The Vine

Although not widely known in the US, British graffiti artist Banksy has achieved cult status across the pond, provoking reactions of both admiration and outrage, apparently in equal measures.

His satirical works have appeared (always anonymously, adding to his mystique) on streets, buildings and bridges in cities throughout the world—primarily in and around London, but also in post-Katrina New Orleans, the West Bank, Disneyland, the Louvre and many other exotic, far flung places.

They are public expressions of political and social commentary, with themes ranging from whimsical and irreverent (as shown here) to subversive and dark. Some of his indoor pieces have sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds, and his celebrity collectors include Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Christina Aguilera.

He’s also the subject-turned-director of Exit Through the Gift Shop, an indie documentary of the underground street art scene. When Banksy realizes that amateur filmmaker Thierry Guetta is, well, an amateur, he takes over the project and fashions it into a thoroughly entertaining story.

As with all graffiti—even graffiti as witty and astute as Banksy’s—it raises the question: Is it art or vandalism?

It’s a slippery one to consider, and you find yourself falling into “eye of the beholder” and “I know it when I see it” non-answers.

But then again, maybe it’s a lot simpler than all that. Does it make my community more interesting? Does it make me smile? Does it make me think? If a Banksy piece surreptitiously appeared in my town, would I be pleased it’s there?

Yes. Unequivocally yes.

That, to me, makes it art.

“It’s really long, and it will make you cry” doesn’t sound like much of an endorsement. (It is, and it will.) But Atul Gawande’s article, Letting Go, is a profoundly moving exploration of end-of-life questions that we all need to consider.

When battling a terminal illness, at what point should treatment shift from staving off death to, instead, making the remaining days as rich and fulfilling as possible?

Most terminal patients and their families choose, quite understandably, to continue aggressive (oftentimes experimental) courses of treatment, regardless of how remote the chances of success or how debilitating the side effects. We hope against hope that our loved one will, in effect, win the lottery and become the outlier on the life expectancy charts.

This is human nature. It’s also modern medicine doing precisely what it was intended to: prolong life. But it isn’t a palliative approach (taking into account not only physical but also social, emotional and spiritual conditions), and it eventually comes into conflict with the thing we value most of all, which is to prolong living. Having lucid, heartfelt conversations with the people we love. Being outdoors and feeling the sunshine and breeze on our skin. Going out to dinner with friends. Eating chocolate ice cream.

There’s a common misconception that hospice care hastens death, a waving of the white flag as the patient forgoes further treatment in favor of higher doses of pain relief. In fact, studies show that the opposite may be true.

“In one, researchers followed 4,493 Medicare patients with either terminal cancer or congestive heart failure. They found no difference in survival time between hospice and non-hospice patients with breast cancer, prostate cancer, and colon cancer. Curiously, hospice care seemed to extend survival for some patients; those with pancreatic cancer gained an average of three weeks, those with lung cancer gained six weeks, and those with congestive heart failure gained three months. The lesson seems almost Zen: you live longer only when you stop trying to live longer.”

When patients enter into a hospice program, they begin to confront—together with family, doctors and caregivers—the painful but necessary questions about how to prioritize their time left. They talk about how they want to live. And how they want to die. And it’s the act of talking about it that seems to make all the difference. In a study by the national Coping with Cancer project, two-thirds of terminal-cancer patients had no discussions with their doctors about their goals for end-of-life care. But the third who did:

“[W]ere far less likely to undergo cardiopulmonary resuscitation or be put on a ventilator or end up in an intensive-care unit. Two-thirds enrolled in hospice. These patients suffered less, were physically more capable, and were better able, for a longer period, to interact with others. Moreover, six months after the patients died their family members were much less likely to experience persistent major depression. In other words, people who had substantive discussions with their doctor about their end-of-life preferences were far more likely to die at peace and in control of their situation, and to spare their family anguish.”

Swedish doctors refer to this as the “breakpoint discussion,” a series of conversations that help determine when to “switch from fighting for time to fighting for the other things that people value.”

I confess that I write this as someone who has yet to confront these decisions. It’s easy for me to advocate Gawande’s approach; I’m not faced with the prospect of losing somebody I desperately want to keep with me. But my dad turned 80 this past year, and my mom, who’s struggled with numerous health issues, is only slightly younger. Theory will become reality before too long.

When it does, I hope we have the courage to value living, not just life.

Photo credit: Kevin Rawlings

IT consulting giant Gartner predicts that within the next few years, one in ten of your friends on Facebook and other social networks will be nonhuman social bots—automated profiles capable of mimicking human conversation, created for the purpose of reaching and influencing consumers.

We’re in the early stages of this now, they speculate. The social media presence of most organizations today amounts to a steady drip of outbound communication. But with time and funding, these efforts will grow increasingly sophisticated, as software “learns” how to listen, observe and eventually engage in two-way interactions personalized to each individual.

I suppose this was inevitable. With more and more people retreating behind the walls of the social web, clever and persistent marketers are finding ways of breaching those walls. (Did we think they’d just go away, leaving us to our unfettered friending and liking and poking?)

But before subjecting all of your online colleagues to Turing tests to flush out the bots, consider a simpler precaution, a human version of the electronic captcha screen.

Want to be my Facebook friend? Gladly. As long as we’ve first met in person. A face-to-Facebook encounter.

Photo credit: Don Solo

Here’s the first thing you should know about author-speaker-über motivator Tim Sanders: he’s intensely interested in what you’re doing for other people.

I met Tim at a Fast Company conference in 2002. He would give a keynote address later that afternoon, but this was a small, early-morning breakfast session for members of the magazine’s online community. After his talk—which was brimming with energy and practical wisdom in spite of the early hour—I approached Tim with two copies of Love Is the Killer App for signing.

One was for me, and we had a friendly exchange as he inscribed it. The other was for a young manager I’d recently hired, and this is where Tim absolutely lights up. What’s her name? How long has she been with you? How cool that you’re investing in someone else’s development. Don’t ever stop.

Tim Sanders has been described as Dale Carnegie for the digital age, and it’s an apt comparison. One of the core ideas in Carnegie’s books is that you can change other people’s behavior by changing the way you react to them—in other words, build up yourself by building up the people around you. What Tim does so effectively is take classic principles of positivity and bring them into a modern business context. Carnegie, Peale, et al. meet the networked, social, always-on world.

Remarkable individuals are shaped by remarkable forces, and in his latest book, Today We Are Rich, we meet the force who shaped Sanders. Billye Coffman is the grandmother who raised him as a son and instilled in him the values of generosity, positivity, gratitude and confidence. She is, in effect, a single mom raising Tim while also caring for her elderly mother, coping with the disintegration of her marriage, and facing staggering debt. Her wisdom, safe to say, is hard-won.

“Confidence is rocket fuel,” Billye tells Tim in the midst of her struggles, and he elaborates on this:

“Self-confidence is a purifier of sorts that reduces the chatter in your head and allows you to fall into a state of flow… When you believe you’ll be successful, you achieve a calmness that improves your ability to slow life’s game down and see things more clearly…

“When you think you’ll get an A, the test is an opportunity to shine, not a daunting task. Your relaxed mind is able to add two plus two and come up with four, in contrast to the nervous mind, which can be fraught with basic errors in math, logic, reason, and judgement.”

Messages of positive psychology too often veer into mawkish, homespun, Stuart Smalley territory, but that’s certainly not the case here. Today We Are Rich is deeply grounded—in Billye’s life-tested truisms, for starters, and also in Tim’s simple yet powerful (and challenging) examples of how to put principle into practice. This book is an upbeat life coach merged with a disciplined, rigorous, kick-your-ass personal trainer.

We know from neuroscience that fear has a paralyzing effect on our brains, creating a bunker mentality and shutting off the creativity and adaptability we need to get out of difficult situations. The first remedy for fearfulness, say Billye and Tim, is to “feed your mind good stuff.”

TWAR is a great place to start. Well worth buying a copy.

Better yet, buy a copy for someone else.

Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson, speaking at The Vine in Napa, asked the audience to raise their hands if they considered themselves an artist. In a room of 200 people, maybe a dozen responded.

If you ask a class of kindergarteners the same question, he observed, every hand goes up. So where, along the path from childhood to adulthood, do we start believing the lie that we’re not artistic and creative?

It’s a false belief that’s instilled and reinforced by many different sources—our own selves among them. I’ll allow that most do so unwittingly and with the best of intentions, but it’s a lie nonetheless. And far too many of us buy into it.

It’s fitting (and no coincidence), then, that profound insights into creativity can be found in children’s literature, as I was recently reminded while reading with my daughter.

Ish is the wonderful story of Ramon, a young boy who loves to draw—until a critical remark by his older brother causes him to fixate on all the ways his pictures are not “right.”

Fortunately Ramon has someone who believes in him, a younger sister who helps him see the beauty and meaning in his “ish” drawings. His trees, while not perfect, are tree-ish. His silly feelings are expressed in images that are silly-ish. And when he begins to write, even though he’s not sure if he’s writing poems, he knows they’re poem-ish. And that’s enough.

As the author Peter Reynolds tells it, “Thinking ish-ly allowed his ideas to flow freely.”

Now, of course structure and order and precision matter. I don’t want my dentist coloring outside the lines while performing a root canal. But an over-emphasis on exactitude can be the very thing that bottlenecks our creativity.

Jim Collins has famously pointed out that “good is the enemy of great”—that our willingness to settle for good prevents us from achieving greatness. But so too is perfect the enemy of great.

The next time you find yourself hitting a creative wall, think of Ramon.

Think ish-ly.

Some of the best books I’ve read scored, on average, three stars on Amazon. Likewise some of my favorite movies on Netflix.

It’s not that they got a lot of three-star reviews. Hardly any, in fact. Rather, they got a lot of fives and fours—and also a lot of twos and ones. They were willing to turn off some people in order to thrill others.

Three-star reviews are a product of trying to be acceptable to all, offensive to none. The world is full of three-star books and movies. And restaurants and cars. And businesses and jobs and careers. (There are not, however, a lot of three-star whitewater rafting expeditions. One way to transcend mediocrity is to choose a category that, by definition, can’t plausibly coexist with mediocre.)

One final thought…I don’t believe there are any three-star people. We’re far more unique and nuanced than that. But we do make a lot of three-star choices in the way we apply and express ourselves.

Photo credit: Carst van der Molen

We may find out.

Facebook is relocating its corporate headquarters from upscale Palo Alto to the decidedly more gritty, blue-collar community of Belle Haven in Menlo Park. And their design plan, from the sounds of it, involves knitting the campus (formerly a cloistered compound that housed Sun Microsystems) more closely into the surrounding community—physically and socially.

That process began this past Saturday with an “urban planning hack-a-thon.” Ryan White of Fast Company’s Co.Design participated, and he writes of the experience:

“Some 150 architects, designers, and students forfeited their Saturday and wired in for a 12-hour draft-a-thon that produced a bevy of ideas for connecting the isolated Facebook campus with the surrounding community and adjacent wetlands, as well as suggestions for redeveloping the area with better transit, denser mixed-use housing, and lively retail and business districts. …

“Facebook says it wants to change the fortress vibe and embrace the community. So to kick things off on Saturday, designers took morning bus tours of the adjacent Belle Haven neighborhood — several dozen local residents came along to lend their thoughts — and then broke into Red, Yellow, Blue, and Green teams. Teams of 20 to 40 each rolled up their T-shirts and began cranking out as many hand sketches and digital models as they could before an after-dinner deadline: a show-your-work presentation before a packed assembly of fellow architects, Facebook reps, Menlo Park city officials, and a sprinkling of nearby residents. The day’s mission, as Norman tells it: ‘creating a sense of community’ — or perhaps, more to the point, to create a larger sense of community, one that very conspicuously features Facebook. …

“Designers repeatedly sought ways to transform the area immediately adjoining the Facebook campus into a dynamic ‘hub’ of restaurants, retail and transit, a kind of physical manifestation of the company’s reputation for knitting people together.”

Readers of this blog will have already noted the myriad political, zoning and funding obstacles that stand in Facebook’s way—welcome to our world—and indeed Menlo Park’s mayor is anticipating loud, contentious opposition when the design concepts are presented at the next City Council meeting.

Undoubtedly it will be years before the fullness of the plan is realized, and many of the project’s rough edges (rough in a good sense, as in creating traction, not splinters) will be sanded down along the way. Such is the reality of urban redevelopment.

But when the world’s largest cultivator of digital community turns its attention to the physical realm, we should all be watching their progress with great interest.

And rooting for them to succeed.

[ NB: the rendering above is one of multiple concepts generated at the charrette, not the actual plan. ]

I recently finished—and was thoroughly moved by—Paul Murray’s much acclaimed novel, Skippy Dies.

Many book reviews have already been written, so I won’t duplicate the effort here, other than to comment it’s been a long time since I was so vividly reminded what fourteen felt like—the sheer intensity of being, so easily exhilarated and yet so easily crushed—and how much of that experience we unwittingly carry with us into adulthood.

There’s one passage in particular that seems worth sharing, as it’s resonant with many of the themes we’ve explored throughout past Vine gatherings.

Murray reflects:

“Maybe instead of strings it’s stories things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant superstory, except it got broken up into a jillion different pieces, that’s why no story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into all the other people’s we know, until you’ve got something that to God or whoever might look like a letter or even a whole word.”

Somewhere Margaret Wheatley is nodding her head.

If Catcher in the Rye had a three-way with Lord of the Flies and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, their love child would look a lot like Skippy Dies.

Don’t read it if what you want is feel-good (it’s an Irish tale).

Do read it if what you want is to feel.

Up ’til now, speaker videos from the last three-day Vine conference have been locked away, Rapunzel-style, hidden behind by passwords known only to attendees of the event.

Enough, we say!

If they can Free Willy (four times, including a remake, for crying out loud) then who are we to keep such edifying talks all to ourselves?

Presentations from The Vine conference in San Diego are now unlocked and can be viewed in their entirety here, or by clicking the header in the right-hand column labeled, appropriately enough, Videos.

There you’ll find filmmaker Ric Burns‘ riveting story of New York’s recovery from near financial collapse (the ’70s version, that is, eerily relevant to the meltdown that was playing out right before our eyes)… Charles Leadbeater‘s deep and thoughtful perspective on boulders, pebbles and the power of collaborative creation… the spirited, funny and insightful performance poetry of Rives… the profoundly moving improvisational pieces performed—for the first time ever together—by musicians Michael Jones and Stephanie Winters… and more. (All of the talks are posted, except for the one we no longer speak of. If you were there, you know what I mean.)

One thing to note, the volume runs a little high on these. Adjust your speakers accordingly.

Hope you, and others, enjoy the resource.

Super Bowl XLV between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Green Bay Packers is being heralded as an historic matchup. Pitting two of the league’s most iconic franchises, it’s the first-ever title game in which both teams are more than 75 years old.

I’d add this to the significance: you’re hard-pressed to find two sports franchises anywhere in the country so tightly woven into the culture and identity of their cities and regions. (Although you could make a strong case for the Boston Red Sox or the New Orleans Saints.)

It’s been said that there are two topics that will draw complete strangers into conversation: the weather and a winning local sports team.

“Sports are us,” observes Eric Angevine, “and we are sports.”

For better or for worse.

For the record, I’m predicting…Steelers 27, Packers 24.

Photo credit: melissajonas

Under the category of ‘not exactly the smoothest PR move,’ a Pulte Homes division president was caught removing neighbors’ lawn signs displaying an anti-Pulte message.

It’s a case of childish behavior on both sides, actually, beginning with a neighborhood tizzy over Pulte’s purchase of lots in what was originally planned to be a village of entirely custom-built homes. But custom sales stalled, the developer sold some of the lots to Pulte, and protest signs began appearing in front yards.

(You can certainly see why. I mean—horrors!—those luxury production homes attract all manner of riff-raff. Before you know it, your tony little enclave is a suburban ghetto.)

In an ironic twist to the story, the Pulte prez lives in the very same community—in a custom home, no less.

Think the next HOA meeting will be a little dicey?

This idea has been advanced by many others, much more eloquently than I will here, but it still bears repeating.

People don’t buy square footage. Or floorplans or elevations or parks or schools or real estate values. (And they certainly don’t think of homes as “units.” Can we strike that from our industry’s vocabulary?) Those things are the rational factors we cite to justify an emotional decision we’ve already made.

We buy a home because of what it helps us become. A safer neighborhood (perceived or real) helps a mom or dad feel like a better parent. A LEED-certified building near transit helps the environmentally conscious feel redeemed for reducing their carbon footprint. A community designed around urban farming helps a foodie feel affirmed about her localvore lifestyle, and gives her another means of telling that story to others.

As our friends at Strada are fond of saying, “This is not a toaster.” I don’t want to hear how much extra storage space I’ll get. I want to be part of something that I can believe in. (And that goes beyond the product, by the way. YOU have to embody that something too.)

The auto industry is really good at creating badges of identity—and their raw materials are steel and rubber.

Why can’t we, working with wood and glass and stone and landscaping, do even better?

NB: A framed print of Hugh’s cartoon above hangs in my home office. You can get one here if you’re so inclined.

The New York Times Magazine has a fascinating article about Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist who set out to study cities—specifically, whether there might be fundamental laws governing their patterns and growth.

“We spend all this time thinking about cities in terms of their local details, their restaurants and museums and weather,” West says. “I had this hunch that there was something more, that every city was also shaped by a set of hidden laws.”

As it turns out, apparently they are. The article elaborates:

“After two years of analysis, West and Bettencourt discovered that all of these urban variables could be described by a few exquisitely simple equations. For example, if they know the population of a metropolitan area in a given country, they can estimate, with approximately 85 percent accuracy, its average income and the dimensions of its sewer system. These are the laws, they say, that automatically emerge whenever people ‘agglomerate,’ cramming themselves into apartment buildings and subway cars. It doesn’t matter if the place is Manhattan or Manhattan, Kan.: the urban patterns remain the same.” (Emphasis added.)

Without giving away too much of the article, West’s findings reveal (in his interpretation, debated by others) a bit of an urban Gordian knot: The denser we are, the more innovative and productive we become. The more we innovate and produce, the more resources we consume, and the harder it becomes to sustain that growth. Unless, of course, we innovate our way to new resources.

Cities, West concludes, may be the only solution to the problem of cities.

(Click for full-size images)

I’m thinking the placement was intentional. A vicious cycle of customers.

Your move. Be sure to lift with your legs, not your back.

Dreams can be had for 99 cents. But the cheap, shitty trinkets that end up in landfills—those will set you back a dollar or more.

The Social Web, version 0.0.

The weather’s always nice, your marriage will be happier, your kids will never need braces, and your golf handicap will drop to single digits.

Even in sidewalk graffiti, there’s always an idealist. And always a cynic.

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NB: All photos posted through a Creative Commons license, with thanks to the creativity and generosity of the artists who freely shared them.

The New York Times Magazine features an article that’s perhaps serendipitous—in that it’s a perfect lead-in to next week’s Vine salon—or perhaps simply indicative of how prominent the food-as-community movement is becoming.

Christine Muhlke set out to write a column about farming and food artisans. Along the way, she discovered that it’s really a story about community.

In interview after interview, food producers and enthusiasts inevitably described their passion, their craft and their livelihood in relationship to the larger network around them. As one farmers’ market baker tells her, “People hand me money all day and tell me they love what we do, so it’s not really work at that point, it’s my social life.”

But this is not just the rarefied territory of university towns, foodie blogs and Michael Pollan book clubs. What’s most exciting and consequential, in my opinion, is the potential for farming and food to help repair and restore broken neighborhoods.

Muhlke writes:

The strongest example of a food community I’ve seen was in Detroit, where a vibrant farming scene has sprung up literally from the ashes. In a neighborhood that is a true food desert — there are no national chain grocery stores within city limits; more than 90 percent of food providers are places like convenience and liquor stores — I watched young men and old women socialize while picking collard greens in abandoned lots brought back to life by the Urban Farming organization. There was no fence, no supervision, no charge. Some of these people — neighbors — haven’t spoken to each other since the 1967 riots, the Urban Farming organizer Michael Travis told me as we watched.

“The new food movement is still labeled as Do It Yourself,” she observes, “but it’s really Do It Ourselves.”

NB: The Vine, in collaboration with Hart Howerton, will host a salon on innovative ways of integrating new development with existing agriculture (enhancing the value of both) on October 28th in Fairfield, CA. A limited number of seats are still available. Details are here.