Category Archives: leading

Introducing Creating Infectious Action, Kindling Gregarious Behavior (CIA-KGB), to be taught starting in April at the Stanford Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford

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Wow, what a lot of fun that namestorm was!  The "KGB"  names are still rolling in, and I have to say there was some very creative thinking going on (see Reilly’s comments on the previous post below).  The winner is Kindling Gregarious Behavior, because it sounds good, actually describes the content and aim of the course (not a bad thing at all when you think about it) and — best of all for me — it echoes the observation that Wikia CEO Gil Penchina made on a panel I hosted at last year’s AlwaysOn conference.  Gil made the point that, instead of spending all your time, energy, money and luck building a big bonfire on your own and then hoping that a bunch of other people will choose to come and sit around it, why not identify all the myriad little campfires burning around you and pour a little gas on each one?  That’s the way infectious action and gregarious behavior get fed.  It’s not about some big top-down mission, though centralized thinking matters.  It’s about embracing the power of the community.  It’s about kindling.

Anyway, I’m really excited to be teaching CIA-KGB along with a truly fabulous — FABULOUS! — teaching team.  We learned a lot teaching CIA last year (and got lots of great coverage in BusinessWeek and other august journals), so this year we’ve made some tweaks to the class to try and make it an even better experience.  This year’s class will again involve a creating infectious action project for the good folks at Mozilla, and will then focus on a project for Global Giving.  I’m very excited to be working with Global Giving, and it already feels good to be brainstorming project ideas with my Mozilla friends.

This will not be your usual classroom experience.  Everything is real, everything is open-ended, and the sky is the limit.  It’ll be scary.  It’ll be fun.  It’ll be something, hopefully, which knocks your hat in the creek.  As if all that weren’t enough, it looks like Global Giving will be supporting some summer internship positions for CIA-KGB students who A), kick butt in the class, and B) want to keep working on Global Giving-related issues.  How cool is that?

Are you a Stanford student with Master’s standing?  Please consider applying for the course.  You can find an application here.  It’s due March 9, and we’ll be selecting 24 people to part of the CIA-KGB classroom community.  The journey is the reason we do all of this, and the fruit of the voyage will be more experience with the design thinking process as well as further developing methodologies for creating infectious action and kindling gregarious behavior.

Some good no asshole coverage

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The San Francisco Chronicle published a nice interview with my colleague Bob Sutton about his new book The No Asshole Rule.  I have a little blurb in the article about why it’s so important to filter out jerks when you’re trying to encourage innovative behavior.

I love Bob’s book and I think the coverage it’s receiving is great — I hope that it pushes the world a little closer to a state of affairs where the pursuit of happiness in the workplace is not only encouraged, but is the norm.  My only worry stems from the power of Google; will my descendants forever associate a web search on my name with the term "asshole"?  I hope not.  English is just so damn boring when it comes to swear words for the nether regions.  If that association is going to be a sticky one, I’d much rather it be with something like the Spanish gilipollas or — even more mellifluous to these ears — the Italian cafone.

On a side note not even tangentially tied to cafones, I must apologize for two trends on metacool as of late.  All of us on the staff of metacool are dedicated to writing thoughts about the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life.  But as of late we (I) haven’t been posting that much, and what I have posted has usually been a pointer to something else rather than some (semi) original thinking.  Why?  Well, I’m not one to spend a lot of energy fabricating excuses, but I’ve been hella busy innovating.  Deep in structuring some prototypes and figuring out where to go with them.  Also, I’m busy getting the next version of Creating Infectious Action cranked up for the Spring Quarter at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.  I’m looking forward to teaching it with a rather awesome group of individuals.  More on that to come.  One change is that it’ll probably be called "CIA-KGB" for short, instead of just "CIA".  So drop me a line and help me out with name brainstorming by letting me of any good verbs that start with a "K".

But creativity is endless. so expect a surge of posts (oh boy, has that word has been ruined forever, or what?) in the next few weeks as all this goo gels in my head.

RIP, Michael Brecker

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When I was a teenager, jazz great Count Basie passed away, and I remember being shocked at how hard my music teacher took the news.  For him, Count Basie was The Man, the one who had inspired him to pursue a life in music, to become a teacher to kids like me.

Today, I’m so sad — and shocked — to hear that one of my heroes, saxophonist Michael Brecker passed away last month.  With his passing, the world lost a great innovator and a rare artistic genius.

For me, as a saxophone-crazy teenager, hearing Brecker’s eponymous debut album blew my mind utterly and completely.  It was like getting a direct injection of musical innovation.   "Original Rays" showed his ability to control the remarkable EWI MIDI instrument.  His rendition of "My One and Only Love" introduced me to the iconic tune for the first time, got me interested in Coltrane, and stuck with me ever since — it was the song my wife and I used as our first dance at our wedding reception.  And there’s nothing quite his old albums where he’s playing in a style called heavy metal bebop, like on the track "Skunk Funk".  If you’re not into jazz, you know his sound, because he played just about everybody’s album.  Michael Brecker is the person playing the saxophone on Dire Straight’s tune "Your Latest Trick".  It’s safe to say that I drove my parents, siblings, and neighbors crazy playing along to that album, figuring out how to play those amazing licks of his, how to get that amazingly fat yet supple sound.  Hearing him play a concert live later that year was a dream come true.

I never heard him play live again, unfortunately.  And though I’m upset over his death as if I actually had known him personally, I only knew him through his albums.  But music gives you that direct connection to people. 

Life is short.  Live it up, do what you want and can to enjoy it.

Memorable Ads, Impossible Dreams, and Being Innovative

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My colleague Paul Bennett of IDEO has written an insightful and delightful essay for BusinessWeek: Most Memorable Ads of 2006

Here’s an excerpt from Paul:

We’re clearly at an inflection point. I’m not even a traditional ad-guy
and I’ve been asked to write this, so what does that say? We’re all
firmly in this together—marketers, designers, clients, agencies,
researchers, ethnographers, art directors and writers, all being sniped
at, out-thought, and remixed by consumers younger than our own kids.
Hard as it is to say, in most cases, they’re as good, if not better, at
this stuff than we are. Now, together, we must figure out where to go
from here. But before we get in to a whole spiral of circle drumming,
chest-beating and problem-solving, let’s take a quick tour of some of
the highlights of the last year.

But first a warm-up of sorts: Honda’s Impossible Dream spot—which aired in December, 2005, and therefore doesn’t make the official 2006 list—deserves a mention for Not Being Afraid of the Joy of Great Storytelling,
for expansive locations, great nostalgic music, excellent casting, and
a fantastically simple premise. In it, a guy emerges from his trailer,
mounts a scooter, and then seamlessly moves from product to product,
stirring emotions, sweeping us along in his wake, and bringing a tear
to many an eye.

I’ve written before about Honda’s Impossible Dream ad in the context of what I like to call tangible brand mantras (you can see the ad by following that hyperlink).  It’s an ad I can watch over and over (and I have – maybe 50 times; not as many viewings for me as the original Star Wars, but getting there).  And it’s one which is authentic and true even though it’s so outrageous and funny.  Honda is a company where the CEO knows whereof he speaks.  It’s a company as capable of pulling off revolutionary innovation outcomes as it is innovating on a routine basis.  It’s a group of people not afraid of thinking weird but right.  And, above all, it’s a company which solves for happiness because, when one gets down to the bottom of it all, that’s what drives innovation.

Sir Ken Robinson on TEDTalks

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Ideas Worth Spreading. 

That’s a topic near and dear to my heart.  And one for which I’m more than happy to play a willing accomplice.

In this particular case, it’s both a pleasure and a duty.

 

 

At the TED2006 conference earlier this year I had a peak life experience in the form of a talk by Sir Ken Robinson.  He stirred my soul and reminded me why I was here on the planet. 

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I encourage you to take 20 minutes to listen to Sir Robinson.  If you’re engaged in any kind of creative endeavors in your life (and
we all are), you must see this.  And if you’re responsible for the
care, feeding, and education of another human being, you must see this.  See his video (and many more) on TEDTalks.

(plus, it’s all sponsored by one of my favorite producers of cool products, BMW)

Let’s Create Infectious Action

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From the Worldchanging website:

"We have a choice to make. We can build a future of green products and industry, renewable energy and leapfrogging technologies, clean water and fresh air, livable cities and healthy children. Or we can have the kind of world Ed Burtynsky shows us."

See a quick video of Ed Burtynsky’s powerful images

As of late, metacool is seen by about 3,000 4,000 people a day.  Can you help me create infectious action?  Could we double that number?  Tell a friend, and a friend of a friend, about the Ed Burtynsky video, and then ask them to do something about it.