BIF-9 Summit Book

THINK TRANSFORMATION. TRY MORE STUFF.

As innovation junkies, we’re wired differently. today, we are connecting and inspiring one another toward a better future. welcome to #bif9.

HUMANCENTERED

STORY FUELED

SYSTEMS CHANGING

SILO BUSTING 2

COCREATED

#BIF9 carries a sense of homecoming, a reunion of sorts. The kind where all the crazy aunts and uncles gather, regaling us with tales of adventure and awe.

Perhaps the family reunion metaphor is accurate; I believe that innovators are cut from the same DNA. We are insatiable optimists and see opportunity in everything.

We are curious about everything. We know that learning together is the best way to get better faster. We believe in transformation and disruption - both personally and across our industries. We are all storytellers, knowing that stories connect and unite us, and enable us to transform together.

Each year, when I look towards the Summit, this is the promise I see. 400+ innovation junkies, who share this DNA, reuniting. 32 fabulous storytellers who will jumpstart your heart and mind, pushing your thinking to the edge.

But their stories are just the beginning. Their stories catalyze your conversations and collaborations. I see this happening time and time again from the stage, from the audience, and in the hallways of the Trinity Repertory Company. It is always awe inspiring and overwhelming.

This is what makes #BIF9 special. We don’t need more meetings of the usual suspects; we need the ability to think and act in new ways, laterally across silos and disciplines. The world doesn’t need incremental progress; it needs wholly new possibilities born from disruptive, creative people working together in entirely new ways.

This is our promise, catalyzed every year at the Summit. #BIF9 is really your platform, to plug in with your fellow disrupters. Your conversations and collisions will mold it and shape it. We trust this implicitly. We merely create the conditions for something beautiful and purposeful to emerge. The rest is up to you.

Welcome to the family.

saul kaplan is founder & chief catalyst, business innovation factory www.businessinnovationfactory.com @skap5

WHAT DOES

BIF DO?

BIF enables leaders to design and test new business models, with one goal in mind: transformational change.

Learning Community

We connect innovators and inspire a better future.

We know that business model innovation is challenging. It’s even more difficult when you’re doing it all alone. But, with a network of collaborators, the faster we experiment, learn, share, and repeat, the faster we’ll succeed. Join us!

Here’s how...

Membership For organizations looking to go up the learning curve together.

Summit Every year we don’t just come together; we strive together.

Experience Labs

We enable social system transformation by designing and testing new business models through sponsored projects.

It all starts with empathy. We begin by gaining a meaningful understanding of people and what matters to them deeply and holistically. It’s from this understanding that genuine model innovation with our community partners originates.

Our work revolves around the experience of the...

Student

Patient

Entrepreneur

Citizen

Experience

labs

BIF enables social system transformation by designing and testing new business models through sponsored projects.

Student Experience Lab putting students and teachers in the driver’s seat to create new models based on the experiences of all stakeholders across the educational system.

Patient Experience Lab designing and testing new models of care that transform the delivery of wellness, from babies to oc togenarians.

Entrepreneur Experience Lab exploring the experience of entrepreneurs, in par tnership with Babson College, to unleash their power ful energy to solve economic and community ills.

Citizen Experience Lab leveraging citizen-organized networks to rethink government as we know it and to turn more communities into innovation hotspots through civic engagement .

our lab

partners

For more information about sponsoring a project within our Experience Labs, contact Eli Stefanski, BIF’s Chief Market Maker, at estefanski@businessinnovationfactory.com or @elithechef

this year

at bif September, 2012 Announced partnership for first phase of work, Feedback for Teachers// Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

November, 2012 Began first phase of work, Elements of Wellness//Children’s Medical Center-Dallas

January, 2013

Unveiled Mapping the Trip// College Board

Unveiled Feedback for Teachers// Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

December, 2013 October, 2012

February, 2013

Unveiled second phase of work, Elements of the Entrepreneurs Inside Experience//Babson College

Unveiled Transitions//ACT

July, 2013

March, 2013

Unveiled MyChildren’s Process Improvements//Children’s Medical Center – Dallas

Unveiled Elements of Wellness//Children’s Medical Center-Dallas

Unveiled The Masterclass: 10 Entrepreneurs Defying Easy Definition//Babson College

May, 2013

April, 2013

June, 2013

August, 2013

Began second phase of work, MyChildren’s Process Improvements//Children’s Medical Center-Dallas

Welcomed BIF’s newest member// Northeastern University

Launched partnership to improve prenatal health and reduce pre-term births// Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center

Began third phase of work, The Masterclass: 10 Entrepreneurs Defying Easy Definition//Babson College

Announced partnership, Connected Aging Experience//Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

how DOES

BIF DO it?

We stay true to our principles. The BIF Genome was developed to help identify 15 fundamental principles that define the collective DNA of business model innovators.

the bif

genome CONNECT

INSPIRE

TRANSFORM

BIF

Membership Bring BIF Membership to your organization’s leadership team table.

BIF Members benefit from a customized business model innovation workshop, a team package to the BIF Summit, and exclusive Membership playdates.

Current members include:

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

Register before January 1st, 2014 for the 2013 discount — 25% off tickets!

We can’t wait to celebrate our 10th anniversary with you. To register at the discounted rate, visit www.businessinnovationfactory.com/bif10

Connect.

For more information about #BIF10, Contact Jessica Wallner, BIF’s Community Engagement Manager, at jwallner@businessinnovationfactory.com or @JCWallner

meet the

bif team

What element of the BIF genome do you most identify with and why?

Mickey Ackerman

Jeff Drury

Chief Design Strategist

Interactive Designer/Developer

It’s a user-centered world. Design for it.

Be inspiration accelerators.

It’s people who matter. If we’re not designing for them, what value are we really creating?

I want you to run with this.

Emma Beede

Experience Designer

Kara Dziobek

Experience Designer

Collaborative innovation is the mantra.

Transformation is itself a creative act.

A well-crafted and managed team of unique individuals who complement each other’s strengths and makes up for weaknesses, enables successful collaboration.

Since I was five I wanted to be an artist and help people.

I feel incredibly lucky to be able to use my creative background to design for positive human experiences.

Christine Costello

Christine Flanagan Student Experience Lab Director

Design Director

Off the whiteboard and into the real world.

Together, we can design our future.

Spend equal time thinking and doing because what might seem like a long distance between ideation and execution is easily shortened with experimentation and discipline.

I believe in the power of design and it’s ability to transform people’s experiences and to give them the power to discover and chart what’s possible for themselves.

Tori Drew

Victoria Guck Administrative Assistant

Director of Operations

A decade is an awfully short time to waste.

Catalyze something bigger than yourself.

Time is powerful. Imagine how much we could accomplish by living each minute instead of waiting for the next one.

Live life.

I am an enabler, mostly for good. I want to help people, projects and ideas reach their full potential.

James Hamar

Lindsey Messervy

Multimedia Producer

Experience Designer

Passion rules. Exceed your own expectations.

Stories can change the world.

How can you wake up every day and be part of something you don’t believe in? Passion is the fuel that pushes you to fulfill yourself, personally and professionally.

For me, storytelling not only gives the listener incredible insight into people’s attitudes, beliefs and behaviors, it also gives the storyteller a platform to share - thus, elevating and honoring their perspective and experience.

Saul Kaplan Founder and Chief Catalyst

Eli Stefanski

Tweaks won’t do it.

Chief Market Maker

We’ve become really good at tweaks. But how do we become market makers? Incremental change may be necessary but it isn’t sufficient for the 21st century defined by next practices, disruptive technologies, and transformation.

Make systems level thinking sexy.

Samantha Kowalczyk

Community Engagement Manager

The world is interconnected; we need to design in an interconnected way. We need to understand our interdependencies and recognize our connectedness.

Jessica Wallner

Digital Media Generalist

Enable random collisions of unusual suspects.

Experiment all the time.

I believe that value exists within the voices of real people. Create platforms to share stories and build networks of people who wouldn’t normally connect... and transformation is undeniable.

When I’m designing, the final and best result is almost never the first iteration of my first idea. I find it’s harder not taking those few extra steps in a direction I wasn’t expecting.

Deb Meisel Experience Designer

Build purposeful networks.

Looking back on life, it’s our connections that sustain us.

Building relationships is a beautiful, nourishing act that creates resilience.

meet the

bif-9 storytellers

STEVE BLANK

The Repeatable Path to Startup Success

18

Steve Blank is a child of the sixties who repaired fighter plane electronics in Thailand during the Vietnam War and then returned to the US to ride the peak of the dot.com wave. He says he is “still throwing hand grenades into the status quo.”

As the Father of the Lean Startup Movement, Blank always has something to say about breaking the rules— not that there’s anything wrong with them.

“We make up those rules, and most people like structure,” Blank says. “That’s actually how the human race survived. Back during the days on the savanna, most people were happy hunting and looking for food, but there were some who said, ‘I wonder what’s over those hills.’”

Those were the entrepreneurs. They were hardwired to push the walls around them. It was part of their DNA, Blank says, just as it’s part of his.

For 21 years during the ‘80s and ‘90s, Blank was the innovative and risk-taking force behind eight significant high-tech startups. He is quick to point out that two of them imploded, but his formidable success with the others, along with his instinct to retire in the last bubble, has made him a magnet for hopeful entrepreneurs in an unsteady economy.

He says the entrepreneurial personality—curious, creative, driven, willing to fail—may be somewhat atypical but it is not as unusual as we have imagined.

“It’s not about Steve Jobs,” Blank explains. “We can extract the pattern of these individuals. We can step back and say, ‘Hey, these types of people are rare, but they continually pop up in every generation.’”

It also helps if they come from dysfunctional families, which Blank describes as a “cruel and unusual training ground” for entrepreneurs: “These people bring order out of chaos—they grew up like that. They were the survivors. Their brain chemistry allows them to shut down

noise and focus on what is important. They are tenacious because they have something to prove.”

Today, Blank relishes his role as a teacher of young entrepreneurs at Berkeley, Columbia and Stanford— schools he said he could never have gotten into otherwise. He writes books about entrepreneurship and is generously dedicated to his blog at steveblank. com. Occasionally, he hosts entrepreneurial retreats at his beloved K & S Ranch outside Silicon Valley and travels the globe to share his business experience while observing startup strategies in other countries.

He says he is giving back to the community that did well for him. He has an “unusual Venn diagram of experience” that might be worth sharing. But he notes that he is not trying to convince people to think like he does. “It’s a zen-like thing,” he says. “The less you care about it, the better you are at it.”

The lesson that Blank teaches most often is that every startup must search for its own business model. That’s where the rule-breaking comes in. But his experience has shown him that, across a portfolio of startups, there are some tricks to reducing failure—a “repeatable path” that leads to success.

Blank is debunking the notion of the startup as driven by a rogue personality with mystical skills and esoteric knowledge. It’s not that complicated, he says.

“At the turn of this century, I realized that the entrepreneurial journey that people thought of as a solitary journey was much like the path that other people were following, yet no one ever described the path,” Blank says.

In these more reflective days filled with travel and deep conversations, Blank is realizing that the person and the path are not the only essential ingredients of entrepreneurship. Having recently visited China, he sees

how a place can also make or break innovative ventures.

In China, the tolerance for risk is low and the fear of failure is high.

Silicon Valley, on the other hand, is a phenomenal place to fail.

“You have to be willing to get knocked down,” he says.

“You have to be driven by this notion. China is not like that, but the US is still a country where failure doesn’t mean shame. We get to repurpose our entrepreneurs— we have an ecosystem here that allows us to do that.”

steve is an author, educator, and serial entrepreneur www.steveblank.com @sgblank

DAVID BUTLER

Keeping Coke fresh

20

David Butler can’t get away from the clichéd expressions that describe what he does: designing, innovating, leveraging systems, breaking down silos. And those are the hip terms.

As chief of innovation at the Coca-Cola Company, Butler knows that once we put a label to something, it’s already lost its freshness. His job, he says, is to get at the business behind the label and keep making it new.

How does one do that for the most recognizable brand in the world? For starters, Butler doesn’t get caught up in the jargon of innovation.

“A lot of time is spent just talking about the meaning of these words, and they get in the way,” he says. “Let’s talk about the benefits, the outcomes. Let’s get to the point faster, connecting things that don’t seem to be connected. I’d rather talk about making something less complicated or how this thing is going to create growth.”

Butler thinks of the Coke brand not as a logo or a material artifact, but as an organic entity with fibers that reach in all directions, up and down, horizontally, around corners, twisting through the workings of a global market. It must exist in a transparent ecosystem where it can identify potential sites of nurturance and grow where it will.

And yet, it must maintain its integrity, its timeless, sacrosanct charm. The bold red color, sassy white ribbon and perfectly curved bottle have become global symbols of a simple pleasure in life: the icy, cold Coke that satisfies and delights. The brand even held its own during the Great Depression with a clever slogan that spoke to the mood of the times: “The pause that refreshes.”

But Coke’s tradition and status have been both a blessing and a burden, according to Butler, whose task is to create synergy in a multi-national corporation that has “a lot of moving parts.” To an extent, the

brand makes its own shelf space, but the world is not pausing and refreshing as it once did. Coke must constantly reinvent itself while providing the comfort of predictable enjoyment.

One of the great testing grounds for Coke’s appeal in real time is Japan, Butler says. He is fascinated by the country’s inclination to juxtapose its deep respect for tradition with its insatiable passion for novelty: “In Japan, the culture itself thrives on the next thing. The flow of new ideas that happens there is like nowhere else.”

In the small store environment of Japan, where everyone fights for space, a 50 percent turnover in merchandise every month is normal. “The speed of things hitting the market there is just incredible,” Butler says.

“It’s huge pressure. If you don’t sell something, they take you off the shelf and you can’t get back on. You have to fight for survival and keep coming up with new ideas.”

Coke regularly launches new products in Japan to see how they fare, and in the process, this mature and established corporation learns how to make itself new.

Assimilating quickly to morphing micro-environments is crucial to the healthy growth that Butler has made possible at Coke.

But his eye is on the whole innovation ecosystem, in all of its mind-boggling magnitude and malleability.

Conceptualizing the Coke brand in this context has led it to experiment with a new Accelerator type program.

They have hired successful entrepreneurs to come work for Coke and develop new “scaleups” (startups which may be able to reach a global scale much faster).

As Coke helps bring them to scale, it learns something about likely hotspots of growth and emerging patterns of connectedness. Big multinational corporations haven’t gotten in this game yet, Butler says, but Coke is interested because “if more startups go from failure to success,

that’s good for everybody.”

Butler confesses an infatuation with systems thinking and anything in large scale that has the potential to connect people. Considering that one-quarter of the earth’s population drinks a Coke product every day, he is in the perfect setting to gratify his imagination. His discerning eye remains on the lookout for the fertile spaces where Coke can diversify and thrive.

“Getting a grip on how things interrelate can help us shape the ecosystem of the future,” Butler says.

Call it design, if you will.

david is vice president of innovation, the coca cola company www.coca-colacompany.com @davidrbutler

JAMES R. DOTY, M.D.

getting our evolution right

22

James Doty decided on his career path in fourth grade when a doctor came to visit his class and modeled for him the type of person he wanted to be. It was not the work of medicine that made the strongest impression on Doty, but the man’s kindness.

Throughout his life, Doty has been similarly touched by individuals who have cared for him, and without realizing it, guided him toward a life as a neurosurgeon who now explores the potential of human compassion.

Doty speaks openly about the difficulties of his childhood and the constant anxiety he felt growing up.

He says he felt his parents’ love, but he never had the kind of family stability that sets a child on a solid path in life. He managed to make his own way because other people acknowledged his goodness.

“When someone senses your latent ability and says, ‘I believe in you,’ that can change the whole trajectory of your life,” Doty says. “Every one of us is pining on some level to be embraced and to have someone unconditionally demonstrate love to us. When that happens, it allows for the release of all our fears and anxieties, which stop us from being who we truly are.”

Much of Doty’s work now is focused on the way compassion affects our psychological and physical wellbeing. People who have a habit of thinking and acting with empathy have steadier heart rates, healthier blood pressure levels, and stronger immune systems.

Practicing kindness may be healthful, but our DNA does not exactly make it easy, according to Doty.

In our genes, we are hardwired to feel compassion toward people in our “in-group,” he says, but evolutionary survival instincts tell us not to extend that compassion to an “out-group.” This genetic predisposition is becoming unsustainable in a world that is opening ever wider.

“If our species is to survive, we have to get out of this

tendency to pick an in-group and out-group,” he says.

“This constant determining of who was in or out was useful a millennia ago, but in our modern society, it’s not useful at all.”

Our sympathetic nervous systems are designed to perceive threats by listening and watching. In a more primitive time, when man roamed the savanna, a single sound could raise the heart rate along with levels of cortisol and epinephrine, but as the threat diminished, those physical states reverted to their baseline.

Our brains still work this way, but our physical responses are skewed. Phone calls, emails, deadlines, people talking, the noise of life—all of these can distract us from our mission to survive, raising our hormone levels and intensifying our physical responses to stimuli.

We are on high alert, our sympathetic nervous systems are engaged, and we tend to withdraw. We rarely have a chance to revert to a peaceful baseline where we can “rest and digest.” The tissues of our bodies remain chronically inflamed and incapable of rejuvenation. In many cases, we become ill and our longevity decreases.

Abstract thinking and insight fade away.

“How do we overcome these leftovers from our evolution?” Doty asks. “How do we work around these defects in our development? Evolution is wonderful and it has allowed us to be here, but it is not always the best fit for the present situation.”

Finding room for compassion in a society that overengages the sympathetic nervous system is a challenge.

But Doty believes in certain possibilities: We can develop technology that creates more healthful and compassionate states of being. We can design systems that are inclusive and redemptive, allowing for the actual development of people instead of taking advantage of them. (Are punitive banking fees truly

necessary, he wonders?) We can dismantle hierarchical relationships that make some people feel weak. And we can allow spaces where people can be vulnerable without the fear of negative consequences.

As a neurosurgeon with highly-specialized life-saving skills, Doty says he sometimes has a more profound impact on people when he is not performing surgery on their brains. Sometimes people simply ask him to listen.

“They break down, cry, and have this amazing, extraordinary, cathartic experience and feel dramatically better,” he says. “All they want is for one person to take the time to acknowledge their humanity.”

james is the director and founder of ccare and clinical professor of neurosurgery, stanford university ccare.stanford.edu @stanfordccare

mary flanagan

Playing games and finding our humanity

24

Games are artificial situations in which players willingly attempt to overcome contrived obstacles.

They can be fun, a type of escape, because they are not exactly real. Like great art, however, they reveal the deepest impulses of humanity.

“Games have existed from a time before the pyramids,” says Mary Flanagan, a game designer and professor of digital humanities at Dartmouth College.

“They are older than written language. They clearly are a link to what is an ancient and essential aspect of being human.”

As a theorist and scholar, Flanagan explores the way we represent ourselves in playculture and digital spaces. She is an activist designer who has founded Tiltfactor, a gaming research laboratory at Dartmouth focusing on designs that foster a “joyful commitment to human values.” She is also an internationallyexhibiting artist and writer whose creative practice further investigates human relationships with systems.

“Games are dynamic systems, and systems have always been a part of life,” Flanagan says. “Knowing about the systems of the weather during agricultural times or the health of animals and their environment has been key to human sustenance.”

She notes, however, that we don’t always perceive the long-range impact of systems because their effects take place over extended periods of time. But now we are experiencing a heightened awareness of them because they are becoming more expansive. “The consequences of our systems are global,” she says, “and the turnaround for the consequences is becoming shorter.”

Playing games is one way to mediate our relationship with systems and to understand cause and effect. Play can therefore be a way of thinking critically, Flanagan

says. Play takes us outside the rules of our everyday lives and gives us a chance to interact with and experience alternate realities with novel types of constraints.

Game theorists suggest that games can express our inner psychological lives or serve as social reactions to the main drive of a culture. Perhaps they fill an emptiness, satisfy a desire or release stress to make life bearable.

While it might be possible to psychoanalyze a culture through a study of its games, Flanagan does not presume to make such heavy-handed interpretations through her work. She observes the values and skills expressed in play in order to understand how games work. And she is using that knowledge to bring gaming into a new era.

“I believe that we haven’t yet explored the richness of play and the medium of games to its fullest potential,” she says. “Collaborative and cooperative gameplay can be a great deal of fun, for example, yet most people think that for a game to be fun it has to be competitive and there has to be only one winner. I don’t want to approach play with those types of assumptions.”

Flanagan purposefully designs games that give players a chance to express positive, almost utopian, values that are desperately needed in the world today.

“At a basic level, producing only what you have seen before isn’t very creative,” she says. “I don’t think all games and play need heroes and enemies, points and gold stars. That’s too simplistic. I am constantly working to invent game models that are good at tackling human issues.”

In Flanagan’s theory of game design, we can practice kindness, generosity, empathy, sharing and other benevolent actions as we play. We can draw on altruistic inclinations as we respond creatively to a manufactured obstacle. “I want to use the power of games for imaginative play to help people realize new things that benefit society,” she says.

Which way the game will go depends on the sensibilities of the person designing it. “All games involve a game designer’s values, whether they intend them or not,” Flanagan says. Clearly, game designers have a choice.

They can create play that safely contains a release of the negative sensibilities that we suppress in everyday life.

Or they can invent spaces that allow for the flourishing of the better things we could be.

In Flanagan’s most recent research, she has developed new games that actually lower discrimination and triple pro-social attitudes about women in science. She has discovered playful techniques that have shown in experimental research to influence people to be less biased towards others.

In her theory and practice, Flanagan studies games as a way of understanding how our values are embedded in the technologies and systems we build. Games tell us something about ourselves.

“They involve fate and chance as well as fundamental human values such as fairness and equity,” she says.

“Games and play are a deep part of being alive.”

mary is a professor in digital humanities, dartmouth college and founder, tiltfactor www.maryflanagan.com @criticalplay

PING FU

To make business 3D, add the human dimension

26

Imagine sending a 3D image of your feet to a shoe manufacturer, and a few days later, being delivered a pair of shoes that fit you to a tee.

Such small things make our lives beautiful, according to Ping Fu, Chief Strategy Officer at 3D Systems and, prior to that, Co-Founder of Geomagic, a leading global provider of the 3D printing technology that could make the perfectlyfitted shoe scenario an ordinary market occurrence.

Geomagic was acquired by 3D Systems in February 2013.

Geomagic’s technology has done some not-so-small things, too. Medical imaging that creates cranioplasty plates and maxillofacial prosthetics. Digital reconstruction of the Statue of Liberty for archive. 3D imaging and analysis of heat tiles while in orbit that ensured the safe return to earth of the shuttle Discovery in 2005.

The bread and butter of the technology, though, comes from its application to simple manufacturing, according to Fu. 3D printing makes possible less costly, more streamlined manufacture of customized products that are made locally and distributed efficiently. They also leave less of a carbon footprint compared to products manufactured elsewhere and shipped back home.

Putting it simply, Fu says, “We can make stuff, make better stuff, and make more green stuff.”

Fu is adamant that the US is the place to make this happen. Mass production was created in America, she notes, and when it was moved out of the country, innovation went with it.

3D printing can turn that around, she says: “We invented 3D printing and we need to keep it here. If it doesn’t happen here it will happen somewhere else. If we fail, it’s only because we’re too comfortable.”

She has a hunch about this, and her hunches have served her well. Along the way to developing Geomagic’s

technology, Fu turned down some lucrative business opportunities because she wanted to create something of value--even if she didn’t know exactly what that would be.

She says it was intuition that led her to a career in technology.

Born in China, Fu experienced some of the worst of the Cultural Revolution there and arrived in the US in her early 20s with no money, no connections, and no English.

She began her college education in the early ‘80s at the University of New Mexico where she encountered the new and unknown discipline of computer science. She believed that studying computers would put her on equal footing with Americans who were just beginning to enter the field.

Today, Fu is one of the most influential entrepreneurs in American business. She has endured numerous struggles and “graceful” failures, crediting her ultimate success to her resilience in a brutal market.

She sees a shift in the purpose and mood of American business now. The “go-go days” of the ‘80s and ‘90s, “did a lot of damage” to the quality of the businesses we have created. The emphasis on quarterly earnings, the push for IPOs, the exhilaration of unbelievable wealth all contributed to a lack of social consciousness that resulted in debacles like the Enron scandal.

The crash of the 2000s, she says, has brought some humanity back into business.

“When money is harder to make, it makes people stop to think deeply how to make a better company,” she says. “That’s the way that companies differentiate themselves now.”

This is the philosophical space in which Fu finds herself at the moment. The twin experiences of her life in China and in the US have deepened her commitment to nurturing the human side of business: “I have a

more highlighted awareness of fairness, poverty, and suppression around the world.” She has learned to embrace compassion and understanding as a way of being, even in the highly competitive field of technology.

This year, Geomagic was sold to 3D Systems, where Fu remains as Chief Strategy Officer. She is optimistic about her new role in the C-Suite.

“Being at the top of a public company poses a different kind of challenge,” Fu says. “Not too many women are founders of technology and at the top of a management structure. I now have a bigger business platform for me to see the advancement of the company.”

Fu envisions herself as a “midwife” delivering innovation.

“I want to see if I can help that birth to grow and blossom,” she says.

ping is the author of “bend not break” and the founder and ceo, geomagic www.bendnotbreak.com @pfugeomagic

grant Garrison

Doing good is worth a try

28

Grant Garrison is happy. Just ask him, and he’ll tell you all the things that make him that way: his job, his wife, the “intrapreneurs” and colleagues he works with. It’s not surprising that he’s the strategic director for GOOD/ Corps, a unique consulting firm with a mission to expand the amount of good in the world.

He says he gets his optimism from his mother, an elementary school STEM teacher with relentless curiosity. Like her son, she also loves her job, whether she is teaching her students about worms or dinosaurs or triangles. And she never stops learning, a quality that Garrison says is the basis of her optimism.

“I guess if you’re out there exploring the new, it’s hard to get sad or pessimistic about the old,” he says.

This philosophy has shaped Garrison’s perspective on the daunting challenges we face as a nation and around the world. He’s had a strong education, including a degree from Duke University, but says it was the semester he spent abroad in South Africa that set him on the path to GOOD/Corps.

Living in Cape Town ignited his passions around race, social justice, and community empowerment. He worked on the ground with young people who weren’t downtrodden about their problems, but were trying to fix them. When he returned to Duke, he began studying leadership and discovered that true leaders did not have to be charismatic personalities, but individuals who knew how to bring out the best in others.

Garrison has brought his upbeat energy right to the center of GOOD/Corps, which galvanizes brands and organizations into identifying opportunities for new social impact leadership that advance their core values while also meeting bottom-line objectives. Clients are driven by consumers who want products that reflect their own social compassion, he says. “There is a recognition that

it’s cool to care. It’s an ethos.”

Plus, Garrison points out, we need consumers to get involved in solving complex social problems: “We’re more likely to solve these big issues if a whole lot of people are engaged in them. Technology ties us together, accelerating the empathy that we feel for one another.”

The “seismic shift” that took place with the rise of the internet has contributed to the emergence of a powerful public social consciousness that is just beginning to manifest itself, according to Garrison, who predicts that we are only in the very early years of experiencing what that shift is. He adds, “People know that the tidal wave is coming, and they don’t know what to do about it.”

Garrison has found that the key bridges in this new context are positive-thinkers who want to do something big inside their own organizations and create change in their own way. These “intrapreneurs” are committed to shaping things up and moving things along, Garrison says: “Their values tend to be really front and center. It’s clear when you meet them. They’re all about impact, not politics and ego.”

The intrapreneur embodies optimism. That person sees good in the immediate context, which Garrison notes is a pretty realistic attitude.

Corporate America has its skeptics about the practical application of this growing consumer idealism.

Many organizations have tried to connect with social movements and have gotten “burned,” Garrison says.

Those setbacks often happen when the CEO just picks a cause, or a company’s social impact endeavor is misaligned to its core product or service.

Other critics argue that linking corporate growth to social impact is just a ploy to increase profits. Garrison remains undaunted by such naysayers.

“I’d rather believe and be fooled than be a pessimist,”

he says. “I don’t fear self-interest. I embrace it. Once I know what your self-interest is, we can be honest about what your objectives are. “ Garrison says GOOD/Corps was founded with the awareness that we’re not all saints. We want to be active consumers who do good in the world, so any organization that can help us find a way to do that taps into a huge opportunity.

“Being a force for good is worth a try,” he says. “At the core, I’m a pragmatist, so I just want to make change. I’m not going to say no to anyone who comes to me and says they want to make things better.”

grant is co-founder and director, good/corps www.goodcorps.com @garrisongrant

ROSANNE HAGGERTY

To end homelessness, solve a bigger problem

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Rosanne Haggerty’s obsession is homelessness. She’s been working on it since she graduated from college, and what was to be a short volunteer project at a youth shelter became a lifelong commitment to ending homelessness.

From the outset she grasped that an endgame to homelessness required housing, not temporary shelters, as a starting point. She created the not for profit, Common Ground, to convert derelict buildings into vibrant mixed income communities for the homeless, artists, and low wage workers. She showed that a stable home linked to jobs and health and mental health support ended homelessness for good. But as time went on, even though Common Ground built new properties, homelessness rates continued to rise. Despite their success, Haggerty realized that creating homes was not enough. The whole system needed to change.

The “spin-off” that resulted from Haggerty and her team’s reimagination of purpose is Community Solutions, a national non-profit that not only creates homes but also strengthens the communities around them. Its mission is helping communities solve the complex housing and health problems of vulnerable people. Their immediate goal is housing 100,000 of the most vulnerable homeless individuals and families in the country by this time next year. Their movement, the 100,000 Homes Campaign, has spread to over 200 communities who have housed over 65,000 individuals and families since 2010.

Haggerty says that having a target number to hit has been a huge catalyst. “Having a collective, measurable, time bound goal has been like a booster rocket,” she says. “Change is never easy, yet all of us act much more crisply, collaboratively and creatively in a crisis.

We create an experience of urgency to liberate people from bureaucracy.”

The main obstacle to reaching an endgame on homelessness, Haggerty explains, is that no one organization or agency has complete visibility into the overall system. While most organizations have what they consider reasonable rules, they don’t often see that other organizations have their own, different rules.

For a homeless person to comply with the rules of each agency whose cooperation is needed to secure an affordable home, effective health or mental healthcare, income benefits or a job- all the elements of a stable life- is a daunting, if not impossible, task.

In the end, the system as a whole defeats the purpose of delivering assistance to those who need it most and are least able to navigate a complex array of bureaucratic rules.

Community Solutions works to integrate the breadth of resources and skills that exist within communities so that “they add up to more than the sum of all the parts.”

Housing the homeless has meant building collaborations across siloed organizations to realize a collective goal.

Solving complex problems begins with listening, observing, and mapping the existing assets of a community. The initial step is to get everyone in the same place, to remove blame and put the onus on everyone to shift a little.

“A lot of stuff gets sorted out informally,” Haggerty says. “Some of this is not at all designed. Solutions tend to emerge organically if you get people in proximity to each other with clear goals, actionable data and regular communication.”

Convincing entire communities to change the way they approach homelessness is sometimes a matter of demonstrating the long-range cost effectiveness of creating housing versus hospital, shelter and jail costs incurred in attempting to manage homelessness. But

Haggerty is discovering that civic pride has become a major “pull factor” in mobilizing communities.

That’s why Community Solutions also takes their systems approach to crafting a “real endgame” as Haggerty calls it: helping communities prevent homelessness from occurring in the first place. They also created and lead neighborhood networks in two of the communities with the highest rates of poverty and homelessness in the country. Even in these beleaguered neighborhoods, there are proud residents and organizations ready to work differently to turn around the communities they love. “In getting started, we look for those people who are the unofficial leaders—individuals who know everyone, understand core problems, and find ways to help every day” says Haggerty. “The incredibly hopeful thing is that in every community we find these change agents. They have been there all along, waiting for a process that they can hook into. “ As with any innovation, ending homelessness at the systems level demands high optimism and faith in all the players. “We start with a belief that everybody wants to be part of the solution,” Haggerty says. “We are completely open—everybody show up, you’re all invited. We are on the lookout for people who are change agents, leaders who want to get something done, early adopters ready to pull up their sleeves. But we don’t wait around for the laggards.”

rosanne is president, community solutions www.cmtysolutions.org @cmtysolutions

SCOTT HEIMENDINGER

Modernist Cooking Evangelist

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In 1870, a young army chef in the Franco-Prussian war formulated ideas about preserving food more efficiently as the French lay under siege by the Germans at the Fortress of Metz. His name was Auguste Escoffier, the iconic French chef whose military experience later inspired him to bring the innovation of the kitchen “brigade� into the best restaurants of Paris and London.

Escoffier modernized the culinary arts in the 19th century by codifying recipes, simplifying menus and standardizing the restaurant kitchen. His groundbreaking methods of two centuries ago have become fundamental to fine cuisine today.

In August 2013, a food geek from Seattle and his business partners launched a Kickstarter campaign for a sous vide device that cooks food to absolute perfection by sealing it in airtight bags that are submerged in warm water baths, sometimes for days. His name is Scott Heimendinger, a former Microsoft Program Manager and food blogger who now evangelizes for the swelling Modernist cuisine movement.

The Sansaire sous vide immersion circulator reached its funding goal in the first 13 hours of the campaign and was met with overwhelming public response. When the Sansaire ships later this year, priced at $199, Heimendinger hopes the device will finally make sous vide cooking accessible to a broad audience, and perhaps change the way people cook, one meal at a time.

Heimendinger is the Director of Applied Research at Modernist Cuisine, a research kitchen and eponymous cookbook publisher founded by ex-Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. Through the 2011 publication of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking ($625, 2,400 pages!) and their 2012 follow-up Modernist Cuisine at Home, the team elucidates the science behind all forms of cooking, both traditional and contemporary.

Old culinary rules about roasting, baking and pan frying produce “very nostalgic results,” Heimendinger admits, but they all use extremely high heat to get to the core of a thicker food: “The traditional way to roast a chicken is fraught with compromise. That makes it really difficult on the home cook.”

We can do better, he says. Modernist chefs seek to eliminate guesswork and mediocrity in the kitchen by intensely studying the chemistry and physics inherent in all cooking.

They slice microwaves, blenders and entire ovens in half to demystify their functionality through cutaway photographs. They cook superbly crispy French Fries with the help of an ultrasonic jewelry cleaner. They create “molecularly creamy” mashed potatoes through the use of enzymes—eliminating the chef’s reliance on butter and milk to achieve the desired texture.

“Cooking is governed by physical processes,” Heimendinger explains. “By understanding what those processes are and how they work, you will develop an intuitive sense for things that will make you a better cook and less dependent on cookbooks and recipes.”

While Escoffier’s culinary methods appealed to an industrializing culture that valued efficiency and organization, the Modernist approach to cuisine appeals to a rising generation of high-tech natives who want a deeper experience with deliciousness.

These are not fast food junkies, but people who will bake bread, home-brew beer and pickle cucumbers. They are motivated by a sense of mindfulness about what they eat, not just by speed and convenience.

“You can totally buy good beer and pickles in a store,” Heimendinger notes. “But there’s a difference in the relationship that these folks have with their food.

They gain satisfaction and social clout from doing it themselves.”

Now is the moment when we can also change our relationship with the kitchen, according to Heimendinger.

The sous vide cooking process, for instance, is slower than traditional methods, but it is incredibly exact and requires unattended time that frees the cook up for other things.

“Sous vide does dramatic things for how you fit proteins into your daily routine,” Heimendinger says. “When you’re cooking on a grill, you have a very narrow window of time between underdone and overdone. But with sous vide, you can leave your food unattended for hours with no negative consequences. I believe that our role in the kitchen should not be that of human thermostat. Leave that responsibility to machines, and use the time you save to apply your creativity to the rest of the meal.”

Heimendinger predicts that Modernist cooking methods will eventually be adopted at the same rate as any other new technology. And there will always be people who think the old ways are good enough. But the audience for this culinary movement has been bigger than expected, he says.

scott is a food geek, diy enthusiast and director of applied research, modernist cuisine www.seattlefoodgeek.com @seattlefoodgeek

PETER HIRSHBERG

Retribalizing on the city platform

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Peter Hirshberg sees Marshall McLuhan everywhere.

In a career that has included a long stint in Silicon Valley, a foray into the cosmetics industry, a reimagining of the social media world, and now engaging with smart cities, he’s applied McLuhan throughout his life.

Fifty years ago, McLuhan described technology as an extension of the self that enabled us to reach beyond our physical bodies into a space where we interact with the world. Today, we call this space the platform, and while we debate over how to define it, Hirshberg says, “McLuhan’s already been there.”

Hirshberg has been thinking about the platform ever since his days at Dartmouth in the ‘70s, when he first encountered computers as a tool for time-sharing.

“You could actually see the seeds of social media,” he recalls. One college professor insisted, though, that “computers are for computing” by which he meant that computers solve the old problems of accounting, engineering and math in sped-up ways, but using them for some form of personal communication was a really silly waste of resource.

Already an applied McLuhanist, Hirshberg rejected this conventional response. He says a light bulb went off in his head. Why not use computers for what people wanted to use them for? McLuhan had speculated that any medium has a way of imposing its own grammar on us, so if computers were fostering new forms of connections that was probably worth pursuing.

Hirshberg leaned on this philosophy a few years later at Apple Computer, when the platform was moving from the computer to the Internet. He felt the urgency to explore that unfamiliar terrain, but Apple was initially ambivalent about bringing its services online. “We had to socialize the idea of networking inside the company first, and then go sell it to others,” he says.

In the ‘90s, Hirshberg’s career took a slight “detour” when he ran online operations for Estée Lauder. He went from “routers to mascara,” but still felt as if he were standing on the same platform: “I used to give a talk called, ‘Everything I know about the beauty business, I learned at Apple.’” Steve Jobs, he says, knew that beautifully designed products can emotionally empower a customer base. “Steve had intuitively brought the principles of the prestige luxury business to the commoditized world of desktop computing and taught a whole generation to think that way.”

Hirshberg eventually moved into social media, fascinated by the accumulation of human consciousness he observed in networking and blogging activity on the internet. He focused on building a market and creating an ad platform around that space as Chairman of pioneering blog search engine Technorati. Today, he says, “the platform is moving from the screen to mobile and from mobile to the world.”

That’s why his current stop is the city. The smart city, to be exact, one in which the best possible uses of technology work for people in the material world. “More and more people will participate in and develop the city-as it becomes a platform,” Hirshberg says.

At the center of this smart city, Hirshberg still finds McLuhan, who predicted half a century ago that technology would “retribalize” humanity by condensing our connections and keeping us “electrically” involved in each other’s lives. He saw the fragmented, mechanical world of industry moving toward an age of wholeness, empathy and deep awareness. He called it the “global village.”

Big data is part of this ever-evolving platform that is “spreading out into the world around us,” according to Hirshberg. With 2.4 billion Internet users worldwide, we are learning fast about complex systems and problem

solving. The ebb and flow of a city emits massive amounts of data in real time, immediately revealing to us how a crowd is behaving in a given situation, whether it’s a World Cup championship game or a traffic jam.

“The city is really the ultimate place to practice this stuff,” Hirshberg says. “Second by second, we can understand human behavior atomistically.” It is McLuhan’s electric age when action and reaction occur simultaneously.

On the smart city platform, big data retribalizes us by condensing our associations and making it easier for us to optimize existing resources, or as Hirshberg says, “evoke what’s already there.” But, just as we had to be cautious about not over designing cities for car culture, we have to think through how to avoid the overly mechanistic implications of hyper connected culture. “McLuhan pointed out that augmentation leads to amputation.

Today’s ubiquitous smart phones means that people are often glued to screens on the street, in restaurants, even in bed. We are at once fully connected to the network but less connected to each other. So for cities, place making, shared experiences, urban design that pulls for community, as well as public art and citizen co-creation are becoming an important design center for civic innovation. We have to get those things right, and urgently,” says Hirshberg.

peter is chairman, re:imagine group www.atomicbomb.com @hirshberg

WHITNEY JOHNSON

The Return of La Whitney

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Since Whitney Johnson’s visit to BIF-7, she has jumped off one S-curve and onto another. When you’re on the flat part of the curve, she says, it’s time to get moving.

After co-founding Boston-based Rose Park Advisors investment firm in 2007, Johnson left last year to devote more time to speaking, writing and consulting for startups. She co-created a new “Forty over 40 Women to Watch” list that she says fills a gap in the way business recognizes influential players across a variety of fields.

Her book, Dare, Dream, Do (2012) offers guidance and an encouraging push for anyone who has hit that point in the curve where they find themselves restless and low on endorphins as things become too easy.

In his review of Dare, Dream, Do, management thinker Clayton Christensen wrote that it “drills down” on the question of how women build a happy life, professionally and personally. The book tells the stories of women who have made an impact in their careers while maintaining a fulfilling personal life, but Johnson’s message is utterly universal.

Whatever your dream, she advises, let it expand you. Even in the pursuit of a passionate goal, there will be space for all of the essential components of your life. Johnson is relentless in her own pursuit of this fuller existence.

“I never give up,” she says.

As a highly regarded equity analyst, Johnson is considered someone worth listening to, and the relational component of business has become the centerpiece of her work. Business magnates in Latin America referred to her affectionately as “La Whitney,” not just because she has the savvy and the guts of a commanding financial expert, but because she also has the heart of an intuitive person who sees the big picture.

In her early days as a financial analyst at Merrill Lynch, she used to work 90-hours a week.

She says she was probably harder to work for back then because she wanted to go over things several times, making sure they were right.

Today, she has tempered some of that perfectionism with more deliberate attention to those around her: “I’m a pretty demanding person because I want the product to be good, but the people who work for me feel like I am their advocate. The short term returns of being kind are not necessarily there, but if you dispose of a relationship like you do a bottle or a can, then over time, the cost of business gets a lot higher.”

Johnson now sees with greater clarity the need to tend to the personal dimension of life even as we commit ourselves to a professional goal.

Work doesn’t have to be an “Eat, Pray, Love” experience, where you abandon everything for an idea, she says. Professional women find Johnson’s message deeply applicable to their own experiences, but at the same time, she isolates the most pressing job-life question of the current cultural moment: Where is the line between pursuing our careers and cultivating ourselves?

Johnson attributes this tension to a natural conflict between the male and female aspects of the human psyche. The male tells us to act while the female tells us to nurture. In her holistic view of existence, we cannot afford to let either piece go unattended.

“Life has been really hard in the U.S. for the last few years,” she notes. “People have felt vulnerable. Society as a whole is coming to the realization that we can’t do things the masculine way or the feminine way. Ideally, we would get to the point where we fuse them.”

The best way to draw on the complete force of the psyche, Johnson suggests, is by simply showing up in the fullest sense. Being physically and mentally present, drawing on every intellectual and emotional store

available and applying it to any endeavor. It’s the only way that Johnson knows how to be, and probably the fundamental formula for her phenomenal success on Wall Street.

In every pursuit, Johnson advises her clients, colleagues and friends, “Be kinder to yourself, kinder to other people.” But don’t ever stop expanding your life.

La Whitney never gives up.

whitney is an author and co-founder, rose park advisors www.whitneyjohnson.com @johnsonwhitney

RABBI IRWIN KULA

INNOVATION IN THE TECHNOLOGY OF RELIGION

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As the world propels itself through the 21st millennium, powered by transformational technology, Rabbi Irwin Kula pushes the question that gets lost in the momentum: How do we create more developed and evolved human beings?

Kula, the President of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership in New York and author of “Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life,” has a fearless attitude about change. It is a rare quality among spiritual leaders who tend to adhere closely to religious beliefs and customs, resisting the movement of the world in a courageous defense of the sacredness of humanity.

But religion can change, too, Kula says, without losing its fundamental purpose: to invite us to think more judiciously about our morality.

“All religion is a technology of human flourishing,” he says. “There is no tradition on the face of the earth that wasn’t at one time an innovation.”

Ethics evolve over time. What is murder? What is theft? What is a person? As our practical capabilities develop, so does our understanding of the terms that define the contours of society. Who is included and what natural rights do they have?

In America, Kula notes, the constant debate over the definition of a human being has brought an end to slavery, instituted women’s suffrage, allowed space for the Civil Rights Movement and just recently enabled gay marriage.

“We’ve always had shifts in the way we’ve made sense of our lives,” he says. “Our ethical horizon is always expanding. What would happen if we began to apply innovation theory to religion, spirituality, ethics, and moral development?”

What we need at this moment, according to Kula, are “early moral adopters,” people who think deeply about what type of wisdom and compassion the world now

requires. He sees the gap between technological change and our ethical response to it as ever widening.

“You can’t psychologically and ethically skip any stages in moral development,” Kula explains. “If the only early adopters we have are concerned with the most cutting edge technology, we’re going to be in big trouble.”

A pressing concern, Kula says, is that technology creates more power. When that power falls into the hands of marginalized individuals, “it is a very dangerous thing.”

A rebellious teenager a generation ago might have made only a temporary wrinkle in the social fabric, but with the massive force and sophistication of assault rifles today, that same teenager could inflict enormous damage.

Technological power among the privileged is equally threatening, according to Kula. The consequences of ethical recklessness in this quarter are subtle, but insidiously wide-ranging. Technology matched up with trading, for example, amasses wealth for a select few without producing value for the many.

“There is a very significant unraveling of the social contract among the elites,” Kula says. “We have the lowest levels of institutional trust in the history of America now and we’re not going to Google our way out of those problems.”

The current need for more ethical awareness is absolutely critical, Kula says. But conversations about morality are difficult to have, even for an influential rabbi.

Secular leaders who proclaim their ethical ideals and incorporate them into business or civic practices often have a more commanding influence over the general public.

With so many Americans today identifying as nonconsumers of traditional religion, Kula acknowledges that the relationship between our everyday lives and our purposeful religious attitudes is “very, very fragile.”

And yet we cannot lose that spiritual dimension of our

existence, he says: “The metaphysics of these religions are clearly wrong, but the wisdom is right.”

Just as Kula urges religious leaders to innovate, he also asks secular leaders to actively discern the serious moral questions that inevitably arise with technological change. To safeguard the human spirit in the coming age, he recommends a different kind of conversation among “bridge characters,” people across a variety of domains: poets, artists, designers, outliers of all stripes, people who are simply smart in their fields, whatever they may be.

“We need some of the best and the brightest to be early moral adopters, maybe risk a little in reputation, status, ridicule—that’s what early adopters do. Along with physical and cognitive enhancement driven by technology we need moral enhancement. Then we will have technology that truly helps human beings.”

rabbi irwin kula is president, the national jewish center for learning & leadership www.clal.org @irwinkula

Easton LaChappelle

no time for school

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In the past few years, Easton LaChappelle, 17, has been developing a robotic arm that he hopes will be light enough and strong enough to act as a prosthetic device for amputees. And while he’s managed to maintain a near 4.0 GPA at the same time, high school has been getting in the way of his progress.

LaChappelle is creating a robotic arm that is no heavier than a human arm—about 10 pounds—and can be taken on and off easily, making the wearing of a prosthetic device manageable and eliminating the need for invasive neurological surgery.

He’s spoken with many amputees and prosthetics users who have explained to him how the devices they use now are a struggle. “They’ll tell me they have a device that’s too heavy and too bulky and ends up underneath their bed because it’s too hard to use,” LaChappelle says.

His goal is to keep everything external, wireless, and someday, operated by a control system that interfaces with the brain. He wants to “surpass human functionality with mechanics” by making an arm capable of lifting 200 pounds and rotating 360 degrees.

He taught himself how to do all of this. “School hasn’t really helped at all,” he says. “This is a personal project.”

There were science fairs and awards, but LaChappelle spent most of his time at these events standing in front of his project explaining how it worked until his voice gave out. He rarely had a chance to take part in the real fun of a science fair—going around and seeing other people’s projects.

LaChappelle lives in Mancos, Colorado, a small town in the southwestern portion of the state, right at the Four Corners. Population: 1,200. The nearest Radio Shack is 30 minutes away. He likes it, he says, but as a kid he found there wasn’t much to do except ride a bike, and in his case, “take apart most everything” that had pieces or a motor.

He says, “It was good that I was forced into boredom and had to try to figure out something else to do.”

His usual routine has been to get through the school day and get home to work on his projects until bedtime.

His brother is away at college and he lives with his parents, who are extremely tolerant about what goes on up in their son’s bedroom. The house is small, so they hear everything: “I work with metal a lot, and have to cut it with big blades and stuff. And I do a lot of hammering.”

The bedroom is filled with 3D printers, computers, a workbench with a grinder, a drill press, a big soddering station, numerous robotic arm prototypes and a video camera so he can open source his work on YouTube.

LaChappelle says it’s not too bad: “It’s my own space—it could be worse.”

Somewhere in there, he also has a bed, but he doesn’t always have time to use it. He likes to work at night, occasionally all night long, after which he just finds another time to sleep.

“I like to think that I’m a pretty efficient worker,” he says. “I have a semblance of goals that I have to achieve to get things done. I’ll have something printing on the 3D printers and be working on something else. There’s no excuse to have any downtime with a project like this.”

This summer, LaChappelle led a team at NASA that investigated how astronauts on earth control robots in space. He has several college scholarships offers in hand and invitations to direct projects at universities around the world. But he’s also building his own robotics business and says if he went to college now he’d probably just be doing the same work in a different place.

For now, he’s sticking to the familiar. He prefers the solitude of his own workshop in Mancos—7,000 feet above sea level with deserts and canyons not far off. He believes environment can affect a person’s work style.

At night with his bedroom windows open, there are zero distractions and his mind is clear. “It’s kind of peaceful,” he says. “I definitely do think nature helps with productivity, too. I can look outside and see mountains and forests and everything.”

easton is a student and prosthetic robotocist @eastonlachappel

PAUL LEBLANC

BUILDING THE ON RAMP TO A BETTER LIFE

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Paul LeBlanc sees education as an “on ramp” to more stable work that allows people to prosper and take better care of their families.

As the President of Southern New Hampshire University for the past 10 years, LeBlanc has attracted considerable attention for bringing the university to the next level through the creation of the largest non-profit provider of online degrees in New England and the fourth largest in the country.

SNHU also provides the classic residential, comingof-age experience for 18-year-olds who want a deliberate learning community: a dynamic classroom environment, unique on and off campus activities, and intensive mentoring from faculty.

But the university now serves an entirely different type of student: adult, non-traditional degree-seekers who make up the bulk of American college enrollment today. They are not looking to sit on the quad having coffee with their professors, LeBlanc notes. They race home from work, grab fast food, get their families settled, get a load of laundry going, and log in to their online classes at 9:30 p.m.

They are intensely focused on gaining the basic competencies they need to get ahead in the workforce.

“We tend to romanticize the classroom,” LeBlanc says.

“Those of us who lived and loved college life forget that not everyone was there.” These students are working adults whose first priorities are family and work and then fit education into very busy lives.

LeBlanc has championed the expansion of online programs at SNHU as a way to “keep alive the American dream” by putting education into the hands of as many students as possible. To that end, SNHU has the first and still only competency-based degree program approved by the US Department of Education – no courses, no three-

credit hour units, just 120 competencies and students can go as fast or as slow as they like. All for just $2,500 per year.

“I’m so passionate about making these opportunities available because I see what it did in my own life,” he says.

He describes his parents as “hard scrabble” immigrant farmers from Canada who had only an eighth grade education. He is the only one of five children in his family to get a college degree—at a state university because he couldn’t afford the private liberal arts college of his choice.

Today, LeBlanc has a Ph.D. in English and has been president of two Northeastern colleges. He is on the brink of writing his fourth book, travels the globe frequently, shepherds significant transformations in higher education, and speaks with unabashed pride about his two highly accomplished daughters: one a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, the other a doctoral candidate at Stanford University.

“What connects the dots is my ability to get a college degree,” he says. “Education is still the best platform for social mobility.”

SNHU’s tremendous success as an online education provider has enabled it to continually reinvent its brick and mortar campus with new buildings and creative programs. Under LeBlanc’s presidency the university has moved from Tier 3 to Tier 1 in regional U.S. News and World Report rankings. Last year, Fast Company listed it as No. 12 overall out of the “World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies.” It was the only university to make the list.

“The reason SNHU has been successful in trying new things is that we are willing to get out of our own take-it-forgranted mindsets about how we do things,” LeBlanc says.

While the rise of online education creates frustration in some quarters—among traditionally-minded faculty, for one—LeBlanc emphasizes its empowering student-

centered quality that offers greater uniformity and consistency in the learning experience.

“Thirty years ago, a college degree was a signal to the labor market that you knew how to think critically or had certain math skills,” he says. “Employers could make assumptions about you. But the reliability that a college degree once carried is no longer there.”

Online education prioritizes what the student knows, LeBlanc says, which creates “greater clarity about the claims that students make for their learning.”

SNHU’s mission to improve labor opportunities begins on its own campus. The university is repeatedly recognized by the Chronicle of Higher Education as a “Great College to Work For,” based on its exemplary benefits package, solid compensation, and professional development opportunities.

“We try as hard as we can to make sure that everyone has a living wage, even those working at the lowest hourly wage,” LeBlanc says. “We are staffed even in the leadership positions by first generation college graduates, as I was in my family, and there’s a real commitment to help people to get to that next level.”

paul is president, southern new hampshire university www.snhu.edu @snhuprez

HOWARD LINDZON

The tape has moved to the streams

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In a bygone era of American finance, J.P. Morgan sat in his Wall Street office with his own stock ticker, letting the tape run through his fingers as he controlled the flow of information into the markets. Today, we have “the Human Ticker,” according to Howard Lindzon, Co-Founder and CEO of the expanding social investing site, StockTwits.

This is the world of the new tape, Lindzon says, where people create their own ticker streams that are easily accessible and tailored to their specific investment interests. StockTwits is leveling the investment playing field by making information immediately available to everyone.

In comparison, the old ticker is “very dull” and a little bit dumb, Lindzon remarks. The Human Ticker is much smarter. Using the best technologies of social media, it puts more people into the conversation. Lindzon admits it can also be addictive, but “it’s exactly what people want.” It’s easy to learn, interactive and infinitely flexible.

“We have these tools now from our iPhone or desktop to reach pretty much anyone that we want, to talk to about any subject,” Lindzon explains about StockTwits and social investing in general. “We’ve never had tools like that, never had this kind of instant leverage. It’s very hard to value the impact of these things. ” He describes StockTwits as a positive community comprised of like-minded individuals who have a passion for investing. It is a platform for journaling and getting feedback from others. “It makes me a better investor, more of a mentor,” he says. “It keeps me accountable to all of my ideas.”

StockTwits has become a natural extension of Lindzon’s own financial activity: “If I’m on the stream, people can reach me. StockTwits is built to manage my workflow, and it just so happens that other people like it.

We’re really one giant customer support desk.”

On StockTwits, people can share anything from traditionally-generated research to the most unstudied opinions about a recent trade, an intriguing company, a simmering trend, or even the public mood at the moment.

Members create personally-tailored streams and watch lists in a recently redesigned format that facilitates smoother communication and following.

“It’s like a treasure hunt,” Lindzon says. “You’ve got to put in the time, but we’re here to help you go faster.”

It’s all very gratifying and highly individualized. Lindzon says that there is no right way to do it, but creating the perfect Human Ticker demands constant pruning and adjusting. It doesn’t necessarily follow traditional protocols in the sharing of information, but social investing has its own rules. (“In the financial business, deleting a tweet is the worst thing you can do,” he notes.)

And, he adds, the unstructured, unvetted flow of information requires “a new trust system” that starts with the same “buyer beware” vigilance that is necessary in any type of investing.

With the pipeline of financial information more open and accessible, Lindzon notes, banks are losing control of a profit center and a source of revenue, but they are discovering that it is impossible to compete with the media drip of Twitter. “They’re reading the stuff that we’re reading,” he says of stock chatter on social media. “It goes both ways—it’s just more interesting now.”

Social investing is now in the “acceptance phase,” according to Lindzon. Heavy-hitting financiers are becoming more outspoken about their investment views.

And even though most players in the biggest financial houses are still under restrictions not to share information through social media, they want in, he says.

Information exchange in the current market cycle is dramatically different from J.P. Morgan’s way of doing

things, but Lindzon says it doesn’t necessarily change the nature of the way people invest.

“The companies that we’re talking about are changing the economy,” not StockTwits, he says. But he is fascinated by the way the social Web is bringing social leverage to the stock market by enabling people to “speed things up.”

Lindzon says he has trouble sleeping at night. And judging from the breakneck pace of his StockTwits posts, it isn’t surprising that he can’t turn off all that energy on a dime.

“Sometimes you can’t think,” he shares on StockTwits, “just watch and admire how markets work.”

howard is co-founder and ceo, stocktwits www.howardlindzon.com @howardlindzon

ANGELA MAIERS

WHISPERING TO THE WORLD

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In preschools and kindergartens across the country, one classroom job is coveted above all others. It is a position of immense responsibility that requires a significant public contribution.

Milk carrier.

Three-and-a-half-foot individuals embark on a journey down to a cooler somewhere in the far recesses of the school. They carefully count the milks (regular and chocolate) and make their return, straining through the hallways with trays of icy cold containers. The honor is huge. The peer pressure is enormous.

Angela Maiers, Founder and President of Maiers Education Services, offers this image to remind us that at the early stages of our education system, we are doing something right. From the start, we expect children in our schools to contribute in a way that is meaningful to everyone.

Carrying milk, she points out, is the most elite job.

“That was the job away from the teacher, and the teacher trusted you,” Maiers says. “There was not one kid who screwed up on that job. You have the milk of the entire classroom. If you miscount, and one kid doesn’t get his chocolate milk, you’re in big trouble.”

At some point, though, we stop expecting this contribution from our students. And that, according to Maiers, is the moment they stop giving it.

They cease to dream audaciously. They believe that things are going fine without their effort, that somebody else can do better. Instead of standing up, they sit back.

“Somewhere, the world starts whispering to you, ‘No you’re not good enough,’” she says.

As a teacher and educational consultant for over 20 years, Maiers has been using her scintillating energy to shake people out of this general malaise. She harnesses every medium at her disposal—speaking, writing, blogging,

tweeting—to rally others to see what she sees. That is, we can do amazing things—all of us, from the littlest milk carriers to the highest placed CEOs. But we need to expect it of each other. In fact, Maiers insists, we need to demand it of each other.

She says that a failure to have faith in ourselves and others has particularly negative consequences in schools, where a passive mindset becomes systemic, affecting teachers and administrators as well as students.

“Every single teacher came into this profession not for the money or the notoriety but to change kids’ lives,” Maiers says. But then curriculum burdens and administrative politics wheedle their way into the classroom. Pedagogical focus shifts or fades. “Teachers become run over by the system. They give up and start to live up to their limitations and not their potential.”

The game-changer in this equation, Maiers suggests, is technology. She sees social media as a liberating force that offers novel solutions to age-old educational problems. It used to be that the teacher with the biggest file cabinet—chock full of lesson plans, unit exercises, projects and worksheets— wielded the most power.

“When the Web came along, that was no longer a commodity,” she says. Now, teachers can reach beyond their districts and even their states for fresh curriculum content and delivery methods. They can pose questions to the e-sphere of their choice, and be inundated with feedback and support. They are no longer confined by the mentality of the teachers’ lounge. “There is a world of teachers on the Web, a network of people who will not let you fail,” she says.

Through social media, Maiers captures thoughts, moments and ideas and sends them out with the anticipation that someone—somewhere—will find her input worthwhile. It is a mindset, she says, a belief that

her habit of giving will create serendipitous results. It is her positive whisper to the world.

“Social media gives us a chance to make public what we see,” she says. “Technology is an amplifier of who we are at the core.”

The social media connection, according to Maiers, satisfies one of our basic biological drives as human beings—to feel necessary in the world: “It’s part of our DNA. We need to know that somebody notices us and values us. It is the deepest level of validation.”

Five-year-olds know this, as they venture out into the hallways to secure cold milk, knowing with cool assurance that the entire class depends on them.

angela is founder and president, maiers educational services www.angelamaiers.com @angelamaiers

ANDREW MAnGINO

Bestirring a movement, Ben Franklin-style

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Andrew Mangino and Benjamin Franklin could have been best friends. They each got their start in journalism, explored a bit of politics, and became change makers in their own communities.

Franklin helped create America. Mangino helped create The Future Project, a movement aimed at bringing education alive in what he considers the broken ecosystem of our schools, where potential gets locked up in bureaucracy and hopelessness.

Certainly, Franklin would never have tolerated such dismal mediocrity. But as he counseled 300 years ago, “we may make these times better, if we bestir ourselves.”

The Future Project, based in New York City, takes a group of carefully selected “Dream Directors,” usually bright, motivated young men and women from the community, and brings them right into the schools to “fire people up” and get them thinking about their ideas, their plans, their sense of purpose.

The goal is not to point out the shortcomings of teachers and the curriculum, according to Mangino, but to help students choose the narratives of their own lives.

They are ready and equipped to serve, he says—they just need to be pushed to their limits.

In Franklinesque fashion, The Future Project tries to have a little fun with the movement. “We found in the world of transformational education that a sense of humor is missing,” Mangino says. “Young people are full of such wonderful imagination and laughter. School should be a place where people are laughing and having fun and engaging their whims.”

The Future Project helps students gather up the energy that falls through the cracks of a typical school day and harness it into projects that have immediate currency in their own lives: reducing violence among youth, raising the self-esteem of middle school girls, writing rap music

without curse words, and transforming their schools through art.

“We are very much out to change culture, to show entire schools that everything they’ve always wanted they already have, to challenge people to channel small actions into bigger actions and demonstrate to the world and to yourself what lies within you,” he says.

Mangino, recently named to the Forbes “30 Under 30” list of social entrepreneurs, was inspired to cofound The Future Project after reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Franklin, who rallied the resources and talents of his own generation to build a new nation.

“The character of the Dream Director is very much inspired by the character of Ben Franklin,” Mangino explains. “He had this way of straddling the line between idealism and pragmatism. He had a crazy big dream for his community, Philadelphia, and ultimately, the whole country. At the same time, he was a sensible pragmatist who could figure out how to get from here to there.”

Mangino, like Franklin, made his initial public splash in the newspaper business. He had his own crazy big dream at the age of five, when he started his first newspaper, reporting “hard-hitting news” about things happening around his block. Eventually, he became the gamechanging editor-in-chief of his high school newspaper, and then in college, of the Yale Daily News.

Reporting for the Yale Daily News exposed Mangino to some of the educational problems facing the surrounding community of New Haven, Conn., where he encountered the same apathy and disengagement he had witnessed in his own high school. Later, he spent some time as a blogger and speechwriter in D.C. and realized that politics was “just a means of achieving something larger, of reelectrifying America and instilling a sense of possibility.”

Mangino has now circled his way back to the place

where he feels a personal sense of urgency to make change: in the schools. He insists that the future is bright, and that good things will happen in our educational system if we act now.

Benjamin Franklin never waited to put something crucial in motion when he saw what his community needed. Whether it was a fire department, a library, or some homespun wisdom from Poor Richard—he showed people how they could make their lives better today. “You may delay,” he quipped, “but time will not.”

At The Future Project, Mangino is of the same mindset: “Everything happens now. That’s one of our core messages. Start it today. That message, weirdly enough, is not present in our society right now.”

andrew is ceo and co-founder, the future project www.thefutureproject.org @andrewmangino

CARMEN MEDINA

AWAITING SECOND ENLIGHTENMENT

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Former CIA official Carmen Medina has spent her entire professional career thinking about information— how to get it, who to share it with, how it flows. What excites her lately is how it empowers young people.

After a 32-year career with the CIA, Medina is now a Specialist Leader at Deloitte Consulting, where she works with a group of millennial-age fellows focusing on Innovation and Intelligence. She says they seek real meaning in what they do, a quality that she finds “spectacularly wonderful. “They have a disarming kind of communal honesty about them,” she says.

Medina links these general millennial qualities to the greater availability of information that is the hallmark of the world they were born into. More information is creating a youth culture that doesn’t accept things at face value.

“When I was growing up, I didn’t have a lot of information,” Medina says. “If you wanted news, you read Time magazine—and there wasn’t much else. But these young men and women have the capacity to figure things out and compare and observe the gaps. They do it naturally. They don’t settle for facile explanations—they really investigate.”

They have an easier way to communicate with each other and are more willing to collaborate than the generation before them, Medina says. They have a sense of autonomy and confidence in their response to the world. They don’t ape conventional wisdom and passively contribute to the preservation of traditional thinking.

“It’s not that they’re anti-authority,” Medina says, “it’s that they just don’t accept hierarchical ways of organizing society. I love that. They definitely think that this is their world to shape.”

Part of Medina’s role at Deloitte is to help these millennials think more critically, organize their ideas and

use evidence to support their point of view. But she also helps them to hone their skills of “sense-making,” their ability to make a pure interpretation of reality: “When you make sense of the world, you free yourself as much as possible of your preconceptions. You observe the world as it is.”

Millennials have a natural affinity for sense-making, she says. They have a wider range of observation, a willingness to acknowledge the unexpected and greater flexibility in responding to what they see. They don’t spend endless amounts of time gathering evidence before they act. They are nimble. They make decisions, but they’re not afraid to change their minds.

The generation ahead of them finds these attributes unnerving.

“I think we’re still in the grips of the strategic planning stuff of the ‘80s and ‘90s, where someone very clever has to come up with the blueprint for decision-making, and then everybody will be doing that for a while, and they’ll do it to excess,” she says. “We could scale down the apparatus around decision-making. What’s really important is reality, not the decision.”

According to Medina, this shift away from, top-down leadership has been facilitated by social networking, which creates an environment where we all observe the world together in a powerful, reciprocal relationship.

“For me, social networking represents the largely unfiltered reactions of people to what they are observing,” she says. “This is unprecedented. We never, ever had this information before. It’s telling us a lot more about how humans operate and the human condition. I think it’s helping us to see human society more realistically.”

The downside of all this information flow is that the human psyche cannot process everything it is currently absorbing. Medina senses an “existential plague” on

the horizon as people grasp the magnitude of global problems and feel at a loss to find solutions. She worries about a crisis of meaning in the world.

But her faith in millennials blooms in this space.

They will put their creative sense-making into high gear, embracing technological tools. She hopes that these individuals who are redefining marriage, family and relationships also take a fresh look at capitalism, national security and foreign policy.

“I like to think we’re on the cusp of a second enlightenment,” she says. “Once you’re rethinking marriage and family, isn’t everything else up for grabs?”

carmen is a retired deputy director of intelligence, cia, and specialist leader, deloitte consulting llp www.recoveringfed.com @milouness

DEB MILLS-SCOFIELD

Love and the network in an I-Thou world

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How many people end conversations with clients by saying, “I love you” or giving them a hug and a kiss?

Deb Mills-Scofield does. At the end of the day, when the work is done, she ascribes to Martin Buber’s I and Thou philosophy: we exist only in the way we encounter others.

Putting aside for a moment Mills-Scofield’s phenomenal success as a groundbreaking systems engineer turned consultant/venture capitalist/ teacher, she remarks on the great abundance of happy intangibles she has met with over the years: “I have a fabulous husband, incredible kids, a super dog, a wonderful life, and a great network.”

Mills-Scofield attributes her very existence to a network of people who vouched for members of her family during World War II. Most of her family died in Auschwitz, and those who fled the Nazis scattered throughout Europe to countries where someone was willing to sponsor them. “You needed to know someone in order to escape,” she says.

As a first generation American, Mills-Scofield still upholds a deeply-rooted expectation that others will grant her a measure of freedom and generosity if she shows up on their doorstep. Her own family history has made her believe in people, not rules.

She likes to push boundaries, to “see where the lines are and whether they are hard and fast.”

Don’t tell her that she can’t graduate from Brown University in three years because she will. Don’t tell her that, while she’s there, she can’t create one of the country’s first-ever undergraduate concentrations in cognitive science. She’ll do that, too, and then sling all of that timely knowledge into the creation of the most lucrative messaging system patent in the history of AT&T Lucent.

And don’t tell her that at the age of 22, with the cachet of her Bell Labs experience behind her, she can’t walk uninvited—and without a graduate degree— into any

executive’s office at AT&T and speak her mind. Hierarchies make no sense to her; they impede innovation.

Mills-Scofield grew up in Rumson, N.J., where she and her sister attended public schools, but every Tuesday her mother took them into Manhattan to visit the museums.

The girls were also encouraged to take another day off every week—to stay home and play. When the school superintendent called Mills-Scofield’s parents to express his concern about their daughters’ frequent absences, Dr. Mills asked what their grades were. “A’s,” the superintendent informed him. Her father replied, “Oh, good—it’s working!”

“Right from the get-go,” Mills-Scofield says, “my mental model for education was that it is the responsibility of your parents and yourself. That was ingrained in me early on, and that’s how I went through school. I thought that’s pretty much how the world worked.”

Mills-Scofield’s educational model is her life model.

It begins with people, not the canon. It is driven by the individual’s urge to know and to create. It does not revere the status quo.

“My favorite line to my clients is, ‘So, where is it written?’” she says. “Challenging orthodoxy is a central theme for my whole life, which is all tied up in the network.

I view life as an experiment: learn, apply, iterate. That’s what your network is for.”

Mills-Scofield explains her own network this way: Her consultancy is her livelihood and passion, her venture capital firm, Glengary, is her way of giving back. She helps the entrepreneurs she invests in to get their ideas off the ground by connecting them to her clients, who want innovative products and services. Her insanely curious Brown students keep her on the edge, and therefore, better able to mentor her clients and guide entrepreneurial projects.

“In my mind, it’s a total system,” Mills-Scofield says, and perhaps only a mind like hers could hold it all together.

But in her deeply humanistic I and Thou vision, MillsScofield attributes any success to people and their capabilities. Technology is spectacular, she admits, but while it enables us to reach each other faster, it also lets us hide and stay entrenched in our ways.

“That’s why the network is so critical,” she notes. “I keep learning new things. It’s a gift. It’s a proxy for me because I can’t be everywhere anyway. Let the network work on its own and pay it forward.”

deb is distruptor, mills-scofield, llc www.about.me/dscofield @dscofield

DAVA NEWMAN

Thinking big and floating in zero-G

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Growing up under the wide open Montana sky may have had something to do with Dava Newman’s passion to study space. Watching the landing of Apollo 11 on television when she was five years old also played into her desire to explore places that are almost beyond our capacity to imagine.

The stars are clear and bright in Montana, says Newman, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. Looking up at the night sky, seeing the moon, and wondering if we could ever reach another planetary body seemed a natural exercise for a young girl in Big Sky Country.

“We have big, vast natural spaces, and we are very big dreamers,” she says of Montanans. “We think big and we dream big.”

For the past several years, Newman’s research at MIT involves designing the perfect spacesuit—one that will keep astronauts alive in space while giving them maximum flexibility to do what they are out there to do—explore.

She has four mockups and four prototypes of these “BioSuits™,” which serve as self-sustaining life ecosystems.

As she makes discoveries about how to perfect the BioSuit™, she finds herself continually astounded by the human body itself. Simulating in advanced materials, the structure and fabric of the body has led her to marvel at the elegance and resilience of the real thing.

“Everything about the human body is amazing,” she says. “I’m always in awe at the complexity and the perfection of its design.” For instance, she says the skin is a complicated organ: “For an engineer trying to replicate it, good luck. It’s wonderful, stretchy, and tough. We are trying, in some sense, to recreate some of its special magical properties for our ‘second skin’ suit design.”

In searching for novel ways to approach such design challenges, it is extraordinarily helpful to take oneself out of context, to separate oneself from an accumulated body

of research and come at things from a different angle.

Perhaps go out into space, to get an unusual perspective.

Although Newman has not flown as an astronaut, she has spent considerable time in micro- and partial- gravity.

On NASA’s zero-gravity plane she’s flown up 40 thousand feet, been “dropped out of the sky like a rocket,” to relish the 25 seconds of true microgravity, or weightlessness.

The purpose of this extreme roller coaster maneuver, the “25 seconds of weightlessness followed by a monstrous 2-G pullout,” is to simulate the feel of zero-G. “Mind you,” she says, “we fly at least 40 of these parabolas in a flight session.” Not everyone finds the experience physically pleasant, she admits with a laugh: “It’s called the vomit comet. But it’s worth it—it’s all in the name of science and technology.”

Newman has also had some more sedate microgravity moments, which she says have no parallel with any experience on Earth. “Everything floats,” she explains. “It’s a wonderful, bizarre feeling to feel all of your organs floating. You’re suspended in this really nice weightlessness.”

She says she loves her dreams after a week of microgravity flights: “I am floating and flying in my dreams.”

While Newman develops ways to put the human body safely into space, she is mindful of how it functions here on Earth. She says that in 50 percent of her work, she thinks about how the technology she is creating will help people. For everything she designs, there are three to five possible “Earth applications,” she says.

Her deepest hope for her research is that she might discover ways to improve the quality of human life. For one thing, her BioSuit™ experiments are leading her closer to understanding how we might design a suit that enables people with limited musculoskeletal mobility to move better on their own. She thinks of it as “a soft exoskeleton

with some nice locomotion enhancing capabilities, or a soft exoskeleton.”

Newman says she is an explorer in everything she does, whether she’s researching the human body’s adaptability to space or circumnavigating the globe in a sailboat with her partner, Guillermo Trotti, who she notes is her biggest inspiration—followed by Apollo 11.

Her attitude about human potential is buoyant, like organs floating delightfully in zero-G. And because her mind is not limited to the sphere of this Earth, Newman’s optimism is as wide open as the Montana sky. It’s filled with bright stars that, in her conception of the universe, are not that far away.

dava is professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems, massachusettsinstitute of technology esd.mit.edu/faculty_pages/newman/newman.htm

BRUCE NUSSBAUM

What beckons you?

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When Bruce Nussbaum first began reporting on traditional business topics as a managing editor at Businessweek, he was one of the first journalists to cover design as a field of business. Over the years, he has watched it expand as a concept.

Whereas 20 years ago, we designed things, today we also design experiences and engagements, but “the guts, the process and the results are very much the same,” Nussbaum says. He prefers the term “creativity” because it is more accessible to a wider range of people.

Nussbaum’s new book, Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire, makes a case that creativity is not an elusive quality but a basic human potential that we all have. He says the social and economic horizon ahead of us will demand that we tap into that innate capacity.

While doing research for his book, Nussbaum searched for examples of truly disruptive innovation. “I was really struck by how simple it was rather than how complex it was,” he says.

Whittling down the creative process to a single idea, Nussbaum says that innovators know how to connect the dots. They often begin with things that are familiar to their own generation—their worldview, experience and technological acumen—and then link them to their own personal interests and value systems.

The innovations that result are unique configurations of dots that integrate some essential elements: knowing how to do things, feeling passionate about doing them, and ensuring that they are meaningful in the present context.

The dots swirl around us. Experimenting with their possible connections and arrangements reveals the world to us in different ways and heightens our creativity, according to Nussbaum. He feels an urgency to play with

these possibilities right now because mass production and commoditization are numbing our experiences and depleting our planet.

One of the key concepts Nussbaum discusses is aura--the strong engagement of people with objects and experiences. Wonderful objects and experiences beckon us. But that sensation is almost impossible to scale in a multi-billion dollar internet industry where companies like Google and Facebook make money by clicks. Clicks don’t always translate into purchases. They are becoming mindless and ordinary. They don’t excite us. Engagement is slipping. “When there was one thing or two things to choose from, we were drawn to them,” Nussbaum says. “But when we’re all choking on choice, nothing is beckoning us.”

The “Experience Economy” is being replaced by the “Engagement Economy” and we need to learn how to beckon and build aura. Beckoning itself has become commoditized in this era of big data, he notes. We walk past a store, emitting personal data from our cell phones, and immediately an advertisement summons us inside.

It’s not exactly the experience we crave. “It’s cheap aura, cheap engagement,” Nussbaum says.

There are deeper ways of beckoning. The soft sell of a salesperson engages us for a moment, but allows us to walk away. Intrigue lingers. A locally made artisanal object has a tangible tie to a place that we know. It resonates.

We want the emotion, the physicality, the aura.

The recent push to generate these types of consumer experiences represents a different type of market reality, a new dimension of capitalism, according to Nussbaum.

We want to buy, we want to share and we want to be swept away.

“You want to be part of something larger, and you want to be in the flow of something that carries you,” he

says. “That’s human.”

In business conversations, the notion of flow is usually associated with work that completely absorbs us as we effortlessly produce something. Nussbaum suggests, however, that we can also achieve flow on the other side of a market exchange as we make purchases and connect our own dots to something outside ourselves.

Today, Nussbaum explores these ideas with his students at Parsons The New School of Design in New York City, where he is a professor of innovation and design. As this generation comes into maturity, he sees it as uniquely poised to shift the market economy with its originality and intuitive sense of what is necessary.

“Creativity is really the source of capitalism,” he says.

“And sharing is really at the heart of capitalism—not kumbaya sharing, but exchange and benefit.”

Nussbaum says this new, cohesive form of capitalism is something “big and wonderful.” It has fallen under the media’s radar, but it is happening. It is a revival of making and meaning, and it beckons us.

bruce is professor of innovation and design, new school www.creativeintelligencebook.com @brucenussbaum

STACY PEARSALL

GRACE UNDER PRESSURE— THE UNIQUE SENSIBILITIES OF A COMBAT PHOTOGRAPHER

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Stacy Pearsall is tough as nails. She also has an artist’s sensitivity about the surprising nature of the human spirit. She is hyper-vigilant in unfamiliar surroundings, yet attentive to the stories of strangers. She is cynical and compassionate at the same time.

As a former combat photographer in the U.S. Air Force, Pearsall has a unique skill set. Twelve years in the service and three tours in Iraq taught her to maintain situational awareness—how to stay alive, keep other people alive— and still create a space for art.

“I was always anticipating what the possible outcomes would be for any situation, being in the right place to capture that moment, being able to frame it up,” she recalls.

Pearsall joined the Air Force at the age of 17, partially inspired by her great-grandfather who was a Marine in World War I. She says she opted for the “smart force” instead of the Marine Corps because she wanted to develop mental brawn. When she began studying still photography, training for combat was part of the deal.

Today, Pearsall is a disabled veteran who engaged the enemy in combat despite the official ban on women in frontline situations. She earned the Bronze Star Medal and Commendation with Valor and twice has been named Military Photographer of the Year.

As a combat photographer, she faced the complicated challenge of finding a balance between being a military photographer and being a photojournalist. The two don’t necessarily run in tandem, she says.

“When you are pulled into extraordinary situations, the body’s natural response is fight or flight,” Pearsall explains. “Behind the camera, you can do neither of those things. You’re doing something unnatural. All the energy that would be put into that fight or flight is put into a creative response.”

Operating under adrenalin and enemy fire, Pearsall had to visualize images and create meaningful frames for shots, knowing that her life could end instantly. Her purpose, she says, was to bring light to subjects that most people do not even know exist.

In the process, she “turned off” who she was outside the military: “I had to put aside the idea that I was a wife with a family and obligations at home. I had to accept death as a part of the occupation in that moment or it would have consumed me.”

The moral complexities of Pearsall’s military objectives were enormous. She had to determine when to put down her camera and take hold of a weapon or pull someone to safety. “For each individual, that threshold is different,” she says. Once, a fellow soldier and good friend was shot in the head right in front of Pearsall. She contemplated whether to do her job as a photojournalist or simply be present with him. She took one photo and laid the camera aside.

Documenting war is a humane act and the sensibilities of the combat photographer drive the story. In one way, Pearsall stands apart with her camera, but she is not objective. She is involved in the action, knowing which shots are real, which ones are part of the narrative.

“You’re supposed to take yourself out of the photo, but that’s impossible,” she says. “Just by being in the situation, you’re inherently changing the environment.

Whether you choose to shoot or not to shoot is really the first line of censorship.”

The satisfaction of her work as a combat photographer comes from documenting the heroism that young men and women exhibit in extraordinary circumstances. “I want to show the world what happened so that it doesn’t go unrecognized,” she says. “Ten or twenty years down the road, they’ll look back and it will be there, evidence

of these wars.”

As a civilian, Pearsall has started her own business, the Charleston Center for Photography, where she teaches her art. She says she enjoys putting people in situations where they can be creative and happy. But she spends half her time working with veterans, helping to ease their way back into a life outside of combat.

She says she believes in fate: “I survived what I did so that I could help veterans. I became a photographer so I could tell stories. All of these things happen for a reason.

I’m sure of this.”

stacy is a photographer & educator www.stacypearsall.photoshelter.com @stacypearsall

Evan ratliff

Story telling the longform way

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In the first two decades of the Internet, much of the thrill was about getting content onto the Web. Ease, accessibility and unlimited space made it an open frontier to be shaped to our own liking. Now, some media theorists say, those Wild West days are over. It’s time to get more civilized.

Online journalism is one field that is moving beyond the crude structures of its initial Web debut. The truncated, near breathless style of Internet news writing may be past its heyday, according to award-winning journalist Evan Ratliff.

Ratliff is a long-time contributing writer to Wired magazine and has written for The New Yorker, National Geographic and other prestigious publications in a transformational media market. He is also the Co-Founder of both Atavist, a media and software company aimed at digital/mobile publishing, and The Atavist, a digital-first nonfiction publication.

The platform that makes Atavist go is Creatavist, software that makes it easy for users to build and publicize their own digital stories. Using the software, writers can fold into their narratives multiple types of media: character profiles, maps, timelines, videos, audio clips, photography.

Anything that will help the writer to articulate the story while enhancing the reader’s experience.

“It is a substantial shift in terms of how people can read something, and for us, in the way that the story can be told,” Ratliff says.

The central feature of digital-first publishing is the “e-single”—an original piece of longform nonfiction journalism that is sold individually for $2 to $3 and downloaded directly to mobile devices or e-readers.

Ratliff describes it as something between a lengthy magazine article and a book—a manageable read that’s “great for a plane ride.”

He predicts that some conditioning will be needed to convince people that the e-single is an item worth paying for: “Part of what we’re saying is that it’s OK to sell these things. They’re like books, but we sell them directly to readers.”

The longform story itself is a narrative that takes its time in the telling, unlike the short and anxious newswriting style that has become standard on the Web in the last 20 years.

Writers and their audiences are now looking for something more sophisticated, Ratliff says. Web narratives that are split into numbered pages seem outdated and clunky. Bare-bones presentations have a tired feel. And yet, the publishing freedoms of the Web are enormous.

Digital means not having to think about the costs of ink, paper and distribution. The new frontier is in perfecting the experience.

The challenge, Ratliff says, is to “design for digital environments in a way that will hold people’s attention.”

To that end, longform stories are highly collaborative projects in which one person maintains the overall vision, but every other player makes a distinct mediaspecific contribution.

“We want to make sure that we’re not just doing text,” Ratliff says, but in pushing boundaries, some artistic discernment is required. “There’s a difficult line between making something that’s really interesting and making something that’s really cheesy.”

At the heart of it all, Ratliff sees good storytelling. While traditional journalists look for the “hook,” editors at The Atavist ask themselves a deeper question: “Is this a great story?” Is it compelling? Is it true? Can the reporters go out and get it? Can they write it beautifully? Does it have investigative value?

Longform storytelling seems well-suited to nonfiction narratives, but Creativist has also been used by businesses,

hospitals, schools, and diverse organizations that want to tell the stories of what they are all about. Others have used the software to build how-to manuals and learning modules.

Ratliff is optimistic about the future of digital/mobile publishing in all of its possible permutations. He says the next generation of storytellers has a knack for expressing itself across a range of media: “Young people are either trained or just naturally gifted in approaching the world that way.”

Creatavist is helping to civilize the Web by enabling a richer, more nuanced digital aesthetic. But there is still quite a bit of wide open space in that multimedia frontier, according to Ratliff.

“There are no rules and very few examples,” he says.

“The fun thing is, right now, you can experiment.”

evan is co-founder, ceo and editor, atavist www.atavist.com @ev_rat

Joann stonier

Data is the new currency

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The simplest cell phone call is a miniature data gold mine. Two people talking on their mobiles think they are having a simple conversation, but as they chat, data is being collected about their location, the time and length of their call, and possibly the way that information interfaces with their other digital activity.

The content of the call is important, according to JoAnn Stonier, Global Privacy and Data Protection Officer for MasterCard Worldwide. But it’s the metadata—data about data—that is of such high interest to a variety of parties. “It’s a different currency,” she says. “Data is the new form of exchange.”

Everywhere we turn we are leaving behind “digital breadcrumbs,” as Stonier points out, and everyone is “churning through thousands of bits of data to figure out what offers to give each of us next, and at some point, your content and experiences begin to be managed.”

Stonier does not like to be managed herself, so at MasterCard, she works to ensure that the company maintains an open and respectful relationship with the data of its customers.

“My job is to be the voice of the individual,” she says. “We always start with the individual. What are our customers or cardholders going to experience? What are they going to see? Do they understand what we are doing? That drives many of our decisions.”

Privacy has its own sensitivity spectrum, Stonier notes.

Some people don’t mind sharing everything. Others are troubled at the thought of relinquishing even minimal amounts of personal information, and many others fall somewhere in between. It can be tricky to find the right balance. But she says that people have a right to know what data is being collected about them and how their information is being used.

When we click “Agree” on an Internet privacy

statement we don’t always understand what the resulting data records look like. And enterprises who create data profiles about us can get it wrong. Even people who would like to be proactive about managing their own data often end up surrendering. Stonier says: “Most people are somewhat aware that someone is doing something, but they mostly give up because it is too difficult to figure out how to influence or change the decisions being made.”

Although privacy officers like Stonier have existed for almost two decades, she says that the tide of big data is expanding their role in an “unwritten space” where “new laws are being written right now.”

And those laws can be uneven because they often times lag behind the technology that makes them necessary. Furthermore, Stonier says there is growing tension between enabling commerce and innovation while protecting privacy for the individual. “The laws can sometimes be difficult to allow business to innovate, but they don’t always provide the individual with the protection that is intended,” she explains. “When regulators think about laws governing data, they think about big data companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, but the challenge is that the law applies to everyone, including the butcher shop down the street.”

As a global privacy officer, Stonier keeps abreast of what the data laws are in every area of the world, assisting MasterCard in developing policies with countries that have vastly different cultural notions about privacy and a government’s role in protecting it.

The US is an “outlier” in addressing privacy issues since it does not have a comprehensive privacy law, she says, but other governments are beginning to shift their energies to develop a more comprehensive approach to protecting their citizens’ privacy: “Many countries want to be part of digital commerce. They want that

type of commerce for their economy and they wake up to the fact that data is big business and that there is an emerging need to protect the personal information of their citizens.”

As Stonier races to deal with the back end of privacy issues in the context of global commerce, she is convinced of the need to address those issues early on—at the design level. She teaches international business and business strategy in the Design Management Masters program at Pratt Institute, where she encourages her graduate students to be ever mindful of the user’s privacy as they develop digital products and services.

“Design is the ability to take things that are not well known or defined and define them,” she says. “The problem is that nobody knows how to best define privacy.”

Thinking about how to treat data is central to the new information society, Stonier says. “Privacy is part of the sustainability of all that.” But she cautions: “We’re running out of time. What we decide today will create the future.”

joann is svp/global privacy and data protection officer, mastercard worldwide newsroom.mastercard.com/people/joannstonier @privacydesign

Carl Størmer

Keeping the tempo

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At the age of 43, jazz drummer Carl Størmer finally learned to lead with his left hand. When he was a child growing up in Oslo, Norway, he was taught to fight his instincts and drum right-handed, but now he knows that such discipline held him back.

Størmer is an accomplished jazz musician and entrepreneur whose Boston- and Oslo-based consulting firm, JazzCode, helps organizations glean valuable insights from the principles of jazz. As in jazz, he urges his clients to lead with what comes naturally, to improvise as the context unfolds and to be well prepared.

“The measure of success is the quality of your interaction in the moment,” Størmer says. “Presence is the most important factor.”

Presence is the frame of mind that enables creative action in unpredictable circumstances. Størmer came to understand this philosophy most deeply, not as a jazz musician or the head of a start-up, but as the father of two premature infants—his daughters, Hannah and Sidsel, now 18 and 14 years old.

Each of them weighed barely a pound at birth. Størmer and his wife, Ane, watched over their tiny daughters in the neonatal intensive care unit for 10- and 12-hour days over the course of many long months, never knowing what their next move would be. During this time Størmer learned that in order to keep moving he had to make decisions even without perfect information.

They discovered that a total immersion in this moment is what makes it possible to move on to the next one, and the next one. And they experienced this reality once again four years ago when Ane suffered a massive stroke that changed their lives.

Personally and professionally, Størmer has lived a truth that his wife hit upon after her stroke: control is for beginners. It’s an illusion—a remnant of a past

age that rejected the unconventional in favor of uniformity, certainty.

But now we live in an era of complex interactions, Størmer notes. The outsourcing of mass production means that our workforce is left with the more complicated tasks of running an organization. The ability to solve unfamiliar problems depends not on the limited value of training and preparation but on flexibility and adaptability. A bit of jazz.

Work today demands presence, a readiness to jump in when the moment opens up, a sense of timing, and a give-and-take that shifts with every note. As Størmer points out, we can’t always plan ahead, make decisions early, apply professional judgment, and know that if “x” happens, we will do “y.” But, he says, we can prepare in order to release the mental capacity needed to be present.

“Even an unskilled person can do that successfully, and that’s why we use scripts,” he says. “If you work as a fireman or a jazz musician or a psychiatrist or a lawyer or a consultant, it’s much harder. Organizations try to force this model of planning and rules based behavior, and you can try to apply that model, but it’s going to break down.”

In the current organizational ecosystem, the rules are losing their former essential quality. Solutions develop under time pressures and through collaborative efforts with experts across a variety of specialties. The ability to have a high quality conversation is crucial.

“The faster the context is developing and the less predictable it is, the more important it becomes for you to be present, to observe what you think might be the most relevant contribution at the moment,” he says.

Størmer encourages managers to trust more and control less—to give people the liberty to be present in their own way. “You never tell musicians how to hold

their instruments,” he says. “You tell them what you want them to play.” He advocates increasing mastery through simplification – tempo, scope, and by letting people solve their task using the method best suited for them. It makes little sense to be processed focused if you are only doing something once.

In life, as in jazz, we can never lose the tempo, Størmer says: “Real-time happens second by second, but if you perfect things too long, you lose momentum.

Being alive means that you have to trade perfection for forward momentum.”

“Life is expiring options all the time,” he says. “Take options as they appear in real-time, and turn them into something that will prevent everything from stopping.”

carl is principal/founder, jazzcode inc. jazzcode.com @jazzcode

alexander tsiaras

Seeing the story of the body

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If patients could see for themselves how fat collects on the outside of a blood vessel, the globule growing in size as it absorbs unnecessary refined sugars, then perhaps they would put down that doughnut.

A slew of health articles and a doctor’s orders may have made the same suggestion, but seeing it for oneself hits home.

The visualization of the hidden parts of the body is a far more potent way to motivate healthy living than what any medical authority tells us, according to Alexander Tsiaras, Founder and CEO of TheVisualMD, an online compendium of health visualizations and personal health applications. Tsiaras is an artist and technologist who creates software that “paints” the unseen parts of the human body into digital form to make them visible to a Web audience.

Medical visualization creates a note of clarity that is often lacking in the examination room. “Think about the state of the listener,” Tsiaras says. A patient with metastasized colon cancer may need an intricate scanning procedure, but the doctor’s explanation of the process becomes meaningless to the patient, whose mind is focused on the larger questions of his condition. Handing that patient reams of text explaining the procedure does not help.

On the other hand, Tsiaras notes, “I can show you a picture of the body, and in 30 seconds, you get it completely with the pictures. Whether you’re scared or not, you get it.”

Getting it is the first major step toward adherence to a prescribed health regimen, according to Tsiaras. Even when people know that they should take their medication, exercise, or stay on a specific diet, they resist.

People also need the tools to be inspired by their own bodies in order to sustain a commitment to healthful

regimens, Tsiaras says: “Until the person’s own body becomes the story to them, there is a very, very likely chance of going back into slippage from that regimen.”

Tsiaras says we are reaching a point in medical care where patients can scan their own bodies and store their images in the cloud where they have control over their own medical information. There are emotional benefits to such empowerment. Seeing, and therefore, knowing the hidden places of one’s body can create a sense of security, he says: “You get away from one of the terrible feelings in life, which is apprehension, not knowing what is happening. The idea of having a picture and stories to alleviate that apprehension is huge.”

Once we view a medical condition at the gross anatomical level, it becomes more difficult if not impossible to reverse. But the intricate technologies that have made anatomical visualizations possible and accessible to patients are becoming so refined that we may now consider ourselves at the molecular level, before certain conditions have a chance to set in.

“Images and video at TheVisualMD tell medical stories that can help to ease a patient’s worry in the midst of a health crisis,” Tsiaras says. “But the wider range goal of the Website’s content is to enhance wellness in general, to help people achieve the maximum potential of their health.”

“We all want to feel the lightness of our body being able to do what it’s capable of doing when it’s functioning magnificently,” he says.

alexander is editor-in-chief and founder/ceo, thevisualmd.com www.thevisualmd.com @thevisualmd

doug ulman

Start with Yes: Survivorship the LIVESTRONG Way

68

At the beginning of a recent cruise ship getaway with his family, Doug Ulman wanted to be anonymous. Ulman, the president and CEO of the LIVESTRONG Foundation, told everyone with him, “For this week, if anyone asks what I do, I’m a lawyer. I just want a week of vacation.”

But as soon as they got on the cruise ship in Florida, he broke his own rule.

A couple in their 60s, sporting bright yellow LIVESTRONG t-shirts, had stepped onto an elevator with the Ulman clan. For a few seconds, Ulman remained silent while his family watched to see what he would do.

Finally, he said to the couple, “Hey, thanks for wearing that t-shirt.”

In the conversation that followed, Ulman discovered that the woman had survived breast cancer. She, in turn, was ecstatic to learn of his affiliation with LIVESTRONG. The small exchange between them built another piece of the community that Ulman has been nurturing for 12 years as the revered and internationally respected head of one of the largest cancer support organizations in the world.

Advocating for people with cancer is both a professional and a personal mission for Ulman, who was diagnosed as a young adult 17 years ago. At that time, he felt isolated and bewildered as he dealt with the emotional and physical difficulties of treatment.

“When I was diagnosed, the clinical side was challenging, but that piece was less problematic for me than the psychosocial and practical piece,” he says. “The real gap in that experience, personally, was not having other people to talk to who were my age, and who had cancer.”

There was a distinct feeling of not knowing where to turn, recalls Ulman, now a three-time cancer survivor. His response was to found, along with his family, the Ulman Cancer Fund for Young Adults to help other people his

age navigate their cancer experiences and keep them moving steadily on the path of survivorship.

Today, as he heads up LIVESTRONG, Ulman remains committed to empowering cancer survivors with useful knowledge and connections to a supportive network of people who have been there. Standard medical care does not reach far enough to help people with the complications of insurance, transportation, employment, parenting, or fertility that can arise after a diagnosis of cancer.

“No matter who you are, no matter what your diagnosis, socioeconomic status, or level of education, you are immediately reduced to this level playing field with everybody else,” Ulman says about the moment of diagnosis. “You literally have no idea what to do. Our organization is built around the notion that we help people now. We aren’t looking for something that can help people five years from now.”

Ulman draws a distinction here between advocacy and fundraising. A money-making enterprise can give generously, usually to a researcher in a lab coat who might find a cure, but it doesn’t necessarily provide compassionate and caring assistance to a cancer patient suffering from anxiety over how to function at work after chemotherapy. LIVESTRONG advocates for that person by creating tools, services and programs with cancer survivors not for them.

“We don’t exist to raise money,” Ulman says, “we exist to serve the needs of people with cancer. If we ever lose that focus, we will end up way off course.”

In the past few years, Ulman has been a stalwart leader of LIVESTRONG, not only through the cycling controversies surrounding the organization’s founder, Lance Armstrong, but also through an ongoing, massive overhaul of the national healthcare system, which has

split some diehard LIVESTRONG supporters into clearly defined camps. “It’s been brutal,” Ulman admits, “and it’s going to get harder before it gets easier.”

Staying honest, upfront, and a little bit vulnerable in the face of such difficulties is the only way to keep moving and to do whatever is best for people with cancer, according to Ulman. It is the mentality of survivorship.

Ulman calls it optimism, the tenacious belief that anything is possible. “That is by far the best way to operate,” he says. “It also creates huge challenges because you end up going down too many paths sometimes. But I like to start with the answer being yes.”

doug is president and ceo, livestrong www.livestrong.org @livestrongceo

PAUL VAN ZYL

TRANSFORMING ARTISANSHIP INTO A LUXURY BRAND

70

The sun sets in gold, orange and pink on the Ganges River where weavers in the 500-year-old silk tradition of Varanasi gain inspiration from the primordial luminescence of the land. But in this ancient city, the spiritual capital of India, the looms sometimes sit idle, unable to compete with cheap knock-offs from the Far East.

The world cannot afford to lose these gorgeous, handwoven silks or the cultural knowledge of the artisans who produce them, according to human rights activist and social entrepreneur, Paul van Zyl. Van Zyl is the Co-Founder and CEO of Maiyet, a luxury designer brand with a global conscience. A former South African lawyer, he now operates from the epicenter of the fashion industry in New York, where he hopes to protect the livelihoods of skilled artisans by making “covetable” the culturally-unique objects they create.

Maiyet’s strategy is to turn some of the world’s oldest cultural productions into luxury items demanding price points that acknowledge their unique worth: “Luxury is all about artisanship, and as long as we have a sense of refinement and culture, we are going to want to have objects made with great skill.”

To help preserve disappearing artistic traditions, Maiyet has partnered with Nest, a nonprofit that provides infrastructure and training to improve working conditions for artisans while keeping them profitable and socially conscious in a global marketplace.

“We felt that there are a spectacular group of artisans around the world whose work is being undervalued,” van Zyl explains. “Some forms of artisanship have a deep heritage and artisans will have to position themselves as precisely that in order to survive.”

Maiyet, according to van Zyl, fills a gap in a market that did not have a single luxury brand with a social mission at its core.

The brand is grounded in the philosophy that shared economic interests strengthen associations among diverse people. Muslims and Hindus in India have a better chance of establishing a peaceable co-existence if they see themselves as a unified group producing a valuable and respected commodity like Varanasi silk.

“If you get that identity shift to occur,” van Zyl explains, “it becomes much more difficult to tear those communities apart with religious demagoguery. There are a thousand ways in which you can privilege and strengthen more tolerance and more interactive forms of civic life, and there a thousand ways in which you can undermine it.”

Having lived through the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa in the 1990s, van Zyl understands communities in conflict. He describes the “dual reality” of his own stable, middle-class life in the white suburbs while poverty, deprivation, oppression and violence were meted out against the majority of citizens.

“Growing up as a white South African puts a particular onus on you to think about how you use that privilege to broaden opportunity and correct injustice,” he says.

Van Zyl was the executive secretary of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the mid-‘90s, actively participating in the struggle against Apartheid and has since advised other countries on how to transition to peace after periods of great violence.

“In my lifetime, good prevailed over evil,” he says. “It’s not necessarily the case that that happens. I’ve seen how an extraordinary amount of energy, sacrifice, courage and ingenuity can, in fact, make a very significant difference when things seems hopeless and insurmountable.

Everything I’ve done in my life has been about that.”

Van Zyl now brings his humanistic vision to the global market. In the next five to 10 years, he predicts, businesses

will be assessed not just on profitability but on the way they achieve social impact. And this “new norm” will be driven by a basic economic pragmatism: industries that give back will simply be more sustainable.

Starting a luxury brand with a deep social mission is a “gigantic challenge,” van Zyl acknowledges, but he is confident that Maiyet will help bend the forces of the market toward benevolence. The company has already brought the shimmering palette of the Ganges sunset to an exclusive clothing line at Barney’s New York.

To achieve such far-ranging social entrepreneurship, van Zyl recommends high optimism and some oldfashioned pluck: “Throw yourself at the more challenging and tricky problems in the world with the hope that you can overcome them.”

paul is founder & ceo, maiyet www.maiyet.com @paul_maiyet

ALAN WEBBER

The disappearing man in the gray flannel suit

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If you want to keep track of how the world is changing, keep track of business. So suggests Alan Webber, CoFounder of Fast Company magazine, who for over two decades has been interpreting the intersection of life and work in America.

Webber has just completed a book, “Life Reimagined: Discovering Your New Life Possibilities,” co-written with Richard Leider, about how people make transitions during their so-called retirement years. As it turns out, retiring doesn’t have the same appeal that it did a few generations ago when it felt like a reward after a lifetime of dedication to a single organization.

The man in the gray flannel suit—the company man—is now the vestige of another time, another culture of work.

Today, people move around in search of jobs that nourish them in important ways, and in retirement, they still want that nourishment. Fewer of us look at our careers as having an endpoint where we will segue cheerfully into a leisurely existence.

“It’s part of the vocabulary of our times,” Webber says.

“Nothing is a destination; everything’s a journey.”

Webber has observed the progression of this work-life attitude since he helped launch Fast Company in 1995.

As he reported on business and the economy, he was chronicling a major cultural shift in the U.S. He says Fast Company was really a magazine about work, and it spoke to a generation of Americans who were witnessing the end of the organization man, that post WWII employee who put self to the side so he could put food on the table.

Boomers had another idea about work. They wanted to be fulfilled by it, and Fast Company watched and reported as it happened.

“The dirty little secret about Fast Company was that it wasn’t a business magazine,” Webber says. “It was a magazine that took a very capacious view of what

constitutes business. If you take a broad view of the role of work and the workplace in people’s lives and in society at large, business is a huge driver of how we think and what we value, what we do and what we don’t do.”

Globalization in the ‘90s destabilized traditional organizations as people began to look at different models of what large-scale corporate America was supposed to be. The pages of the magazine aimed for a new conversation, exploring questions about business in society: What makes a company a good place to work? Where do great ideas come from? What are the conditions for failure? What technological changes are going to happen? Do leaders have to be tough?

People who were willing to ask those questions about work helped release a flood of entrepreneurial energy.

“We were trying to cut things on the diagonal and look with peripheral vision,” Webber says. “There were people in large organizations who thought they were misfits, people who wanted to be entrepreneurs who thought they were the weird ones. We were telling people who were feeling marginalized and alone, you’re the one who gets it—you’re the guy who’s seeing the future, and the others are going to come late to the game.”

The mantra of the magazine from its inception was: Work is personal, computing is social, knowledge is power. Break the rules. “Today all those things are true, but on steroids,” Webbers says.

Just as he tapped into a major social shift 20 years ago, Webber senses another change coming around. Instead of rethinking work, members of the younger generation today are rethinking capitalism. They want their work to contribute to something larger than themselves. For the man in the gray flannel suit, that “something” was the company. For boomers, it was self-fulfillment. For this generation, it’s the world.

The current workforce feels a sense of cohesion with people beyond the compass of its own existence. The new mantra is this: What we do every day at work can ripple away from us and reverberate out into the world.

No gray flannel suits here.

“I think folks are hungry for that sense of purpose in their lives, to be part of something that actually works— something that makes a difference and solves a problem,” Webber says. “They want a handle on why what they’re doing every day is worthwhile.”

alan is an editor, author and columnist www.rulesofthumbbook.com @alanmwebber

RICHARD SAUL WURMAN

A possible map of Richard Saul Wurman (or, one iteration thereof…)

74

Richard Saul Wurman gladly provides the lead for his own story: Out of everything he has accomplished in his intriguing career, he is most proud of receiving the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.

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

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

The map is not complete, but it is gaining texture.

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

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

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

Wurman identifies himself as a student of Louis Kahn, a major architect of the 20th century. From Kahn, he

learned not to be tethered to an idea. Starting with an end product in mind distorts the design. It is a presumption against nature, an unwillingness to let materials, spaces or people have their own presence.

One cannot set out to design a beautiful building, Wurman says: “A building has to become what it wants to become. When something is incredibly well-designed, it becomes beautiful.”

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

He watches and waits to be fascinated. He will put a group of spectacularly extraordinary people on a stage just to see what they will talk about. Hopefully, they won’t be boring, and we will witness something true.

He insists that the conferences he has created over the years are just for him. He doesn’t care about the audience. But as he makes something understandable to himself, he brings patterns to the surface where others can see them as well. He is known for making the complex clear. “I’m just trying to understand things,” he says, “I’m not trying to change the world.”

He considers “expertise” an empty notion, and what generally passes as “information” to be just the opposite.

They add nothing to the map he is working on. “We worry about stuff that we think is information that is actually data,” he says. And we don’t get true information because we “blither out” meaningless questions. “We ask bad questions because we don’t have a quest.”

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

A single, good conversation could make that happen.

Years ago, Wurman used to paint 12 hours a week, but he got away from it. Now he is gravitating back toward that solitary, aesthetic practice. What appears on his canvas today may be a map of where he’s been or part of the quest he is still on. Who knows? It will become what it wants to become.

richard is an author and information architect www.wurman.com @rswurman

XIAO XIAO

finding the deep experience in technology

76

The best digital technologies don’t have to offer bombastic multimedia sensations. They can be much more powerful and elegant, according to technologist and pianist Xiao, a Ph.D. candidate in the MIT Media Lab who studied computer science and architecture as an undergrad also at MIT. It is time, Xiao says, to design in a way that lets the user fill in the sensory blanks. The trick is to find the “sweet spot” by giving people just enough informational cues while allowing them to inhabit and participate in a communicative space in their own way.

“Designing technology in this way is closer to being a master at Chinese brush painting or playing a fugue than just being a technologist,” she says.

Born in China, Xiao moved at the age of eight to New Orleans, where she said the aesthetic of the city made a mark on her. Musicians improvising on Frenchmen Street exposed her to the visceral quality of live performance. As a technologist, she tries to capture the deep experience of listening to music wafting through Frenchmen Street, the way it emanates from the instruments and bodies of musicians and reverberates in the fibers of the listener’s body.

Live musical performance happens in culturallyconstructed spaces, a reality that is always integral to Xiao’s design efforts. When she goes to an art gallery, she practices “indwelling,” projecting herself into the art, imagining herself at different scales, wandering around in the terrain of the work. The exercise helps her to think about the way we encounter information from different perspectives, “turning it around in our heads, but also turning ourselves around inside it.”

Her office chair at MIT is a piano bench; during the day she sits on it facing her desk and computer, at night she turns to play on a Yamaha grand piano. Every day,

she combines technology with art, carrying insights from one world to the other. “Both the piano and the computer have keyboards that enable you to externalize your ideas using the dexterity of your fingers,” she explains.

Xiao’s current project is MirrorFugue, a technology that projects onto a player piano the image of a person playing the keys of a musical composition. It makes the abstract entity of music into a more visceral experience by showing the body of the person playing the piece.

Music, she says, is physical as well as intellectual. Before it became possible to broadcast or record music, disembodying it from performance, it was always tied inextricably to the body.

It is important to see the person playing the music.

“There is something about the human body that people just respond to,” Xiao says. “Being human, we like looking at ourselves, even at data about ourselves.”

She points out some of the whimsical and enriching possibilities of MirrorFugue. For instance, one performer can sit down to the piano and play while another is projected simultaneously. The player piano itself strikes the notes of the virtual performer. In this way, one could play a duet with a remote individual—even with one’s earlier self, or with a deceased grandparent.

The purpose of this technological exploration, according to Xiao, is to find ways to deepen our connection to the physical world.

“For billions and billions of years, people have interacted with the world through our bodies,” she says.

“We pick things up, climb trees, smell flowers, and feel the wind in our hair or the rain falling down around us.

But these days, because of convenience, we’ve given up a lot of this rich experience in favor of viewing it through a computer screen, tapping a screen with just a couple of fingers.”

We’ve developed a pathological preoccupation with the visual and nothing else, she says. We are losing the affective aspects of interaction—body language, tone of voice—which predominate face to face communication.

Computer science abstracts the world into something that computers can easily store and communicate, but musical performance still has the power to completely envelope us. As Xiao turns back and forth between the computer and piano keyboards in her office, she searches for ways to make the dry conveyance of information as rich as a musical performance.

“The most profound things in life are derived from deep experience with the world,” she says.

xiao is a technologist and pianist www.xiaosquared.com @xiaosquared

THANK YOU,

SPONSORS for your ongoing support and for your help in making BIF-9 possible.

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We’re helping people on their path to better health.

CVS Caremark is a pharmacy innovation company.

We combine a retail pharmacy, a pharmacy benefit manager and a retail medical clinic to create better health care solutions. Solutions that help control costs in Medicaid and Medicare Part D. Solutions that make complex specialty care less complex.

Solutions that engage and empower health care consumers. We are 7,500 retail stores staffed by highly trained pharmacists who improve the coordination of care and dispense valuable advice to ensure that patients stay on their prescribed medications. We are one of the largest pharmacy benefit managers in the country, finding new ways to make prescription medications more affordable and accessible as we drive better health outcomes.

We are a retail medical clinic with over 650 locations, providing more convenient access to quality health care for common and chronic conditions. We are committed to education, policies and programs that help people on their path to better health. CVS Caremark is a pharmacy innovation company, and every day we’re working to make health care better.

Learn more at CVScaremark.com/BetterHealth

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CVSOOSP3115 CVSOOSP3115_3-5X6-75_V1c

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Ignite your ideas.

THE MOST TALENTED INNOVATORS IN THE WORLD GRADUATE FROM RISD shop.oreilly.com ©2013 O’Reilly Media, Inc. The O’Reilly logo is a registered trademark of O’Reilly Media, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. 13813

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a place where critical thinking and making go hand in hand risd.edu/bif9

trinity repertory company

The State Theater of Rhode Island www.trinityrep.com • (401) 351-4242 201 WASHINGTON ST. • PROVIDENCE • RI STEPHEN BERENSON & BRIAN McELENEY

Special thanks

to Alayne Barnicoat, Meghan Hinds, Maureen Tuthill, Jeremy Withers and David Zacher for their contributions to this book.

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“it’s part of the vocabulary of our times... nothing is a destination; everything’s a journey...”

-alan webber

collaborative innovation summit september 18-19, 2013 providence, ri

www.businessinnovationfactory.com Š 2013 business innovation factory 60 valley street, unit 25 providence, ri 02909 84