…Dopplr will really make me happy when it can manage all of it for me.

FYI…the Canadian tour has changed a bit. This weekend, we’ll be in Vangroovy working away with our awesome pals at Ma.gnolia on some very cool projects. Later this month, it’s FOO, then off to the Montreal Jazz Festival, then Cowtown briefly to say ‘hi’ to Mom & Dad and get that TN1 Visa renewed…

And I’m really excited about July, because it includes an actual vacation (a reading on a beach sans laptop kind of vacation) and Blogher!

Further to Sir Ken Robinson’s fabulous TED Talk on education, and further to my presentation on Un-managing and the research I included in it by Malone & Lepper regarding intrinsic motivation, creating risk-positive-failure-forward environments are crucial to innovation.

I had a discussion regarding this a while back with Joshua Schachter (I think it was at ETech, right after I read the chapter on the birth of Del.icio.us from Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days. We were musing on how crucial it is to have the room to fail in order to actually ‘discover’ anything new and that it appeared from the founder stories that many of them discovered a success by actually failing multiple times (or as a result of a failure itself).

Think of all of the ‘innovators’ in history – the number of ‘failed’ experiments!

Living in the valley is like living in a different universe. When I travel around the world, I see smatterings of what I am surrounded by here: pro-risk personalities. And the less ‘grounded’ people are in their need for certainty, the crazier their ideas seem to be. (now, I’m not saying that crazy = good, just that safe = same old same old) Over and over again, when people ask how they can achieve the silicon valley type of opportunities in their areas, I tell them, “Celebrate failure.” Failure is cheaper than ever. Fail often. I often get puzzled looks and a backlash.

Now, I’m not saying that people should aim to fail, but by embracing that possibility, we open ourselves to taking more risks and, thus, succeeding. And the types of risks we take…those matter, too. I still don’t believe that we should take needless, stupid risks like mortgaging your house to buy a billboard ad (but that’s my call, not yours). We should take risks on ideas and people and following dreams…just to see where they should go.

So, in the discussion with Josh, we laughed about the idea of doing a LoserCamp…a BarCamp designed to celebrate how we’ve failed along the way. Why we’ve ‘failed’. What we’ve learnt. And how to allow ourselves to fail more often until we get to the point of a ‘win’ (and we need to redefine what this means there, too). We need to take a look at the ‘failures’ and celebrate them as risk takers. As people who have the balls to try something that is unconventional. Were they too early to market? Too late? Spent too much too fast? Didn’t spend enough?

What we need to get out of this is NOT a formula for avoiding failure, but a bunch of anecdotes on how we can minimize the impacts of failure in order to fail over and over and over again. AND how we can create opportunities for others to fail as well. Especially in places other than silicon valley, where we inherently laugh in the face of failure (and flaunt it proudly in many cases). We may want safety nets – but not too secure (or they become crutches). We definitely want a more positive take on people who have risked and failed with plenty of encouragement to get up, brush yourself off and go for it again.

So…LoserCamp….when? Where? Anyone want to step forward? I’ll totally work alongside you, but I’d rather see a Barcamp newbie take this on. And I want to see it happen in a place outside of the valley. NE1?

—————

Update: I should add why I think it is very important to call this LoserCamp and keep it in the failure space:

#1. We all stumble and fall, but we often think we are alone in doing so. De-stigmatizing ‘failure’ or the negative outcomes makes it much easier for people to talk about it and connect on that level. Remember my post, ‘Forgiving Your Inner Gollum’? I received over 15 personal emails thanking me for being so honest and letting others know they weren’t alone.

#2. We aren’t just celebrating learning from failure, we are celebrating the act of not being afraid of it. It’s a bit defiant to reclaim the negative word. I like that.

It’s very much about embracing the chaos. I don’t want to paint a pretty picture of it. It’s tough. It sucks. And there are costs. But the rewards are high, too.

In his amazing TED Talk, entitled, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”, Sir Ken Robinson tells the story of going to see his son in the play A Nativity Scene. When the three wisemen appear (three costumed young boys), they deliver their lines with only the interpretation that youngsters can deliver. There are no ‘rights’ and no ‘wrongs’ – only point of view (I won’t ruin it for you…you’ll need to watch it for the punchline). Sir Robinson concludes, with (paraphrased):

Kids really aren’t frightened of being wrong. Unfortunately, we stigmatize mistakes and give them that fear. And the problem is that if we aren’t prepared to be wrong, we’ll never come up with anything original. We are educating people right out of their creative capacities.

In my presentation about unleashing the creative beast in work teams, my first and most important point on creating a positive, creative space is to make a safe space…where there are no ‘dumb answers’. But this level of trust takes a heckuvalotta time to achieve. Why? Well, we were taught that wrong is bad a long, long time ago. Wrong answers were met with no reward and, sometimes (often), punishment. And nobody wants to feel bad.

In addition to this we are also taught there is one right answer to almost every question. Even the most liberal curriculums have bias. What about POV? We are all well aware of the hordes of perspectives erased from historical recording. Science? It’s experimentation where theories are taken as truth (until refuted by new theories, which are, then, seen as truth). Furthermore WHAT we choose to study and from WHICH ANGLE these things are studied is incredibly biased.

My son brought home an assignment on matter, where there were multiple choice answers. In one question, it asked which of the following is a characteristic of the molecular structure of a solid: a. the atoms are spaced far apart, b. the atoms do not vibrate, c. there are no atoms. From my recollection, all three were wrong. However, b. was the answer. A quick lookup in a science journal told me that the atoms do, in fact, move, but just not very much. I urged him to write a paragraph that refuted the answers and he looked at me in horror.

But the answers were all wrong! They were misinforming students, perhaps to simplify, but they were doing a disservice nonetheless. Tad didn’t care too much. Not because he didn’t care (because in the right instance, he would take a stand), it was because he knew he couldn’t change it. There was one way to pass his class and a thousand ways to fail. He would rather just go with that one ‘right’ way.

Think about how, everyday, we have disagreements on individual POVs. Human relationships are riddled with them. Usually neither party is “right”, but there is nothing in the known universe that could resolve the conflict based on “facts”. The closest thing to the truth is that there is never one ‘truth’, only thousands of perspectives…even from those closest to the situation. It’s the messiest thing in the world to unravel truths. Then, I wonder, how do we suppose that we can so certainly ascribe any particular set of ‘standards’ and ‘answers’ to learning? Why are we beating diversity and imagination and curiosity right out of the heads of our people?

So, it isn’t really that our brains are broken. It’s that the ‘system’ is broken (and I say system, because I can’t think of a more accurate term right now).

We’re a whole lot of square/triangle/oblong/octagon/hexagon/etc. pegs trying to fit into round holes. And some of us find it easier to ‘fit’ than others.

A friend of mine sent me a link to this page that reads:

You’re going to the therapists because your parents know that you are not happy. You are not happy because you don’t fit in. You don’t fit in because you are not normal. So, if the therapist(s) can help you to be normal, everything will be all right.

Except for one problem.

You are not normal. There is something wrong with you. Your teachers know it. Your parents know it. Your brother and sister know it. All of the other kids know it – and they make sure that you know it, too. And how many therapists do they think it takes before you know that you are incurable. You may not be as smart as everybody thinks you are, but you’re not stupid.

I encourage everyone to read it. Maybe you see a piece of yourself there. I know that, even as a high achiever, I did. The only difference is that I dealt with it differently, with defiance, with resentment and with defensiveness.

Now, I know what some of you may be thinking (or maybe I don’t?): “If we don’t have measurements, how can we expect to understand progress? Performance? Etc.?”

I don’t know. Do we need to understand these things in 2-dimensions? It seems quite trite and externalized. It’s forgetting the amazing intrinsic motivations we naturally possess.

As well, defining one ‘right’ is, naturally, going to favour SOMEONE. It would stand to reason that those who set those measurements have set them to favour themselves. Just like the writing of history. I’ve witnessed several painfully inaccurate POVs presented as ‘truths’ in my own experiences. Hegemony surrounds us in this system. A system that uses measurements that favour a few will perpetually be in power.

If we were to make a list of what we would ‘lose’ by removing standard measurements versus a list of what we could gain, I wonder what the outcome would be?

For those of you who don’t follow my SlideShare account, this was the Keynote presentation I gave at the recent GOVIS conference in Wellington, New Zealand. Because the video doesn’t currently embed:

1. The Day of the Longtail By Michael Markman, Peter Hirshberg, Bob Kalsey; Produced for The Computer History Museum

2. What the Heck is BarCamp? by Ryanne Hodson & Jay Dedman (I always frickin’ cry at the end of this…man)

3. Transit Camp on CityTV

Funny things happen that change everything. And they happen in a second and, sometimes, for no apparent reason. And sometimes, as I stated in my earlier post, bad stuff happens alongside the good and good stuff happens alongside the bad. I think it was another ‘Momism’ that said, “When one door closes, another one opens.” So, when a really sad thing led me to be to be subbing in to present at the GOVIS conference in New Zealand, I took it as a huge door opening. I took the opportunity to talk about all of the things that I’m really, really passionate about. To speak of the changes I really dream about.

I spoke of the building blocks we know and love: Coworking, BarCamp, OpenID, Microformats, Creative Commons, etc. as well as real, crucial examples of how we should apply the idea of open data to the lives of our citizens:

1. healthcare records being openly accessible and wikified for the patient
2. communication and information exchange in regards to our childrens’ education to be a fully accountable (parent-teacher-student-administration) open dialogue
3. the government as an open, extensible, secure platform for local business.

These aren’t ‘nice to haves’, these are ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL.

Once you imagine the possibility, it’s really tough to be okay with the way it is today. Believe me, I’m really revved up to move this forward. Since I’ve made this presentation, I’ve been invited back for a second keynote address to another branch of the NZ government, been contacted by someone in the Australian government who wants to find out more, and been introduced to people who are doing similar work in Canada.

And I know that there are many of us around the world who are thinking this way. All of our small pieces, loosely joined are culminating into more and more pressure to rethink antiquated systems of top-down control over information…especially since we have such a wealth of it at our fingertips. With every door opened/closed, we discover new possibilities. Every butterfly among us who flaps her/his wings add to the storm that is brewing.

As with all of my material, this is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike (by-nc-sa) License, so please, spread it. Mash it up. Change it. Add to it. It is available for full download at Slideshare and I am happy to send you my original document if you would like that, too. More ideas, based on your experience in whatever country you reside in would be great, too. In my experience, our public services have the worst user experience ever, but they will only improve with our input. I encourage you to read up more on what went down at TransitCamp in Toronto and attend, if at all possible, the upcoming OpenCities event June 22-24, for examples of how we can all work together for change.

[asynchronous peek-a-boo with Dad by TaranRampersad]

Yesterday’s Facebook announcement was a way exciting occasion, marking, I believe, a new era. For those of you who didn’t catch the news, Facebook has opened up itself as a platform so that anyone can take advantage of (what Mark Zuckerberg called) the “social graph”, the network of real connections through which people communicate and share information, and build applications that run inside and outside of Facebook, including the ability to make $$ (Facebook will even handle the payment processing for no charge!). Pretty powerful, seeing that there are 24 million quite active users (50% log in daily…that’s pretty significant).

As I sat in the audience listening to Zuckerberg talk, it unfolded to look like a less ‘Everything is Miscellaneous‘ version of the internet itself. Facebook is making an internet inside of the internet…a kinder, gentler, more secure version. The ‘Tidy Web’ as Biz Stone coined in a subsequent conversation. Surely everyone still has the ability to function in the wild, wild west version (the world wider web), but can now seek refuge in the less spammy, privacy enabled, benevolently regulated Facebook version.

This is the smartest move I’ve seen a web company make in a long time…plus, if Facebook keeps their grassroots approach to the world (a la Zuckerberg) and doesn’t get too cozy with the companies launching in Facebook, they could create the most utopic world online.

But something struck me as particularly funny during Zuckerberg’s address: the construction of this “social graph”.

The description of the social graph (the true ‘platform’ – not the technology, itself) was charmingly geek. From what I understood, Zuckerberg described this world of Facebook as a way to scale relationships and make them much more efficient. I turned to the people beside me and laughed, “Finally! Exactly what I needed! More efficient relationships!”

But Chris gave me push back, “Well, yeah. How many friends do you have on each social network?”

And he is right.

Flickr = 535
Twitter = 353 (with 815 following)
Ma.gnolia = 113
LinkedIN = 379
Facebook = 418
+ about 100 other various social networks with 50 here and 100 there “friends”

And, no, not all of these contacts are truly “friends”, but the connection to each and every one of them serves some sort of purpose, even if it is only to put that person in my virtual rolodex for a day in the future when I may need to make a deeper connection. This is our currently most reliable measure of social capital, a growing and REAL asset for people in today’s economy. Some connections are more ‘valuable’ than others, of course. I can tell a Facebook connection is worth more for my particular group than the MySpace connections were, as I imported my gmail account last night and added a few people I only exchanged brief emails with a while back, who took extra care to clarify our ‘connection’ before accepting my friend request. I get fewer ‘random friendings’ on Facebook than I got on MySpace. My theory is that screen that says, “How do you know this person?” creates a deeper thought process into who you collect as ‘friends’.

Mark Zuckerberg promoted the idea of a-synchronicity: “Sure, you could pick up the phone or meet in person, but we don’t have time to do that with everyone of our friends anymore. A-synchronous communication makes it more efficient to keep in touch.”

I think about my own behaviour around this phenomenon. I prefer texting to talking on the phone. I spend way more time answering emails than I do sitting down for coffees. I know I WANT to spend more QT with people in my life, but with a growing social network, I have a difficult time keeping up. With each project that I add to my plate, I add new, interesting, fantastic peeps who I can’t build deeper relationships with because I’m stretched so thin already. I do have much deeper highly offline-maintained relationships, but I can count those on one hand these days. Even my brother and I found ourselves re-connecting better after he joined Facebook.

Is this bad or good? I don’t know. I do know that, en masse, it’s happening. And it seems to me that no amount of lamenting over what we’ve lost or creating dichotomous camps of geeks vs. neo-luddites is going to change the propulsion forward with this a-synchronous world.

It’s change. And with change, there are as many downsides as upsides. Clay Shirky described this on a panel at the Personal Democracy Forum. It isn’t old vs. new. It isn’t black or white. It’s a whole lotta grey. Personally, I think the downside of ‘efficient relationships’ will be miniscule compared to the upside of my growing social capital and global connections.

Times are a-changing and Facebook is smart enough to lead it forward. It doesn’t mean that they’ll ‘win’ or be on top forever, but yesterday’s announcement surely gave them a most advantageous position to lead. Smart. I look forward to watching the rest of the story unfold.

[photo taken by: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid]

The thing that bothers me about this cartoon by one of my favourite subversive thinkers, Hugh Macleod, is not the message. Hugh’s cartoon is poignant. It speaks the truth. It’s from his soul. And I think the message is clear. What bothers me is how the cartoon has been absorbed.

Think of it this way.

Option #1 Upon seeing this cartoon, Microsoft PR could have gone rancid. Ballistic. Ignored or shut down. Or worst, ceased and desisted. That’s the ‘clueless’ answer we half expect companies to do. And we loooove to call companies on this…use big examples of how these old skoolers just “don’t get it”. Have we totally stopped talking about Kryptonite already? (I still pick up on the meme) But companies, and especially companies like Microsoft, are not stupid. And their PR people are even less stupid. They haven’t spent years of building ‘evangelist’ teams of people to do community outreach to end up blowing it on something like this.

Option #2 is that they read it, reflect and realize that they need to do something about this. Not shut it down, but it actually gets them thinking, “Man, maybe it is time to change. Maybe we aren’t relevant anymore. Maybe we’ve just got too mired down in being big company that we lost our edge?” and they could start actually doing something about it. It doesn’t appear that is the case.

There is a third Option, though, and, in my estimation, it is the scariest option of all.

Option #3 is akin to systemic or implicit prejudice. It’s there…you can feel something is wrong, but there isn’t something explicit enough to be able to call anyone out on it.

Option #3 is when marketing uses subversion as a marketing tool. It’s what happened with the Chevy Tahoe ads. So, the story went: people defaced the ads. Bloggers waited in anticipation for GM to take them down. And they didn’t (well, not right away). So, a miraculous thing started to happen…people started to say things like:

“Wow, they are so smart. Look at all of us visiting their site.”

and

“I think I just increased my respect for GM. They DO get it.”

Which made me stop and shudder in a big way. You see, by taking on the subversiveness of those ads, they appeared as if they ‘got it’. They appeared as if they were doing Option #2. Now, time will tell whether GM gets rid of this line of enormous vehicles and replaces them all with more fuel efficient, hybrid or electric vehicles, but the issue I take with the outcome of all of this is that a simple PR move totally quieted the critics. They neutralized by taking the punch.

Which is what Microsoft is doing here. Whether or not they are actually ‘changing the world or going home’ is up for deep debate and discussion, but when they showed up at the Web 2.0 Expo sporting this cartoon all over t-shirts and signage, I was taken aback. The PR people were standing at the door to the MS session, happily handing out their (men’s XL & XXL) tshirts to everyone coming into the session. A big smile, saying, “See? We’re hip. We’re listening,” across their face.

Meanwhile, we were running the Web2Open across the hallway and had spoken with some Microsoft people a week earlier about them coming down and being involved in the Mashpit. “Bring developers and your APIs.” I offered and added, “This is for the developers and the community, so we aren’t ‘featuring’ anyone. We’ll let people decide what they are working on.”

Well, no developers showed up, but those same t-shirt flingers were more than happy to ‘spam’ our tables with Microsoft literature as they ran by. It seemed to me that the appearance of clued in was much more important than being clued in. And could you blame them? I mean, being clued in is a terribly time-consuming, drawn-out process that takes a long period of humility, pain and general deprogramming. Whereas, appearances are pretty simple. All you need are a stack of gapingvoid t-shirts and a heartfelt speech.

I do have the utmost faith in human beings…still…even after all of these years of hearing people say one thing, then do something else. And still, even after watching so many people around me fall for the line rather than judge by the performance…still, I think that people are smart and can see these inconsistencies for themselves.

But this is a cloak. The cloak of subversion is strong. And the strongest part of it is that we, ourselves, want to believe SO strongly that stuff is changing this fast. We want our stories to carry into our clueless clients’ offices and say, “See? Microsoft is doing it. Why can’t you?”

I do believe that times are changing…companies are changing (or have to change). I believe the tide is shifting and there will be a great leveling (in fact my book proposal, which is coming along nicely, thank you, is about this very belief). But I don’t believe it is happening as fast and led by the characters that we are pointing to. We, too, have to change our own measurement systems to see where things are making leaps and bounds and it is truly, in the individual stories and the long tail.

Subversion…REAL subversion is going down. And it is kickass, amazing, disruptive stuff. But it will: a. take some time to shake out and b. come with some crazy consequences we don’t even realize yet. And it isn’t as simple as GM keeping Tahoe-bashing ads up on their site longer or Microsoft using a cool Hugh Macleod cartoon on their conference materials.

Subversion isn’t a marketing tool. It’s a path to change. We can’t lose site of that.

Brands don’t get diluted because they are overused in popular terminology. Brands get diluted because they’ve ceased to be relevant.

(e.g. ‘xeroxing’ or ‘googling’ something)

I’m not sure if you recall, but a couple of months back, I wrote a post entitled How To: Receiving Customer Feedback. Some of my favourite points in that list, such as, “Try not to take negative feedback personally” and “Ego doesn’t belong here”, run rampant in organizations where the employees spend too much time looking inwards and getting self-congratulatory. The higher the eagle is flying, the more likely there will be knee-jerk defensive responses to criticism and an outright dismissal of ideas that aren’t yours.

We’ve spent loads of time talking to Chris Beard of Mozilla and I find that he’s a pretty open guy, has a good dose of humility and enjoys a good debate from time to time. That’s why I was quite surprised to see the responses by other Mozilla employees & core community members (and especially those who run the ‘community’ site, SpreadFirefox) to Chris’ latest post. Responses like:

• What’s your point dude? … Are you bored? (Ian – community member)
• “So it’s great that you can mouth off but if you’re not willing to help out, file bugs, be active in spreadfirefox, what you say doesn’t really matter.” (Rafael – ex-Mozilla employee, now community member)
• “Ian, I’m sure you all would love a free lunch, (Flock did too,) but that ain’t how Open Source works or what being a member of the community means.” (Asa, mozilla employee)
• “Chris Messina, as I said to Ian, no free lunches here. If you think Mozilla’s mission is important, then put something on the line for it.” (Asa, mozilla employee)

Whoah. Out of the 47 some-odd responses, many from the Mozilla volunteer developer community, the defensive ones came from Mozilla core people, some who are paid to interact with community members/issues.

Now, some background about Chris himself…he’s never been a paid employee of Mozilla. He moved to SF 3 years ago, a bright-eyed hopeful and heard a call for volunteers on this Open Source browser called Firefox, which he enthusiastically answered and subsequently spent many late nights and weekends donating his time for the launch and early growth of the SpreadFirefox campaign. From what he tells me, he didn’t realize that the people he was working alongside, like Asa and Rafael, were actually being paid for their work. But that isn’t really the point. The point is that Chris was dedicated then and continues to be dedicated to a bright future of Firefox – without any ulterior motives other than he believes in the original stated mission of creating source on the net.

After finding out that Mozilla was hiring for the team, he interviewed with people. For whatever reason, they passed him over and, needing to actually pay the rent, he was coaxed into working at a company called Round Two that would become Flock…but only under the condition that Flock would work with Firefox and not in competition to Firefox. (and, although he hasn’t stated it, I believe that Flock’s lack of playing nice in the OS sphere had a lot to do with his leaving – his heart wasn’t in creating a MySpace browser)

I’m often frustrated with Chris because we have clients and bills to pay of our own, but he continues to spend a great deal of ‘mind space’ and energy on Firefox (as well as his disappointment with Flock). Each hour he spends thinking about this stuff is an hour we can’t bill for. So, to Asa and Rafael, who have told him to put his money where his mouth is…he does. Too much of it IMO. So much of it that I worry about his inevitable broken heart on this subject.

He gives a damn, which is the greatest gift a project (and especially one that makes good money) could hope for. You should be so lucky as to having people that still give a damn after leaving scathing comments like that on someone’s blog post. Man, maybe I should talk smack to him so that he cares more about the projects I want him to give a damn about.

[p.s. yes, of course I'm biased. But I think I know a bit of the inside track and can 'translate' Chris' rants into the passion they represent. As a positive and, generally, thoughtful - as in paused in thought - guy, he only spends this kind of time on the projects he loves]

Marilyn Waring‘s first gesture towards me proved the point she would make earlier.

Knowing virtually nothing about me other than I dropped her an email explaining that her book, Counting for Nothing (originally titled “If Women Counted”), changed the way I looked at the world and that I had dedicated my life to shifting value systems because of it and that I was coming to New Zealand and would love to meet her. She met me in the lobby of her hotel (lucky for me, she was visiting Wellington for a couple of days while I was there) and invited me up to her room for tea.

Her room.

Now, this is the sort of thing that women don’t do, do they? Invite strangers, especially fans into their hotel suites. These are intimate, private spaces. Safe spaces. Vulnerable spaces. But Marilyn seemed nonplussed about the whole thing. She made tea whilst settling in. Started right in at telling me about her latest beef with the government and how she was going to debate them into the ground the next day. After I got over myself, we melted into the kind of conversation one experiences after many years of knowing another person. In no time, we had the laptops open, showing amazing works and thoughts, and sharing our passions.

Then she said it to me: Trust is an externality. And she may or may not have noticed it, but she lived this statement and, through her words meeting her actions, totally inspired me (again).

The next day, I was due to give my Government 2.0 presentation and had lacking content in the ‘trust is the way to (citizen) empowerment’. In an instance, it made sense to me. Are we naturally selfish? Or is it the systems that encourage it?

The Open Source world needs to make the assumption that people are, basically, good in order to succeed. And, because of that, there is a great deal more good behaviour than bad. As well, being trusted is a very empowering thing. Personally, someone saying, “I am giving you this responsibility. I have faith in you,” makes me want to work much harder than, “I know you’ll screw this up, so I have put measures in place to ensure that you can’t.” It seems that anything the law touches goes on the premise that people are, basically, bad and need to be protected from one another (and themselves).

When trust is externalized too much, we end up relying on those externalities instead of an intrinsic bond between human beings to do the right thing. So much that when we imagine the law falling down, we imagine chaos. Remember the blackout on the East coast of North America a couple of years back? There was an assumption that people would pillage, burn, steal, rape and generally go Mad Max. Very very few did. No more than on a typical day with power, really. Instead, we all took to the streets, making due with generators and made peaceful parties in public parks.

In the book The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, they tell a story about the lawlessness of Burning Man. The authors come across a man going ballistic on a street sign, obviously quite high and scared. One of the authors asks the man why he is attacking the sign, to which the man replies, “Because I can’t find my camp. I’ve been circling for hours.” The authors, realizing there is nobody else but them to help this man, reply, “Well, if you tear down the sign, many others will be even more lost and feel just like you. You don’t want that to happen, right?” The man agreed and they all set off to help him find his camp.

Burning Man doesn’t have a police force. It doesn’t have laws. It does have thousands of drug-induced, water-deprived, heat-stroked people who gather for a week in the desert. You would expect more havoc to ensue, but, surprisingly, it doesn’t. Or, it does…but in a totally positive manner. Could it work for more than a week? I don’t know. Perhaps. When asked to think for themselves, people generally step up to the challenge.

[update from Chris Carfi: it isn't lawless...the country sherrif's departments have jurisdiction. Ori's story still applies because he 'thought' it was without policing and, thus, took logical civil action, but it isn't a totally free-from-externalities week after all]

But most likely, there’s a happy medium somewhere between Burning Man and current government where we can start to truly internalize trust for other human beings. I would love a world where inviting a new friend home for a cup of tea doesn’t feel odd and invasive.

As a child, I loved the colourful rhymes of Dr. Seuss. His characters were so fantastical and silly, with names that made you giggle whilst you learnt. Some of my favourite stories were The Sneetches and The Lorax. The Sneetches was a wonderful parable of the celebration of diversity (actually used in Bosnia to teach young children to have racial tolerance) that I understood at a very young age when, at the age of 10, I asked my mother whether the stars on the bellies of the star-bellied Sneetches were supposed to represent being a boy and prayed for McMonkey McBean to show up on my street.

The Lorax had and even more obvious agenda. This furry little creature spoke for the trees and spoke of the ways the trees and the water were tied to the health of the general ecosystem of the valley the Once-ler was destroying in his quest for biggering and biggering (a term that I use to this day to describe the zero-sum game most businesses play). He kept popping up to show the Once-ler (the representative of big business) that his benefiting from clear-cutting the Truffula Trees (to make thneeds…that everyone needs) was hurting the environment and the animals that depended on it. Of course, the Once-ler eventually learnt a valuable lesson, but too late. He had no more trees to chop down, customers moved on from the Thneed trend and he was left with an environmental mess, riddled with guilt, looking for someone else to clean up his mistakes.

It was obvious to me at a young age that Zeuss wasn’t talking about some fictional industry, and, by the time I was 14, I was writing letters to editors and sitting-in in protest with fellow neo-hippies. Today, I see many Lorax’s around, the most powerful example of which is the Inconvenient Truth work by Al Gore, that warns the world that, even though we may not personally feel it, we are moving towards a world in which there will be no more earth to exploit.

The future seems bleak, indeed, but I have noticed some growing memes in the recent year that have led me to believe that things are actually changing…actually shifting towards a more Lorax POV. Each theme overlaps in a significant way and is fueled by Open Source principles and the Web 2.0 world spirit as well. They are: The Triple Bottom Line, The Science of Happiness, The Non-Zero Economy, Boutique, and Community.

1. The Triple Bottom Line

   I keep hearing this phrase popping up everywhere from small business owners to politicians. The triple bottom line means that businesses have two switch from merely thinking about : People, Planet & Profits. As I learnt in the amazing documentary, The Corporation, the law behind corporate entities are set up to only focus on one bottom line: profit…and, according to the documentary, the bottom line looks more like this: profit at any and all costs. If you haven’t seen the documentary, I highly recommend it. What was most poignant for me is that the responsibility for the costs of success are shifted to shareholders, who simply cannot be held accountable as they are not part of the decision process and don’t understand that maximizing their profits comes at the cost of many things: humans, environment and their own livelihoods.

   The shift towards the triple bottom line is an important one then. It actually defies the legal specifications of a corporation. Will the law follow suit?

2. The Science/Economics of Happiness

   Everywhere I turn there is another article or paper or book on the growing science of happiness. I’m really enjoying reading Dan Gilbert’s latest, Stumbling on Happiness, but I, personally, got interested in the subject way back in ‘the day’ (more like my 2nd year of university) when I was introduced to Marilyn Waring‘s work. Although she didn’t explicitly talk about the economics of happiness, she did provide me with an amazing argument for why we should NOT be measuring progress by GDP, the main point being that it leads to ‘The Corporation’ type practices and misrepresents actual well-being in a country.

   Certainly, having no money can make you miserable, but studies have shown that having heaps of money makes you no happier than having enough money (and ‘enough’ is seems to be what brings you out of constant struggle and into a comfortable standard of living, which varies with the cost of living. In SF, for instance, that # is probably $100k, whereas in Calgary, it’s probably closer to $50k). In fact, some making heaps of money actually experience more anxiety and those shooting for having heaps of money often sacrifice their personal lives to get there. So, this new outlook on happiness is leading to many folks surmising that we need to start valuing more than just what’s in the bank (shock!).

3. Non-Zero Sum Economics

   The title of this post alludes to this. So, we’ve won. We are the biggest company in the world. Top of Fortune 500′s and on the tip of everyone’s tongues and riding high. But what about it? What does it get us other than the continued struggle to stay there, the target of everyone else’s desire to de-thrown us and continuous pats on the back? Personally, I can’t count a single company that has held the ‘top spot’ for all of history. And more die trying than actually get there.

   Sure, there are perks at the top. Money buys loads of influence, but as many are envious and waiting for you to screw up, you can’t really exploit that to its potential. And because you are so scared of losing the top dog spot, you start to do really asinine things to keep it. Look at all of the awfully desperate things Microsoft is doing these days. It only makes it more sad because of their glorious position at the top at one point.

   Another recommendation is Robert Wright’s Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, where he surmises that society becomes increasingly non-zero-sum as it becomes more complex, specialized, and interdependent. I agree with him as I look around me and see the mountains turning into the foothills and a growth of co-opetition towards better outcomes for customers.

4. Growth of Boutique, Craft and the Support for Local

   I wrote about the Boutique Era a while back and I continue to see signs of the growth of the sentiment towards ‘craft’ and the support for the local. Everywhere I travel, people recommend their local coffeeshops, little holes in the wall neighbourhood restaurants and the true boutique hotels (not the ‘W’, but hotels in restored buildings, decorated by local artists and run by pillars of the community which are quite reasonable). They wrinkle their noses in disgust at Starbucks, P.F.Chang-type chains and Mariotts. Even with the clear benefits of ‘points’ and consistency, more an more people are choosing the local and the boutique.

   Part of the reasoning is the desire to create individual experiences, which cannot be reproduced en masse. Another reason is that it’s proven to be better for the local economy to buy goods produced locally, which, in the long term, benefits the residents willing to pay a little more today. Local restaurants are more likely to use truly organic food, so health is also a factor. But most of all, there is a growing backlash against the global brands that don’t seem to change no matter what community they invade.

5. Community Over Commodity Focus

   When we look at companies that do endure over longer periods (and by ‘endure’, I mean brands that stay around for many decades, but stay pretty steady profitability – no boom and bust, only happy coasting), they tend to focus more on the customers and creating individual connections than appealing to a mass audience. Some of them have even resisted growth in order to stay true to that principle as outlined in Bo Burlingham’s Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big. Companies like Kiehl‘s that have been around since 1851 represent this for me, but majority of these companies, you probably wouldn’t have heard of unless you actually live nearby or you’ve had a good friend rave about them. They don’t generally spend money on mass advertising because their strength is in spreading via word of mouth. Any large influx would actually damage their ability to personalize their service.

   Slow and steady and aligned with their customer community is what will win their race. They don’t worry about ‘crossing any chasms’ or look to the Fortune 500 to measure their worth. Each and every customer that comes in their store or calls them to say, “My good friend so-and-so recommends you highly” is worth more than the actual purchase.

   These companies have decent positive income, happy employees, ecstatic customers and value connections over consumption. Sure, commoditizing something brings in big bucks today, but focusing on community creates long term, sustainable businesses.

Things are shifting and, in an amazing conversation with Marilyn while I was in Wellington, she agreed that the perfect storm is brewing that is leading to a disruption of the current economic outlook. As more and more people hear about alternative measures to the GDP (most notably the GPI, but also the success of the GNH in countries like Bhutan – login required), start thinking about Happiness and alternative measures of well-being and discover the amazing experience of local, the more this shift will happen. I truly believe the democratization of publishing and distributing has gone far towards influencing this shift. As more an more of these ‘amateurs’ go online, the more and more the powers that be will be unseated (there is a reason why Andrew Keen feels threatened by them) and the more and more people will start to define their own measures of success and you had better believe that there won’t be a centralized organization telling us what those are.

So, truly. Even if you could win this one Microsoft…what really IS the prize? You’re victory party is going to be a little lonely me thinks.