The TrueTalk Blog

To Succeed: Stand Out/Fit In

It may be a paradox but being successful today means both standing out as special and fitting in as a team player. Here are a few ideas about how to do both. Look forward to hearing your thoughts.

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Uniqueness

Featured Foto Friday again!

Imagine this. You own a small pharmacy in Brooklyn. Everywhere you turn, you see encroaching monsters: CVS, Duane Reade, Walgreen's. What do you do?

How about painting a mural on a brick wall? How about one that shows you as a genuine, trustworthy human being?

Expressing your uniqueness is your #1 job, no matter what you think your job is.

Your Workplace: What Works? What Doesn't?

I'm very interested in your thoughts about these questions. Please comment or make video responses.
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Mapping The Corporate Genome: Part 1

It's been a long time since I've recorded an audio podcast but I decided to start a series of reflections on the nature of the corporation in today's world that seemed well-suited to that medium.

I'm very interested in your thoughts about this and look forward to hearing from you.

Here's Part 1 of Mapping The Corporate Genome.

Download or listen here.

The iTunes version.

We Need A New Kind Of Social-ism

We squander talent as if we didn't need it. We allow our most precious resource to lie unused in millions of citizens. We develop social networks that contain tremendous value and fritter it away.
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Inspiration From The Past

Where do you get your inspiration from?

The Past and The New

We somehow have developed the belief that in order to be "innovative" something must be "new." As a consequence, many of us never look at the past.

David Trott, British advertising elder said this about that in his blog:

New is just the ground claimed by people who aren’t good enough to win by being better. New is just a justification for dull being done in a different way.

In the end, that approach has creative consequences.

What makes our business more trivial than any other form of creativity is that we aren’t trying to build on what went before. We’re just anxious to get to the latest technological gimmick before anyone else. I think this attitude cheapens what we do. We confuse being first with creativity. We confuse ‘new’ with ‘better’.

How do you use the past as a source of innovative ideas?

Hat tip: Piers Fawkes and the folks at Marktd.

Travel Musings

Sometimes you read something and you just can't get it out of your head. Like this paragraph from an article in this past Sunday's Times Magazine:

The sheer number of projects under construction and the corresponding investment in civic infrastructure — entire networks of new subway systems, freeways and canals; gargantuan new airports and public parks — can give the impression that anything is possible in this new world. The scale of these undertakings recalls the early part of the last century in America, when the country was confidently pointed toward the future. But it would be unimaginable in an American city today, where, in the face of shrinking state and city budgets, expanding a single subway line can seem like a heroic act. “In America, I could never do work like I do here,” Steven Holl, a New York architect with several large projects in China, recently told me, referring to his latest complex in Beijing. “We’ve become too backward-looking. In China, they want to make everything look new. This is their moment in time. They want to make the 21st century their century. For some reason, our society wants to make everything old. I think we somehow lost our nerve.”

The thought that the United States has lost its collective nerve, just as the entire world is in full swing modernization, is astonishing.

But the line that really gets me is this one: "we've become too backward-looking." Something about that line resonates with me. Look around you. Everything in the US feels like a throw-back. Musically, we're stuck in an infinite loop of the 50's through the 80s. Time travel entertainment almost invariably goes backwards. Even "modern" entertainment shows like Battlestar Galactica has a grungy, weathered feel. The issues being debated in our government are mostly issues aimed at maintaining the structures and practices of the past. Mention how far behind the US is in technological penetration (net usage, wireless speed, mobile phone coverage/usage) and people look at you as if you're insane.

This is the United States, we seem to be saying, we're #1.

This is a post-World War II mentality. The Baby Boom generation, bless our little plaque-filled hearts, grew up in an era of cultural, economic, political and military ascendancy.  We've (my generational companions and I) always felt that we were the zenith of all things cultural.

"We can change the world, Re-arrange the world," Crosby, Stills and Nash told us. And, we did.

The problem may be that once we did, we seem to have thought we were done. Everything was supposed to stay in place, just where we put it. Just as the rest of the world, Asia in particular at the moment, is leapfrogging into the next era, we're busy debating whether or not we should provide our citizens with universal heath care (cleverly stigmatized as "socialized medicine"; how idiotic, ever hear anyone call it "socialized police protection" or "socialized highway construction"?), distracting ourselves from the kinds of challenges (like national debt, Social Security insolvency and biotechnology innovation) that will soon put us in a position we haven't experienced since the pre-World War I 20th century: behind.

Neither Either Nor Or

Kevin Kelly is one of my intellectual heroes. His thinking is so clear and far-reaching that I always learn something from him.

In this post, Kevin uses controversy concerning the taxonomy of life by biologists to shed light on questions of technology. He writes:

I venture further to suggest the same thing will happen in our classification of technology. At the moment, a phone is a phone is a phone. But already we see phones and cameras melding in the future. We see computers and TVs converging. We see computers and film falling into each other. We see cars becoming entertainment theaters, and shoes becoming health monitors. As technological devices and services become more complex, their boundaries of identity will blur and overlap.

Eventually, the distinction between living species and technological species will also be primarily one of convenience and habit, as genetically engineered organisms accomplish what machines used to do, and machines do what biological organisms used to do.  We'll end up identifying a device as a probability index. It is mostly phone we say, with a little bit of photosynthesis bacteria. Or this notebook is kinda of alive. It is para-living, in that 50% neighborhood of life. 

The splitters will be the last to acknowledge artificial life, or AI. While the lumpers think that both are already here, but lumped into a group we don't yet have a name for.

The problem? The either/or mindset. I've written about either/or thinking here before. The need for clarity and simplicity drives our desire to achieve "The Answer."  Efficiency rules; effectiveness be damned. Bathing babies, prepare to be tossed. Parsimonium uber alles!

Particularly in times of crisis (no, this is not a regurgitation of the faulty "crisis = danger + opportunity" meme) the seduction of parsimonious choices is practically irresistible.

Resist it.

One way to do so is to read Roger Martin's recently published book, The Opposable Mind, which illustrates ways that successful business leaders transcend this lose/lose mindset through what he calls "integrative thinking." Simply put, Martin found that leaders like Procter and Gamble's A.G. Lafley and Red Hat Software founder Bob Young consider more problem features to be salient, resist the temptation to ascribe simplistic causality to systemic effects, approach decisions holistically, and creatively resolve tension among opposing ideas. And, they use this mindset relentlessly, because, as Lafley put it when asked about a P&G plan that achieved both cost cutting and innovation:

We weren't going to win if it were an 'or.' Everybody  can do 'or.'

Another way? Give us a call...we can help.

Left Out: How A Simple Innovation Can Save Big Money

I was reminded that innovations don't have to be huge or complicated to have real impact.

iTunes edition