This cheered me right up today. Thank you Kris
From The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge:
Is it not a curious fact that in a world steeped in irrational hatreds which threaten civilization itself, men and women—old and young—detach themselves wholly or partly from the angry current of daily life to devote themselves to the cultivation of beauty, to the extension of knowledge, to the cure of disease, to the amelioration of suffering…..?
The world has always been a sorry and confused sort of place—yet poets and artists and scientists have ignored the factors that would, if attended to, paralyze them.
From a practical point of view, intellectual and spiritual life is, on the surface, a useless form of activity, in which(people) indulge because they procure for themselves greater satisfactions than are otherwise obtainable.
I shall concern myself with the question of the extent to which the pursuit of these useless satisfactions proves unexpectedly the source from which undreamed-of utility is derived.
One of those days when three senior team members start spontaneously singing…
PS: just found this on return from Friday lunch…mischief managed!
Filed under: 10 Questions for Strategists, blast from the past, Experience, Get Friendly, Great Stuff, passion
2 of 10 QUESTIONS FOR STRATEGISTS
One of the key things you learn as you practice strategy is to size up the problem you’re addressing.
As you tackle business problems and marketing challenges and service design opportunities and consulting projects you start to understand the unique components that you need to address to get it done.
You start to build frameworks to organise the chaos. Matrices so that you can map out a messaging house. You build process to describe the journey you’ll take clients on. You work out what sells and how clients buy.
You craft your process into a practice. You make charts. Lots of charts that you can remix and reuse and refresh.
They say the only difference between a junior and a senior strategist is the amount of charts they have access to…
(Vegetarian warning….)
All tenure gives you is the experience to know what kind of beast you’re dealing with…and what you need to carve it up.
Charts are knives- they should cut through, they should help you break things down, and carve out the cuts in the carcass.
The more knives you have, the more tasks you can get done quickly.
You wouldn’t use the same knife to chop an onion that you would to fillet a fish.
So your charts need to be fit for purpose, many and various.
And above all- sharp.
In the 6th century, a list of the seven deadly sins was officially outlined by Pope Gregory the Great, who reduced the original list of eight written by a respected monk named Evagrius the Solitary. The list was changed only slightly again in the 17th century, with the final list, which we still refer to today, composed of lust, avarice, gluttony, sloth, anger, greed, and pride.–
The Atlantic notes that seven years ago in a soliloquy transcribed by The Wall Street Journal, Reid Hoffman suggested a comprehensive theory of social-network success.
“Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins,” the LinkedIn co-founder and venture capitalist said.
I do remember it all starting out quite differently. I was recently kicking through some of my archives and came across this piece from 2006: We are not alone
Mother Teresa spoke often about the effects of being lonely and the crushing poverty of spirit that is caused by feelings of being unwanted- so much much so that she called this ‘the leprosy of the West’. A recent international study claimed that more than a third of adults are lonely.
There’s alot of talk that screens are taking over face to face interaction, and that culture is suffering as a result. David Armano’s fantastic post We Are Not Alone. Life 2.0 puts forward the notion that the growing suite of web tools allows us, through creating and connecting, to find out that others like us exist.
There is a now a place where we can find that ‘we are not alone’ and more. Screen life, online life IS ‘real’ life. For many (and there are many- over 450,000 bloggers in Australia alone) our online time informs and inspires our terrestrial activities.
Examples of this range from the fabulous red paper clip story, to the spontaneous walkouts in high schools of over 40,000 students across California organised through individual myspace pages and to the popularity of acts like The Artic Monkeys and OKGo.
These stories, OUR stories, will only grow as we continue to contribute our time and energy to trying to connect with each other.
Myspace organised walkouts…wowsers…(the more things change the more they stay the same: https://www.schoolstrike4climate.com/ organises local walkouts through Facebook, a platform that wasn’t even available in Australia 13 years ago)
While I’m sure that humanity’s darker traits get more oxygen on social platforms that we’d like- there is light to be found. I wonder how useful it is to entirely demonise something that is only reflective of… well, us.
Twitter gets a very notices, a a wrath filled echo chamber and for very good reasons.
My parry and repost:
( Rob Campbell shared this with the line: “The most beautiful, loving – yet heart wrenchingly sad – story that you’ll read today. Especially the last 5 words.”)
Please explore this marvellous thread about sharing unsolicited poetry with crying strangers:
The kindness will just kill you.
Filed under: Experience, Get Friendly, The Rules, Zeitgeist | Tags: generosity, psychology
Wonderful interview with the organizational psychologist Adam Grant, who many know from his New York Times columns, describes three human orientations, of which we are all capable: the givers, the takers, and the matchers. These also influence whether organizations are joyful or toxic for human beings. His studies are dispelling a conventional wisdom that selfish takers are the most likely to succeed professionally. And, he is wise about practicing generosity in organizational life — what he calls making “microloans of our knowledge, our skills, our connections to other people” — in a way that is transformative for others, ourselves, and our places of work.
50 minutes well spent
Filed under: Digital Strategy, Experience, Get Friendly, Great Stuff, passion, Zeitgeist
It’s Festival time in Sydney. While I’m super excited about taking my inner child by the hand and having a bit of a frolic on Sacrilege, the true sized inflatable bouncy castle Stonehenge in Hyde Park’s Festival Village, I was interested to read this in The Australian
FESTIVAL organizers measure success in terms of ticket sales and economic impact, but a new cultural metric may be tweets and pictures on social media. Last year, an enormous yellow duck was a hit of the Sydney Festival, where 1.7 million people could not have missed seeing it at Darling Harbour. Some 14,000 images were posted on Instagram using festival hashtags.
Mmmm. ‘Cultural Metric’. Good notion. Loads of tension in it:
- What is culture?
- How might culture be measured?
- How do we value it?
The NSW Government is investing more than $5 million to ensure the success of the 2014 Festival,
“Last year the Sydney Festival attracted more than 500,000 people with more than 120,000 tickets sold to paid events, including more than 33,000 people who attended events in Western Sydney. In 2012, it injected almost $57 million into our economy“
From that perspective an arts investment looks like a pretty good return to the taxpayers hereabouts. I wonder how they’d value those tweets.
Early last year MoMA curator of Architecture and Design Paola Antonelli led a discussion about Culture and Metrics, (which I’ve entirely re cut below):
- why bother?
- the reality is that cultures come and go over time. If we don’t know what’s valuable about a particular culture, we run the risk of losing it forever.
- not all art is concerned with culture, and not all culture is arts-based
- it’s the best way to create a future that human beings want to inhabit.
- MoMA has been one of the most important cathedrals of the imagination in my life since childhood, and envisioning it as a driver of R&D across society at large is extremely exciting.
- measurement
- Kate Levin, the Commissioner of The Department of Cultural Affairs for New York City: measuring culture, is mostly about objectives and outcomes. She used The Gates as an example of a valuable, measurable project funded by the Department for Cultural Affairs. Four million visitors to this 16-day installation created $254 million in revenue for NYC.
- Measuring culture will require us to think of new ways to measure and share the story of a project’s insights and impact.
- culture and value
- “For me, The Gates was never about whether the saffron curtains and plastic frames were art. Some people argued that it was a hideous monstrosity while others loved it. Instead, I just felt lucky to be part of the flow of conversation and people as we passed together through The Gates on a beautiful blue and gold day. I felt lucky to be a New Yorker. And that’s the point of culture. It gives us a sense of place while at the same time evoking a deeply personal experience of the universal. “
- “For me, The Gates was never about whether the saffron curtains and plastic frames were art. Some people argued that it was a hideous monstrosity while others loved it. Instead, I just felt lucky to be part of the flow of conversation and people as we passed together through The Gates on a beautiful blue and gold day. I felt lucky to be a New Yorker. And that’s the point of culture. It gives us a sense of place while at the same time evoking a deeply personal experience of the universal. “
As Rita observed, and who was at the MoMA talk, it brings to life one of Andy Warhol’s statements:
- “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art.”
Creating a deeply personal experience of an enterprise, creating a real and vibrant culture, feels like a bit of an art, and has the same kind of challenge:
Answer: With great difficulty.
Then again…. people are the only metric that really counts.
It’s hard. Really hard. Most companies can’t do it. The ones that can, make a fortune. Life is unfair.
Filed under: Get Friendly
Penguins speak to me for so many reasons, and as a totem they embody my own aspirations
to have the ability to deal with that which does not truly matter
to launch into the unknown and ‘tee-hee’ while I’m doing it
to refine my six word story, “breathe. it will all be ok”
to something silly, active, positive and whimsical
and bring that mantra to the point of most powerful reduction
SLIDE
Filed under: Get Friendly
“I wanted to get into show business because I thought it would give me close proximity to monsters.”
– Stephen Tobolowsky
Something I tell the team quite often is: “it’s not show friends, it’s show business“.
And it is true. While it isn’t a fairy tale there are monsters, there are things lurking in the darkness in all kinds of show business. I’m liking the notion that we need to remind ourselves that trolls hide under bridges (and sometimes in daylight, and sometimes inside ourselves).
The only way to disarm a monster is to laugh at it. And silly is a wonderful way to invite the monster to join in on the fun.
Filed under: Get Friendly
It’s super easy to be a douchebag.
If you work in creative strategy or planning your daily diet may encompasses exposure to this toxic pyramid:
You are not alone. (thanks to this post Getting Real. For Real which reminded me I probably should say this more often.)
If you’re feeling like this you understand the landscape that you work in very very well.
And as result you might get called ‘difficult’ or ‘unapproachable’ or ‘aggressive’.
It’s really hard not to give yourself permission to let that toxicity out.
But when people are coming to you for education and inspiration and insight how appropriate is frustration? How effective is is? How is it working for you?
Punching people in the face for not understanding is momentarily satisfying, sure. Do you really want to be that guy?
But again, you are not alone in struggling with this.
I am fiery. Shouty. The volume goes up to 11 when I get excited.
Which is why I find this to be pretty helpful this week (edited):
Feel the fire … don’t get burned.
Emphasise with words, not volume.
1. Feel the fire, but don’t get burned. If something really excites you or makes you angry, effectiveness lies in creating comfort. Share your exhilaration or ire with words, not volume.
2. Speak how you want to be spoken to. Doing so will set the tone for the entire conversation. If you start out with an attack, you could end up in a war. If you begin with kindness and clarity, you will have a much easier time.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about time recently: about how it seems to slow and speed; about how to utilise it as a medium; about memory and future memory; and about how people experience moments and experiences in different ways.
In my late teens I lived in Brazil and part of the acclimatization was getting used to a totally different time scale: Social time, one of the silent languages of a culture. What was once familiar and comfortable became unfamiliar and wrong. Notions of ‘tomorrowness’, the looseness of social meeting times and time appropriateness were all challenging to me. It did me the world of good to fundamentally understand that everyone’s internal metronome ticks differently.
It might have helped me greatly to have had access to the wonderful video above. In it Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world.
What we have discovered in 30 years of research is that there are six main time zones that people live in: two focus on the past, two focus on the present, two focus on the future.
He goes on to segment them into:
– Past positive: focus is on the “good old days”, past successes, nostalgia, etc.
– Past negative: focus on regret, failure, all the things that went wrong
– Present hedonistic: living in the moment for pleasure and avoiding pain, seek novelty and sensation
– Present fatalism: life is governed by outside forces, “it doesn’t pay to plan”
– Future: focus is on learning to work rather than play
– Transcendental Future: life begins after the death of the mortal body
He notes that we all divide our experience into time categories; the difference is simply how. When you’re speaking with someone he or she might be thinking about past experiences, and ignoring the present. You might be doing a cost-benefit analysis and thinking about the future. Are you Past-Positive or a “Transcendental” Future-oriented person? Find out by taking his Time Perspective Inventory, then watch last year’s TED talk on the secret power of time.
Drawn by Andrew Park of Cognitive Media.
(I should note the listing of the 6 time zones is Jason Kottke’s.)
Fun fact: Zimbardo conducted the famous Stanford prison experiment in 1971
Filed under: Get Friendly
Forgot to say: this should be sung to the tune of Mull of Kintyre, late at night, with the addition of toxic amounts of caffeine, sugar, trans fats and too little sleep. Loudly. Or it becomes the tune in your head for days. Or both.
Red Mullet with Thyme
A dish that I’m thinking
Might kill the desire
For chips and hard drinking
Red Mullet with Thyme
Crap have I munched on and bottles I’ve drunk
Late night fast food don’t feed brains that have shrunk
Pitching’s plate’s full of nutritional crime
As I dream of green beans with Red Mullet with Thyme
A trip down memory lane. Recycled posts from the last three years:
The shouty:
- Would you like a small dash of Get Stuffed with your Shut the Hell Up?
Institutionalised Rudeness by Sociopaths (IRS from now on) is far from OK. In fact IRS is so far from OK it is huddling in a yurt in Outer Siberia. With no booze. And no friends.And it’s not invited to any tzushy end of year drinks parties either. It’s banned. Passe.
In addition the “Punch In The Face” motivation technique is also banned. Previously thought to inspire the creative class to consistently meet the 20 hours overtime barrier, it has been recognised as an illegal tool of IRS and is now a Taser-able offence.
If you have been subject to IRS, or any suspect ‘motivation’ techniques, you can apply for your branded taser (which can also do double duty as an attractive cocktail shaker).
Bring it on.
The sweet:
- The Power of Noticing
- Sometimes doing research for my job I come across a piece of truth and beauty. One example is this article “Kindness Counts”.
- Mostly I think that we just need to be kind to each other.
And notice each other.
And value the power we have inside of ourselves to make a difference- especially those who are blessed with the gift of being able to notice what’s going on in the world around us.
The serious:
- ROI= Risk of Ignoring
- So what are you missing out on? What’s the ROI?
- As with anything that’s going on in social media, it’s all about the Risk of Ignoring:
-
- As a reader of blogs: Can you afford not to be informed about the latest thinking in your discipline? Can you afford not to learn from some of the brightest minds and most passionate advocates in the industry?
- And as a writer: Can you afford not to keep a notebook of your online reading? Can you afford not to contextualise and have an opinion on what’s going on in advertising?
- And ultimately, as an ad-exec: Can you afford not to have experiences that would help you understand people’s behaviour in the social media space
- Value and tulip bulbs
- In the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay wrote about tulip mania.
- We can get terribly focused on the bulb- on the device that will deliver the results that we are after. As strategic guardians of brands we need to remember the heart of what it is that we are trying to deliver- to plant a seed so that a flower will grow
- In the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay wrote about tulip mania.
- What’s your Return On Ego?
- The context here was making sure that you compartmentalize business decisions in the online space between those that are founded on KPI’s and those that make the Brand team feel good.
You can see all the bloggers involved here: Recycle A Blog Post Day #rabpday . Nice one Mark.
What are you going to re-share?
Filed under: Get Friendly
Filed under: Get Friendly
Richard Dawkin’s Appetite for Wonder
You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world. You also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.
The potential people who could have been standing in my place but who will never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara — more, the atoms in the universe. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Donne, greater scientists than Newton, greater composers than Beethoven. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I that are privileged to be here, privileged with eyes to see where we are and brains to wonder why.
and from To Live at All Is Miracle Enough
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked — as I am surprisingly often — why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?
Filed under: Get Friendly
It’s been a hot old week in Sydney for reasons only partially due to the tilt in the earth axis.
But in the last day or so, and in unexpected contexts, a tune has been following me round, Sunscreen. I has just the right kind of cheesy aphoristic spoken word pathos that has afforded a bit of a cool breeze…
and a gentle reminder that if you have to stand in the sun it’s a really good idea to protect your self.
There are other things you can do with the elements, of course. Some imaginary friends have commented on how blimmin’ cold it is in the Northern Hemisphere right now. I’m sure lemons are in short supply where you are, so if you share the ice I can put on the citrus, and we can make margaritas.
The print below made by Aly Lenon at 2Pie “simply pushing our faces into fresh powder on cars. They are all concave, but create a super cool illusion of 3D sculptures. Enjoy.” There’s heaps more go, check them out.
Filed under: Get Friendly
My anti-hero alter-ego of today:
Naaaaaaaaaaff-tastic
Creation Story:
The pressure hothouse of pitching when all clients brief you the day before Christmas and want to see concepts the week they get back from holidays.
SuperPowers:
Intune, Intouch, Insight
Gizmos: Deflection of Distractions
Vambraces that deflect all incoming social opportunities (ptchew!ptchew!)
Lasso of Ambiguity (or the “look over there lasso”)
Theme tune:
Oh the Strat-gy Stage is a-rollin’ ov’r the plains
With the planners flappin’ and the suits slappin’ the reins
A insight they cry: a believable way!
Whip crack-away, whip crack-away, whip crack-away
Filed under: Get Friendly
I am speaking at the Digital Marketing and Media Summit in Melbourne this Friday 21 November, and Julian Cole has arranged a Beerspheer get together for afters:
Madame Brussels 59 Bourke St, City
Please come for a chit chat, good cheer and cupcakes
Filed under: Get Friendly
A cool spring night.
A Potts Point view.
Ten inquisitive types.
Four TED films with chat-astic bookend commentary.
Each person brings wine and treats
But nothing is better than the host’s contribution
Mango tart with burnt fig and honeycomb icecream.
Great conversation in good company.
Yum!
Filed under: Get Friendly
- gusto: vigorous and enthusiastic enjoyment
- spicy or savory condiment
- enjoy: derive or receive pleasure from; get enjoyment from; take pleasure in; “She relished her fame and basked in her glory”
- the taste experience when a savoury condiment is taken into the mouth
- (and who knew?) Relish is the king of the troll kingdom and the father of Burly, Blabberwort, and Bluebell. He temporarily joins forces with the queen, but later abandons her plans for conquest when he decides to take the 4th Kingdom for himself. telan.pl/en/wiki/The_10th_Kingdom.html
What’s yours?
Get Shouty 