BIF10 Program Book

a letter from

the chief Ten years, three hundred and twenty storytellers, five thousand participants, and millions of random collisions of unusual suspects, and all in the blink of an eye. I’m grateful, humbled, blessed and blown away by what we have accomplished together.

We made ourselves vulnerable. We connected in ways none of us imagined possible. We checked our egos at the door. We inspired each other to push beyond our limits.

We laughed and we cried together. We nudged each other to the edge where the cool stuff happens. We reinforced a sense of optimism to a fault. We helped each other get better faster. We realized we are not alone. We are living the transition from push to pull. We demonstrated we are better together. We committed to going from tweaks to transformation. We wear our silo-busting badges proudly.

We learned that innovation is about so much more than technology. We got below the buzzwords. We done good!

We’re just getting started.

If you’re new to the community and conversation, don’t worry. Come on in, the water is fine! That’s the thing. There are an infinite number of unusual suspects to collide with and adjacent possibilities to explore. There’s room for everyone and all capabilities in our transformation sandbox. You are welcome and valued here.

I can’t believe it’s been ten years. How did that happen?

Let’s face it, other than my family I have never done anything for ten years! That’s because I manage my life and career to a very simple concept. I only do things that keep me on a steep learning curve. That’s where I do my best work. If the curve flattens, I’m out.

Thanks to all of you, every day of the last ten years including today is like the first day of school, complete with butterflies and the wonderment that comes from

exploring new horizons. I am forever grateful. I feel blessed to have been bombarded with a ten-year meteor shower of constant random collisions. It has finally sunk in to this dinosaur’s thick skull that the best learning curve is one that we scratch and claw our way up together. The BIF community shares learning curves because we know they’re mutually reinforcing. Our learning curves will be steeper, more fulfilling and impactful only when we pay it forward by learning with and from each other. At BIF we go up learning curves together. Innovation is a team sport.

The last chromosome in our BIF Genome states that A Decade Is An Awfully Short Time To Waste. I can honestly say that the BIF community hasn’t wasted the last ten years.

We have put ourselves in position collectively to make a real difference at the scale of the social system challenges we face. The ante goes up in our next decade together.

We face it with optimism, courage, confidence and a purposeful network poised for greatness. Less push, more pull. Together we are creating the future. I’m game if you are. Welcome to BIF10.

what does

bif do?

We work with individuals, organizations, and communities who believe that business model innovation is on the critical path to transforming our most important social systems. We help leaders design and test new business models in the real world.

Individuals and organizations that are good at business model innovation share a common set of characteristics. We call it The BIF Genome. Are you wired the same way?

CONNECT

INSPIRE

TRANSFORM

how does

bif do it?

We believe that business model innovation is on the critical path to transforming our important social systems including education, health care, and government. Tweaking our existing models and systems won’t work. We need to imagine, prototype, and test new models and systems in the real world.

Systems Thinking

Storytelling

We must work across systems, avoiding the tendency to introduce point solutions. Systems are networks of business models that have evolved into cooperation. This is how we align incentives to drive behavioral change.

We use stories to pull people into transformation, asking them to cocreate the narrative as it unfolds.

Through stories, we help leaders see the world differently and create the will to invest in new opportunities.

Gold in the Grey Space

Experimentation

We need to think and act horizontally.

The tall walls between institutions and people limit possibilities. We can design powerful models by accessing existing capabilities across silos and disciplines, combining them in new and different ways.

We must move faster from the whiteboard to the real world, creating tangible versions of our hypotheses that people can experience. Through a portfolio of rapid experiments that test multiple paths simultaneously, we can accelerate learning and development.

Co-Creation

Human-Centered

We want to engage people in the co-creation of new models, systems, and solutions. We don’t just design for users, we design with them. From patient engagement to studentcentered learning, we believe cocreation generates more relevant and engaging models.

We need to shift our lenses and develop a rich understanding of the people we serve. By understanding their experience, behaviors, and motivations, we can identify the jobs they need done and imagine wholly new opportunities to serve them.

experience

labs BIF’s real-world Experience Labs are where the social good happens. Here, we imagine, design, and test transformative business models in complex social systems. Our goal is to help people live meaningful, healthy, and productive lives.

Student Experience Lab

Designing experiences for future generations of learners The BIF Student Experience Lab designs, prototypes, and shares education models that empower 21st century students.

Patient Experience Lab

Reimagining the path to health and wellness across generations The BIF Patient Experience Lab designs transformative business models that enable healthy, productive lives.

Citizen Experience Lab

Unleashing citizen power for community transformation The BIF Citizen Experience Lab enables citizens to co-create the future of their communities.

this year

at bif Announced Teachers Design Unveiled Masterclass Special for Education (TD4Ed)//Bill and Report: Entrepreneurs of All Melinda Gates Foundation Kinds//Babson University

SEPT, 2013 Launched Phase 2 of work, Connected Aging Experience // Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

OCT, 2013 Unveiled My USU Lumina Foundation

NOV, 2013 Announced partnership to improve prenatal health and reduce preterm births//Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center First trial of Community Critiques, for Connected Aging Experience

Announced StudentsDesign for Education (SD4E) // RI Board of Education and Youth in Action

DEC, 2013 Unveiled Phase 2 of Connected Aging Experience//Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

JAN, 2014 Announced partnership for Complete Florida// University of West Florida

mar, 2014 Welcomed Deb Mills-Scofield, Bruce Linton, and Irwin Kula to the BIF Board of Directors

apr, 2014 Unveiled Complete Florida// University of West Florida

may, 2014

Unveiled Connected Aging Experience// Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Announced partnership for SD4E with the Nellie Mae Foundation

june, 2014

Held second trial of Community Critiques for TD4Ed

Welcomed TD4Ed teachers to BIF present their ideas Unveiled TD4ED online

ACT and BIF begin work to inspire high school transitions.

introducing bif’s business model

bootcamp These days business models are more susceptible to outside disruption than they’ve ever been, and doing R&D on new business models is tough.

We can help. Our new Business Model Bootcamp is a two-day, customized, experiential workshop for leadership teams. We’re offering the Bootcamp for existing leadership teams because it’s existing businesses that have the hardest time conceiving of business models other than the one they currently have, let alone doing the real-world testing and prototyping required to create new business models.

For more information about BIF Membership, contact Eli Stefanski, BIF’s Chief Market Maker, at estefanski@businessinnovationfactory.com or @elithechef

bif’s business model design process

get

involved Are you an insatiable optimist who sees opportunity everywhere?

Are you constantly in search of a better way? So are we.

How do individuals engage with BIF? BIF offers inspiring opportunities, such as our Collaborative Innovation Summit and Community Critiques, that help individuals scale the business model innovation learning curve.

How do organizations engage with BIF? Organizations engage deeply with BIF, benefiting from our R&D labs for new business models, our Collaborative Innovation Summit, our methodologies, and our insights.

For more information about BIF Membership, contact Eli Stefanski, BIF’s Chief Market Maker, at estefanski@businessinnovationfactory.com or @elithechef

our

members

bif2015 september 16-17, 2015 providence, ri

Register before January 1st, 2015, for the 2014 discount — 25% off tickets!

To register at the discounted rate, visit www.businessinnovationfactory.com/bif2015 For more information about #BIF2015, contact Renee Hopkins, BIF’s Community Engagement Manager, at renee@businessinnovationfactory.com or @TheBIF

The summit conversation continues... be a part of it!

vala

afshar getting in the game of social media Vala Afshar became an expert in social connectivity back in 1980 when he was ten years old. He had just arrived in this country with his mother and sister after fleeing civil unrest in Iran. His father stayed behind for four years, in hiding, until he could gain political asylum in the U.S. The departure from Iran was so abrupt that ten-year-old Vala had no time to understand American culture before he was immersed in it. He was an upper-middle class boy with a private school education who suddenly found himself living in a multi-family dwelling and navigating the Boston-area public school system.

He spoke two sentences of English, and on the first day of fifth grade, he showed up wearing a three-piece suit.

“I’m in a class, and I have no idea what anyone is saying,” Afshar recalls. “I look totally different, I’m dressed differently. And the hostage crisis is happening at the same time. There was a lot of animosity about what was taking place on the other side of the world.”

He was two years ahead of his peers in math, but little else

made sense to him at school. In Iran, he read from right to left. Here, even the letters were different. He watched TV shows at night to learn English and lose his accent.

For someone who was the captain of the soccer team back home, Afshar felt the most out of sync in gym class, where the big sport involved a strange-looking orange ball and a rim ten feet in the air. He was continually picked last for every team, and “not last out of just the boys,” he notes.

“I couldn’t believe how the pendulum had swung,” he says.

“Even though it was a completely new sport to me, I just didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t good at it.”

His mother bought him a basketball, and he practiced endlessly on a court near his home until he had mastered dribbling, shooting, and passing. By seventh grade, he was the captain of the basketball team. In sophomore year of high school, he earned his varsity letter.

“Basketball helped bridge the gap,” he says. “When I was on the court, I didn’t have to worry about where I came from, that I didn’t speak the language, or what I wore.”

At a young age, Afshar identified basketball as a medium into an unfamiliar culture. He learned a key lesson off the court, too, from kids who sat with him at lunch and took a kindly interest in him: “That level of collaboration with no agenda is something that I subconsciously appreciate.”

This attitude of simple generosity sits at the core of Afshar’s business sensibilities today. He has a natural inclination to share, a quality that serves him well as the CMO of the software-defined networking company Extreme Networks. He has become a noted expert on the way social media optimizes business and user experience.

social connection is pretty much the same: Learn to play the game. “As long as you’re interested, over time you may become interesting.”

Vala is CMO, Extreme Networks www.extremenetworks.com @valaafshar

With a weekly podcast, a popular Huff Post blog, and a book, The Pursuit of Social Business Excellence, Afshar is the current face of the “social first” movement. Over 35,000 Twitter followers flock to his curated stream of insights about business and human behavior.

19

His rules are simple: Share. Be generous. Be clear about who you are and where you’re going.

“I think remarkable people are visible,” Afshar says. Being accessible builds trust in a “mobile socialrevolution that has created an attention deficit” in our culture. He loves the “small town” feel of a company that puts a voice behind its brand, one that humanizes business by leveraging the social.

“I feel better when I know I’m traveling with an airline and they took the time and effort to Tweet at me, ‘Have a safe flight.’” Failing to respond to social media, he says, is like not responding to email or the telephone. “I’m amazed at how many businesses are not going where the conversation is.”

Learning basketball was Afshar’s way of going where the conversation was in the fifth grade. Today, his strategy for

camille

BEATTY from the north carolina mountains, a new breed of robots emerges Surrounded by the peaceful, sunny mountains of Asheville, N.C., 14-year-old Camille Beatty has plenty of freedom to move around and to think. A few years ago, she felt a fervent curiosity about the way gadgets worked in her house, so she reached through the Internet and learned how to make things Today, she is a sought-after builder of robots, a passion she “can’t give up.” She builds the robots with her father, Robert, and her 12-year-old sister, Genevieve, whose soldering expertise helps put them in motion. Baby sister Elizabeth likes to play with their creations, and Camille’s mother, Jennifer, is an artist who helps out in the workshop.

As they worked together to learn the details of building robots, Camille and her dad set up a tech blog called www.beatty-robotics.com to share their projects with their friends and fellow makers. The family hobbyist enterprise became a business in demand last year after the New York Hall of Science asked them to build a remote-controlled replica of the Mars Rover for an interactive display. As other museums around the world commission Beatty Robotics to build similar pieces, they are gaining a name for themselves. “We have Popular Science and Make

magazine all over our house because we’re robot people,” Camille says. “Then all of a sudden to be in them is amazing. It’s like a dream.”

The Beattys are busy, but Camille stays very much on an even-keel. She attends private school, where she enjoys science and language arts. After school, she works on her robots, but her interests are diverse. “I like to be outside,” she says, especially when it is “nicely breezy.” Depending on the weather, she swims, goes horseback riding, or hikes in the mountains that are “all over, 360.”

In her jaunts, she studies animals, which are “made to survive in this world,” and envisions ways to perfect her robots. “I look at how nature and animals work together, and I get ideas off of that,” she says. Many of the Beatty robots have “expressions”—eyes and other endearing animal-like features.

Camille spends up to two hours a day with her horses, training for dressage competitions, which she describes as “a competitive performance where horse and human move as one.” She is a skilled photographer and has her own Etsy business, making horsetail bracelets for people who want a memento of a beloved animal. She practices piano

because it is the one thing her parents require, although she admits, “I don’t really like the piano very much.”

She has an Instagram focused on horses, but no Facebook and no TV. She is in bed by 10:30, at the latest. “I’m really conscientious about sleep,” she notes. Before nodding off, she reads. Her current favorite titles include The Fault in Our Stars, The Hunger Games, and Divergent.

Camille gets more out of a day than most people get out of a month, but her routine is loose. “I’m pretty good about my time and I’m not that much of a procrastinator, so homework doesn’t have to be at a certain structured time.”

She works when she feels drawn to it, whenever that might be. Sitting on a stool in her workshop with safety goggles on, drilling holes through metal, she might be wearing a fancy dress, riding clothes, or her pajamas, depending on what she was doing when the machining mood struck her.

White House. In a speech to the nation on the burgeoning American Maker Movement, the President held up the two enterprising sisters as a shining example of the American Dream in action. He quipped a line from the Beattys’ website: “Who needs a paper route when you can start a robotics company?” And then added, “But the Beattys say one of the main things they’ve learned over the last few years isn’t about power tools or engineering or electronics. What they’ve learned is that, ‘If you can imagine it, then you can do it -- whatever it is.’ And that’s a pretty good motto for America. ”While her parents have produced this open, seemingly limitless environment where their daughter is flourishing, Camille has a spark exclusively her own: “Robotics is a passion of mine, and a passion is going through to the end.”

Camille is a Robotocist, Beatty Robotics www.beatty-robotics.com 21

“Most of the time, there’s not a lot of pressure,” she says about her work schedule. “If we’re hungry or thirsty or sick and tired of doing this at the moment, we really don’t have to. If we run into a difficult problem, then we take a step back and find the next day that, Oh, my gosh—the thing we were trying to figure out was there all the time.”

Recently, all Beatty Robotics operations were moved from a dark, cold basement room made of cinder blocks to a converted guest house garage where there is ample room to store and organize the millions of parts that go into the robots. There are areas for machining metal, soldering, photography and display.

Camille speaks effusively about the light, the air, the friendliness and sense of “ease” swirling around the new space.

This summer, Camille and her sister were invited by President Obama to demonstrate their robots at the

angela

BLANCHARD you can’t tweet change There’s no time in this world to wait for policy to change or for our systems to reconfigure, especially when work needs to get done. And certainly not in Houston, where community activist Angela Blanchard has dispensed with the tired exercise of over-analyzing neighborhood problems before trying to fix them.

“We’re feeling free to show up, saying what we mean to say, speaking about people the way we really see them, breaking free of the mold of talking about problems,” she says. “We can be more and more, everyday, ourselves, putting our beliefs about people on stage, instead of behind the curtain.”

“You can’t build on broken,” Blanchard says. You have to build upon what works — upon the existing assets and aspirations of the community.

As the president and CEO of Neighborhood Centers Inc., the largest charitable organization in the state of Texas, Blanchard chooses not to spend her life reforming ponderous systems. Instead, she’s working with them, taking what they produce and making it work.

Community development is a movement. Blanchard’s appreciative approach and asset-based model to community transformation is integrated throughout the organization’s culture, not just at the community level.

“Change begins with the first new question,” she says.

When you focus on the aspirations and assets of an individual, you can create innovative and tailored solutions that are relevant to the community. “We grow with the region,” Angela says.

Blanchard says Neighborhood Centers has been experiencing a “giant awakening” because it’s doing exactly the work that should be done to address poverty and connect people to opportunity in Houston, even when that means putting things together in ways that aren’t typical.

After more than 100 years of operation, Neighborhood Centers has become a $260 million organization with 1,200 staff members, 7,000 volunteers and 70 service sites that reach more than 528,000 people in the Houston region every year. Yet, it manages to stay directly connected to the communities and people it serves.

“We’ve learned to be big where it matters and small where it counts.”

It’s a hunger for realized potential, she says. “I will spend the rest of my life on those hungry people.”

The key to transformation is that it must be authentic. We live in an era that is about being scalable and replicable.

Community activists from other regions who want to copy the successes of Neighborhood Centers often fail to see that transformation cannot be transplanted.

Angela is President & CEO, Neighborhood Centers, Inc. www.neighborhood-centers.org @cajunangela

The transferable part of Neighborhood Centers’ success lies in understanding its philosophy and the “figure it out” attitude behind it, Blanchard says: “We do what we can, where we are, with what we have right now.” That’s the hard part, the place where most people give up because they want the quick fix, the formula that is easily duplicated. But, “you can’t tweet change,” she says. “You actually have to do work.”

Despite Neighborhood Centers’ many achievements, there are naysayers who insist that it isn’t really working.

The criticisms are inconsistent, and to Blanchard, they amount to one thing: people don’t accept the fact that innovation can happen at the neighborhood level. “Our work matters — it works and it matters.”

It’s the spirit of the people in that place that keeps Neighborhood Centers moving forward. “The human spirit is not extinguishable,” Blanchard says.

“I remember being a young person living in Beaumont, Texas, watching the train go by and thinking about where it came from and wondering where it was going, and thinking about how I could get on it.”

The pain of poverty has a dimension that goes beyond money, she says. “People want to know, Is there a place for me in the world, and will I get to do anything?”

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david

BOLINSKY from crayons to pixels, telling the story of life David Bolinsky began translating the processes of life into art when he was four years old. His father used to bring him home long sheets of butcher paper, and he would lie on the floor drawing panoramas of the dinosaurs and volcanoes that had captivated him in the Walt Disney film Fantasia.

“Despite everybody’s love of the hippos doing ballet, I was really fascinated by the dinosaur piece,” Bolinsky says of the film.

This early impulse to depict the story of life on the planet was only the beginning of Bolinsky’s career as a medical illustrator. Bolinsky’s medium is now digital and his subject has become the “metropolis” of the cell, that “extraordinarily complicated entity with hundreds of thousands of working parts that have to perform flawlessly over and over and over again.”

Bolinsky has been drawing since he was old enough to pick up an instrument. His father, a sculptor and art historian, nurtured that nascent passion by exposing his son to the materials and subjects that might inspire him. He remembers spending many hours in his father’s studio at the Buffalo State University, where he played with clay and plaster or drew from life models.

When Bolinsky was 10, his family traveled through Europe, stopping at one point in southern France to see the Paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux. He was astounded.

“They were so exquisite, so evocative, that they’ve stayed with me my whole life,” he says. “The experience enhanced my intention to transfer my own observations of life to whatever medium I was working in.”

Bolinsky began to consider more purposeful applications of his art when he got to high school and his advanced biology teacher noticed that he was always drawing interesting sketches in the margins of his notes. “He pulled me aside and told me, ‘You can earn a living drawing pictures for science’.” He first experimented with animation using a simple flipbook at age four, and later evolved to stop-motion using 8mm film.

Around that time, Bolinsky’s family doctor introduced him to the genre of medical illustration, where he saw his twin interests in science and art perfectly fused: “At this point, everything came together for me. I could be doing science drawing, but doing it in medicine.”

At the age of 16, he had decided to become a medical illustrator.

Years later, after earning a degree in medical illustration and studying anatomy and medicine, Bolinsky began to think that his long-time dream of one day using computer technology to produce the animations that he had always been doing by hand was finally possible. In 1984, he left his job as senior medical Illustrator at Yale University to found the first digital medical animation company in the world. “There was nobody else doing it,” he says. “Once the technology became available, it was no secret in the digital community that animation would someday be a tour de force, but in the medical community, it was less evident.”

inundated younger generation has lost the ability to tell stories, Bolinsky sees just the opposite. He harkens back to the cave paintings of Lascaux, and remains convinced that none of our storytelling ability is ever lost — “it is just enhanced with each new medium that comes along.”

David is Founder and Creative Director, e*mersion www.e-mersionstudio.com @emersionist

Bolinsky has come a long way since the days when he was sprawled on the floor, coloring dinosaurs on butcher paper.

Now, as he tells the story of “The Inner Life of the Cell,” he is grateful for the technology that has dramatically advanced the way we express and comprehend knowledge.

The great migration of information into visual media in the past three decades has made the general population more visually sophisticated, capable of processing complex information to an unprecedented degree, according to Bolinsky.

“The visual vocabulary that people have begun to absorb and utilize as second nature today, as learned from games and special effects in everything from 30-second ads to feature films, really enables the science community to have an access port to people that simply did not exist 20 or 30 years ago,” he says.

This progression of human understanding based on moving images is especially significant for medical illustrators, according to Bolinsky, because there are “complex timeand-motion-dependent concepts with lots and lots of moving parts” that would be almost impossible to convey through text or static images alone.

So, while some “gray hairs” lament that the visually

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dorie

CLARK what do people say about you when you leave the room?

“Brand” is another word for reputation, and we all have one, according to marketing strategy consultant Dorie Clark.

Whether we think so or not, we have a personal brand that defines us in the eyes of others.

“People think something about you,” Clark says. “You’re not a tabula rasa.” The trick, she says, is to figure out if there is a gap between how you want to be perceived and what people say about you when you leave the room.

Closing that gap is where the work of personal branding comes in, according to Clark, CEO of Clark Strategic Communications.

Forbes.com says she “has hit the ball out of the park” with her book on the subject, Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013).

Clark knows a little something about reinventing the self. She grew up in Pinehurst, N.C., a tiny town of 3,000 where she says everyone watched the same TV shows and nothing ever happened. She read a lot, played sports and dreamed of being a spy.

At 14, she went off to Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Va., to a special academic program for teenage girls, and two years later, transferred to Smith College in Northampton, Mass., which she describes as the “best town in America.”

She graduated with a degree in philosophy at the age of 18.

She says she loved accelerating at that rate. “I was incredibly happy because, as a kid, I always felt a little older than I was chronologically.” Early on, Clark understood who she was, and has been both optimistic and fearless in her efforts to move herself into spaces where her strengths take root.

At Smith, the study of philosophy opened up “big, what’sthe-meaning-of-life questions” that fascinated her, spurring her on to pursue a master’s degree in theological studies at Harvard Divinity School. After a brief stint in journalism, Clark turned her energies to marketing, where she says her habit of probing the truth about individual existence has shaped her philosophy about marketing the self.

“You hear all the time — so much that it’s like a mantra — that

the secret of success in social media and marketing is authenticity,” Clark says. “How do you have an authentic voice? If you really dig down and engage with that question as more than a cliché, it very quickly leads you to questions about life.”

A tough economy can also turn people philosophical as they try to position themselves within the clamor of job ads and self-promotion that crowds the Internet. But Clark says we must resist the temptation to worry about where we fit into all this complexity.

don’t know how to successfully do personal branding, and they are not going to put in the effort to learn how. But if you do, that immediately sets you far, far ahead of the competition.”

Dorie is a Marketing Strategist, Speaker, Author of Rebranding You www.dorieclark.com @dorieclark

“Since the 2008 recession, employers have the upper hand,” she says. “Many of them feel that they can or want to wait and be picky and hold off for the absolute perfect candidate who fits 10 different criteria for a job. If you’re trying to compete on the axis of those 10 ten criteria, then you have bought into their narrative.”

The only way to fight back, according to Clark, is to be different, be exceptional, be famous within our own realm: “We have to become so well known on our own terms that the balance of power shifts.”

This is where authenticity comes in, she says, because it is the core of the personal branding that distinguishes us in the market. “The first really critical step is reckoning with who you are, what you’re like, what you care about, and what you’re capable of. You can never be authentic if you don’t understand who you are.”

It’s not about bragging, she says, but about manifesting our strengths and taking charge of our own narrative. Being proactive about “showing your stuff” is challenging and time-consuming, she acknowledges, but in the context of today’s media-rich employment market, it is also critical.

“There is more work involved in having a good professional reputation than 20 years ago,” she says. “Most people

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bethany tate

CORNELL developing talent across generations, cultures In growth markets like Russia, Indonesia, and Sub-Saharan Africa, there is a “huge war for talent,” according to Bethany Tate Cornell, a senior leader in the Learning Design Center of Expertise at GE Crotonville. Winning it means being an “employer of choice,” one that offers an appealing “value proposition” to the current workforce.

Tate Cornell’s area of expertise is talent development in the hire-to-retire cycle at GE. She says she is a “steward of culture” and a builder of the capabilities that will grow and inspire people — and keep them in the company.

“Once you get them in, talent development becomes very much about putting the right people at the right place at the right time to benefit both the company and the individual,” she says. “Whether you’re a sexy startup like Netflix, or Proctor & Gamble, which has been around forever — from a talent acquisition perspective, you start with your value proposition.”

Talent development is partly about culture, she explains, helping employees to absorb the values of the organization, learn how things get done and how people communicate, and understand how contributions are recognized and rewarded.

It’s also about building capabilities and facilitating the progression of a person’s career through appropriate

technical and functional education.

As employee demographics change, however, Tate Cornell says GE is constantly on the watch for new ways to compete for talent. With five generations in the workforce, from Millennials to baby boomers, determining how people define work and how work gets done is not simple. “Younger generations are defining things with different filters and parameters than even the Gen Xers,” she says.

GE used to develop talent in the traditional way: Recruit graduates from top schools and place them in two-year leadership programs with rotations throughout the organization. At the end of that process, the employee would then interview for a formal role at the company. GE still offers a range of leadership programs and accelerators, and the company strongly believes that the majority of learning (about 80 percent) happens on the job, says Tate Cornell — through challenging assignments, stretch opportunities, and performance development.

But at the same time, GE has continued to expand the formal and informal learning experiences it provides to employees at every level and career stage. This is particularly true on the leadership side, where Tate Cornell and her team oversee a portfolio of transformational courses under the Crotonville banner — courses that range from one to three weeks in length, classes and seminars that can be completed in a day or two, and digital and on-

demand learning “interventions” that can be completed in as little as a few minutes.

“Many of the Millennials don’t want to wait,” Tate Cornell says. “They have a very different perspective around how quickly they deem themselves ready.” Even within a company like GE that is global, heavily-matrixed, and filled with a wealth of multi-dimensional opportunities, “they want things fast—they don’t always want to go through the traditional due diligence.”

Characteristics of success have been shifting as well, Tate Cornell notes. Ten years ago, most employees equated achievement with a vertical rise through the company.

People were more willing to train in whatever areas they were needed, go wherever they were sent. Now, employees expect to tailor their jobs according to personal considerations around family, flexibility, and work-life balance. They want diversity in their assignments and meaning in their work.

internal social collaboration network. “A lot of people who wouldn’t necessarily speak up on a call will speak on the chat log. They have a voice through a different medium.”

Influenced both by Millennials and by its expanding base of global colleagues, Tate Cornell says GE is becoming more contemporary and open in its thinking, especially on how to define the workplace. It is reassessing issues of work-life balance, restorative vacation time, and talent-based work arrangements.

“Human resources has a seat at the table at GE,” she says.

“It is involved in supporting major company imperatives.

We’re making an impact at the employee level, and we’re doing that all over the world.”

Bethany is Sr. Leader, Learning Design & Technology COE, GE www.ge.com 29

GE is highly attuned to these concerns and makes continual efforts to tailor its value proposition to the nature of the current workforce, according to Tate Cornell. “I’m happy to say that we’ve been around for over 100 years because we’ve never stopped evolving,” not just in innovative product development, but in a “very deliberate and focused attention to people.”

With more than 60 percent of its workforce outside the U.S., GE has placed significant emphasis on understanding and respecting local customs in multiple countries where perceptions of authority, loyalty, and gender can vary tremendously.

Tate Cornell says that social networking has proven invaluable to breaking down some of those cultural barriers. Virtual environments provide a neutral zone where employees across the globe can contribute freely.

“It’s amazing to me how our chat log has just exploded and has become vital,” Tate Cornell says of the company’s

cheryl

DAHLE story paves a way through complexity More people would solve problems if they were easier to fix — but that mindset will have to shift if we expect to manage the challenges of our global society, according to social entrepreneur Cheryl Dahle.

“We like certainty, we like to be able to say, this is right and this is wrong, and come to a conclusion,” says Dahle, CEO of Flip Labs, an eclectic group of consultants working to develop socially responsible design across a variety of sectors.

Dahle describes Flip Labs as an “experiment” that moves into that place of uncertainty by taking an entrepreneurial approach to changing large, complex systems that seem hopelessly beyond fixing. The organization’s clients are philanthropies and investors interested in innovating systems that have become unwieldy and destructive in their complexity.

Flip Labs brings in the cavalry — experts, entrepreneurs, scientists, communicators, and designers who take an “agnostic” view of the problem. They endeavor to rise above the naiveté that seeks a silver bullet solution, and

they reject the passivity that typically surfaces in the face of intricate difficulties.

Somewhere in between those two extremes are the “problem owners,” Dahle says, the people who try to figure out what is missing from the system.

“For solutions and systems to work together, we need better connective tissue, but nobody founds organizations that do that,” she says. “We are overwhelmed by the complexity of some of the big issues we’re facing, but we’re looking for obvious intervention strategies. We’re not actually doing the hard work of making connections.”

Dahle attributes this avoidance of complexity to the simple human longing for satisfactory experience: “We don’t like not knowing if what we’re funding is immediately effective or not. We don’t want to take risks on qualitative judgment instead of quantitative judgment. We get fixated on numbers.”

The demonstration case for Flip Labs’ novel approach to complex systems change is Future of Fish, an affiliated

organization committed to ending global overfishing.

Tracing the path of fish from ocean to vessel to market and beyond is a massively convoluted and opaque affair that illustrates the puzzling factors contributing to this environmental crisis.

After intense study, Future of Fish uncovered a host of logistical flaws in the middle of the seafood supply chain that were driven by some arbitrary human tendencies.

“Environmentalists want you to care solely about the environmental aspects of fish, but you also care about quality, taste, and the local aspects of the economy,” Dahle says.

We want fish that is responsibly caught, and yet we have a low tolerance for diversity on our dinner plates. If we are not willing to eat whatever comes up in the net that day, then we are unwittingly forcing players along the supply chain to mislabel fish so that it will appeal to our tastes.

The antiquated system that still tracks fish on paper makes it impossible to determine the real story of where the fish came from. And there is no incentive to fix that system, if some suppliers want the option of falsifying labels in order to sell the day’s catch.

“We have such a busted supply chain, for lots of cultural reasons as well as technical reasons,” Dahle explains.

Even our inclination toward the good can exacerbate the problem of overfishing, when it is used to manipulate the supply chain. “The consumer wants the experience of choosing to do the right thing, and that becomes the gamification of feeling better about your interaction with the environment.”

Knowing the full story behind fish gives us a concrete understanding of at least part of the larger abstract system that we cannot see or grasp. “We need to care about a story before we can care about the specifics of

the environment,” Dahle says. “Right now, that’s way more important than making the moral case that it’s better that the fish is line-caught rather than dredged at the bottom of the ocean.”

Story provides a point of entry to a problem that will require not one, but many solutions. It enables us to act more purposefully on our compassionate impulses.

“One of the most important things that we all need to cultivate is deeper empathy for these enormous problems we are having,” Dahle says. “Being able to be present with that enormity is the starting point.”

Cheryl is Founder & Executive Director, Future of Fish www.futureoffish.org @heyfishlady 31

michael anton

DILA a necessary discourse on the unfinished design

We live in a culture that lulls us to sleep and feeds us lots of funny dreams. We have nightmarish visions of a creation that’s gotten away from us. Zombies occupy our imaginations because they personify the unthinking automatons we have become—producing nothing and unconsciously feeding on the brains of others.

Such are the concerns of Michael Dila, the founder and self-labeled Chief Instigator of UNFINISHED, one of many companies he’s started in his mission to “punch holes in the present.” Dila seeks a better possible future, and he thinks we can get there with thoughtful, open-ended design that anticipates the evolution of the human mind.

His apocalyptic dread aside, Dila sees technology as offering one possible remedy to the numbness of our present culture. If we can create thoughtfully-constructed networks that “hack space and time,” we can make our worlds smaller, fuller, and more relevant.

But the zombies get in the way, and the zombies are us.

We tend to sit back and allow the heroic innovations of others to justify our own creative passivity.

“We see important conflicts as the business of titans and gods and celebrities and heroes,” Dila says. “We tend to think of ourselves as people who cannot change and influence things. We see ourselves as followers at best, more usually as spectators.”

With an academic background in philosophy and epistemology, Dila’s mind is a whirlwind of existential thought strands—some ancient, some current—with nodes that connect to his theory of design as a thing in motion, a form of “insurgency against the restraints of the present.”

His vocation, he says, is to make people unhappy: “My job is to make them experience the imperfect and mediocre present as so excruciatingly painful that they feel driven to change it. I find that good things come from being uncomfortable and bad things come from comfort and complacency.”

To that end, Dila ascribes to the “aesthetic of the unfinished,” the notion that we are never quite done.

Always, there is something more we can do. Integrating this perspective into the practice of design assumes

a world of pure potential. Dila insists that products, systems, and models of behavior must be taken up as iterations of how one might encounter the world.

That is why he is so riveted by the open source movement that promises a more “democratized way of participating in design.” Whereas 20th-century modes of production eliminate thinking from the process, the open source space demands constant thought and responsiveness, he says. We have been stymied by the traditional design goal of creating a finished product, which implies the existence of a perfect object that needs no further modification.

“The idea of a perfect product has buried in it a kind of hubris that is embedded in design culture,” Dila says. “The trickle-down effect of that culture permeates all levels.

When you think of the industrialization of labor, the design is a closed system. Input and output. Everybody becomes ancillary to the mechanized flow of a process.”

Whether from laziness or a failure of imagination, he says, people “find it impossible to picture themselves as part of the design process.”

Dila’s thoughts about design generally circle back to the theory of work, the necessary action of any human being who hopes to function reasonably well in the world. We have made work a drudgery, he says, when it could be something far more enriching.

“The enemy of all work is mindlessness, which is just a different way of saying alienation or a relationship to work that is inhuman or antihuman and doesn’t require that you be anything in the job other than a robot.” Conversely, he says, “There are all kinds of labor where you can be a complete person. We have to design work that makes that possible.”

Dila notes that recent business models are “cracking the code” for engagement at work by building systems that enable people to enjoy their jobs—no matter what they do.

“Part of the code is making room in the unfinished design for what it means to relate to the customer, allowing people to bring their personalities to work.”

Zombies can stay home.

Michael is a Design Insurgent and Chief Unhappiness Officer about.me/michaeldila @michaeldila

33

liza

DONNELLY use the tools that come along the pike With pen and ink in hand, or maybe an iPad, Liza Donnelly poises on the edge of a constantly morphing space. She will somehow make a cartoon of it, once the image and idea fuse in her mind.

As a veteran cartoonist for The New Yorker, Donnelly artfully intuits the perfect setting for her concept. Maybe it’s two people talking. To capture an offhand remark, she might draw them both on the street, walking to work. A more serious conversation could take place across a café table. Domestic issue? The kitchen, of course. Marital hiccups are best left for the bedroom.

For more delicate subjects, Donnelly favors the front seat of a car: Two people, sitting side-by-side, not looking each other in the eye. It’s the perfect time to say something that might otherwise go unsaid.

With the playful irony that is her signature brand of humor, Donnelly’s cartoons light up those moments when, despite our best intentions, we just can’t get it right.

“I like making people laugh, but I also like making people think,” she says. “I like using cartoons to talk about subjects

that are of importance to people.”

With her seemingly mellow treatment of difficult topics, Donnelly masters the premiere skill of a great cartoonist: She gets the laugh, but the idea lingers. Sometimes it’s a joke about the silly ways we seek meaning and purpose—testing out a cuisine fad or sporting a new fashion trend. Other times, the concept touches on more disquieting realities: the impact of divorce on children, our passive tolerance of labor exploitation in developing countries, the mounting wreckage of our environment.

Donnelly is also known for her astute commentary on women, a part of her art that developed by instinct as she cartooned her way through post second-wave feminism in the 1980s.

She says: “I wasn’t particularly focusing on women’s issues at all. My work was just my work.” But as The New Yorker began to purchase more of her cartoons directly or indirectly about women, Donnelly realized that the “landscape of humor” had a void where a feminist voice should be.

Her latest book, Women on Men, is “pointedly pretty much all women talking,” she says. “Women can be funny, and we should be funny,” but feminist issues are only part of the “daily

kind of politics” that they tend to embrace. Striding casually through Donnelly’s cartoons is an “Everywoman” who speaks for the world on a broad, human plane. Not just a feminist one.

“The caption may have nothing to do with women, but I make the speaker a woman because, Why not?”

Donnelly became involved with Cartooning for Peace in 2005, a group which has exposed her to an astounding group of international cartoon artists. Their work exudes beauty, strength and bravery, she says. In international cartooning, the issues are often weightier, the tone more somber than in the U.S. brand of the genre.

“Many countries have a tradition of strong, editorial cartoons,” Donnelly explains. “It’s almost like art. But this country has a different style—not always, but often American political cartoonists are going for the joke more than making a statement.”

While Donnelly enjoys the joke, her artistic impulse often pulls her beyond it. However, she hasn’t found many outlets for the issued-based cartoon that skips the humor. “I’m more serious, sometimes too serious,” she says. Recently, she was hired to do a weekly political cartoon for the new site Medium, and is enjoying the outlet for her serious side.

Once in a while, Donnelly likes to break away from both the serious and the joke. “My big wish is to draw the quirky things that I want to draw that maybe don’t make a lot of sense.”

Technology is nurturing that whimsy. Donnelly occasionally sets aside pen and ink to do some quick sketches on her iPad. She Tweets out quick impressions of people at special events or while watching TV, and was contracted to tweet-draw the Olympics and the Mad Men finale for NewYorker.com.

OnForbes.com she posts videos of herself drawing an entire

cartoon. (“People find it fascinating that I can do that.”)

“I’m trying to use whatever tools come along the pike,” Donnelly says. “People are so tired of words sometimes.”

The space where a cartoon will be continues to morph.

Donnelly flows through it in real-time, wielding the tools that suit the moment, drawing the cartoons we need to see.

Liza is a Cartoonist, The New Yorker Magazine www.lizadonnelly.com @lizadonnelly

35

matthew t.

FRITZ if it’s to be, it has to be me Strolling down Vine Street, the main drag of Arthur, Ill., population 2,282, one might absorb a history lesson about getting things done. In this once indiscriminate spot in 1872, just west of the Kaskaskia River, a railroad was laid down for the first time, stretching east to west across the Big Slough, as it was known.

Where the tracks crossed over a road to nowhere above this empty, mosquito-infested swamp land, the railroad put in a switch, and one brave soul built a house and a store. Five years later, 300 people were living there. As they dredged water to make the village habitable, they uncovered the black prairie soil that sustained the first farming families to settle the area.

Arthur, Ill., is also the hometown of Col. Matthew Fritz, a U.S. Air Force pilot and recently the Chief of Staff at NATO Air Training Command in Afghanistan. It’s where he internalized the work ethic that has earned him military command opportunities over the years. As a boy, Fritz watched his grandfather, a World War II veteran, make his living as a business owner dedicated to this small, hardy community.

His father, too, is a successful businessman carrying on the tradition of community service and engagement.

Fritz’s grandfather on his mother’s side, Delbert Taylor, owned a restaurant and a clothing store before he became mayor of the village board. “My earliest memories are of him, out there, sweeping the sidewalk in front of his store, shaking hands, reading the people,” he recalls.

He was “politicking,” Fritz says, and modeling the behavior of the ideal citizen—committed, engaged, proactive. “He used to say, “If it’s to be, it has to be me.’ That’s something I grew up with. Especially in a small town, you’re expected to participate in church, community and school; otherwise it just isn’t going to work.”

If you’re on the high school basketball team, you might have to leave the bench during the national anthem to jump up on the stage and join the band. So it was for Fritz growing up in Arthur, Ill. The idea of everyone doing his or her bit has been fundamental to Fritz’s management of large-scale, complex military operations. And when he is not helping to build an air force in Afghanistan, he shares his leadership knowledge with 90 thousand Twitter followers as well as through blogs, workshops on change strategy, and a new

book, Leveraging Your LinkedIn Profile for Success.

In the military, where Fritz says his job description changed every three years, failure is both “public and painful.” There is constant pressure to be effective, even in unpredictable circumstances. “Variables in the military equation are extremely diverse, and every day, things change that we have no control over.”

the tracks crossed the road in Arthur, whose welcome sign reads: “You’re a stranger only once.” The message? Now that we know each other, we can build things together.

Matthew is a Pilot and Military Officer www.advancedvectors.com @fritzmt

It is best to assume the attitude of the pilot, he says, by compartmentalizing the tasks at hand. Composure and anticipation are crucial because even the most perfect flight can be thwarted by wind, weather and birds. There will always be obstacles, but with experience, Fritz has learned to put himself in front of a situation.

“As a young pilot, I always felt I was hanging on to the tail of the airplane. Now, I think ahead.” It’s a lesson for the private sector as well, he notes. “The speed of business is extremely rapid. There may not be lives on the line, but there are jobs on the line.”

Volatility in both the military and private sectors has convinced Fritz that relationship building and dedication to the group are fundamental to long-term sustainability.

They are the soft skills he learned growing up in Arthur, Ill., ones that haven’t yet become a regular part of “the military lexicon,” he says.

Even in Afghanistan, he’s discovered that American military personnel are perceived as people who don’t listen very well. “We’re very time-driven, results-driven. In America, people live by their watches. In Afghanistan, people live by their relationships.”

Fritz recommends that we slow down and be more intentional. Talk to people, see what they know, he says, just as his grandfather did while sweeping the sidewalk in front of his store. That’s how a village came to life where

37

christopher

GERGEN doing better at doing good The most recent college graduates stepping into the world strive to create lives that matter.

This resolute search for life and career fulfillment is not a passing whim, nor is it limited to the young, according to Christopher Gergen, CEO of Forward Impact, an organization dedicated to cultivating the change-making potential of future leaders. The cultural imperative to find meaning in one’s work is only getting stronger, and Gergen says there are ways to help people get there.

Forward Impact is just one initiative spearheaded by Gergen, co-author of Life Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives, to help young entrepreneurs become change-makers, even at the earliest stages of their careers. It is possible to set them on a path that taps into their abilities while supporting their pursuit of integrity and purpose in a variety of dimensions — not only in work, but in their social, intellectual, and personal endeavors as well.

“We want to create transformational educational experiences that help a person to create a life that is deeply fulfilling and impactful,” says Gergen, who teaches

leadership and social entrepreneurship at Duke University.

“We want people to be happy and do the things they care about, while having a positive impact in the world. ” In addition to developing a pipeline of leadership talent, Gergen is also focused on helping communities harness this talent potential. Perhaps the most tangible representation of this vision in action is Forward Impact’s network of entrepreneurial living communities, called “ThinkHouses.” These are residential facilities for recent college graduates — “fellows” — who are working on entrepreneurial ideas in their chosen fields and who want time and space to “pave a more intentional life for themselves while developing ideas that can have lasting impact,” Gergen says.

Fellows compete for the chance to live for 11 months in themed group houses, where they attend weekly leadership development and venture acceleration worskshops, work with a mentor, and enjoy regular Sunday dinners and community events that keep them grounded socially and physically in the place where they are investing themselves.

Gergen calls the ThinkHouse model a “win, win, win,” — pointing to the benefit that comes from living in the community, the gains within the neighborhood of filling newly renovated houses with high energy talent, and a positive return for investors. But he notes that setting people on a path is not enough. Communities also have to create enabling environments that connect these emerging innovators with the resources and relationships they need to bring these ideas to fruition — including access to talent, capital, policymakers, etc. Along these lines, Gergen has helped start a number of entrepreneurial community development organizations in North Carolina, such as Bull City Forward in Durham, Queen City Forward in Charlotte, and HQ Raleigh.

Gergen has a knack for helping people find an outlet for their positive energies. He co-created the hugely successful and scalable online tutoring company, SMARTHINKING, which ultimately served 200,000 students at 1,000 institutions of higher education before it was acquired by Pearson Education in 2011. Other past endeavors include launching a live music bar and restaurant in Santiago, Chile, and the Entrepreneurs Corps — an initiative with Americorps*VISTA that placed 400 business volunteers into nonprofits nationally for a year of service.

Gergen says now most of his energies are focused on millennials who are poised to take on purposeful lives, but he is also working with organizations like the Center for Creative Leadership, where he is Innovator in Residence, to develop a “talent pipeline” that stretches both backwards and forwards. “How do some of these ideas translate to children as young as five and six years old? The leadership potential for this next generation is immense. With our school partners we are looking for ways to empower young people to believe in themselves and understand how to lead with others to put ideas into

action for the good of our communities,” he says.

“The complexity of the challenges facing our world right now are outpacing the innovative solutions to address them,” Gergen shares. “Our challenge is to help develop the confidence and competence among our next generation to develop and scale positive solutions — and help communities harness this talent and energy.”

Christopher is CEO, Forward Impact; Innovator in Residence, Center for Creative Leadership Fellow, CASE at Duke www.forwardimpact.info @cgergen

39

eileen

GITTINS the book becomes content Many things will pass away in the new technological order, but the book will not. Even in this expanding era of digital reading, the human yearning to turn the pages of a book and connect one’s mind to it remains pure and persistent.

Software expert and passionate book lover Eileen Gittins is creating a space where technology can preserve the timeless mystique of the book. As the creator and CEO of the print-on-demand enterprise, Blurb, Gittins is determined to “perpetuate paper” and make it more luscious.

Gittins has been hooked on books for as long as she can remember, thanks to her mother, who modeled the reading habit for her. “When I used to see her at night, she always had a book. She would write in the margins, whether it was Agatha Christie, P.D. James, or Dostoyevsky, and then talk about it at the dinner table.”

Her father made sure his daughter understood the value of his wife’s readerly ways. He told Gittins, “You don’t appreciate this now, but you will later: Your mother is the smart one.”

She assumed it was because of the books. Through her father’s lesson and her mother’s example, Gittins learned at an early age that “the measure of intelligence was not about your occupation but about your intellectual curiosity and appetite for reading and listening and learning.”

The life of the mind surrounding the book is the central spirit of Blurb, where the pleasure of absorbing a book intellectually can be supplemented by the joy of creating one. Gittins wonders, “Why can’t people just make a book, even if it’s not for sale?”

Since its launch in 2006, Blurb has made almost 8 million digital and print books, 2 million of which were created in the last 12 months alone. It has multiple print locations around the world, and ships to over 70 countries across five continents.

For a moderate price, Blurb authors upload content onto the company’s publishing software, design an e- or print book, and in the case of a print version, select the size and

material for the cover. They are “truly bespoke books,” Gittins says, with specialized moleskin, headbands, footbands, and custom end sheets. Many Blurb books are intended as personal keepsakes, but others are offered for sale right from the Blurb website or on Amazon.

This transformative means of getting content into print is opening up the world of publishing to authors who might otherwise be shut out of a rigorously competitive industry.

Unlike large, commercial publishing houses, Blurb does not require an initial print run of several thousand copies to make a profit.

envisions a renewal of the old-fashioned codex, with the kind of à la carte features offered by Blurb.

The book itself becomes content, and takes on a new life.

“I just love that,” Gittins says. “There’s a reason why that old thing worked.”

Eileen is Founder and CEO, Blurb www.blurb.com @BlurbBooks

“The only way to make this possible was to create a business model where Blurb could make money on a book of one,” Gittins explains. “No longer are you at the mercy of someone who says the book won’t sell. All of a sudden, your book is not the thing you thought.”

Blurb has developed some niche markets: it is the world’s largest publisher of roller derby books and has become a favorite at the Hollywood wrap party. But Gittins says that 37 percent of the company’s worldwide revenue comes from businesses that see a book as key to establishing their credibility and communicating the quality of their product. The “designed book,” with 50 percent text and 50 percent charts and graphs, has become a Blurb staple.

“I’m amazed at the ways in which people use books now to elevate their content and illustrate their message,” Gittins says. “So many Blurb books are the result of a passion, of a lifelong study. Creative people of all kinds want their book’s content to reflect their true intentions, but also for the form of the book to feel unique and special to them.”

Gittins expects physical books to come back bigger than ever because “all things go to the new things, and then there’s a stasis, or the old develops some retro feel.” She

41

john

HAGEL in a retreat to the village, a rediscovery of passion As we assess our well-being on this networked globe, the idea of the village lingers in the mind. Technology improves exponentially, sometimes leaving us breathless with wonder and exhaustion. It is tempting to speculate that things were better in a simpler time.

Paradoxically, the technology that expands our scales of interaction also brings us back to that proverbial village, where we encounter each other close-up, according to John Hagel, management consultant and author in the business and technology space. Hagel is co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, where he studies disruptive patterns in business and identifies challenges and opportunities on the horizon.

The prospect of connecting with anyone, anywhere, leaves us wide open in unfamiliar ways that we now have to confront, Hagel says: “In villages, we were pretty transparent in our lives. Everybody in the village knew everything about everybody else. The move to cities created privacy and lessened visibility. We’re moving back, in a sense, to creating environments where there’s less and less of that invisibility and more of that exposure.

How do we cope with that?”

Gaining self-knowledge is one way, Hagel suggests. In a simpler world, where everybody knew everyone else, it stood to reason that people knew themselves pretty well, too. That is the piece of our existence that we have to reclaim in this era of high visibility. We need to know our personal narratives.

“We all have a narrative implicitly that we are living,” Hagel says. And to see it, we must identify the big decisions we’ve made, the hard “choice points” that carved out our paths — then we “extrapolate from that.”

We can change our personal narratives, too, he notes, and redirect them toward the type of trust-based relationships that will sustain us through change. “I’m a big believer in this notion that people either drain your energy or amplify your energy,” he says. Before we can gravitate toward those who will amp us up, we need to know ourselves first.

Millennials have an inherent aptitude for seeing and embracing their personal narratives, according to Hagel.

They accept the future as unscripted and take it upon themselves to build the surroundings that suit who they know themselves to be. They are not worried about where

they will end up, and they expect to shape reality around them as they go.

“Many of the Millennials that I know have an instinctive sense that it’s going to be up to them to find ways to learn,” he says. “School is just the beginning, which creates a bit of restlessness, a sense of urgency to find a place where they will learn things faster.”

excites them. They don’t want to arrive, they want to search. “To me, what’s most important and interesting are not the answers, but the questions,” he says.

Author, Co-Chairman, Deloitte Center for The Edge www.johnhagel.com @jhagel

Acting on that sense of urgency requires passion, a topic that has absorbed much of Hagel’s attention lately. It is a quality he sees resurfacing among boomers who realize that retirement on the golf course is not the paradise they had envisioned. They want to know, what’s my next act in life?

They want back the passion that our institutions tend to strip away from us because it threatens stability. “Passion is not predictable,” Hagel says, and is often regarded suspiciously by executives who dismiss it as something that happens outside of work. And the executives who do encourage passion in the workplace usually equate it with long hours.

Hagel acknowledges that not everyone is built to pursue passion, not everyone is ready to embark on a risky journey of boundless enthusiasm. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. “Most of us have a very deep passion,” he says.

“It is within us, and it’s up to us to cultivate it.” Tamping it down is a learned behavior we acquire as we get older and want the security of knowing what’s going to happen day after day.

“If you go to a playground and watch a group of five- or six-year-olds, how many of those kids really want to be in a stable, predictable world?”

Hagel sees children, millennials, and boomers as explorers on a magnificent quest to connect to something that

43

irwin

KULA religion as a technology: applying innovation theory to making ‘good people’ As transformational technology propels the world through the 21st millennium, Rabbi Irwin Kula pushes the question that gets lost in the momentum: How do we innovate more developed and evolved human beings?

Kula, the president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership in New York, author of Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life, and co-founder and executive editor of the new platform Thewisdomdaily. com has a fearless attitude about change. It is a rare quality among religious leaders who tend to adhere closely to inherited beliefs and customs.

But like any system, religion has to adapt too, Kula says, to get the job it has been designed to do, done. “Religion is a technology of human flourishing. There is no tradition on the face of the earth that wasn’t at one time an innovation designed to help us flourish. A tradition is simply an innovation that makes it.”

Ethical innovation is an essential part of the human journey, Kula notes. Our definitions of what is right and wrong, what constitutes a person, and what entails a good society expand as we learn, explore and debate.

In America, we have ended slavery, instituted women’s suffrage, initiated the fight for civil rights, and recently legalized gay marriage.

“We are always growing our understanding of how to be better, more compassionate people and how to build a better world,” he says. “Our moral horizon is always expanding however incrementally and fitfully…the question is whether the technology of religion – its wisdom and practices - can actually help us in this next human epoch.”

“The fastest growing religious identification in America is ‘None’,” he says, which means that “there are increasing numbers of ‘non-consumers’ of existing religious institutions products and services.” Religion, historically the primary delivery system of ethics, is not working for millions and millions of people.

Kula derives much inspiration from theories of business innovation, especially from the works of Clayton Christensen. Along with entrepreneur and co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival Craig Hatkoff, Kula founded the Disruptor Foundation, whose mission is to apply disruptive innovation theory to religion, spirituality, ethics,

and moral development. “The metaphysics of these religions are clearly wrong, but they wisdom and practice about life that is right and needs to be unbundled.”

A pressing concern, Kula says, is the increasing gap between our technological power and our ethical intuitions and capacities. “A generation ago, marginalized individuals - a rebellious teenager, yet alone a terrorist might have made only a temporary wrinkle in the social fabric, but with access to new technologies, can today inflict enormous damage.”

Similarly, technological power among the privileged is equally threatening, says Kula. “The consequences of ethical recklessness in this quarter are subtle, but insidiously wide-ranging. Technological power matched up with financial trading, for example, can destroy the global financial system and lead to a few amassing great wealth without producing anything of value for the many.”

“There is a very significant unraveling of the social contract,” Kula observes. “We have the lowest levels of institutional trust in the history of America and recent studies show that two thirds of Americans do not trust their fellow citizens. And we’re not going to google or ‘facebook’ our way out of these problems.”

We need, according to Kula, some of our best and brightest to be “early moral adopters,” “disruptive spiritual innovators” who are interested in working to develop new wisdom and practices (i.e. products and services) that can compress the time and space necessary to create “good, ethical people.”

Just as Kula urges religious leaders to innovate, he also asks secular leaders to actively discern and wrestle with the serious moral questions that inevitably arise with technological innovation.

As a while, Kula maintains, we need more people willing to risk a little in reputation, status, ridicule — that’s what early adopters do — to insure that along with the physical and cognitive enhancement driven by technology, we also get moral enhancement. “If the only early adopters we have are concerned with the most cutting edge technology, we’re going to be in big trouble,” he points out.

“Biting the apple from the tree of knowledge has always meant choosing between curse and blessing, sin and enlightenment,” he says, “We have bitten now we are choosing.”

Irwin is President, Clal-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership www.clal.org @irwinkula 45

david

MACAULAY insistent curiosity: a necessary madness David Macaulay wants to know how things work.

Cathedrals, castles, the human body. Any subject matter will do as long as it feeds into his expansive and insistent curiosity.

To figure things out, Macaulay draws pictures. Drawing forces him to look more intensely, to better see and understand. It is a behavior that eludes us in a world of increasing complexity, he says. We are often oblivious to the way things work. We take for granted some of the miraculous systems—natural and manmade — that sustain us.

“Everyone can learn to see better — not what you’ve been told is in front of you, but what’s actually in front of you,” Macaulay says. “When you draw something you really have to look at it. And when you really look at it, you can’t avoid thinking about it.”

For 40 years, Macaulay has been drawing to question and clarify what he knows. The product of all this insistent curiosity is more than two dozen children’s books that

explain through words and pictures how things are built, how they work, how they come together, and how they are taken apart. His talents as an author and illustrator have earned him numerous awards, including the distinguished MacArthur Fellowship and a Caldecott Medal for his book Black and White (1990).

Macaulay’s books are primarily visual narratives supplemented with text. “Sometimes it’s more efficient to use the words,” he explains, “but how great is it to have those two languages to work with and pick and choose from?”

The endearing inquisitiveness embodied by Macaulay’s work was sparked at the kitchen table of his childhood home in Lancashire, England, where his parents made things right in front of him.

Macaulay watched as things that were put together at the kitchen table went on to serve a practical purpose in his home and neighborhood. Witnessing people at work—making and fixing things—is too rare an experience

nowadays, he says. And the more complex everyday objects become, the more we lose sight of how things work or what they mean.

“We’re discouraged from interacting with the very things we use every day,” Macaulay says. “And gradually this diminishes our natural curiosity.”

“There’s a humility that’s forced upon you as you beat your head against the wall trying to work out something,” he says. “But my experience tells me that eventually I’ll get there and it will have been worth all the effort.”

David is Author and Illustrator, The Way Things Work www.hmhbooks.com/davidmacaulay

He suggests that the pace of life is actually sedating us.

“It makes it almost impossible to recognize when you’re bored,” Macaulay says. “If you don’t recognize when you’re bored, you will just sit there. If you’re distracted from your own boredom by some senseless television program or too much Facebook, the days go by. It’s very passive.”

Macaulay demonstrates the flip side of this passivity through his delightful and sophisticated books — mostly histories, expositions, and illustrations of how extravagant buildings came together. He explores the lavish use of space and materials that make up these structures. He describes the political and spiritual aspirations that lifted every stone and joist into place.

Macaulay says he is not inspired by castles, per se, but by the human spirit that piled rocks on top of one another until they satisfied a very particular need. He says stepping into an immense cathedral or an exquisite mosque can make one feel ethereal in a way that no high-rise in Manhattan ever could. He builds books around gorgeous buildings and fascinating objects because they remind him of what people can do.

Macaulay is himself a model of the unrelenting determination he celebrates in his work. He spent six years studying anatomy so that he could produce an accurate book on the human body. It was madness, he says, but it was necessary.

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walt

MOSSBERG a watchdog for this tech revolution Journalist Walt Mossberg has spent the past two decades chronicling and commenting on the devices that have altered the mediascape of the world. As perhaps the premiere technology reviewer of the digital age, he feels fortunate to sit at the center of a democratizing shift in human existence.

“To have been able to record and judge the advance of this personal technology over this particular period has been a tremendously lucky break for me,” Mossberg says. “There are only so many moments in history when the world gets changed by something that happened in technology or business.”

Duplicating this experience, he says, would take him back to 1908 to report on Henry Ford as the Model T rolled off the assembly line in Detroit. Or further back to the First Industrial Revolution to talk with cotton workers about the “new amazing loom” that transformed the textile industry in early 19th-century England.

Mossberg’s work in the current tech upheaval has afforded him impressive access to change-makers like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison.

He saw the iPod before it became public. He was an early

and ardent proponent of the user-generated content favored by AOL. His fascination with technology began in the ‘80s, when he was a computer hobbyist, obsessed with the pure but esoteric potential of the PC. At the time, he was covering national and international affairs for The Wall Street Journal during the closing years of the Cold War. But in 1991, when reporters still used typewriters and revised articles with scissors and jars of paste, Mossberg convinced the WSJ to let him write a “Personal Technology” column. It was the first of its kind.

The column focused on gadgets—PCs, digital cameras, cellular phones—that had started to attract and perplex the ranks of ordinary consumers who wanted these new technologies but didn’t necessarily understand them.

Mossberg says his target audience from the start was “regular people.”

“An information appliance should not require a technical degree to use it,” he says.

In his column, Mossberg described how devices could amplify or diminish the user’s connection to other devices,

to people, and to the world. He contextualized gadgets within a technological ecosystem before anyone knew such a thing existed.

broader picture of the tech industry, not just the gadgets.

But two things have never changed for him as a journalist: “Writing in plain English and not talking down to people.”

His reviews have made tech stocks rise and fall. But they have also enabled tech companies, if they’re paying attention, to see the real effect their devices have on people. The product glitches Mossberg has found have often led to meaningful tweaks in technology.

In his typical nod to the readers who trust him, Mossberg says he wants Re/code to be relevant and entertaining.

“That’s not so easy, but we’re finding our way, and so far, we’re off to a great start.”

He has become a watchdog of the relationship between humanity and its tools.

Writing reviews, Mossberg says, is like “explaining or being an advocate for people.” He is respectful of price but is not a bargain hunter. He unravels marketing ploys and tech jargon to help prospective buyers determine the “ease of use and quality” of a product. He has no patience for the “fan boy and fan girl culture around tech,” which he says is “corrosive and kind of dumb.”

He holds up common sense as a shield against the addictive hype of tech.

Mossberg is committed to this angle of his work: “I was always much more interested in helping the users of technology rather than the makers of technology.” At the same time, he adds, “I can’t help but be sympathetic to a small startup that has a great idea, but maybe doesn’t have it quite right. I admire those people.”

Technology has now changed the way Mossberg delivers his message. This year, he moved out of legacy journalism altogether to start Re/code, an online technology journal he runs with his business partner, Kara Swisher.

Re/code represents a style of reporting that embraces the sensibilities of the web to reach consumers where they live. For his part, Mossberg now comments on the

Walt is Co-CEO, Revere Digital; Co-Executive Editor, Re/ code; and Co-Executive Producer, The Code Conference www.recode.net @waltmossberg

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joy

MOUNTFORD designing experience, creating delight A classic goal of design, to make something useful and beautiful, is giving way to a slight variation on its theme.

Now, a thing must be useful and delightful.

The difference lies in the realm of experience, according to S. Joy Mountford, who has been a leader in the field of user interface design since the tech explosion of the early ‘80s. Beauty in design is essential, she says, but it’s not enough. Delight runs deeper. It arises from the way we interact with something over time.

Mountford’s pioneering work at Apple, among other key tech organizations, and her founding of the International Student Design Expo, have established her as a distinguished thinker about the way we think about our products.

She doesn’t design static, unchanging objects. She designs experiences. She studies the synapse between object and person and imagines ways it could be more fluid. It is an unpredictable, sometimes puzzling task because “everyone is different, everything they do with something is also different.”

Designing an experience to be functional takes a lot of

effort, Mountford explains. It is a slow process grounded in observation. She marks the sequence of a user’s interaction, again and again. “And that is what I do all day long. Watching people is what you have to do. You look at them using something, and they give you all the answers.

Most people design for themselves.”

Through patient scrutiny, Mountford differentiates between objects or systems that “work” and those that people can easily use. She details out step by step the irksome features of a feature or product thing and suggests modifications. “A lot of what I do is say, ‘I don’t need to know that’.” She isolates the unseen factors that help users to either absorb an object into their lives or toss it aside in frustration.

Personally, she could do without the updates to her mobile phone that made the fonts narrower and faint.

They made the device look “cool,” but now she can’t see the time. “That, to me is absurdly annoying. That did not delight me. They infuriated me.”

Mountford designs with hand-picked multi-disciplinary teams, that tackle “real world problems that either have a money or a date stamp.” She prefers B2B projects with

specific aims, compared to projects that can only guess at the vagaries of the consumer. “I’ve retreated to dealing with businesses that have to get a real job done,” she says.

“They work with us to fix problems, and they tell us what they want. Consumers don’t know what they really want!”

In both sectors, she says, design is moving from ‘intentional to unintentional.” Early in the tech boom, “Interface had to be transparent, so it didn’t interfer,” she recalls. “We would ask, How do I make it more hidden so that it’s not a trial and tribulation for the user? Now, we have so much going on in the cloud, but we don’t know what’s going on when or where. No more wires to follow, we’ve hidden nearly everything.”

Suddenly, we now want to see what is happening all around us, Mountford says. An increased paranoia over our data has led to a “revolution” about knowing where our information is, who has access to it, and what it’s being used for.

Questions of privacy naturally arise, accompanied by a whole new set of design challenges, many of which are split down generational lines. Young people are “excited by quantity,” she says. They want a horde of followers and don’t mind the melding of the public and private self. They willingly connect to networks that track their movements and habits.

Mountford has little interest in all of that. “I very much value my privacy and solitude so do not want any more technology just for the sake of it. I don’t want my refrigerator reminding me that I need milk.” Lately, she muses over the idea of being cloaked by wearing a veil out in public, so surveillance cameras can’t mistakenly collect data on her without her knowledge.

Interfaces that are ‘always on’ could also be a pointless menace, according to Mountford, who has spent her

career purging objects and systems of the features that make them a nuisance rather than a delight.

“I love design and the interface challenges lying underneath objects,” she says, “but I hate technology for its own sake and always have, which is why I have a job. If I was in awe of it, I’d just be another geek.”

Joy is an Internationally Renowned Interface Designer www.joymountford.com

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alexander

OSTERWALDER taking the fuzziness out of innovation Business model innovator Alex Osterwalder is not a fan of fuzzy spaces. He likes clarity, concrete definitions, and predictable processes. He likes tools.

He says we can bring all of these things to the “fuzzy space” of business model innovation by making it a more systematic profession.

And just as a surgeon uses a distinct set of instruments for a specific surgery, so should innovators have a reliable set of tools to create business models that respond quickly to market shifts.

We need to think differently about business model innovation, according to Osterwalder, co-author of the bestselling Business Model Generation and inventor of the Business Model Canvas, a strategic management and entrepreneurial concept. The company he co-founded, Strategyzer.com, delivers a set of methodologies, software tools, online courses, and practical techniques for making strategy and innovation more precise and manageable — just as it seems to be getting fuzzier.

We are “moving up the ladder of abstraction” because product innovation is not enough, Osterwalder says: “It’s

something we already know how to do, and it is relatively easy to copy. It doesn’t give us a competitive advantage anymore.”

Today, the business model itself needs constant upgrading.

But, Osterwalder notes, “as long as we have fuzzy tools, we can’t work seriously on these difficult problems.”

His proposal? “What if we prototyped business models and value propositions the same way we prototype products?”

Start with an idea, and test it immediately. Change plans.

Experiment, learn, and pivot.

Reliable innovation tools that perform regular adjustments to the business model could keep the organization tuned up and ready to maneuver.

“What is frightening for large companies, in particular, is the speed at which business models are expiring,” Osterwalder says. And although he is against “the dogma of speed,” he points out that “we move way too slowly in most organizations.

Nowadays, business models inevitably expire like yogurt in the fridge.”

We can no longer rely on the conventional business plan that repositions the organization. We cannot luxuriate in the

protracted process that moves in unhurried fashion from idea, to research, to exposition, to implementation. “If you continue to write business plans, you’re maximizing the risk of wasting your time and failing,” he warns.

“There is still this belief that the exciting new ideas come out of particular places like Silicon Valley,” he says. “The world is changing and business model innovation is happening anywhere.”

But the problem with spending so much time on an idea is that we’re less likely to reject it. “We need to move away from a static approach where we refine our ideas too early,” he says. Plus, there is no such thing as the right business model, anyway. “There’s no recipe, there’s no algorithm that says, ‘Do this business model and you’ll succeed.’ But there is a right process to search for business models that work.”

Osterwalder emphasizes that innovation tools cannot replace the very human qualities of creativity and risk-taking, but they allow us to systematize those things.

Admittedly, rapid prototyping can be challenging, especially in large corporations that prefer linear processes. They are experts at execution, Osterwalder says, and those strengths should be preserved.

But he says that businesses today need a “dual culture” of execution and innovation —one group that executes, manages, and improves the current business model, and another group that tests better models: “You need people who prototype, experiment, and throw away ideas after brainstorming and rapid market testing. That’s what the other team does, the ones who create the future.”

Innovation should be a profession grounded in methodical processes that make business model creation predictable and accessible, according to Osterwalder. It shouldn’t have to depend on a sudden, brilliant spark that becomes the answer to everything. “Anyone who says, ‘I had this idea and put it into execution’ is usually a liar. Everybody likes to be the person who knew it right from the beginning.”

It’s true that some people are better at seeing the future, he acknowledges, but the reality is that every significant innovation comes from a series of trials, mistakes, and readjustments. Innovation does not spring spontaneously from the brains of creative geniuses. It does not arise organically from mystical regions.

With the proper tools, business model innovation is no longer a fuzzy space. It is material for the maker, the new innovation professional who has a set of carefully crafted instruments laid out and ready for use.

Alex is an Entrepreneur, Speaker, Author www.alexosterwalder.com @AlexOsterwalder 53

rupal

PATEL what color is your voice?

One of the most complicated motor tasks we perform on a daily basis is speech. Breath passes from the lungs over the vibrating vocal cords that chop up the airflow into neutral vowel sounds. From there, those sounds are filtered upward, where the mouth and face shape them into words.

In her research, she realized that people with speech disorder may be unclear, but they are consistently unclear.

Trying to discern what they are saying is like listening to someone with a very thick accent, she says. “It’s hard to understand at first, but then you figure it out.”

The human voice is a primal instrument of communication, and a critical component of human personality, according to Dr. Rupal Patel, a speech scientist at Northeastern University.

Furthermore, people with speech disorder produce distinct acoustic features with a melody that is particular to them. “Even if all they can say is ‘Aagh,’ they can show that they’re mad,” Patel says. “They can vary their prosody with changes in pitch and loudness produced at the level of the vocal folds. They can whine and show excitement or fear. These things are relatively preserved in people who can’t speak or who have slurred speech.”

Voice changes our opportunities and our access to information. It suggests who we are. “There is a kind of hue in voice,” Patel says. “It’s fascinating what assumptions we make about people based on their voices.”

Those who cannot speak cannot express the full breadth of their being, Patel says. They live in a smaller social world where only certain people can understand them.

Patel is trying to create individualized synthetic voices that match a person’s gender, age, and even emotions, rather than the one-size-fits all, computer-generated voices that dehumanize the articulated sounds of the person.

Patel is currently developing technology to give unique, synthesized voices to people with speech disorder — those who can produce vocal sounds, but cannot form the mouth and tongue in such a way that those sounds become articulate speech.

The technology she is developing combines the sounds produced by the person with speech disorder with the articulated speech of a voice donor. “Whatever vocalization they can make, we extract as much of their voice quality as possible and blend it with someone of the

same age, size, and gender, who is similar in personality, prosody, and rhythm,” Patel says.

Mixing the two together produces a synthesized voice that more closely matches what a speech-disordered person might sound like if he or she could clearly articulate.

The importance of the technology, and the factor that makes it so appealing, is that people with speech disorder can contribute a piece of themselves to the creation of their own, partially synthesized voices. “What we have now is OK, not perfect,” Patel says, “but what’s key is that the voice is made from another person’s voice, combined with their voice; it’s something they have a part in shaping.

That’s empowering.”

Having a unique voice widens a person’s range of expression, and for someone with speech disorder, it opens up a previously limited world. Patel has discovered that people who have previously had a voice often don’t want a generic synthesized one, because it sounds too different from their own. She hopes to help these individuals reconnect with their voices using her technology. And for those who have never been able to clearly articulate speech, her goal is to offer them a means to experience that part of themselves for the first time.

“For the individual who’s never had a voice, it is an extremely moving opportunity,” Patel says.

The benefits of the technology go far beyond improving the quality of life for the person with speech disorder, according to Patel. It helps those around them as well: “It’s very hard for people to make a connection with a prosthetic voice when it doesn’t match the other person in gender or age. It’s a rudimentary thing.”

On the other hand, a uniquely tailored voice, one with “color,” gives caregivers and family members deeper

access to the person with speech disorder. They feel more closely attuned to a loved one whose words are not filtered through a mechanized, generic-sounding voice.

“We don’t realize how important our voice is to our personality,” Patel says. “There is so much connected to how we speak, not just what we say.”

Rupal is Founder, VocaliD CadLab @TweetRupal

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dan

PINK being decent, being effective: it’s all good business In his latest book, To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, bestselling author Dan Pink argues that everything we do in life is a form of sales. All day long, we persuade others, make exchanges and try to get people to see things our way.

After publishing several books on the way we work, Pink has been touted as an expert on human behavior. Not the boring, scholarly type of expert, he points out, but the kind who is highlighting an obvious fact: human beings are not machines who can constantly tweak their daily habits to generate more and more personal productivity.

Recognizing that, yes, we are all in sales on some level, draws attention to the soft skills that make us good with people. It’s a part of business that for years has been devalued in favor of a more industrious way of being in the workplace.

The “command and control” systems in place at most companies squeeze out human energy in an environment that runs on algorithms and collective egoism, he says.

“We think of ourselves first—that’s how we’re wired.”

“An idea that’s been gurgling around for 20 years now is that, at some level, to be successful at work, you had to be different from who you are,” Pink says. “You put on a mask and check your identity at the door.”

But every move we make is connected to a person somewhere. Being attentive to that person smoothes our own way through the world, which is good for everyone, and especially good for business.

It’s ineffective, he says. Today, organizations are appreciating the value of “bringing your full self to work” because people get more done when they have the autonomy to be who they are, wear what they want, and work in their own way.

The ones who practice this philosophy with intention are what we call salespeople. Pink admits that when he started writing To Sell is Human, he didn’t “get” salespeople. As the book evolved, however, he gained “new respect” for those who openly wear that label. “They

have much thicker skin than the rest of us,” he says. “They have the courage to withstand constant rejection when most of us would crumble.”

And yet the clichéd image of the pushy salesman loomed over him as he developed his argument that we are all salespeople. Pink wondered about using another term to define what people are doing at work and out in their lives every day. Words like “persuasion” and “influence” seemed “too anemic to describe what’s going on,” he says.

“There is a growing affinity between the basic human quality of treating people well and what it takes to be effective in the world,” Pink says. “Being respectful and taking the perspective of the person in front of you is the right thing to do, but it’s also the effective thing to do.”

Dan is the Author of To Sell is Human, Drive, A Whole New Mind www.danpink.com @danielpink

He decided to be simple. Straightforward.

“I explicitly didn’t put another label on it,” Pink explains. “I wanted to reclaim that sales label, which was a tall order.”

The nature of sales has changed, anyway. In the old days, the salesman had the bulk of information about the goods he was hawking; the buyer could only hope for a square deal. But today, we have access to so much information about a product before we ever enter into a bargain. The balance of power has shifted.

Now, both sides have to listen, which Pink says is one of the biggest challenges in this economy. “Business has downplayed softer qualities like listening,” he says. “No one’s ever taught us how to do it. You go to school, and they teach you how to read and how to write, but they never teach you how to listen.”

To make better sense of our own lives, Pink suggests that we all try to listen more, and once in a while, look at things from someone else’s point of view.

These are the behaviors of decent people who pay attention to the way their actions affect others. But that is just a happy side benefit to what Pink says is a practical guide to surviving in a complex economy.

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arlene

SAMEN surrender: or, how a vegas girl meets the dalai lama and becomes a cnn hero Arlene Samen’s mother always told her she would be a great nurse. And yet, at the age of 18, she left her home in Las Vegas and went off to California to study child psychology. It wasn’t until she took a job in an obstetrics practice one summer that she “fell in love with working with women who were having babies.”

She credits her mother, a single parent who struggled to support her children, with instilling in her the disposition to serve others. “My mom was so compassionate to people, and even though at that time we were quite poor, she always taught us that we should give to others and that had a lot of influence on me.”

A few years later, Samen became one of the first nurse practitioners in the country, specializing in high-risk obstetrics.

Samen was profoundly moved in 1997 by an encounter with the Dalai Lama, who told her plainly, she must go to Tibet and help women to give birth there. Meeting His Holiness, Samen says, was karma. She was already intensely drawn to the spiritual philosophy of Buddhism and was prepared for a life of surrender.

Today, she is the president and founder of One Heart World-Wide, a nonprofit working to reduce maternal and neonatal morbidity rates in the indigenous world. Her life has continually flowed toward what she perceives as her purpose: to free women of suffering in childbirth.

Samen says she never foresaw the type of work she would eventually accomplish with One Heart. “In my twenties, I wanted to be married and have children, a family, a garden, and a dog,” she says. “There wasn’t an aspiration that I would end up changing something in such a large way.”

“When I was 12 years old, I told my mother that I was a Buddhist,” Samen recalls. “I’m not really sure where that came from, but I just knew.” Buddhism is a very simple religion, she says. It’s about kindness. “It really was the message that my mother always taught me, to be kind and compassionate.”

The purpose of One Heart is also simple. Even in the most

remote regions of the world, where the closest birthing facility is a four-hour walk away, the human instinct to save mother and baby is universal, according to Samen: “When you lose a wife or a child in childbirth, it’s so tragic and so detrimental to the whole family. When people feel like they can be a part of making sure that doesn’t happen, everybody’s on board with that.”

In training birth attendants and introducing clean birth methods, One Heart carefully designs birthing systems that accommodate the cultural and spiritual beliefs of the local people, and where possible, utilizes the resources of their governments. “We go in at such a grassroots level and learn about their culture and love them and respect them and put our arms around them. We walk with them through the pregnancy.”

Reducing maternal and neonatal mortality rates by 80 percent in the indigenous cultures One Heart serves on four continents is an existence fraught with uncertainty.

In the midst of the Tibetan uprising of 2008, on the day Samen was named a CNN hero for her significant impact on healthcare in the region, a soldier held her at gunpoint.

In that instant, she says, she accepted that her life, as she had lived it to that point, would have to be enough.

Surviving such moments has made her feel as if she is on borrowed time, and occasionally, she feels deeply the pang of personal sacrifices.

“It’s been very challenging, and so emotional, too,” she says of her work. “I have to surrender and give up a lot of things. At times, there is so much joy, and at others, you feel like you’re on an emotional roller coaster between bliss and magic and tragedy.”

Sometimes, Samen imagines a day when she will step

off this roller coaster. “I think, ‘Someday, I’m just going to go back to being a nurse practitioner three days a week.

Someday, I’m going to have a normal life.’ And then, another five years goes by. Maybe that will just play out the rest of my life.”

Arlene is Founder, President and Executive Director, One Heart World-Wide www.oneheartworld-wide.org @oneheartww

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len

SCHLESINGER cracking the toughest business model of all: higher education Becoming a college president today is a high-risk entrepreneurial venture that demands an unusual form of grit. Ivy walls and lecture halls may be charming, but keeping them standing requires business savvy infused with a genuine concern for the public good.

“are more similar than they are different.” In turning Babson around, he started with the revenue side of the puzzle, which he says was “easy to solve”: Get enrollment up, build a better aggregate base of applicants, maximize use of the campus itself.

Len Schlesinger has the perfect credentials. Currently the Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School, he recently completed an impressive five-year run as the president of Babson College in Massachusetts, where he managed a major rebranding effort that he says left the school materially better “on every fundamental outcome measure.”

The bigger success he helped marshal in, he says, was “highlighting the essential Babson difference” by focusing on the school’s entrepreneurial mission. That meant not trying to be great at everything, a mistake made by many struggling colleges that cannot seem to find their focus.

Schlesinger came to the position as an academic with administrative experience and a businessman with a set of metrics that backed up his entrepreneurial teaching qualifications. But he says there were times when walking the line between the two sectors was tricky: “On a good day, I was a business person whose background was in academics.

On a bad day, I was an academic whose background was in business.”

But Schlesinger says that higher education and business

“A vast majority of my peers in higher education have a very difficult time telling their story,” he says. “We spent a lot of time at Babson working on the positioning of the school from the mission statement on down.”

Another big challenge for colleges like Babson is justifying the cost of a residential-based education. For many parents, the hefty price tag is an investment second only to the purchase of a home. According to Schlesinger, Babson has helped parents to “engage in feeling good about the quality of this transaction” by showing them how entrepreneurial learning is allocated over a 160-hour week, not just in the classroom.

While some classic business strategies work in higher education, Schlesinger notes that it is still an archaic system that is highly resistant to change. The culture of shared governance among faculty, administrators, and trustees makes the process of transformation particularly complex.

In reality, Schlesinger says, not every aspect of running a college benefits from shared governance. He suggests that all parties pool their ideas at the beginning of an initiative, but at the execution stage, someone specific must take the reins.

training versus liberal arts is a ridiculous question,” he says.

Worse, the question detracts from the positive evolution of a system that continues to deliver enormous benefit, according to Schlesinger, because on the broader landscape of higher education, “There’s lots to celebrate.”

Len is Baker Foundation Professor, Harvard Business School www.hbs.edu @lenschlesinger

“There’s lots of stuff that we do together, and that’s the stuff that’s very messy,” he says. “Every academic worth their weight has opinions about everything, and I want the opinions. However, there has to be some place where things get integrated and decided. I get very nervous when people, by their very nature, trash hierarchy on ideological grounds.”

Egalitarian workplace theories that reject hierarchy demonstrate a “fundamental lack of logic,” he says. “In all of these new organizational forms, I am strikingly confused about who calls the question and how.”

Having leaders and a process to support innovation is essential, according to Schlesinger, especially when survival challenges vary with institution type: universities with healthy endowments worry about loss of federal research funding, state universities contend with dramatic legislative budget cuts, and smaller, tuition-dependent colleges struggle every day to figure out “how to make it in this world.”

For-profit institutions are an unfortunate anomaly in this mix, he says, because they turn a college education from a public good into a consumer transaction.

At the same time, Schlesinger is not interested in romanticizing the liberal arts degree, especially when doing so denigrates the teaching of practical skills that students will need in the workplace. “The discussion about professional

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david moinina

SENGEH innovation begins with empathy At the intersection of many fields sits the inquiring mind of David Moinina Sengeh. As a Ph.D. candidate at the MIT Media Lab, Sengeh is working to design tailor-made prosthetic sockets that can be worn comfortably by amputees. It is a project that demands intense, cross-disciplinary interaction.

In developing a perfectly fitted prosthetic device, Sengeh’s compassion for the person who will use it is only the beginning of what goes into his design. He carefully considers anatomy, medical imaging, manufacturing materials, 3D printing, and a host of other factors that must come together to produce the desired product.

Fortunately, he likes to ask questions. “Lots and lots of questions,” he says. “If you don’t ask the right questions, you will have a hard time navigating those multiple fields.”

At MIT, Sengeh is constantly surrounded by scientists, designers, and thinkers who have been charged with “creating the future.” He probes and prods their minds, attempting to grasp the complexities of what they do, so he can apply their knowledge to his design of prosthetic limbs.

It is a form of communication that involves not only intelligence and field-specific expertise, but also a genuine yearning to process information that will create social value.

Sengeh, a native of Sierra Leone, grew up in the midst of that country’s brutal, 11-year civil war that left more than 50,000 people dead, and according to some estimates, more than 4,000 people who had had limbs crudely amputated as a form of political terror.

He says he does not need to be an amputee himself to feel empathy for those who are. For his entire life, he has been a witness to the human condition of people who have carried on with their lives despite the economic, social, and emotional difficulties associated with such a traumatic disability.

His naturally inquisitive mind and inherent compassion converge on one seemingly simple question: Why are the prosthetic devices used by amputees in Sierra Leone — or anywhere in the world, for that matter — so uncomfortable?

Typical prosthetic devices are ill-fitting, creating pressure and discomfort that diminishes the quality of amputee’s life, a

situation that Sengeh says is “completely unacceptable in our age.”

Ideally, what lies on the other side of a simple question — such as the one posed by Sengeh — is an explanation that will satisfy. The person providing that explanation must impart knowledge in a way that others will be able to understand.

Sengeh has found that people are normally generous in their willingness to answer questions, but that sometimes they simply don’t know how to communicate what they know.

“I have a collaborator, a good friend, and I ask him questions about what he does, and sometimes he can explain it and sometimes he can’t,” Sengeh says. “It’s hard for people when they can’t explain what they do.”

Even so, that habit of questioning must start somewhere, and when Sengeh is not working on the design of prosthetic limbs, he goes back to Sierra Leone to create conditions in which the inquiring and empathic mind can be developed. He says that the talent and mentorship needed to nurture innovative thinking is severely lacking in his home country, where there is a pervasive cultural attitude that help will come from the outside. Even those Sierra Leoneans, like himself, who are making change there have gone away and returned.

“There isn’t a high concentration of people who are taking the lead in solving very practical problems,” he says of Sierra Leoneans. “They are not experiencing the joy of problem solving.”

Through his international nonprofit, Global Minimum, Sengeh aims to provide resources and experiences that nurture innovation among young people who need to get their hands dirty, solving problems from scratch at an early age. “We should allow our kids to explore, to play, and to break things every now and then,” he says.

Sengeh anticipates that, with proper training, the problems young people solve will have “global importance and local relevance,” because the questions that absorb the inquiring, empathic mind will always be significant.

“Who am I to judge what is important to somebody? But at the end of the day, what we create must have a positive social value.”

David is Ph.D. candidate at the MIT Media Lab; President and co-founder, Global Minimum Inc. www.gmin.org @dsengeh

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haydn

SHAUGHNESSY outside the enterprise, human needs evolve In every age, information is a strategic asset. Our efforts to organize information have driven us toward the computational-based processes that characterize the digital era. So, while we tend to think that technology produces information, what really happens stems from human need, not from the technology. We routinely miss the power of human sentient needs such as this.

Innovation adviser Haydn Shaughnessy contemplates these ideas in his efforts to clarify the realities of the new economy. In creating the current technosphere, he says, we have become a “computational culture,” one that prioritizes problem-solving, transformation, and efficiency. We are moving to a self-organizing, self-correcting, and meritocratic community where conventional business practices are unraveling.

Peoples’ changing sentient needs are a key part of this, according to Shaughnessy. The way we think, the way we feel, our social relationships — some of the basic components of human existence are shifting beneath us.

We are undergoing an evolution in human sentient need that is vaster than we have yet documented. There is no academic study of changing needs, no cornerstone text to consult. But it is real.

“Our ability to understand the profundity of change that we’re right in the middle of is limited by the structures of

what we currently know,” Shaughnessy says. “It’s very hard to nail everything down and give structure to it because we have to step outside existing ideas to get there.”

The imperative to understand this transformation intensifies as traditional enterprises become outmoded, according to Shaughnessy. Some organizations can no longer sustain the magnitude of their own operations, and in their move toward efficiency, nor should they try but the consequence is they let go tens of thousands of people at a time.

A possible benefit of this development, Shaughnessy notes, is that “large organizations will shrink down to something that is much more human.” But workers left in the wake of drastic scalebacks are not being rehired.

As people attempt to stabilize themselves in this undefined space, they are developing a new shared power outside the enterprise. Shaughnessy describes it as a “self-propelling ecosystem that anticipates the kinds of problems to be worked on.”

The open source movement, he says, is the precursor of this power. It has made “major advances” across an array of fields, creating new languages, technologies, platforms, and products in computation and services. It is protean. And, it is embedded with a high quotient of “social affinity,” a sense of like-mindedness that builds trust among its constituents.

Shaughnessy points out that enterprises spend huge amounts of money on advertising to generate the same levels of affinity that small, innovative companies, such as Kickstarter, accrue organically as they help people to connect and accomplish personal goals.

It’s not enough to sell a product anymore, he says. Brand loyalty is disappearing for products that offer no value beyond themselves. Now, a purchase must integrate the buyer into a community, a factor that can’t just be bought with ad dollars.

This momentum toward fluid organization outside the enterprise stems partially from our inherent urge for human association, according to Shaughnessy. Many pundits argue that being connected is a recent cultural obsession generated artificially by technology, but “the need for connection is what comes first,” he says. We naturally desire “presence” and will always orient ourselves toward it.

The way that orientation is happening now, Shaughnessy suggests, is significantly different from anything we’ve seen in the past. As technology expands our opportunities for presence, it also heightens our appetite for it. The needs of the senses are evolving in ways that “we won’t be able to roll back.”

We cannot anticipate what the long-range impact will be of a computational mindset coupled with amplified human connection outside the enterprise. An additional factor is our rapid loss of focus and concentration and shifting patterns of mind as we try to build mental structures that let us function within and comprehend a hyperlinked knowledge world.

Shaughnessy expects that it will at least approximate the impact of writing. Once people learned to write, they could be present to each other in new ways. They could record ideas, put them aside, and return to them later. Writing altered humanity’s relationship with itself and with its own memory, opening up unique opportunities for abstraction.

It changed the human mind.

As our cognitive and sentient processes evolve rapidly in unknown directions, Shaughnessy identifies at least one notable effect: the urge to organize experience by telling our own stories. “We are moving toward narrative,” he says, “in order for us to have credibility in this unmapped territory, so people can understand where we’re coming from a why our ideas are worth following.”

We are charting out our positions and describing some of the arcs of a new system. Thinkers on the conference circuit are not the only ones who are having this conversation, Shaughnessy says. “but figuring it all out is up to people like us who are out there trying to describe what’s going on.”

Haydn is an Author, Advisor and Speaker www.haydnshaughnessy.com @hadyn1701

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rachel

SHECHTMAN telling a new kind of story While most businesses look for a branding strategy to carry them through the next phase of the economy, Rachel Shechtman wants one that will get her through the next four to eight weeks.

Shechtman owns and runs a novel retail enterprise, STORY, a 2,000-square-foot space in Manhattan that she and her team give a different theme to every four to eight weeks — Love STORY, Her STORY, Good STORY, and so on. For every theme, Shechtman changes the look of the physical space, brings in a new set of vendors, trains her staff on product knowledge, plans community activities around the particular story they are telling, and completely recreates the narrative of the store.

“We close down in between to catch our breath and redesign the entire store,” she admits, but the movement never stops.

This serial redesign and re-creation is the quintessential element of STORY, and one that allows it to take on some of the best aspects of digital commerce. What appeals to most people online, Shechtman says, is the expectation of new experiences and behaviors. We get fresh content on

our phones all day long, she notes, but most bricks-andmortar stores only change four times a year.

Shechtman brings the excitement of the new to the fixed reality of the physical store by creating a “special sauce” that joins the rapid flow of merchandise, a range of diverse events, visitors, and serendipitous connections of an online website with the community feel of a local business.

Shechtman, a Connecticut native who comes from four generations of retailers in the New York metropolitan area, says, “I always knew I’d do a store to get it out of my system, but I didn’t know it would take this crazy form.”

The intention of STORY is to move away from thinking about sales per square foot to creating “experience per square foot.” Shechtman says she wants each STORY iteration to have the feel of a cocktail party — one filled with unexpected, enjoyable moments and conversations.

In putting into action this new type of retail experience, Shechtman is committed to the idea of “democratizing access to discovery.” Not only does she want to attract customers of all stripes, but she also opens her shelves

and floor space to small brands that big retailers might not want to take a risk on. When planning its next theme, STORY holds open “pitch nights” where lesser known vendors can make the case for how well they will fit into the upcoming chapter.

makes sense for their respective businesses.

Shechtman’s theory is that a merchandiser can be not only a “translator,” communicating the value of products and services to customers, but also a “discovery platform” where brands meet other brands. One of the unique outcomes of STORY’s innovative approach is the blurring of the lines between B2B and B2C, she says. The store’s eclectic format has resulted in some fortuitous brand partnerships, ranging from GE to Intel to American Express, to “merchandise” themselves together for more impressive returns.

Rachel is Founder of STORY; Consultancy at Cube Ventures and Entrepreneur www.thisisstory.com @rachelshechtman

STORY’s constant change routine has impressed upon Shechtman the importance of “contextual selling,” or the idea that a product will be noticed more when positioned next to certain other products and within just the right theme. Some of the merchandise that does well in one STORY she says, may not have the same appeal in another. Offering a Saturday yoga class works with Wellness STORY, but it might not make sense in the Style.

Tech STORY. Shechtman says trying to pick which of the past 16 STORY themes she has enjoyed the most is like “comparing who’s your favorite kid” because the best results at STORY are non-salable events. “The experiences are not quantifiable as it relates to my personal enjoyment factor,” she says “As long as each STORY resonates with men, women and kids, young or older, local or foreign – I am ecstatic!”

The special sauce that makes STORY so delicious has no set list of ingredients. It consists of what’s fresh on the market that day. It’s a branding approach that Shechtman recommends to other retailers, to explore in a manner that

“To me, it’s not about just repeating a strategy that works well,” she says. “It’s about looking at why it’s working and using that to inform new tactics.”

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elana

SIMON finding balance in cancer research and the ivy league Elana Pearl Simon, computer science major and sometime aerial acrobat, enters Harvard University this fall as a published researcher of the rare form of liver cancer she was diagnosed with six years ago.

weird stuff they’ve been experiencing and found so confusing.” A Facebook page devoted to the disease allows patients to share symptoms because, she says, “It’s always good to know that you’re not alone when you’re going through something like this.”

Needless to say, Simon, 18, performs extraordinary feats of balance with relative ease. Whether she is dangling from the silks of an acrobatics arena, conducting genetic sequencing in a lab, or getting a hug from President Obama (who called her accomplishments “remarkable”), her poise and optimism seem effortless.

Through an appeal she made on YouTube, Simon has been able to obtain tissue samples from fibrolamellar patients and begin an online database for patient medical records that will provide doctors with more extensive knowledge about the cancer.

Surviving her own cancer, fibrolamellar hepatocellular carcinoma, and making a scientific discovery that could lead to a possible cure for it has been “awesome,” Simon says. But what she has found most gratifying is finding others who have the disease and helping to create a community that empowers them.

“With a disease like fibrolamellar, doctors probably haven’t seen many cases of it, so it would be much easier if they could go online and see the medical data from all the patients who’ve had the disease and know more about it and make more informed decisions about treatment,” she explains.

Through social media, Simon has connected with other fibrolamellar patients who want to talk about “all that

Such patient-driven initiatives are changing medical research, especially for diseases that have been “ignored,”

according to Simon. Fibrolamellar is a cancer that doctors know very little about, so they often miss the symptoms or confuse the condition with other liver cancers. “Doctors don’t think to check someone for it, which is why it took so long for me to get diagnosed,” she says.

Simon’s research on fibrolamellar, published in a coauthored paper in the April 2014 issue of Science, has identified a rare gene mutation that results in the formation of cancerous tumors in the liver. For years, doctors could not figure out why Simon had been suffering from abdominal pain, but she was diagnosed early enough that surgery was a viable, and ultimately, successful option.

Even before she was cured, Simon says she was relieved to at least know what had been making her sick. “It was better to fall into some category that explained what was causing all of this,” she says of the undiagnosed symptoms she’d had for so long. “It makes you feel more normal. Finally, you have some direction to go in.” Not knowing, she says, “you think that you’re the problem, like something is different about you fundamentally.”

Simon didn’t start researching fibrolamellar until she was fully healthy herself, and she acknowledges that she was in a unique position to study her own cancer. Living in New York City, having a father who is a biophysicist at The Rockefeller University and getting an internship at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, she knew doctors and had unusual resources at her disposal.

She happened to be in the right place at the right time, she says. “I don’t think that’s the case for most people. I’ve grown up in a world where going to the lab and working on tissue samples is just totally normal and natural for me.

But people can always find some way to get involved in

the research or try to encourage others to research the disease. People can find some way to try to take action.”

With Ivy League pressures and her own commitment to the fibrolamellar community, her training as an aerial acrobat will help her to keep her exquisite balance.

“Tricks take up a lot of space, but as long as you have at least 15 feet, you can perform something.” She adds, “I’m definitely going to need this in college.”

Elana is a Cancer Survivor, Cancer Researcher, Student www.elanasimon.com

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darden

smith chasing songs will never die Songwriter Darden Smith says the pursuit of his art has kept him on the planet. Uncovering the story behind a song means listening to people, noticing beauty, and saying yes to ideas.

Making a living in the arts requires a constant recalibration of the self, says the Austin-based Smith, especially in the music industry, where trends and technology swiftly change the landscape. He says most artistic reorientation takes place after “a good crisis comes up and you look around and start telling the truth.”

To keep from fading away, artists must shape their craft thoughtfully in response to the flux of the world. “Job stability lies within the artist,” he says. “No matter who you are in the arts world, the gig is going to end.”

No one told that to Smith when he bought his older brother’s guitar at the age of nine. He had been fascinated with the instrument, and once it was his, he began taking lessons from a teenage girl who taught him to play Neil Young songs.

“I just loved the sound of hitting that guitar,” he says. One

day, in the middle of a lesson, Smith noticed a picture on his teacher’s wall. It was a man with longish hair, wearing jeans.

He was reclining on a couch, surrounded by guitars, and thinking intently about something while a phonograph played on the floor in front of him.

“I remember sitting in her bedroom where we did guitar lessons, and I said, ‘Who’s that guy?’ She said, ‘That’s Neil Young. That’s who wrote the song you’re playing.’ It was the first time it ever clicked to me that someone actually wrote the song.”

The image of the artist engrossed in his craft brought unexpected clarity to Smith. Hey Hey, My My. At the age of 10, he suddenly knew who he was.

He began writing poems and putting them to music. A few years later, his family moved from a farm in Brenham, Texas, where he had “all that land to walk around on,” to a planned community outside of Houston. The change in atmosphere oppressed him, and he turned to his art. “I just sat in my room and wrote songs all the time.”

It wasn’t until he was 19 that Smith met other songwriters and professional musicians, a group he describes as the gentlest, most wonderful, warm, and honest people he’s ever known. Those who have been in the business for decades are “very clear about who they are and what they’re doing,” he says. “They treat it like it’s a job, not a hobby. As I get older, I am more and more completely at home around artists and musicians. I love it. I crave it.”

“It’s all about listening,” he says. “Once the song starts happening, I listen. People will tell you all kinds of things.

I take their words, and turn it into a song and get it back to them.”

Darden is a Songwriter, Musician, Innovator www.dardensmith.com @dardensmith

Smith’s yearning for the company of musicians goes beyond music. He is energized by people who work hard, stay committed to their craft and experiment to see how far they can push the art itself.

For his part, Smith says chasing a song is personally restorative. Taking some serious angst and setting it to music “puts a different charge on it,” he says. But it also takes him outside of himself.

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He does songwriting workshops in schools around the country, where he feels the unrestrained lightness of kids who haven’t spent most of their lives reacting to hidden social messages that bombard them every day.

Writing songs with soldiers, he says, has been the most surprising and profound artistic experience of life. He loves their raw honesty: “[Soldiers] have a really low tolerance for anything that’s false. All you have to do is ask them, ‘Is this ringing true?’ If it’s not, they’ll tell you.”

After 30 years, 14 albums, and several recalibrations, Smith is purifying the sound and meaning of his songs.

In his latest album, Love Calling, he moves closer to the core of his craft, to the feelings that drew him in from the beginning. He is finding people and telling their stories in what he calls a “magical” collaboration.

thysson george

WILLIAMS fluidity and seamlessness in web 4.0 Whether they know it or not, the 18- to 35-year-olds who live from screen to screen are shaping the parameters of Web 4.0 − The Narrative Web. They organize the world through their mobile devices and expect a future of seamlessness across platforms, according to Thysson George Williams, entrepreneur and general partner of the Boulder, Colorado-based Lookout Investment Group.

Williams is a first-generation American who says he is living the “great, good American dream.” And as a senior member of the much-coveted 18- to 35-year-old demographic, his entrepreneurial vision is one of fluidity.

He made his first splash in business at the age of 14 when he went to work at Crocs, Inc., before the footwear manufacturer had even hit the consciousness of the general market and was still a small enterprise, trying to hold its own among mall giants like Foot Locker and Nordstrom.

Crocs shoes, with their bright colors and funky shapes, had a certain offbeat appeal associated with a casual outdoor lifestyle. Their patented lightweight, revolutionary material seemed practical and high-tech at the same time.

“It was an interesting new kind of futuristic product,” Williams says of Crocs. “They’re inexpensive, they’re ‘fugly,’ and people have an emotional response to them, regardless of whether it’s positive or negative. Plus, they’re widely functional for the price point.”

But the real force behind Crocs’ sudden uptick in sales, 10 years ago, was the unique way in which they were merchandised and brought to market. Williams helped implement the marketing approach that placed the shoes in mall kiosks, rather than on the shelves of major stores, next to Nike and hundreds of other competitive brands.

“They were like low-hanging fruit,” Williams says of the Crocs sold through kiosks. “We had very little overhead and phenomenal exposure.”

Williams is no longer actively involved with the company, but he brings to his current venture the basic principle behind the kiosk model that made Crocs famous: the structuring of a space that promotes fluidity of motion, ideas, people, and goods.

In the next 12 to 18 months, Williams plans to break

ground on a million-and-a-half-square-foot innovation center on 10 acres of land in Boulder, Colorado. The aim, he says, is to create a scintillating space where new concepts, products, and designs can touch the imaginations of people who flow through it.

Williams says Boulder has all of the raw ingredients of a naturally innovative environment: an active tech corridor, a major university, a highly educated population, and a landscape that invites a sense of wonder.

“Boulder is one of five or six places on the planet that have the proper mix to facilitate this type of physical space and seed it with the elements that create the scale and density that then creates interaction,” Williams says. “It has become a place where new ideas are fostered.”

The built environment of the innovation center will bring ideas to the fore through a bumping together of minds, according to Williams: “I want people to be bothered.

That’s the whole thing. I have a great deal of respect for cocooned study in the gaining of knowledge, but I also think that the best way to use the power of our brains is to collaborate, and collaboration feeds on itself.”

Just as he sees people flowing through a mall kiosk — or through an innovation center where the Rocky Mountains meet the Great Plains — Williams also sees them flowing digitally through the “narrative web” that is coming alive on our mobile devices.

People want seamless interactions, whether in physical or cyberspace. “With the death of the browser and the uprising of the apps, the narrative web is the future of what we’re going to see when we interact with our mobile devices,” he says.

Williams notes that he is not an advocate of constant Internet access, and he is extremely mindful of the privacy

questions implicit in the information sharing practices of Web 4.0. But he says that cloud computing and a screensavvy population have brought the concept of fluidity to new heights.

These days, he says, “You have very little reason not to have everything that you want, every time you want it, anywhere you want it.”

Thysson is General Partner, Lookout Investment Group LLC

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guy

WOLLAERT embracing complexity as part of our future As the Berlin Wall began its slow crumble into dust in the early ‘90s, emerging architect Guy Wollaert was among the first wave of Westerners to move swiftly into the vast and wide-open Eastern Europe market. Hired by The Coca-Cola Company to manage infrastructure investments such as plants, distribution centers, warehouses, and office buildings, Wollaert was astounded by the sheer velocity of progress he witnessed on the other side of the wall.

“The speed with which things needed to happen to establish ourselves as leaders in Eastern Europe—that was our biggest challenge,” says Wollaert, who is now senior vice president and chief technical and innovation officer of The Coca-Cola Company. “It all had to happen at the same time.”

Even with that rapid pace of development, Wollaert remained deeply engaged in his work. The creative process of architecture had intrigued him ever since he was a boy growing up in Ghent, Belgium, where the charm of the old medieval city tends to mask the space challenges of an extremely built-up environment. He was drawn to the “idea of leaving behind a visible product that has a sense of permanence and purpose.”

He traveled to places that offered opportunity for a young architect eager to practice his craft. In South Africa, he created

environments around gold mines. “If you want to start a gold mine, you need people,” he explains. “My job was to design the village that was going to house the middle management.

You literally start with a blank sheet of paper and draw a line on that blank page, and that will define where a major road access will be.”

Later, designing factories for Coca-Cola put Wollaert on a path to refining his critical field of specialization—complex, supply chain dynamics.

To Wollaert, a factory was never a structure stuck in place.

He always pictured the widest possible context in which it would have an impact. “You cannot design a good factory if you don’t know what happens before and what happens after,” he says. “Where do the trucks come from? What sizes are they? What should the people flow, the material flow look like. Eventually, you start to ask questions about the end-toend supply chain. You design a factory not for what it needs to do today, but for how it evolves over its life.”

As Wollaert devised better ways of coordinating the flow of operations outside the factory, he convinced senior leaders at Coca-Cola in Japan that they could radically change the company’s business model around the supply chain. “I had a

blueprint on how to do this, and they gave me permission,” he says.

Consolidation was integral to his plans. It enabled the company to streamline costs, reduce its carbon footprint, and move fresher Coke products around the globe.

Wollaert says his strength lies in being able picture how the whole, massive process will flow. “I am not made to operate the business day after day,” he says, because he would rather figure out how a million different factors will ultimately coalesce. He says that there is an urgent need for thinkers who can do just that: “Business complexity is part of our future, and it is growing exponentially.”

To tackle complex problems, Wollaert still starts from a blank space—nowadays a whiteboard where he charts out problems that seem impossible—and then makes a “mind map” out of the difficulties. He is inspired, he says, by how the universe is constructed, how the brain works, how insect colonies are organized. “There are parallels among these things—all these patterns look the same. What are those rules? How do they translate into how we should be working differently?”

Wollaert also applies his complexity expertise to Coca-Cola’s “triple bottom line”—doing good for business, the community, and the planet. “I’m a firm believer in this,” he says. “I seek initiatives from that lens.”

When he ran the company’s juice operations and needed a reliable source of mangoes, he began by finding ways to help fruit farmers in Africa to improve their irrigation methods and reduce their use of pesticides, whilst improving farm yields.

Project Nurture, as it came to be known, doubled the income of Kenyan mango farmers in six years.

Designing that complex system has enabled African fruit

farmers along The Coca-Cola juice business to survive in a better way, and thrive. The business, the community, and the planet benefit. And, Wollaert adds, “We’re growing more great tasting mangoes.”

Guy is Senior Vice President, Chief Technical and Innovation Officer, The Coca-Cola Company www.coca-colacompany.com @gwollaert

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richard saul

WURMAN a possible map of richard saul wurman (or, one iteration thereof…)

Richard Saul Wurman gladly provides the lead for his own story: Out of everything he has accomplished in his intriguing career, he is most proud to have received the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum and the Boston Science Museum’s 50th Annual Bradford Washburn Award, which he will receive in October of this year.

The map is not complete, but it is gaining texture. Wurman does not complicate its creation by worrying over how people will receive it. “I don’t have a mission to make it understandable to other people,” he says of his overall body of work. “If you try to have that effect, it affects your own work. I don’t want to change my work. I already have a client.

That client’s me.”

If innovation is partially about subtraction, as Wurman asserts, then we must subtract all of his professional accomplishments from this piece. What’s left behind is a map.

When he wants to learn something, he seeks out a group of potentially useful individuals who can help him get there. “I do most everything like a pickup baseball team. My fuel is the enthusiasm of others.”

The map is constructed through the exercise of Wurman’s passion: comparative information, the notion that we understand something only relative to what we already understand. Everything he does is “just another step along the same Johnny-one-note idea.” Every book, every conference, every design is a comparative experiment on how he can get people closer to telling the truth. This concept is part of a group of guiding principles of Information Architecture (a term ascribed to him).

He says he gets away with a lot because he has a track record of doing things that pass muster. He does his homework, and he pays attention: “I have worked very hard to be a superb listener. I listen as hard as I can.” Two ears, one mouth.

Wurman identifies himself as a student of Louis Kahn, a major architect of the 20th century. From Kahn, he learned not to be tethered to an idea. Starting with an end product in mind distorts the design. It is a presumption against nature, an

unwillingness to let materials, spaces or people have their own presence.

One cannot set out to design a beautiful building, Wurman says: “A building has to become what it wants to become.

When something is incredibly well-designed, it becomes beautiful; perhaps handsome.”

Wurman prefers to observe as the design takes hold. “I love patterns,” he says. “Everything in my head connects and can be mapped, and the mapping of that is fascinating to me.”

He watches and waits to be fascinated. He will put a group of spectacularly extraordinary people on a stage just to see what they will talk about. Hopefully, they won’t be boring, and we will witness something true. This was certainly the case with his most successful conference to date, the WWW Conference in September of 2012.

He insists that the conferences he has created over the years are just for him. Centered on his curiosities, not that of his understanding of the collective, whose particular curiosities hecannot possibly understand and guessing at them would only dilute his work.

But as he makes something understandable to himself, he brings patterns to the surface where others can see them as well. He is known for making the complex clear. “I’m just trying to understand things,” he says, “I’m not trying to change the world.”

He considers “expertise” an empty notion, and what generally passes as “information” to be just the opposite. They add nothing to the map he is working on. “We worry about stuff that we think is information that is actually data,” he says.

And we don’t get true information because we “blither out” meaningless questions. “We ask bad questions because we don’t have a quest.”

Wurman is on a perpetual quest. He says he doesn’t have rules—he has a life. “I would like tomorrow to be interesting. I would like the day after tomorrow to be interesting, for every day to be different, to be surprised, not have it planned.

Interesting days, that’s what life is.”

His interest is the INFORM in information and the QUEST in question. THE INFORMED QUEST. A single, good conversation could make that happen.

His most recent endeavor is a major cartographic project with partners, ESRI and Radical Media. The Urban Observatory will open in February 2015 at the restored Smithsonian Castle on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Richard is an Author, Information Architect www.wurman.com @namruw

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keith

YAMASHITA keith yamashita, chapter two: impact at scale After two decades of work at SYPartners, Keith Yamashita — the master of the whole-company reboot — is ready to help transform the way business is done globally. His field of vision is expanding, he says, but his winning methods stay the same: Begin with the individual person and work outwards, even across the world.

Yamashita, chairman of SYPartners, didn’t always see the individual as the first mover in organizational change. “My point of view has really changed on this over the years,” he says. “In the beginning, we thought we could move the institution, and in moving the institution, we thought the people would come along.”

doing work for multinational or global companies. All those companies are anchored in the U.S., but now we will start to work for companies that are headquartered elsewhere, as well as on issues that transcend the globe.”

Chapter Two opens with SYPartners joining the recently launched kyu, a group of international firms with discrete talents in brand, design, and entrepreneurialism.

Yamashita describes kyu (pronounced “CUE”) as a “potent collective dedicated to the belief that creativity moves society forward.”

As it turns out, it’s the other way around. If the people don’t budge, the institution idles. Yamashita’s focus on the individual has electrified major organizations like Apple, Nike, Starbucks, IBM, and others. His tactics are unique, but simple: Know your superpower — what you’re uniquely good at. Build duos that bring out the best. Trust that the project will not fail, nor will the people around you.

Although “it’s still super early days here,” Yamashita says he feels a “trusted bond” with kyu, which will act as a strategic unit within the Tokyo-­-based Hakuhodo DY Holdings. Hakuhodo, the oldest advertising firm in Japan and the governing spirit of kyu, is the “pinnacle of a people-centered company,” he says. “The more they revealed about their philosophy, the more it felt like we were operating in an alternate universe on the same first principle. We were so oddly similar.”

But that was all Chapter One for SYPartners, according to Yamashita. “The first 20 years of SY were characterized by

Hakuhodo engages in the insight of sei­-katsu-sha, an understanding of the individual as a whole person with a

complex life, aspirations, and dreams. For Yamashita, this holistic reverence for and understanding of the individual is a critical grounding force in the swift and tumultuous currents of today’s economy.

“We have entered an age of perpetual transformation,” he says. “Gone are the days when you could innovate in cycles. We are now always moving to a new place, and it’s ongoing. I think to do that you have to unleash human talent, so work is going to become more human, more creative.”

“We want to make an impact on a billion-person scale, to pick the issues that affect many of us, not just a few of us.

That’s a long haul. We’re far from it today, but it’s where we’re beginning to direct our energy and our creativity. It might take us the rest of the century.”

Keith is Chairman and Founder, SYPartners www.sypartners.com @keithyamashita

Efficiency plays are no longer enough to vitalize an organization, according to Yamashita. Deep creativity must be drawn to the top by allowing others free play in their work. Trust is essential. “It isn’t yet the paradigm of the whole world, but I wish it were,” he says.

As Yamashita and SYPartners step out onto the planet in a bigger way, he seeks “more comrades and colleagues, more resources” to take on international causes and help countries to fulfill their national aspirations. Lately, he has been working with companies in New Zealand that are having impact far beyond their national borders.

“There is a growing movement to mobilize New Zealanders to transform their country into a model nation — one that thrives in the global economy and still preserves its unique heritage,” Yamashita says.

He never imagined SYPartners would take on such challenges when he started the firm in 1994 with one phone jack, a shared email account, and no clients. “SYPartners has been on a journey of transformation since day one, and we will continue to change and evolve. We are becoming more globally-­minded citizens.”

Chapter Three of SYPartner’s journey is still unwritten, but Yamashita has already sketched out a few major plot points:

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ethan

ZUCKERMAN the myth of connectivity and a call to rewire the world Ethan Zuckerman’s job is to see the internet for what it is.

As the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media and the author of Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection, his research is a powerful reflection on what it means to be a citizen of the world in the Internet age.

Through the study of civic and social engagement within digital infrastructures, Zuckerman has arrived at the disruptive revelation that we are not as connected as we appear to be.

“The world is more global. Our problems and economics are global. And though we are inundated with content, the media is getting less global,” he says.

His research shows that despite the potential to connect across traditional boundaries, our interactions are nevertheless, almost entirely confined to people of similar values, nationality, race, and class. We are living with what he calls “the myth of connectivity.”

Zuckerman argues that the way we have wired our world has ironically made “atoms more accessible than bits.” In an

example, he points out that though the United States grows increasingly dependent on foreign goods, American citizens remain largely uninformed about the people who produce them; “while Fijian water is easy to access, Fijian culture is not.”

He believes it is important to expose and rectify this fallacy; after all, he says, “We’re at the point where there are people in other parts of the world who are absolutely qualified to be part of our conversations.” To not have a dialogue with them would “lead not only to shocking ignorance about the world, but also to missed opportunities for collaboration.”

He adds, “As it turns out, what you don’t know can hurt you.”

Zuckerman attributes the myth of connectivity to a lack of demand rather than supply. With the explosion of personal publishing and the “read-write web,” the issue isn’t so much the lack of stories being told from other parts of the world, but rather, that these stories have been filtered out by the domestic attention span.

One of the problems of journalism with a “free market”

approach, Zuckerman claims, is that it relies on user behavior to recommend content. This filtering mechanism is deeply susceptible to what he calls “homophily.” Meaning “love of the same,” the word homophily expresses the concept also known by the truism, “birds of a feather flock together.”

Homophily explains the tendency of news coverage to cater to the lowest common denominator, or, speaking within the realms of Zuckerman’s research, of the disappearance of international and investigative reporting.

“What we need are new systems to help us stumble over things, to jog us out of ordinary reality,” Zuckerman says.

He claims the key to integrating international, novel, and hard-hitting perspectives into domestic and comfortable discourse is to provide relevant context. Fundamentally, he says, “It’s natural that what’s most important to you is ‘you’ and ‘yours.’ But if we’re not giving people some way in which they can interact with new content, we’ll be missing giant opportunities.”

He forecasts that content recommendations of the future will be able to determine an audience’s interest and the “information rut” that they’re stuck in, before bridging that gap by suggesting novel, yet unexpectedly useful content.

For instance, “following your interest in U.S. mobile phones, you might find yourself reading about Chinese phone technologies, or about how much disposable income the mobile market captures in East Africa,” he explains.

“We say digital tech is going to change everything, but I think it’s important to truly go after that question from different perspectives,” Zuckerman says. “What does it mean if you’re a person of the color in the United States looking for work in the tech industry? If you’re a small-scale entrepreneur in Kenya? If you’re a small country trying to figure out how to get more integrated into the global economy?”

“I was never in love with the narrative of the Internet start up,” he says. “Instead of asking, ‘Who’s going to be the next Facebook?’ to me, the more interesting question is, ‘What’s the technology that’s really going to include everyone?’ ” “Dot com” entrepreneurism may espouse limitless possibility, open and fair markets, and a completely connected world, but it often falters when it comes to practice. Zuckerman holds it to its word.

Ethan is Director, Center for Civic Media, MIT Media Lab www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog @ethanz

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special thanks to Kyla Covert, Nicha Ratana, and Maureen Tuthill for their contributions to this book.

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