But that may soon change.)

With Teichert’s land nearly depleted of mining resources, Randy and his team are repurposing a 3,800-acre infill site as a new masterplanned community designed around urban farming, a tribute to the area’s early agrarian heritage. “It’s time to knit this land back into the community,” he says. “But in starting this process, we wanted to look to the past before planning for the future.”

To do so, StoneBridge commissioned local historical environmental author Paula Peper to research the history and culture of the region. Her work has now been published as a beautifully crafted, limited print, commemorative book, “Sacramento’s Brighton Township: Stories of the Land.” (I got copy #162 of 300.)

Two more books are in the works, which will chronicle the influence (environmentally, aesthetically and culturally) of Sacramento’s trees and surrounding park neighborhoods. All three can be viewed here on StoneBridge’s website. A more detailed account of this project is nicely captured here by the Sacramento Bee.

At lunch Randy lamented of the development industry, “We’re good at building houses, but not building experiences people will remember.”

I beg to differ. Some of you are doing it exceptionally well. Keep up the good work.

Prevailing media reports suggest that we’ve entered a new era of frugality — that consumer behavior is now, and forevermore will be, defined by penny-pinching and learning to live without. To win customers, be prepared for discounts and early-bird specials and a death spiral to the bottom of the price ladder.

On the other end of the spectrum is the view that this is just a temporary blip. Human nature being what it is, we’ll resume our indulgent ways as soon as the economy turns around.

This divide between extremes — fear vs. greed, or asceticism vs. hedonism — is missing the point, Walker says. Human behavior is never that simplistic and black-and-white, and you can’t extrapolate future events by simply observing present (spend nothing) or past (spend everything!) activity.

Instead the authors advise a more intelligent and nuanced approach, a value proposition grounded in neither fear nor greed, but something just as timeless: Aspiration.

They write:

“[A] smaller economy does not mean that the consumer imagination will be bereft of ambition or wholly appropriated by a resignation to do without. Even with smaller household budgets, the capacity for dreaming will be as big as ever. Consumers are not going to give up on their aspirations to a better life; they will just re-channel these ambitions to fit the context of the recovery consumer marketplace.”

The report, “A Darwinian Gale,” can be downloaded here.

His recent commentary on busyness is spot-on. And, for me anyway, convicting.

For all of us who have ever said, “Sorry I [fill in the blank], I’ve just been so busy lately,” take this to heart.

Thanks for the tweak, Chris.

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. (And I’m as guilty as anyone. No finger pointing going on here.)

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 unsolve-able) 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 exactly where to begin (like, say, creating community), narrow your focus.

Find your skim milk.

That’s where you’ll win.

Don Oliver, pictured here with his wife and daughter, passed away after a courageous six-month battle with cancer. He was a kind and gracious man who gave far more than he took. We miss him, and the world is poorer for his loss.

We try to draw a measure of comfort in the knowledge that he’s no longer suffering, and in the belief that he’s now in a better place. Honestly, though, I’m not sure there’s any perspective—not that we’ll see on this side of the divide anyway—that can make us feel okay about a father leaving behind his young child, or parents outliving their son.

I don’t pretend to have answers that make sense of this, but I’m convinced the solace and healing we’re looking for begins in relationship and community.

We experience pain and loss because we form attachments. And we form attachments because the alternative is far, far worse.

Singer-songwriter Regina Spektor, whose lyrics often explore matters of life and death and the search for deeper significance, expresses this more poetically than I can:

This is how it works
You peer inside yourself
You take the things you like
And try to love the things you took
And then you take that love you made
And stick it into some…
Someone else’s heart
Pumping someone else’s blood
And walking arm in arm
You hope it don’t get harmed
But even if it does
You’ll just do it all again

Life is fleeting. People are precious. Relationships are everything. So keep forming them and keep feeding them. When your friends mourn, mourn with them. When your friends dance, dance with them. Be in community with the people around you.

And even when you’re harmed, do it all again.

Wishing you a peaceful and rejuvenating holiday. See you in the New Year.

I’m continually amazed by the number of people on Twitter and on blogs, and the growth of people (and brands) on facebook. But I’m also amazed by how so many of us are spending our time. The echo chamber we’re building is getting larger and louder.

More megaphones don’t equal a better dialogue. We’ve become slaves to our mobile devices and the glow of our screens. It used to be much more simple and, somewhere, simple turned into slow. We walk the streets with our heads down staring into 3-inch screens while the world whisks by doing the same. And yet we’re convinced we are more connected to each other than ever before.

Multi-tasking has become a badge of honor. I want to know why.

I don’t have all the answers to these questions but I find myself thinking about them more and more. In between tweets, blog posts and facebook updates.