BIF2015 Summit Program

BIF2015

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W H AT DO E S bif do ?

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H OW DO E S bif do it ?

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E XP ERI ENC E labs

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BUSI NE SS MO DEL sandbox

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TH I S YE AR at bif

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STO RY tellers

a letter from the chief Maybe I’m just getting old, but the self-imposed pressure to get better faster, and to rise to the occasion of the enormous social system challenges we all face, has never been more acute. I feel a heightened sense of urgency.

I don’t know about you, but #BIF2015 comes at the perfect time for me. I need the annual fix of connection and inspiration I get from hanging out at our BIF Collaborative Innovation Summit with you— the BIF community of like-minded innovation junkies from around the world. I’m betting you can use an inspiration fix too!

I never know what collisions, patterns, and stories will most move and inspire me in advance of each Summit. I do know that each and every Summit has surprised me in unique ways. I look forward to the two days of the Summit every year. I’m grateful and blessed to spend them colliding with you. Bring on the random collisions of unusual suspects and let the inspiration begin!

I also know that after 10 years of hosting the Summit, it never gets old. It delivers every year. #BIF2015, our 11th Summit, will deliver too. Not because this year’s storytellers are more inspiring than ever—although they are. Not because this year’s participants are

more pre-wired for collaborative innovation than ever—although you are. Not because the market screams for transformation more than ever—although it does. Not because the BIF team has poured their hearts and souls into creating the perfect conditions for #BIF2015—although they have. #BIF2015 will deliver because of you.

If we have learned anything from our first decade it’s that if we trust you, the BIF community, the BIF Summit will deliver. We don’t prescribe what should be important to you. We don’t tell you who to collide or connect with. We don’t tell you what to take away from the amazing stories or what patterns will emerge over the two days of the Summit.

Instead, you decide. You decide what’s important enough to share with other Summit participants.

You decide what to share with your networks.

You decide what insights to act upon. You decide, and we all learn together. You engage, and we all engage together. You’re inspired, and we all inspire each other. You act, and we all act together. You’re the magic of the BIF Summit. We trust you. Bring it!

Over the first decade of the BIF Summit, we have nailed self-organized networks. The BIF community knows that innovation is a team sport, and highly

values connection and sharing. We skew social and have been active travelers on every new social media platform. We leave no connection opportunity unturned! We are direct and honest with each other, and we know that being interesting starts with being interested.

The BIF community also knows that if we wait for institutions and institutional leaders to transform our important social systems, we will wait a very long time. It is up to us to use our new self-organizing superpowers to catalyze the societal changes we want. Institutions will come along once they realize that resistance is futile!

My dream for our second decade at BIF is that we get much better at making our self-organized networks purposeful. We’ve got the connecting and sharing part down. Now it’s time to work on making our networks actionable, to get stuff done. Watch out when we get both the self-organized and purposeful parts right. There will be no stopping us!

Our BIF mantra is “Connect, Inspire, Transform.”

It’s time to up the ante on Transform. Together, we will catalyze something bigger than any of us separately. We can make reinvention safer and easier to manage. The connections we make and reinforce

at the Summit provide the basis for us to collaborate and take action throughout the year, exploring and testing new business models and social systems.

Together, we need to try more stuff.

I have high expectations—I know that you in the BIF community are ready, willing, and able. So buckle up, because our second decade promises to be an inspiring and productive ride. I’m grateful for the opportunity to learn from you, to be inspired by you, and to change the world together.

Welcome to #BIF2015.

w h at d o e s b i f d o ?

For 10 years we at BIF have worked with leaders who believe, as we do, that business model innovation is on the critical path to transforming our most important social systems, such as education, healthcare, and government, all of which are currently in need of transformation.

Business model innovation is also on the critical path for transforming business. Why? Because business models don’t last as long as they used to. The only way to avoid being Netflixed is to experiment with new business models to find one that will transform your business for the future—while still operating your current, successful business model.

At BIF, we help both social system and business leaders design and test new business models in the real world.

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

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CONNECT

INSPIRE

TRANSFORM

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how doe s bif do it?

Tweaking existing models and systems won’t work. We need to change our lens and imagine, prototype, and test new human-centered models and systems in the real world.

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BIF’S BUSINESS MODEL DESIGN PROCESS

Change your lens by seeing through the eyes of the customer

Imagine a new experience for the customer

Create a sandbox that combines and recombines capabilities

Develop a resource generator for fueling and growing your business model

Build a low fidelity version of your business model to test in the real world 9

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.

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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.

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introducing ...

R&D for new Business Models has become the new Strategic Imperative.

The only way for businesses to avoid being Netflixed is to do ongoing R&D for new business models, the same way companies do R&D for new products and technologies today. Companies must explore and test new business models in the real world, even models that might disrupt their current business model.

If you don’t, you can be assured someone else is exploring a business model that will disrupt you.

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where corporate leaders come to explore new business models

Here’s how R&D for new business models works: Create a sandbox—connected to but autonomous from your core business—in which to combine and recombine capabilities in new ways that are not constrained by the current business model. From this sandbox, conduct real-world business model experiments. At all times companies should have a portfolio of business model explorations underway, including early stage concepts, in-market prototypes, and later-stage scalable models.

We can help your company access BIF’s Business Model Sandbox to explore and test new business models in the real world—or we can help you create a sandbox of your own.

See more at sandbox.bif.is

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t h i s y e a r at b i f

NOV, 2014 Received grant from the Hewlett Foundation // Kicked off School Hackers Project

DEC, 2014 Received grant from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation // Began Co-Creating Patient Narrative project

JAN, 2015 PXL launched new work with Children’s Health System of TX // Designed and tested models for family well-being Hosted Patient Narrative Participatory Design Studio, welcoming 50+ patient narrative leaders to PVD

Hosted design studios in Dallas to co-create family well-being concepts

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FEB, 2015 Introduced the Citizen Experience Lab

MAR, 2015 Announced partnership with 100Kin10 Initiative

APRIL, 2015

SD4E students presented completed high school designs // 360 High School opened in PVD in September

Unveiled completed Healthcare Narrative Playbook // Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

MAY, 2015

Prototyped and tested a reality TV educational model

Unveiled School Hackers project website, SchoolHackers.org // The Hewlett Foundation

JUNE, 2015

Started “What’s Cooking,” the first experimentation phase of the Family Well-Being Project // Children’s Health

Launched 100kin10 Grand Challenge Platform // Co-Designing

JULY, 2015 Launched “Your Best You,” the second experimentation phase of the Family Well-Being Project // Children’s Health

TD4Ed awarded a Professional Notable Distinction in the Design Education category of the Core 77 Awards

AUG, 2015

Introduced partnership with Lucas Learning to prototype and test new ways of learning

Hosted Education Design session for Chicago’s juvenile detention facility Introduced partnership with Edutopia to share School Hacks

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bif2016 SEPTEMBER 14 & 15

r e g i s t e r b e f o r e d e c e m b e r 31, 2015, f o r t h e e a r ly b i r d d i s c o u n t

25% off tickets !

To register at the discounted rate, visit www.businessinnovationfactory.com/summit

For more information about #BIF2016, contact Renee Hopkins, BIF’s Director of Engagement, at renee@businessinnovationfactory.com or @TheBIF

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t h e s u m m i t co n v e r s at i o n co n t i n u e s ... be a part of it !

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johnabele b e t h e g r e at explainer Business in the 21st century looks different from a few decades ago, but it still requires mastery of the soft skills, according to John Abele, the founding chairman of Boston Scientific Corporation, a worldwide manufacturer and developer of innovative medical products.

“The ability to both understand and communicate ideas in a way that they are understood is extraordinarily valuable and incredibly difficult,” says Abele.“ To communicate to a wide diversity of cultures and mindsets in a way that they all take away a common meaning, you need a great explainer in the group.”

The great explainer articulates why the organization is doing what it’s doing. He or she establishes the mood of the dialogue and gives everyone a fair hearing, Abele says. Shy people are drawn out and the posers are reigned in.

Having built a major global enterprise from scratch, Abele has become a voice of authority on effective collaboration,

which he says can only happen when a group of people know how to talk to each other.

Collaborating is like driving on ice, he says. When you begin to skid, “you increment forward, and there are lots of little test things that you do without knowing it.”

At Boston Scientific, Abele made unprecedented strides in the field of interventional healthcare by bringing together talented physicians of diverse nationalities and making them not just consumers, but also developers, of path-breaking medical devices.

“The biggest mistake in the world is thinking you can get brilliant people together and they will collaborate,” Abele says. We are too often trained to be “pseudo-collaborators,” who pretend to give away aspects of control while we are, in fact, defending our specialty. “You need to strengthen the culture so that there is a sense of trust and respect. People will collaborate if they feel they are not taken advantage of.”

Enter the soft skills. Everyone meets on the same plane to listen, be heard, acknowledge one another, and understand the purpose of the task at hand. Abele notes that this type of cohesion doesn’t just happen.

“Moderation is absolutely everything,” Abele says. “There are an awful lot of people who talk to impress rather than to communicate.” Set time limits to remind contributors that

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no one deserves to dominate the floor. Trump the demagogues by summarizing and articulating their positions before they can throw things off balance.

Abele explains, “By doing that, you are both managing that speaker and also helping the others, because you’re setting the standard by which you’d like to have the dialogue continue.”

People who can rise above, see the humor in a situation, and make accurate observations are the leaders, Abele says.

He recommends constructing a social map of an organization to identify those individuals: “I tend to look for people who I think are likely to be helpful. I talk to them. I also look for leaders who aren’t yet leaders, but they’re going to be. I ask people who they would go to for information on X, Y, or Z. Certain names keep popping up. You learn the ones they trust the most, those who seem the most competent.”

Some places block the productive rapport that enables peers to struggle and learn alongside each other. Abele says you can feel the “take-no-prisoners” energy of such an organization as soon as you walk into it. “It’s the way in which people talk—not the words, but the sound of their voices, the way they move, their facial expressions.”

Abele has found that having fun and being sociable beyond the immediate project builds trust and reinforces the group

ethos, allowing people to read each other better and build context for each other.

“I’m fascinated about creative uses of technology, but I’m just as fascinated by understanding the psyche of groups,” he says. “By that, I mean collective intelligence and how you get amazing performance from people who are smart.”

John is Retired Founding Chairman, Boston Scientific, and Owner, Kingbridge Conference Centre and Institute www.kingbridgecenter.com

rickbenjamin finding the truth through poetry After almost 20 years of calling Providence home, Rhode Island Poet Laureate Rick Benjamin returns this fall to his native state of California. It is a bittersweet remove to a place that is “in some ways indigenous” to him, but that never gripped him quite like this small city, which from its very beginning was a haven for those in search of belonging.

“It took me 37 years to find a place that I could call home,” Benjamin says of his move to Providence in 1996 with his wife, Margaret, and their three babies. “Rhode Island has felt strangely familiar to me. I don’t feel that way about California, even though that’s where I’m from.”

The sheer geological power of California, where mudslides and earthquakes remind inhabitants that they are only sojourners there, has a way of penetrating the fibers of one’s being, Benjamin says. “It’s something I feel in my bones in

a visceral way.” And yet, he remembers playing outside his house when he was young, looking around and feeling lost.

“I didn’t recognize most of it,” he recalls. “I wasn’t on the right planet.”

Providence was a place that he chose. He’s not sure why—he thinks it might have been the spectacular light that bounces off the water and sparkles on the sidewalks. Maybe it’s the endearing fact that Rhode Island doesn’t even appear on all maps and globes.

But Rhode Island is where Benjamin’s family took root. “Later in my adult life, I started doing some of the things that make people feel at home in the world. Finding someone to love felt like home. Raising kids felt like home. I associate all of that with this place. I don’t know how to parse it out.”

Even the Rhode Island state motto, “Hope,” expresses a feeling that Benjamin sees as the object of his poetry: “to find where my own longing is, what it might be for.”

Through poetry, Benjamin explores the process of becoming one with a place. As Poet Laureate, he is charged with composing occasional poems that celebrate Rhode Island, and while there is a “slight containment” in that commission, he says, “the poems are always mine.”

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They are infused with his perceptions of how the state has impressed itself on his life.

When he teaches, Benjamin brings his students out into the community to write poetry with others, so they will take seriously their citizenship in the community. They go to assisted living facilities, detention centers, schools.

“My emphasis has always been on poetry as a medium that builds relationships with other people, and I try to live it that way,” he says. “I love any impulse to be out among people with whatever you have to give. If you have something that is valuable to you, you should be taking it elsewhere, and it comes back to you doubly.”

He has found this to be especially true when he writes poetry with elders who may be losing their capacity to remember, but not to think. “These people have been living for nine decades and I want to know what that means to them.” For some elders, poetry becomes an opening, Benjamin says, a way for them to fathom the mystery of their own lives. “They are so fearless in some ways, so forthright about telling their stories unabashedly and openly.”

As a medium, poetry is a vehicle of movement, Benjamin says. “You can’t write and not move towards something. In my experience, poetry is always telling the truth. I can almost always see it. I can almost always hear it.”

At the same time, Benjamin says he has trained himself to be “suspicious” of closure in poetry. “I sometimes measure moments of discomfort at the end of a poem as ones that really got me somewhere,” he says.

Rick is Poet Laureate of Rhode Island www.rickbenjamin.org

jaimecasap w h at p r o b l e m d o yo u wa n t t o s o lv e ?

Growing up in Hell’s Kitchen on Manhattan’s West Side presents limited opportunities for a Latino kid with a single mother. That was the experience of Jaime Casap, who says he accepted an offer to play basketball at SUNY Brockport in upstate New York because he didn’t want to go to Rikers Island.

At 17, Casap had a high school degree but no one to help him figure out his next steps toward college. His mother labored at two and three jobs at a time, modeling a solid work ethic for her son. But she was “old school,” Casap says, strict and hesitant to let her son take his chances.

He left for college, anyway, despite the red flags that said he would never graduate. “The most important thing I got out of Hell’s Kitchen is a really good pair of reality distortion glasses,” Casap says. “I don’t believe statistics. If you live it and you prove it, nobody gets in your way.”

Today, that kid from Hell’s Kitchen is the Chief Education Evangelist for Google. For the past eight years, he’s been part of a team that brought Google Apps into schools from kindergarten through college and helped make Chromebooks a classroom staple.

Education saved his life, he says, and he plans to return the favor by figuring out where education needs to go.

“The American educational system is doing exactly what it needs to do. Now, we have to figure out the right model for what it needs to be in the future.”

A few generations ago, most people went to work in manufacturing jobs that no longer exist, jobs where a thirdgrade reading level wasn’t a problem. “Today’s students, Casap suggests, should not be thinking, “what do I want to be?”, but instead should be asking themselves, “what problem do I want to solve?”.

Schools should be a resource for students as they map out solutions. That means weeding out practices initially designed for adult convenience. Desks were put in rows for the convenience of custodial crews, Casap says. But “kids sitting in little cattle seats with their arms crossed” do not explore, collaborate, or discover.

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Energetic classroom inquiry requires three things, according to Casap: First, we need good, solid broadband. “There is nothing you can’t do on the Internet,” he says. “That’s how we can dive into storytelling and information, and really look at what’s going on in the world.”

Second, we need seamless Internet devices that make great classroom technology invisible, like flipping a light switch.

“Our job as technologists is to make technology easy to use and accessible, and then get it out of the way,” Casap says.

And third, we have to train teachers to get the most out of these tools. To those who say technology has become a classroom distraction, he responds, “Is it really the laptop’s fault, or are you practicing a method that doesn’t make sense to those students?”

Casap is working with the Phoenix Unified School District to develop a new inquiry-based high school that will incorporate coding and programming into an otherwisestandard curriculum. The goal is to graduate 100 students every year who have had deep, project-based learning experiences and who can program in two different languages.

This will not be a charter school, with special admissions requirements, but a positive proof that “you can be innovative and nimble inside a real school district.”

Casap intends to create a learning environment that helps kids to see what he once saw in Hell’s Kitchen: “It’s about trying to do something despite the fact that somebody said you can’t.”

Jaime is Chief Education Evangelist at Google www.jcasap.com @jcasap

robinchase the internet of m ov i n g m i n ds The four most amazing things in the world are electricity, the Internet, wireless, and GPS. Such is the accumulated wisdom of Robin Chase, transportation entrepreneur and the cocreator of Zipcar, the largest car-sharing company in the world.

rented with wireless technology, using your smartphone or a proximity card. Simple. Seamless. Smart. But Chase says systems like Zipcar are only our first foray into what transportation and the Internet can do together.

Chase includes GPS in her list of transformative technologies, because she sees communication and transportation as naturally linked. While the immense connectivity of the Internet has made certain movements around the globe unnecessary, some things (and people) still have to travel from place to place.

For the past 10 years, she has been working on her dream of creating the networking fabric for the “Internet of Moving Things.” As chairman of the board of Veniam, a connected transportation company that has built the world’s largest connected fleet in Porto, Portugal, she is bringing that dream to fruition.

“Transportation is the center of our world and the key to all opportunity—where you can work, your education, your leisure, your friends,” Chase says. “It is the key to people’s individual lives and to how cities feel and thrive.”

“Veniam is right on the front edge of the connected vehicle wave, and not too early.” Chase says.

The ingenuity behind Zipcar has been its connection to the Internet—cars can be located, unlocked for use, and

What’s happening in Porto—turning vehicles into a fleet of Wi-Fi hotspots—will happen in the US, she notes. Wireless has already transformed other sectors, but transportation has lagged 10 to 15 years behind. Chase says that an “exceptionalist perspective” inside the transportation industry and a resistance to sharing resources have resulted in the manufacture of only a limited number of smart cars, and those can talk only to each other.

“If you’re just going to connect up a subset of new cars, it takes years to get to a critical mass in specific geographies.

Most of the time, you’re not going to pass another vehicle that is similarly equipped to read your signals,” she says.

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The fleet of cars in the US takes 25 years to turn over.

Putting vehicle-to-vehicle communications technology in some cars now means that a viable wireless network of moving things is still decades away. What is needed to kickstart connectivity, according to Chase, is a critical mass of fleet vehicles in urban areas that also connects to existing wireless infrastructure.

Veniam, for instance, is connecting both municipal and private fleets (taxis, trucks, buses) to each other and to Wi-Fi hotspots in the infrastructure, but not to cell towers. “The vehicles are embedded in the wireless ecosystem and adding nodes to that ecosystem,” Chase explains. More importantly, Veniam can enable Internet access to passengers, while collecting terabytes of valuable, high-definition data that can enable a wide range of applications in connected transportation, industrial logistics, and smart cities.

Chase sees positive transformation ahead for many economic and social sectors. Everything is getting smarter, she says. What lies on the horizon is not just the Internet of Things, but the Internet of human minds.

As she explains in her new book, Peers Inc: How People and Platforms are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism, our ability to give and find intelligence everywhere is just beginning to impact our growing collaborative economy.

“We are at the inception now of what it’s going to mean to have everything connected—that’s what has yet to unfold,” Chase says. “That ability to find the right person at the right time with the right asset—that is something that we are just beginning to find out.”

Robin is a Transportation Entrepreneur and Author www.robinchase.org @rmchase

basitchaudhry harnessing the power o f m e d i c a l d ata For Dr. Basit Chaudhry, the practice of medicine is rapidly transitioning between the old and the new—between a time when physicians acted as unfettered authorities in one-onone relationships with patients, and the current age, in which medical knowledge and data have expanded so rapidly that no one physician can know everything they need to.

While Chaudhry feels concern about the ramifications of rapidly expanding medical science, he’s also excited about the “wonderful things that are going to happen.”

But, he says, these wonderful things will happen only if we can put data at the service of human healing, rather than the other way around.

Today’s challenge: How to blend the best of these worlds, so medicine becomes more democratic and scientifically sound, while still maintaining the physician-patient relationship.

With a medical degree and a PhD in information technology applications to medicine, Chaudhry has focused on how we might fuse medicine and technology to develop new systems of care. To that end, he helped develop IBM’s Watson for healthcare. Recently, Chaudhry has founded Tuple Health, a startup medical technology company focused on improving healthcare’s quality, efficiency, and ease of use.

The way in which healing relationships are created is changing daily, with each advance in research, enhancement in medical technology, and wider range of data collected. In the past, the physicians have responded to such dynamics by specializing and sub-specializing. But this has led to a complexity that fragments patients’ lives, Chaudhry says, making the healthcare system confusing and unwieldy for everyone.

Healthcare providers are 20 years behind companies like Amazon and Netflix, he says, which have mastered the art of using data and technology to better understand their consumers and to deliver better services more conveniently.

Why not use data and technology to make healthcare just as convenient and easy to use? Chaudhry asks.

Yet simply collecting health information will do nothing to help us understand patterns that affect health, Chaudhry notes. Data only tells us about behavior if we make sense of it the right way. “Data always has context and meaning. It’s the responsibility of people, not machines, to define that meaning.”

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The momentum toward more data-driven healthcare has raised concerns that the physician-patient encounter will diminish, to the point where the patient becomes a series of test results and images. But, Chaudhry says, protecting the human relationship at the heart of medicine can best be done by “resisting nostalgia,” and by understanding the change that is happening.

Technological change will continue to happen in medicine because people are making it happen, Chaudhry says.

We need to figure out how to build social systems around this change, around our algorithms and machines. Healthcare can become more equitable and more humane. Whether it does or does not depends on all of us, together.

The standard 15-20 minute exam cannot paint a complete picture of the patient. Chaudhry remains convinced that a more creative use of data will give new dimension to the physician’s grasp of the patient’s medical state and the behaviors that create it.

Basit is the Founder of Tuple Health www.tuplehealth.com @BasitMD

“I’d love to see that data become the occasion for telling a different kind of story, a co-equal act of interpretation among the physician, the patient, and a team of professionals,” Chaudhry says.

What medicine’s new shape will be is up to all of us, he notes.

We’re just starting to shape that future. And technology has begun to alter what health looks like.

“Inside our technology systems, disease and health will be represented as high-dimensional vectors,” he says. “A large proportion of healthcare will happen in virtual space, by one algorithm interacting with another. These interactions will become part of the physician-patient relationship. They’ll set the context. We need to be ready for these transformations.”

j o s h u a d av i s e xc avat i n g t h e sto ry Passion, for Joshua Davis, means being totally committed to an idea—down to the last, nitty-gritty detail—and never letting up on it until he has exhausted himself trying to make it real.

Once, he wanted to be Indiana Jones. It didn’t matter that he was a middle-school kid growing up in the San Francisco area. He almost made it happen. “It wasn’t a passing fancy,” Davis says of his dream of bringing the great “Indy” to life.

“I spent the better part of two years learning everything I could about archeology. I convinced my Dad to take me to Knossos. I bought the brown fedora and the bullwhip.”

He didn’t stop there. With the relevant knowledge and the correct outfit, Davis next made the world of Indiana Jones materialize in his own. “I made a bunch of ceramic pottery and inscribed it with ancient hieroglyphics, cooked it and shattered it and buried it on the school campus, and made a treasure map.” He convinced his teachers to let him to teach

a course on excavation and pottery. Then he organized an archeological treasure hunt for his fellow eighth-graders and set them loose on the school grounds with their maps.

They never found it. Davis says he made it too complicated, so he told them where it was and they unceremoniously dug it up. It wasn’t the hoped-for conclusion to the adventure he had set in motion, but in the process, Davis had built a world around an idea, and saw it through to the end.

He is doing something similar today as co-founder of Epic Magazine, an online publication and media platform dedicated to telling the long story, the one with twists and turns, unpredictable human drama, and whispering voices calling out from obscure and exotic locations.

Davis, a writer, filmmaker, and long-time contributing editor to Wired magazine, says he is looking for stories that can be stretched across a variety of media—radio, television, film, stage. To have this elastic quality, a story must be “convincing and captivating,” he says, the kind of tale that can be told around a campfire.

Identifying that story, according to Davis, is often a matter of instinct. “If it piques my curiosity, and it continues to pique my curiosity, I hope that I’ll be able to communicate that to an audience. That’s part of the challenge of being a storyteller­.”

Central to Davis’s interest in any narrative is the true-life characters that drive the plot. “I like meeting new people,

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interesting people, and trying to understand why they make the decisions they make and do the things they do. I like telling those stories.” He is drawn to unique figures—the underdog, the misunderstood. Mix in a little quirkiness or adventure, and he is on the move.

Like the hidden shards of the faux ancient pottery Davis once so meticulously crafted for his eighth-grade excavators, Epic stories might be encountered in eclectic venues. Their discovery will no doubt point to some extraordinary realities as their narratives unfold.

Davis is dogged in reporting. He loves to travel and will hunt down the facts of a story in the underbelly of any continent.

He has interviewed inmates in prisons on three different continents. He has been stranded in the Iraq desert in the midst of a war. He was kidnapped in Libya. He spends months, even years, gathering the details of the narrative he is tracing.

How does he know he has the story?

Joshua is a Co-Founder of Epic magazine and a Contributing Editor at Wired www.joshuadavis.net @JoshuaDavisNow

“Once I’m able to tell it,” Davis says.

With the essential elements of the story in his sights, the writing flows, just like a yarn told around the campfire. But the rich experience of the narrative depends on texture, rhythm, and nuance. At Epic, he says, “We’re trying to really dive deep. These stories are not meant to be short.”

Epic is not funded with ads sold against content, but through annual fees paid by studios that have a “first look” opportunity to develop stories in other formats. Three Epic stories are currently under contract with 20th Century Fox Studios. Davis says this funding model represents a “natural relationship” between the storyteller and the story developer, who can make the story materialize in places where people will find it.

m i c h e l l e d e n n e dy p r i va c y. . . a n e c e s s a r y respite from the world Privacy used to mean the state of being alone, away from the attention of other people. Now, it is defined as freedom from unauthorized intrusion. It has become something to protect.

Privacy protection is a new reality that demands an intelligently considered response, according to Michelle Dennedy, a vice president and Chief Privacy Officer at Cisco.

The problem, Dennedy says, is that we are inconsistent about what our privacy means. As a result, we don’t know how to protect ourselves. “We have a personality disorder about our privacy,” she says. “We go crazy if someone takes away our right to carry a gun, but the story of your life is something you can sell for a candy bar.”

Dennedy, who is also founder and CEO of the iDennedy Project, a privacy and consulting firm, began her career as a patent litigator. The “new kid” who got the assignments no one else wanted, she was often funneled work on the

untested field of privacy protection. So, she says, “I just looked at it like a patent portfolio.”

She considered privacy a form of intellectual property, a non-tangible asset with rules about staking out what you own. Once she began to break down privacy in those terms, Dennedy saw it as a vast and uncharted domain that she has spent the bulk of her career exploring and clarifying.

One of the most complex challenges privacy experts face today is the lack of global uniformity as to what privacy is and how it should be treated. In some countries, it is associated with shamefulness or rudeness. Even ideas about appropriate levels of physical closeness can shape concepts of private space.

Dennedy says that most European countries consider privacy a basic human right, but find that putting structures in place to protect it too intrusive. In Europe, she says: “Talking about privacy in operational terms is like devaluing human rights.

But the only way you can have a human right is to recognize that it’s there, and protect it.”

Although the US has no federal privacy law, Dennedy notes that we have “a very litigious society” and robust privacy programs that “pack a big punch. We haven’t really figured out a cultural sensibility about privacy, but it’s like the First Amendment. It’s a very American concept.”

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Tackling today’s privacy issues has been a complicated challenge, but Dennedy says she is confident the millennials will sort it out satisfactorily. “Part of my excitement is that I think we will find more and more highly skilled people who actually care about the nuances of privacy,” she says.

“They’ve grown up modifying and scaling their own personas.

I’m hoping it’s going to evolve, but we’re going to get pretty beaten up before that happens.”

To nail down solid privacy protections, Dennedy predicts we will need versatile individuals with crosscompetencies—developers who understand privacy engineering, technologists who know the law. Information ethics should undergird everything.

But, she points out, a gulf in communication across disciplines inhibits our ability to build effective privacy protection systems. Privacy engineering is an art, she says: “It is as much about anthropology and psychology as it is about technology. Joining those worlds together is difficult.”

Yet as our privacy quietly erodes on all sides, privacy engineering becomes more and more crucial. The chance to be alone, free from unauthorized intrusion, is not just a human right, but a human need, Dennedy suggests. She rejects the notion that public and private personas should be fused together as a uniform, ever-accessible entity.

Privacy, she says, gives us a necessary respite from the world.

“We need a place where we have the ability to be private and make mistakes, to rest and recalibrate who we think we are, and to learn and evolve into the next thing.”

Michelle is VP and Chief Privacy Officer, Cisco www.cisco.com/security @mdennedy

ca r l a d i r l i kov l i f e - c h a n g i n g l e s s o n s i n pa s s i o n , c o n f i d e n c e , a n d c o m m u n i c at i o n The arts are “fundamental human expressions of our deepest desires, fears, failings, and successes,” says professional mezzo-soprano Carla Dirlikov, whose voice “grabs the heartstrings with its dramatic force and musicality,” according to Opera Magazine.

The passion behind that dramatic force can be found not only in Dirlikov’s performances, but in her humanitarian work.

Her passion: Bringing arts education and cultural exchange programs to some of the world’s most poverty-stricken areas.

Dirlikov found her voice at a violin lesson. “The teacher often would have me sing the line of music,” she told writer Megan Gloss in Classical Singer magazine. “I discovered that it was easier, and I liked singing more.”

The young violin-turned-voice student also learned that an opera singer could be a role model and a difference-maker, an inspiration that came from the great tenor and conductor

Placido Domingo’s humanitarian work during and after the 1985 Mexico City earthquake.

Both lessons stayed with her. Her professional calendar is full—over the last four years, she has sung the title role in Carmen more than 80 times, in 12 countries in Asia, Latin America, and Europe, and most recently in China, Bulgaria, and in the US—as well as other opera roles and solo performances worldwide.

Her difference-making calendar is also full. For the past 10 years she has served as a Cultural Arts Envoy for the US Department of State, promoting American culture overseas, giving master classes, and teaching music to orphans and poverty-stricken youth. “When I’m scheduled to perform abroad,” she says, “I will contact the State Department and ask what I can do, based on what my rehearsal and performance schedule dictates.”

Dirlikov also serves as an Artists Committee Member and speaker for Americans for the Arts. She’s the first singer ever to win the Sphinx Medal, and the first opera singer to be appointed as a Turnaround Artist as part of The President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities’ Turnaround Arts Initiative.

She has worked with the United Nations and the Aspen Institute, is a board member of Leonard Bernstein’s Artful Learning model, and has performed for the White House

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Initiative for Educational Excellence for Hispanics’ Policy Forum for Music and the Arts.

Arts education offers the best opportunity for young people worldwide to change their lives—to find their own passion, to learn how to reach for success in the real world.

Most recently, she founded the El Camino Project, whose mission is to explore Latin America’s history and culture through its music. Under her leadership, this nonprofit organization is partnering with Harvard University on an upcoming conference on preservation, titled “Safeguarding Civilization in Times of Crisis”.

“How do you teach someone to be passionate, to dream, to imagine, to figure out how to achieve something they really want to accomplish?” she asks. “All children deserve passion-driven learning. You never know when or where you will find your passion.”

Dirlikov learned the value of arts education and cultural arts exchange as a child growing up in the Midwest. The child of first-generation immigrant parents, a Bulgarian father and a Mexican mother, she suffered the bullying and teasing schoolchildren dish out to those who are “different.”

Carla is a Mezzo-Soprano, Humanitarian, and Founder and Artistic Director of the El Camino Project www.carladirlikov.com @cdirlikov

Despite not sharing a common language, her parents shared a love for music. As a child, Dirlikov listened to tapes of symphonies and operas, as well as traditional Mexican songs and dance music.

“Music connects us,” she told writer Megan Gloss of Classical Singer magazine. “It creates community. When music suddenly becomes accessible, it opens up and reveals something new to people. That exchange can be life-changing.”

Dirlikov credits her arts education for teaching her the confidence and skills to succeed in the real world.

That education also helped her find her passion in the arts, in performing, in teaching, and in helping others.

chrisemdin if students can rap, they can do science When a student raps about photosynthesis, something exceptional comes into being. The discourses of Hip-Hop and science collide in the mind of a single individual who has figured out a way to make them speak to each other. Cultures stream together and a new shape appears.

For master teacher Chris Emdin, that new shape is the young person who dared to engage in a conversation with someone outside his or her community—with an expert who seems to speak another language.

“When you introduce young people to a different type of language, a whole different experience opens up,” Emdin says. “It’s like someone who’s lost a limb and gotten it back.

They have this unbridled enthusiasm about the world.”

Emdin, who holds a PhD in urban education, is an associate professor and a director at the Center for Health Equity

and Urban Science Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He is also the co-creator of #HipHopEd, a social media movement aimed at using art and cultural identity to get more kids into STEM education.

It is part of what Emdin calls “reality pedagogy,” or, using culture as an anchor for education. Don’t just meet students where they are academically—step into their lives and look around. See the colors they see, listen to the sounds they hear, feel the beat of what they do every day. Deliver the content from that place and watch students come alive.

“There’s nothing like seeing a young person reawakened to their own potential,” Emdin says. “You can actually see it.

Eyes widen, hands are raised and waving, they are sitting at the ends of their seats. They see themselves in the world in a different way.”

At first, Emdin says, students experience “complete apprehension” when they realize he is asking them to fold scientific principles into rap. “Any time you are introducing something new to a group, you’re bound to get all the emotion that comes with that,” he says.

Many students assume the task is beyond them because they haven’t yet grasped the science piece of it, but Emdin reminds them that rapping itself demands high creativity, sophisticated linguistic skills, and a sleek form of intelligence.

If they can rap, they can do science, Emdin tells them: “Same amount of smartness, you feel me?”

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Much of Emdin’s week is absorbed by educational consulting, workshops, teacher training, and writing. But every Friday, he is in the classroom, with middle-school students in Brooklyn, “figuring all this stuff out,” he says.

He is charged by the educational philosophy of Maxine Greene, who saw “wide-awakeness” as the antidote to powerlessness. Wide-awake students refuse to drift. They act on their freedom and elevate their lives. Such students should be celebrated and made visible, Emdin says.

Teachers, too, need to “hype up” to construct the classroom as a space of interrogation. “If you are perpetually questioning the norm, and you are asking those questions out loud, the students pick up those cues very quickly,” he says. “It is infectious. When you see it, and you feel it, you just want to be a part of it.”

Emdin says a true open dialogue means teachers have to show their flaws and eccentricities, reveal their humanity.

“Students appreciate people,” he says. “They will always give more to teachers who are themselves.”

It doesn’t matter who those selves are, Emdin says. Nebraska farmer? Comic book nerd? Amateur trumpet player? Bring it. Be real. “Find that other thing that gives you life and see teaching through that lens.”

It is possible, Emdin says, to make the classroom not just a space of questioning, but of contemplation. At the end of

every class, he sets aside space for reflection. “You need to activate that inner vision,” he says. He plays music at a low volume and allows students to be alone with their thoughts.

When they remix the discourse, it’s such a revelation.

Cell organelles flow through Hip-Hop sensation.

The rap might not be perfect, Emdin tells his students, but “the science is built in there, which is real gangsta.”

Chris is Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Science, and Technology at Teachers College, Columbia University www.chrisemdin.com @chrisemdin

b a r n a b y e va n s i n a s a c r e d s pa c e , the spirit of change As a child growing up in the West, artist Barnaby Evans found solace in the beauty and grandeur of the landscape— the forests, the coast, the High Sierras. Rather than play with trucks, he played with that landscape. In a natural stream that ran through his neighborhood, he made canals and rerouted water, creating pools and dams. He was amazed at the sense of agency he felt as he reshaped the terrain according to his own vision.

When Evans came to Providence to attend Brown University, he was struck by the contrast in the landscapes. Even the built environments were worlds apart—California’s is newer and rougher-hewn, while Providence’s architecture tells the city’s 400-year-old story.

The settings could hardly be more different, but Evans’s sense of awe in the power of place remained the same. Twenty-one years ago, it was the force behind the creation of WaterFire,

his now-famed sculptural installation of more than 80 braziers that light the three rivers of Providence on select occasions.

The small bonfires sparkle above the water, emitting the scent of burning wood as visitors stroll along the riverbanks and over the bridges, listening to strains of unfamiliar music and passing street dancers. Visitors can feel the warmth of the fire and even taste it on the wind. Volunteers clad in black tend the flames on torch-lit vessels traveling up and down the river.

The 10 million people who have come to Providence to see WaterFire have revitalized the city’s arts community and injected life into a city whose manufacturing-based economy peaked long ago.

“WaterFire was conceived as an effort to build momentum and attention and opportunity for engagement about transforming a community,” Evans says. “It was the catalyst for uncovering the rivers, the preservation movement, and the post babyboom return of people to the city to live.”

While such tangible results have boosted Providence, Evans suggests that the true power of WaterFire is symbolic.

Designed as a populist piece that would engage the public, at its core Waterfire is about renewal. As the fires burn, they pervade the atmosphere with the spirit of change.

Unlike most traditional community events, WaterFire is not rooted in local customs. Anyone can come. Everyone belongs.

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No tickets to buy, no seats to reserve, no schedule to follow.

Simply wander in, converse with strangers, and mill around.

“That remarkable permeability prevents the phenomenon that happens when there are fireworks and then they’re over and there’s a mob scene of everyone leaving,” Evans says.

Legend has it that dogs love WaterFire; they are social animals, Evans notes, and highly tuned to the relaxed and positive social signaling that happens at the event.

WaterFire’s apparent shapelessness helped transform Providence into something it needed to be—a place of pure potential. Art has a way of doing that, says Evans.

“Most artists do their best work in response to circumstances that we would like to overcome or a situation we would like to improve,” he says. “Art allows us to cope with the world, both the new and the old, sorrow and death.”

The experience of public art instills a sense of “communitas,” Evans says, an unstructured togetherness in which all people are equal. “Ephemeral, transitory events provide secondary ways of seeing our society and allow people who might not normally interact with each other to connect under new social terms.”

WaterFire intentionally echoes elements of ancient rituals— the fusing of fire and water under the nighttime sky turns the rivers into a timeless, sacred space. “Ritual and metaphoric

statements are so powerful because they bring people together in a moment of agency, freedom, and equality, where they interact and use symbols to put meaning into their world.”

Evans says WaterFire also follows the spirit of Roger Williams, who founded Providence on principles of religious freedom.

“It’s trying to stress the common humanity of our fascination with ritual, with change, with our ability to bring our best efforts forward into our interactions with each other.”

Barnaby is Artistic and Executive Director, WaterFire www.waterfire.org @BarnabyEvans

marcgoodman t h e d u a l n at u r e o f t e c h n o lo g y h a s u n i n t e n d e d consequences in our connected world

Marc Goodman knows technology shows two faces.

The same technological advances that make us more connected, productive, and prosperous also have a very dark side: We become more and more vulnerable, to more and more creative ways all of this fast-moving technological progress can be hijacked.

At best, the “bad actors” will ignore our best interests in favor of their own. At worst, they will hijack our very lives for money and power. And the bad actors will not only be “just criminals.” They may be corporations, governments, educational systems, healthcare systems— any entity we entrust with access to our lives in exchange for services. These are the “unintended consequences” of technological progress.

But not all is hopeless. Goodman wrote Future Crimes “to inspire and educate others on the security and risk implications of newly emerging technologies”.

In Future Crimes, Goodman offers advice from high-level policy to practical advice for protecting your own data.

Goodman is focused on ferreting out in the present the unintended consequences of the future, so new technological advances like the Internet of Things will work for us, not against us. And he believes some technological innovations could actually solve some of the problems they cause.

For example, he believes we will ultimately develop selfhealing computer networks that detect hackers and automatically make repairs to shut them out.

No one could be better qualified than Goodman to deeply understand both the good and the bad of technology.

He is a global strategist, author, and consultant focused on the disruptive impact of advancing technologies on security, business, and international affairs. Over the past 20 years, he has built expertise in next-generation security threats such as cybercrime, cyber-terrorism, and information warfare, working with organizations such as Interpol, the United Nations, NATO, the Los Angeles Police Department, and the US Government.

Note that he’s an expert on next-generation, not lastgeneration, security. In one profile of Goodman, a reporter referred to him as “futurist-in-residence with the FBI.” His current research includes the security implications

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of exponential technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence, the social data revolution, synthetic biology, virtual worlds, genomics, ubiquitous computing, and location-based services.

Says Goodman, “We can take back control over our own devices and harness technology’s tremendous power for the betterment of humanity.”

Goodman also serves as the Global Security Advisor and Chair for Policy and Law at one of the most forward-looking institutions in the country, Singularity University. The mission of this NASA- and Google-sponsored educational venture is to use advanced science and technology to address “humanity’s grand challenges.” Bloomberg BusinessWeek has described Singularity University as a place “where the world’s brightest minds convene to attack the world’s toughest challenges.”

Marc is a Global Security Advisor and Futurist www.marcgoodman.net @FutureCrimes

The celebrated inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, a founder of Singularity University, has a different metaphor for the dual nature of technology. He says technology is “a doubleedged sword—fire kept us warm and cooked our food but also burned down our villages.”

About Future Crimes, Kurzweil has written, “Marc Goodman provides a deeply insightful view into our 21st century fires. His philosophy matches my own: Apply the promise of exponentially growing information technologies to overcome age-old challenges of humankind while at the same time understanding and containing the perils.”

c at h e r i n e h o k e life is in the second chances Catherine Hoke learned some grit on the wrestling mat.

As the only girl on the boys’ wrestling team in her first year of high school, she didn’t win a single match. She set the school record for getting pinned the most and the fastest.

She tried not to flinch.

“I would go the girls’ locker room and cry my eyes out like a girl, and come back to the mat,” she says.

She knew what the problem was. She was weak, unprepared.

She could barely do a push-up. But by the time she returned for her second season, she was doing 30 pull-ups and 1,000 push-ups a day. When the boys were doing 10 push-ups on every step of the bleachers, her coach told her she only had to do five. “I told him, if I’m going to be competing with the guys, I should do 15.”

That season, she won some matches. Later, she became a California State Wrestling Champion. The real victory, though,

happened off the mats. “I learned to put in the time,” Hoke says. “I never made excuses for my weaknesses, which serves me well now. I learned to figure it out as the underdog.”

Today, Hoke champions the underdog by serving one of the most overlooked populations in America—people with criminal histories who want another chance to make a life.

Ten years ago, she began this work inside the Texas prison system with the Prison Entrepreneurship Program, teaching business skills to inmates who were preparing for life on the outside. In 2010, she launched Defy Ventures, which helps currently and formerly incarcerated individuals develop the character, employment skills, and entrepreneurship skills needed to create profitable and legal businesses. In July, Defy launched its newest program, called “CEO of Your New Life,” inside jails and prisons nationally.

Hoke is a former venture capitalist herself, who now engages top corporate executives and investors to mentor Defy’s entrepreneurs-in-training (EITs). In many ways, “it is a meeting of kindred spirits,” Hoke says, with two groups from wildly different worlds sharing some unique qualities. On both sides of the aisle, they are charismatic influencers with sharp business skills.

When they first meet, Hoke makes the two groups “hug it out” to break down physical and psychological barriers that impede human connection. “Once you bear-hug somebody,” she says, “it completely changes the relationship.” Suddenly,

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a hot-shot corporate exec and a former drug dealer float on the same plane of existence. They connect as people, not identified simply by their labels or titles. Stereotypes become meaningless, and the façades that paralyze us fall away.

“I have experienced so many different levels of failure and setback that I have a far higher tolerance for it than I did earlier on,” she says. “It doesn’t kill me. It’s never going to kill me.”

That’s exactly where Hoke wants everyone to be—looking each other straight in the eye, fearlessly, without deception, without obscuring our realities. “There is something so beautiful and majestic and healing when people can know you for who you are and still love you.”

Catherine is Founder and CEO, Defy Ventures www.defyventure.org @DefyVentures

“I’ve devoted my life to redeeming mistakes,” she says.

“I found that if people are willing to be honest and take ownership, it can lead to powerful bonding.” The bonding, Hoke has learned, is the beginning of everything. It leads to productive business relationships, but it also keeps Defy’s EITs grounded in the family and social circles that support them. Half of the training Defy offers is in character and personal development. EITs are taught etiquette, conflict resolution, forgiveness, communication skills, and even the five “love languages” that show them how to embrace and serve the people who care about them.

“People move forward when they can reconcile their past and create new legacies,” Hoke says. She pours her own gritty spirit and lavishly open heart into that transformative process for people cycling through the prison system. Second chances are her gift. Getting back on the mat, over and over, is her strength.

sophiehouser empowering girls and women to c o d e t h e i r ow n sto r i e s It’s surprising what can happen to a girl at summer camp.

When Sophie Houser went to the Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Program in 2014, she expected intensive computer science training and some helpful exposure to the tech industry. What she got was a little bit famous.

Houser and friend and fellow camp attendee, Andrea Gonzales, created a game, Tampon Run, where the characters throw tampons at their attackers. No guns, no male-generated violence, no hyper-sexualized females. Just a simple chase, with small cotton missiles flying through the air, their delicate strings wafting behind them.

Tampon Run became a sensation for the way it twisted gender norms in the video-gaming industry. Houser, now a freshman at Brown University, has spent the better part of the last year talking to the media about it. Some of that conversation focuses on closing the gender gap in technology by getting

girls into STEM classes and computer science majors—central to the mission of Girls Who Code.

Houser says that she has found coding to be fascinating— watching a black screen fill up with something of her own creation gives her a sense of exhilaration. “It builds a lot of confidence, starting from scratch and witnessing what I could do with my skills,” she says.

Other layers to Houser’s experience show the importance of getting girls into situations where things are being built and created. Integrating a female sensibility into technology suddenly highlights and questions social realities that need readjustment, such as the fact that women make up half of the U.S. workforce, but hold only 25% of all technical or computing jobs.

When Houser stands on a TedX stage or talks with reporters about Tampon Run, she nonchalantly blows open the menstruation taboo that runs so deep, she was barely aware of its existence. That is, of course, until she created video characters who started throwing tampons, and learned that what is normal and natural among women is perceived in most cultures as something to be hidden.

But Houser doesn’t see it that way.

“Now I feel so comfortable about my period—that’s actually the most fun thing to talk about,” Houser says.

“I feel a certain connection now with my friends because

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of that common experience. It’s part of me, part of my body.

It’s such a normal thing.”

Speaking plainly about a women’s issue is part of the logic of Houser’s world. Her film-producer mother is the model of a strong woman. All of Houser’s friends are feminists. And she loves outsized female characters, such as the audacious stars of the sitcom “Broad City”. They are “very cool and open,” she says.

Houser says one of the biggest changes in her life since Tampon Run went viral has been her newfound ability to speak in public. She has been put on the spot and has learned how to be articulate and composed in front of questioning strangers. In the process, she is saying things—in her matterof-fact and friendly way—that make us re-examine our own social attitudes.

Houser says she noticed the rise in her comfort level with public speaking after her summer at Girls Who Code.

She was raising her hand in class—something she had hardly done before. The seven weeks she spent immersed in an intellectually and creatively intense environment with only girls loosened up something in her that she didn’t realize she was withholding.

“I had never been in an all-girls situation and didn’t know what to expect, but I ended up loving it,” Houser says. “There was something really wonderful about being with a group of girls

and we were all learning something new together, all getting frustrated together, and when our code would work, we were all happy together.”

Houser begins her life at Brown University with no declared major—as of yet. She’s not forcing it, she says, because there is still a lot she wants to learn.

Sophie is Co-Creator, Tampon Run www.tamponrun.com @TamponRunner

s t e v e n k e at i n g to k n ow i s to h e a l Steven Keating describes curiosity as the innate desire to “dive down that wormhole” where things are unknown, asking question after question until a satisfying answer presents itself.

Keating’s wormhole was an unfinished basement in Calgary, Canada, where he grew up with an older sister and his accountant parents. He was the kid in the neighborhood who asked everybody for their old electronics so he could dismantle them in his basement, tinker with them, and build new gadgets from their innards. His father never knew exactly what he was doing down there, but he willingly took his son to the electronics store when he needed something to complete a project. At Keating’s request, his father designed a climbing wall for the basement so he would have something to do while the glue dried on his experiments.

His parents gave him free reign, Keating says, with a few provisos. He could make a mess, but no more smoke bombs in the basement, his mother told him after an unfortunate

mishap. He set his own rules when he made a stun gun and brought it to school to zap people: “I would only do it to myself or anyone who asked me.”

Keating clearly had a skill set in “nerdiness” that might have been a problem at school, if it weren’t for his ability to make his projects look cool. Instead of picking on him, other kids interrogated him about what he would bring in next.

When he began graduate study in mechanical engineering at MIT, Keating found a cohort of other individuals just like him. “They were the ones in the neighborhood collecting old TVs and mixing chemicals from Home Depot to see what would happen.” They are also the ones who, along with his professors, helped him last year to confront a cancer diagnosis with courage and curiosity. It was a wormhole Keating did not want to go down, but true to his nature, he dove in anyway.

He had endless questions. The cancer was in his brain, a growth the size of a baseball in his frontal left lobe. He chose to approach what lay ahead with method and rationality.

Rather than attach meaning to his cancer, he viewed it as a pure reaction emanating from the natural world.

“I’m not a religious person, but I took on a semi-scientific religious view,” Keating says. “The world is so scientific that we’re all just a chemical reaction. It’s not my fault that I have cancer, so I might as well experience it.”

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He valued every part of the experience that spoke to his scientific intensity. “Not many people get to go inside a particle accelerator,” he notes, but Keating is one person who could truly comprehend and appreciate the brilliant blue fractal representation of subatomic particles that infiltrated his brain during proton radiation therapy.

“My optical nerve was triggered by the protons. I could see faint blue lightning in my eyeball.”

Keating acknowledges that some people don’t want to know every twist and turn of their bodies, every genetic predisposition or lurking condition that could erupt at any point. But we should all have the choice, he insists.

A year out from his diagnosis, after the tumor and 10% of his brain were surgically removed, Keating is characteristically upbeat and finishing his PhD work at MIT. He is almost ready to ride a bike again, but this “wild ride,” as he refers to his cancer journey, has made him acutely aware that most people have little understanding of their own health conditions, because they are starkly separated from the medical data that could, if simplified and made accessible, help them determine an optimal course of treatment.

Steven is an Advocate for Open Source Patient Data and a Doctoral Candidate, MIT Media Lab www.stevenkeating.info @stevenkeating

“We have Google Maps to help us get to the grocery store, but for cancer, there’s no direction,” Keating says. “We follow whatever our doctors tell us.”

In recent months, Keating has become a vocal advocate for an open access health system that gives patients the right to see and share their own medical information with providers, supporters, and researchers. “It’s the power of knowing what’s happening to you,” he says.

For people like Keating, the knowing and the diving in with curiosity are all part of the therapy that brings them to wholeness.

k i m b e r ly k l e i m a n - l e e l e a d e r s h i p d e v e lo p m e n t : r e i m a g i n e d at g e A corporate executive headed to a leadership training program might expect to spend a few days in a hotel conference room with 100 people from across the company.

They would expect to listen to motivational talks and watch endless PowerPoints on strategic planning. Presumably, they will learn to be leaders.

Kimberly Kleiman-Lee has a better idea. As head of senior executive leadership development at GE, an organization of over 310,000 employees, Kleiman-Lee works with the top six thousand executives responsible for shaping GE’s future.

GE considers “leadership” to be one of their main products, investing well over $1B annually in the development of their employees. And they have terrific raw material to mold, employees who were at the top in their class, who are driven, passionate, and competitive.

Kleiman-Lee started her work at a time when leadership training meant traditional program management. Educators

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would assemble agendas featuring a revolving door of speakers, computerized business simulations, and long lectures. However, “there’s nothing more that I can teach about leadership that they haven’t already been taught by the time they reach this level,” she says.

But, “I can do a little reminding in unconventional ways.”

Thus, a new way to design leaders is born, with an emphasis on experiential learning, not lectures. Kleiman-Lee’s learning experiences take place around the globe, as GE is active in over 175 countries, making cultural immersion a standard component of every experience.

An insatiable learner, Kleiman-Lee takes a deep interest in humans and their potential. She’s a behavioral agitator whose courageous approach to leadership development raises both eyebrows and performance levels.

Over the past four years, Kleiman-Lee and her team have re-imagined the way learning and development is done in Crotonville, to keep pace with the company-culture ambitions of CEO Jeff Immelt. GE is evolving into a simpler, more adaptive company by streamlining processes and empowering employees to make decisions quickly on behalf of customers. Even the compensation program has changed.

“We no longer reward conformity and keeping the waters calm. We reward for testing new waters.”

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And gone is the dated “Session C” annual employee evaluation process. Instead, a new performance development process and tool allows for feedback constantly. Employees can offer behavioral insights to other employees via a mobile app.

students’ ears,” to bring about self-awareness. This process has been a game changer for GE Crotonville…and gets Kleiman-Lee a step closer to producing a leader in every seat.

“We are working to be relentlessly transparent, encouraging constructive conflict to bring out the best ideas, and aligning our business intentions and metrics,” Kleiman-Lee says.

“That’s the kind of organization the next generation will want to work for. We are on the cusp of the greatest cultural change our company has ever seen.”

Kimberly is Lead, Senior Executive Leadership Development, GE Crotonville www.ge.com @KKLCurator

A GE executive headed to one of Kleiman-Lee’s experiences might arrive with no idea of where to go in the morning. They might then be surprised with a 7:30 text, instructing them they have two hours to find their team on the streets of Manhattan, knowing only that each will be wearing a similar baseball hat.

Kleiman-Lee says this kind of experiential learning offers “very personal and transformational opportunities for our leaders,” who “apply them to their work and personal lives liberally.

We’ve had leaders gain confidence, manage their ego, recognize their cultural biases, improve collegial relationships, evolve their approach to problem-solving, and empower their employees tenfold.”

An executive coaching element is included in every experience. “We coach at the elbow, whispering in our

simonmajumdar f o o d i s lo v e . f o o d i s g e n e r o s i t y . f o o d i s j oy .

In September 2014, Majumdar officially became a US citizen, and in celebration, he and his wife, Sybil, have been driving around the country preparing meals for anyone who invites them into their kitchen. They are also promoting his latest book, Fed, White and Blue: Finding America with My Fork. With a knife roll, a bunch of spices, and a box of books in the back of the car, he says: “We are cooking as we go—we are a bit like an old roadshow. And we are finding incredible food everywhere.”

He has noted some exciting culinary developments in his travels, such as the impact of immigration on our food as second- and third-generation families combine their ethnic traditions with American ingredients. Also, he sees some unanticipated improvements in our cuisine from the recent downswings in the US economy.

“What we found with the unique economic crisis is that a lot of the very talented chefs had to move out of the big cities

because they couldn’t afford to live there. A lot of really great food is happening in really small towns outside of where you’d expect it. I would say we’re living in the most exciting time in American food history.”

Majumdar is also enjoying the rediscovery of old traditions in cooking: pickling, fermenting, brewing, distilling, cheesemaking. He appreciates that return to craft that embraces process, and what he calls the greatest quality a chef could have: intellectual curiosity. But, he says, the label “homemade” is not an automatic stamp of quality: “There’s no credit in serving bad bread just because you make it yourself.”

After spending time in restaurant kitchens around America, Majumdar has added dishes to his repertoire, savored fresh catfish, perfected his lobster roll, and discovered that “America is making some world-class cheese” that rivals (almost) his favorite Colston Bassett Stilton from the UK What is most distinctive to him about American cuisine, though, are the “very, very specific” regional differences that define local cultures.

“Everywhere has its quirks,” he says. “People get combative over it when you start talking about their dishes, particularly with barbecue.” He describes barbecue sauce geographically: On the North Carolina coast it’s made of vinegar and hot peppers. Move westward: add tomatoes and sweetener.

Go south: whisk in some mustard. Headed to Texas?

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Make it thick and spicy, or sweet and sour—whatever you like, but always take it seriously. “Beef is an expression of being Texan,” he notes.

Majumdar slightly laments the recent culinary turn toward the casual in cuisine, but only because he finds a nearspiritual beauty in the intricate preparation and presentation of fabulous ingredients. “There are some things that are meant to be luxurious,” he says. “Food is sometimes too democratic—I think we’re missing out on some of the experience of fantastic dining.”

Nonetheless, this year’s cooking road trip has given Majumdar a “wider breadth of experience” in the cuisine of his adopted country, and as a gratuitous side benefit, he has come into closer relationship with his new American compatriots. Some longstanding stereotypes were “fairly exploded” during his journey as he learned, for instance, that the South is not the only region in the country with “amazing hospitality.”

Majumdar wants to go anyplace where “food is seen as joyous.” When he steps into an unfamiliar kitchen, he can tell right away if the experience will be a good one. The atmosphere comes from the top, he says, with the chef who sets the tone of camaraderie, facilitating solid teamwork and creating room, amidst the jostling of elbows, for a flow of light conversation that keeps everyone in sync. “I love that kind of banter in the kitchen—it’s great fun.”

Spending time with people in the kitchen is “magical,” Majumdar says. The rush in the preparation. The exhilaration when the doors swing open for serving. The entire effort moves toward that moment of human connection when the dishes are laid before the guest. After all, he says, “Food is one of the ways we express love for one another.”

Simon is a Food and Travel Writer, Author, and Judge on Food Network’s “Iron Chef” and “Cutthroat Kitchen” www.simonmajumdar.com @SimonMajumdar

m at t m a s o n t h e n at u r e o f c r e at i v i t y is changing Matt Mason first immersed himself in the music industry by infiltrating the edges of it. He was drawn to the sounds coming through UK pirate radio stations, music not sanctioned by a label or vetted by a broadcasting conglomerate. Just some young artists with a fresh pulse, who found gaps in the system through which to get their work onto the airwaves.

Along with doing some pirate DJ-ing of his own, Mason started RWD (Rewind) magazine to help bring recognition to these artists, who had no backing from major players in the music industry. He left a job with a big publishing house to work on a shoestring publication targeting a niche market— and then gave the magazine issues away free. It wasn’t easy, which is why it fascinated him.

“It was an opportunity to highlight part of this culture that was largely being overlooked by the mainstream music industry, which was not including what kids were doing

in London at the time,” Mason says. “Grime and dubstep, which have now blown up into these global music scenes, literally used to be a group of us in one room in London on a Monday night.”

A former journalist, Mason is now a best-selling author who has been working in the open-access sector to help creators reach their audiences. Most recently, he was the CMO for BitTorrent, an Internet technology company specializing in a form of peer-to-peer file sharing that enables artists and creators to see and keep control of their content and data.

Like the pirate radio artists Mason championed in RWD, musicians and other creators today need to find savvy ways to get their work out where people can find it, and the Internet clearly makes that possible. But the creators also need to manage their content and protect its value, Mason says. They can only do that if they see the data that tells them who their users are and what they are willing to pay for. Transparency gives them control over their work, something that musicians haven’t always had.

Fifty years ago, Mason points out, musical artists who signed contracts with major labels often did not understand how they got paid. Labels made huge profits, while artists wondered what they were worth or whether they were getting a fair deal. That was the nature of a powerful industry that saw no need to share information openly. The Internet has changed this dynamic.

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“If people are consuming most of their content on the Internet, that information doesn’t have to be hidden anymore,” Mason says. “You can track and show artists or creators exactly how much money they’re owed.

You can literally split stuff down to the last cent.”

Mason notes that younger artists understand that open-access technology is not just about monetizing their work. “The nature of creativity itself has started to change,” he says, turning more into a conversation between artist and audience.

“Now it’s not just the video of your song, but all of the videos you make every day that influence who you are and how you are perceived,” Mason says. “To have a successful act today, your Instagram, your Snapchat, and your Facebook page are all just as important creative outlets as the music you put out.”

As the Internet generates huge audiences, Mason says many artists are giving some content away for free just for the exposure. The law of large numbers tells them that somewhere down the line, they will make money off a small percentage of this massive fan base.

Clearly, creators today are embracing the Internet as the venue for their art, the source of their audience, and the generator of data that will help them monetize their work.

Mason sees the changing shape of creativity as a new way

of being for all of us. The artists are just ahead of the curve in the way they use technology to augment their own lives.

“The generation growing up next won’t differentiate between media and reality the way we do,” he says. “The Internet is going to become a layer of the real world.”

Matt is an Author, former Chief Content Officer at BitTorrent, and Founding Editor at RWD magazine www.fluence.io @MattMason

andrewmclean t h e p h i lo s o p h y of descent There are old heroes and there are bold heroes, but there are no old, bold heroes—so the saying goes. Ski-mountaineer Andrew McLean, ranked as one of the top outdoor sportsmen in the world, takes note of this piece of wisdom as his career shifts into a new register.

“When I first got into it, I was looking at steeper and steeper lines and first descents,” McLean says. “Now I’m into discovering new areas—remote areas that have not been skied much. I’m still going out and going skiing, but I think I’ve had enough experiences that I’ve toned it down quite a bit.”

The title “ski-mountaineer” denotes a person who climbs a mountain, and then skis down it. For McLean, the ascent is simply the precursor to the main event: descending on the most challenging line with speed and grace. “When I look at a peak, if I can’t ski it, I’m not interested.”

He’s had a good portion of thrilling adventure. But he has also had friends die in the mountains—intelligent, seasoned skiers who could not have predicted a freak accident or a random avalanche flowing like a torrent of water down the path of least resistance.

His specialty is steep skiing and first descents on the earth’s most majestic mountains. Shooting down an untouched 50-degree slope in the forbidding peaks of Denali, Alaska, McLean experiences a kind of bliss. But a lot has changed for him over the years.

“There is a huge amount of subjective risk just being in the mountains that you can’t control,” he says. “The mountain doesn’t know you’re an avalanche expert.”

With a family that keeps him closer to home now, he is a little more premeditated about embarking on whatever good trip comes along. He is pickier about his partners, too.

Ski-mountaineering is a “huge collaborative effort,” he says, and nowadays, he goes out with others who are “mellower and safer” and not out for the most dangerous thrill.

Besides, being the bold hero isn’t what draws McLean to the peak. He likes the puzzle. Ski-mountaineering is 90% mental, he says. It’s about determining when to go, what gear to carry, who to bring, knowing the overall conditions, and having the necessary experience. The physical aspect of the descent is only a small part of the overall picture.

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Danger is ever-present, but McLean says that by the time he’s hiked up the mountain and gotten a feel for the conditions, he is poised and ready. “I’d turn around before I got too nervous about it. I listen to my own inner voice. If I feel worried about something, I don’t do it.”

He hardly ever checks the weather forecast, because “if you get there and it’s bad weather, there’s not much you can do about it.” Sometimes that means spending days in a tent, playing Scrabble and tending to camp chores, just waiting for the right moment. An actual ski descent of 16 hours could take three weeks of biding time.

The planning and forethought that goes into a trip will not be compromised by rash or hasty moves at the top of the mountain. “The best way to succeed in something is to give it plenty of time,” McLean says.

At the verge of descent, McLean goes through his “little checklist.” His body is warmed up with a few turns, his boots are buckled, the bindings engaged. If the snow and avalanche conditions are perfect and he has a great partner, he feels a heightened sense of confidence. He’s excited.

Everything that happens after that should be easy, he says.

All that’s left is to get out over his skis. “When it’s going well, it’s almost effortless. You’re not making a big turn—you’re just lifting your skis into the air.”

McLean says the descent is a physical activity that demands incredible focus. It’s a connection to the outdoors and to friends. Afterwards, the experience recedes into humbling perspective.

“When I’m doing a ski descent, I’m 100% absorbed in what I’m doing. When I’ve finished, it’s just a wave of relief. I look back and think: Ah, whatever, just another descent—ski tracks on a mountain that are going to be covered up.”

Andrew is a Ski Mountaineer www.straightchuter.com @StraightChuter

carlosmoreno the professor x o f e d u c at i o n A teacher who loves interacting with students and witnessing the gradual pace of their enlightenment can find it hard to step outside the classroom and approach education from a different angle.

Carlos Moreno misses his days as a teacher, principal, and co-director of The Met School in Providence, RI, even though his current position as co-executive director of Big Picture Learning allows him to have a greater impact on the lives of students who need a better way to learn. The mission of the nonprofit Big Picture Learning is to redesign education and embed it in the real world of the community.

But in or out of the classroom, Moreno is “relentless” in his efforts to make education more equitable—“being audacious at times, banging on the system if necessary, in the name of opportunity for young people.”

Now, he is Professor X, he says, with an amazing group of X-Men who go out into the schools to fight for justice.

Moreno’s education in the New York City public school system got him where he needed to go—to college. He played sports and was fortunate enough to learn in the intimate community of a small public high school. But he never had a male educator of color, which he says is a significant gap in education today.

Students need to see teachers who look like them and have something in common with them, he says, to engage them more in their own learning and enable them to picture themselves as teachers. Or, as leaders who can shape their communities.

“I try to be a megaphone on issues around inequality and equity,” Moreno says, “why this is an important issue, why there need to be more men of color in education.”

Feeling comfortable with the teacher makes school a safer place, where students can be themselves and talk openly without judgment. But students need to have a sense of who the teacher is, as a person.

“Oftentimes, young folks feel like teachers are keeping their teacher face,” Moreno says. “They might know that their teacher’s name starts with ‘Mrs.’ or that they have a wedding ring, but they don’t know anything about their personal lives, or things they struggle with, or what they’re good at.”

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Teachers who are transparent, even about what they don’t know, set the stage for inquiry. Instead of showing up with content, they show up with possibilities. They improvise and go on detours. “Students want enthusiasm and excitement from the teacher,” Moreno says. “They want to see and hear honesty, to see and feel that the teacher is not just going to get through a lesson plan but is willing to embrace those teachable moments that maybe stray from that lesson plan.”

Not surprisingly, Moreno’s alter ego, Professor X, is a creation of the Civil Rights era—a crusader for tolerance and equality, exactly what Moreno fights for in education.

He says the classroom of 20 years from now should be a place that Professor X would endorse, a place where “each student can get exactly what he or she needs, and that could be anytime, anywhere.”

Students, too, need multiple ways of showing what they know and what they can do. Testing them for competencies in core subjects is not enough, according to Moreno. Educators have to pay attention to the whole child, knowing the student’s interests, talents, and family connections.

Carlos is Co-Executive Director, Big Picture Learning www.bigpicture.org @Carlos_Moreno06

“From a practitioner’s standpoint, it allows you a certain level of differentiation, aside from instructional differentiation, to make the connections and deliver content in a way that is applicable to that student,” Moreno says.

Big Picture Learning is developing ways to help students become self-directed learners who assess their own work and can explain it to others. “It’s an integral part of learning and growth, to reflect on what you did, how you did it, why you did it, what you would potentially do differently if you did it again,” Moreno says. “It’s an opportunity for students to show how all their efforts are connected.”

a l e x a n d e r o s t e r wa l d e r ta k i n g t h e f u z z i n e s s o u t o f i n n o vat i o n Business model innovator Alex Osterwalder doesn’t like fuzzy spaces. He likes clarity, concrete definitions, and predictable processes. He likes tools.

We can bring all these things to the “fuzzy space” of business model innovation, he says. Just as a surgeon uses a distinct set of instruments and a specific process for a specific surgery, so innovators should have a reliable set of tools and a specific process to create new business models.

Osterwalder co-founded Strategyzer.com to deliver such a set of methodologies, software tools, online courses, and practical techniques for making business model innovation manageable. As co-author of the bestselling books Business Model Generation and Value Proposition Design, and inventor of the Business Model Canvas, Osterwalder has the credibility and knowledge for this undertaking.

Business model innovation is critical 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.”

“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.”

We can no longer rely on the usual slow process that moves one idea at a time, from idea, to research, to exposition, to implementation. And focusing so much time on any one idea means we’re less likely to reject it. “We need to move away from refining our ideas too early,” Osterwalder says.

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

His proposal: “Prototype 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.

Rapid prototyping can be challenging, especially for large corporations that prefer linear processes. Such organizations are experts at execution, and those strengths should be preserved.

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“There is a right process to search for business models that work,” Osterwalder says. Businesses today need a “dual culture” of execution and innovation: One group executes, manages, and improves the current business model, keeping the present business healthy. Another group, “people who prototype, experiment, and throw away ideas after brainstorming and rapid market testing,” creates and tests new models for the future.

Some people are better at seeing the future, he acknowledges, but every significant innovation comes from a series of trials, mistakes, and readjustments.

Innovation does not spring spontaneously from the brains of creative geniuses or arise organically from mystical regions.

Rather, innovation should be 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 idea spark. “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.”

Osterwalder emphasizes that innovation tools cannot replace the very human qualities of creativity and risk-taking—rather, the tools allow us to systematize those things, in order to be even more creative and manage risks better.

The organization that will succeed at creating new business models that respond quickly to market shifts won’t be the luckiest one or the one with the “right idea at the right time”— it will be the one whose innovation professionals have a set of carefully crafted instruments and processes ready, and know how to use them.

Alexander is an Entrepreneur, Speaker, and Author www.alexosterwalder.com @AlexOsterwalder

ta n i s h a r o b i n s o n forget the mask, wear the t-shirt Everyone has a desire to belong. In the ideal world, we do so by being exactly who we are. Tanisha Robinson learned this lesson growing up as a bookish, biracial, closeted gay kid in small-town Missouri, an experience she says has made her more compassionate.

Robinson’s sense of compassion grew into an interest in philanthropy, but she thought she needed “a big pile of money” to be a philanthropist. Rather than wait for that day to come, Robinson now focuses on doing good as she goes along.

As a serial entrepreneur, she creates profitable, scalable companies intended to become levers of impact. The companies all operate under the same principle: Robinson builds a nurturing work environment for employees who believe in what they are doing. She gives them the freedom to shine without micromanaging them.

“We pay responsible wages, and our people have great, affordable benefits, so we’re not perpetuating the cycle of poverty for our employees,” she says.

Robinson also embeds social responsibility into her companies’ DNA. On occasion, her workforce becomes a temporary volunteer society that gives back to the community through in-kind donations and charitable projects, made possible through company resources.

Most of Robinson’s time currently goes to Print Syndicate, an ecommerce platform composed of several brands. Her customers are a young, diverse market that can’t get enough of Print Syndicate’s online merchandise: T-shirts, mugs, and other paraphernalia that use offbeat humor to casually claim an identity for the wearer.

T-shirts, the main vehicle for these snippets of self-expression, tend to linger in the consciousness. They bear jokes about sexuality, politics, nerdiness, religion, dinosaurs, and other passions that get us out of bed in the morning.

In an echo of her Missouri childhood, Robinson’s Print Syndicate products help people claim their own identity and shake off the outer layers of personality that make us all stiff and inauthentic. They allow people to come out of whatever

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closet they’ve been hiding in and find compatible souls.

Thus, communities are born.

“A lot of people cover up their capacity for a sense of humor or irreverence,” Robinson says. “These masks that we wear are really around wanting to be seen in a particular way—as intelligent, successful, capable.” Wearing these masks drains us.

Robinson came of age when such possibilities were only beginning to emerge. AOL chat rooms helped her connect with others more like her and create community. “People have these tribes, and these friends, and these affinities…whereas 20 or 30 years ago that was not possible. Counterculture is totally mainstream now.”

She suggests that an added social benefit of Internet technology is that it helps all of us to accept new ideas more quickly. “The speed at which information travels and the speed at which people absorb things is drastically different now,” she says.

Robinson builds a world of belonging starting with herself— she never wears a mask of any sort, and she’s completely upfront about her identity. She feels no pressure to do business with anyone who balks at her gender, race, sexuality, or habit of dropping the F-bomb.

After all, an entrepreneur has to be able say things like “shit show” when things go awry. “Building a business from ground zero is so painful and difficult and rewarding,” she says. “It’s a very intense experience.”

There must be a T-shirt for that.

Tanisha is CEO and Co-Founder, Print Syndicate, LLC www.printsyndicate.com @tanisharobinson

larryrosenstock thinking and making and learning When the economy falters, the classroom comes under scrutiny. The curriculum is rearranged. Pedagogy becomes more abstract. Teachers are switched out for trendier models.

What often does not change, according to educational entrepreneur Larry Rosenstock, is the experience of the child who sits in the classroom, being told what to do and what to think.

“The world is changing and the schools have not,” says Rosenstock, CEO and founder of High Tech High, a group of national charter schools that are loosely based on engineering, acutely focused on getting kids into four-year colleges, and infused everywhere with history, literature, music, and the arts.

At High Tech High, students engage in sophisticated projects that demand sustained attention and a natural merging of disciplines. Students work both independently and with peers

or teachers, in large blocks of time that allow their projects to unfold. Their work culminates in a public showcase, when the community comes in to “kick the tires” of the projects and give students a feel for how their efforts are received by the world.

That public accountability factor, which is missing from most schools, is what keeps HTH students committed to their projects, Rosenstock says. “We have exhibition nights where you can’t park within seven blocks of the school. We’ll have three thousand people in the building because the kids told them to come.”

High Tech High helps students to develop a critical human skill: How to make something out of nothing. They become thinkers and makers, and that is what the world will always need, says Rosenstock, who has had a long career in education and the sometimes ponderous policymaking that goes along with it. As a lawyer, he worked on the reauthorization of the Smith Hewes Act of 1917, a law that expanded vocational training in the US He also taught carpentry to urban youth in the Boston area for over a decade, and for six years, was the principal of two techbased high schools.

These experiences convinced Rosenstock that bringing hand and mind together gives a person a dignified connection to the material world. But training high school students for specific occupations can be risky, in a labor market where the average American will have eight to 12 jobs in a lifetime,

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he notes. For that reason, he has consistently rejected the “false dualism” of workforce preparation vs. the liberal arts.

Students clearly need both, he says.

While HTH students are making projects, Rosenstock is busy making schools. He travels around the world to find educators who know things we don’t. The most ingenious schools, he says, are those whose scarce resources lead them to take a constructivist approach to learning, and a realistic idea of what their students need to know to thrive as adults where they live.

“A few gems of schools are recognizing that in order for their country to have an innovation economy, they need to do something in education to get there,” Rosenstock says.

“They need kids who are very comfortable as innovators.”

Rosenstock is always searching for better ways to teach and prepare the whole student, but he still cherishes a classic element of a solid education: The great teacher.

“I love teachers,” he says. His favorite was a law school professor who challenged students with complicated scenarios. When they took a position, he changed the fact pattern. He did it over and over again until they were no longer sure what they knew.

“For the next 48 hours, you would be walking around at CVS or eating a pizza, thinking about how to get back to the homeostasis that existed before that class,” Rosenstock

recalls. For him, it was that delightful space of not knowing that made him learn.

However, students who attend High Tech High don’t necessarily need a great to force them to learn from the process of reconfiguring what they know. At HTH, students do that for themselves.

Larry is CEO, High Tech High www.hightechhigh.org @hightechhigh

michaelsamuelson k e e p a s k i n g ‘ s o , w h at ?’ u n t i l yo u g e t t o ‘ a h a !’

Change is easy. Sustaining change is hard. After 40 years in the field of health promotion, Michael Samuelson has learned a few things about human behavior. Anyone can start a diet or an exercise regimen, but sticking to it requires motivation that comes from the deepest springs of the soul. And it has to mean something.

Samuelson, an author and speaker on health, leadership and the dynamics of change, is also a cancer survivor who knows what it’s like to push through personal chaos toward a state of subjective well-being. He says that staying healthy can never be about metrics, those unfeeling numbers that tell us to lose weight, lower our blood pressure, or cut out the cholesterol.

Over time, we lose interest in abstract indicators because they fail to provide the answer to a simple question: How are we doing in life, really?

We are always in process, according to Samuelson.

The changes we make to enhance our well-being—

psychologically, physically, emotionally, and economically— should be incremental, dynamic, and never-ending. Change might begin with the intellectual or the emotional, but it won’t stick unless it’s “visceral.” He says: “When it’s visceral it hits you right in the belly—it has huge meaning for you in the way you perceive your life and what you think you need to do. When that occurs, your bones are shaking and your spirit is lifted.”

As Samuelson points out, we have an abundance of tools around wellness, but so often we grapple with them without truly seeing how they might deepen our lives. Sometimes, we downright reject the obvious path to well-being. “That’s the perplexity of bright people doing stupid things,” he says.

“We’ve got the science of life down pretty well, but it’s the art of living part of it that has been the challenge.”

According to Samuelson, our current social contract around health is grounded in the practice of self-responsibility. But to be responsible about our health, we need awareness, access, and affordability. There is an assumption that, in maintaining our own health, we are advancing the interests of the group.

But the endeavor is still highly personal and laden with value judgments about whether the pursuit of health is even worth it.

When contemplating change that brings about wellness, we have a multitude of medical and health options that can seem like empty promises. In weighing those options,

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Samuelson recommends the following: Keep asking, “So, what?” until you get to “Aha!” Case in point: If I do X, then Y will happen. So, what?

If Y happens, then I will get Z. So, what? If I get Z... then I will be able to spend my old age walking in the woods with my grandchildren. Aha! Such moments of realization do not come naturally to us, Samuelson says, because we live in a culture of distraction, compartmentalization, and constant activity where we obsess over the concept of work-life balance. “There are tons of blips out there that are coming at people, who don’t want to stop for fear that without some kind of motion they will be stuck in a quagmire.”

Samuelson has travelled around the globe, visiting places where the struggle for survival is so acute that the luxury of choosing between work and play is incomprehensible.

In those places, he says, love, play, work, and joy blend together in a state of perpetual flow, and happiness comes in small moments of fulfillment. Once, while he was walking through a mud-hut village on the way to Machu Picchu, Samuelson was struck by the flowers blooming outside each dwelling. Every mud hut celebrated its own existence in the midst of what we, in our Western perception, would call abject poverty. But to Samuelson, it was a revelation about simplicity: “Whatever your world is, is your world.”

That is why Samuelson defines health loosely, and without metrics. Healthy people, he says, “are individuals who have a very good sense of self—they’re comfortable in their own skin.

They do not look to harm themselves or others.” And health is not the end, he says, it is merely a vehicle to what brings meaning to our lives.

Michael is an Author, Adventurer, and Lecturer www.samuelsonwellness.com @mhsamuelson

juliussearight o n t h e r oa d a n d feeding the hungry When he was eight years old, Julius Searight’s foster mother sat him down over a plate of cookies and a glass of apple juice and asked him, “Would you like me to be your mother?”

He had been living with her since he was three, but it was at that moment that they decided to move forward with an official adoption.

In telling the story, Searight begins with the cookies and apple juice. Food and security go hand-in-hand in his world.

His childhood is grounded in memories of huge Sunday dinners at his grandmother’s house, where the family gathered after church for the scrumptious gumbo and jumbalaya she served, from her Louisiana heritage.

“I remember her cooking,” he says. “That’s really where I thought I wanted to do something like this when I grow up, maybe have a restaurant or catering business.”

From that moment, Searight worked at odd jobs in kitchens, gaining experience. In 2013, he graduated from Johnson and Wales University with a degree in culinary and food service management, and then spent two years with AmeriCorps, working with the needy. The whole time, he strategized about how he might use his cooking talents to give back to his community of Providence, RI This summer, after almost three years of planning, he opened up Food4Good, a commercially viable food truck that doubles as a mobile soup kitchen. It goes directly to places where people are hungry. “I saw the need for bringing food to the people rather than having them come to a normal soup kitchen,” Searight says.

With his food truck and philanthropy, Searight is realizing his dream of giving back to the working poor. “They work every day,” he says, “but things in America get so expensive that you have to sacrifice, and just what is that family sacrificing? It could be food. You never really know that somebody is struggling with hunger. In America, we don’t really talk about it.”

Searight’s work at food pantries and shelters made him realize that many people are silent about their hunger.

Part of that silence has to do with pride, he says. But it also has to do with hard economic choices made by people who sometimes put off eating until tomorrow in the way others might put off paying the electric bill. Children, especially, often tolerate hunger tonight because they know they will eat at school the next day.

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Grants, community partners, and ongoing donations have helped Food4Good get on the road. But the core of the nonprofit’s strategy for sustainability is to “change the way an average person purchases food,” according to Searight.

The goal is to combine the trendy culinary attraction of the food truck with an appeal to the goodwill of the people of Providence: for every meal they purchase, he can cover the cost of two meals for someone in need.

“People who are willing to give might not because they don’t have the funds or maybe it’s going to be a burden on them,” he says. But those who buy meals at Searight’s food truck know that, while they feed themselves, they are helping someone else to eat.

To the general public, Food4Good sells what Searight calls “comfort meals”—chicken sandwiches, macaroni and cheese, chicken wings, fries, and milkshakes. “We want our food to really spark a memory.” In addition to selling meals to those who are able to buy them, Searight plans to give away 100 meals a day to the needy, on a first-come, first-serve basis.

For those meals, he serves “more nutritious” fare such as soups, sandwiches, and salads.

While Searight loves being a chef, he has also decided that “being a businessman is phenomenal.” He says: “Sometimes you wear more hats than one. One hour I’m a chef, the next hour I’m a director of a nonprofit, and the next hour I’m a contractor trying to get the truck finished.”

He has discovered that ventures like Food4Good don’t happen overnight, and they certainly don’t happen without a little help. “Being an entrepreneur and starting a project like this is very hard to do alone,” he says. “Without the support of the community, we couldn’t do it.”

Julius is Founder and Director, Food4Good www.food4goodri.gandi.ws @FoodForGood

d a n i s h ay surrender a little bit a n d l e a n i n t o t h e f lo w One thing Dani Shay learned from growing up in a big family was how to communicate. For most of her life, she has practiced this vital human art through the grace and clarity of her music.

Shay, a singer-songwriter and acoustic guitar player, is now busy finding ways to get her music and story out into the atmosphere, with impressive progress so far: More than 20 million views on YouTube and appearances on “America’s Got Talent” and “Glee Project 2.”

Shay grew up in Orlando, FL, but now lives in Los Angeles, where she says the creative vibe connects her to like-minded artists.“ The people I’m working with out here have completely influenced my music and the way it’s changing and morphing,” she says. “I’m allowing myself to explore and play and not become or stay one thing. I’d say that my biggest goal is to be authentic.”

Shay’s authenticity resonates through her voice—a crystal that shoots light, shows everything, and bends elegantly with her emotional nuances. Fans respond in kind: “Many fans and friends have said my music sparks a sort of change in their minds: ‘You helped me accept myself. You helped me to accept the way I was thinking about my life.’”

Her songs are poems, she says, lyrics and melody distilled into a single concept. She has been writing such poems all her life. For years, she also kept a journal and wrote stories that helped her get down what she was thinking and feeling.

When she was 16, she discovered the guitar and taught herself how to play. “I would stay up all night until my fingers could not take it anymore,” she recalls. “I can be a little bit of a perfectionist, and by a little bit, I mean a lot. I would just keep going until I actually got it.”

Today, Shay is trying to be less of a perfectionist and more of an artist who allows her creative process to unfold in a natural rhythm. Sometimes she is out there—performing, sharing, posting, and engaging with her audience on many platforms. When she gets pent up with emotions and ideas, she begins “coasting under the radar,” allowing herself quiet, secluded stretches of time to write and record.

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If her rhythm gets disrupted, that is all part of the process, Shay says. A performer’s life can be fraught with crushing disappointment, and in such dark moments, Shay retreats to her “shell.” Once there, she says, “I try to find the lesson and the silver lining in everything. I just surrender a little bit and lean into the flow of it, trying not to resist too much.”

Telling her story is both the impulse and the salvation behind Shay’s art. Music has been her therapy, she says, helping her to sort out charged memories and experiences that are woven into her psyche. “I need to be lifted up sometimes.

Music reminds me of my higher viewpoint.”

Shay says our “crazy brains” can burden us with negative thoughts that take us far away from the present moment and from other people. Through her music, she wants to move people into a space of self-awareness, where we are curious about ourselves and willing to cast off the programming of a society that tells us who we should be.

“I really want to elevate people through my music and help to remind them of their feelings,” she says. “If my truth can impact someone else, then I feel like it comes full circle.”

For Shay, singing slows everything down to a manageable pace where she can listen and relate to others. When she

performs, she often asks the audience to sing along with her, to get everyone to surrender, even just for a moment.

“I like to believe that we’re all connected through some un-seeable but definitely feel-able energy. I like to call it love, but that can get confusing.”

Dani is a Singer-Songwriter www.danishay.com @danishay

gailsheehy searching f o r t h e ‘w h y ’ In the old days of journalism, covering the five Ws—who, what, when, where, why—was the quintessential reporting technique. For generations, it served the informational and cultural needs of an expanding nation. But at some point in the 70s, massive cultural shifts strained that narrative form.

It was at this point that Gail Sheehy, one of the most significant writers and reporters of our age, stepped into the heady field of journalism at the recently established New York magazine.

“Revolutionary fever was at its peak,” Sheehy says of the era. “Feminism was coming into its own, the Civil Rights movements had matured, the gay rights movement was just starting in the background, and then there was the sexual revolution.”

Things were indeed changing, and New York magazine editor Clay Felker, who later became Sheehy’s husband, insisted that the narrative should change accordingly.

The old method of producing newspaper copy seemed inadequate to the task of capturing what was truly going on.

The trick now was to capture the Why, Sheehy says.

Armed with a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and trained by anthropologist Margaret Mead, she experimented in what came to be known as the New Journalism. She wrote in scenes, grabbing her reader’s attention with story, and then posing the question, Why is this happening? As the story unfolded, she shed more light on her subject, building an argument and wrapping it up with a final “kicker.”

Form responded to culture, Sheehy says. It simply had to.

“To depict these seismic changes in people, as well as events, required a more flamboyant approach [to writing]—with vivid scenes and shocking dialogue, startling juxtapositions and abrupt leads. It made you sit up and take notice, and you just couldn’t wait to read the rest of the story.”

The New Journalism became mainstream by the 90s, Sheehy notes, but in its heyday, it played a significant role in her rise to prominence with the publication in 1976 of Passages. The book was a mix of deep reporting, sociological research, anthropological inquiry, and anecdotal storytelling about the predictable stages of life that we all pass through.

Considered by the Library of Congress to be one of the top 10 most influential books of our time, Passages quickly became a treasured cultural artifact, marked up and passed from friend to friend, parent to child, sex to sex.

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In its exploration and debunking of prescribed gender roles and life stages, it became for many people a thing to hold onto in moments of personal unrest. “It was just a very freeing catalyst for people,” Sheehy says of the book.

The message of Passages mirrored what Sheehy was learning about writing and reporting. The forms we live by, even the ones we write in, must be fluid, or we become paralyzed, unable to nurture our beings or connect to others.

Sheehy was writing with deep wisdom about the meaning of life’s passages when she was only in her 30s. She says the knowledge she conveyed in the book grew not only from her own life experiences and her prodigious research, but mostly out of the stories people told her.

“The insights came from seeing the repetitious aspects of people’s inner lives,” she says. Studies come and go. They make an impact and are sometimes discredited. But, Sheehy notes, true understanding comes from listening. “I think talking to people is really where it’s at. If you talk to enough people, you get a good sense of what’s going on.”

In her long career as a noted journalist, author, and speaker, Sheehy has demonstrated her prophetic ability to see reality as it is now. Today’s unique challenges arise, she says, because the preparation to enter adult life takes longer, as does the ability to learn intimacy and to mature in our emotional defenses. Her advice in the face of such uncertainty is to push

through, an idea that is the subject of her recent memoir, Daring: My Passages.

To dare is to combat fears, Sheehy says, to keep going until a door opens. “It’s about breaking the habit of pulling back when you’re afraid, and developing the habit of taking a chance.”

Gail is an Author, Journalist, and Lecturer www.gailsheehy.com @Gail_Sheehy

jamessiegal w h at ’ s g o o d f o r k i d s i s g o o d f o r e v e r yo n e In a child’s mind, play happens everywhere. Skipping down a sidewalk and trying to avoid all the cracks is an adventure that requires commitment, balance, skillful footwork, and sometimes, the biggest leap ever made in one little life.

Imagine creating such spontaneous moments in the most routine places kids pass through with adults—sidewalks, waiting rooms, and bus stops. Emblazon them with hopscotch boards, colorful eye-level drawings, and giant, climbable letters that spell out B-U-S. It would be easy to do, according to James Siegal, president of KaBOOM!. The nonprofit’s mission is to bring play into the daily lives of all kids, particularly the 16 million American kids growing up in poverty.

Siegal suggests that the world could use some thoughtful touches that invite a child to have fun. “If you watch kids, that’s what they want, and that’s what they expect,” he says.

“The ideas are limitless, and the beauty is that they don’t cost a lot of money. They repurpose existing space.”

Siegal traces his journey as a play expert back to Brooklyn, where he and his identical twin brother encountered their first playground: “Everything was cement. Not just the ground—there were cement tunnels to climb through and cement structures to climb on.” It wasn’t fancy and they didn’t care. “It was just a place to create a world.”

Today, he sees spontaneous play dwindling as communities become more isolated. Kids spend long hours stuck at home, not engaging with others or relating to the diversity of the world. When kids don’t play, they miss chances to practice creativity, higher-order thinking, problem-solving, and negotiating. They miss the chance to learn about people who are different and to make friends.

Play is an invitation to be social, Siegal says. It’s a way for kids to learn about responsibility, empathy, and adulthood. “Play is how you practice being older. If you listen to kids and the stories they make up, it’s all about the glimpses that they hear in adult conversations, and they’re trying to make sense of it in ways that are fun.”

Siegal came to KaBOOM! in 2012 from the Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal agency

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that runs AmeriCorps and other programs that engage people in improving their communities. He is now devoted to ensuring all kids get the play they need to thrive, in spaces that are clean, safe, and easy to access for children from all income levels.

Since 1995, KaBOOM! has built over 2,600 playgrounds in partnership with communities. After a two- to threemonth planning process, with the help of 200 volunteers from the community and the corporate funder, the playgrounds go up in six hours. “It’s a modern-day, urban barn raising,” Siegal says.

Through the playgrounds, kids and the caring adults in their lives see themselves engaged in the community that took ownership of that space—an essential part of KaBOOM!’s mission. Says Siegal, “They had a hand in building the playground, and they’re eager to do more.

It’s a quick win that leads to cascading steps of leadership and the courage to do more.”

Siegal is a big fan of “tactical urbanism,” the move to claim public space for community use through quick, temporary upgrades—making parklets out of parking spaces, shutting down streets for biking or playing. But very few of these efforts are kid-focused.

Like the growing movement to make cities more walkable and bikeable, Siegal says urban leaders need to embrace playability.

After all, playable cities create experiences that are good for grown-ups, too, Siegal notes. “If you design with kids in mind, everyone will benefit.”

James is President, KABOOM! www.kaboom.org @JamesSiegal

j e f f s pa r r b r i n g i n g m e n ta l w e l l n e s s to s ca l e Six years ago, Jeff Sparr opened a little storefront on Main St. in Pawtucket, RI, creating a space where people could find peace of mind through art. With this simple idea, he knew he had the blueprint for something that could help people working toward better mental health and mental wellness.

PeaceLove Studios has since become a fixture in its community, a place of healing with a welcoming atmosphere where people dealing with a variety of mental disorders have no need to explain themselves. Through the vehicles of paint and canvas—and many other expressive arts experiences— they find sweet relief by creating art that can hold their anxieties, worries, joys, and hopes.

Sparr is not a doctor, not even an art therapist. He is a person who has found art to be an oasis in his own life. Diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder in his 20s, he discovered that painting alleviated some of his most extreme symptoms.

He became convinced that if creating paintings helped him, creating art could help others, too.

“That was my interest from day one,” says Sparr, who co-founded PeaceLove Studios with his cousin, Matt Kaplan.

“Art can be incredibly powerful and impactful in people’s lives.” He says that PeaceLove approaches mental health with a sense of lightness and fun. “It has to be done in a soft, genuine way that allows people to join in any fashion,” he says.

“If you can lay the groundwork to get people to open up and be themselves, a lot of self-healing can happen.”

Of course, not everyone can get to Sparr’s now-bustling studio in Pawtucket to create their way to peace of mind.

So, his energies for the past few years have been geared toward scaling PeaceLove Studios.

The new Creators program takes a big step in that direction by training facilitators to take PeaceLove’s core expressive arts curriculum to their own communities. And after just two years, PeaceLove’s speaker series has already become a powerful day of sharing and storytelling. PeaceLove’s afterschool programming helps children to understand their own emotions by expressing themselves through art.

Sparr’s original blueprint for a healing arts studio has transformed into what he hopes will become a global movement to erase the stigma around mental illness.

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“At the end of the day, we all have something that we’re trying to deal with,” he says. “Let’s get it out in the open and make it okay to talk about.”

To fuel that movement, PeaceLove has partnered with national organizations that support the company’s programming and product development. The partners have helped to design merchandise with PeaceLove slogans, fund after-school programs, and are now planning to open up studios in new communities. “It’s unrealistic to hire thousands of trainers,” Sparr says,“but what is realistic is to partner with these organizations that already have a footprint in diverse populations.”

The message of PeaceLove spreads naturally when people encounter it in their everyday spaces—at work, in after-school activities, on a trip to the drug store. Even simple statements on T-shirts and jewelry can be meaningful forms of personal identity, micro-messages that further the conversation about mental health. Sparr says, “It’s one thing to have a positive symbol and to have people who get behind that, but now we have tangible ways to connect to people.”

Sparr wants to be in the “peace-of-mind business,” yet the growth of PeaceLove Studios has placed some heavy demands on his own peace of mind. There is pressure and uncertainty, a hectic schedule, not enough sleep—

all supremely discomfiting to someone with OCD. But Sparr does it anyway, because others are waiting for him.

For Sparr, PeaceLove has become a big source of ‘exposure therapy’—“to do what I’m doing is really hard on my health.

But it’s probably gotten me better.”

Jeff is Co-Founder, PeaceLove Studios www.peacelovestudios.com @JeffSparr

barrysvigals how we are is w h at i t b e c o m e s Imagining how a child will experience the space of a school is a delicate process. Ample daylight and views to the outside are essential. The children must understand the building— knowing where they are in the world comforts them.

For architect Barry Svigals, an elementary school is the best type of building to design because the clients “rank right up at the top.” When they enter a new school for the first time, something special begins to happen: “You see these young faces coming in—they look up and smile and they’re happy.

You get such wonderful, immediate feedback.”

Like any building, a successful school design will express its environs, Svigals says. An early consideration will be its orientation to the sun and the circumstances of its geography. More specific elements follow: the feel of the entryways, the flow of the building, the angles of light, the figurative sculptures and inscriptions that impart the structure’s cultural purpose.

And finally, Svigals says, the input of community members is crucial to building a great school, as it should be.

“When schools were made 200 years ago, the community made them. Everyone was there swinging a hammer. Everyone participated in the making of it.”

Nowadays, it is almost impossible to conceive of a time when life was lived on such a small scale, he says. “We’re so far from that now that it’s difficult to understand what the meaning of it is. Our cities are very large and constantly have to reform, and there is a breakdown in the neighborhoods.”

Our built environment reflects these cultural realities, according to Svigals. Many buildings and homes today are designed by engineers who make generic blueprints with no relation to any specific place. They are not designed by architects, who would carefully consult with the future occupants of the space, mold the structure intelligently to the landscape, and thoughtfully account for the history of the location.

Nevertheless, Svigals has sensed a paradigm shift toward sustainability and biophilic architectural design that responds to the natural world, “not as edited by all our modern conveniences that take us away from a place.”

Proper calibration to the environment also respects the human experience that shapes it. “Things that are made from the natural flow of life are most reassuring, but the spiritual

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domain in the history of a place is lost when we’ve built Big Ben in Las Vegas. It’s the error of trying to replicate the past in a wish to preserve it. In this country, we’re famous for that to a fault.”

A development made to look like a 19th-century community can backfire in its attempt at charm, Svigals explains, if it stifles normal connections to the 21st-century world. “When the design doesn’t respond to the aspiration of the time, it can deaden the social circumstances.”

Homes that were actually built in the 19th century corresponded to the conditions of that era. “Those houses were built in a world where change was impossibly slow by our reckoning, so that you could build with confidence that something would last for your family and the next family afterward.”

Svigals suggests that we can no longer build as if we build forever, as Victorian critic John Ruskin once wrote.“That doesn’t hold anymore,” he says of Ruskin’s philosophy. “Maybe even the opposite is true. Life does not stand still. It’s going at lightning speed. Our sensibilities and our needs change.”

In a world of over-production and mass consumption, Svigals purifies the architectural process by making it more relational. “We have no meaning except together,” he says.

“It’s a powerful reality that we have forgotten.” To that end, he begins each design with the two questions that have been with us forever: Who are we? Why are we here?

The parts of ourselves that we pour into a design will signify us. For good or bad, Svigals says,“How we are is what it becomes.”

Svigals is heartened by signs that the rising generation is attending to these important matters. “The route back to what we believe is possible for us to contribute is being negotiated by typically younger people who are beginning to see the seeds of the next civilization blossoming.”

Barry is Founder, Svigals + Partners, LLP www.svigals.com @BSvigals

a l e x ta p s c o t t t h e b lo c k c h a i n expedition Alex Tapscott began his career in investment banking in 2008, just before the US housing bubble burst and several major financial houses went bankrupt. Right from the start, he saw the worst of the business, he says, but he learned a quick and critical lesson: “Bad things can happen when incentives are not aligned with long-term value creation.”

The name of the firm invokes one of Tapscott’s favorite pieces of Canadian folklore—the search for the famed, elusive sea route through the ice-packed waters of the Arctic to the exotic lands of Asia, where spices and riches were thought to exist in abundance. Tapscott likens the historic quest for the Northwest Passage to the nature of entrepreneurship today.

While he advanced rapidly in his investment-banking firm, Tapscott wondered where this path would lead him.

He decided that he wanted to have a more direct impact on the future of business. As a former rugby and football player at Amherst College, he knew how to work with teams, how to lead, and how to help others shape their goals into reality.

“For me, it’s a cautionary tale about the pitfalls that can come your way when you’re starting up an expedition, but it’s also about the enduring human spirit and trying to surmount really impossible odds to do something incredible,” he says.

Today, he draws on this hearty skill set as the CEO and founder of Northwest Passage Ventures, a Toronto-based consulting firm that develops business strategies for earlystage, high growth companies.

Tapscott sees the smart use of disruptive technology as the key to a path-breaking business venture. We are at a critical inflection point, he says, as the rising class of entrepreneurs is looking to old models for a starting point.

“Millennials have a very different view of the world,” Tapscott says. “We’re the first generation to be bathed in bits. We’re the first generation to be immersed in technology.”

Tapscott acknowledges the “strange prosperity paradox” of a technological revolution that has produced uneven results in wealth distribution. The challenge for the younger, more connected, tech-savvy generation, he says, is to level that playing field.

We need to move value around more efficiently, according to Tapscott, pointing to the bitcoin protocol that can make it happen. Bitcoin is based on blockchain technology,

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an open-access platform for the transfer of value between anyone in the world, without an intermediary.

Tapscott says that the existing system of financial institutions that move money is an unnecessary burden for businesses and individuals. “The Internet protocol has dropped the cost of sharing information to almost zero. The blockchain will do the same for value.”

We can Skype with anyone in the world at little to no cost, he notes, but sending money across the globe is still cumbersome and costly: “It’s cheaper and faster to mail an anvil to China than it is to send $100.”

The blockchain also lowers the barriers for participation in the global economy, Tapscott says. This could benefit small businesses, especially those in the developing world, that need access to investment and loans. And the blockchain offers flexibility—it allows for payments of any size, no matter how large or small. In this era of micropayments and open access, many content creators depend on huge numbers of miniscule payments from their users.

“With the blockchain, you can start thinking about new models of charging for things in amounts that are very, very large or very, very tiny.”

Tapscott expects some “killer apps” using the blockchain to emerge in the next few years, and within a decade, he anticipates that the technology will significantly shake up

old institutions. He hints that it could even eliminate the need for stock exchanges. Such a result might take a while, and much could happen in the meantime.

“I don’t think that at any point in time this blockchain revolution will end, just like I don’t think that at any point in time the Internet revolution will end.” Tapscott says.

Like the search for the Northwest Passage, the expedition is still underway.

Alex is CEO and Founder, Northwest Passage Ventures www.npvinc.com @alextapscott

denniswhittle w h at d o r e g u l a r p e o p l e wa n t ? and are they getting it?

These are the questions that drive Dennis Whittle, who has spent his entire career helping bridge the gap between the needs of people worldwide and the NGOs, corporations, and governments whose mission is to meet those needs.

Whittle also has a wicked sense of humor. His official bio states that he was an extra in one of Chuck Norris’s best movies, Missing in Action. And, he was a “short-order cook and busboy at several restaurants, including the late Oasis Restaurant in Leitchfield, K.Y., and the Porthole in Chapel Hill, N.C.” That last resume item also speaks to Whittle’s strong anti-elitist, anti-hierarchy principles. That, and his heartfelt belief in decentralized systems, has defined his work. Whittle recently co-founded Feedback Labs as a way of helping

a network of leading aid and philanthropy organizations develop new tools to better listen to and act on the views of the people they serve.

For many years, Whittle worked at the World Bank. His final role there was as part of a three-person team that led the Bank’s Corporate Strategy and Innovation units. The team started an Innovation Marketplace to capture new ideas from within the Bank for alleviating poverty—and turned the World Bank’s conventional funding process on its head.

Call it a design approach to funding: The Marketplace prioritized rapid, repeated experimentation over careful, slow decision-making; small infusions of cash over multimilliondollar investments. Funders could browse hundreds of booths, quickly evaluating proposals from World Bank staffers for programs that would aid developing countries.

The success of the Marketplace led the team to open up the process to people outside the Bank. Now, people whose needs and voices were usually ignored had an opportunity to put forward their ideas and compete for funding.

The first year a team of two women from Uganda came to the Marketplace. “Women who had never left their village, and certainly not the country, nevertheless showed up to present their idea,” Whittle says.

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According to Whittle, “At the end of the Marketplace a South African woman came up to me and said, ‘We didn’t win.’ I told them, ‘I know—it’s a competition, not everyone can win.’ She said, ‘I get that, I just want to know when the secondary market will open. I don’t really know what that means, but I want to know when it will open.’ “

made me return every phone call within 24 hours, because everybody deserved a return call no matter how busy I was.”

A seed had been sown.

Dennis is Director and Co-Founder, Feedback Labs www.feedbacklabs.org @DennisWhittle

The idea affected Whittle. It wouldn’t leave him. “It was brilliant,” he says. “And everything about how GlobalGiving was built, and everything Feedback Labs stands for, grew out of that idea.”

GlobalGiving, which Whittle co-founded, was the first global crowdsourcing and crowdfunding website for aid projects. GlobalGiving has matched over $190 million from hundreds of thousands of donors, companies, and foundations, to 12,000 projects in 165 countries.

Whittle was also CEO of GlobalGiving its first few years.

Eli Stefanski, who worked at GlobalGiving, says the idea of truly listening to people and serving their needs “was translated into every behavior at GlobalGiving.”

“GlobalGiving was a total startup, and we were crazy trying to figure out its business model,” Stefanski says. “Yet Dennis

“Dennis just has this ‘we all get there together or not at all’ approach to life.”

m at t h e w z ac h a r y cancer is stupid, no need to b e p o l i t e a b o u t i t Sometimes innovation is about direct action and straight talk. It’s about vigorously addressing a need that has slipped through the cracks, and not wasting time on pleasantries in the process. In other words, it’s about being disruptive in an obnoxious way, if that’s what it takes.

This is Matthew Zachary’s brand of innovation, the one that has propelled Stupid Cancer, the grassroots organization he started eight years ago to shed light on the unique needs of young adults with cancer.

Stupid Cancer is a support community for individuals in the 15-39 age group whose diagnoses pose challenges specific to their life stage: fertility, relationships, careers, and most of all, isolation, which Zachary identifies as the number one issue facing young adults with cancer.

While edgy social media activity sits at the crux of Stupid Cancer’s vibrant presence in the young adult cancer community, Zachary says the true attraction

of the organization is its endearing brashness. It’s a little mouthy and demanding in its efforts to get attention, and that is very intentional.

Zachary describes his disruptive business philosophy as “strategic douchebaggery,” because he is not here to placate and please everybody: “That is what I believe got so many younger people to care about us at first. The fact that we have become what we’ve become is because I have this take-no-shit, what-have-you-got-to-lose attitude. At the same time, I can be completely valid and honest and disruptive to anybody if I feel that it’s truth with integrity and honesty.”

A native of Brooklyn, Zachary founded Stupid Cancer after taking command of his life in the wake of a pediatric cancer diagnosis at the age of 21. By his own description, he spent the better part of the next decade in a dark place: he was recovering, but the treatment had taken its toll.

He was seriously underweight, struggling with isolation, watching friends drift away as they do at that volatile age.

When most 20-somethings were taking their first steps into a world they hoped to shape in their own vision, his life dream of becoming a concert pianist seemed over when the fine motor coordination in his left hand diminished.

“I lost my life, pretty much, except that I didn’t die,” he says.

He hiked the Grand Canyon with a buddy, moved to Hoboken, and got a job “tinkering with computers and running cables,” a peaceful sort of activity that he had always loved and that now “anchored” him. “I tried to rebuild from scratch,

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to find connections to things that were meaningful to me.

It took years and years and years to feel like I could be reconstituted as a human being.”

Stupid Cancer came about when Zachary had newly situated himself and was prepared to address a need that had gone unnoticed, namely: Where is all the help for young adults with cancer? Traditional, branded cancer organizations focus on specific types of cancer or hone in on age groups at the ends of the life spectrum: babies and adults.

“I rallied those people who didn’t know they could have representation and a voice,” Zachary says. The great connective tissue of Stupid Cancer gives young adults an abundance of practical resources and answers, but it also gives them a place to vent their anger and express their opinions, to be participatory in something that is truly positive. It gives them a chance to share stories—not self-absorbed memoir accounts of the cancer experience, Zachary says, but stories of navigation.

“It’s the relatable struggle narrative that I think is much more resonant with people,” he says.

Zachary calls himself a “closet anthropologist” who is fascinated every day with how Stupid Cancer is working.

“People are engaged, participating, and contributing to our organization. They take so much ownership for our success.

We’re hitting all the people who wish we existed when they were diagnosed.”

Stupid Cancer keeps moving, and so does Zachary.

He became the concert pianist he had envisioned when he was younger. He is married with adorable five-year-old twins who are learning Spanish and loving life. They don’t know yet that their father practices strategic douchebaggery, doing everything he can to ensure no young adult facing cancer ever feels alone.

Matthew is Founder and CEO, Stupid Cancer www.stupidcancer.org @StupidCancerCEO

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nicoletingle

saulkaplan

s p ecial than ks to Kara Dziobek, Emily Clark, Maureen Tuthill, Rob Ranney, Maureen Ryan, and Jenny for their contributions to this year’s Summit.

bif2015 summit

september 16-17, 2015 providence, ri

Š 2015 business innovation factory 60 valley street, unit 25, providence, ri 02909 www.businessinnovationfactory.com