BIF-8 Summit Book

BIF-8

connect. inspire. transform.

welcome to

bif-8

The opportunity to host BIF-8 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-8 contains 30 plus remarkable storytelling catalysts to get our reaction started. It’s you, one of 350 unusual suspects participating in BIF-8—innovation junkies with a well-developed questing disposition—who will take it from there. BIF8 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-8 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-8, 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-8 will translate into compelling action and sustainable movements.

Storytelling is the most important tool for any innovator. 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-8 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.

Saul Kaplan is Founder and Chief Catalyst, Business Innovation Factory @skap5

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what we do the other 363 days of the year bif experience labs At BIF, we are passionate about enabling transformation. BIF-8 isn’t the ends it’s the means to enabling a purposeful community of innovation junkies who want to design, prototype and test new business models and social systems in the real world. The 363 days in between BIF summits are what really matters. It’s between summits when we continue up the business model innovation and social system transformation learning curve. It’s also when we put the BIF genome, our transformation toolset and our community to work. Our objective is to enable transformation in our social systems including, education, health care, energy and entrepreneurship. BIF Experience Labs were born from a deep conviction that tweaks won’t create the change we need; they won’t get us where we need to go fast enough. We need to go from tweaks to transformation.

We are trying to catalyze something bigger than any of us. We believe that human centered design will help us chart the path. It is the process of understanding the customer experience of people within our systems - patients, students, citizens, elders, entrepreneurs - and using this insight to design and prototype new models and systems, which we take to the real world for experimentation.

Through the BIF Experience Labs, we work with partners and sponsors - public and private - to develop a rich understanding of the real people from within our social systems. We seek to understand how they relate to, and experience the world around them. From these insights, we design (often in participation with our end users) and test new opportunities. Each Experience Lab is housed on a collaborative platform, which enables us to go up the learning curve together with a robust community of innovators. Our goal is to transfer our learning, our failures, and our successes to our partners and the broader system as a whole. Together, we are co-creating the future.

student

The BIF Student Experience Lab is dedicated to studentcentered transformation of the education system to increase students’ access to, engagement with, and success in education. Our student-centered research currently includes a broad look at the educational experiences of college students nation wide, as well as deep dives into the college experience of young men of color, and we have just begun a new project to explore the current teacher experience around new performance assessment approaches. We have put students in charge of the R&D process in elementary school, middle school, high school, and higher education. We have collaboratively designed new business models in higher education. We have created a fab-lab for teachers to learn and play with new teaching models. Together with a network of national partners, we continue to focus on inspiring curiosity in our youth and creating life-long learners.

patient

In the Patient Experience Lab, BIF is exploring how individuals experience health and wellness, and how those insights might transform our current sick care system to a well care system. Through our work in elder care, we’ve developed a rich understanding of the elder experience and identified a number of opportunities for serving a rapidly aging Baby Boomer population. More recently, we’ve expanded into working with individuals and families to better understand and negotiate the social determinants of health and wellness, and experiment in a number of areas, including the future of primary care.

entrepreneur

Together with Babson College, BIF created the Entrepreneur Experience Lab to accelerate the design and development of new entrepreneur support solutions. The Entrepreneur Experience Lab is driven by big questions: How can we extend entrepreneurship to the many, not the few? How can we begin to recognize the economic and social value created by millions acting in an entrepreneurial way? How can we strengthen communities to become entrepreneurial hotspots? Our research includes two volumes of work that examine the experience of entrepreneurs creating new ventures and entrepreneurs working within larger institutions. In the next year, we’ll continue to build on our research, while also moving into experimentation, testing opportunities that help institutions, organizations, and communities unleash more entrepreneurial activity.

citizen

The Citizen Experience Lab is a platform for playing with new models in the public sector. How do we serve and engage citizens? How do people more broadly experience citizenship in their communities (physical and virtual, personal and professional)? How do we pull citizens into shared responsibility for their surroundings? Projects in the Citizen Experience Lab run the gamut from social services to economic development to government programs. Our initial work has focused on, developing a deep understanding of the human behaviors and motivations behind energy consumption in the commercial sector.

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the bif genome connect. inspire. transform.

Passion for an organization, community, or movement is coded at the genetic level. If you want to transform an organization, forget process reengineering and think genetic reengineering. If you want to launch a new business model, make your genome transparent and accessible to anyone with a similar genetic make-up.

We believe that innovators are wired differently. The BIF Genome was developed to help identify 15 fundamental principles that define the collective DNA of business model innovators. Over the last eight years, we have connected with thousands of like-minded innovation junkies and organizations and have observed a common pattern of characteristics that defines them at their core. Using our innovation mantra we grouped these 15 traits into three main categories: CONNECT: Business Model Innovation is a Team Sport Innovation is a team sport that requires collaboration, learning, and experimentation across silos, industy sectors, and disciplines. No one person, function, or organization has all the answers.

INSPIRE: We Do What We Are Passionate About Innovators are epic optimists, fueled by passion and conviction to always find a better way. We must inspire them daily with portraits of possibilities.

TRANSFORM: Incremental Change Isn’t Working Together, we are designing the future. The past is not our reference point; tweaks won’t do. We must create a wholly new vision and experiment our way to its emergence.

CONNECT

INSPIRE

TRANSFORM

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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 can go 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.

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:

www.businessinnovationfactory.com 7

brandon

barnett

Embrace the Complexity Keeping up with the cultural shifts wrought by technology has many market analysts in a whirlwind. As new technologies develop, we interact with each other differently. Subtle movements in the way we do business ripple across our markets and have impacts that we can’t even explain, much less predict.

Brandon Barnett, Director of Business Innovation at Intel Corporation, says we shouldn’t fear all of that complexity. We should embrace it.

There is some semblance of order at this edge of chaos, Barnett says. We live in a world of endless relationships that seem disorganized but, that actually give rise to complex systems. We cannot always discern how the smaller parts of these systems interact, but from their mixture of order and anarchy, we observe distinctive, emergent behaviors.

This is complexity science, and it has branches everywhere in our social and economic landscapes: studies of networks, population dynamics, evolution and adaption, game theory. It is a relatively modern concept intended to explain sometimes ancient patterns of decentralized activity that solve high-order problems.

The classic example of a complex system is the ant colony. Barnett explains: “There are all these seemingly unrelated forces at work. Each ant doesn’t know what the others are doing, but they all play specific roles. From these independently organized individuals comes the order of the surviving colony.”

Barnett is a complex system in his own right. His degrees in electrical engineering, applied physics and business make him far more than the sum of his constituent parts. When he first joined Intel’s incubator, he was expanding on his doctoral research in optics and computer theory. But then he became fascinated with the way new, extraordinary technologies were having an impact in the world—how technologies create new infrastructures and resources from which new economies emerge.

He earned an M.B.A. in entrepreneurship so that he could study these dynamics in depth.

“I realized that I liked that real life application in technology, and I made that jump from technology innovation, to business innovation,” he explains.

Barnett examines the intersection of socio-cultural, technical, and market forces to identify new bases of competition for Intel. It is no longer enough, he says, to rely on traditional market analyses when projecting new business growth. Instead, we have to consider the business ecosystem as a complex system, where things don’t happen in linear fashion. They happen in many places all the time, while the larger system that they comprise adapts as needed. That is why we need to change our analysis from distinct markets to interacting business ecosystems.

Online purchasing, for example, raises issues of trust, privacy and accountability that did not exist in commercial exchanges 20 years ago. Now, we buy things without seeing the person who is selling them to us. We send our financial information over the internet to complete the transaction. Changes in technology require that we relate to each other in different ways, and as a result, new markets form.

Pinpointing where that market growth will occur cannot be left to something as elusive as intuition. But Barnett points out that even intuition is based on accumulated sets of outcomes that we have observed over periods of time. He adds, “If you have nothing else, you have to go with your gut, but your gut is the summation of lots of little things you’ve done throughout your career.”

At Intel, Barnett is working to develop a more robust toolkit to determine which social forces change as technology develops. Even if we can’t direct these

social forces, we can try to identify the self-organizing principles that drive them.

In a way, Barnett says, it’s like trying to sense the emergent order before it happens. But ultimately, it’s a matter of systematically experimenting in the dynamic ecosystem to better understand the complex system.

Big companies, he says, are often so busy optimizing their positions in the marketplace that they miss the big shifts.

According to Barnett, “Right before they’re no longer relevant is often when they seem to be most profitable.

They seem like they’re really at the top of their games, but they just didn’t understand that the fundamentals of that market have shifted. But if you’re the one who is in the right position when the new market does form, there’s really a high payoff for that,” he says.

Brandon is Director of Business Innovation, Intel Corporation

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dries

buytaert

A Glance at Life in the Drupal World It wasn’t too long ago when the idea of opensource software raised more than an eyebrow.

While some people wondered who would buy it, others wondered who in their right minds would bother to make it.

Dries Buytaert, the creator of the opensource web content management platform Drupal, neatly sums up the mental image that many people have of open-source technology: “It’s a piece of software made by a bunch of hippies and they give it away for free.”

That’s not what things look like in “the Drupal world,” according to Buytaert. For one thing, the “hippies” are actually a giant, international talent pool made up of more than 800,000 volunteers who create what Buytaert calls “a culture of extreme peer review” that monitors and approves every change made to Drupal software. They are professionally organized and take pride in producing a mature, high-quality product with impressive levels of scalability.

In its first iteration, Drupal was an informal message board created by Buytaert about ten years ago when he was a student at the University of Antwerp. After he graduated, he put the message board online to stay in touch with his friends, and it turned into a platform for discussion and experimentation on emerging web technologies. To extend that spirit of shared exploration, Buytaert opened up the source code for the site.

Now called Drupal (a play on the Dutch word “druppel,” which means “drop”), this opensource software is used by one out of every 50, or more than 1.5 million websites, including twitter, SONY Music, Al Jazeera, the New York State Stock Exchange, 71 of the top 100 US universities, major publications like Maxim magazine, and non-profit ventures like the Business Innovation Factory.

Drupal fundamentally produces software that is “battle-tested,” Buytaert notes. Compared to traditional proprietary software companies that charge licensing fees and may power only 10,000 websites, “we’re cheaper, we’re better, we’re more tested, and we innovate faster.” The

amount of innovation coming from the Drupal community is “a tsunami,” he says, and whenever a change is made to its software, as many as 30 different people have to sign off on that change.

The growth of Drupal also benefits from broader developments on the web that create an environment perfectly suited to open-source culture. “The web, in general, is changing our lives,” Buytaert says. “It’s changing everything - how we communicate with each other, how we collaborate, and how we do business.”

It also calls for a unique model of leadership, one that is less authoritative and more participatory. Buytaert focuses on having a vision that inspires Drupal’s legion of volunteers: “A big part of my job is to get out of the way.

I can’t really force people to go in a particular direction.

People will only follow me if they agree.”

While the Drupal community generates the most sophisticated software for free, profitability is generated through its commercial arm, the venture-backed Acquia, which provides products, services and technical support for Drupal users. Buytaert founded Acquia in 2007, and last year, it was named by Forbes magazine as one of the most promising companies in America.

The beauty of Acquia is that it can co-exist with the many passionate Drupal volunteers whose endless ingenuity keeps the software on pace with the needs of its users and the ever-shifting culture of the web.

“Imagine contributing to Drupal, or the next version of Drupal, which is used by two percent of the world’s websites,” he says. “It’s kind of fun, versus working for an organization that builds a small CMS that is used by a small company. That’s somewhat exciting, but it’s nothing compared to having the World Economic Forum run your stuff.”

No matter who the client is, Drupal’s goal is to build open, interactive websites, which reflect the egalitarian spirit of open-source software itself: a community of volunteers creates a website that creates yet another community. Directly at the center of this new, essential hub of social, political and commercial information, Drupal is ready.

“Ultimately, everybody will have a website,” Buytaert says, “every book, every movie, everything.

Open source is the only way to get there because there are no licensing fees. It’s already winning. It’s already dominant.”

Dries is Creator and Project Lead, Drupal www.acquia.com @dries

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robin

chase

Configuring Transportation 2.0 Like many good ideas, Robin Chase’s was born of necessity. A mother of three with just one car in the family, Chase had returned from a reunion at MIT’s Sloan School of Management—where classmates were talking about their dot-com start-ups—when she realized she could apply a similar approach to her transportation difficulties.

The result was Zipcar, a car-sharing service that allows members to rent cars online for short periods of time. It’s an ideal solution for city-dwellers who don’t own a car but don’t want to pay for an entire day to do an errand that might take just half an hour.

“This is what the Internet and data transmission was made for — sharing a scarce resource among many people,” Chase says. “I joked that it was like the cartoon light bulb going off over my head, but it really was. Everyone said, ‘Duh! How obvious’, but I said ‘Well, you didn’t do it.’”

Founded in June 2000, Zipcar has been doubling in size year by year, and now has more than 100,000 members in 10 cities across the country.

After stepping down as Zipcar’s CEO in 2003, Chase founded Meadow Networks, a firm that focuses on applying wireless technology to the transportation sector.

But the ride-sharing idea was still percolating. With evidence of global warming mounting by the day, Chase started thinking of how she could merge her expertise in car-sharing with the need to reduce carbon emissions and the development of social-networking sites on the Web. She put it all together in GoLoco, a ride-share start-up that debuted earlier this year. Members fill out profiles that now seem very familiar. In the manner of sites like Facebook or Friendster, people list interests, languages, musical preferences and a network of friends or contacts.

After a trip, members are asked whether they would personally ride with their fellow passengers again, building a reliable first-hand database of feedback.

GoLoco not only helps members find a driver or more passengers, but automatically divvies up the costs (and carbon-dioxide emissions) between the riders. Money is transferred via

online accounts, to avoid awkwardness in the car.

The service, which launched in Boston on Earth Day, has been described as “part high-tech college ride board and part social calendar, with a dash of environmental conscience.”

Chase grew up in the Middle East and Africa as the daughter of an American diplomat. She says it’s not surprising that such an innovation should come from someone whose professional background was in public health. “I started thinking, why don’t people share rides?

They don’t like to ride with strangers, it’s difficult to find a ride, and there’s no reward,” she says. “Social-networking ideas that offer context and degrees of connection mean you don’t need to travel with strangers. Clever algorithms make searching, posting and finding rides easy. Sharing real dollars for real expenses is an incentive.”

“When I think about innovation, it comes from stuffing your head as full as you can with things not in the same vertical silo of ideas, the same discipline. The newest and most exciting ideas come at the intersection of disciplines, from connections that people haven’t made before,” she says.

Her experience has taught her that people already in a field will usually make just small, incremental changes in the way things are done, while those new to the field will be the ones who make the big conceptual leaps.

“If you want to think outside the box,” Chase says, “you’ve got to be outside the box.”

Robin is Founder & CEO of Buzzcar, Zipcar www.buzzcar.com @rmchase

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beth

coleman

From Place to Space: Existing on the New Transmedia Canvas Beth Coleman has been on the road lately.

She occasionally settles in one spot, but she prefers an unstructured space, unbounded by the monastic scholarly tradition in which she was trained. That is, a virtual space.

She is living in the new transmedia utopia, where the virtual and the real co-exist seamlessly. Having spent several years as an assistant professor of Comparative Media at MIT, Coleman has taken on a brand new position as the director of the City as Platform lab at the Games Institute, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. She has been charged with exploring everything from the library to automobile efficiencies to health care as possible venues for innovation collaboration and design.

“We’re working on designs in which art and culture lead instead of having technologists say, ‘Here’s your app, and here’s your phone,’” Coleman explains. “There’s a huge opportunity at this moment to fill in this space with the kind of world we want to live in.”

What she envisions is not a cityscape where everyone is armed with a smart phone leading “frictionless lives.” That world may be clean and efficient, but as Coleman points out, “There are also great creative frictions that will just get left in the dirt. We want to be in a city where chance encounters occur that can be serendipitous. We want to create opportunities for that.”

Creating those opportunities means experimenting, as Coleman does, with design labs where artists, scientists, designers, and other innovators can bump shoulders. They have unlikely conversations, producing a “cultural alchemy” that pushes content onto different media that wrap themselves around the globe in every time zone. It is an expanding, amorphous space to which we are only beginning to adjust. Coleman calls this new way of being in the world “x-reality,” which she explores in her book Hello Avatar.

“We have so strongly integrated networked media into our lives that it’s quite clear we’re not leading alternate lives, but we’re living our lives spread out across different platforms,” she explains. “People can see bits and pieces of your activity. It’s an augmented space, and unless something calamitous happens, it will only increase.”

Her own career reflects this reality. With a doctorate in comparative literature from NYU, she is also a sound and film artist, an author, cultural theorist, and lab director. She has spread herself out across numerous platforms that produce the coherent richness of her life. To Coleman, virtuality and ubiquitous computing are extraordinary techniques through which she enlarges her own existence as an individual, an artist, and a scholar.

Herein lies the irony of her present endeavors: she finds herself on the road—literally—to explore the positive potential of x-reality. But that is the point, she says. By collaborating across divergent media, we meet people we might not otherwise have known. More often than not, those virtual connections become face-to-face encounters. Coleman emphasizes that “co-presence,” or presence at a distance, is both a supplement and a precursor to vital real world connection.

We are at crossroads, she says, in terms of what we will design and what we will accept as normative ways of being present to one another. Our human nature roots us in the idea of place as a specific location that contains objects, memories, people—things that orient us and tell us who we are. When our place changes, our subjectivity shifts. Now we have to think in terms of space—an undefined area of human activity that may have no physical locus in the world, but where we might nonetheless exist.

The spaces created by transmedia call for new ways of perceiving how we relate to the world. We may have to redefine ourselves, and that is what Coleman finds so promising about x-reality. Just by opening up our mobile devices, we can invite others into our lives— through talking, texting or visual engagement. We make ourselves present elsewhere via the many portals that lead from where we sit to where we would like to be.

“It’s too tantalizing and exciting to think of the things that can be done,” Coleman says. “We have transmedia, so let’s use it well.”

Beth is Co-Director of the Critical Media Lab, Professor of English Literature and Languages, University of Waterloo, Ontario cms.mit.edu/people/bcoleman/

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carol

coletta

Breathing Art Into the City Carol Coletta’s urban upbringing established for her the pattern of a great and vibrant city as a place where people can stumble onto the fun and stumble onto each other. It has simple amenities, lots of intensity, and high mobility.

“I grew up in a perfect urban neighborhood,” Coletta says of her beloved hometown of Memphis. “I could walk to school, the grocery, the library, the movie theater, and friends’ homes. I could jump on a bus and get downtown all by myself. The freedom of that was great.”

As she was beginning her career back in Memphis in the 70s, Coletta found she had a knack for creating downtown events that sparked renewal on the streets she loved to explore.

Ultimately, the Chief Administrative Officer of Memphis hired her to establish the city’s first downtown redevelopment organization.

It was a dream job for Coletta. She was a young woman working inside city hall for a CAO who was open to ideas about revitalizing Memphis. “We were at a moment when we could move a lot of things,” she recalls.

But the challenges were daunting. Memphis sat directly at the center of the Civil Rights Movement, when deep-rooted notions of place and community were in an upheaval. And it was here, on April 3, 1968, that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. He was assassinated the next day at the Lorraine Motel on Mulberry Street.

Coletta says that it was difficult at that point to envision Memphis—or any city—as a welcoming setting for the cultivation of culture and people.

“The world was definitely moving away from downtown at that point, and that only accelerated after the disruptions over race and injustice,” she says. “Our biggest challenge then was just getting people to believe that things could be different, that there could be a different future for this place than was easily recognizable.”

Since those heady Memphis days, Coletta has been building cities—not in the bricks and

mortar way, but by nurturing all the intangibles that bring life to the streets. Through her experience as CEO of CEOs for Cities, Executive Director of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, host and producer of the radio show, Smart City, and as the head of her own consulting firm, she discovered that renewal efforts must honor the hard work that is already happening in the field. A successful transformation of a city is a unique reflection of the assets and the context of that particular place.

“The fact is that we want to make sure that we always remember where the juice is, and it’s local,” she says.

Art is the new frontier in building up cities, according to Coletta. It’s a powerful way to enhance the quality of place, attract and keep the talent, and allow people to thrive in place. “Every city, every community has arts and artists,” she notes. Art draws the senses to what is truly moving a city. It brings the distinctiveness of a place into stark relief. It connects people, places, ideas, and resources.

Today, Coletta is the president of ArtPlace, a grant and loan-making organization that coordinates philanthropic and government resources to fund creative placemaking in communities across America. ArtPlace identifies the creative pulse of a community and uses that as a sort of divining rod for locating fertile areas in which to make investments.

“The first sign of transformation is an increase in vibrancy,” she explains, “but there are a thousand different ways to produce vibrancy. Artists are endlessly creative in finding those ways.”

Coletta now lives in Chicago—another city she adores.

She loves the intensity and the way the Chicago River and Lake Michigan shoreline blend with the flow of the city. The art is big and bold—just around the corner

from her office stands a 50-foot Picasso sculpture that was commissioned by Mayor Richard J. Daley in 1967. Coletta can stroll past it every day on her way out to lunch.

She sees it as a gift, but she knows that to most Chicagoans, it’s nothing particularly special. It’s just part of the air they breathe on the streets of a great city.

Carol is President of ArtPlace www.artplaceamerica.org @ccoletta

17

john

Donoghue

Making a Business Out of Brain Research The financial crisis of 2008 hit every industry hard, and when resources run thin, research is usually among the first places to feel the pain.

Even if it’s brain science.

At Brown University, neuroscientist John Donoghue has managed to keep advancing his groundbreaking research program on brainmachine interfaces despite having to close down a separate company, Cyberkinetics, Inc., which he started to pursue clinical trials in this pioneering field.

Donoghue conducted the preclinical phase of his research at Brown, and the creation of Cyberkinetics allowed him to apply his findings to seven people in a first-of-its-kind pilot human clinical trial. The centerpiece of the clinical trials was BrainGate, a brain-computer interface that enables paralyzed individuals to control computers and robots with just their thoughts.

BrainGate had only begun to accomplish what Donoghue envisions—a technology that enables people with devastating spinal cord injuries to control their worlds through a chip implanted in their brains—when Cyberkinetics closed under financial constraints.

Donoghue and his team are still hard at it, though. “We moved all the technology back to Brown,” he says, “and with clinical management by Massachusetts General Hospital, the company spun back into an academic setting.”

This is the kind of resilient maneuvering Donoghue attempts to engineer for the participants in his clinical trials: Coming at life from a new angle with different tools and resources, he has preserved the essence of the technology development that existed before the advent of an unforeseen set of circumstances that led to BrainGate’s rebirth in the academic setting.

Donoghue says he is a “scrambler” who has a knack for pulling things together when necessary. But he also credits the collaborative culture at Brown for facilitating his research over the years. He says that the relatively small size and the close proximity of the science, engineering, and math communities led to cooperative efforts to tackle big projects. “It’s part of the fabric of the university to work together,” he explains.

Additionally, Donoghue notes that the faculty members and students he works with drive the research in astounding ways. They are motivated by passion, intellectual curiosity, and a desire to inhabit the frontier of neuroscience: “You see the spark go off and they just get so excited by what they’re doing. They’re just there.”

And they have to be because, as Donoghue declares in understated fashion, “Figuring out how the brain works is a really complicated problem. It takes a little introspection.”

The questions his team ponders are simple and huge at the same time: What does a thought look like? What is the beginning of consciousness? How much of it is under our control? How does the brain make a decision?

Donoghue’s personal motivation for pursuing a longrange and slowly-realized goal comes in large part from the deep empathy he has for individuals who cannot control the movements of their own bodies. When he was a child, he was sick with a bone disease that confined him to a wheelchair, and as a result, he was often in contact with others who had movement disorders. “I saw the devastation of these kinds of diseases,” he says.

The “mysterious” nature of his own disease piqued his interest in medicine at an early age, while at the same time, he was developing a habit of tinkering—with chemistry sets and electronics, “back when electronics had tubes.”

Donoghue also was, and still is, inspired by science fiction—Star Trek, especially—because “it makes you think of what is possible” rather than what is actual: “It’s projecting what the world would be like if certain things happened.”

In Donoghue’s case, as a neuroscientist studying profound brain disorders, he has tried to project what the world would be like if we had a wireless brain

implant to do the work of a neurological system that no longer functions properly.

While we have surpassed even some of the fantastical medical technologies only dreamed about in Star Trek, Donoghue acknowledges that the final frontier of his own neurological research lies far in the future.

In the meantime, he immerses himself in brain science and continues to negotiate the tricky terrain between business and the university, “trying to get corporate culture to understand the value of an academic approach to a very complex problem.”

John is Henry Merritt Wriston Professor and Director, Brain Science Program, Brown University donoghue.neuro.brown.edu

19

felice

frankel

Behind The Still Image, Life Unfolds When Felice Frankel began photographing scientific phenomena 20 years ago, the researchers she worked with at Harvard University and MIT resisted her sense of perfection. They were satisfied with the fuzzy image under the microscope as long as it generally conveyed the data. But when Frankel played with light and color to make the image pop, while still maintaining the integrity of the information, they were hooked.

Today, Frankel is a research scientist in the Center for Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, where her exquisite photographic images continue to provide a heightened medium through which her colleagues can see what they are uncovering in the lab. “When I show them the difference, they want it,” she says. “They want more than good enough.”

The photographic image Frankel produces is the end result of a series of nuanced decisions she makes about how to represent a scientific phenomenon. To capture it perfectly, she looks beyond the material qualities of what she is seeing: “I have to understand the science of what I’m photographing. I have to know what in the world this is about.”

She always works with a co-author, she says, because “none of my images work without text.” But she pushes the visual aspect to the limit, imagining how her audience will grasp the concept behind the image. “The important part of the question is not the answer, but the consideration of the answer,” she says.

Frankel thrives on the slow, reflective process of visually representing an idea. At MIT, she directed a program funded by the National Science Foundation called “Picturing to Learn,” where groups of students created drawings to teach scientific concepts to others. They used no software or other sophisticated tools that might have skewed the way they created images.

They simply drew. And in the process, they found out what they didn’t know.

“It’s not just making a drawing for somebody,” Frankel explains. “You’re making a drawing to teach someone. You’ve got to figure out a hierarchy of information. There’s nothing better than

having a discussion around whether an image works or not.”

Frankel discovered early on not to assume that everyone has a visual imagination. Some people think in formulas, numbers, or equations. To the rational mind, empirical documentation is the ultimate authority. But Frankel suggests that a picture raises that documentation to a different level – this is what you don’t see in the data.

And yet, the picture itself does not close the subject.

It is part of an endless unfolding of phenomena. It takes us farther down the path of inquiry, opening our consciousness to see that there is more, and yet more, to discover.

“There is a very serious place for a still image where one can just behold and gaze and reflect and wonder,” Frankel says. The image is not a finite object with a selfevident beginning, middle and end, but a vibrant and expansive space.

Not everyone is comfortable with this notion, however. “The biggest dilemma we have in our society is the difficulty we have in understanding uncertainty, improbability,” Frankel says. “There is an incredible need for people to be given very simple answers to things.”

This need leads us to believe that what we see is always a coherent reality.

But as Frankel points out, every representation of a thing is really a carefully orchestrated re-presentation, not the thing itself. Choices are made about which information to convey. Images are cleaned up, details are left out, attributes are accentuated.

Science has no discernible starting point. Every realization of a phenomenon leads us backward to something else. “Any kind of representation is a deductive process,” Frankel explains. “I can’t see

the atoms that are creating the molecules that are creating the compounds that are creating the surface structure. But I can see the result of that structure at the molecular level. So, in a way, I’m not really representing anything.”

Frankel is at ease with this ambiguity. It is why she thinks of the image as a place to wonder. She does not present us with a photograph and tell us, This is what it is. Rather, she invites us to consider, This is the beginning of one edge of what it could be.

Felice is a Research Scientist in the Center for Materials Science and Engineering, MIT www.felicefrankel.com @felicefrankel

21

marc

freedman

An Encore for Baby Boomers, A Boon for Everyone In the first days of America, the lucky, hoaryheaded individuals who survived into their 50s were viewed as distinguished, respected, and divinely blessed. They had the answers to all the important questions. They even tried to look old. Today, not so much.

Marc Freedman, founder and CEO of Encore.org, a nonprofit that promotes “encore” careers for individuals of the 50+ set, thinks those early Americans might have been on to something.

Psychologists have described middle age as a period of “generativity,” a life phase filled with energy and productivity that could be applied in useful ways. But in a culture that has made early retirement a mark of success, many people aged 50 and over have been relegated to “oxymoronic status,” according to Freedman. Too old to work and too young to die.

“We thwarted the natural, generative impulse of this age,” he says. “So, I thought, why not engage the generation that the Peace Corps was created for in the first place, to give them a second round of service?”

Freedman has been interested in US social programs and policies ever since he was an American Studies major at Swarthmore College. Throughout his career, he has taken what he has learned about the historical roots of social programming and designed real life initiatives that match up people in need with people who can help. He calls it “applied American Studies.”

One result of Freedman’s work was his 1993 book, The Kindness of Strangers: Adult Mentors, Urban Youth, and the New Voluntarism, which is considered a seminal text on mentoring in the US. Today, he is widely recognized as one of the leading social entrepreneurs in the nation.

The critical insight Freedman has gained through his research and experience is that the most important element of any social program is the human element. He saw this most clearly in his study of the Big Brothers Big Sisters movement that began in the early 1900s.

“I discovered that Big Brothers Big Sisters was having a staggering impact on the kids in the program,” Freedman says. “It’s incomprehensible. The very big outcomes far outstripped those of much more expensive initiatives.”

Time was the thing that mattered most to kids in need of support. “But where are we going to find the people to do the things that only people can do? That’s why I became interested in the older population. It seemed like that was the one place where there was a vastly growing population of individuals that had numbers, but also time.”

Freedman sees tremendous opportunity in the cultural shifts brought about by increased life expectancy. Since 1900, life expectancy has risen from 47 to 78, the highest it has ever been in US history. As a result, every stage of life seems to have stretched across a longer time span. Childhood is prolonged, careers last indefinitely, and middle age is expanding more than any phase of life. Furthermore, half the children born since 2000 can expect to live into their 100s.

We can no longer assume that people in their fifties will retire and scamper off to a “leisure village” for second childhoods. For most individuals, that is not even a sustainable option. The practicality of income, combined with the instinct to give back in the encore era, now call for some unprecedented approaches to work and lifestyle after 50. And before 50, for that matter.

Freedman’s efforts at Encore.org are only the first step in what is sure to be a major rethinking of cultural practices and social policies across the entire life course.

He advocates pensions for people in their 20s to 40s so that they can spend more time with their families. He promotes the creation of meaningful jobs for people

in their 60s to 80s, who have valuable experience and knowledge.

“Life is certainly becoming more of a long distance race, rather than a sprint,” Freedman says. “Why the balloon payment of leisure at the end? That’s the insanity about retirement: for years, we’ve retired earlier and earlier as we were living longer and longer.

The period has become half of our adult life and it was never intended to be that way. Why write off a quarter of your life?”

Marc is CEO and Founder, Civic Ventures www.encore.org @encorecareers

23

james

gardner

For the Great Taste of Innovation, Add a Spoonful of Sugar There’s a lot to be said for hard work, but not if you don’t enjoy it.

Gamification advocate James Gardner says a little entertainment on the job has positive organizational benefits that keep workers engaged and more productive. The trick is to figure out what makes a game fun, and apply those elements to a work situation.

“It’s the spoonful of sugar argument,” Gardner says. “Boring is not an engagement strategy that works in anything other than the short term.”

The sea of cubicles that has inundated global business in the past several decades brings with it a growing concern about boredom in the workplace. In such an environment, how does an organization keep its employees constructively involved in their own jobs?

Gamification experts have found that building some good-natured competition around mundane, on-the-job tasks makes them a bit more pleasurable and, shall we say... addictive?

Obviously, employees who feel good and are engrossed in their jobs are great for business.

As the general manager of international operations at Spigit, a San Francisco-based innovation management software company, Gardner applies the winning principles of gamification to the process of innovation. Spigit software zeroes in on the engagement factor that stokes the creative juices of any organization.

In a time of shrinking attention spans and increasing digital distractions, Gardner says: “You have less time to get people engaged before they get bored. We have to really ramp up the hooks, the psychological dynamics that make things fun. We put the hooks in the software, and they stay.”

While working in the field of innovation and technology in the UK, first at Lloyd’s Banking Group and then in the Department for Work and Pensions, Gardner dealt with some of the most extreme obstacles to healthy change: conservative business practices and a slow-moving

civil service administration.

As the individual in charge of keeping these staid institutions in step with globalization and technology, Gardner had his work cut out for him. Banks and innovation don’t normally see eye to eye. Ditto: government bureaucracies and innovation.

But the recent financial crisis provided a unique opportunity to do things differently, he says. Out of desperation, people were willing to experiment with new approaches: “It’s only at these crisis times that genuine transformational change can happen. When your back’s against the wall, the impossible becomes possible.” But in between those crisis moments, Gardner saw great ideas get whittled down to almost nothing by the time everyone was on board with them.

“Extremely traditional organizations are quite command and control,” he says. “How do you convince the entrenched old guard that change is a good thing? Suggestions introduced by younger people are often disregarded.”

Gardner has a doctorate in Innovation Management, but he notes that large corporations rarely designate an entire position to the task of being ingenious. So, uncovering valuable ideas usually becomes someone’s added responsibility.

Gamification makes it amusing and fun for employees to go above and beyond the specific duties of their positions to solve business problems. Spigit software taps into the collective mindset of an organization to find out what initiatives or solutions are percolating there.

In addition to all the fun, Spigit enables positive change in another way—by setting aside the traditionally overblown notion of what an innovation actually is. It is not an unprecedented gadget or system that explodes onto the market, Gardner says, but the strategic adaption

of existing ideas and services that have already made their initial splash. Once they become cheaper and easier to use, that is the time to take them on and make them fresh.

Gardner points to Apple as the “poster child” for this strategy. “Apple doesn’t do anything innovative— the iPhone, when it came out, was just a phone with a different screen,” he says. “People are beginning to realize that creativity and newness aren’t necessarily drivers of corporate value.”

Instead, Gardner explains, innovation is a numbers game, an incremental process that must be coaxed.

And in any given organization, all the ingredients for innovation are usually simmering under the surface.

Gamification is just the bit of sweetness that brings out that burst of flavor.

James is Chief Strategy Officer, Spigit www.spigit.com

25

teny

gross

The Importance of Being Civilized British historian Arnold Toynbee once wrote that civilization is a movement and not a condition. Sustaining it is an ongoing endeavor.

Israeli-born Teny Gross has acquired this piece of wisdom through hard experience. As a powerful advocate for nonviolence in the city of Providence, R.I., Gross struggles every day to make the city safe by starting with a basic goal: he encourages people to behave civilly toward one another.

He says we can never let up on that goal, as he learned firsthand as a youth worker on the streets of Boston in the 1990s. He met with gang members, churches, civic groups, business leaders, politicians and law enforcement officials to reduce spiraling violence in the city. He witnessed a transformation. As Toynbee might have said, it was a movement.

“For a moment in Boston, we really had people working as one,” Gross says. “It felt great.

Everyone was working hard, and I rode home every night thinking, ‘People are sleeping in Boston because of me.’” He adds, “You need to feel almost messianic about it.”

It was a difficult state of affairs to sustain, Gross now realizes. Human nature creeps in when the crisis seems to subside. The work becomes professionalized, and those on the front lines are relegated to the sidelines. Organizations begin to fight for turf, publicity or grant funding.

The only way to prevent that type of backsliding, according to Gross, is to “obsessively care every day what happens in the city.”

Since 2001, Gross has been doing just that in Providence, where he is the executive director of the Institute for the Study & Practice of Nonviolence, a unique organization that teaches nonviolence and provides advocacy for at-risk communities. His most critical staffers are “streetworkers” - past offenders who are changing their lives by mentoring young people who seem destined for gang life or worse.

At the Institute, Gross’ staff brings rival gang members, offenders and victims under one roof, engaging in a delicate sort of diplomacy to keep them talking to one another, politely.

In a society that relies so heavily on punishment as a deterrent to crime, he insists instead on the importance of treating people decently.

“We need more civilized behavior,” he says. “Many sectors fail to provide a civilized example.

The way some athletes, politicians, business leaders, cops and teachers talk today is amazing. Whether in public service or private business, many of us have a sense of entitlement. How then can we expect our kids to be polite, have a sense of direction? We have to make it cool to be civilized.”

To garner outside support for the Institute, Gross often makes a more practical appeal. He presents business people and politicians with a simple business model: punishment is inefficient and costly. “It’s a contradiction to self-interest,” he says. The easy response to crime is to lock up the troublemakers, but preventing crimes and rehabilitating offenders— what Gross refers to as “recycling human capital”—saves millions of dollars.

The institute’s strategies for nonviolence also include target marketing. When 0.3 percent of the population commits 75 percent of the violence, good business practices call for focusing on that 0.3 percent. The Institute does this with its nonviolence trainers, streetworkers, victim advocates, employment and community advocates, who assume an “intense customer service attitude” toward their client base of at-risk youth.

Their aim is to be consistent, reliable, and supportive of potential and former offenders, their families, and their victims.

“You don’t get what you want by forcing your will,” he says. “You cannot talk about kindness. It’s got to be demonstrated every day, all the time.”

Streetworkers often put themselves in dangerous

situations as part of their commitment to a younger generation trapped in a cycle of violence. They demonstrate their support by showing up in homes, hospitals and court rooms. But sometimes, Gross says, they do their work by walking young people through a more civilized world.

“I take gang members to bookstores. I tell them, ‘I want to show you my crack cocaine. Books are my addiction. Knowledge can be a passion.’ They love the exposure, love the attention. We really try to show them the world is wider. It is our duty as adults. The previous generations showed it to us.”

Occasionally, Gross finds that sustaining a civilized world comes down to “the little gestures,” like a quick text message sent on the spur of the moment as he heads home from work: “Guys, be safe tonight. ”

Teny is Executive Director, Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence www.nonviolenceinstitute.org @tenygross

27

darell

hammond

Everything We Need to Know, We Learned on the Playground Carved in stone near the gates of Mooseheart Child City and School outside Chicago is the motto, “Enter to learn, leave to serve.” It might not be the kind of thing a child would notice when he first comes to live at Mooseheart, but for Darell Hammond, it has become a reality.

When he was four, Hammond’s mother brought him and his seven siblings to Mooseheart because she could no longer raise them alone. She lived on the grounds near her children while they stayed in agespecific houses and attended school. Once or twice a year, the family spent a night together in a cabin by the shore of a 300-acre lake on campus. Hammond remembers his mother making them the fried dough that he loved while he and his brother tested their Boy Scout skills by building a roaring blaze in the cabin’s fireplace.

Mooseheart provided Hammond with stability and an education. It also gave him 1,200 acres of lawns to run on and endless trees to climb. There was room for him to wander, imagine and explore.

“I was incredibly lucky to have a great place to play and be a kid when I was growing up at Mooseheart,” Hammond says. “It’s something that every child deserves, and I want to make sure that they have it.”

Today, Hammond is the co-founder and CEO of KaBOOM!, a nonprofit that helps communities build playgrounds and playspaces in their neighborhoods. Since its inception in 1995, and with the help of more than a million volunteers, the organization has transformed over 2,117 playspaces by providing communities with the tools, resources and guidance to build them.

The building process is so well-organized that a playground goes up in a single day. First, KaBOOM! identifies a “Play Desert,” a place with a high concentration of children but not

enough spots to play. On the morning of the build, around two hundred volunteers gather in front of an empty lot and then work all day putting together slides, swings, rock walls and other play equipment that has been chosen by the community, including its children.

They haul mulch and mix cement in whatever weather conditions exist that day. Six hours later, they stand before a complete playground.

“Building a playground in one day is nothing short of a phenomenal experience,” Hammond says. “You see disbelief disappear right before your eyes and the impossible becomes possible. It’s just magical. It is also empowering because at the end of the day, participants see the result of a lot of small actions adding up to a big result.”

KaBOOM! addresses two of Hammond’s most pressing concerns: getting people to commit to the health and well-being of their own neighborhoods and giving kids a chance to play near their homes. He notes that playgrounds now compete with TV, movies, video games and cell phones, but that kids need to get outside and test their limits more.

“The playground is where kids learn to share, negotiate, take risks and form relationships,” he says. “Time on the playground also allows children to blow off steam so they can focus better in the classroom.”

Playgrounds serve to balance some of the more extreme child-related policies our culture has developed in recent decades. Since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001, the academic pressure schools place on children has escalated while time devoted to daily recess has shrunk significantly. We’ve also taken playground safety too far, according to Hammond, often out of fear of lawsuits.

“Accidents are an unfortunate fact of life,” he says, “but to lower every slide and jungle gym to a height that would interest only a toddler is doing our children a grave disservice.”

Hammond stresses that children need to take on vital challenges. Scrapes, bumps, and bruises teach them valuable lessons. At Mooseheart, he learned those lessons while hanging from trees. The school took in children from bad situations and made those situations less bad, Hammond explains, but it did not push children beyond their limits. They found those limits through play.

“Play should be part of our children’s days, every day,” Hammond says. “For that to happen, we must recognize that play is not a luxury, but indeed a necessity. And besides, it’s just plain fun.”

Darell is CEO and Founder, KaBOOM! www.kaboom.org @darellhammond

29

michael

harsh

Getting Jazzed About High-Tech Healthcare When Mike Harsh came to work as an electrical design engineer at GE Healthcare in 1979, he planned to stay for two years and move on to something else. That was 33 years ago, and he’s still “jazzed” about the place.

“It feels like I just started, and today’s my first day,” he says about his position as vice president and chief technology officer of GE Healthcare.

Harsh had several job opportunities upon graduating from Marquette University with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.

Most of them were in the aerospace industry out in California, but one was in the medical systems branch of GE. He recalls thinking to himself, “I can either design weapons delivery systems or I can design medical scanners that look inside bodies.”

He opted for bodies, and entered the historic design culture spawned when Thomas Edison created GE in 1878. What began with Edison’s light bulb in 1879 has continued with more than a century of groundbreaking innovations across numerous markets. Some of the most radical changes took place in medical imaging and diagnostics at GE, starting with the first X-ray machine in 1896, developing into computed tomography (CT) scanners and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines of the late 20th century, and culminating with the new frontiers of molecular medicine in the 21 st century.

“Edison just tried stuff,” Harsh says. “We’re not afraid to try stuff.”

The innovations Harsh has seen in just his own lifetime at GE Healthcare are remarkable.

When he first started as an engineer with the company, there were no personal computers.

He used a time-share computer and calculator, and he designed electronics systems on a big piece of paper with the help of ruler and template. In the medical world, patients were still undergoing exploratory surgery because medical imagery was still so rudimentary.

Now, Harsh notes, imaging and diagnostic technology perfected by GE makes it possible to detect medical conditions before they are incurable: “We have got to get out of the paradigm

of ‘see it and treat it.’ That means you’re waiting for something to happen before you treat it.”

One of GE’s latest technologies traces the molecular pathways of individual cells to build up a complete image of all the cells in a given region. Doctors and medical scientists are then able to gain deeper insights about what is going on in a particular area of the body because they are looking at more than just a random tissue sample with only the minutest piece of data.

A more accurate ability to see and understand what is happening in the body is changing what type of medical care is delivered and at what stage. This “precision medicine,” Harsh explains, is quickly taking shape on the medical horizon: “The exact form of treatment will be more specialized. Rather than having something that works on average on most people, it’s going to work very well on a few. We can target the therapy very specifically to the disease or to the patient’s genetic makeup.”

The fabulous technologies that Harsh is helping to shepherd through GE Healthcare are allowing the company to consider a broad array of questions about access to medical care. Ultrasound that fits into a shirt pocket changes the point of care in a way that dramatically disrupts current business models. Aging populations globally place enormous pressure on each country’s healthcare infrastructure and call for more community-based healthcare models. In many underdeveloped regions, where Harsh says healthcare is “extremely Darwinian,” the need to deliver high end medical equipment at a manageable cost is intense.

While GE Healthcare takes “large swings” in its research arm and in market development, Harsh points out that the company also puts tremendous effort into the design of its machines to improve user experience—

not for technicians, but for the people whose health lies in the balance.

GE’s MRI scanners allow patients to control the lighting, the background, and even the scent in the room as they undergo an imaging procedure. For children, GE designed backdrops that could be applied to diagnostic imaging machines that portrayed adventures decorated with story lines and characters.

Developing technologically superior medical equipment that is also “fun, intuitive, and delightful” is only one of the ongoing challenges that keeps Harsh coming back to work with gusto, even after 33 years.

Every day, he says, “I’m still doing new things.”

Michael is Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, GE Healthcare www.gehealthcare.com @mikeharshge

31

jeremy

heimans

Bringing Social Movements to Scale When he was in his 20s, Jeremy Heimans set aside his childhood dream of running for Prime Minister of Australia. He wasn’t giving up on making positive change in his country—he had simply found a more effective way to do it.

Heimans is the co-founder of Purpose, an organization aimed at creating “21st century movements” that deploy huge numbers of people online and on the ground to influence the political process. Purpose mobilizes efforts to fight cancer, eliminate nuclear weapons, and ensure the rights of LGBTQ individuals through sophisticated technological tools that create virtual communities around the globe.

When he was eight years old and still thinking about that run for Prime Minister, Heimans had tried to bring about political change the old-fashioned way: by creating documentaries, spearheading traditional media campaigns, and lobbying politicians.

But as he grew up, so did the Internet. Heimans was becoming disillusioned with what he calls “calcified 20th-century political institutions”, at the same time that technology was making it dramatically easier for people to get involved in politics. He realized that waiting to transform institutions from the inside was an ineffective waste of time, especially when other options were opening up.

Like a true prophet, he read the signs of the times and co-founded Australia’s GetUp!, a social movement that now has more members than all of the country’s political parties combined, and Avaaz.org, the world’s largest online political movement.

Heimans is now recognized by organizations such as the Ford Foundation and the World Economic Forum as a visionary who is changing the world through his savvy application of technology to politics.

“New behaviors emerge because technology makes them possible,” Heimans says. “It gives people opportunities to act on issues they care about, whereas a political party doesn’t give you those opportunities.”

And people are inclined to act on their ethical beliefs if they can do it in the moment or do it

easily. Heiman says technology gives people easy entry points to participate in movements. “The way people affiliate or ‘join’ in the 21st century tends to be more fluid than it was in the 20th century, and we need to adapt to that new reality,” he says.

“Part of our work is about giving people a chance to act at moments of crisis and opportunity,” Heimans explains.

“Things move so quickly these days.”

And action begets action. When individuals participate in a movement on the internet, their efforts become visible to others, which in itself generates more activity.

“Social proof is really a powerful dynamic in movement building,” Heimans says. “You see friends doing it and it makes acting more plausible. People know they are part of something bigger. Your individual action may not feel meaningful, but you know you’re part of a movement.”

Technology makes it possible for us to interact with our elected officials and hold them accountable in unprecedented ways. Gone are the days when signing a petition was the average citizen’s most typical political act outside the voting booth. Online social movements scale indefinitely, creating entry points even for people who are only weakly committed to a cause.

The challenge for an organization like Purpose is to keep people there once they are in. Heimans says that Purpose employs technological tools to coordinate large numbers of volunteers and keep them energized through powerful storytelling.

“Like all movements, people get tired,” Heimans says.

“We try to sustain people’s engagement, to take them on a journey. How do you move those people up and make them more active and committed over time? We engage people in interesting ways.”

Political involvement through technology is also engendering more face-to-face contact, Heimans says.

It is what gives some movements their “robustness”: “Online organizing actually facilitates more offline activity than would otherwise occur. The internet is an incredibly powerful tool to get people to find each other.”

It is also the tool that enabled Heimans to find himself, in a sense. He speculates that, without the technology that has enabled global social movements, he would have ended up in one of those calcified political institutions he once revered. But that was in a different political landscape, one that had no place for people like Heimans.

Not that they didn’t exist, he notes. It’s just that, “there were fewer of me, and we had less impact.”

Jeremy is Co-Founder and CEO, Purpose www.purpose.com @jeremyheimans

33

andrew

hessel

Genetic Engineering From a Laptop Bioengineer Andrew Hessel is on the hunt for scientific researchers who don’t want to just study life, but build it. Now that we can write genetic code, print DNA, and infuse it into the genomes of existing bacterial cells, where do we go?

“It’s a complete mind shift for researchers,” Hessel admits. “Scientists don’t make things per se; what they try to do is understand things that already exist.”

Today we have the ability to do genetic engineering from a laptop, and Hessel is trying to inform and inspire a new generation of scientists who are willing to grasp the lifetransforming potential of this powerful new tool.

The idea of engineering life artificially tends to conjure up images of unpredictable life forms that grow out of control, bringing harm and disease to the planet. But that’s the stuff of science fiction. According to Hessel, we should be more worried about electronic warfare and insidious hacking activities than synthetic life forms.

“I find computers far freakier than any living organism,” he says. “With most microbes, you wash your hands, bleach the counter, and they’re gone. But who’s going to turn off all the computers?”

Besides, biological information travels slowly, filtering through ecosystems, confronting at every step of the way the formidable human immune system and modern medical technologies that thwart its progress.

“To examine the flow of biological information, you start with the first person who catches a cold,” Hessel explains. “The spread of that new cold around the world takes months. That’s incredibly slow compared to a tweet, which can spread around the world nearly instantly.

Compared to electronic information, I don’t think biological information has a hope.”

Hessel thinks of biological information in computer terms. Bacteria are processors; viruses are software; genomes are operating systems. And most importantly, human beings

are programmers who create apps that add new features to existing genomes. “It doesn’t matter whether you engineer something or whether you evolve something,” he says. “You kind of end up at the same place.”

By programming living systems, Hessel suggests, we will reach into every single area where biology operates and change our planet. We will control the food supply, create new drugs, and build renewable fuels. Grass will spread the internet everywhere it grows.

This utopia is not so far away. Genetic engineering has brought us to a point where we can think about bypassing natural selection to create our own species in the environments we choose. Hessel calls it a “parallel biology,” one that allows us to mix and match different organisms to generate synthetic offshoots of the tree of life.

“It’s completely outside of the Darwinian philosophy of incremental change,” Hessel says. “We basically throw all the old rules out, and now we get to apply human needs to it. And that’s pretty cool.”

As Google satellites reveal, we have already transformed the face of the earth through our technological advancements. We just haven’t done it in the most intelligent fashion.

“We’re literally changing this entire planet by putting up buildings and creating gadgets with plastic and toxic materials,” Hessel says. “We’re doing it with stuff that isn’t very friendly to life. We’re putting living things to the periphery and we’re poisoning ourselves. I think we have to shift our thinking a little bit and start remembering that we’re living organisms, and we have dependence that involves all the other living organisms on this planet.”

Hessel is exuberant about the biological possibilities

that lie ahead. He says we should let fun and curiosity drive genetic research, not the narrow needs of markets. At the very least, we have to learn to think exponentially.

“If you think about taking 30 steps, you know exactly how far you’re going to go and where you’ll end up,” Hessel says. “But if you take 30 exponential steps, you’ve walked around the world over 10 times.” It’s a doubling factor that our brains can’t quite grasp because we are hardwired to conceptualize in linear fashion, moving steadily in one direction, rather than taking boundless leaps to wherever.”

“Everything’s changing except our thinking, which is the slowest thing,” Hessel says. “When it comes to the rate of change in technology, human beings are the limiting factor.”

Andrew is a Genomic Futurist and Distinguished Researcher, Autodesk, Inc. www.andrewhessel.com @andrewhessel

35

tony

hsieh

Zappos Happiness at Street Level Tony Hsieh likes to plan parties and see how the flow of energy works there. Now, he’s planning a city, and a huge audience is waiting to see what kind of fun shakes out.

As the CEO of Zappos.com, the online apparel and footwear company that generates a billion dollars in gross sales a year, Hsieh brings the party atmosphere to work to get everyone colliding, connecting and smiling.

“The more social interactions we have,” he points out, “the happier we are. The happier we are, the more money we make. And so on.”

The feel-good factor at Zappos.com has become famous, especially since the 2010 publication of Hsieh’s New York Times bestseller, Delivering Happiness, which describes the winning work environment he established at the company. Hsieh is more than willing to share his insights about building a progressive and upbeat corporate culture. And as Zappos.com looks to expand its physical facilities in Nevada, he’s taking his strategy to the streets.

In 2013, the company is transplanting itself from a facility 20 minutes outside The Strip to Downtown Las Vegas, which Hsieh is committed to transforming into a scintillating cultural hub. If all goes as planned, the idyllic cityscape that he has planned will be bathed in Zappos happiness.

Hsieh transformed Zappos.com into a billion dollar enterprise when he thought beyond shoes and made company culture the core of the business. He says Downtown Project (downtownproject.com) is the same concept, just at a different scale.

Hsieh notes that he was inspired by Edward L. Glaeser’s book, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier, which argues that the city is humanity’s greatest invention. He is architecting “the most communityfocused large city in the world in the place you’d probably expect it the least,” and has personally invested $350 million in the venture. Zappos.com will be right at the core of all the hustle and bustle.

The plans are utopic—coffee shops, grocery stores, creative communities, recreational facilities—all in close proximity in an urban location that needs revival.

Additional residential facilities have been slated for construction. The project is also injecting seed funds into small businesses, tech companies and the Las Vegas education system as incentives for people to relocate there.

“I live downtown, and I want to help make it a place where everything you need is within walking distance, to create an ecosystem that will attract and maintain more employees, and to invest in small businesses that create a sense of neighborhood and community,” Hsieh explains. “I want to open source what works and doesn’t work.”

Hsieh says his focus is on creating positive density that will maximize the number of serendipitous collisions among people right on the streets and in the cafes around the corner. The idea is to take the cultural strategies that built Zappos, apply them to downtown Las Vegas, bring in a whole new set of players, and watch innovation happen. Hsieh anticipates a “virtuous loop” through which the company will learn from random encounters with people who are out and about in the community.

“That’s how ideas come about—seemingly unrelated people or industries colliding,” Hsieh says. “We want to get that to happen more frequently. The whole move downtown is about having the community be part of our brand, and all of those things give new meaning to the company.”

Hsieh is not daunted by the scope of the project because he says that any redevelopment efforts will be a boon to the area. As he points out, “It’s pretty hard

to do worse than empty lots.” At the same time, he is eager to tap into the fun and quirky creative class that already exists in downtown Las Vegas. It fits well with Zappos culture, he says.

The unknown possibilities of planning a city have absorbed Hsieh’s attention and stepped up his legendary drive to build happy spaces.

“The blank canvas-ness of it is appealing because then you’re just restricted by your imagination,” Hsieh says. “Five years from now, people will turn around and say, ‘What the hell just happened here?’”

Tony is CEO, Zappos.com www.zappos.com www.downtownproject.com @zappos

37

saul

kaplan

Stirring Up the Magic at BIF For many BIF storytellers, the BIF Collaborative Innovation Summit boils down to one thing: Saul.

They speak of him with reverence and a deep appreciation for the way he “gets it.” His is the governing spirit that draws them to Rhode Island for a chance to luxuriate in the space of possibility he and Team BIF create for them every year.

Saul Kaplan, Chief Catalyst of the Business Innovation Factory and engaging host of the BIF-8 Summit, has a superior reputation as a noted facilitator of meaningful conversations about community and transformation, broadly defined. But Kaplan himself is quick to credit his BIF colleagues for consistently killing it with an incredible slate of storytellers that makes him “crazy proud” of each Summit.

When he is not scolding Team BIF on twitter for hogging the bandwidth at work (well, that was during the Olympics) or treating them to the occasional midweek Margarita, he says they are all engaging in thoughtful, extended conversations about preparation for the Summit and the exciting human-centered design work going on in the BIF Experience Labs.

“We’re all very opinionated, so we all have very strong ideas about the work we are doing and the mix of storytellers for every Collaborative Innovation Summit,” Kaplan says.

Naturally, the mix is different every year, which keeps Kaplan just where he does his best work—on a very steep learning curve. “When the curve starts to flatten out, I know it’s time to move on,” he says.

But Kaplan hasn’t had to worry about that since he founded BIF in 2005. After a long career in the corporate world and a move into the public sector to spark economic development in Rhode Island, he has discovered that the steep learning curve is right under our feet, in the towns and cities where our organizations take on life.

“Finding the fresh angle,” he says, “is a matter of reimagining not just business, but the way business inhabits its surrounding social system.”

“I spent 30 years thinking about innovation through the lens of the corporation, so I had every black and blue mark imaginable trying to be a change agent,” Kaplan says. “Now, for the first time, I was thinking about innovation through the lens of the community.”

The new perspective was a “real epiphany,” Kaplan says, because it enabled him to see “all the parts on the playing field.” Gradually, Rhode Island came to represent for him a space of pure potential: “I started to see the community as a platform for entrepreneurship and innovation, and I began to think about how we could turn our community into an innovation hotspot. The work we do at BIF came from that. I think it’s the work I’ve been prepared to do my entire career, my entire life.”

Kaplan says innovation is often a matter of reassembling parts to deliver value more efficiently. And yet, while he advocates suppleness in today’s business climate, he has recently engaged in a very traditional activity with a decidedly fixed result: he has written a book—hard copy, pages, print, and cover. It’s the real deal.

“The irony of publishing a book right at the peak of disruption in the publishing industry has not escaped me,” he admits.

The book itself, The Business Model Innovation Factory: How to Stay Relevant When the World is Changing, may be a permanent physical artifact. But it is also one of the moving parts that now shifts into a different position in Kaplan’s innovation cosmos. He doesn’t see the book as the last word on business model experimentation. He sees it as an opportunity for discussion.

“I enjoyed, in some kind of sadistic way, the challenge of locking myself in a room and writing a book,” he says, “but I completely enjoy being out talking about it now,

more than I did writing it.”

Sharing stories and connections is ultimately what drives the BIF Summit. Storytellers spin their yarns, adrenalin flows through the audience, and then—the random collisions of unusual suspects begins. Kaplan insists that the event remain as unstructured as possible to protect that sacred time between stories when the collisions take off.

“We resist every temptation to over-engineer it. And when someone asks, ‘Why isn’t the summit bigger?’

I say no. Intimacy is important. We’re not going to change that.”

Before each Summit, Kaplan reminds the storytellers that it’s not all about them—it’s about the magic they stir up. But when that magic happens, everyone knows the secret potion came from BIF.

Saul is Founder and Chief Catalyst, Business Innovation Factory @skap5

39

valdis

krebs

Getting Technology and Sociology to Match Social 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.

In a “sameness network,” lots of dots and criss-crossing lines indicate a tightly-knit group

of well-connected 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 is Founder, Chief Scientist, orgnet.com www.orgnet.com @valdiskrebs

41

lara

lee

Digging for the Future Lara Lee speaks Mandarin, rides a Harley, and has three Ivy League degrees. She’s lived around the world, from San Francisco to Singapore, and has been named a Master of Innovation by Businessweek magazine. But for all her diverse talents, she probably gains the most traction in her career by knowing “where to dig.”

As the Chief Innovation and Operating Officer of Continuum, a global design and innovation consultancy headquartered in Boston, Lee cannot afford to rely on superficial readings of big data, focus groups or piles of market research to reposition her clients. Delivering organic growth to companies that offer everything from financial services, to healthcare, to global consumer package goods, means finding a patch of common ground.

At Continuum, Lee dives through all the intricacies that make a business go to find where it touches people personally. That means knowing how to identify the basic human motivations that drive behavior.

She proved that she knew where to dig when she worked for the Harley-Davidson Motor Company for 15 years. When she started with the organization in 1993, the customer base was perceived as almost exclusively white, male — and getting older.

By concentrating on new geographic and demographic markets, Lee helped engineer a market expansion that reached out to riders who were younger, more diverse, and female.

During her tenure at Harley-Davidson, the company boosted annual revenues from under $1 billion to nearly $6 billion.

“It was great working with a storied brand and helping it become meaningful to new audiences,” Lee says of the motorcycle company’s multiple moves into unchartered territory.

Knowing How to Dig The secret to translating a brand across cultures, according to Lee, is maintaining its

essence while connecting it to fresh populations. Doing so requires a deep understanding of why the brand appeals to a certain audience in the first place. It’s about getting to what ethnographers call a “thick description”— understanding not just what people do, but why.

Understanding the why is something that requires extended observation, prolonged contact, and openended conversations. Figuring out what makes people tick is not something that can be done through synthesizing data, Lee notes. “We have more data at our disposal than ever before, but crunching data from social media is just playing back what people are already talking about.”

She says the quick responses people give when they “like” something on Facebook may indicate past preferences, but they do not offer insights about how people’s thinking is evolving. They tell us what’s trending, but they don’t outline a pathway for future innovation.

They are more about current feelings or emotions than the deeper values that drive behavior.

“If you’re only paying attention to sentiment, you’re getting a very superficial understanding,” Lee says. “Most people don’t think about why they do what they do. We don’t tend to live our lives with that level of awareness.”

“Much of the work we’re doing today is humanizing complex systems,” she says. “That could be as messy as reinventing banking to make it more customer centered, or as seemingly simple as streamlining the process of buying an engagement ring.”

Humanizing the research process at Continuum sometimes entails going out to eat with a bunch of Gen Yers and seeing what’s in their refrigerator. Or it means sitting in a one-room apartment in Shanghai with three generations of a family to understand new mothers and

their changing values when it comes to raising their children. Or it can even require riding on the back of a milk truck in Bangalore at 4 a.m.

Even when technology makes it easy to gather big data fast, Lee says the hands-on, thick description approach to research is the gold standard when it comes to designing impactful innovation.

Digging for Success “Business in general seems to toggle back and forth between being people and human-centered to being tech and science-centered,” she points out. “It’s not a new trend, but rather an ebb and flow. Right now, we’re in a mode where there’s intense pressure to find new growth in a persistently down global economy. And there’s a feeling that human-centered solutions are more long-range in nature.”

But that’s a misperception, according to Lee. “The human-centered approach is what helps you understand what matters to people, both now and into the future, and allows you to get your innovation successfully into the market.”

The key to success is not only knowing where or how to dig, but understanding what to do with the understanding once you’ve unearthed it.

Lara is Chief Innovation and Operating Officer, Continuum

43

jeff

Lieberman

Exploring the Mind-Universe Continuum The human mind is constantly at work building conceptual models of what it wants to understand. Jeff Lieberman says it shouldn’t always try so hard. If the mind spent more time in contemplation, it might free itself of the need to categorize, theorize, and order the world around it.

Contemplation, he says, is “about sitting with something that is beyond, knowing it’s beyond— it’s not about thinking about something, it’s just being with it.”

Drawing on his four degrees from MIT—in mathematics, physics, engineering, and media arts and sciences—Lieberman has been investigating our human tendency to classify everything in terms of form and function. We place great importance on this process of cataloguing. But the universe, he notes, is really just a series of artificial separations that have evolved since the Big Bang.

It’s all very scientific, he explains. “If you go back billions of years and look at this planet, it’s just a bunch of rocks and debris that have bumped up against each other and stuck together because of gravity. Once those things on the planet simmer for years and years, we start to get life forms that look like independent things. We are aware that we are this body, on this planet.

But when you look from a really far view, you see that it’s all an artificial separation.”

Lieberman acknowledges that even the rocks and debris in his analogy are only an approximation of something far more and interconnected. His point about human evolution is that we originated as random, undifferentiated matter that took a specific form and developed self-awareness. In that sense, we are part of a continuum, an interconnected single entity.

“When we back up from evolution, we see human beings as just one step in a gigantic, cosmic chain, not the be all and end all. Perceptions in the mind’s eye separate nature into pluses and minuses, black and white. Underneath that is this single thing. In physics, we call that energy.”

Labeling that single thing as energy may satisfy the mind’s need to categorize, but it still does not generate a direct experience of the interconnection that pervades the universe. We feel

a primordial sense of this interconnection just before waking up, prior to our first moment of consciousness.

Lieberman explains: “You have no personality when you are sleeping, no sense of time. There’s something about that experience that is very, very deep, very old, that has nothing to do with your personality.”

And then we wake, and the first sense of separation seeps into our minds. With it comes self-created suffering that Lieberman notes, isn’t required in the experience of life. “The more we define ourselves, the more we define a boundary to ourselves.”

Lieberman tests his theory about the constraining effects of false categories by resisting them in his own intellectual and creative life. He composes music, makes technological sculptures, and hosts the Discovery Channel’s Time Warp. He inhabits the type of undefined, crossover space that has become the new locus of authenticity. From here, he brings people into an emotional and mystical connection with science and the universe.

If we ever had such a connection, we seem to have lost it. We are so used to technology, for example, that we are less and less mystified by it. As a result, Lieberman says that we don’t see it as a phase in our own evolution, as part of the continuum that contributes to the expansion of consciousness. “Technology accelerates the transfer of information,” he explains. “That’s going to further our tendencies to think more and more on deeply conceptual levels.”

While Lieberman welcomes such high order thought, he cautions us that the tool of the mind can spin out of control. “It can’t stop for 15 seconds—we used to not be able to think in words ever, but now there are some things about our experience that we are not even

noticing because we are thinking all the time.”

Contemplation, Lieberman says, can release us from the self-created bubbles that separate us from life itself. Even a more thoughtful application of technology may help us to navigate a path we haven’t even thought of yet.

Jeff is a Sculptor, Musician, Roboticist, and Host, Discovery Channel’s Time Warp

45

nicholas

lowinger

Nothing Like a New Pair of Sneakers Since he was in second grade, Nicholas Lowinger has wanted to be an attorney. He is now in ninth grade and still holding onto that dream, but in the meantime, he’s gotten sidetracked with another endeavor. Two and a half years ago, he started his own nonprofit organization and has been meeting the demands of an expanding entrepreneurial enterprise that to date has raised over $250,000 in monetary and footwear donations.

This enterprise is called the Gotta Have Sole Foundation, a charitable venture that provides new footwear for children in homeless shelters.

What began as a service project for Nicholas’s Bar Mitzvah in seventh grade, originally met the needs of a few shelters in the Rhode Island area where he lives. Today, it is a smooth-running operation driven by the Lowinger family and a team of motivated volunteers who fill orders from homeless shelters across the US within two to three days of receiving requests.

“We donate the shoes as quickly as we can,” Nicholas says. “When we get an order, generally that day we will go into our warehouse—which is our garage—and find the shoe sizes that we need.

Most requests are for sneakers, but in the winter, Gotta Have Sole tries to give out boots as well. In the spring and summer, they toss in flip flops if they can. The whole point, to Nicholas, is to give a child his or her own shoes, not a secondhand pair that has been molded to the shape of someone else’s foot. He wants kids to have decent footwear—and, he wants them to feel good.

“When you get something new, it’s great,” he says. “Something you can call your own.”

Through summer 2011, Gotta Have Sole had donated shoes to 900 children, primarily throughout RI and MA. By August 2012, the foundation gave footwear to 5,300 children in 11 states. The demand has become so heavy that the all-volunteer organization is now running out of space in the Lowinger garage and is looking to hire paid workers, if they can find funding

to support this.

As the nonprofit grows, Nicholas is acquiring unusual skills for someone his age. He knows how to keep paperwork and finances organized—inventories, orders, grant requests, and donations. He’s become skilled at dealing with business people who are making corporate donations of money or shoes.

“I try to be as professional as I can because I’m the CEO of the organization,” he says. “I don’t really know how to explain it—I’ve just gotten used to talking to people who are adults. It really doesn’t phase me.”

Gotta Have Sole publicizes its efforts through its website, flier campaigns, videos created by volunteer college students, and various social media outlets. But occasionally, Nicholas has to do some old-fashioned public speaking to explain exactly what he does and what the organization needs. It’s a tall order for a 14-year old, but he says experience has made him tough: “If I ever had any shyness about me, it’s pretty much all been dealt with, I guess. Even if I was shy, the need for helping these homeless children is much more important than my own self.”

One of the most enduring lessons Nicholas has learned about business, however, did not come directly through experience, but from his grandfather who was a distributor of stationery products throughout Massachusetts. His grandfather taught him never to forget a simple act of customer courtesy: writing thankyou notes.

“We send thank-you letters for every donation as quickly as we can,” Nicholas says. For the same reason that he wants to give children shoes of their own, he makes every effort to personally respond to the generous donors who are keeping so many kids running around in

a good pair of sneakers—he wants donors to feel good.

Planning for the future of Gotta Have Sole, Nicholas says the nonprofit’s board is considering an expansion into donations of adult shoes. And until they run out of room in the family garage, he will continue to fill shoe orders when he comes home from school. But he hasn’t forgotten his long-term career goal.

“I still want to go to law school,” he says, “but I’d like to keep this going as long as I can because there’s still going to be the need.”

Nicholas is Founder, Gotta Have Sole, Inc. www.gottahavesole.org www.facebook.com/GottaHaveSoleFoundation @gottahavesole

47

david

macaulay

Insistent Curiosity: A Necessary Madness David Macaulay wants to know how things work. Cathedrals, castles, the human body.

Any subject matter will do as long as it feeds into his expansive and insistent curiosity.

To figure things out, Macaulay draws pictures.

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

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

For 40 years, Macaulay has been drawing to question and clarify what he knows. The product of all this insistent curiosity is more than two dozen children’s books that explain through words and pictures how things are built, how they work, how they come together, and how they are taken apart. His talents as an author and illustrator have earned him numerous awards, including the distinguished MacArthur Fellowship and a Caldecott Medal for his book Black and White (1990).

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

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

Macaulay watched as things that were put together at the table went on to serve a practical purpose in his home and neighborhood. Witnessing people at work—making and fixing things— is too rare an experience nowadays, he says. And the more complex everyday objects become, the more we lose sight of how things work or what they mean.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David is a Bestselling Author and Illustrator of The Way We Work and The New Way Things Work

49

simon

majumdar

From Plate to Globe: Savoring the World’s Cuisine Simon Majumdar’s passion for food has made him famous, but it’s not all about the food for him. It’s about the people and noticing the small stuff.

As an author of two food-travel memoirs, the co-creator of a hugely successful food blog, and a popular judge on The Food Network’s Iron Chef America, Majumdar’s life has taken on a glamorous sheen of late. Eight years ago, this half-Bengali Brit left a 20-year career in publishing to pursue an eccentric fantasy to “go everywhere, eat everything.” Since then, he’s been to over 71 countries, made friends all over the world and earned a name for himself as the food critic who writes like a dream and eats like a pig.

“All of these things are kind of happenstance, and you’ve got to be good at what you do,” Majumdar says of his second-career successes. But he attributes most of these fortuitous occurrences to his genuine interest in other people, and the excitement he exudes over the little things they take for granted in their own cuisine.

“The way I look at it is that I’m traveling around the world for food—and to meet people,” Majumdar says. “People like talking to me, particularly when we start talking about food.” And, because he is “well brought-up,” he says, “I always stop to have a proper conversation.”

The sad irony behind Majumdar’s twin loves of food and people is that he doesn’t get invited out to dinner much anymore. His wife tells him their friends worry that he will be critical of the meals they prepare. It’s true that he relishes exotic cuisine and an impressive presentation that gets the taste buds in gear. He insists, though, that he is always grateful when someone takes the time to cook for him.

He may be an intimidating Iron Chef America judge, but he’s not a food snob.

At home, Majumdar works in a simple galley kitchen and does most of his cooking with a

solid 10-inch pan that he uses “for just about everything.”

He relies on three good knives, a Dutch oven, and an excellent pair of poultry shears.

His refrigerator and pantry are stocked with the essential ingredients of the Bengali food he grew up on— onions, garlic, chilies, a range of hot sauces, limes, lemons, carrots—and some good chicken stock to infuse flavors.

There’s a lot of white wine on standby in the Majumdar kitchen, and he always, always has milk. “Because I’m English,” he explains, “and if I don’t have two to three cups of tea a day, I’m likely to commit bloody murder on someone.”

He loves leftovers, Kansas City barbeque, the sweetness of corn and the fascinating varieties of the potato. He finds a “magical” pleasure in the unassuming task of chopping tomato and onion and putting it into an alchemic process. Butchering and grinding a big joint of meat is a sort of metaphysical undertaking for him: “There’s almost a kind of primal thing about it, but after you’ve finished, you feel so much more connected to everything you’re doing.”

Majumdar laments that big farming, particularly in the US, has alienated us from the means of our food.

Massive agricultural corporations con us into thinking that good food should be cheap, served in huge amounts and loaded with salt and sugar. “We’ve forgotten how to feast,” he says. “We’ve learned how to gorge.”

As a result, Majumdar says, we forget that everything on our plate is there for a reason. The gastronomical layers that created delicious hodge-podge cuisines in places like New Orleans tell stories of immigration, slavery and conquest. Today’s street food, now made fashionable by social media and Instagram, originated in the chuckwagons that headed westward after the Civil

War and evolved into the “roach coaches” that feed industrial park and construction site workers.

Majumdar eats it all up, every historical and savory bite. To him, food is always a celebration, never a chore. But it’s also part of his special charm that he keeps things real. He cautions celebrity chefs who get caught up in their fame: “Never forget you’re just making someone’s dinner. It’s transitory. It’s going to disappear in 20 minutes.”

Simon is an Author, Food Writer and Broadcaster www.simonmajumdar.com @simonmajumdar

51

carne

ross

Let The People Talk Carne Ross uses the knowledge and connections he gained as a career diplomat in the UK to help fledgling states make inroads into the top circles of international power. He literally walks them through the halls of the United Nations to help give them a physical presence before the high-ranking diplomats, who typically decide on their fates without ever consulting them.

Some of the countries he helps do not have official “state” status or voting rights at the UN, and therefore cannot make their voices heard in meetings that profoundly affect them. Ross has worked to open up these meetings so that the most marginalized countries can speak for themselves.

It is one of many incremental steps he is making to promote greater inclusiveness in international politics through Independent Diplomat, a nonprofit diplomatic advisory group Ross founded after resigning from his post in the UK in 2004.

In his efforts to make diplomacy more transparent, Ross has discovered that large groups of people do not need a charismatic leader to articulate their issues. It is the subject of his new book, The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century, where he argues that we don’t even need government.

“In the ideal world, there would be none,” Ross says. “In the real world, it should be doing everything it can to enable people to make decisions about their own lives. Instead, it does the opposite.”

Ross proposes what he calls a gentle kind of anarchism. That idea can be unsettling for some, especially in the US, where the Constitution was constructed to prevent what the Founders called the “tyranny of the majority.” But Ross notes that Constitutional safeguards put in place over 200 years ago to prevent this perceived danger have been ineffectual, anyway.

“We’ve constructed a system that guarantees that we live permanently in a tyranny of the

majority,” he says. “That danger has not been dealt with; in fact, it’s been magnified.”

In general, Ross is not quick to harken back to early modern political philosophy for timeless models of civic perfection. Hobbes may have been an alarmist when he suggested that, without government, we would tear each other apart. Even the experimental democracy set up by American colonists in 1787 cannot possibly correspond to the reality of the United States in 2012.

“The political circumstances in early America were very different from what they are now,” Ross says. “There were smaller groups of people, government was much more local. And yet, we take their prognostications about how government should work as irrefutable and eternal.”

Today, democracy is in a crisis, according to Ross.

People are questioning it, becoming more and more frustrated with it. It is not solving their problems, and they are taking a long, skeptical look at the status quo.

“I think national political institutions are in a death spiral,” Ross says. “They will not exist in their present forms in a hundred years. Something is coming which is much more consonant with what we have today.”

And that something may be the leaderless revolution Ross sees on the horizon. Our tendency to celebrate the history of great men who saved humanity is misleading as an historical truth, he says, and has only made people feel disempowered. But when people actively deliberate on their own behalf, they are more committed to resolving problems, less arbitrary in their decision-making.

“It’s always more powerful to meet people and have sincere conversations or negotiations with them,” he explains. “You end up with much more agreement than

you actually thought. Detached politics is causing more conflict because people are able to depict the other side as devilish and stupid.”

Removed from the bureaucracy and obfuscation he encountered in British diplomacy, Ross has become convinced that political action is dangerous when it devolves into a distant activity done by others. In reality, every action—or inaction—has political consequences.

“To me, politics is what you do every day,” he says.

“But you can’t wait. You have to get on with it.”

Carne is Founder and Director, Independent Diplomat www.independentdiplomat.org @carneross

53

hillary

salmons

Middle School Angst: No Such Thing Here Ah, those middle school years. If we could all get in touch with our inner pre-adolescent personality, we might have a deeper understanding of who we are now.

Hillary Salmons thinks so, anyway. As Executive Director of the Providence After School Alliance (PASA), a progressive afterschool program for middle school students in Providence, R.I., Salmons has not forgotten her own “awkward” passage through this stage of life. And yet, she cherishes it.

When she was in middle school, Salmons was the oldest of five children and always in charge of making sure everyone had fun without getting hurt. Even at that early stage, her talents leaned in the direction of community organization. She put on puppet shows and did fundraisers.

Once, she held a carnival to raise money for her friend’s father, a fireman whose department was in dire need of an additional firetruck. “So I said, ‘Patty, let’s have a carnival and raise money for your father so they can buy a new truck.’ We raised $50. I’ve been doing this stuff all my life.”

Salmons made the most of her middle school years, but she knows it’s not easy. Surging hormones and powerful emotions do battle every day with the brain’s natural urge to think critically. “It’s the most trying time of human development,” she notes. “It’s equivalent to learning how to walk and talk.”

But there are some highly positive attributes associated with this age. The middle schooler, according to Salmons, is “wise and honest, high energy, a very social beast.”

Middle schoolers are thinking for the first time about how they will function in a world beyond their families. They are beginning to put their dreams into action. They join clubs, become Eagle Scouts, build forts, dress up, and spin out imaginary worlds in which they are the primary players. These activities often set the stage for what comes later.

“It’s amazing how much those experiences inform our passions today,” Salmons says.

Salmons’ own middle school penchant for community action marked the start of a path that led her to PASA. She’s still organizing carnivals, only now they are put on for middle schoolers in Providence who would otherwise be sitting home in front of a TV, or out in the streets looking for something to do. She’s figured out a way to provide them with activities that keep them safe while tapping into their intense curiosity with PASA’s AfterZone, an extensive potpourri of creative, intellectual, and physical activities provided by 80 different community partners in Providence.

Salmons says she’s a “systems thinker,” an experiential learner who has a knack for pulling people together: “I’m not an idea person. I see solutions in other people’s work. I’m curious about how people solve problems.”

Years ago, when she was living in Japan with her investment banker husband, she found herself gravitating away from the gated atmosphere of the American community, and toward the European expatriates who held together so effortlessly as a group.

“We would gather around the field hockey field or watch a soccer game,” she recalls. “Someone would play bagpipes and we’d all share in a picnic lunch.

There would be three-legged races. We did sports with our kids.”

In a way, Salmons says, the experience she had in Japan was like living in a small village where casual rituals build community. It is the effect she shoots for with the AfterZone, which combines “chill time” and reading with some structured learning. The point is to give kids a safe place to stretch themselves and have fun.

But it’s tough to approximate the village life Salmons grew up with or the one she experienced with her European friends in Japan. “We have a more transient

society, and transience is a huge problem,” she notes.

All the more reason, in her mind, to apply systems thinking to community solutions that pull people together. She did it with her carnivals. She did it in Japan. She’s doing it in Providence, a city she loves, because “it has all the ingredients.” At the same time, she’s nurturing the passions of today’s middle schoolers who will soon be the ones finding the solutions.

Hillary is Executive Director, Providence After School Alliance www.mypasa.org @mypasa

55

nancy m.

schlichting

Perfecting the Hospital Experience Hospitals are scary places. Nancy Schlichting, CEO of Henry Ford Health Systems (HFHS) in Detroit, has known this since she spent a week in the hospital when she was a little girl. Her grandmother had just died and she was feeling frightened and unsettled. When evening came around, she was completely alone because there was no visitation—not even for parents.

The rules were rigid and the nurses enforced them with callous formality.

When Schlichting was 9, her mother was hospitalized for a month with a serious illness.

None of the four children in the family were permitted to visit her. Schlichting said she was filled with anxiety during this time and had a terrible year in school. When her mother finally returned home and walked through the door, she had lost so much weight that Schlichting’s little sister didn’t even recognize her and ran the other way.

These negative experiences left a powerful impression on Schlichting. When she was still a child, she used to pretend that she worked in a hospital far nicer than the ones she had known.

She had a nurse’s uniform and a doctor’s kit, and in the imaginary world she crafted, all of her patients were treated with dignity and compassion.

“From the youngest of ages, I had it in my head that I could do it better, and that I could make a difference in the care of the patients,” Schlichting says.

When Schlichting started her undergraduate degree at Duke University, however, she was dismayed to realize that she “didn’t have the stomach” for the clinical side of medicine. But she then encountered something called “health policy” and learned that there was a business end of hospital care, that she could drive healthcare change from a place she had never known existed.

“I discovered that it was exactly what I wanted to do,” she recalls. “This light bulb went on and I was so thrilled. I realized that there are people who look at the whole business of the hospital.”

Bringing business to healthcare is Schlichting’s unique and substantial talent. She is particularly lauded for engineering a massive financial turnaround of HFHS in 2003. And the endless list of community awards she has received from diverse organizations attests to the broad impact she has made as a healthcare professional.

Schlichting emphasizes that the community lies at the core of every hospital’s mission. “Hospitals exist for the benefit of the community, and in almost every case, were developed by people who believe in the need for healthcare,” she says.

Her capacity for bringing the healthcare community together is so well known that she was once asked to mediate labor difficulties in the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. She makes music out of potentially adversarial situations by recognizing when someone else has a better idea and by identifying shared goals.

“You have to have some common ground, and I always try to find the common ground—which is usually immense,” she says.

Of course, Schlichting always considers patients and their families to be the most important critics of the healthcare provided by HFHS. They are experiencing the hospital firsthand and their word-of-mouth publicity can make or break its reputation. “Every transaction, every interaction, every aspect of what we do is constantly evaluated and tested by those individuals,” she says.

“Sometimes we can do the most miraculous surgery and screw it up in the valet parking or the billing.”

Schlichting’s passionate attention to each caring detail in the delivery of healthcare has resulted in the 2009 opening of the first hospital HFHS has built since 1915. Located on a 160-acre campus in West Bloomfield, Michigan, this fabulous, $360 million facility

has luxury hotel amenities that promote health in mind and body. Patients say the atmosphere is quiet.

Superior cuisine, a day spa, a weekly indoor farmer’s market, a demonstration kitchen, and an atrium filled with live plantings and curved paths edged in cobblestone, make this a community space as well as a hospital. In these open and peaceful surroundings, hospital administrators notice that patients actually seem relaxed.

The new hospital is a triumph for healthcare, but not exactly a surprise, given Schlichting’s higher purpose.

It is a fitting expression of the better world of patient care that she first imagined as a child.

Nancy is Chief Executive Officer, Henry Ford Health System www.henryford.com

57

susan

schuman

Touching the Forgotten Middle Transforming a large organization calls for a sweeping strategy and an effective entry point. Susan Schuman, CEO and partner of SYPartners, has long known that the best place to start the process is with the individual.

That’s where big impact happens, she says.

After 20 years of helping CEOs and leadership teams navigate significant transformations at companies such as IBM, Starbucks, and Ann Inc., SYPartners has gathered some wisdom about how individual people contribute to a thriving organization. To share that wisdom with a wider audience, the San Francisco and New York-based consulting firm last year created a sister company called Unstuck, a mentorship network that brings transformational strategies to everyday people.

The hallmark of the new company is an iPad app that provides users with in-the-moment solutions to help them get “unstuck” from the little habits that hold them back. The app offers more than just personal development content, Schuman points out, because it’s not enough to know why you might be caught in a state of inertia—it’s also important to know how to get out of it.

The Unstuck app delivers productivity tools that assist users in working out some of the kinks in their daily routines—things that block output. Unstuck suggests a more productive system and breaks it down into bite-sized pieces to be tackled one at a time.

The app begins with the premise that getting stuck is not a bad thing—it’s simply what happens to people in life, Schuman says. When we feel incapable of moving forward, we have an opportunity to identify places where we need to grow or change.

“In your pursuit of getting better,” she says, “you’re going to get stuck all along the way. Life is a series of movements to get unstuck.”

Developing the app has led Schuman to think more deeply about the way stuck individuals translate into stuck teams. Conversely, productive and creative individuals make up the great teams that build strong, resilient companies.

Schuman is now spearheading another new enterprise called Teamworks, a host of collaborative tools that helps groups function more efficiently. She says people love to work in teams and to feel as if they are contributing to something bigger than themselves.

“People come to companies for more than just a paycheck—they really do,” Schuman says. “They actually want to understand the purpose of the company. That’s why they do what they do every day.”

Being part of a well-functioning team is central to maintaining a sense of mission, according to Schuman, but people don’t always know how to go about it. It isn’t a process that either happens or it doesn’t. “Great teams don’t come about by chance,” she points out. “They work hard at coming together.”

The Teamworks suite of tools expands the cooperative space where people can connect in an organization.

Schuman notes that there are multiple places where this can happen, both online and offline. The idea is to create an experience of internal collaboration that will ultimately drive transformation at scale.

The power of the Teamworks approach is that it reaches into the largest and often most understated population of individuals in a company—the “forgotten middle,” according to Schuman. That is where the lion’s share of people work day in and day out.

“Look at that whole group of people who sit within the middle of an organization. They’re just low enough that they don’t always have access to the things they need, but they’re responsible for carrying out really essential work.” she says. “They all want to be better, they want to know that what they’re doing is really driving a higher purpose. What would happen if we reignited that group, gave them a set of tools that would allow them to be better together?”

Touching that forgotten middle means helping them maximize cooperation and efficiency in the everyday spaces where they interact. This frees them up to see some purpose in what they do.

It can be purpose with a little “p,” she says. But it is a series of little p’s that keep people working together to make their organizations great: “If everybody has a shared belief about what they’re doing and where the company is going, then the company can go and do great things.”

Susan is CEO and Partner, SYPartners www.sypartners.com @susansyp

59

rachel

shuster

Mobilizing Youth to Like Community Service If you want to get something big done, bring your friends along. That’s what 16-year-old Rachel Shuster does when she takes on service projects in her hometown of Dix Hills, Long Island. This honors student is also involved in some typical extracurricular activities—playing tennis, hanging out with friends, managing the website of the school newspaper. But her hobby, she says, is community service.

She’s been doing little bits of it all her life, taking a cue from her mother, Dina Shuster, who brought her daughter to soup kitchens and encouraged her to donate her old clothes to charity. Rachel says she has a “charitable family” that is always doing things for the community. She has continued the family tradition, but now she takes her peers along for the ride.

“Why do it alone when I can make it more rewarding to do it with my friends?” she asks.

Over five years ago, Rachel started a local chapter of Kids Care Club, a program of generationOn, which mobilizes youth to take action in their communities. She says the club provides a community service platform that appeals to her. It isn’t run by a religious organization, the Scouts, or adults. “I wanted to find a way for kids to be planning projects and events on their own,” she says. “Kids, when they join together, can have a real impact and effect change”.

While the group effort is so important to the success of Kids Care Club, Rachel says it is also important to have one point person at the head of any project. She considers herself a strong leader and has learned that there is a “balance that you have to find between being a boss and being a friend in order to put together a successful event.”

Through her Kids Care Club, Rachel has shown her friends that engaging in service projects not only makes them feel great but has a valuable impact. To deepen their commitment, she has created an executive board. They decide on projects through a combination of brainstorming, online research, and networking. Local community leaders meet with the club to pitch the needs of their organizations. Then the club votes.

Her events span from teaching at Head Start programs, cooking for residents of the Ronald McDonald house, to local area clean-ups. Sometimes the projects are fundraisers, such as a bowling night her Kids Care Club organized last year to fund a playground for the Association for Children with Down Syndrome. Events such as these, she says, raise both money and awareness, especially among younger people who are taking their first steps toward volunteering.

That is why she thinks Facebook and twitter are “really great tools.” They spread the word in a way that appeals to a younger generation. “Let’s say we were back in the day,” she proposes. “Advertising for a service project might be on a piece of paper in black ink. Facebook is big, colorful and reaches a lot of youth as well as adults. People are circulating the information, ‘liking’ it, and seeing what others are doing. This encourages attendance, participation and disseminates the message.”

One of the most rewarding events Rachel and her Kids Care Club have organized was a carnival for the children at a homeless shelter. They had games and snow cones and face painting. She describes the event as “intimate” in both size and feel. One little girl told her that the carnival had been the best day of her life. “That’s just crazy, that this small carnival in the small backyard of a homeless shelter was that big of a deal to them,” Rachel says. “It had a huge affect on these kids’ lives.”

No matter what the project is, Rachel has found that simply listening to people can be a powerful form of community service. She has interviewed Vietnam veterans to document their experiences. She has gone into nursing homes to sit and chat with residents.

“One of the cool things about working with the elderly

is that you get to hear what they have to say,” she explains. “It is so interesting to listen to them tell about their life stories. It makes them feel good to know that there are people that want to listen, especially kids.

You gain something as a person by listening to these people talk to you about their hobbies as a child or their families. I’m talking about it now and getting the chills.”

Rachel is not sure if she will be a social entrepreneur forever. But for now, she is satisfying a need in her community by mobilizing its most energetic and optimistic demographic. “Youth have a voice, youth can make a difference in doing service in the world,” she says.

Rachel is Founder, Kids Care Club HHH www.generationon.org @kidscarehhh

61

jeffrey m.

sparr

Peace of Mind, Love and the Health Benefits of Art The man in the fedora appears only on canvas. With a few, quick brush strokes, he is suddenly present, exuding his easy charm. He is the alter ego through which Jeffrey Sparr expresses his smooth and confident side. He is the “peace man,” as Sparr calls him, the one who gets the conversation going on a topic that many people approach with hesitation.

That topic is mental illness, and the man in the fedora acts as the symbolic ambassador of PeaceLove Studios in Pawtucket, R.I., a community of mental health advocates who believe in the power of art to heal the worried mind.

Co-founded by Sparr in 2009, PeaceLove offers expressive arts programming and community activities that foster acceptance of people with mental illness. Through painting, visual journaling, crafts, storytelling, and other artistic media, the organization builds an imaginative space that nurtures peace of mind.

Just as the LiveStrong bracelet has generated widespread support and awareness for people with cancer, PeaceLove hopes to do the same for an illness that affects one quarter of the population.

“When you’re talking about mental illness, you’re talking about something that’s blind and invisible and misunderstood—that’s a devastating combination,” Sparr says. “No one has been able to build anything that 26 percent of the population can really get behind as a positive symbol for mental health.”

More than 20 years ago, Sparr was the captain of the Ohio State University tennis team when he began to manifest symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder. Today, he is a family man who has enjoyed a successful career in the textile business and started his own marketing and management company. And, every day, he feels the impact of an illness that can fill even the smallest moments of life with intense, inexplicable worry.

Sparr has managed his symptoms in part by using some familiar practices from the business world: “Just like business people who need a strategic plan, I have to have a strategic plan for my every day.”

Sixteen years ago, he discovered painting as a creative “artlet” that provided a temporary release from the invasive symptoms of OCD. “The artist part of me came out of nowhere,” he says. “It’s taken me into a whole new world. One of the things about the creation of art is that you get lost in it.”

When he paints, Sparr uses foam brushes, brash strokes, and bold colors. He works quickly. He doesn’t paint faces. Pouring his energies onto the canvas, his symptoms disappear for a moment, and he is in a zone, experiencing the quietude of his own mind. He is the man in the fedora: cool, strong, and self-assured. “I’m the peace man,” he says. “It’s like a Superman thing.”

And like Superman, he wanted to do something good with his newfound power by extending the pure benefits of art therapy to others with mental illness. Friends encouraged him to embrace this project by combining some of his most distinctive traits—his business acumen, his artistic inclination, and his experience having OCD— and turning them into a winning formula for mental health advocacy.

PeaceLove is a dual entity: a non-profit arm that provides free programming for a diverse demographic and a for-profit segment that builds the brand. “I knew that if we could run a for-profit business, that was our assurance that PeaceLove would be sustainable,” he says. “We could attract the best people and make a long-term investment.”

This dedicated effort to keep PeaceLove alive for the long haul carves out a small space in the world where having an illness like OCD has no stigma. No

explanations, no concealment, no one telling you to snap out of it. “Therein lies the magic of the whole thing,” according to Sparr. “You’re creating a place where people can share their stories, and it’s OK.” The strength of PeaceLove lies in its simplicity, Sparr says. “Ask people what gives them peace of mind, and it’s not the big stuff.” Perhaps it’s just having a brief respite from the burdens we all carry. Or in Sparr’s case, it’s the ability to occasionally conjure up a charismatic alter ego—one with a stylish hat, a jaunty pose, and a healthy acceptance of who he is.

Jeffrey is Founder, PeaceLove www.peacelovestudios.com @peaceloveri

63

david h.

stull

Bringing the Musical Gesture into the World The Oberlin Conservatory of Music faces the rare and delicate task of nurturing student musicians and preparing them for great performances out in the world. The nature of those performances will vary—some may not be musical at all. But the training that Oberlin students receive transcends even music itself.

David Stull, Dean of the Conservatory since 2004, describes the ideal graduates of the school as “quite remarkable individuals who are capable in a range of areas and absolutely fluent in the context of a technological world.”

They are also accomplished musicians who leave Oberlin ready to promote themselves as artists, carve out their own performance venues, and sell their special brand of music.

Stull, a tubist who flies planes in his leisure time, is an Oberlin graduate himself and has seen firsthand the way technology and globalization have transformed music education. When he was a student, he recalls: “There was no talk whatsoever about the profession. The academy was seen as a place where you didn’t do any of those things.”

Today, Stull says, there is far more conversation between students and faculty, more of a dialogue about music. And the level of accomplishment among incoming students is higher than ever.

Students are also more sophisticated in their musical tastes because their access to music has been close to unlimited. An 18-year old who has never left home can hear the London Symphony Orchestra perform Mahler and watch as Valery Gergiev conducts.

“That gives them a level of sophistication that we simply didn’t have,” Stull says. “Everyone’s ears are much larger. Jazz, classical, pop, hip hop all flow far more freely into a central place of music.”

On the Conservatory’s 440-acre campus 30 minutes outside of Cleveland, Stull carefully protects the unique space—the “cocoon,” he calls it—that permits the level of intensity needed to acquire mastery over a single instrument. “Music requires not just the ability to focus,” he

says, “but to focus for long periods of time mastering a new piece. Incorporating a complex repertoire into your being is a complicated task.”

But the Conservatory has a twin mission to prepare its students to apply what they have learned to the world.

“I am very much a fan of our cocoon because it generates the best work in our students,” Stull says. “It helps them develop the confidence to take on risk. But if they don’t leave the cocoon before they graduate, we set them up for failure.”

To that end, Oberlin students produce their own commercial record label and perform in a variety of venues from Carnegie Hall to more intimate, local settings that support emerging styles of music. They learn how to publicize their shows through social media and branding strategies.

“We have to move them from the theoretical to the possible or the real,” Stull explains. “When they leave, they’re going to have to be very savvy about promoting themselves.”

Oberlin faculty emphasize that students must set themselves apart as artists by offering compelling performances in their own voices. The nuts and bolts of publicity and managing a label are crucial, Stull says, but so is the philosophy behind the label: What is my message and what makes me special as an artist?

“Giving a piece your stance, your take—that is ultimately what you have to do to promote yourself avidly.”

When Oberlin students exude the finest qualities of a musician, according to Stull, they demonstrate proficiency at the art of quick and thorough preparation.

They learn precision, coordination, spontaneity and anticipation. They do more than perform a passage— they convey it to an audience with purposeful intention.

They adjust and improvise. They take their joy into the community.

Strip away the music from this ideal Oberlin graduate, and what Stull describes is the adaptable, creative, passionate, and generous individual that most organizations are hungry for right now.

The musical gesture is, after all, natural, ancient and timely all at once. It confronts the immediacy of its surroundings, fusing cultures and diverse sensibilities.

Music is our most primal form of communication, Stull notes, predating even the spoken word: “There are aspects of human experience that we only know through music. Music emanates from the world.”

David is Dean of Conservatory of Music, Oberlin College and Conservatory new.oberlin.edu

65

bill

taylor

Staying Fast, Staying Loose, and Still Keeping Good Company Bill Taylor, self-professed advocate of big ideas and co-founder of the iconic Fast Company magazine, has spent the past two decades bringing a humanizing touch to the concept of work.

An entrepreneur, innovator, author and speaker, Taylor recognizes that a rigid separation between work and life brings a soulless aspect to business. Companies have too much power to define what an employee is if that employee leaves his or her authentic identity at home.

The way Taylor sees it, individuals who fuse their work and personal lives bring their whole set of values to the job and have an enduring impact on the organizations they work for.

“In some very profound way, people of all generations want to feel like what they do for a living is consistent with and a genuine expression of what they care about as human beings,” Taylor says. “Most people of any generation want to feel that the workplace and their lives are happily in sync.”

When Taylor co-founded Fast Company in 1995, his editorial agenda articulated a new culture of work that was facilitated by technology but dominated by ideas. Clout and physical assets such as factories, warehouses and storefronts didn’t count the way they did 50 years prior: “Corporate muscle mass was less important than corporate brain power.”

Instead of being an organization that amasses power to get rich, the new, “fast” company would unleash freedoms from within, allowing people deep in the ranks to have input about the goods and services they were producing.

Such ideas made Fast Company and its quickly burgeoning fan base “outliers” 17 years ago, according to Taylor, because their perspective was so novel. It was egalitarian, unstructured, and creative in ways that made the old guard uneasy. “It felt more like business sci-fi than it did

like business,” Taylor recalls. “Yet here we are now, and in many ways, we’ve won the debate.”

As the new business model has unfurled, we’ve faced some unexpected results.

The energized company of the present leans on technology that decentralizes power and creates intense global connectedness. It runs through an entire business cycle in a flash. The 20-something crowd, Taylor notes, can come up with a slick idea, create an app with little to no money, and in less than a year, millions of people around the world will be using it. Instagram, anyone?

“That’s what makes the world go ‘round,” Taylor says.

“Smaller and smaller groups of highly motivated people can do bigger and bigger things.”

Some of these barely-definable businesses seem to be careening toward a future that only they can see.

More traditional organizations stand by and watch them disappear onto the horizon, wondering what type of leadership is needed in that distant place.

“It would take an act of great willpower or an act of great denial to look at the world and not feel that it is more confusing than ever before,” Taylor says. “There’s so much pressure, so much noise. In the midst of all this uncertainty, the individuals doing the most productive work are the ones who have the greatest sense of confidence.”

Confidence comes from clarity, according to Taylor.

With clarity, leaders become magnets for ideas, companies become magnets for superstars. The startups Taylor has chronicled for so long have absorbed this truth. He still celebrates their spirit and exults in the earlier years he spent “reveling in the sense of the new and folks who were starting from scratch.”

But now, Taylor turns his attention in a different

direction—backwards, so to speak.

“Today, the really urgent question is: For those long-established, large organizations that have been around for 50 or 60 or 100 years—who continued to survive, but just don’t feel relevant and compelling and exciting—what are the ideas and strategies they can apply to help them return to prosperity, innovation, and excitement?”

Moving and morphing with the times, Taylor published a book, Practically Radical, aimed at helping large, staid organization—like universities—to unleash change that will lift them out of the “sea of sameness” that threatens to make them irrelevant.

And once again, he finds himself about to blaze another trail. “That’s who I am today,” he says. “That’s the part of my enduring message that feels most timely.”

Bill is Founding Editor, Fast Company, Coauthor, Mavericks at Work, New book, Practically Radical www.williamctaylor.com @practicallyrad

67

sherry

turkle

Reaching Beyond Technology: Embracing the Boring Bits When Sherry Turkle was growing up in Brooklyn in the 1960s, she and her family had what she considers a healthy relationship with technology. “In my family, we yelled at the television set,” she recalls. “And we watched it together—it was a social activity.”

Now, she yearns for those days when the information coming across the screen was the shared subject of discussion and debate.

For the past 30 years, Turkle, a professor of the social studies of science and technology at MIT, has been writing about the way technology affects our human interactions.

Her most recent book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, concludes that we are at a moment of temptation with our machines; we are asking them to do things that only people can accomplish.

But this is an unfolding drama, Turkle says. She believes that technology is “amazing” and can enhance communication in astounding ways. But that doesn’t mean, she cautions us, that it can take over where only conversation among humans will suffice.

“One of the things we’ve learned about technology is that it tends to make us forget what we know about life,” she says. “You always put what you know about people first.”

Turkle stresses that the Internet is still developing, and that we can shape it as it moves forward. That is why she disagrees that we should simply accept technological progress because it is “inevitable.”

“On the contrary,” she thinks, “As technology becomes more mature, we have more experience and can develop a more commonsense set of ideas about who should use it and how it should be used.”

As a case in point, she harkens back to the 1920s when it was legal for anyone of any age

to drive a car. As time went on, most states settled on 16 as a good minimum driving age. Turkle notes: “We didn’t have any trouble deciding it would be a good thing to keep ten-year-olds out of cars. Why do we feel so unconfident that we can’t make a decision like that about Facebook? It is not beyond us to decide that we don’t want ten-year-olds on social media.”

Turkle has extensively studied the interface between technology and children. She says it is where we see the effects of technological changes expressed most dramatically. She has interviewed hundreds of children who feel the brunt of these changes on two fronts.

One, is that parents are so wrapped up in their smart phones and e-mail that they forget to parent. Children are feeling the need to compete with technology for their parents’ attention, and as Turkle points out, “That’s not really what we had in mind.”

The other challenge for children is that they are growing up to believe that true friendship occurs on Facebook or through texting. They are missing what Turkle calls the “complicated, messy, demanding, tonal” experience of face-to-face conversation, which she considers the “bedrock” for psychological development. Children who are not exposed to the awkward and complex nature of raw human interaction will have a “tin ear” for the nuances that make up personal relationships.

“For what purpose?” Turkle asks. “So we can be on Facebook more? Having conversations with other people is where we learn to have conversations with ourselves.

We are losing opportunities for self- reflection.”

Sometimes that crucial introspection comes at the most mundane points of our days, when things get quiet and the world moves slowly. But we tolerate fewer and

fewer of such moments as the number of available screens and “friends” increases exponentially.

Turkle notes that there are “a lot of boring bits” that make up a life or a social movement, and whether we decide to accept them or walk away from them will tell us something about our commitments. Giving a “thumbs up” on Facebook, she adds, is not an authentic commitment that generates real change in the world.

The boring bits of life are still worked out painstakingly, she says. “Tremendously important policies and the shape of this country are being decided in very traditional ways. There is a sense that you have an option to opt out of that, but you don’t.”

Sherry is a Professor, MIT, and Author www.mit.edu/~sturkle @sturkle

69

tom

yorton

Improv for Business?

Yes, and... See How it Works At The Second City, the world-renowned comedy company, living in the moment is the stuff of great improvisation. This is the stage that launched some of the greatest comedians of our day: Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Mike Meyers, Tina Fey, Steve Carrell.

The list goes on.

As CEO of Second City Communications, the business solutions division of The Second City, Tom Yorton’s passion has been in expanding the power of improvisation beyond the stage to address a wide array of challenges in innovation, learning, training, social media marketing, and more.

It turns out, improv fundamentals work very well in business – the idea of working without a script; the importance of co-creation and building on others’ ideas; and the essential challenge of balancing the needs of individuals and the ensemble.

“So much of business – like life itself – is one big act of improv,” Yorton said. “People make plans but, if they accept that there’s a whole bunch of stuff they can’t control, then most of what they’re doing is improvising,” Yorton added. “Working without a script, creating something out of nothing, working in teams, co-creating solutions with input from the marketplace – all that’s improvising.”

The Second City has been a dominant force in improv comedy for 50-plus years – but the application of the company’s expertise to business has taken shape over the past 20 years or so. Second City Communications now does more than 400 assignments a year for clients looking to spruce up their customer relations skills, tap into their collective creativity, or maybe get their employees to play nicely together.

Yorton describes how he ended up at the helm of Second City Communications as a ‘happy accident’ in a career spent largely toiling in the leadership ranks of technology, retail, and

advertising companies. “I come out of corporate ranks – not from the world of improv or theater. In fact, I often say that I’m the most unfunny guy at Second City,” said Yorton. “But my experience – and in fact, my scars – are from bumping up against the same organizational hurdles that improv is so effective at helping companies get over – challenges that include connecting with customers, engaging employees around change, moving into new markets, innovating new products and services, working without a script,” said Yorton.

Co-creation is essential to the improv process. The classic rule of engagement is called, “Yes, and.” When your partner says something, you respond, “Yes,” and then add to it. Yorton explains: “Whatever you say, I affirm and build on that. You can create interesting scenes and characters that way. You can also create an entire business model.”

Drawing on its command of the 3 to 5 minute sketch, Second City Communications creates online videos that develop corporate brands in “short form funny” format and reach a huge audience fast.

“To be successful, our actors have to use the same skills that are regarded as soft skills in business—how to listen, to react to the unexpected,” Yorton explains. “We built this capacity to use humor as a mirror to hold up to an organization, to pop the tension bubble. We get people laughing at the shared truth of the organization, and it changes the mood. By changing the mood, you’re able to make progress,” Yorton added.

Improv turns business upside down. Don’t follow the leader, follow the follower. Rigorously support whoever initiates. Forget what you know about critical thinking because, as Yorton points out, “there are times when it’s about creating something new, so there’s nothing to be

critical about.” Forget your self-interest. Exist for your partner to succeed. Live in the moment.

Even Yorton is amazed at how the delightful raucousness of improv can enliven a business: “How are we able to co-mingle this temple of satire with this affirmative, positive thing? It’s really a powerful combo.”

Yes, and… Second City Communications does it so well.

Tom is Chief Executive Officer, The Second City Communications www.secondcitycommunications.com @secondcitybiz

71

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