BIF-7 Summit Book

BIF-7 connect. inspire. transform.

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WELCOME TO

BIF-7

our lawyers have required us to post the following disclaimer:

“BEWARE OF RANDOM COLLISIONS OF UNUSUAL SUSPECTS.”

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hey wait. we don’t have any lawyers. collide away!

Sharing stories is the way to create a network of passionate supporters that can help spread ideas and make them a reality.

Storytelling is a core BIF value. We believe that advancing our mission to enable system change in health care, education, energy and entrepreneurship is critically dependent on our ability to create, package, and share stories from our work.

By openly sharing the process and output of our work, we strengthen our community of innovators and become more purposeful with every new story.

BIF-7 is all about sharing stories. One glorious story after another in no particular order, from storytellers (not speakers) sharing personal and raw insights about what innovation means to them. No breakouts, flip charts, or prescriptive assignments. It is up to you to decide what is compelling and which connections are most interesting and valuable.

So unbuckle your seatbelts and let the random collisions of unusual suspects begin.

The opportunity to host BIF-7 is an incredible blessing.

The inspiration I take away every year overwhelms me. I love to watch the reaction unfold, feel electricity from the cacophonous breaks between sessions, observe connections being made and collaborations hatched. If I close my eyes, I can actually see cognitive surplus sublimating into transformative potential. It’s palpable and it’s magic.

Each summit takes its own form. We don’t anticipate or prescribe themes, we simply bring interesting people to share their story at a dinner table set for 350. Trusting the audience is imperative. Each year, the unique group of participants will create its own random collisions. The canvas unfurls in unpredictable and delicious ways. It’s up to each of us to discern the patterns most relevant to us. Pattern discovery is a joyful process and integral to the magic. The cauldron of BIF-7 contains 30 plus remarkable storytelling catalysts to get our reaction started. It’s you, one of 350 unusual suspects participating in BIF-7—innovation junkies with a welldeveloped questing disposition—who will take it from there.

BIF-7 promises to be a target-rich environment to mine for personally relevant patterns and meaning.

You are sure to be inspired by the seemingly unbounded optimism of the stories and interactions among participants.

You will leave BIF-7 believing that there is nothing that collectively we can’t do. There is no hill too high, no social system too intransigent and no cultural divide unbridgeable.

I’m tired of events where we spend too much time admiring the problem, whining about obstacles, or getting bogged down in infuriatingly polarized political debate. At BIF-7, the optimism will be pervasive and tangible. It represents stored potential that we will all take home and act upon. I know I will.

BIF-6 storyteller Carmen Medina, former Deputy Director of the CIA, said it best: “Optimism is the greatest form of rebellion.” Carmen’s words are powerful, true and give me hope that the inspiration you take away from BIF-7 will translate into compelling action and sustainable movements.

Storytelling is the most important tool for any innovator.

saul kaplan, chief catalyst, business innovation factory @skap5

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MORE THAN A SUMMIT

designing the future at the business innovation factory

Welcome to the Business Innovation Factory—a network of innovators, transformation artists and troublemakers who are designing the future by exploring the power of experimentation in the real world.

The Business Innovation Factory (BIF) is a platform for transforming our most intractable systems— healthcare, education, entrepreneurship and energy.

It’s a place where players—both private and public—can design and test new solutions in a real-world environment.

It’s a recipe to solve the hard and gnarly parts of innovation that beleaguer us all: Where will great ideas come from?

How can we test them? How will they be implemented and scaled? How do we evaluate them in the face of uncertainty?

How do we ensure that current business models don’t swallow them whole?

suspects creates magic: A sneaker company adopts process from a car designer. A police chief teaches a business guru about collaboration. A 12-year old inspires us all to dream big. These personal stories collapse assumptions and help us imagine possibilities to transform value creation in our own industries and disciplines.

The Summit is just one of many opportunities for connection, inspiration and collective learning. Innovation salons, gatherings, and select storytelling events buttress online learning and knowledge sharing here at BIF. To move knowing into action, we work individually with community members to understand business model innovation and apply relevant tool sets to specific business model challenges. For example, we work with teams coming to the Summit, orient their experience around a real innovation challenge and follow up post-event to prevent the return to business as usual.

In our Experience Labs, BIF design teams offer advanced, boundary-breaking insights that fuel experimentation and transformation. Taking a human factors approach, we put the end user—the student, elder, consumer, patient, or

The BIF model is simple: Connect, Inspire, Transform.

Through our Collaborative Innovation Summit, we annually convene and connect a rockstar line up of innovation storytellers. It’s a space where the random collision of unusual

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entrepreneur—at the center of an innovation dialogue to find patterns in their behaviors, motivations, and factors that signal unmet needs. We then identify opportunity areas and solution ideas for companies, nonprofits, and government agencies to play with and test in the real world.

We often partner with these groups to participate in the experimentation process—from prototyping to testing to market making.

In our Student Experience Lab, one of our unique approaches is to put students in charge of the transformation process. Through our participatory studio, we introduce students to a design-driven process for innovation. Framed within the context of a current education system problem, students travel through the design process, ultimately landing on a set of ideas to improve their experience. From here, we design, develop, prototype and implement one or more of their solutions.

Getting students directly involved in improving their own experience is a big priority for BIF. In addition to offering education stakeholders new and relevant ideas for enhancing the student experience, the studio demonstrates a new

technique for engaging students in an ongoing innovation process that is both interdisciplinary and action-oriented. It’s an important example of how organizations can proactively put students in the driver’s seat of their own internal R&D activity, thereby changing the culture and fabric of the institution—and ultimately the system—itself.

Through the Connect, Inspire, Transform model, BIF is creating a national movement of innovators with the audacity to change everything. We are passionate about radically rethinking how value is delivered across the public and private sectors. And we will create the momentum required for systems level transformation and a better world.

Join us.

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the bif genome connect. inspire. transform.

together, we can design our future

catalyze something bigger than yourself collaborative innovation is the mantra

enable random collisions of unusual suspects

build purposeful networks

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make systems level thinking sexy

stories can change the world

passion rules - exceed your own expectations

off the white-board and into the real world tweaks won’t do it

transformation is itself a creative act

experiment all the time

be inspiration accelerators

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a decade is an awfully short time to waste

it’s a user centered world - design for it

join us connect. inspire. transform.

We urge you to let loose your passion and join our network of innovators, transformation artists, and audacious change-makers. BIF is accelerating innovation in the public and private sectors and unleashing the transformative power of our community. Tapping into the wisdom of our community gives us access to limitless knowledge. We don’t have all the answers, but we know that when we experiment and learn together, we go can farther than we can go alone.

Join us. Be part of designing the future.

community channels: membership: For companies and institutions who want to go up the innovation learning curve with us to better understand and practice business model innovation, we offer customized membership packages. For example, we work with members to leverage BIF’s experiential learning events including the Summit to move from inspiration to action. We also prepare customized innovation salons and help our members connect to the exciting work going on in our Experience Labs. Working closely with our members we design packages around their specific innovation needs and interests.

bif experience labs: Connect with the BIF Experience Labs. Contribute your passion to transforming our most intractable systems—from health care to entrepreneurship, from energy to education. Your ideas matter. We are also happy to help you apply the insights and tools from our Experience Labs to enable transformation in your organizations and communities.

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twitter: @thebif Stay engaged with the latest conversations from the BIF community by contributing to our random collision of unusual suspects (#RCUS).

facebook: business innovation factory Daily potpourri of posts, pictures, and innovation chatter.

linkedin: business innovation factory community Business insights and contributions from a global network of innovators.

bifspeak blog: Hosted by our community, BIFspeak covers what’s current in the innovation space. From design thinking to business model innovation to system changing, the blog and bloggers always stay fresh and engaged.

innovation story studio: More than just an archive of cool videos, interviews, audio and narrative pieces, the Innovation Story Studio is BIF’s opensource knowledge platform for helping our community learn from each other.

bif book club: A community of book-loving BIF’ers who like to read, discuss and debate good books.

innovation e-blast: Our e-newsletter keeps you current on Experience Lab activities, events, and happenings in our community.

Visit us online:

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ANGELA BLANCHARD emerging after the storm

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urricanes used to come and go with only moderate fanfare around the Gulf Coast.

Or, so it seemed to Angela Blanchard while growing up in Beaumont, Texas, a “little bitty refinery town about a sneeze from Louisiana.” Hurricanes blew in with the kind of predictable regularity that stopped the normal rhythms of life for a bit, brought everybody together, and passed on through.

“When we had a hurricane, we had a party,” Blanchard says. “We made gumbo, everybody came, we put water in bottles, and when the water went down, we cleaned it up and forgot about it until the next time.”

Now the storms are bigger, stronger, faster and they come with alarming frequency. Concentrations of population in hurricane regions only increase the damage and loss of lives. The result is what Blanchard describes as an “enormously chaotic world where we live from disaster to disaster without a between.”

In the wake of these storms, Blanchard has learned

that our systems don’t work, and that even the smartest people in the world can’t figure out what to do. But that’s not all she’s realized.

“Over and over and over again, there are always amazing people who emerge after the storm,” she says.

“We think that people just look out for themselves, but we are more caring, more patient, more generous, more giving and more willing to work with each other than we think we are.”

As the President and CEO of Neighborhood Centers Inc. in Houston, Blanchard has made a life out of helping communities pull together under difficult circumstances. In her 25 years with the nonprofit community development group, she has witnessed “remarkable moments of grace” that mobilize people in the aftermath of a storm—whether it is a natural disaster or an influx of newcomers to a city where 70 percent of the residents were born somewhere else.

In addition to running innovative schools, NCI helps people apply for citizenship status, sort out financial

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and legal technicalities, and overcome language barriers that keep them at home or in jobs that don’t even begin to tap their potential.

Blanchard insists that it is the spirit of the city that makes it all work. Just like her neighbors in Beaumont gathering to make gumbo after a hurricane, people around Houston act with the kind of compassion that comes without thinking. It is something she has seen so many times that it no longer surprises her.

It’s the way she was raised. Her parents, she says, were giving people who grew up on the margins, in a “particularly painful form of Southern poverty.” They were married at 17, had eight children before they were 30, and always believed that the future would be better. They taught their children that everyone counts, no one is invisible, and there is always enough to go around.

“We never knew how close to the edge we were,” she recalls. “We were always thinking we were the luckiest people in the world.”

That world always felt abundant to Blanchard, and still does, even when she confronts the deeply chronic challenges of urban life in Houston: poverty, unemployment, and in the most diverse city in America, alienation and displacement.

Last year alone, natural disasters displaced 42 million people around the world, changing global patterns of immigration and bringing many new faces to Houston.

“Most of them have fled poverty, ignorance, isolation, oppression,” Blanchard says. “They’re just determined to create a different story for their kids. Their focus is on the future, not on themselves. They have no ideas about working less and playing more. They have an idea about building something.”

People in Houston feel a kinship with those who struggle, according to Blanchard. “Everybody knows what that yearning feels like—to want for your work to

matter,” she says. “We don’t care where you’re from, we just care where you’re going.” The important thing, she says, is to create a place where “there’s room for you to put what you have on the table.”

Blanchard’s goal is to get everybody to the table.

Her mother always told her: when you have a party, there are no invite lists. It’s either everyone, or no one.

“And she meant it,” Blanchard adds. angela blanchard is president and ceo, neighborhood centers, inc. www.neighborhood-centers.org @neighborhoodctr

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gotham chopra gotham’s liquid heroes

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the digital future. Comics seemed perfectly suited for segueing into a new narrative medium.

“Graphic fiction is an interesting form of storytelling,” Chopra says. “It’s the oldest in many ways, from a creative standpoint. From a business standpoint, it’s also compelling because the publishing market is not what it has been in the past. It’s still an incredibly dynamic way for creators to create stories.”

Chopra has told stories as a journalist, documentary filmmaker and blogger, but the medium of the graphic comic is the space where he is finding the most creative freedom. The idea of keeping things “liquid” reflects the way today’s media forms flow into one another, not just through devices, but through genres as well.

Comic books become e-books with moving graphics, and with a little magic, they eventually become films: “The filmmakers we’ve found love it because the graphic novel is basically storyboarding an idea.”

ven in the world of comics, it is difficult to avoid corporate culture. Gotham Chopra does his best, though, in part by not assuming an executive title at Liquid Comics, the once traditional publishing company he co-founded six years ago and then “re-envisioned” as the world turned digital.

“When we reorganized three years ago, I did not take a title,” Chopra explains. “I’ve never been in the corporate culture. I think of myself as a creator and a storyteller, so the title is a bit of a distraction. That’s why I call myself the co-founder. I just sort of create and have fun.”

In its original permutation, Liquid Comics produced comic books and graphic novels under the name Virgin Comics. That was in the “early days,” Chopra says, when there were no iPads, no iPhones, no Androids.

But around 2007, things started to look different, and the company was rebranded and renamed to embrace

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Into this increasingly competitive market, Chopra infuses his own sensibilities. Growing up in Boston, he was immersed in the heroic exploits of not only the Red Sox and the Celtics, but also in the adventures of Batman, Superman and other classic American superheroes. However, Chopra was also seeped in the mythology of his own Indian ancestry, such as the Indian mystics known as the Sadhus. Founding Liquid Comics with his sister, Mallika, was a way to bring those mythic figures into the American mainstream.

“Pokeman and Yu-Gi-Oh! are more East Asian,” Chopra notes. “There was never an Indian equivalent of that stuff, no deep, amazing archive of great myths and characters. Part of the mission of the company is to mine that creativity. In India, most of the young creators are always pushed toward outsourcing.

We wanted to help pioneer a shift in thinking: Be creators, think up new characters and bring them into the world.”

In fulfilling its mission, Liquid Comics helps rising Indian artists find expression on a global canvas as they tell the ancient stories of India. And the heroes are not so different from those of Western mythology, Chopra says. Much of the same basic narrative is at play: reluctant heroes get their powers from some divine or alternate realm and go on quests. The difference, he says, is that Western heroes often battle the natural world, whereas Indian mythic figures tend to confront the mystic realm. Their quest is to understand the true nature of reality and to master it.

“Indian heroes operate at a different spiritual level,” Chopra says. “Physically, they tend to be much slighter, smaller, sleeker and more androgynous than a typical Western heroic figure.”

The liberating effect of graphic comics, according to Chopra, is that they show the possibility of melding the physical and spiritual elements of Western and

Eastern philosophies. They bring the past, present and future into conversation with one another in a way that unfetters the mind and ignites a powerful, healing curiosity.

Graphic comics show the possibility of a world with no boundaries—in essence, the very antithesis of the rigid corporate structure Chopra has so long resisted.

“I know that, even for the things I feel intuitively, there’s nothing absolute. We like to think in terms of black and white, but the world is a pretty colorful place.” gotham chopra is co-founder and managing partner, liquid comics www.liquidcomics.com @gothamchopra

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MALLIKA CHOPRA the power of intent

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hen Mallika Chopra became a mother, everything seemed to fall into place.

Even for the woman who at the age of 22 helped bring MTV to India, the simplicity of mothering is the most exhilarating experience she has ever had.

“I’ve been lucky,” Chopra says. “I’ve gone to good schools, I’ve had interesting jobs, but becoming a mother enhanced everything I was doing and gave me confidence to do everything in a stronger way. I found my voice.”

As a businesswoman working in the media industry, Chopra says it is sometimes difficult to stay centered.

But raising her daughters—Tara, 9, and Leela, 7—has given her a clear purpose, she says. Her first book, 100 Promises to My Baby, is just one expression of that purpose. Another is her wellness website, Intent.com, launched in 2008.

Chopra describes Intent.com as a platform that builds community by giving people a place to express their hopes and goals—for themselves and

for others—and receive positive encouragement from like-minded individuals. These “intents” are posted on the website in short, unadorned phrases that convey in a very down-to-earth way the intimate aspirations of each writer. People on the site can “support” an intent just by clicking a button. Chopra calls it “twitter with a purpose.”

Although it sounds simple enough, Chopra faces a huge challenge. Swirling debates about the effect the Internet is having on our brains and our lives have raised concerns about the long-term value of on-line culture. The Internet is already changing the way we do business and socialize, with mixed results. And to be sure, negative online behaviors have become increasingly worrisome. But, could the Internet also be a place of community, solace and encouragement?

This has been Chopra’s hope. As a partner in Chopra Media, she has spent the past 15 years fusing multi-media with the self-help industry. Intent.com is the most elaborate manifestation of her efforts thus

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far. And activity on the site has given her reason to feel gratified.

“What we’ve seen, which is so exciting, is people supporting each other’s intents, showing support through pressing a button,” Chopra says. “That really does empower people to feel like they are being supported, like there’s a community that’s cheering them on in their aspirations.”

The idea of putting an aspiration “out there into the universe” is an ancient spiritual technique, Chopra points out. But the new twist with Intent.com is that the Internet immediately builds a community around those aspirations. Someone feeling a little down over the gloomy weather posts, “My intent is to enjoy this beautiful rain today. . .” She soon receives a “support” suggesting a perspective that might help her achieve that intent: “enjoy beautiful rain, joy of trees, its leaves, branches, joy of hills.”

The sentiments are simple—slight pieces of compassion or insight that may help someone take a small step toward something meaningful.

And the community of Intent.com has a dual effect: once posters are buoyed by “supporters,” they feel a sense of commitment to achieve their goals. If someone is cheering you on, you don’t want to let them down.

When the pursuit of an individual aspiration binds the community together, the benefits are exponential.

In addition to the influx of daily intents highlighted on Intent.com, the website also hosts links to more than 600 bloggers, all of whom are vetted by Chopra for their quality and credibility. Although she is the driving spirit behind the site, she purposely stays in the background. “We gave it to the community so they can drive it,” she says. “I’m one voice.”

Chopra found that voice the moment she became a mother, and through Intent.com, she expresses it in a way that harmonizes perfectly with today’s Internet

culture. She tries to use the power of social media to transform positive intentions into tangible actions.

The potential for good in this endeavor is obvious.

“I see social media as another tool out there that can be used for good or bad,” Chopra says. “I focus on our role to make it a positive experience. As we move forward and become connected to people in a different way, I think it will change us.” mallika chopra is a media and wellness guru www.intent.com @mallikachopra

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JOn CROPPER who are you? meet cropper 6.0

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now thyself, said Socrates. This elusive piece of wisdom is crucial to personal fulfillment, but also to effective branding, according to media and marketing mastermind Jon Cropper.

“As a consultant, I’ve met with dozens of CEOs, and I ask them, ‘What do you stand for as a brand?’ Rarely is the answer clear and precise. But the very best of them will tell you with unwavering focus: ‘This is our mission, this is what we’re about.’”

He knows who he is: “I’m Cropper 6.0.”

Acknowledged as an expert in youth and urban culture, Cropper has enjoyed many successful marketing permutations as an executive for MTV, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Quincy Jones, Nissan and Young & Rubicam. Colleagues in the field say he has the “Midas touch.”

He doesn’t stop until he finds that “nugget of genius, that genuine aspect” of a company that hasn’t yet been fully leveraged. And then he brings it out into the light. “The answers to the deepest questions reside in your own history,” he says. “Innovation is driven as

much by a respect for your history, as it is about being a futurist.”

Cropper’s exceptional Nissan campaign stands out as a decisive marketing model for the existing mediascape. It spiked Nissan sales, earned him an Effie award and landed him on the cover of Brandweek magazine as the “Best Marketer Under 40” in 2004.

Somehow, he managed to turn the sensible, middle class Nissan sedan into a hip option for a rising and somewhat jaded generation of car buyers.

His strategy was a combination of seduction and performance that met the consumer head-on, a tactic that is sedately referred to as “non-traditional outdoor / experimental advertising.” Live music and celebrity interviews broadcast from the backseat of a purple Altima. An Armada inside a cherry-red and glass storage container displayed in select cities.

Graffiti and street sculpture promoting the Maxima.

And guerilla theater, where poets stand up in movie theaters during a Nissan ad and yell to the audience, “Who are you?”

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This live interactivity is part old-school in the way it draws on the energy of one-on-one sales. But it’s also new. Audiences appreciated the effort and attention paid to them. It’s an antidote to the mass marketing ‘numbification’ of print and screen advertising.

Cropper insists that marketing is “not how many eyeballs you reach, but how many hearts you touch.”

He knows that young consumers today are a tough sell. They don’t just want a product to jump out at them. They want it to mean something. They have such effortless access to merchandise and services that they’re not easily impressed with quick delivery, good prices, or even something cool.

Cropper proposes that brands also have a responsibility to help reduce the current mood of economic anxiety. He says, “To provide peace of mind as part of your sales organization to me is critical.”

That’s why he insists that companies need to “outteach vs. out-sell” the competition: “If you’re going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing, you should be deploying those resources in a way that the customer is getting something for it. It’s about giving people useful information.”

One way that brands can make themselves useful, according to Cropper, is to educate. Higher education has become so expensive, and in many ways so out of touch with the vocational needs of today’s graduates, that some brands are filling that void with things like Cisco’s entrepreneurship programs, Google Code University and Apple’s iPhone Developer University Program.

By extending themselves through educational channels, brands become more intimately connected to their consumers. In turn, consumers have the chance to be trained in specialized areas by experts in the fields they value. Through this mutual extension, both sides come to know themselves more fully.

Everybody wins.

Cropper is entering into this “branded knowledge future” himself as co-founder of FuturLogic, a 100 percent online digital entrepreneurship institute. It is an unprecedented, for-profit educational model that brings together brands, technology and outstanding talent from around the globe.

Coming from a family of educators, Cropper deeply respects traditional learning, yet he is awed by the highly positive potential of a space where brands and educators collide. He anticipates that youth culture will get it. jon cropper is founder, futurlogic www.futurlogic.com @futurlogic

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ANGUS DAVIS

spurring innovation by making some noise

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says. “It’s a pathway to become a mad scientist or a consultant, but if you want to become part of something really great, it needs to be as part of a team.”

When he started Tellme, for instance, the first thing he did was identify the “smartest people in the world” who knew something about speech technology. He found 14 of them through MIT’s Media Lab. “I decided, I’m going to hunt down these 14 people, and at one point we had about half of them working for us at Tellme,” Davis says. “We were able, in a startup company, to provide a very different channel for their greatness and inspiration.”

Another ingredient that greases Davis squeaky wheel is his obsession with making the humantechnology interface almost invisible. That means making technology work for us, instead of the other way around.

“If you have to break out the manual, you’re a slave to technology,” he says. “What you want is the reverse of that—you want it where your life is better because of it.”

he great inventor is a myth. It’s the squeaky wheel that spurs innovation.

So says Angus Davis, who has some measure of experience in this area. Davis was a major player in the early development of the Netscape web browser that revolutionized Internet surfing. He also created Tellme Networks, a voice recognition software program that makes touchtone voicemail operations obsolete.

Tellme was acquired by Microsoft in 2007.

Davis’ latest enterprise is Swipely, an online social network that tracks and rewards consumer purchasing patterns with one swipe of a credit card.

Behind any entrepreneurial venture, Davis notes, there is someone who has been the “squeaky wheel” in identifying key problems and the key people who can solve them. He drives innovation by “peppering” people with questions, “peppering” them with ideas.

He’s not “the guy programming the computer code,” but the one who gets the perfect team together.

“I don’t think that being a lone, independent thinker is a pathway to create anything that’s great,” Davis

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Swipely begins with this philosophy of convenience.

Officially launched in March 2011, the online service enables users to accumulate points or rewards from vendors every time they use their credit cards.

“You can do it without having all the nonsense of cutting coupons, keeping a loyalty card in your wallet or checking in places,” Davis says. “I’m already using a credit card to pay for things, so why can’t that just keep track of my loyalty points? Why do I have to do all this unnatural stuff?”

And Swipely does more than just smooth over the customer’s experience. Davis refers to it as a “social commerce” company that will help local merchants by giving them a new way to build solid relationships with their patrons. Consumers are increasingly making shopping decisions based on the nature of these relationships, he says.

“We’re trying to build a lasting marriage between merchants and their best customers,” he explains.

Small businesses have a natural edge when it comes to personalizing customer service, but they can’t compete with the high-tech merchandising capacity of national chains. Swipely may be changing that.

“We’re arming these local merchants with the nuclear weapons of marketing, just like the ones used by their big box brethren,” Davis says. “We’re putting state-of-the-art customer relations marketing tools in the hands of these local merchants so they can make every customer who walks through their doors feel like Norm Peterson walking into Cheers.”

If Davis track record is any indication, Swipely will be a boon for Main Street and patron alike.

In the meantime, he is applying his squeaky wheel to a seemingly impossible task in his own backyard: improving the quality of Rhode Island public education.

“I’ve always been attracted to interesting problems,”

Davis says. That might be an understatement, considering the chronic and deep-rooted problems Rhode Island schools currently face.

But Davis remains unfazed. He is already on the move, peppering educational bureaucrats with his questions and ideas. True to form, he’s getting things done by “stepping up and speaking out.”

As he points out, “If you don’t ask, the answer is always no.” angus davis is an entrepreneur and founder, swipely www.swipely.com @angusdav

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john hagel working on the edges

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ohn Hagel used to reach out to people through ideas. Now he does it by letting down his guard every once in a while.

From his position as co-chairman of Deloitte LLP’s Center for the Edge, Hagel sees openness as an antidote to the volatility inherent in expanding global markets. A little ingenuousness builds camaraderie and generates a healthy interplay of human emotion.

“When people come at you with a façade as if everything’s under control, it does not generate trust,” Hagel says. “We’re all imperfect beings. We have flaws, things we’re struggling to find out about.”

Acknowledging—and perhaps even nurturing—our changeable, human natures can teach us to improvise and exercise tacit judgment. Whether we work in a cubicle, a research lab or a corner office, even the most routinized tasks occasionally involve ambiguity.

“We need the ability to respond to unexpected events,” Hagel says. “With intensifying competition on a global scale, stability is eroding and the manual doesn’t help you in that case.”

At the Center for the Edge, Hagel carefully observes the unexpected on the “edges” of business, where

things bump up against each other to produce change.

It’s an important place to watch, he says, because what happens at the edges transforms the core.

But for business leaders accustomed to delegating from that core, the edges can be disconcerting.

Keeping things steady out there requires an act of faith.

“As I evolve my thinking about where we’re headed, I believe that trust-based relationships are becoming more and more important,” Hagel says. “And I have a very strong belief that you don’t build trust without vulnerability.”

Being vulnerable goes against the grain of American business culture, which has worked for generations on the principles of Taylorism—each worker does his or her allotted task while the manager ensures that they interact efficiently. There is no room for the human element in scientific management.

“Frederick Taylor figured out how to standardize and precisely define work so that it didn’t matter who the people were,” Hagel points out. Taylor’s “Efficiency Movement,” which gained traction during the Progressive Era, is part of what Hagel calls the

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world of “push,” or, the idea that business can forecast demand with reasonable accuracy and push its operations in that direction. It is an organizational model that drives many of our institutions—such as education and government—and that places a high premium on stability. But under this model, long term profitability trends are withering, Hagel notes; since 1965, the return on assets of U.S. public companies has declined by 75 percent.

Why keep pushing in the wrong direction? Hagel suggests that instead of trying to predict what we need and risking miscalculation, we should be more open to making connections that will expose us to what we didn’t know we needed.

Hagel calls this the world of “pull.”

His latest book, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, explores flexible organizational models that morph with the needs of the market. Rather than have one supply chain, for instance, companies should set up loosely coupled supply networks that respond seamlessly to the ebb and flow of business. Such elasticity, Hagel says, permits scale without inertia.

Because the idea of “pull” is highly contingent on connections, the passion of the individual worker becomes even more important. “Passionate people are twice as connected,” according to Hagel. “They have an instinctive kind of urge to reach out to other people who share their passion.”

Supple markets that are girded with stability and driven by a passionate workforce create a space for something that isn’t often talked about in business: harmony.

Hagel says he gets a strange reaction from people when he talks about harmony at a meeting: “It’s like that image of dogs watching television. Their heads are going back and forth, and they know there’s

something potentially interesting, but they often have no clue what it is.”

The fluid, harmonious business systems that Hagel advocates might soon become the province of a select group of highly adaptable organizations. Their success will certainly depend on attracting the right people and the right resources at just the right time.

It seems like luck, but Hagel says it’s serendipity that we can shape. john hagel is an author and co-chairman, deloitte center for the edge www.deloitte.com/centerforedge @jhagel

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UMAIR HAQUE a new prophecy for a global america

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ndustrial prosperity has reached its limit.

Stagnation, decline, impoverishment and a general kind of misery mark the end of an era of one model of growth. A great reconfiguration of the global economy is inevitable.

Such are the prophecies of Umair Haque.

Haque does not have a completely doomsday outlook, however. As a blogger for the Harvard Business Review, director of the London-based Havas Media Lab, and a self-described “diehard capitalist,” he insists he is a great optimist at heart. “I firmly believe we will get out of this mess,” he predicts. His dire assessment of the “flatlining” of human progress under our current economic system is countered by his buoyant call for a “meaningful prosperity.” As such, Haque is sending out a warning against anything that smacks of immediate gratification: McMansions, 70inch plasma televisions, and Jersey Shore frivolity.

He thinks we can do better. But first, he says, we have to rearrange the building blocks of our economic institutions to make them more humanistic: “Institutions, at the end of the day, are just an expression of values. What really has to change is the way in which we value the future, nature, one another, and our own well-being.”

Envisioning the future has recently brought on a flood of retrospective musings about core American values and how they might apply—or not—to the expanding global economy of today. Haque poses the question, “How did we get from being that shining city on a hill?”

More importantly, how can we get back there?” Haque suggests that we need the same type of foresight as the people who settled this country.

“When the Founding Fathers came over here they had a fundamentally different vision of a good life than what was offered to them in England,” he says.

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“It was about everybody having a chance to foster and develop all of that great stuff of life. They were rebelling against an aristocracy that kept people from reaching their potential.”

Beneath Haque’s witty and satirical blogging about Donald Trump’s inanity and the dumbification of the strip mall consumer lies a pervasive sadness over this sense of unrealized potential. Indeed, he laments loss and wastefulness of any kind. And with an MBA from the London School of Business, it is only fair that he turn his sharp critiquing tools on himself.

“In a previous life I was a banker and a trader, but I found that it was congealing my soul faster than it was filling up my bank account,” Haque says. “I was miserable, and one day, I just quit.”

Through his blog and his recently published book, The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business, Haque attempts to write a new economic order into existence. He is shepherding the transition from a functional economy that provides us with “stuff we don’t need” to an aspirational economy that creates pathways to satisfying the intangibles in life—health, wisdom, and maybe even the pursuit of happiness.

“The only point that I ever want to make is that we need to ask bigger questions,” he says. “The fundamental error is to presume that the role of the economy is merely to provide us with material plenitude. We’ve been there and done that and gotten the T-shirt. The question is, What happens after that?”

Haque surmises that the demands of the global economy will show us how to reshape the way we do business. Countries like India and China are already “steaming ahead with very different kinds of economies,” and we need to take note, he says: “The good news is that the world is a big place. If America is not capable of making the leap, my guess is that

there are countries that are very hungry to make it. In this game of global competition, the stakes are much bigger.”

But even the bigger stakes are rooted in the most basic individual choices that we all make, no matter what income scale we inhabit. After all, Haque points out, the economy is just a tool. What we choose to accomplish with that tool will define us. “There has to be more,” he insists. “If there isn’t, I’m checking out.”

Not to worry, though, because Haque says he’s already seen “the green shoots of reinvention springing up.” umair haque is director, the havas media lab blogs.hbr.org/haque @umairh

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alex jadad “heal” is a beautiful word

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his life to “bridging the gap between what people need to live a long and happy life, and what they get.”

As Canada Research Chair in eHealth Innovation at the University of Toronto, he is trying to start a global conversation about wellness, one that looks beyond medical research and healthcare institutions and toward a holistic approach to healing.

He has studied and followed native communities around the world that have not adopted Western medicine, yet have demonstrated a capacity for healing that often exceeds our own. “They are much more grounded to the earth than we are,” he says, because they acknowledge all the intangible things that make a patient a person. There are tremendous opportunities to embrace this “conceptual framework for the pursuit of meaning and joy” that he believes is essential to a full life.

Jadad’s aim is to promote healing as a way of life.

He wants to get us thinking about our regrets, our

r. Alex Jadad is full of questions: “What makes you happiest? What do you regret most? How do you want to die? What is ‘your verb’?” He admits such queries can be unnerving, but only if we expect definitive answers.

“Not knowing is what makes me happiest. “ Jadad has arrived at this understanding after years of experience as a palliative care physician. He has seen people face death. Often, he is the first person they talk to about dying. At this delicate moment of life, so many questions go unanswered.

Aside from physical pain or fatigue, Jadad says the main source of human suffering at the end of life is the accumulation of regret. Things we should have done that we didn’t do. Goals we have reached that turned out not to be worth it. “I have become a regret manager,” he explains.

As chief innovator and founder of the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, Jadad says he has devoted

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guilt, our joys, and our desires earlier, rather than later.

But he points out that the health system is reactive and heavily medicalized, offering no support to proactive efforts to pursue human happiness.

Most biomedical research funds go toward putting more years into our lives. “A tiny fraction is spent on keeping us well,” Jadad says, adding that “the emphasis is on diagnosis and ‘fixes’” and that “in most countries where we have data, veterinarians receive more training on how to manage pain than medical students.” He adds, “It is time to start putting more life into our years.”

Changing the system will not be easy. “When we’re healthy, we don’t care about the healthcare system that we hope will be there for us,” he says. “But the system for which we pay over $5 trillion a year worldwide, will just be offering us chemotherapy, radiation and surgery if we get cancer. Our wellbeing beyond institutional boundaries is nobody’s formal responsibility” Programs and services that offer workshops, exercise and dietary plans to help people thrive even as they confront serious diseases such as cancer, tend to create the impression that an irreverent, warriorlike mindset and a green smoothie will wash away the ugliness of a terminal illness.

“I wish everybody could turn a diagnosis of cancer or another life-threatening disease into a meaningful and deeply transformative experience,” Jadad says, referring to the sometimes exceptional successes of such programs. “But people feel guilty if they don’t have a positive experience. They end up blaming and punishing themselves: Why am I not feeling well? I should be stronger, I should be more energetic, more proactive, more assertive. But I’m scared, I’m weak, I’m vulnerable, I’m crying all the time.” Finding innovative ways to mitigate, or even eliminate all of these sources

of suffering drives his work as a core scientist in the Centre for Health, Wellness and Cancer Survivorship at the University Health Network in Toronto.

Our healthcare system and our needs are woefully misaligned, according to Jadad. “We are all facing a terminal illness. It’s called life.”

And that, explains Jadad, is why healing is the most important thing. “I’m trying to be a healer. That’s what we’re missing. We’re trying to fix, conquer, beat. But heal is a beautiful word.” alex jadad is chief innovator & founder, centre for global ehealth innovation www.ehealthinnovation.org/ajadad @ajadad

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whitney johnson

a strong sequel for the real life working girl

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y a strange coincidence, Whitney Johnson had just arrived in New York when the movie Working Girl hit the big screen. And just like Melanie Griffith’s character, Tess McGill, Johnson was a secretary in the financial district who wanted to do better.

She had moved to New York so that her husband could study for a Ph.D. in microbiology at Columbia University. She was supporting them both and, with a music degree, being a secretary was the best option available. She found the work tedious. But all around her, executives—mostly men —were riding high on success in their high-powered financial positions.

“I was going to work and thinking, ‘this is not interesting, this is not exciting,’” Johnson recalls.

“Working Girl came out when this was all happening, and I remember seeing the film and it inspired me. I thought, ‘I am going to do what she did.’”

Tess McGill’s “sense of pluck” resonated with

Johnson. She related to the character’s internal drive to make something happen: “That sense of, ‘You look at me and think I can’t do this, and I’m not qualified, and I don’t look the part. And by golly, I’m going to do it anyway.’”

Johnson started taking business courses at night, got a job in investment banking, and within a decade became a top-ranked analyst at Merrill Lynch, specializing in Latin American markets. Today, she is the President and co-founder of Rose Park Advisors, a Boston-based investment firm focused on disruptive innovation, or companies that are creating or reshaping markets. She blogs for the Harvard Business Review and is the forthcoming author of Dare-DreamDo: Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare To Dream.

While Johnson has all the key attributes of a successful analyst—a great work ethic, a knack for building financial models and a keen eye for picking

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stocks that make money—she says her particular strength lies in forging solid connections between investors and CEOs. To that end, being straightforward is crucial. She notes: “If I don’t know something, I say I don’t know.

I don’t lie. And 99 percent of the time, people know that I genuinely care about them.”

People notice her authenticity. One business commentator said he reads Johnson’s blog to find out what a “real manager” is thinking. Johnson says she is pleased with that assessment because she thinks of herself as “a working person’s real-time commentator.”

By nature, Johnson is a person more likely to ask questions than to make statements. She is constantly assessing risk and working out the terms of a relationship, whether she is talking to a group of investors or her own children. “I look at what the transaction is in any given situation,” she says. “What is each stakeholder trying to get done? How can you make it so that each person can win?”

That inquisitive frame of mind makes her a master of details and a clear-sighted judge of circumstances.

She describes herself as “very discovery-driven,” someone who looks at the “brass ring” in front of her and goes after it.

That’s one reason why she walked away from a seven-figure job at Merrill Lynch six years ago. There were no more brass rings, and she didn’t want to just keep “dialing it in,” she says: “I had peaked. I was not going to make more money than I was making. I felt the pull of wanting to do more entrepreneurial things, wanting to create and build something that was more mine.”

After a period of “reassessing and recalibrating,” Johnson now applies her financial expertise in a creative capacity at Rose Park Advisors. “I thought I

would never go back to Wall Street,” she says. “But I spent nearly 15 years working incredibly hard to gain all these skills. I wanted to make a contribution, and I came back to that via this fund.”

With the fund now reaching critical mass, her blog gaining in popularity and her book about to launch, Johnson says she is in a highly satisfying “discovery stage” and she intends to keep it that way.

Clearly, the Tess McGill pluck is still going strong.

For Johnson, dialing it in is simply not an option. whitney johnson is president, rose park advisors www.roseparkadvisors.com @johnsonwhitney

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VALDIS KREBS

getting technology and sociology to match

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ocial network consultant Valdis Krebs predicts that site-based social networks are “doomed to failure.” Having to go to a universal website and log in if we want to interact with our friends is all too much work, he says.

It is like the early days of telephone, when the caller had to ring up an operator to request a connection.

Eventually, the caller could dial the other person directly. And then there were phones everywhere—at work, in the car, and now in our pockets. We can talk anywhere—all we need is a time and number to connect on.

Krebs calls social networking websites “the landline of technology,” and declares that they will soon wear out their usefulness.

He has nothing against social networking websites.

In fact, Krebs has been on twitter longer than 95.8 percent of all twitter users. He is active, personable and socially-conscious in his tweets. He just sees something brighter on the social media horizon.

“When this whole social networking thing will really take off is when we’re able to do it directly from where we are,” Krebs says. “Rather than go to a site that’s the center for everything, I’m going to be the center of my network or universe—which I am already.”

The connection will be peer to peer, rather than client to server. If we want to send a message to someone, he says, “Let the computer figure out whether it’s an e-mail or a text. We, as humans, shouldn’t have to care about that stuff. We have to get the technology and sociology to match.”

These are things Krebs puzzles over as the founder and chief scientist at orgnet.com, which analyzes patterns of connection and paths of information flow among groups of people.

Through software and mathematical computation, Krebs identifies the nodes of intersection that comprise a person’s social network. Mapping out such a network is simple enough, he says. It can literally be reduced to a diagram.

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In a “sameness network,” lots of dots and crisscrossing lines indicate a tightly-knit group of wellconnected individuals. Ninety percent of the people in this environment know each other. When one of them changes, everyone adopts together. Krebs says it is all fairly predictable.

In a “bridging network,” however, the dots are fewer and the lines farther apart. Ninety percent of the people do not know each other. Everyone is different, they don’t all connect. No single individual is a deeply integrated member of any group. It’s a much more difficult place to be, Krebs says, “but more interesting because you never know what’s going to happen.”

Krebs stresses that the actual map represents only one dimension of human interaction. It is just a picture of the data. To fully understand what we are seeing, however, the map needs a prose interpretation. “We do need the prose because we always need the context that might explain why certain things are happening,” he says.

Fortune 500 companies often hire Krebs to tell them how the people in their organizations are connecting.

Something like a new computer software system in the workplace can have a dramatic impact on workflow, decision-making and protocol for approvals.

The sociology of the organization changes and Krebs is asked to pinpoint mathematically where those shifts have occurred or to help locate the most productive pathways of communication.

There are many positive applications for this type of inquiry, Krebs says, but sometimes people disregard the humanity represented by the maps he creates.

Potential clients occasionally ask him to conduct analyses that will help them eliminate people from their organizations. They are looking for quick solutions, he says, pushing the math into places it can’t go.

Krebs pushes in the other direction. He prefers to

apply his skills to a more humanistic set of endeavors addressing issues that deeply concern him. Lately, he has been using his maps to detect patterns of mortgage fraud, property flipping by slumlords, crime and corruption.

“I’m a fan of the little person, the middle class, the family unit, those kinds of true-blue American things,” he says. Krebs sees this technology used by local activists and community groups.

On the brighter horizon Krebs envisions, technology rises up to match his own personal sociology. valdis krebs is founder and chief scientist, orgnet.com www.orgnet.com @valdiskrebs

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MARI KURAISHI

a lesson from history: the crucial moment is now

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“It’s been in that stage for 20 years,” Kuraishi notes.

“The result is that young people have absolutely no expectation of getting a job in an expanding company.”

Now, she says, they go from job to job at smaller companies, usually working part-time.

She wonders if these changes have altered the character of Japan’s younger generations: “Are they fundamentally different? I think they might be. Even in a society that is regarded as very conservative, you can get quick shifts in people’s expectations.”

Whether these shifts mean progress for Japan in the long run remains to be seen. But Kuraishi’s professional life has been devoted to the notion that the most important historical moment is now. People who are struggling cannot wait for progress to pull them along.

This is a simple lesson from history. During the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s closest advisor, Harry Hopkins, once told opponents of relief programs: “People don’t eat in the long run. They eat every day.”

In anticipating future progress, Kuraishi places some of her faith in technology. She notes that technology has radically changed business in a positive sense,

he “inexorable human progress” model of history holds that humanity has always been marching toward an advanced state of existence. Events unfold in such a way that we consistently move forward.

Mari Kuraishi has been in a unique position to consider the validity of this theory. Holding a degree in history from Harvard University, she has also worked at the World Bank and is now the co-founder and president of the GlobalGiving Foundation, a charity fundraising website that supports grassroots projects in the developing world.

From her vantage point as a both a historian and a global economic leader, Kuraishi has seen that human progress is not as inexorable as we tend to think. Society indeed advances, but people get left behind. The path of progress diverges or disappears altogether.

She has witnessed this reality in her homeland of Japan. When she was growing up, Japan was a “rising star,” she remembers. The economy was growing, Japanese brands were becoming world recognized and every generation was richer than the next. But by the ‘90s, the economy had begun to plateau.

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especially the way it enables unknown businesses to break out quickly with substantially lower costs.

“The speed with which companies emerge and can dominate is much faster because the barriers to entry are a lot lower than they used to be, and the advantages of incumbency are a lot lower than they used to be too,” she says.

What Kuraishi hasn’t seen as a result of technological advancement is a greater number of people enjoying things like clean air, safe neighborhoods and enough consumer goods to generate real value.

“Having a potential radical shift in the mix of public and private goods that leads to individual satisfaction has got to be part of the equation, otherwise it’s not realistic for us to depend on the engine of market economics,” she says.

GlobalGiving doesn’t wait for that engine to move.

Depending on government bureaucracies or large corporations to enact initiatives with trickledown impact leaves too many lives and too much potential growth in the balance.

Working from the ground up, GlobalGiving matches grassroots projects in undeveloped regions with willing donors. The website utilizes the fruits of our technological progress to make donating easy and satisfying.

With just a few clicks, donors can give to a project that appeals to them and receive instant feedback on the details and progress of those efforts.

Speed, transparency and choice are crucial to the giving experience.

“By making it easier, we’re hoping to make it more compelling,” Kuraishi explains. “It moves giving from an obligation to something you choose to do because it makes you happy. We want to make it as satisfactory as buying a new car.”

Technology may speed on, leaving some people

floundering in its wake, but GlobalGiving is using it to unleash untapped philanthropic possibilities. Since 2002, the organization has helped more than 200 thousand donors contribute over $50 million to almost 5,000 projects around the world.

Through her careful management of the foundation, Kuraishi helps to uncover those pockets of human existence where inexorable human progress is taking its time. mari kuraishi is co-founder and president, globalgiving foundation www.globalgiving.org @mashenka

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DENNIS LITTKY go ahead, make him mad

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elieving strongly in the power of hands and mind, Dennis Littky recently had his palm read. A professional palmist told him something he probably knew already, but hearing it helped him understand himself a little better: “I need people to disagree with me. It helps drive me on. I get pissed off at what is happening or not happening for our students, and it inspires me to move.”

Those who benefit when Littky gets mad are at-risk teenage students who attend one of his hundred innovative public high schools in the U.S., the Netherlands and Australia. Driven by the fact that one student drops out of school every 12 seconds in this country, Littky has spent the bulk of the last 40 years on a fierce campaign to correct educational imbalances.

The problem, Littky says, is that not every student fits neatly into the traditional classroom: four walls, a blackboard, teacher at the front. He has been trying

to re-invent that space in a way that makes it more meaningful. Real education, he insists, is not just about science or history content, but about finding “real work” for students to do where they can apply their knowledge. “Students have to have an understanding of the world—they have to be able to change on the dime,” he says. “It’s not just about the schoolhouse.”

Over the course of his career in educational reform, Littky has been hired for espousing such pioneering teaching philosophies and then fired for putting them into practice.

In the late ‘60s, when educational innovation was just beginning to peak in the U.S., Littky emerged from the University of Michigan with a double Ph.D. in education and in psychology. He thinks of himself as an educator with a strong psychology background and a born teacher, a person with a natural inclination to motivate and inspire others. He always goes for the underdog, he says, which is why his methods have

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often been criticized by mainstream educators and conservative school board members who view him as too progressive, too informal with students, and in the early days, too outlandish in his appearance (a beard and chinos).

In 1995, Littky co-founded Big Picture Learning, where his mission was to create schools that take things personally. He put this vision into practice in 1996 with a network of six small public schools known as The Met Center, located in Rhode Island.

The schools are designed on a model of deep engagement – between teacher and student and between students and the real world. Littky banks on the personal touch—knowing his students and seeking their input about how they want to be educated and spending time with their parents and with the leaders of their communities. The aim is to build a seamless educational culture.

A few years ago Littky began looking at what happens to students after high school. While Big Picture graduates fair pretty well, the overall U.S. data is clear: 89% of first-generation college-attending students drop out. “It’s absurd,” says Littky. “This is not simply about the student not being college ready. It’s about the college not being student ready.”

So in 2009 he and Jamie Scurry expanded his reach with an experimental College Unbound program that offers a BA in partnership with Roger Williams University. Up next is another iteration that helps the 19 to 50-year-old demographic of individuals who have had some schooling, but then dropped out. Littky wants them back too.

Despite resistance in the early years, Littky’s educational methods have been widely recognized lately by his peers in the field and financially supported by nearly $10 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He has been described as both gifted and

eccentric—a maverick—but he claims his philosophy is more basic than his reputation suggests.

Teaching is simply about moving students, he says, tapping into their passions and pointing them in a worthwhile direction: “We feel responsible to help our students to become creative citizens and workers in our world. It’s our constant work, but it doesn’t happen overnight.” dennis littky is co-founder and co-director, the big picture company www.bigpicturelearning.org @dennis_littky

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ANDREW LOSOWSKY the expressive potential of media

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serendipitous moment of delight when you encounter it. It demands attention, and creates a single method of navigation. For better and worse, websites rarely function the same way.”

In his own creations, Losowsky seeks elegance through simplicity and coherence. One of his works, The Doorbells of Florence (Chronicle Books), was a book of short stories, each one inspired by a photograph of a doorbell. The project began as a series of fictional captions on Flickr.

Last year, he created a print-on-demand magazine, Stranded, entirely written and illustrated by more than 60 people who were, at the time of their collaboration, stranded somewhere across the globe during the volcanic ash cloud that erupted in Iceland. (Losowsky himself was stuck in Dublin, where he worked in a “succession of internet cafés” to make the magazine.)

With the emergence of digital books and magazines, Losowsky says that most creations are currently pale

magazine is like a museum. It houses a series of objects—illustrations, photographs and articles by a variety of creators, brought together by a curator and designer to communicate an overall idea.

This is how Andrew Losowsky describes one of his favorite media. He is in love with the storytelling potential of magazines – as well as that of books, websites, theater, advertising, museums, television, radio. All of which, he says, are starting to overlap.

In his day job, Losowsky is the Books Editor of The Huffington Post. He is also a writer who has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and The Times of London, and a conceptual creative who thrives across a multitude of venues.

A book or a magazine remains distinct from digital media, according to Losowsky, because of its physical presence: “It shares a space with you. It sits on a shelf or a coffee table. There is an opportunity for a

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imitations of print, and “we have yet to see a great piece of digital-based publishing emerge.” He notes, however, that radio began in the same fashion, with recorded stage plays. It’s still early days for digital publishing. After all, he says, “books are pieces of technology, magazines are pieces of technology, and they have the advantage of hundreds of years of refinement over the web. Just like software, books and magazines are constantly being upgraded, such as with the introduction of page numbers, italics, different paper options. None of these existed at the time of Guttenberg’s Bible. Upgrading simply means reacting to people’s needs, and expanding the possibilities of what can be done within a medium.”

The visceral attachment we have to print intrigues Losowsky. Shortly before giving a lecture at Brown University, he stopped at a nearby used bookstore and spent a dollar on a poorly written “holistic childbirth” manual from 1930. During the lecture, he asked his audience: “This book is terrible. Does anyone mind if I tear out the pages?” The reaction was not positive.

“If I had asked, ‘Can I delete a pdf of this book?’ I don’t think anybody would have cared,” Losowsky says. “We have these emotional connections to the idea of books, and scarcity of knowledge. And that can be played with.”

Losowsky believes that we are entering a golden age of print – at least in terms of the quality and variety of what will be available. “Previously, the only options to get your message out were print, radio and television.

The latter two were out of reach for all but the richest companies and individuals. So print, with its own considerable barriers to entry, was the default way of spreading information. There was no choice.”

But the medium no longer leads the way, he says.

Where before, people might think “I want to write a novel,” increasingly, the starting point is the story. “Here

is what I want to say, and who I want to read it. What is the best storytelling option? A magazine? A book? A website? A twitter feed? A series of photographs on Flickr? All of these options are open to anyone with a computer.”

“Our relationships to time and space are changing,” he muses. “The more we understand what a medium does to a story, the more we can choose how we tell it.” andrew losowsky is author and books editor, the huffington post www.losowsky.com @twitsplosion

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FRED MANDELL change is good

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arshall McLuhan described the artist as a person of integral awareness, one whose work is a “social navigation chart” that tells us how to cope with the consequences of change. McLuhan’s notion of the artist’s special skills might explain the career trajectory of Fred Mandell—a historian-turned-financial advisor-turned-artist.

Mandell is a man of integral awareness, in the McLuhan sense, someone who has always studied the process of change—in his own community, through history, across financial markets. In his sculpture and painting, he celebrates the beauty and quirkiness of human nature, the essential qualities we all have that make us capable of change.

In his younger days as a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago and assistant professor of history at the Roosevelt University, Mandell was active in the Civil Rights movement and worked in urban areas trying to initiate social change. His model for

this engagement came from his mother, who helped spearhead school desegregation in Malverne, New York in 1954. Mandell’s father is someone he describes as a “Horatio Alger bootstraps” type of man who grew up in poor circumstances and made a life for himself and his family, despite the odds.

Even with such strong visionary models, Mandell was not entirely prepared for the discovery he made toward the end of his successful career with American Express, when he took a sculpture class on a whim and discovered he was an artist.

“I always liked shaping and reshaping things, whether it was an organization or a sculpture,” he says. When people started paying him for his pieces, he began to pursue art in a serious way, not knowing where it would lead.

Mandell’s artistic output revealed to him a natural inclination we all share to build a coherent body of work over a period of time—work that draws on our

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talents and experience but that always anticipates the future. In this sense, we are all artists, he says. And we might benefit from a keener understanding of how art expresses the ebb and flow of life, even giving it a nudge at times. As McLuhan suggested, art can be a social navigation chart through uncertain terrain.

The practical applications of this concept of art became clear to Mandell. “What began to occur to me was that there were amazing parallels between the challenges that artists face in creating a body of work and the challenges that business leaders face in creating a great organization,” he says. “The creative processes of the great masters of art mirrored the process of change in organizations.”

Today, Mandell calls himself a life-change artist, writer, and creative catalyst who shows senior executives (and others) how to think about what comes next in their lives. Change is the most inevitable of all human conditions, and we have to be ready for it no matter who we are: “We’re in the midst of a significant economic downturn. People are being forced to retire; they’re dealing with ageism. It’s a challenging environment for people to make a transition in—they have to develop a different set of skills moving forward, different from the ones they had as employees of a company.”

Change doesn’t have to be like jumping off a cliff, Mandell says. It can take place over time; it can be planned. It requires patience and forethought.

His recent book, Becoming a Life-Change Artist: 7 Creative Skills to Reinvent Yourself at Any Stage of Life, focuses on the logistics of making life-altering transitions. “A lot of my work comes back to the skill component,” he says. “A lot of people have a vision of what they would like to do but they don’t know how to get from here to there.”

In getting from here to there, Mandell advocates a calm embrace of the unknown. One of his early

bronze sculptures, “Acrobats,” depicts three human figures, one perched on top of the other. He created each figure individually, never knowing for sure if they would balance perfectly on top of one another in the final piece. They did.

The life lesson here: work with the material and experience you have at hand. Trust your vision of what it will become. Mold it piece by piece until it comes together. It will. fred mandell is an author and artist www.fredmandell.com

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JIM MELLADO

in church as in business, innovation matters

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s president of the Willow Creek Association, Jim Mellado takes his inspiration from an intriguing mix of sources: Peter Drucker, Everett Rogers, and Jesus. His business is faith, and if the best ideas about evangelism come from iconic thinkers on corporate organization, then so be it.

Even before Mellado joined Willow Creek Association (WCA) in 1992, he was already intrigued with the vibrant church that had created the nonprofit.

As a graduate student at Harvard Business School in the late ‘80s, he had read an article by Peter Drucker in the Harvard Business Review that listed a number of nonprofits with superior organizational skills and impressive rates of growth: the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the Girl Scouts—and Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois.

What each of these organizations had in common, Drucker argued, was the clarity of their goals. The mission was the priority, and the organization was

shaped around that mission. The purpose of a church is usually clear and simple, Mellado says: “When churches are working right, they are an essential piece of the community that fixes injustices. They ought to be on the front lines of social response to terrible things that are going on.”

It doesn’t always happen that way, however. Mellado attributes some of the shortcomings of today’s church to a “dearth of leadership;” a simple inability to translate the goals of the church into a reality on the street. Just as in business, the harvest may be plentiful, but the laborers can sometimes be few.

WCA exists to help all local churches realize their potential, but its focus is to serve those who are more innovative, progressive, willing to try new things and take risks. When these churches lead the way, they pave the way for other churches to follow. “It’s critical that the pioneering churches thrive,” Mellado says.

“If that doesn’t happen, most churches who need

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someone else to make the first move, won’t change and will become irrelevant over time.”

The major venue through which WCA develops church leaders has been its annual Global Leadership Summit. Mellado says the summit serves as a magnet to draw out individuals who can bring the church’s mission to life. “To embrace new ideas, people have to hear about them,” he says. Today, the event gathers over 7,000 people and is simulcast/videocast to 470 locations, reaching more than 150,000 people from 70 different countries.

Speakers at the summit come from both the spiritual and secular sectors. Given that Mellado’s first brush with Willow Creek was as a Harvard MBA student, he is not averse to having the church look to the business world for some pointers on leadership.

On a very basic level, church leaders have always had to balance budgets and manage people. But leading the church of today can be a daunting challenge. Willow Creek, for example, holds services across six campuses for 22,000 weekly attendees and operates on an annual budget of over $30 million. If today’s pastors expect to maintain their congregations and watch them grow, they must be well-versed in administration, management and strategic planning.

WCA provides resources to help them do just that.

But beyond the everyday administration of a smoothly functioning ministry, the continued vitality of the church depends on constant innovation. That is why WCA has modeled its approach to leadership training partly on the diffusion of the innovation theory of Everett Rogers, who proposed that innovators and early adopters pave the way for meaningful social change.

“We’re focused on these innovators and early adopters,” he says. “We’re the ones that find them and connect them to others that are like them so

they can learn from each other. Pioneering is lonely business, but we’re the ones who can remind them they are not alone.”

As they grease the skids of connection and learning, WCA encourages church leaders to be “very intentional” about their mission “to connect and serve people who are really far from God.” Doing so means focusing limited resources on leaders who can stretch their minds in boundless, creative ways to minister to the faith communities that depend on them.

“People’s needs are unlimited,” Mellado says. The mission is perpetual and urgent. jim mellado is president, the willow creek association www.willowcreek.com @jimmellado

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christopher meyer what’s next for capitalism?

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These are the places we should study, he says, if we want to see how capitalism will continue to evolve.

Meyer, the founder of Monitor Talent and author of four books including the forthcoming, Standing on the Sun: How the Explosion of Capitalism Abroad Will Change Business Everywhere, has long been an innovator in the area where economics and technology intersect. He has been thinking about digital convergence since the ‘80s, before most of the world even knew what digital was. He recalls the days when his terminal connected to a time-sharing network with an acoustic coupler—a telephone receiver stuck into two rubber cups.

Meyer worries that business people see globalization as simply bolting on global markets to the capitalist system as it stands today. But in an evolutionary framework, if you move a species to a new habitat, it will adapt over several generations. The capitalist system itself will change its rules to reflect the norms and histories of the emerging economies, but few people are expecting that. “Fish are not aware of

conomists have been discussing evolution as a useful model of how the economy will move forward since the 1980s. Diversity, selection and recombination can shape economic as well as natural ecosystems. Chris Meyer runs with this idea to make predictions about the global economy over the next decade.

He sees capitalism as an adaptive system that grew out of the conditions of the past. The limited liability corporation, for instance, made the capital-intensive industrial economy possible because it spread the risk of providing the massive financing required for large scale manufacturing.

Meyer observes that although the technologies of the industrial revolution were developed in the U.K., the society that was built around them emerged in the U.S., where growth was rapid. “The same thing will happen this time,” Meyer says. “The U.S. invented information technology, but the societies based on it will be developed by the youthful, rapidly growing economies in Asia, Latin America, and soon Africa.”

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the water they swim in. In the business world, most people are so focused on swimming that they’re not thinking about where the water came from.”

But outside the fishbowl, things are shifting. The most robust economies today are figuring out ways to adapt capitalism to solve economic problems in places too poor to attract global competitors, and too poorly organized for government programs to have much impact.

“You see this in India, in particular, where people see challenges that we would call social problems in the U.S. as market opportunities,” Meyer says. “Yes, there is a social benefit when you solve them, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make money doing it.”

Technology drives these new economic outlooks, according to Meyer, because it provides information required to determine need and assess risk: “The feedback comes from the technology. Everything comes back to the availability of data. Once data is available, people start organizing around it.”

Free flowing information makes the boundaries of a corporation permeable, spurs innovation, and welcomes the use of external know-how. Smaller networks of experts naturally come together to concentrate on targeted projects. For the most part, these networks are making more headway in discovering new forms of capitalism than larger, bulkier, slow-moving corporations, Meyer notes.

“Networks make a wider variety of ideas available,” he says. “You get more new ideas and powerful solutions on the best ones. Companies that do not make themselves into networks are not going to be able to keep up with those who do.” But there are exceptions: GE, IBM, and a handful of other global giants are taking the lessons of the networked economy to heart, and will become powerful vectors spreading new practices in capitalism through the global economy.

Meyer embraces the biological framework of economics because he is already watching the evolution unfold. He’s spent the past three years in Brazil, India, China, Bangladesh, and elsewhere, observing natural selection not just of products but of the “genes” of capitalism itself. Capitalism is evolving into a new species, and the genetic variation driving the process is decidedly digital.

“In the economies where the birth rate is higher, a greater portion of the population will be digital natives sooner,” Meyer notes. “There are corporations who are taking this very seriously.” christopher meyer is founder, monitor talent www.monitortalent.com @chrismeyer16

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GRAHAM MILNER bleeding wd-40, and loving it

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raham Milner admits that his interest in cycling tends toward the obsessive. And there have been other obsessions: running, tennis, martial arts, yoga, rock climbing. Cycling is simply his latest and longest standing fascination.

He says he’s not smart enough to have an intellectual obsession, and that his physical activities are fueled more by enthusiasm than expertise. But alongside this humble self-assessment stands the urge Milner feels to accomplish something significant every day—even in the smallest spaces of his life. The thing that gets him in the saddle day after day, clocking 150 to 200 miles of cycling a week, is the sheer freedom he feels from getting somewhere under his own power.

The intangible benefits of cycling spill right over into Milner’s position as executive vice president for global innovation at the WD-40 Co., where revenue has tripled since he joined the executive ranks there

in 1992. “I cycle to make me better at work,” he says.

“It gives me the ability to thrash out any frustrations, and it’s also a time that allows for inspiration.”

Born in England and raised in Jamaica, Milner came to the U.S. as a college freshman at the University of San Diego. He stayed on to earn his MBA at San Diego State and began a career in advertising. His parents made sacrifices to educate him here, he says.

Eventually, they left Jamaica and everything they knew to give Milner and his two brothers a better life.

“When my family came here, they had been quite successful in Jamaica,” he says. “My dad was a lawyer, my mom was a teacher. They left with nothing and had to dramatically alter their lifestyle. My two brothers and I feel that sense of wanting to give back through achievement and being happy.”

Through a combination of high expectations and no limitations, Milner’s parents instilled in him a will to

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succeed and a healthy appreciation for life. His openhearted energy is a perfect match for the core culture of WD-40, where enthusiasm for this iconic American product runs to the extreme. Milner claims that if he fell off his bike and cut open his knee, a golden amber liquid would ooze out.

“I bleed WD-40,” he says. And, so does everyone at the company. By Milner’s description, they are a committed and diverse group of “decent folk” –the kind of people you wouldn’t mind sitting next to on a plane ride. They call themselves a tribe, sharing a common mission and operating through a system of ritual and recognition that rewards sustained group achievement. Milner advises new employees not to worry about distinguishing themselves in order to move ahead because “the spotlight will always be on you in a small company.”

Individual achievements are crucial, but they have an even greater impact when geared toward the progress of the larger WD-40 group, according to Milner. He spends a majority of his productive time on any given day trying to make that happen.

“If I can get people to work really well together, the sum is better than the parts. My job is to try to blend that into a team. Team is gigantic here.”

Keeping the group cohesive is largely a function of emotion, which is something Milner embraces— whether it’s the emotion generated by a great day of cycling or the emotion of gratitude that drives him to achieve. He says engaging people from the heart to the head is the best way to create a passionate atmosphere, which is essential in a market where the rate of failure for new products is incredibly high.

People need a reason to get up in the morning, Milner says. Even if it’s simply to add to the 2,000+ known uses for WD-40, whose secret ingredients have solved many sticky household and industrial

problems since the product first appeared on store shelves in 1958.

Call it an obsession. Call it dedication. Or call it effective branding. Milner’s goal is to leave a good impression of WD-40 wherever he goes. “At the end of the day, I find myself thinking: Did the company get value from me today?” Of course, the answer is always yes. graham milner is executive vice president, global innovation, wd-40 company @jamrider

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matthew moniz standing in a sea of clouds

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hirteen-year old Matt Moniz hasn’t read Ernest Hemingway’s classic short story, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” But unlike Hemingway, Matt has actually climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.

No big deal. He’s working his way around the continents, having also reached the highest points of Europe, North America and South America. That leaves Australia, Asia, and Antarctica still to conquer.

In mountain climbing lingo, that puts Matt in the 4/7 club, having summited the highest peaks of four out of the seven continents.

The top of Kilimanjaro is special, Matt says. “There were no mountains anywhere. There was just a sea of clouds below you.”

Last summer, Matt set out to climb the 50 highest points in all 50 states in 50 days—an adventure he refers to as the “50 in 50.” He did it with almost seven days to spare. In the process, he became a National Geographic Adventurer of the Year and established

a new speed record for the U.S. Highpoints. He just completed a 30-page book about his “50 in 50” expedition for National Geographic.

The previous year, in 2009, he tackled another excursion called the “14 14ers in 14.” Translation: he climbed 14 mountains over 14 thousand feet high in 14 days. Well, Matt did it in eight.

Perhaps it’s just what they do in his home state of Colorado. With “14ers” in plentiful supply across the state known for its outdoor culture, mountain climbing seems like a logical form of entertainment. But for Matt Moniz, it’s something else. It’s more than a hobby, and it’s deeper than a passion. It’s a way of life that flows seamlessly in and out of natural rhythms of his life.

Training for a major climb is an ongoing process. Matt does two hours of rock climbing three times a week, supplemented with uphill mountain biking, running, and strength workouts. He fine-tunes his skills in a

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climbing gym, where he practices with members of his climbing team.

In preparation for his trip to Bolivia this summer to summit two 6,000 meter peaks - Nevado Illimani and Huayna Potosi - he and his father drove 12 thousand feet up a 14er, slept the night to help acclimate themselves to the thin air, and then rode their mountain bikes the rest of the way up. Sometimes he carries a “superheavy” pack around when they go hiking just to get used to the extreme weight of the gear they will carry on a major climb.

Despite all the methods of preparation though, Matt says, “I think the best way to train for mountains is actually to climb mountains.”

It’s all serious business. The things that could go wrong on a climb range from discomforting to life-threatening.

Take weather for instance, the top of a mountain can present an enormous range of experiences: extreme heat, extreme cold, and storms that crop up violently at the very summit. Every climber will have an aversion to a particular type of weather. Matt is no exception: “I really, really hate the wind. I’m pretty much fine with any other weather, but I cannot deal with wind.”

Clipping snow pickets is another major concern.

As Matt and his father climb, they plant stakes in the ground that will catch those who fall. When they stop to camp at certain points on the way up, they set up tents, cook, and cut one-foot square snow blocks. “On Denali,” Matt says, “the wind is so fierce so you build a wall around your tent, like a windbreaker.”

At altitude—or 17 thousand feet—things change.

“Your body shuts down. It really doesn’t like you. It’s focused on staying warm.” Hunger disappears. The only food they can tolerate is Pringles.

Down time is simple and includes talking, Hearts tournaments, and audiobooks. Matt’s literary preferences include sci-fi, fantasy and Eragon. They

melt snow and add the water to their freeze dried food, eat, and go to sleep on two pads—one foam, one blow up—and a sleeping bag designed for temperatures that fall to 40 degrees below zero.

Matt Moniz is an altogether new breed of individual: focused, perseverant, at peace. A kid standing in a sea of clouds, listening to Eragon on his iPod and munching Pringles on the snows of Kilimanjaro. matthew moniz is an alpinist www.climb7.com @climb7moniz

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ERIN MOTE

to be an honest broker, it’s all about relationships

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ollowing Erin Mote’s twitter stream is one breathless ride from coast to coast and continent to continent. From DC dinner parties to Sunday afternoon strolls in New York City.

And then maybe a couple of days in Munich to hear about the Female Decade and womenomics.

This Arizona girl is everywhere, and she has to be.

As part of the Leadership Team at NetHope, a collaboration of 33 worldwide humanitarian NGOs, Mote travels 200 days a year across six continents.

Every morning between 4:30 a.m. and 7:30 a.m., she reads 1,000 e-mails, and then spends the next 15 hours doing what she does best: talking to people.

“I live in meetings,” she says. “Every day is different, but it always involves meetings.” She says the constant interaction with people comes naturally to her.

An “extreme extrovert” who loves to dress like a “girlygirl,” drink whiskey, smoke an occasional cigar, and devour Sookie Stackhouse novels, Mote is versatile enough to relate to anyone. Such adaptability works in her favor because, at any given moment, she could

be walking into a conference with a head of state, or chatting on the phone about humanitarian initiatives with Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore.

Everything she does is about relationships and connecting to people, Mote says. It is a task she takes to heart, as evidenced by her twitter activity. Her tweets are a quirky mix of lighthearted social critique and urgent notices about what’s going on around the globe. She keeps her followers informed about turtles mating on the runway at JFK, an alarming fashion faux pas at the Capitol, and while she’s at it, the latest mobile application to stop human trafficking around the world.

Mote is a young woman at the top of a predominantly male technology field, a lifelong Girl Scout who admits that, “Sometimes I use my femininity as an advantage because there are a lot people who are going to assume that, as a woman, you aren’t smart enough.”

But beneath the girly-girly exterior, she holds two master’s degrees—one in Russian and Eastern European Studies and the other in Public Administration—plus

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a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Topped off with an expertise in technology, Mote is a trusted voice who counsels senior administrators at USAID on how to expand the federal government’s humanitarian reach in innovative ways.

“I probably have one of the most unique jobs in Washington,” she says. “I am a trusted broker—I’m always honest, I never sell you something that you’re not going to be able to accomplish, and if you’re going to fail, I tell you as fast as I can.”

Mote is busy taking non-profits to another level through her efforts to make humanitarian aid not an end in itself but a first step in building long-term global relationships. This endeavor means forming some unusual coalitions, for which she serves as a “chief negotiator, arbiter, and alliance builder around technology.” She sees herself at the center of “a new wave in international business” that creates catalystic partnerships between the private sector and host countries.

“I believe we’re past the point where global development is a bilateral relationship,” Mote explains.

“It’s no longer between one host country government and another. The question is, How do we bring the private sector in at the earliest point? We should be asking ourselves at every moment, How fast can we exit a country?”

But exiting a country doesn’t mean that the relationship ends. Ideally, the free-flowing network of goods and services will continue in sustainable fashion for a double bottom line of profit and social good. As Mote sums it up, “We work with major companies at intervention to create economic and social gain at the heart of global gain in emerging markets.

In the end, that has a long tail in terms of private sector development.”

To get that long tail moving, Mote stays abreast of every new wrinkle in best business practices, digital connectivity, and private-public partnership. Her job demands a rare mix of personal qualities: enormous amounts of energy, technological savvy, keen business acumen and high levels of gregariousness—all tinged with an astute sense of diplomacy.

Luckily for Mote, this is not difficult. erin mote is chief of party, usaid global broadband and innovations alliance www.gbiportal.net @erinmote

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rebecca onie

a prescription for health: never take no for an answer

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s Rebecca Onie works to recreate American healthcare, she doesn’t worry about the gap between where we are and where we need to be. She thinks far beyond that point. What she finds exhilarating is the prospect of a healthcare system we have yet to imagine.

Onie is an attorney and the CEO of Health Leads, a national nonprofit that utilizes the volunteer energy of college students to help patients get the basic resources they need to stay healthy. Sometimes medicine simply isn’t enough. Having things such as food, housing, transportation, and English language skills are also essential to good health.

But physicians can’t prescribe for everything. They can’t always see what lies outside the examination room door.

What happens before the patient sees the doctor has interested Onie since the mid ‘90s when she was a pre-law student at Harvard volunteering in the Housing Unit of Greater Boston Legal Services. It was there that she began to see the many underlying

causes of illness. She says she became “fixated on this connection between health and poverty.”

Onie was raised to think about the well-being of other people. Her parents, both teachers who once were involved in the Civil Rights movement, valued community service. But they placed even more emphasis on the kind of efforts that correct social injustices.

“There was definitely a lively conversation growing up in our house about politics,” Onie says. “But it was much more around how you change the underlying inequities. Why do people need to access food through a soup kitchen? There was a focus around understanding the context in which those structural challenges arise rather than on addressing the results of those inequities.”

Onie’s solution to the injustices she witnessed at Greater Boston Legal was to create a novel approach to the healthcare system. In her sophomore year of college, she started Project HEALTH, which brought college students into the Boston Medical Center

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Pediatrics Department to help connect patients to people or resources they needed most.

It is the type of service our healthcare system does not provide. And it consists mostly of time-consuming and tedious tasks—making phone calls, sending e-mails, or doing Internet research—the little efforts that can make a huge difference in one person’s life.

As it turns out, Project HEALTH wasn’t just a college project. Today, it is called Health Leads, and serves 7,000 families in urban clinics in Boston, Providence, New York City, Baltimore, D.C. and Chicago. And the organization is still manned by student volunteers who talk face-to-face with patients to identify the nonmedical issues that affect health so powerfully.

Onie has one word for what it has taken to make Health Leads a viable part of our current healthcare system: tenacity. It is a quality that she looks for in college volunteers because she knows from personal experience that it brings results.

She explains: “My dad always used to ask me, ‘Can’t you take no for an answer?’ But not taking no for an answer has been the defining ingredient of how I approach my work.” That approach includes asking question after question until she gets an answer and “attaching” herself to doctors in hospital corridors to find out exactly how the healthcare system is treating its patients.

“The impulse to ask a lot of questions is something that I’ve been rewarded for,” she says. “It’s the only posture that ever made sense for me to take. I’m here to learn. I’m here to listen.”

The challenge for Onie is that, 15 years since Project HEALTH’s inception, people now expect her to have the answers. “For years, I would say, I don’t know anything about healthcare. I can’t say that anymore.

Now it’s about my being emboldened to step proactively into the conversation.”

But her appetite to learn hasn’t diminished, Onie insists. She keeps that hungry edge—that tenacity— because she knows the challenges are so daunting.

“That could either be demoralizing or frustrating, but for me it’s really liberating,” she says. “We are empowered to take huge risks because the odds of our failing are so great. Every success is in some ways unexpected. The sense is that the overall challenge is great, but the intervening victories are that much more significant.” rebecca onie is co-founder and ceo, health leads www.healthleadsusa.org @healthleadsnatl

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DAN PINK assume nothing, expect everything

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n the early autumn of 1900, Orville and Wilbur Wright left their home and bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, for Kitty Hawk, North Carolina where they would try out the experimental gliders that eventually led to the world’s first successful airplane.

They were hoping to test one of history’s greatest assumptions: that human flight wasn’t possible. Three years later, the Wright brothers proved that it was.

“If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true,” Orville said, “there would be little hope of advance.”

This is precisely the philosophy espoused by bestselling author Dan Pink in his new book about the dynamics of work, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Pink, an Ohio native like the Wright brothers, argues that long held truisms about motivation are creating a self-defeating cycle of low creativity and low production in the workplace.

Our assumptions about what makes people tick are sending us down the wrong path, he says.

“In many ways, we are the prisoners of our assumptions,” says Pink. “The assumptions we make

about who people are and how the world works send us off in a particular direction where our options are pretty narrow. The same thing is true of any kind of management policy.”

In his book, Pink specifically critiques the traditional carrot-and-stick theory that positive and negative reinforcement improve worker productivity. “Before we think about ways to optimize the existing motivational system,” he says, “we have to consider that it might be the wrong system in the first place.”

Pink agrees that carrot-and-stick motivators may be effective for simple, algorithmic or mechanical tasks, things that require “turning the same screw the same way on an assembly line.” But most jobs that demand such skills, he points out, have been outsourced overseas.

More complicated, right brain work—the kind that entails artistic, empathic, and creative ability—is difficult to outsource or automate. And the greater complexity of the work calls for motivational techniques that are a bit more subtle, more enduring.

It’s no longer enough to simply “dangle money out

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before people” to drive them to action, Pink says.

“Money matters a lot, but it matters in a different way than people might think.” First and foremost, he notes, employees must be compensated adequately and fairly. Taking the issue of compensation off the table leaves the door wide open for experimenting with other workplace forces that might make the most of what Pink describes as our natural inclination to be curious and self-directed.

One of the ideas Pink promotes in Drive is that companies should set aside days when nothing routine is scheduled. Instead, employees bring in their own experimental designs and devote the open time provided by their employers to developing pet projects. Pink points out that free-wheeling workdays like these have resulted in creations like Gmail and the Post-it note.

But for such serendipity to occur, employers have to believe that their employees have the capacity and the ambition to invent something new and exciting without supervision. “If you’re running a company and you feel like you have to monitor the people who work for you, then you’ve hired the wrong people,” Pink says.

Most of the passive and inert behavior infiltrating the workplace is learned behavior derived from years of schooling that teaches risk aversion and compliance, according to Pink. Although he thinks these behaviors can be unlearned, he insists that it won’t happen in a carrot-and-stick workplace. Employers must provide a fertile and edgy work environment that gives “individual talent the chance to be amplified and to be communicated.”

But Pink acknowledges that creating such an atmosphere is everyone’s responsibility. He is a big believer in a little thing called grit, the dogged perseverance of a single person to master a task or

make the impossible possible—even to prove the naysayers wrong and invent an outlandish reality called human flight.

In making his case for rethinking our approach to work, Pink calls out persuasively to employers, but his confidence rests most securely on the dignity and potential of the employee. “I try to look at the world through the lens of the individual rather than through the organization,” he says. “My approach is the experience of one.” dan pink is the author of drive and a whole new mind www.danpink.com @danielpink

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BYRON REEVES work is a serious game

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yron Reeves has been thinking of ways to turn work into serious play. Combining the hugely popular media of gaming with the needs of our existing workforce, he says, will increase productivity while stemming the tide of growing worker disengagement.

“If it’s good to be engaged at work, why should we have the tools that IBM and Oracle give us that are stunningly boring?” he asks. “All the things that are true of the software I use when I’m at home are not true of the tools we are given at work. The idea that work is work and play is play and never the two shall meet is melting quite a bit.”

Reeves has spent his career as a Stanford University communications professor studying how people use and respond to technology. He is also co-founder of Seriosity, Inc., a software company inspired by game psychology. His recent book, Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete, argues that gaming in the workplace is a good idea.

And why not? Games are already a powerful form

of media. Gartner, Inc. estimates that worldwide spending on the gaming ecosystem will exceed $74 billion this year; $44.7 billion of that amount will be spent on gaming software. Reeves’ idea is to bring the best features of games into the average workday to make it a more energizing experience.

“There are features of games that are highly engaging,” he says. “We want to figure out why they work, what ingredients they have, and then isolate them, recombine them in other areas that can be used explicitly for good.”

There is “something fundamentally human” about the way people respond to games, according to Reeves. Some popular games— such as Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto—are thought to promote violence, aggression, eroticism, or gender and racial biases.

Others, like Farmville, are more socially-oriented and driven by a player’s desire to invite the most friends to the site.

What Reeves finds most intriguing, though, are online games like World of Warcraft that require highly sophisticated levels of collaboration among tens of

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thousands of players in a single environment. Such games demand organizational skills that are invaluable in the workplace. Reeves also notes that online gaming makes it possible for many different kinds of people to lead: “Leaders in the real world are taller than most people, better looking than most people, and they talk faster. In the game, those things matter much less.”

Of course, the game has to be just right to be an effective workplace tool. “In a serious game, you’ve got to align the entertainment and the excitement with some sort of productivity or metric that an organization cares about,” Reeves says.

Imagine a call center with ten thousand people advising clients on health insurance claims: a vast space of constant chatter from isolated workers filling quotas and resolving an endless tide of issues. To remove the sense of drudgery, Reeves suggests that call center workers participate in ongoing competitions, the results of which they can see at all times. When they reach a goal, their progress is tracked in seconds or minutes, rather than in quarters or years. They can see how they’re doing moment by moment.

They also see where they stand in relation to everyone else at the center. “The transparency is huge,” Reeves says. All the information employees need, to understand how they are affecting overall productivity, is readily available.

Reeves has also found that transparency generates a great sense of autonomy among workers. “It is possible for me to see myself in how I fit into the larger picture. I can see myself, I can see my team. I’m being recognized for a small contribution, but it’s there and I get points for it. I can see my place in something that’s a lot larger than me.”

If Reeves is correct, the complex categories of experience inherent in gaming have the potential to address one of the most classic and elusive problems

addressed in the literature on organizational behavior in the workplace.

“People want to know,” he says, “Did I make a difference? Am I providing any value here? That’s what humans worry about.” byron reeves is professor stanford university, behavioral scientist, author, proponent of interactive gaming and virtual worlds in the workplace www.seriosity.com @seriosity

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SEBASTIAN RUTH

musicianship: thinking about where music is needed

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he sounds of classical music waft out of a storefront on Westminster Street in Providence, Rhode Island, while city residents set up folding chairs on the sidewalk to catch the sublime vibrations. An occasional performance of Beethoven or Vivaldi is a familiar part of the soundscape in this West End community.

The creative mind that sets it all in motion belongs to Sebastian Ruth, a violinist and recent MacArthur Fellow who, 14 years ago, decided against a staid and “stifling” career as a professional musician to found Community MusicWorks, a nonprofit music organization with service at the center of its mission.

It started as a civic project that Ruth dreamed up while he was a student at Brown University, and he still finds the enterprise “hugely satisfying.”

Ruth is also a professional musician, founder and member of the Providence String Quartet, which is permanently housed at CMW, and holds open rehearsals on premises.

The CMW afterschool program includes over one hundred students, ages 7 to 18, who take weekly music lessons for free. Instruments are provided. The waiting list is long. There is no application process— students just have to live in the surrounding area. It is a neighborhood plagued by poverty, crime and teen pregnancy, Ruth notes.

That is why Ruth and his wife, Minna Choi, a violinist who also teaches at CMW, reside in Providence.

They are musicians who live, work, teach, and perform in their own communities. “What is nice is when you bump into a student in the grocery store,” he says.

“They don’t always realize that you are their neighbor.

Most assume that you don’t live in the neighborhood and that it’s volunteer work. Then they realize—you do this as a job, you’re a musician.”

Ruth says Community MusicWorks is “modeling a life of chamber music,” in which masters and their apprentices play together in the neighborhood they share. Musicians and their music emerge organically

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from the community. “CMW’s original vision was to be flexible and play interesting concerts that we created around the community,” explains Ruth. “And that happened. Then I hoped that we’d have a band of students who were really excited about playing, and some students who were excited to come together and start talking about music. And that happened too.”

Now, CMW has begun to commission pieces developed specifically for its own musicians. Ruth says, “What excites me is to think, ‘What does it look like when we commission a piece that says this is going to be performed by a double string quartet—a professional quartet and their students?’” The visual experience of seeing young people on stage performing alongside their mentors becomes a powerful expression of the committed relationship between student and teacher, musician and community.

Musicianship, Ruth notes, is not just about playing one’s instrument. It’s about “playing well and having something to say, thinking about where your music is needed, tuning in to what this really means for your life.”

Sometimes CMW musicians take their show on the road to venues around the city— churches, schools, museums, community centers. They pop up at cafés, city hall or the train station. It’s a “playful interaction” with the public that creates “an intentional transparency,” Ruth says. “Kids experience this music in their neighborhoods and feel like it happens intentionally for them.”

When the Providence String Quartet first began rehearsing in the Westminster Street storefront, Ruth says that groups of kids used to walk by and make teasing gestures. “They were mocking us,” he recalls, “but that’s fine.” Every day they would pass by and have their fun. Ruth and his fellow quartet members

started waving back, keeping the kids engaged with what was going on in the window. The teasing tapered off, and eventually, the kids on the sidewalk began to pretend they were playing instruments, too.

“By the end of the year, it was like we were best friends,” Ruth says. “Those kinds of engagements I find very special. When we think of the kinds of concentric circles of impact we have in the neighborhood, those kids might be in the outer ring, but if they encounter a string quartet at later points in their lives, they might say, Oh yeah, they had one of those on my block.” sebastian ruth is a violist, violinist, music educator, and 2010 macarthur foundation fellow, community music works www.communitymusicworks.org

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LEN Schlesinger act... learn... repeat...

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en Schlesinger says that the past few years as the president of Babson College in Massachusetts has been “an absolute gas.”

The huge smile and breathless pace he brings to the position are only outmatched by the tenacity with which he adheres to the Babson motto: The Educator for Entrepreneurship of All Kinds.

“Many people would think this is a bold statement to the point of being outrageous,” Schlesinger says of the motto. “But this is our time. If we don’t seize it, we will spend the rest of our lives regretting the missed opportunity. Entrepreneurial thought and action is at the core of much of what ails the world.”

Babson is consistently ranked number one in entrepreneurship by U.S. News and World Report.

And Schlesinger says there’s a good reason for that and it relates to the broad scale “democratization of entrepreneurship” the college is committed to.

Entrepreneurship, he says, is not an exclusive concept relegated to Inc. Magazine, Fast Company and selfcongratulatory books. Nor is it about “hanging on

with fingernails from a crevice, towing piles of debt and failed personal relationships behind you.” Anyone can do it.

“Millions of people are self-defining themselves out of the universe of entrepreneurism and that’s tragic,” says Schlesinger. “The fact is, entrepreneurial thought and action can be codified and taught to anyone.”

This upbeat sense of urgency has served Schlesinger well in his long career on both the academic and private sides of business. In addition to teaching at the Harvard Business School for 20 years, he has held executive positions at Limited Brands and Au Bon Pain. His latest book, Action Trumps Everything — Creating What You Want In An Uncertain World, explains how the power of entrepreneurial thought and action — at home and work — brings people closer to their life dreams.

Schlesinger’s drive and motivation to try new things are a result of his natural curiosity combined with the unconditional support given to him by his parents when he was young. Both of his parents were

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Holocaust survivors who “completely lived through their children,” he says.

“They reinforced whatever confidence I had, probably to the extreme. I was given lots of latitude to do lots of things when I was younger without someone looking over my shoulder critiquing everything I did.

So when I got to college, there wasn’t much I thought I couldn’t do.”

This unbounded sense of potential saturates every part of Schlesinger’s personality. To say he is full of life is an understatement, and he expects the same liveliness from others.

Perhaps this is why BIF and Babson have such an affinity for each other.

During the past year, the organizations embarked on a new partnership to create an Entrepreneur Experience Lab to accelerate the design of new entrepreneur support solutions. Schlesinger says that by developing a deep and ongoing understanding of the experience of entrepreneurs, new insights will be found to guide the next generation of programs and policies at Babson. “It’s about providing an authentic voice to those entrepreneurs who drive new venture creation nationally and globally,” he explains.

With so many people today paralyzed in the face of large-scale problems and high degrees of uncertainty, Schlesinger says the imperative for the entrepreneur is to just plain do: Start with the means, not the ends; define affordable loss; network like crazy (with people you like); and leverage contingencies. “There’s a whole way of thinking about the world that doesn’t include fantasizing about an 85-page business plan and 12-year forecast spreadsheet.”

It turns out, says Schlesinger, the construction of networks that drive entrepreneurial ventures looks exactly like a crazy quilt — fabric scraps that come together into something beautiful. “It’s radically

different from what many people think to be the construction of an entrepreneurial enterprise. And we need different methods and approaches to support this new type of construction.”

He points to a research study of 50 successful partnerships. Forty-two of them started with people who got together and had no idea what they wanted to do. “All they knew is that they liked each other and wanted to do something,” he says. Indeed, that’s just the kind of emotional connection that drives us all. len schlesinger is president, babson college www.babson.edu @lschlesinger

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DALE STEPHENS college dropout? not exactly

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The aspect of college that he found most troubling, however, was the closed nature of the learning experience he had signed up for. He saw a yawning gap between thought and action.

“At college there were smart people with awesome ideas, but they were writing research papers, not changing the world,” he says. “Even if they wanted to change the world, they didn’t know where to start.”

A standard college education, according to Stephens, doesn’t nurture qualities that help students thrive in the so-called real world: creativity, initiative, leadership and the ability to self-start. Sadly, he notes, many of these qualities are already disappearing when students first arrive at their freshman dorms.

“Everybody has natural curiosity,” Stephens says, “but by the time most people come out of 12 years of school, often disillusioned by it, their curiosity and natural passion are beaten out of them.”

Stephens’ answer to an unfulfilling college experience has been to create a new type of college, an “UnCollege” where students direct their own learning, seek out their own mentors, and “hack their education” in a way that personally suits them.

little over a year ago, Dale Stephens left his northern California home for the ideal educational experience. A small, liberal arts school in the Midwest. An almost full tuition scholarship. A college that promised to change his life.

Instead, what he found was a cliché—one with a hefty price tag and a dubious return on investment. After eight months, he left.

What Stephens had hoped would be four years of formative intellectual exploration seemed to his peers to be nothing more than the thing to do after high school. “College has become more of a rite of passage to adulthood than an actual vehicle for learning,” he says.

As a former unschooler and self-directed homeschooler growing up just outside Sacramento, Stephens says his fleeting college career at least exposed him to a cultural mix of people he had never known before. But he also found that the mediocre, cookie-cutter education typical of most colleges today does not justify the exorbitant and ever-rising costs of an expanding higher education system.

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While he says it is “ludicrous” to expect that all 18year-olds will know exactly what they want to do with their lives, there are plenty of students who can figure it out. UnCollege is geared for those intrinsically-motivated individuals who have the desire to learn outside the classroom and the motivation to make it happen.

Since its inception in February, UnCollege is gaining steady momentum with most of the major media attention focused on the school’s proudly “contrarian” founder. Stephens has also attracted impressive philanthropic support. He was recently awarded a $100,000 “20 Under 20” Thiel Fellowship for promising young individuals who forego a traditional college education to work on innovative projects.

As he continues to refine his educational philosophy, Stephens points out that UnCollege is not just about fixing a broken system. He sees it as a social movement aimed at changing people’s minds about what constitutes a solid education, and ultimately, about the meaning of work. “We have to change the notion that college is the only path to success,” he says.

And he is not the only one questioning the status quo of higher education. Even college educators are concerned about the value of the experience they are providing. But resistance to the UnCollege movement is coming from a surprising quarter, Stephens says.

“Most college and university professors and administrators are generally interested in improving the student experience,” Stephens notes.

“It’s the students themselves who feel that their experience is being devalued by the prospect of an alternative type of school.”

That said, over 2,000 “educational deviants” have signed up for UnCollege, which has so far defined three majors: organization, technology and

entrepreneurship; computer engineering; and design.

Working with six people and 30 volunteers, Stephens is creating a crowdsourced curriculum built by likeminded individuals who sense the urgency to reshape the college ideal.

The support is encouraging, Stephens says, but he feels the pressure to keep the movement on track: “The most powerful thing I have right now is my voice.” dale stephens is founder, uncollege and thiel fellow www.dalejstephens.com @dalejstephens

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EVA TIMOTHY one flower + one moment = freedom

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rowing up in Bulgaria behind the Iron Curtain, photographer Eva Timothy yearned for a life in the United States. She remembers “having nothing, but having a dream.” When she finally arrived here in 1994, five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she kissed the ground.

“We lived in hard circumstances without freedom,” Timothy recalls of her Bulgarian childhood. “That is why America is very dear to me.”

Today, happily nestled in Massachusetts with her husband and three children, Timothy is living the American life she once only imagined. She became a U.S. citizen three years ago, and, just recently, her parents moved here as well.

She is also thriving in her professional life as an award-winning photographer whose work is now part of the permanent collections of the U.S. Library of Congress and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and which has exhibited at several

museums and galleries around the United States and Great Britain.

A significant amount of Timothy’s photography is done in black and white. Contrasts of light and dark, relieved by bleak shades of gray, perhaps suggest the residue of her life behind the Iron Curtain. But her images appear almost to move with an unexpected vibrancy. Timothy’s entire portfolio, in fact, seems to express a unique joy that somehow found a way to stay alive under oppression.

Despite the starkness of a communist existence, Timothy remembers her home city of Sofia as a place of natural beauty filled with endearing holiday customs, scrumptious food, a rich storytelling tradition, and deep family bonds. Before she ever had a camera, she says, she was taking pictures of this world with her mind.

Her father, an artist who painted in oils, used to stop her on walks occasionally and tell her simply to

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look at a flower. Time became inconsequential while Timothy examined the flower in an imaginative space of her own. “You would just completely pause,” she says of these moments. “It just changes you. There’s so much beauty around us, and it’s so important to notice that. We have to slow down and feel it more in our hearts.”

By encouraging such quiet and seemingly random observations, Timothy’s father showed her an aperture through which she could glimpse another world. Not surprisingly, lenses have become not just the tools of her art but a consistent subject of her photography.

Prisms, magnifying glasses, spectacles, telescopes— all of which were invented to stretch the vision of humanity—feature prominently in Timothy’s work.

Her recent monograph, Lost in Learning: The Art of Discovery, celebrates the instruments and texts used by the great thinkers of the Renaissance, individuals who changed the course of human history. “I was amazed by the Renaissance,” she says. “These people had so little in terms of technology and yet they did so much.”

When “photographing” the Renaissance, as she phrases it, she used the power of juxtaposition to suggest moments of awareness that led to the great discoveries made by visionaries like Galileo and Columbus.

“I might bring two or three of their books together in my studio and try to create a whole new picture, or tell a whole new story about them,” Timothy says. “I want to look even deeper into their lives, to find out even more about them, to discover them all over again.”

She describes the sensation of creating an image with a portrait of Galileo looking at his own sketch of the moon: “My heart was beating so fast!”

Timothy sometimes takes an entire day to set up one photograph. It is not easy, she says, because

even life in America can suffocate the creative spirit, especially with the encroachment of technology and the urgency to be connected. She tries to control that aspect of each day, to guard the time and space she needs to work.

“When you’re constantly plugged in, it’s very hard to create,” Timothy says. “When I work, I don’t want an Internet or phone. I close all the doors. It’s just me.

Just my time to create.”

Even now, she yearns for the freedom of one moment, the expansive feeling of hovering quietly over a delicate flower in Bulgaria. eva timothy is a fine art photographer, l.r.p.s www.illumea.com

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CHRIS VAN ALLSBURG little animals that wear clothes—keep out

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moved by art that grows out of subtle things—points of view, lighting, facial expressions. He tries to make art like that. He estimates that three-quarters of his work is driven by something he’s seen. “When I tell myself the story, I’m actually seeing it happen,” he says.

A Van Allsburg story depicts odd things taking place in a familiar world. The author says his narrative impulses are strongly influenced by what he was exposed to as a child; The Twilight Zone, for instance. While his work leans toward fantasy, he has no interest in stories where the entire reality is fantastic.

“There are some features of reality that are weird to me,” he says, “and they just find their way into the narrative.”

He began drawing for a rather “prosaic” reason.

He was a sculptor working in a studio in Providence, Rhode Island, and, on winter evenings, his landlord shut off the heat. It was simply too cold to work, so

is stories often begin in the midst of things, as if the reader is already captivated. The action is mysterious, exciting, perhaps unnerving. The illustrations present a puzzle that can only be solved by reading the text. A children’s book by Chris Van Allsburg won’t fit into a pleasing little pattern.

He doesn’t write books about “little animals that wear clothes” going off to their first day of school. He calls that type of literature “bibliotherapy” because it comforts children and parents. Books like that, Van Allsburg says, represent a collaborative effort among writers, illustrators, editors and marketers to find a commercial audience.

“Is that art?” Van Allsburg asks. “I’m not trying to comfort children. I’m trying to excite them, trying to share with them what mystifies me.”

The Caldecott winning author and illustrator of Jumanji, Zathura, and The Polar Express says he is

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he went home and started drawing. He then started writing because he wanted to complete the stories begun by the pictures.

Van Allsburg aims for lucidity and simplicity in his prose style and lets the pictures handle the emotional, subtextual elements. “A very good story for a picture book should not work well on its own,” he explains.

“There should be things missing from the story that are presented in the pictures. Both things should be inadequate by themselves, and that’s what makes a good picture book.”

The idea for Van Allsburg’s first book, The Garden of Abdul Gasazi, originated in the library of the Rhode Island School of Design, where he was teaching art classes: “Back in a very remote dust-covered part of the stacks, I found some old English landscape books with black and white photos of English gardens. That was something very enchanting and spooky to me.”

He wanted to draw pictures of those gardens and discovered that his “picture-making ambitions” could run the story. He toiled away through the writing.

As the images flowed through is mind, he created a narrative to solve the problems they posed: “There’s a boy running through the topiary garden. Why is he running? He’s chasing something. Add a little dog.

Who would own such a strange garden?”

Van Allsburg enjoys creating books that cannot easily be placed in particular time period. His world is one that is slightly set apart. He is not interested in contrivance and sentimentality.

He was perplexed when one of his early stories, Two Bad Ants, received some criticism for being too conventional. The ants in question temporarily desert their colony to live in a sugar bowl, but when they discover that life outside is dangerous and unknown, they return home to safety.

“Some saw it as a justification for conformity, but the

ants had made a bad choice,” Van Allsburg says. “My point was that having a clear sense of what the best place is for you will bring you happiness.”

That’s why little animals that wear clothes never make an appearance in a Van Allsburg book. He knows that writing such stories will not bring him happiness.

His purpose is clear—to create books that move and mystify him. His millions of readers are thrilled to go along for the ride. chris van allsburg is an author, artist, and screenwriter, the polar express www.chrisvanallsburg.com

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andy van dam the power of happenstance

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s a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania in the early ‘60s, Andy van Dam found himself steeped in math-heavy engineering courses and decided he needed a break.

A new course, programming for digital computers, sounded interesting.

They certainly didn’t have a digital computer at Swarthmore College where van Dam earned his B.S. in engineering sciences and where he had worked with analog computers. Penn had only one digital computer, the pioneering Univac I, and it was off limits for student work. “The entire semester we wrote programs, but we wrote them in machine language— zeroes and ones,” he says. “We never ran them on an actual computer because we didn’t have access to one.”

Van Dam eventually became so hooked on the whole idea of computing that, in 1966, he became the second person in the country to earn a Ph.D. in the brandnew field of computer science. “I thought it was just incredible that you could tell a computer what to do,

and it would do it,” he says. “The digital computer is the only universal tool we have—the only tool that can do anything you tell it to do with sufficient precision.

There’s nothing like that in human creation.”

Van Dam grew up in the Netherlands, where his father and mother were both professionals. He credits them with giving him “the DNA and the chops” to be persistent and hard-working. As a Jewish family living in Europe when Hitler rose to power, they were also survivors. His father took a research job in Java (then part of the Dutch East Indies) in 1939, and in 1942, he and his parents became “involuntary guests” of the Japanese in a sequence of concentration camps until liberation came.

“We barely escaped with our lives,” he says. “But every single member of my family who had stayed in the Netherlands were victims of the Holocaust. So we were the lucky survivors.”

Post-war, his family was repatriated to their home city of Groningen, which was a “pretty grim place in 1946. It was also a living that taught him to look beyond

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what was presently possible.

In 1952, when he was 13 years old, van Dam and his family started life over in Woods Hole, Massachusetts where his father became a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The only English Andy knew at first was “hello” and “thank you,” but steeled by a superior Dutch education, he skipped a grade, and his American experience began.

For more than 40 years, van Dam has been one of the most influential computer scientists in the field.

He collaborated with Ted Nelson on the first hypertext system on commercial equipment in 1967, and as a coauthor with Jim Foley, literally wrote the textbook on computer graphics. To this day, he is a consistent pioneer in the area of human-computer interaction. “I want it all,” he says, “keyboard, dictation, pens, magic markers, touch.”

He also co-founded and was the first chair of the computer science department at Brown University, where he still delights in teaching introductory courses to “absolute newbies.” He prefers to work with an army of undergraduate, rather than graduate, TAs because he loves their zeal: “Raw talent and enthusiasm are wonderful commodities. I exploit them to the max.”

As a beloved professor, van Dam has spawned successive waves of computer scientists who are now prominent teachers and technologists in their own right. His enthusiasm for the world’s only universal tool reverberates throughout the industry.

Taking that first computer class on a whim “revolutionized” his life, he says. He insists that it wasn’t logic, planning and certainly not a vision that led him into computers. It was curiosity. Joy. An openness to new experiences.

“All the major things that happened to me in my career were the result of happenstance and serendipity,” he says.

That’s why, when anxious students ask him for career advice, he tells them to stop worrying and follow their passion.

“My mantra is relax! Just learn and be open to tackling new subjects. Balance breadth with depth because you’re going to change your mind about what it is you want to do. It’s not about specific technology and techniques. Let the flow of events channel you in the right direction for you.” andy van dam is thomas j. watson, jr. university professor of technology and education, and professor of computer science, brown university www.cs.brown.edu/~avd

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duncan watts in predicting the future, leave room for chance

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ark Twain once commented that a classic is a book everyone praises but nobody reads. Something similar might be said about common sense. We all claim to have it, but do we even know what it is?

According to Yahoo! research scientist and sociologist Duncan Watts, the answer is: probably not.

His latest book, Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer: How Common Sense Fails Us, explores some of the pitfalls we encounter when we assume we know something simply because. . .we know it.

“Everybody thinks they know what common sense is, and nobody agrees on a definition,” Watts says.

Common sense is generally thought of as practical, everyday wisdom that helps us get through a variety of everyday situations, he explains. It tells us how to address other people, what to wear when we go to work, how to behave in different social settings.

It is “an extremely sophisticated and adaptable form of intelligence,” Watts admits, but not as useful as we might think.

“It’s not that common sense is bad—it’s that we’re so

impressed with it that we use it to reason about all sorts of behavior,” he says.

Common sense fails us when we use it to predict the behavior of large numbers of people in order to influence things like social policy, economic development, corporate strategy and marketing.

“When we are tempted to use it for those activities, that’s where we run into trouble,” Watts says, because common sense cannot solve what is naturally more a mathematical problem.

Having evolved from mathematician to sociologist, Watts knows the difference. He used to work out social networking theories using only mathematical computations, but now he approaches a similar set of problems in the role of a sociologist. The transition has been bumpy.

When he expressed himself in mathematical principles, people tended to view him as an expert in some abstract form of knowledge. But when he speaks as a sociologist, everyone thinks they know better. Why? Common sense tells them so.

Watts suggests that common sense is something

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we fabricate in retrospect to reason away the logic behind a chain of events. We see the way something has turned out and we want to know why.

He thinks that’s why we love stories—we abhor complexity and sweep it away by creating fictions about why things happen.

And our stories always have key players who drive the action, which is also part of the fiction, Watts notes. We want to believe that certain individuals lead us with their vision or consummate skill.

Marketers, in particular, always want to know what types of people are the most influential. Does Sarah Jessica Parker start a fashion craze for Manolo Blahniks simply because she’s Sarah Jessica Parker?

No, according to Watts. Celebrity fashionista aside, there has to be a set of characteristics at play around that product for it to suddenly explode in popularity.

What marketers should focus on, he says, is that set of characteristics that makes success more probable on average—without getting fixated on spectacular explosions of popularity that after the fact appear to have been detonated by particular individuals. But we can’t help ourselves. We want the mystical infusion that will galvanize our next marketing campaign.

“People love magic,” Watts says resignedly. “Well, too bad—it doesn’t exist. I’m sorry to break that to you, but now let’s try to solve the problem without the superpowers.”

The bottom line for Watts is that everything is random. We can study the statistics that say some things are more likely than others, but in the end, chance plays a significant role in the way events unfold. He has no problem with such uncertainty, but others find it distasteful.

“Most people associate randomness with lack of meaning,” he says. “Things are not completely random—some things are more likely to succeed than

others. It’s just that we can’t predict which ones.”

Watts sees the world as vastly complicated and unpredictable. He is content to compute the likelihood of an event without deciphering an overall design behind its possible occurrence. He accepts reality as slightly arbitrary.

His mother asks him how he can sleep at night, but he says, “It doesn’t really bother me. It’s not clear to me why we should know everything.” duncan watts is principal research scientist, yahoo! www.research.yahoo.com @duncanjwatts

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JOHN WERNER

a geography of the middle school mind

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ohn Werner is fascinated with maps. He collects them, frames them and hangs them up where he can study the visual representation of space. “You can divide the world into people who love maps, and then everyone else,” Werner says.

“It’s fun to look at maps to understand where we are in relation to things.”

Werner is interested in both physical geography and in the social experience of space. He calls himself a “connector,” a “start up guy” who brings people together to interact with each other and with the material surroundings of the places where they learn, work and live. This year, for instance, he has been organizing the TEDxBoston 2011 Adventures, an ongoing series of activities that gets TED conference participants out into the city of Boston to feel and celebrate the region. He says these outside “adventures” help to bond conference participants through a common encounter that ultimately enhances their association and interactions in future events such as the TEDx Boston conference.

Making such connections has become the major focus of Werner’s mission as the Chief Mobilizer for Citizen Schools, an educational nonprofit that expands the learning of sixth through eighth graders in 20 cities across seven states in the U.S. Most middle schoolers simply don’t know where they are in relation to things—historically, physically, interpersonally and in relation to the businesses that play a pivotal role in society. And they are getting little help in overcoming this disadvantage. According to Werner, middle school has become the “neglected years of American education,” a kind of abandoned territory that cries out for some civilizing influences.

“We created these schools for sixth, seventh and eighth graders and didn’t really think of the consequences,” he says. “But it’s a real critical point, and a hard time in education. There’s a huge need to work with this age group because during this time, students mentally drop out of school, preventing them from achieving success when they reach high school.”

The old philosophy of education, especially in urban

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areas, was to keep the outside world at bay while quiet learning went on in the classroom. But considering that students spend 80 percent of their time outside of school, a more compete form of education, Werner argues, puts students in productive contact with the full, physical reality of their surroundings. That’s why Citizen Schools opens up the classroom doors and brings the real world in where students can see it, touch it, speak to it, move with it and experience it.

Citizen Schools partners with middle schools through specialized apprenticeship training programs.

Volunteer “citizens” form a “second shift” of educators who teach kids about their own professions, and in turn, get kids excited about what they can do to build the world around them. Volunteers work directly with students and gain their trust while helping them to set goals and produce tangible projects.

“Everyone should know stuff and have access to information and feel smart and share it with other people,” he says. “A lot of middle schoolers have never met an engineer, or people who actually do things in the real world. They don’t see why the things they’re learning are helping them; they don’t see the benefit of being lifelong learners.”

The trick, of course, is to attract the professionals who want to share what they know. But since its inception in 1995, Citizen Schools has had phenomenal success doing just that. The organization has attracted 22,000 volunteers to offer their time and expertise to this vulnerable and fledgling group of kids. And although Werner’s skills as a “connector” have been a major force behind the program, he attributes most of Citizen Schools’ accomplishments to the endearing charm of the students it serves.

“Middle schoolers are not these huge kids that are intimidating to volunteers,” Werner says. “In middle school, they’re kind of cute. The fire in their eyes

hasn’t been put out. They haven’t checked out. They still get excited about random things and have so much potential to be successful.”

In this vibrant setting, Citizen Schools creates an atmosphere of rich communication, where students can showcase their projects, find adults that they “click with” and discover ways to become invested in their own education. They develop their own maps, so to speak, for the routes they will take through high school and beyond. To Werner, it’s the ultimate lesson in geography. john werner is chief mobilization officer and managing director, citizen schools www.citizenschools.org @johnkwerner

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richard saul wurman the commissioner of curiosity

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together many of America’s sharpest thinkers in the fields of technology, entertainment, health and design for sprawling intellectual gabfests. He has also been involved with all of BIF’s Collaborative Innovation Summits, serving as mentor, storyteller and host of the first two.

“I’m an aficionado of what happens when you get interesting people together and you make it easy for them to overcome their shyness and get them talking to each other,” Wurman says. “Unequivocally the Business Innovation Factory attracts smart individuals who tell a fresh story about their passions, ideas and failures.”

Once described by Fortune magazine as an “intellectual hedonist” with a “hummingbird mind,” Wurman’s body of work is based on an epiphany he had as a young man: Human understanding is held back by difficulties in the way writers, designers and publishers convey information. Driven by that awareness, he left the practice of architecture (where he apprenticed with the legendary Louis Kahn) for what he came to call “information architecture,” advocating innovative design and editorial techniques to make data more

ichard Saul Wurman likes to simplify things to initials and numerals: TUB is The Understanding Business, a company Wurman founded to capitalize on his theories of knowledge. 33 is a fable re-imagined three decades after its original telling as a conference keynote address at the 1976 AIA convention.

There’s also TOP, one of his publishing companies, along with Access Press, that produced books on “the topics that matter in our lives”—such as healthcare, wealthcare, travel and child-raising; IA is information architecture, a field Wurman essentially launched three decades ago; or it could stand for Information Anxiety, his blockbuster 1990 book that foresaw the growing problem of data clutter and proposed a radical new means of organizing and presenting knowledge.

Then there’s 19.20.21., a massive undertaking to standardize the information available on 19 cities that are expected to reach 20 million inhabitants in the 21st century.

Wurman is also known for creating and sharing the TED, TEDMED and eg conferences, which brought

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visual and comprehensible.

“The only way to communicate is to understand what it is like not to understand,” Wurman has said. “It is at that moment that you can make something understandable.”

With 82 books under his belt, Wurman’s oeuvre is outrageously eclectic, and it all springs from the same source: his own ignorance. Spurred by his lack of understanding of what he considered basic or crucial topics—like healthcare, education, travel and childrearing—Wurman has spent his life seeking ways to convey them to others more clearly. “Anything you do should come from your age, your ignorance or your curiosity,” he says.

Though he still considers himself a designer, Wurman remains true to his realization of decades ago – that design and technology are only tools to facilitate comprehension. What’s most important are the têteà-tête exchanges that happen between people.

An entire chapter of his best-selling Information Anxiety is devoted to what he calls “the lost art of the conversation.” He writes: “There is nothing we do better than when we do conversation well. There is no other communication device that provides such subtle and instantaneous feedback, or permits such a range of evaluation and correctability.”

At 76, Wurman returns his gaze to conference making.

On September 18, 2012 WWW.WWW will make its debut. “It’s a celebration of improvised conversation in its most informative manner,” explains Wurman. “Simple pairings of amazingly interesting individuals prompted by a question, generating a conversation.”

WWW.WWW will have no presentations, no schedule and (gasp!) no expensive tickets. Wurman says he became deeply committed to redesigning the idea of a gathering after realizing that truth, “a commodity that we most value and desire,” is amazingly scarce.

“If among all the buttons on your remote control there was one button called truth, wouldn’t you push that button?” he asks. “WWW.WWW is designed to metaphorically provide such a button and create a setting that will allow truth to be revealed.”

The gathering is designed to be the first 21st century conference in its form, technology & economics.

“Innovators spend too much time trying to design a better version of what already doesn’t work,” Wurman says. “Why are we so focused on making things better – when instead we should be starting again?

Am I terrified? Of course. But is there anything more interesting?” richard saul wurman is an author and information architect www.thewwwconference.com

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thank you, sponsors for your ongoing support and for your help in making bif-7 possible

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The College Board Advocacy & Policy Center is proud to be a sponsor and work with the Business Innovation Factory to improve the academic achievement of Young Men of Color across the nation.

IE Brown Executive MBA

Learn more about the student experience: http://youngmenofcolor.collegeboard.org

The College Board Advocacy & Policy Center was established to help transform education in America.

Guided by the College Board’s principles of excellence and equity in education, we work to ensure that students from all backgrounds have the opportunity to succeed in college and beyond. We make critical connections between policy, research and real-world practice to develop innovative solutions to the most pressing challenges in education today.

Two Institutions One Unique MBA

Visit us at http://advocacy.collegeboard.org/.

www.brown.edu/ce/mba

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CREATIVITY PERSONIFIED.

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THE MOST TALENTED INNOVATORS IN THE WORLD GRADUATE FROM RISD a place where critical thinking and making go hand in hand

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Trinity Repertory Company reminds us of the immense power of theater to bring us together as a community to help us remember the past in a way that will light up the future, and to keep pushing us to figure out what it means to be human.

MOVING SOLUTIONS FOR IMPROVED SENIOR HEALTH.

—LOUISE KENNEDY BOSTON GLOBE

Rhode Island’s Tony Awardwinning theater!

A small wearable device that delivers personalized reminder messages to our elderly loved ones to get up and move. It’s an idea conceived by URI nursing professor Pat Burbank, and being transformed into a reality in collaboration with URI professor Ying Sun and his biomechanical engineering students. Interdisciplinary research and innovation that improves lives. That’s URI.

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BIF-7 the bif team

christine costello tori drew jeff drury christine flanagan james hamar katherine hypolite saul kaplan samantha kowalczyk eli stefanski special thanks to kyla covert and maureen tuthill for their contributions to this book.

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“Once in a while you encounter a gathering that says it’s about ideas, and, well, it’s about ideas and more.

It’s about a way of sharing ideas that is friendly.

Honest. Comfortable. Unassuming. It’s about a way of bringing people together so they actually get to engage with each other. It’s about a mindset that is genuine. Which only happens because the people who stand behind the conference are genuine. And honestly interested in the right stuff, the real stuff, the stuff that matters. And it’s what makes BIF matter for me.”

Alan Webber, author, journalist, global detective

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collaborative innovation summit september 20-21, 2011 providence, ri

www.businessinnovationfactory.com Š 2011 business innovation factory 60 valley street, unit 25 providence, ri 02909 80