The mini-conference we held as part of the Creating Infectious Action course I’m teaching went really well.  I learned a ton from both the speakers and the audience — we had quite a crowd show up!

Part of that audience was Nick Baum, who works as a project manager at Google.  Nick is one of those cool people you meet at conferences like this — someone who’s lived all over the place, done loads of neato things, and writes one helluva interesting blog.  In fact, he’s done an enormous amount of work to document the conference on his blog, writing great summaries of the talks given by:

• Paul Saffo, IFTF
• Peter Ebert, SAP
• Dr. Jamie Shandro, Stanford ER
• Michael Dearing, eBay
• Steve Jurvetson, DFJ
• Paul Moore, Yahoo!
• Perry Klebahn, Atlas Snowshoes

Read it all at Nick Baum’s  Creating Infectious Action mini-conference summary

Can design thinking move the needle on hip hop?

I think so.  How about pushing together hip hop lyric writing with an open source approach to content development we saw in the world of Firefox?  Why not?  Here it is:  www.onerhyme.com

Can design thinking be used to further the careers of various hip hop artists?

We’ll find out tonight.

Creating Infectious Action

What are you really selling?  A product?  Goods?  Services?  An Experience?  A Story?  Community?

How about all of the above?:  Peet’s Global Journeys

Tom Guarriello hits the nail on the head:  The Long Tail of Reputation

Dan Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, keeper of the fantastic Orange is the New Pink blog, and a fellow reader of Oprah magazine, has a really cool article in this month’s Wired called Rise of the Neo-Greens.  In it he describes the rise of the green aesthetic, whose adherents "…are charting a third way, triangulating between the hippies and the hip."  Of course, it’s more about the stories people tell themselves than it is about the actual eco-impact of the offerings they consume.  As he notes:

But regardless of age or income, consumers buy cars with gas-electric
engines primarily because of what the vehicles say about them – to
themselves and to everyone else.

If all marketers are liars, then all consumers are believers.  That’s not a value judgment so much as it is a insight to guide design work.  We live in an age where marketing — the process of deciding what to make — is overlapping with the design process.  If you’re only designing the object and not paying attention to the story surrounding it, you’re abdicating your opportunity to craft something that’s truly infectious.

I’m normally not one to kiss and tell, but yesterday’s session of Creating Infectious Action really knocked my hat into the creek.  It’s a cliche for a teacher to say that they learn from the process of teaching their class, but with this one it’s really true.  The intellectual ferment in the room was palpable.

Bob Sutton and I like to say that we’re running the class "Letterman Style", which means that we’re there with a monologue (dialog?) at the start and end of the show, and between those two points it’s all about guests from industry, our illustrious panel of team coaches, and the students.

Leading off was Professor Chip Heath from Stanford, who told us a scintillating story about how to design ideas that stick.  Then we had the incredible opportunity to hear Asa Dotzler and John Lilly from Mozilla tell us the story of how they spread Firefox.  We’re all figuring out this creating infectious action thing together, and I hope you’ll see the evolution of that idea here and in other places around the web.

A big part of future marketing efforts will be accomplished using an open-source approach.

See the future today at Firefox Flicks.