One of the messages I’ve been lucky enough to be spreading lately is that of questioning the gap between business and human values. I started thinking about this issue almost two years ago, but wasn’t able to quite shape it into the message I needed to get across until earlier this year when I was preparing to give a workshop at Best Buy HQ for the Social Media Club Reality Check Series in January.

It occurred to me as I finished up The Whuffie Factor and was traveling around talking about it, there were parts of my message that were valued by business leaders and other parts that were glossed over. Those that seemed to make people squirm were the touchy-feely ones like Embrace the Chaos and Find Your Higher Purpose, which IMO are the most advanced ones. They require a major shift in thinking from being very traditional business thinking to being very human-centric. For me, this is a no-brainer. It’s key. Businesses sell to humans, why shouldn’t they align with human needs. But what I discovered as I delivered my message is that I seemed to be speaking a foreign language. And not only was it foreign, but it was undervalued. “Where is the 101? Should we have a Facebook page or a Twitter account or both?” “How do we measure ROI?” was thrown back at me like nothing I said had sunk in. I was told by colleagues that my message was too basic. Huh?

That’s when I began to realize that there is a deeper misunderstanding here than the economics of social currency – which is what TWF is all about and I started preaching in 2006. But as I heard more and more social media types describe these social economics (whether they used Whuffie or Social Currency or Social Capital or…), something wasn’t changing: the business approach to online communities. Social capital wasn’t being described as a currency that works differently, but in tandem with market capital, it was being described as a thing to be mined…a justification for a social media strategy. “Look at all of the social capital we can leverage to make more money!” This was so not my intention.

And then the lightbulb went on! I realized that what was wrong with the whole picture was the gap between the underlying values of business:

• Profit
• Process
• Efficiency
• Return on Investment
• Risk Management & Planning
• Maximize Resources, Minimize Waste
• Reliability
• Accountability
• Growth
• Hierarchy
• Competitiveness & Winning
• Dedication & Loyalty
• Control
• Etc.

…and the underlying human values that drive community:

• Compassion
• Generosity
• Connectedness
• Freedom
• Love
• Truth & Authenticity
• Courage & Fidelity
• Charity
• Wisdom
• Stories
• Openness
• Personal Growth
• Beauty
• Etc.

Certainly, there is reason to some of these value-gaps. As business has grown and the ability to reach wider, global audiences has increased, efficiency and process help drive the planning for expansion. And with profitability at the core of all these values, that is necessary. But as businesses started to move into a very sacred space (and I like to compare our online communities to that of the forests of Pandora on Avatar in my presentation), these values begin to poison the very human interactions we have there. All of a sudden, things shift and the things we hold so dear are being ignored (or de-valued “tweeting about what you are having for lunch is so inane!”), co-opted (community members, themselves, becoming ‘personal brands’ or what I call roboticized) or exploited (community sourcing is the process of exploiting generosity). And this is not the direction we need to go in IMO. I believe strongly that, rather than business injecting business values onto our communities to business ends, we really need to turn the tides and teach business how to espouse human values again…or as Gary Hamel writes in his excellent column, put soul back into business. It is human beings, after all, that are necessary to the success of any business (whether employees or customers).

Which is why I DO mind the gap between business values and human values and why this has become the focus of my most recent work and presentations:

As the presentation states, we humans are growing less and less trusting of where we are spending our money and our time (working), but we still desire that connection. No, we don’t want to be chummy with companies, but we are seeking out those brands that espouse human values to spend our time and money with. And that is the key here. It’s not just a nice thing to do, although I believe that without this shift, the world is going to get a whole lot scarier – think the current economic crisis but worse. It’s also a smart business move. There is much more business can learn from the values driving the growth of online communities than where to target the next generation of buyers. Call it a revolution or a paradigm shift or what you will, but it is happening and it needs to be said over and over until the shift is made universally. This doesn’t just make for a better future for humans, but for business as well. Like it or not, we are living in a consumer society and we may as well make it a harmonious relationship.

So, yes, I DO mind the gap and so should everyone else. We spend a great amount of time on connecting, sharing, being generous and creating beauty. This is incredibly valuable and IS making the world a better place. Let’s keep it move in that direction.

[photos by: shutterstock]

Most all of us, whether we notice it or not, spend a good part of our lives in some form of consumer-company interaction. Whether we are shopping for groceries, banking, paying rent, shopping for clothes, picking a movie, buying a book, selling our services, working for a company whose services we are performing for customers or eating at a restaurant. I’m not sure what percentage of our lives are spent on one side of the equation or the other, but I’d guess that a good majority of our time is spent consuming or selling.

And though I dislike the term ‘consumer’, the truth is that in today’s world, that’s what it resembles. It’s transactional, impersonal and more often than not marginalizing. It’s as if it is in the DNA of business to push the limits on how badly it can treat the customer to maximize revenue. And over the years, it seems, that limit has been creeping further down the rabbit hole of customer hell. Pain limits are pushed to a level where the customer *almost* decides the transaction isn’t worth making with the business, but when the customer gets used to that pain level, the business pushes the pain further. And so on until we are so used to poor treatment, the simplest gesture that makes us feel empowered again feels like a win.

With online soapboxes like Twitter, blogs and Facebook, though, the individual has the ability to connect with other individuals to get a better deal, and the bigger the soapbox, the more we are empowered. The only problem is that business has got wind of this soapbox and works strategically on shutting it down.

I was working away at my computer today when my phone rang. I picked it up to hear the friendly voice of a representative from CIBC, the bank I deal with in Canada. “How are you today, Miss Hunt? I’m calling to see if I can help you with the issue you were having with CIBC the other day.” I paused to wait for it, “You know, the one you posted about online?”

Bingo. CIBC is using some tracking software to pick up mentions on Twitter and the blogs (most likely will reply to this post, too) and then saw that I have over 30k followers and that particular rant started a rather large conversation. Because of this, my ‘issue’ was escalated to a personal service department where I now have a personal service agent who I may call at any point with issues. Awwww. Isn’t that nice?

No. It’s strategic. And it’s a lovely and nice way to try to silence me. Like attracting more bees with honey. Or being the sun in the parable about the wind and sun in competition to remove the coat from the man. And the gentleman I chatted with at CIBC was awesome and said he’d relay all of my suggestions to the proper decision makers and gave me his personal number and released some money from the hold, but I’m still not satisfied.

Because, well, I don’t take bribes (#12) even when they don’t look like one. I want change. I don’t want to see change for me, I want to see change for everyone. I want banks to stop experimenting with how far they can push us before we cry ‘uncle’ on their policies and start thinking about how they can help us achieve our dreams with customer-empowering policies. I want business to invest in technology that streamlines and helps the customer experience, not technology that spies on us. I would even go as far as sitting down with executives at CIBC for FREE to understand what the hold up is and to consult with them on improving their system for customers. I’d even connect them to the right talent to implement the system. Hell, I want this so badly I’d even pay for this to happen.

Every business starts facing a decision to make: are we here to serve customers or are we here to get rich? Conventional wisdom, set by standards that are unproven and short-sighted, leads most businesses to pick the latter. But picking customer happiness as the core driver to your business is actually the better way. It leads to satisfaction, loyalty, positive word-of-mouth, efficiency and, ultimately, riches for the business. Happy customers means you spend less on customer acquisition and retention, employee retention and recruitment, innovation (you are more innovative, but use less resources), and operations (happy customers lead to more efficient operations as you, by definition, become more efficient). You’ll beat the competition every time because they can’t figure out why customers flock to you while they have rock bottom prices.

As I‘ve been quoted saying, ‘Designing your product for monetization first, and people second will probably leave you with neither.’ As the market tips more and more towards the whims of the customer, this will ring more and more true. Now is the time for us to use all of the power we have to move business in the direction of customer-centric thinking. It’s good for everyone.

[photo credit: JLMaral on Flickr]

I love disruption, especially when one is disrupting towards a positive end. When there is the ability to disrupt a dominant system that discriminates against people or favors those already in power – such as well, North America – I love it even more. So firstly, to outline what I propose to disrupt:

1. Stereotyping – somehow, even though we examined stereotypes eons ago, the attitudes seem to persist. The problem is that now they persist in more subtle ways. Not so easy to put our finger on it and call it out, which is an issue.
2. Individuality over community – this one is easy to spot and many will tell me it’s a good thing. I don’t think it is. There should be a balance, but if anything, I believe the balance should tip in the favour of community. Many studies have shown that putting community interests first actually benefits the individual more in the long-run. See: Non-Zero and The Origins of Virtue.
3. No-Choice Consumerism – I’m not referring to monopolies as much as I am referring to the lack of choice we actually have in choosing to opt-in or opt-out. I love to shop. Anyone who knows me knows I have a bit of a passion for it. But when I do, I struggle to keep in charge of my own experience and outcome. There are too many situations where pressure, scare tactics, smoke and mirrors and general exploitation come into play while I’m trying to make a decision.
4. Life Inc. – Also the name of an awesome book by Douglas Rushkoff, it’s also the reality of a world of people emulating corporations. I see this all of the time: people concerned about their personal brand, creating an elevator pitch for their lives, choosing friends based on ability to connect to powerful people, creating an image they can never live up to and when it falls apart, they try to sweep under the carpet. It’s emotionless, inauthentic and getting really boring if you ask me. I wrote about it a little here.

There are a few other themes, but I want to move along to the disruptions. Disruptions are unlike movements or protests or even flashmobs. They don’t require a great deal of organizing and you can’t really plan when you are going to perform them. The one thing they DO require is courage because they are about being hyper aware of the moment in which you see one of the above themes playing out and then questioning the theme openly – at the expense of being called a party pooper. But the awesome part of disruptions is that they are extremely powerful. When someone tells a racist joke and, instead of laughing, you say, “That’s not funny,” they will think twice about telling that joke again. So…here are 15 easy everyday ways to disrupt a system:

1. Flip around your pronouns when storytelling, especially where they have been heavily gendered. Refer to a man caring for the kids/doing housework, refer to a woman as the CEO, etc. Not only are you breaking the cycle of bias in the brains of your listeners, you will get their attention. Like Chip and Dan Heath say in Made to Stick, the #2 way to make your idea stick is through unexpectedness.
2. When talking to someone who uses gendered pronouns (or having someone tweet or blog gendered pronouns), gently suggest they read the previous suggestion. OR you can answer back flipping the pronoun if you want to be more subtle. It will make them think about it from that point forward.
3. Look people in the eye and smile at them as you walk by them. Add a nod or ‘good day’ once you get the hang of it. This one is super simple and incredibly catchy. Research has shown that smiles spread.
4. Diversify your examples. Find out what is happening beyond the whositwhatsits in your professional world and educate yourself on the people doing great work at the edges. In technology, it’s me looking at what’s happening in India, Europe, China, etc. as well as what’s happening in Silicon Valley. Bring up these examples in conversations that highlight the whositwhatsits over and over again until people spread it onwards.
5. Call out sexist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic or any other ‘minority group as stereotype’ jokes, references, slurs or language. This sounds like a d’uh thing, but it’s really hard. Doing so makes you look like a party pooper. But really, the person making those comments should know that they look like an arse. You are doing everyone a favour.
6. Don’t buy products from companies that offend you or treat you badly. Most of us do this already, but sometimes it’s really really convenient. Hell, I have a plan with AT&T. I need to not do that anymore. And I buy from American Apparel, even though their ads make me really angry. I need to stop that, too. It’s inconvenient, but important to send the message through not spending our money to support bad companies.
7. Take the time to talk with people with vastly different opinions. This is really hard. I usually get about 5 minutes into these conversations and want to scream and run away, but persistence (and patience) pays off. The first step is to stop trying to get them to listen to you and listen to them. Find a point of connection. There is usually more than one of those. Hear them out. Understand where they come from. Believe it or not, we usually want the same things, we just disagree on how we get there. Once the defenses are down, you’ll find great solutions together and inform your own opinion.
8. Take the time to get to know people with vastly different experiences of the world. This always blows my mind. I learn WAY more from having conversations with people who don’t fit the ‘mainstream’ experience of the world than I do from bestsellers.
9. Start taking people to task who talk about new media marketing in the same way Mad Men used old media marketing. If I see another new media guru use Don Draper’s creative style as the ideal to uphold in marketing, I’ll scream. No, that ‘carousel’ episode is still the epitome of how things ‘were’ (creating some sort of illusion to sell a product) and does not represent really connecting to one’s customer. The real power in online communities comes from the ability to connect with new friends and old on a human level. Emotional. Real. It’s less about how a company can co-opt and exploit that and more about what companies can learn from this. (more about this at a later date)
10. Admit to your mistakes. Openly. Brutally honestly. And take responsibility for them. Then learn from them.
11. Get to know your neighbours. Even the crab apples upstairs who tell you to turn down your bass. Spend time getting involved with your neighbourhood associations, events, etc. Reach out and create a supportive community. This is something else I need to do. I find this really scary. I don’t know why. The benefits outweigh the potential rejection.
12. Don’t take bribes. What I mean by this is don’t take a free voucher or delivery or whatever a company offers to you alleviate the pain they caused you with your transaction with them. Instead, ask for them to fix the problem. Take them to task and offer to give suggestions that may help them improve their service. For instance, I ordered a microwave from Future Shop and then got totally dicked around by their awful call in center. When they figured out I had >25,000 twitter followers, they contacted me offering all sorts of things, but I refused. I said, “I don’t want you to fix this issue for me, I want you to fix this issue for everyone.” Who knows if it’ll be effective. I haven’t shopped there since. I told them to call me when the call center is fixed and I’ll try them again.
13. Leave product reviews. There is a reason why sites like Yelp, Chowhound and Amazon are so popular. It’s because of people like you and I leaving product reviews. I rarely buy anything – even offline – without checking the Amazon reviews. Yelp and Chowhounds are my personal foodie guides wherever I go. And in Montreal, I found this amazing list of restaurant reviews. Generous people sharing their knowledge everyday makes the world an easier place to navigate.
14. Demand your data. Why? Because if this awesome group has their way, the future will be driven by the customer and then you’ll want all of the content and reputation and identity and history you’ve been depositing around the internet for years. It will be valuable for your experience and for YOU to leverage your own power. So, click on that little ’suggestion’ tab or ‘feedback’ button and say to the networks you are making more interesting with your contributions: “Hey, have you thought about giving me the opportunity to export my reviews/tweets/photos/connections/shopping history/preferences/etc to use elsewhere?” The more requests they get, the more they’ll be pressured to do this.
15. Use all the tools available to you to call out injustices and bad experiences. The beauty of the web is that there are literally hundreds and even thousands of others who have experienced similar situations. If you get pissed enough and have enough momentum, you can even start to do something about it. The United Breaks Guitars videos did an amazing job of getting dozens of people to share their experiences (and also refused to take a bribe by asking United to make a donation). And as I wrote here, even spreading the word through blogs and tweets makes a difference.

Of course, these small steps are only icebreakers to apathy, but we all get so busy that starting somewhere that fits in our schedules yet is bigger than a tweet is a good start. And each of these small disruptions packs a big punch. Good disrupting!

The presentation I gave at nextMEDIA in Toronto today. Basic premise, let’s put human stuff first when using the ‘new’ media (and in every case, in fact). Stuff like personality, quality, relationships and taking the time to invest in the people you follow/follow you is really important for being able to raise that crucial social capital that helps us achieve our goals at the end of the day (job, growing our business, changing the world, raising money, etc).

[image from: Shutterstock]

I was fortunate enough to be part of a webinar with Beth Kanter today. Beth gave a fantastic presentation and I really enjoyed our conversation (I’ll post the link once it’s available).

But what I enjoyed the most was when, in response to a question about figuring out how much Whuffie one has, Beth showed a great diagram:

that will be in her book coming out next year, The Networked NonProfit.

What I love most about the way Beth thinks of measuring is that the impact, not the influence is the final goal. The big prize. All too many times, people stop at the influence part: how popular is that person? how many followers do we have? who is talking about me and my company? how much love do people feel for me?

This is one of the biggest reasons I don’t like to measure Whuffie. I get the question time and time again when I talk about the book. The question I *should* be getting is ‘what can I do with my Whuffie?’. We should be less concerned about how many followers one has and more about what that person does with that many followers. Not only is Whuffie left better in the non-fungible, ephemeral realm, but it is inconsequential. The measure needs to be in the impact. If we concentrate on our influence, we forget the end goal. We get caught up in our ego.

And ego isn’t where we want to get caught up. Fame for fame’s sake. Followers for followers sake. This all turns into, “Look at me! I’m influential! It makes me special!” It’s easy to get caught up in, but don’t. Which reminds me, an influencer who tends to not dwell on his famousness, Chris Brogan, talked about this the other day. Enjoy:

Remember the impact. What will be your legacy? That you were just famous for being famous (i.e. Paris Hilton and/or Vaporware)? Or that you made a difference, built something revolutionary, or led a real change in the world?

[Please don't read this if you haven't seen the season finale of Mad Men - serious spoiler alert]

For three seasons of Mad Men I watched in frustration as Don Draper seemed to get away with anything and everything. A handsome, well-dressed, privileged, tall white guy that could take everyone in his circle for granted, lie to them, cheat on them and treat them like garbage, yet continue get everything he wanted. It was a frustrating parable for me, a woman who spends a big part of her daily routine trying to make the world a place where people like Don can’t get away with murder. But there he was and people loved him. Hell, even I had to love him.

Of course, he was “good” to the people who didn’t say anything. He bestowed his wife, Betty, with all the finery she wanted at home, provided a good life, said the right things to let her know she was lovely. Yet, he cheated on her at every turn, lied to her constantly and treated her like a child when it came to her real, human concerns. She was solipsized by his personality as merely an extension of him. With his former secretary and now copyrighter, Peggy, he kept her secret and gave her a good promotion and an office. She should be grateful, right? Only she paid for his graciousness along the way by keeping his secrets, working her weekends away (while he played), jumping when he said jump and taking his constant belittling.

It wasn’t only the women who were kept at arms length with Don, it was also the men. He didn’t really have any friends. No sense of loyalty. He spent most of his time peacocking around, proving that nobody could own him. And nobody could. They feared him and were too scared to talk back. Too scared to stand up to him. In fact, Don’s ‘relationships’ were akin to having thousands of Twitter followers but little engagement with them. Looks impressive from a distance, but rather ineffective in the long run.

Until the last part of this season…or at least the last two episodes…where you saw his controlled world break down around him spectacularly because he forgot that the glue that holds together worlds when times are tough is relationships. And relationships aren’t something that Draper understands. When the people around him finally get the gumption to say ‘enough is enough’, Draper has to face the fact that he’s broken everything he tried to build by forgetting the most important part of life: connections to other people.

I’m sure Draper isn’t going to change overnight and become a warm, caring individual. I doubt that he’d be as interesting. But I look forward to the next season where he realizes that he does have to invest the time into ‘throwing sheep‘ a bit more and building those soup friends. Ruling through fear only creates resentment and de-motivates. And I look forward to the world that is tuned into The Draper having an epiphany themselves that the best way to get to the top is through being networked, notable AND nice.

I got an email a couple of weeks ago from a friend asking me to remove a reference to someone talking about a project who was taking credit for the project without doing any work. Although I completely understood her frustration, I really didn’t want to remove the quote. It just so happened to be the best quote I could find to underscore the importance of the project. And I needed to drive home the importance of the project (one technique is to reference third party quotes – something I learnt in writing term papers) to my audience.

Conundrum!

Was it really that damaging to the project to give credit to someone who is a big talker instead of a big doer, especially when his big talk is of value to spreading the word about the project? And if it was a collective project that no one person could lay claim to, did it matter that I even quoted him in my presentation? And finally, if the quote itself was helpful to me getting the point across to an important group of stakeholders and removing it was going to make that task more arduous, why remove it?

Is credit really that important?

Well, yes and no. The things that make giving credit important are:

1. Communities are often meritocracies. Therefore, those who are recognized as contributing gain whuffie. This whuffie leads to them being able to accomplish more. If the wrong person gets credit, this person could potentially use his/her whuffie for evil instead of good.
2. Getting attention for an idea often leads to monetary rewards. Clients who don’t do their homework and take a quote or a clip of someone taking credit for a project that isn’t their own and hire him/her for money make credit important. If the people doing the real work end up broke and desolate because Mr. Talky Pants reaps the rewards for their hard work, this is an awful outcome.

So, I understand the request for me to not promote Mr. Talky Pants. He shouldn’t reap the rewards or be able to use the credit towards promoting his not-so-desirable agenda.

At the same time, I watch as a great deal of time and energy is spent by really smart people on who gets credit for what. There seems to be a direct co-relation between the amount of complaints about being ignored and those who start ignoring the person complaining:

Why? Well, even if the complaint is totally valid, nobody can do much about it. And if you tell someone who has used a quote or mistakenly given credit to the wrong person that they shouldn’t be, it just makes them feel bad…and they’ll relate feeling bad to you. So they may stop giving credit to that person, but they won’t feel obliged to turn around and give it to you.

I know. I’ve been the person complaining. And I know it came across poorly and more than a little whiny. My ego had gotten in the way of the real end goal.

What I realized in the aftermath of me spending a great deal of time and energy worried about who is stealing my thunder is that:

1. It isn’t my thunder in the first place. Ideas are rarely (if ever) formed in a total vacuum. I didn’t just suddenly come up with something and it happened. Lots of people had great ideas before me that were built on until I merely added a dimension to it.
2. Ideas are meant to be spread, not egos. And the idea WAS being spread. That was the point. Not whether or not I was hoisted up as being the biggest hero in the universe. Why would that matter? It’s not about me. It’s about the idea and how it helps others.
3. If that was my last good idea, I’m screwed. So why focus on it? Instead, shouldn’t I be focusing on what is the next big idea?
4. I should be more concerned about the ideas that I’ve had that weren’t spread. There is a good area to focus on. Why didn’t they resonate with people? Should I work on my own communication skills? Maybe my research is wrong.

Ideas aren’t very tangible unless they are acted upon. And in order for an idea to really take flight, you need all sorts of people to make it happen. You need:

• A creator (or creatorS) – the raw idea people.
• A catalyst (or catalystS) – the people who take an idea into actionable territory.
• A champion (or championS) – the promoters who are good communicators and have a good network to promote the idea through.

Credit really belongs to all of these players. An idea without execution is worthless. A great idea and execution that nobody knows about will go nowhere. The trick is to make certain we aren’t focusing on one piece of the innovation at the end of the day. We need to change our dialogue from being about the myth of the lone inventor (hat tip to Scott Berkun’s awesome The Myths of Innovation) to the reality that everyone has a role to play, even if it isn’t something we inherently value (like marketing or product management).

So as any of you who visited HPC yesterday know, it was attacked by a malware hosting site. I’m not sure how they do it, but somehow they get in and implant iframe code to serve up malicious software for unsuspecting visitors. I think it may have been a security hole in WordPress combined with my own laziness around passwords (now fixed). Either way, it wasn’t a good day and I spent many hours cleaning out this bad code and trying to figure out what the heck was going on. Many hours were also spent by Ivan Storck (of Sustainable Websites – my host), William Dodson (from OBX Designworks) and my friend Mathieu (developer in Montreal) in helping me through this. By the time we got all of the malware attack cleaned out, Google had blacklisted my site (which led to a series of blacklisting by all the sites using Google’s indexing API). Yuck.

I wasn’t attacked personally. This happens randomly all of the time. Somehow there is money to be made in ruining the internet. However, I find it very odd to think that one would wreck the very thing that provides them with a steady stream of income. I compared the action to the self-replicating Smith on the Matrix. (spoiler alert) Imagine if Smith would have won – he would have taken the machine down and everyone would have died. There would be no point in him existing anymore.

Which brings me to my point: where did we go wrong in the world to encourage the Smiths? The malware hosts? The scammers, spammers, frauds, grifters, etc? Those that would pollute the very environment they need to exist in? These people are obviously gifted with the ability to problem solve, code, think up elaborate schemes and strategize. If they used this talent for good and not for evil, imagine how AWESOME the world would be!

It’s a tragedy of the commons, where selfish thinkers abuse the common space for their own gain. Of course, this thinking – if truly strategic – assumes that not all will follow the selfish path. The tragedy occurs when everyone thinks selfishly and the commons is ruined and unusable, leaving nothing for anyone to exploit any longer.

If instead human beings thought truly strategically – and this is the basis to my favourite book in the universe The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation by Matt Ridley – and contributed to the commons, we would all thrive! But this selfish, short-term thinking hacking away of small pieces of the pie happens and we all suffer…including the hackers themselves eventually.

This happens because – as Ridley says in The Origins of Virtue – the system is set up to encourage such selfish, short term thinking. Narrow view competition, multiple times removed culpability and a focus on short-term rewards have encouraged this. For instance, there are corporate structures, with their quarterly reporting (short-term view) and lack of social responsibility (the responsibility is with the shareholders who are far removed from the decision making as well as the consequences of that decision making). Copyright and patents also contribute to the attitude. I would argue that almost everything about surviving in modern society has to do with removing ourselves from responsibility and giving us the individual task to survive one day at a time (but that is a different post).

Thus, we encourage a great deal of tragedy in the commons themselves, costing billions of dollars in security, fraud protection, insurance and damages every year to those who try to live their lives on the up and up.

So, how do we stop this insanity? Like Peter Parker in the picture – whose tragedy was focusing on his own selfish needs resulting in the loss of his uncle – we aren’t recognizing the long term consequences of our actions. I really think this needs to be forefront in our discussions around this stuff. We also need a good dialogue and understanding of the butterfly effect – how one action leads to effecting so many others. It may seem small and insignificant to cheat here and there, but it adds up and changes the system we are part of. And finally, and I know this type of thinking isn’t popular amongst Americans, we have to imagine how we can contribute to the commons to mutually benefit (instead of one or two people benefiting, leading to the suffering of others). It’s not socialism, it’s smarter thinking. Just think of the costs we will save on our taxes alone when we don’t have to pay for the inefficiencies of a system full of people trying to cheat it.

We do have great power here. These tools can be used for great things. Solving hunger, poverty, creating peace, boosting economies (in countries where most of the spammer/scammer stuff comes out of), finding cures for bad diseases and all of the other social pitfalls we’ve created by thinking too short term for our world. So…where do we start?

Just a few months ago, I wrote about how somebodys are nobodys that got lucky, musing on the cult of fame and trying to put a person’s status into question as a reason to fawn over him/her. I got back a great reaction (many people didn’t like the idea of ‘luck’). So yesterday, when perusing through some links, I found an article that summarizes an actual scientific study of lucky vs. non-lucky people. It turns out that there IS such thing as lucky people, but it’s not some sort of mystical fate playing its hand at work after all. Instead, ‘lucky people’ are those who are really observant and open to opportunities.

Bingo. From the article:

“And so it is with luck – unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.”

I just about fell out of my chair reading this as it feeds right into the whole ‘embrace the chaos’ mantra I’ve been chanting for the past 4 years of my life (ever since I began getting ‘luckier’). The researcher, Richard Wiseman is a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, goes on to highlight four main characteristics of lucky people:

1. Lucky people are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities;
2. Lucky people make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition;
3. Lucky people create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations; and
4. Lucky people adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

This is fascinating, but unsurprising to me. I’ve read other research that says that positive ‘Pollyanna’ type people go much further in the world. I also know from personal experience that focusing on negative bits tends to create more negative outcomes while keeping my spirits up sails me through rough patches and leads to new and awesome opportunities. I’ve also observed many people who seem to attract negative drama and, therefore, never move forward. These people often refer to themselves as ‘unlucky’. No coincidence.

I’m definitely interested in picking up Wiseman’s book, The Luck Factor: The Four Essential Principles (another coincidence? ) to find out how he backs up his theories with experiments. A couple of further observations I loved from the article:

• Lucky people follow their ‘gut’ feeling rather than the rational side of a choice.
• Unlucky people stick to a routine – same route, same people at parties, etc – they don’t like to venture outside of their comfort zone.
• No matter what misfortune occurs to a lucky person, he/she will tend to look on the bright side of things. (“broke my leg? heh. no problem! at least it wasn’t my neck!”)

I guess it’s true that you make your own luck. I know that ever since I’ve begun pushing myself out of my comfort zone, my luck has changed. Or rather, that I changed my luck.

It seems there is a rash of talented people who have spent years, time, energy and their own money to build their knowledge, connections and skills enough to provide value who are constantly being asked to transfer all those knowledge, connections and skills along to others for free. I know this because: a. many of them are friends and people whose work I admire and have spoken out, b. I am one of them.

Some who approach me even have the balls to say, “You’ll get alot of Whuffie out of it!”

Um. That’s why I built up my whuffie in the first place, dude.

I think it’s useful to explain the process of how and why someone would work for whuffie and then at what point one gets paid in earth dollars and why (although the why should be obvious).

Why work for whuffie?

• Your name isn’t widely known and you need to build your reputation. By speaking or doing pro bono work, you will start to build up that valuable whuffie that is needed to get the paid work you need to cover your bills at the end of each month.
• Your name is widely known in one vertical, but the conference or cause that has approached you can give you exposure in another vertical you are highly interested in building a name for yourself.
• You really, really believe in the cause or the conference. It’s something you are crazy passionate about.
• In the case of a conference, you were 100% going to be there anyway (like SXSW Interactive).
• You are good friends and you know that friend will have your back anytime you ask in the future.
• Doing this could land you a gazillion more paid gigs (like speaking at TED or PopTech).
• You are pretty much guaranteed of being compensated another way – selling books, CDs, seminars, etc. (but this one is tough – I’ve asked the conference to pony up for a minimum number of books to give away in lieu of a fee).

That’s pretty much it. Free tickets aren’t payment. I’ve actually been offered a free ticket only the DAY ON WHICH I’M SPEAKING, which means they are saying, “Sure, we’ll let you in to talk, but then you need to pay to come back.” Wow.

After you have built a name for yourself, you should be charging. And even if it’s a friend’s conference, they need to pay to get you there and put you up for it. Your friend should also buy you a beer or two and recommend you to other conference organizers (who will pay you). Really good friends will actually pay you. Money coming out of your pocket to help someone else’s event (or business in the case of consulting or a workshop) rock is not sustainable. If you continue to do this after you’ve built a name for yourself, you have completely squandered the reason for you building your reputation in the first place! Really. If you will continue to work for free, why not just spend nothing and go nowhere? It’s more sustainable.

Why? (and here is obvious part)

Because your landlord/bank won’t let you pay your rent/mortgage with whuffie. The grocery store won’t take whuffie either. Neither will your utility companies, clothing stores, universities for your kids, bookstores for your reading materials or the many other realities of day to day bill collections. At some point, you need to cash in on some of that whuffie and put some money in the bank.

So, the bottom line for me is: I will work for whuffie if I really believe in something, but I will work for cash if it is for your benefit. And I will do the same for others. I pride myself on making sure that people get paid when I benefit more from their labor than they do. And I won’t ask if I don’t think I can pay them.

And personally, I think that conferences that pay their speakers are better. The speakers feel valued and transfer that feeling onto the audience, who also feel valued. Very few exceptions exist and where there are exceptions, there are HUGE benefits to the speakers (not empty promises) for speaking there.

As a sidenote, I’m pretty sure that perceived value also works into the scenario of working for free as well. Once you say yes to it, you lose value in the eyes of the client or conference organizer. In the words of Don Draper: “I don’t think you’d be in the presidential suite right now if you worked for free.”