The Vine

Saw this short bumper video while watching Nick Jr. with my kids this morning. Bob Marley’s classic “Three Little Birds” visualized in a charming cartoon. Couldn’t resist sharing it here.

Is it sappy and lightweight to offer this up as content on a business-oriented blog? Perhaps. But it’s two minutes of whimsy and encouragement—and two minutes of not checking the DJIA or Irene coverage. We could all use a bit of that right now. Enjoy.

UPDATED: The YouTube video previously linked below has since been removed. (Apparently Twentieth Century Fox didn’t appreciate the user’s copyright infringement.) You can instead view it here on the website of the animators who created it.

Each year on today’s date (8/26), and in the week leading up to it, the creative souls at 826 National promote National Youth Literacy Day through events and festivities—including eight-hour, 26-minute Write-a-Thons—at their tutoring centers around the country.

On July 11th, 7-Eleven stores give away free Slurpees (while supplies last)—and see a big boost in sales because of all the impulse purchases generated. Why, yes, I believe I will have a Slim Jim.

Math geeks—my wife is one, I’m allowed to say it—have claimed 3/14 as Pi Day.

Star Wars geeks—my wife is not one, but I’ll say it anyway—observe Star Wars Day on May the Fourth (…be with you).

These are simply dates on a calendar, of course. What gives them significance is that groups have claimed them to commemorate and to celebrate (and, yes, to sell) something. Something that others believe in, or want to support, or find entertaining, or simply crave. Or all of the above.

Maybe your brand doesn’t lend itself to a calendar tie-in (and if it doesn’t, please don’t force one). Maybe you find the whole thing a bit gimmicky (it is).

But there are serendipitous connections all around you. Just look for them. And when you see them, grab them.

Closing thought…Somebody somewhere declared March 10th to be (I’m not making this up) the International Day of Awesomeness. Why wasn’t it long ago claimed and owned as a major event/ceremony/fundraiser for the March of Dimes?

Photo credit: Steve Rhodes

The web is awash in Steve Jobs tributes today, so this feels a bit like piling on. Still, it’s a perfect opportunity to post the video of his famous, often quoted (and even internationally plagiarized) Stanford commencement address from 2005. The full transcript is here.

As Jobs told the Stanford grads, “You’ve got to find what you love.” I think it’s safe to say, he did.

Golden Richards has four wives, twenty-seven children, and—as if his relationships weren’t complicated enough already—a mistress.

Golden is the patriarch of Brady Udall’s tragicomic novel, The Lonely Polygamist. It is a tenderly and unflinchingly told story of the dysfunctions we pass from parent to child, generation to generation. A story of tribes and alliances and the yearning for, at once, individuality and belonging.

And, okay, yes…a story of a guy with four wives, a practice (and an underlying belief system) that mainstream society regards as anywhere from odd to abhorrent. But Udall treats this matter with careful neutrality, and in the midst of this fictional family’s bizarrely complicated relationships, you will begin to recognize the patterns and peculiarities of any family’s—of your own family’s—dynamics.

(In researching the book, Udall was surprised to find that most of the polygamists he met did not fit the stereotype of buttoned up, controlling men with meek wives. They were instead average, everyday men and women—or as he puts it, “Normal people living in a very abnormal way.”)

In their own peculiar (to us) manner, Golden and his brood simply aspire to, Udall writes, “that most wondrous and impossible of things: one big happy family.”

Here’s a selection.

Look closely and you’ll see: in this house there is trouble. There has been trouble here for a good many years, though you’d hardly know it by appearances. The children, rambunctious as always, scamper and gossip and play, the mothers busy themselves making dinner, and the father—where is he, anyway?—labors somewhere in the outer precincts of the backyard.

No, nothing obviously the matter. If you didn’t know any better you might think: domestic sweetness, familial bliss. But look a little closer, get right up close, and you can’t miss the off-kilter rituals, the sorrows nursed in isolation, the back-door transactions, the mini-dramas of dread and anxiety and longing. At this very second, for example, you’ll find Daughters #2 and #3 in an upstairs bedroom, hatching a plot of revenge on Daughter #5 for being a kiss-up and a tattletale and exposing their respective crushes on two of the best-looking boys in the valley, while Daughter #5 herself is curled up in her hiding place under the stairs, trying to stanch the most recent of her spontaneous nosebleeds, which she believes to be divine punishment for impure thoughts and questionable intentions, and because of which she has become a tattletale and Miss Goody Two Shoes in hopes of getting on God’s good side. In the woodshed you’ll find Son #4 weeping bitterly and eating his own earwax. In the front room is Daughter #10, right out there in the open, sitting alone on the lavender Queen Anne divan, talking openly, idly to her dead brother, Son X, while two of her living brothers, Sons #11 and #6, aim their homemade rubber-band guns at the back of her head and count: one, two, three. And maybe, if you’re paying attention, you’ll notice Mother #2 slipping into the hall bathroom the second it comes open to give her wig a quick adjustment and stuff her latest and rather unpredictable roll of stomach fat under the band of her pantyhose—she wants to look good for her man tonight!—and coming back to the kitchen, letting out that braying laugh with which she tries to hide large and complicated feelings.

The house, a gothic Victorian with a jagged roofline and a three-story tower fashioned from blond sandstone, makes proud display of its odd-shaped rooms and narrow hallways and tilting staircases—an architecture that, despite Mother #1′s every attempt to suppress such things, encourages factionalization and secrecy and disorder. Away from the warm bright center of the house where the mothers try to outdo each other in the kitchen, there is a shadow world of disputed territories and black-market economies, a shifting and complex geography of meeting places and neutral zones and sour little crevices and dusty pockets where children go to steal a few desperate moments of solitude.

There was a time when my purchases were influenced, even triggered, by reviews on Amazon—wisdom of crowds, and all that—until I realized just how easy it is for PR machines to game the ratings (positively and negatively, and I’ve seen plenty of examples of both). If twenty “people” give a book five stars and write fawning reviews, but haven’t rated any other item, something’s hinky.

When you create a set of rules—or, in the case of Amazon, a fixed system—people will find and exploit the loopholes. And, like it or not, they’re perfectly within their rights to do so. The system is in charge, and users are simply playing by the letter (if not the spirit) of it. And so you find yourself layering rules on top of rules, eventually arriving at the kind of circular absurdity depicted here.

But when you create a set of guiding principles, you put the community in charge. When you can effectively communicate, “Here’s what it means to be a member of this tribe,” the terms of participation become, paradoxically, vaguer and yet easier to enforce. The community collectively polices acceptable vs. unacceptable behavior. (For a great example of this, see Flickr’s community guidelines. My favorite: “Don’t be creepy. You know the guy. Don’t be that guy.”)

This holds true in any social construct, online or offline—families, businesses, churches, knitting clubs, MMOs. I’m thinking in particular of neighborhoods, of course, where we create homeowner associations to govern acceptable conduct. But what if, rather than nitpicking the colors people might choose to paint their garage doors, we instead gave them a thoughtful, inspiring, human set of guidelines for how to behave more neighborly? (Yes, it requires us to define, and defend, what constitutes neighborliness. Yes, it will polarize some people.)

Stand for something aspirational, not against something negative.

Here’s a brilliant use of high-tech gadgetry to facilitate the timeless, low-tech act of buying someone a cup of coffee.

Jonathan’s Card allows you to download a picture of a prepaid Starbucks card on your phone and use it to pay for your order. (His card gets charged, not yours.) It’s the work of Jonathan Stark, a mobile app consultant who describes it as “an experiment in social sharing of physical goods using digital currency on mobile phones.”

The site also gives details on how you can make a contribution to the card in order to keep the karmic cycle going—and that’s the whole idea of the project, of course. Turns out this is a modern twist on an old Italian custom called Caffe Pagato (“coffee paid”), an act of kindness in which a patron pre-pays the espresso of someone who’s short on cash.

I just added $10 to Jonathan’s Card (five coffees, or two fancy schmancy drinks). I hope others who read this blog will do the same.

Props to Marjorie Kessler—who’s been a reverse mentor to me over the years—for clueing me in to this.

UPDATED: Starbucks has since deactivated the card (with what seem like genuine regrets, in fairness to the company) because of concerns over hacking and abuse. The twists and turns of the story may actually be more interesting and telling than the original experiment. And when you consider that the main goal of the project was, in Stark’s own words, to inspire “more people to think like this and spawn more projects,” it has already succeeded.

I recently attended a talk where the speaker showed a video clip from Apollo 13—the climactic “heat shield” scene where the command module re-enters Earth’s atmosphere and, for more than three minutes, the fate of the astronauts is unknown.

Except it’s not. I’ve seen the movie several times. Even when viewing it for the very first time in the theater, it was still no surprise that Jim Lovell et al. survived. We’d known the outcome since 1970.

So why, each time I see the film (and again recently when watching the short clip), do I get all tense and teary-eyed?

Because it’s not the outcome that I’m responding to. It’s the anguish endured by the families and loved ones of the astronauts. That scene is heartwrenching because I experience, through the talents of actors and storytellers, the excruciating interim of not knowing whether they (I) will ever again embrace their (my) spouse-daddy-son-friend. Those people, over forty years ago, hurt. So I hurt.

The relatively recent (and still emerging) scientific findings on mirror neurons are fascinating, and they may help explain the basis for social behaviors and human civilization as we know it. But we don’t need neuroscience to tell us that empathy is powerful. It’s hardwired into us. We live it every day.

A movie…or a story…or a place…or a brand…or a person that helps me feel something meaningful and authentic (read: there has to be underlying truth) is persuasive indeed.

There’s a flip side though. If you, the storyteller, don’t feel something genuinely and deeply, how do you expect me to?

(Click for full-size images)

I remember when this was a statement of defiance, not a public health warning.

Saw this in a well-to-do gated community. We’re all making tradeoffs in the Great Reset.

You can’t judge a book by its cover, Part I…

…and Part II.

The hallmark of a strong community. All for one, one for all.

The hippies should have joined forces with the trailer park.

Score one for the nonconformist.

Maybe it’s our perception of beauty that needs elective surgery.

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NB: Some photos taken by yours truly, others posted through a Creative Commons license, with thanks to the creativity and generosity of the artists who freely shared them.

Norwegian author Jo Nesbø shares a poignant, bittersweet account of his—and his daughter’s, and his country’s—response to the recent bombing and shootings.

“Not even the brightest future can make up for the fact that no roads lead back to what came before,” he writes. “To the innocence of childhood or the first time we fell in love.”

Any American old enough to remember 9/11 (or Columbine, or Oklahoma City, or…) will relate to Norway’s tug-of-war of emotions. Shock, disbelief, sorrow, outrage, anger, vulnerability, fear. But then, eventually, blessedly—courage, resolve, unity, restoration of trust, and an unwillingness to allow an act of evil to corrode a way of life, a way of living, a way of being, that defines you.

One of Norway’s most famous sons is Edvard Munch, an expressionist painter who became famous for The Scream, which is said to represent the anxiety of modern man. But in the aftermath of the attacks, what we see from Nesbø and his countrymen is decidedly not the helpless, head-in-hands, wailing image from Munch’s painting. It is, instead, the coming together of a proud, dignified people to reclaim civility.

“[I]f there is no road back to how things used to be, to the naïve fearlessness of what was untouched, there is a road forward,” Nesbø concludes. “To be brave. To keep on as before. To turn the other cheek as we ask: ‘Is that all you’ve got?’ To refuse to let fear change the way we build our society.”

Photo credit: Federico Soffici

Walker Smith makes the simple (but all too often overlooked) observation that consumers will use a product when—and how—they’re ready to.

As an example of this he cites the tablet computer. Apple tried (and failed quite famously) to deliver one in 1979 and then again in 1993. In 2001 Bill Gates predicted that tablets would dominate the PC market within five years. It wasn’t until 2010 that the iPad came along—and even then early reviews criticized the device for not functioning the way tech pundits thought tablet computing was “supposed to.” Thirty million (and counting) sales later, some experts now believe that the iPad will kill the laptop.

It was eye-opening when the National Association of Home Builders recently reported that 53% of U.S. for-rent housing is comprised of single-family detached homes (27%), duplexes (6%) and townhouses (20%), traditionally the domain of for-sale development.

When a majority of the nation’s rentals have crept into buyers’ territory…when so many households struggle to even qualify for a mortgage…when a generation questions the fundamental mindset of buying and perceives homeownership as a form of debtors’ prison…

This may be the market telling you how they want to use your product.

You can get frustrated that they’re not using it in the way they’re “supposed to.” You can, to use the tech analogy, continue trying to sell them a laptop.

Or you can find a way to adapt and give them the iPad they’re lining up for.

Photo credit: waferbaby

This sign is actually trying to say, clumsily, keep track of your possessions (belongings/things).

But it works better as a piece of Zen philosophy about relationships.

It’s not just a touchy-feely sentiment. People connected to a robust, face-to-face social network—friends, family, co-workers and neighbors—are demonstrably happier and healthier.

We all have a belonging thing.

And we all need to take care of it.

Photo credit: nowyou33

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.

I found this photo on Flickr and was immediately struck by it. Who among us hasn’t, at one time or another, been on both sides of this transaction—the distracted and the disregarded?

The photographer, Ed Yourdon, sums it up perfectly: “We ignore the people who love us, in order to carry on conversations of dubious relevance.”

It’s part of a set titled Ephemeral artifacts of our time: the cellphone, and Yourdon’s commentary is posted below. Be sure to check out the photo gallery, which he’s made available through a Creative Commons license. Thanks, Ed, for sharing your art and your insight.

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Looking back on some old photos from 40-50 years ago, I was struck by how visible the differences were between the culture of then, versus the culture of now. In some cases, it was evident from the things people wore, or carried, or did, back then which they no longer do today. But sometimes it was the opposite: things that didn’t exist back in the 1960s and 1970s have become a pervasive part of today’s culture.

A good example is the cellphone: 20 years ago, it simply didn’t exist. Even ten years ago, it was a relatively uncommon sight, and usually only on major streets of big cities. Today, of course, cell phones are everywhere, and everyone is using them in a variety of culture contexts.

However, I don’t think this is a permanent phenomenon; after all, if you think back to the early 1980s, you probably would have seen a lot of people carrying Sony Walkmans, or “boom-box” portable radios — all of which have disappeared…

If Moore’s Law (which basically says that computers double in power every 18 months) holds up for another decade, then we’ll have computerized gadgets approximately 100 times smaller, faster, cheaper, and better — which means far better integration of music, camera, messaging, and phone, but also the possibility of the devices being so tiny that they’re embedded into our eyeglasses, our earrings, or a tattoo on our forehead.

So the point of this album is to provide a frame of reference — so that we can (hopefully) look back 10-20 years from now, and say, “Wasn’t it really weird that we behaved in such bizarre ways while we interacted with those primitive devices?”

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.

Here’s a very clever play on the Whole Foods/organic/green culture—which, let’s be honest, is often served with a generous helping of smugness and piety. (C’mon, it’s healthy to laugh at ourselves.) Interesting to consider that the lifestyle is mainstream enough to be parodied.