Hiding in Plain Sight

In retrospect, we should have seen it coming. All of it. The problem is the same thing that's always the problem: the future is hiding in plain sight.
Everybody knew that an obscure Republican state legislator couldn't get elected from Massachusetts to the U.S. Senate--not to Ted Kennedy's old seat.
Everybody knew that Toyota is synonymous with quality--there's now way Toyota would need to make a massive recall.
Everybody knew that the Peyton Manning is one of the greatest quarterbacks ever to play football--if not the greatest. No way the Colts don't win the Super Bowl.
(Add your own "everybody knows" here.)
But that's not the way it works. The Bay State voters were feeling rambunctious about the economy, Martha Coakley ran a bad campaign, and the future is hiding in plain sight.
Toyota rushes to overtake GM as the world's largest car company, and when a mistake gets into its assembly line process, its efficiency works against it instead of for it, and 8 million cars later, the future is hiding in plain sight.
And the Super Bowl? Who dat!
Maybe it's just human nature: we write the narrative we expect to see, and having written it, no longer expect to see it but begin to believe that it's the only possible narrative.
Or maybe we just don't want to think about the unthinkable. Focus on what you can imagine and all those other things won't happen, can't happen.
But every company needs one; every startup requires one; every political office should have one; every newspaper and blog ought to go get one right away: someone whose job it is to think the unthinkable, to ask the "what if?" question, to play the role of the in-house skeptic. Because that thing that's hiding in plain sight? There's a name for it: we call it "reality."

Got Art?

I opened up my copy of the New York Times yesterday, and there was the Arts section!
What was remarkable about that? Well, if the NYT were America's public schools, there wouldn't be an Arts section--it would have been eliminated long ago because of budget constraints. But there it was, a whole separate section, devoted just to the arts. Remarkable!
A cynic would say that it's still there because there's advertising to support it. But the Times has eliminated a whole variety of offerings, even those where there's arguably advertising support. So something else is going on here.
That something else is the essential quality of art to our lives.
Take a look around whatever room you're sitting in right now. What do you see? Any paintings, photographs, pieces of pottery, prints? How about a CD collection or DVDs? Now imagine your room with all those artistic expressions removed--and what are you left with? Pretty bland, pretty boring, pretty empty. If Jung was right, and the house is a symbol for ourselves, there's a reason why we bring art into our homes. It makes all the difference in the world. It turns a house into a home, it turns an existence into a life.
So put a little life into your life: get art!
And for a chance to be part of a "slow art day" go to: http://showsupport.typepad.com/odyssey/art-watch/

Rule #53: It's never the thing itself.

At the end of a meal at a Chinese restaurant, along with the check they present you with a fortune cookie. But it's not the cookie you're interested in--it's the little slip of paper inside. It's not the cookie, it's the fortune. But if they just presented you a slip of paper minus the cookie, that wouldn't work either. You need the cookie wrapped around the fortune so you can pretend that you're eating a cookie for dessert, when what you're really doing is reading a fortune for dessert.
In the world of script writing, they have a term for "the thing itself." They call it writing "on the nose." It's when you have your character announce to the audience exactly what he or she is feeling--the actual thing itself--rather than wrapping the feeling in a piece of behavior that enacts what's really going on inside. It's delivering the cookie, without the fortune.
This line of thinking comes up because this morning I was talking with the always-insightful Betsy Burroughs about the world of social entrepreneurship--and why even the term "social entrepreneurship" is so often a big turn-off. The problem is, it's all cookie, not fortune. It's so on the nose, it makes most people want to thumb their nose.
But what's at the heart of social entrepreneurship--the fortune in the middle--is the promise of a way of shaping the future. It's the opportunity for really smart, creative people to combine their entrepreneurial business skills, their technological smarts, their buiness model creativity with something that matters, something that's bigger than just making more money. It's money, but it's money plus meaning.
That's the excitement that's hidden inside the boring terminology of "social entrepreneurship."
It's a lesson I learned back in the early days of Fast Company magazine: the dirty little secret about Fast Company was, it wasn't a business magazine. Not really. Not in the old fashioned way. The business magazine part was the cookie, the delivery mechanism that made the real product legitimate. The real product? That was a new conversation about the future, about how individuals could make a difference by tapping into the best business has to offer.
The truth is, it's never the thing itself. It's always what's tucked inside.
So ask yourself: What is it that's tucked inside your business? What's the fortune around which you've wrapped your cookie?

Finding Your Voice

Here's a thought about a candidate for Rule #53: If you want to find your own voice, it helps if you start singing! Take my friend Todd Sattersten, for example. (http://www.toddsattersten.com/) Brilliant guy. Incredible synthetic mind. Great capacity to read and understand and then re-contextualize all kinds of business ideas. But up until recently he's been working as a voice coach (it's a metaphor--he's been an editor and promoter of other people's writing) and not as a singer of his own material. Then this week, he releases a unique e-book, his own reflections on margins, prices, value, business models. It goes viral. He gets tons of feedback. Hears from people all over the web. A star is born!
What's the lesson? Sing your own song. (Yes, it's right and good and worthy to be generous, no question. And to pay your dues by standing in the wings til you're ready.) But most of us are ready before we know we're ready. So start singing--or writing, dancing, designing, creating. Get your own ideas, words, images, creations out on stage. See what the world thinks. Then do it again.
If you want to find your own voice, you have to start singing--sooner or later.
Way to go, Todd!

Apologies to One and All . . .

. . . for my prolonged absence from my own blog! Nothing worse than an absentee landlord.
Now, where were we?
Since last we spoke, I've been kind of busy. An amazing trip to Germany to spend a couple of days with Muhammad Yunus and a full complement of Grameen-related enterprises--60 companies in all--eager to learn more about the concept of social business. (And then, not long ago, I got a sneak peak at Dr. Yunus' next book that goes deeply into his idea for social businesses). From there to India for a 3 week exploration of Southern India--my first trip to that amazing country. In 3 weeks you get to see both a little and a lot. I got to see some fascinating social enterprises, such as FabIndia, a brilliant company that produces great Indian clothing and supports the poor and talented villagers who are working to produce the material for the clothing. But I came home knowing that 3 weeks only scratches the surface of a country like India. I made it to New York for FrED--the maiden voyage of a creative conference on executive development and leadership for an era characterized by VUCA (tip of the hat to Bob Johansen): Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity. Later, I was back in NYC for a series of meetings with old and dear and brilliant friends like Seth Godin (congrats on the new book, Linchpin--another sparkling contribution to creative thinking and individual purpose) and Steve Rosenbaum (pushing the frontiers of the web and video). Plus a dinner with Roger Black, who is always thinking new thoughts about design. Then out to San Francisco for meetings on the next FrED, a chance to tour Lick-Wilmerding, one of America's most amazing schools led by the charismatic Al Adams, and stimulating conversations with some of the Bay Areas most intriguing thinkers on strategy, design, and social change.
But my real mission: working on a business plan for the long-awaited social entrepreneurship project that has gone by various code names: Blue Letter and The Turnaround Society.
Stay tuned for more blogs--comments on the news, updates on Rules of Thumb (the Japanese version is about to make its premiere thanks to Ichi), and the very much work in progress!

David Carr In the Breakdown Lane

If you read David Carr in the NYT this morning, you were treated to a snarky interpretation of what's wrong with business journalism today. According to Carr, the "collapse" of business journalism has been caused by one simple development: business isn't heroic any more. The way Carr sees it, business journalism is about larger-than-life heroes of capitalism making huge financial bets that result in enormous personal gains. Inspired by glossy coverage of epic corporate chiefs, readers flock to business magazines, hoping to learn how to do what their out-sized heroes have done.
But Carr's column tells us less what is really wrong with business journalism and more about what's wrong with too much time spent in New York, drinking the same kool-aid as every other journalist in Gotham. When everybody sees it the same way, you can be sure that nobody really sees what's going on.
There's a reason why the magazines that Carr writes about have lost their way--and it isn't because business is any less interesting, dynamic, or important than it was 5 or 10 or even 2 years ago. Let's go through the failures and then talk about some of the successes and see what we learn.
Why did BusinessWeek get sold for $2 million? Because the idea of a weekly news magazine that thinks its job is to report "news" is preposterous on the face of it. That said, BusinessWeek is far from worthless: it has a terrific web site and with serious re-work, could be converted into a valuable property. But not if it thinks its in the news business.
What happened to Portfolio, the $40 million business bust launched and then killed by Conde Nast? Early in Portfolio's development, I asked one of its top people what the mission of the magazine was--what was its definition of victory? The answer I got was telling: "This is Conde Nast," I was told. "The mission of the magazine is to make money." And how does that relate to the reader? And to why a reader should bother to subscribe?
What about Fortune? In 1929, when Fortune was launched, it was a magazine of business sociology, telling the story of the growth of the new-to-the-world American corporation. Eighty years later, Fortune has lost its editorial purpose. In the 1980s and 1990s Fortune wrote about Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, Jack Welch. It had covers devoted to "the 10 toughest bosses in business," as if being tough were a postive definition of leadership. In the early 2000s, Fortune picked Enron as America's most innovative company--several years in a row! This is a magazine that needs to re-think, not its frequency, but its way of writing about business and the service it provides its readers.
Now let's look at The Economist, a publication that is writing about business, writing about the ideas behind business, writing about the changes going on in business--a publication pointedly ignored by David Carr. Why is The Economist doing so well? Because it has a clear idea of its mission. It understands what it does for its readers. It presents, not news, but a lens on the news. It offers a seasoned, experienced, intelligent eye on business, economics, and the mixture of the two. It has no by-lined articles. But it has a very consistent editorial voice--a slightly right-of-center British economist's interpretation not only of what is news-worthy, but also what the news actually means.
And what of my old magazine, Fast Company? It has never been guilty of the description offered by Carr. From the beginning, Fast Company has focused on a different idea of what is important about business. When Bill Taylor and I started the magazine, we went so far as to say, "We're not a magazine--we're a movement." What did that mean? It meant that we had an agenda for business--a different definition of leadership, a different idea of how business could and should be done. We didn't focus on the same old CEOs--we wrote about "people before they're famous, ideas before they're safe." That's still what Fast Company writes about: innovation, change, new ideas, best practices, new thinking, and new business models.
Business magazines aren't in trouble because business is less interesting than before the big crash.
Business magazines are in trouble because the crash revealed a fundamental fault that existed before the crash: Most of them had lost their reason for existing. They no longer understood what their mission was; or their mission had lost its relevance and they had failed to adapt.
But business today is more, not less, important than ever. It needs smart, thoughtful journalists who can wrestle, not with celebrities and heroes, as Carr suggests, but with new ideas and fresh ways of creating value.
If David Carr doesn't understand this fundamental point, he'd do well to talk with his colleague at the Times, Joe Nocera, who not only understands what business journalism is about--he practices it with every column he writes.

Rule #5 Change Is a Math Formula

Sorry for the long stretch between blogs! I've been traveling non-stop since my last posting--and if it weren't for a piece on the front page of today's New York Times on zero-waste, I would have waited until I got back to Santa Fe on Friday to weigh in with a report of an amazing month-plus of travel!
What did the Times report?
Here's the key paragraph about a news story describing the rise of the zero-waste movement, a movement that is replacing old-fashioned recycling with an even more ambitious approach that eliminates waste. The Times' Leslie Kaufman writes, "Though born of idealism, the zero-waste philosophy is now propelled by sobering realities, like the growing difficulty of securing permits for new landfills and an awareness that organic decay in landfills releases methane that helps warm the earth's atmosphere."
Change is a math formula! Change happens when the cost of the status quo is greater than the risk of change. When it comes to the corporate costs of doing business and the social costs of dealing with waste, economic pragmatism is forcing real change. It is cheaper and more reasonable to eliminate waste than to pay the rising costs of burying it or even of trying to recycle it.
Here's the thing: most innovators want to focus on coming up with cool ideas that make risk look more attractive because the new solutions are so appealing.
But it turns out that it's ultimately more effective to drive up the cost of the status quo--if you want to be a change agent, learn how to make the real economics of existing systems become more transparent! Showcase the real costs of doing business the way we've done business for years! When the cost of the status quo goes up, the risk of change looks a lot more attractive!