More Than a Review

Cool Friend John Moore from the Brand Autopsy blog went above and beyond in his review of Tom's new book, The Little BIG Things. John reviews a lot of books. He occasionally gets very creative as with the dramatic readings of Switch or Linchpin.

We found it quite remarkable that when he turned his attention to Tom's book, he decided to highlight particularly notable quotes by creating a slideshow in the exact style of the slides Tom uses in his presentations. John was so precise and accurate that two long time colleagues of Tom thought John had dug through Tom's slide presentations and pulled them out. Not the case. Check out the slideshow and see for yourself why we were fooled. More importantly, the slides are an excellent summary of the highlights of the book. Nice work, John!

Beyond Excellence:
The "Berserk Standard"

Amazon has changed the world.
eBay has changed the world.

Craigslist has changed the world—put about a zillion nails in the coffins of newspapers, among many other Richter 8.0+ things.
Craigslist has more traffic than Amazon or eBay.
(Though a private company, Craigslist has a projected market capitalization in the billions.)

Amazon has 20,000 employees.
eBay has 16,000 employees.
Craigslist has ... 30 employees.

There is more than one way to skin a cat—even a thoroughly modern cat.

"Pragmatic" action?

Among other things, every (!!!) time you start a project, no matter how small, reach out to several S.W.P.—seriously weird people—for their views about what you are undertaking. Keep reaching until you find a couple of people who are so far out that they more or less speak gibberish.

It may indeed be gibberish, and probably is gibberish—but perhaps once or twice in a lifetime, it'll be someone and some approach that amounts to a blueprint for doing the work of 10,000 with 10, à la Craigslist vs. Amazon and eBay.

Never get seriously underway until you've surfaced a couple of ideas that score perfect 10s, or at least 8s, on the ... Berserk Scale.

At the least, you will have had your mind stretched, the best exercise regimen of all; at most, you may have taken a baby step toward inclusion in the history books.

NB: I've got two books beside me as I write this:

The Weather Channel: The Improbable Rise of a Media Phenomenon (Frank Batten with Jeffrey Cruikshank)
ESPN: The Uncensored History (Michael Freeman)

The idea of an all-weather channel and the idea of an all-sports channel were considered the fantasies of raving lunatics. It took both sets of "lunatics" forever to prove their points. Yet both properties achieved matchless popularity (user-addicts by the millions) and market values of several billion dollars each.

(Source of data re Craigslist, Amazon, eBay: Wired, cover story, September 2009.)

High Volt-age Project from GM

General Motors is in the midst of a highly visible project that will reinvent the brand, or provide more evidence that, "GM is a sleeping giant," as a former CEO of Toyota said. The Chevrolet Volt is an electric plug-in hybrid that was introduced at the Detroit Auto Show in 2007. Bob Lutz, the design champion of the Prowler, Viper, Ford Explorer, BMW 3 series, Pontiac Solstice, Saturn Sky, and others, is the brains and the brawn behind the project. This car is cool. Forty miles on a charge from that outlet in your garage, and then, if necessary, a small combustion engine kicks in to recharge the batteries on the road. Top speed of around 120 mph, 0 to 60 scores in at a respectable, albeit quiet, 8.5 seconds. The reclamation of the GM brand as an innovator and leader in automotive technology rests on their ability to meet two publicized goals: First, it has to meet the November 2010 launch goal. Secondly, GM must meet its stated intention of selling this vehicle at a price of $30,000.00. Toyota has said it will have a similar plug-in hybrid available for public sale by that November date. The race is on! As a former GM employee and current stockholder, I am of the opinion that GM cannot afford to lose this one. To win, GM has to reinvent its management and business model. I question whether this new aggressiveness can survive in a culture bloated with bureaucracy and powerful internal departmental silos. Already, they are hedging on the $30K target, though milestones seem to be on schedule for the launch date. Here are some things I would suggest, and I really want to hear from you all on what you think they might do.

To General Motors:

1. Treat the Volt team like the Saturn Corporation launch. Get them away from Detroit and the GM hierarchy. Let other executives know that this project is hands off. The Volt team needs autonomy.
2. Call Bob Stempel. As a former CEO of GM and contemporary of Bob Lutz who turned his attention to improving battery technology after his tenure at GM, he would get that this is truly legacy work. He is, and always has been, a real car guy. Jerry Hirshberg is worth a call as well. Both are former GM execs who were ahead of their time.
3. Be thinking innovation in execution as well as design. Where and how you build this vehicle is critical. History shows the launch phase of projects have been the showstoppers. You will need new manufacturing techniques, new supplier relationships, and importantly, a workforce not constrained by historic labor practices.
4. Invite the designers from Cadillac and Buick in. Don't even tell the Cobalt design team where your offices are.
5. Oh, and don't tell the finance folks where you are, either.
6. Attract and retain the best and the brightest for this project. Forget seniority and entitlement.
7. Give the first models to the folks who had their EV1's [GM electric car that was for lease only] taken from them. You have a little brand rebuilding to do.

That's a few things that cross my mind. What do you think? We're rooting for the home team here in Michigan. This is a WOW! Project for the big three.

A Question for the New Year

WOW! What a terrific question from Edge.org:

What have you changed your mind about? Why?

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert: "In 2002, Jane Ebert and I discovered that people are generally happier with decisions when they can't undo them. When subjects in our experiments ... couldn't undo their decisions they tended to concentrate on the good features and ignore the bad. ... I had always believed that love causes marriage. But these experiments suggested to me that marriage could also cause love."

Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: "Like many people, I once trusted in the wisdom of Nature...and thought that, with the advent of genetic engineering, we would be tinkering with life at our peril. I now believe ... the history of life on this planet has been one of merciless destruction and blind, lurching renewal ... Those that survive do so despite Her indifference ... There is nothing about natural selection that suggests our optimal design ... Mother Nature is not now, nor has she ever been, looking out for us."

Kevin Kelly, author of New Rules for the New Economy: "Much of what I believed about human nature, and the nature of knowledge, has been upended by the Wikipedia ... I knew from my own 20-year experience online that ... an aggregation of random contributions would be a total mess ... How wrong I was ... The reality of a working Wikipedia has made a type of communitarian socialism not only thinkable, but desirable ... When you grow up knowing rather than admitting that such a thing as the Wikipedia works; when it is obvious to you that open source software is better; when you are certain that sharing your photos and other data yields more than safeguarding them—then these assumptions will become a platform for a yet more radical embrace of the commonwealth ... Its mind-changing power is working subconsciously on the global millennial generation, providing them with an existence proof of a beneficial hive mind, and an appreciation for believing in the impossible."

Futurist Peter Schwartz: "In the last few years I have changed my mind about nuclear power. I used to believe that expanding nuclear power was too risky. Now I believe that the risks of climate change are much greater than the risks of nuclear power ... Furthermore, human skill and knowledge in managing a nuclear system are only likely to grow with time."

OK. Truth-telling time. What have YOU changed your mind about?

Christmas Giving:
Not Too Late to Do Good

Sure it's late, but here are a couple of suggestions:

OLPC. Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child program is a gem. At laptopgiving.org you can give a kid in a developing country a laptop for $200 or, for $399, do "Give One. Get One." You give a developing country child one, and get one for your child.

BoGo Light. About Two Billion people have no electric lights. Substitutes, such as kerosene, are dangerous and play havoc with the environment. Enter Mark Bent, inventor of a $25 solar-powered flashlight. BoGo is "Buy One, Get One." Go to BoGoLight.com, and for $25 plus shipping you get one—and he sends one to the relief group of your choice. You can choose pink or orange. Please choose pink!! Orange was the sole color, but men routinely stole them from women. Men are not so inclined to swipe the pink ones. In a tale reminiscent of the development of micro-lending, the guys use the lights to sit around and do nothing; women use the lights to teach each other to read, do family chores such as gather firewood, etc.

FYI, I am a participant in both programs, though I am not associated with either one other than in the role of Cheerleader.

And You?

"Foundation" is an intimidating word that brings to mind Bill Gates or Ross Perot. But how about Catalino Tapia? He came to the U.S. from Mexico 43 years ago, at age 20, with $6 to his name. He held a series of jobs, and eventually started his own gardening business. He owns his home in Redwood City, CA, south of San Francisco, and recently his son graduated from Berkeley's law school (Boalt Hall). In 2006, he started a non-profit corporation, Bay Area Gardeners Foundation. With a dozen immigrant gardeners on the board, the foundation this year awarded nine college scholarships @ $1,500 each.

Marvelous!
I guess you don't have to be Bill Gates, after all!
And you?

(The above story courtesy the San Francisco Chronicle, 10.15.07—I grabbed a copy last week on my way to Korea.)

On Time, On Budget, but Was It Wow?

Am I the only person who is frustrated at the wave of negativity in the UK media about the 2012 London Olympics? It has been almost sixty years since the UK hosted a Games, and even then the IOC asked London to host the 1948 games when the world was recovering from six years of carnage and in economic turmoil. Well, the celebrations of July 6, 2005, after the London bid beat Paris' by 54 votes to 50, have long since abated, and we now have general carping and scoring of political points about the eventual cost of staging the Games and who will have to pay. But what about the benefits?

If cleaning up and refurbishing one of London's biggest industrial wastelands and installing a world-class array of sports facilities with a supporting transport infrastructure isn't a Wow! Project, then I don't know what is. Then there is the challenge of the events themselves and the inspiration that having the Games here has already given to youngsters dreaming of their own future sporting prowess. It speaks to a level of ambition that seems to be sadly lacking in many of our public and private enterprises. I recall Tom Peters speaking in London about the Channel Tunnel being THE civil engineering project that he (as an ex civil engineer) would love to have directed. That project went a little over the original budget forecast, too, as I recall!

To transform our flagging businesses and run-down communities will take bold ambition, and a willingness to pitch, win, and deliver projects of vision and magnitude. At the end of the day, the only success criterion that really counts is "Was it Wow?"

All Business

The excuse for our family vacation was Max and Ben's participation in SSWC06, the Single Speed World Championship bike race—in Stockholm this year. Max took a brilliant 10th among 200+ participants, including some pros. Ben, in his first race of this sort, netted a top-half finish among the group who actually finished the grueling course. Above are the two stalwarts minutes before the start.

Oh My God!

Didn't expect to write another book. 70 hyper-tailored presentations and the Blog are more or less enough. But our Erik Hansen who, along with Cathy Mosca, is co-major domo of the Blog, visited with my UK publisher, Dorling-Kindersley. Special Projects publisher Stephanie Jackson wants a book. So she and chief designer Peter Luff (design-are-us at DK) cooked up some ideas. Erik presented them to me last week, and I was 90 percent hooked—Blog stuff will be front and center with keen illustrations.

You know Erik from his posts and as architect of the Cool Friends interviews. But do you really know him? The picture of the hand, at his presentation, is Erik's. In a future Post I will reveal the rest of him!

TP Day at inBubbleWrap

Our friends at 800CEORead have put together a venture called inbubblewrap where they are currently offering free books—and other goodies—to people who sign up at their site. And today, five lucky folks have a chance to win a copy of Tom's beautifully designed Sixty as well as a bucketful of other books and paraphernalia. Cost? Your email. Value? Priceless, of course. Check it out.

Sales Blood Drive

We got an email from someone who was inspired by his own experience giving blood to implement the first-ever virtual blood drive. To give it focus, he's targeted sales professionals.

In an "attempt to rally one of the largest professional groups in the world to donate blood," his company has proclaimed the last week of this month to be the first "Global Sales Blood Drive." It seems this is a time of year when need is up and supply is down.

If you're a salesperson who'd like to be part of this effort, go to www.salesblood.org for details. It's a Wow! Project, and you can help to make it more so.

Big Moo Reminder

I know we've mentioned it before, but I've got Big Moo on my mind since I'm headed to NYC for a launch party Thursday night. The book's sales number at Amazon.com is now 150, though it was as low as 70 last week. Help Seth, Tom, Dan Pink, and all the other authors raise more money for charity by buying multiple copies of the book. Thanks.

Remarkabalize

As we told you last month, Tom is one of the 33 authors of The Big Moo (it'll be published on October 20 and you can pre-order a copy here). Tom has referred to Julie Anixter, another of The Big Moo authors, as his "Official Muse." She has started a network called Remarkabalize with co-author Dean DeBiase which is based on the ideas of The Big Moo and is producing the Big Moo movement. Their website launched today: www.remarkabalize.com. Cool concept: One of their offerings is the ability to customize the cover of the book with bulk purchases. Check that out here. They also tell the remarkable stories of the charities that will receive 100% of author royalties from The Big Moo here. Makes you want to get out there and start doing something remarkable, doesn't it?

Fighting Fire Within the Web

Sally Helgesen, twice a Cool Friend, has given us this post, which she also put at her new website, sallyhelgesen.com. Thank you, Sally:

I know it's only June, but my vote for the coolest example of what frontline empowerment can achieve is already cast. It goes to the New York City Fire Department, which has just approved a new rope system designed not by some outsourcer but by a group of firefighters, who were spurred to action by a fire in the Bronx in which two comrades died because of cumbersome and weak ropes.

The firefighters who designed the new system did so by drawing on off-duty skills such as rock climbing and metalworking. Working on their own, they formed a design team, studied materials, went to conferences to interview vendors and learn what was available and why, paying their own way to do so. Once they had figured out an alternative, one of the team members taught himself to sew so they could create a prototype. Their passion and hard work paid off: This week, the NYFD announced it would spend $11 million to acquire their system.

The story reminded me of the case study I did on Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, which appeared in my 1995 book, The Web of Inclusion. The purpose of the book was to explore organizations that were good at drawing on the talents of people at every level—not just those at the top. I wanted to see what it takes to get past the industrial era distinction between head and hands, to bridge the divide between those who make decisions and those on the front lines who actually implement those decisions.

Beth Israel was doing a great job of this at the time. The president and the VP for nursing had recognized that nurses were the real point of intersection between the hospital and the patient, and were trying to turn the traditional hierarchy on its head by empowering nurses to make a wide range of decisions. One stunning example was Donna Miller, an oncology nurse who felt frustrated because the adhesive bandages that the hospital was using were causing trauma to her patients' skin. In her spare time, Donna set to work on her old Singer to design something that would solve the problem, creating a high quality prototype using Velcro and elastic straps from old girdles. Donna tried it out in the ward, and then the hospital worked with her to patent, manufacture, and market the device.

Most organizations talk a blue streak about the need to unleash their peoples' talents, but do a sorry job of drawing on ideas that don't come from those at the top. In order to learn from what the New York firefighters or Donna Miller did, companies must build webs that enable people from every part of the organization to contribute ideas. How to start? In researching The Web, I found that companies that were good at drawing from a broad base of talent were companies that had the capacity to listen to their squeaky wheels.

Squeaky wheels are those people who question why something like the Bronx fire tragedy had to happen, or why patients have to suffer from torn skin. Listened to and given support to try new solutions, squeaky wheels have the capacity to put their passion and frontline experience to use in the service of finding new solutions. The problem is that many organizations tend to see their squeaky wheels as troublemakers, complainers, or subversives. They try to isolate them, rather than harnessing their discontent.

Naked Conversations

You, our esteemed and (we've found out through our poll asking about browser usage) techno-advanced readers, know this by now, but it's about time we posted something: Robert Scoble and Shel Israel are writing a book online. Naked Conversations. They've blogged twelve chapters so far, scrapped at least one, added, revised, and edited, all in response to response at their book website. In effect, they have an infinite number of coauthors.

We're happy to say that Tom is among them. He wrote a foreword that's posted here.

Community Bikes

When you get to Copenhagen, one of the first things you see are people riding around on brightly-colored bicycles with a little map of the city attached to the handlebar. Turns out they're community bikes, available to all. There are a number of places around the city where the bikes are stored. You go there, insert a 20 kroner coin (about $4) into the locking mechanism, and away you go. When you return the bike to one of these collection points, your 20 kroner is reimbursed. Very cool. Of course this is a city, too, where the bike lanes are as wide as car lanes. And being used by a lot of bikes. Turns out there are over 12 million bicycles in use in Denmark. For a population of 5.4 million. Sounds like the ratio of cars to licensed drivers here in the U.S.

Opportunity

I have an opportunity to link to Rolling Stone magazine online, and I may never have another. Our friend James Hathaway let us know that his org, Clear Path International, was mentioned in Rolling Stone. He's not on the cover, but that's still pretty cool.

Clear Path International aids landmine victims in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand, and there's a benefit CD, due out in May, written up in Rolling Stone. If you'd like to contribute to the cause, or pre-order the CD, there are links on the CPI website. So, there's opportunity for you, too.

BTW: James was posting reports on a recent trip to Southeast Asia on tp.com. His last post (my favorite!), links to the rest.

Why I Am Here

As I mentioned in my last post, I am in Quang Tri Province in Central Vietnam. This region received the heaviest sustained bombing campaign in the history of the world ... more bombs were dropped here than in WWI and WWII combined. Not all of the bombs detonated on impact, and many still lie in the ground here. These bombs are not duds, they just have not exploded ... yet. They lie in wait to be removed safely, or, much too often, detonate when someone disturbs them accidentally (sometimes intentionally) and the person is killed or maimed for life.

In the last two days I have visited with 3 young bomb survivors who are receiving help through our organization. Thanks to our terrific staff, two of them are now walking again. One though, a 13-year-old boy, is lying in a hospital bed after an artillery shell he was playing with blew off his lower legs and one of his arms last week.

Yesterday we visited the boy in the hospital. His mother and father were at his bedside along with other family members. His face was full of gunpowder burns and small bits of shrapnel.

"How do you feel?" one of our staff asked in Vietnamese.

"It really hurts." he replied.

It is hard not to see your own children in the eyes of one so badly injured. My heart broke when they translated what he said and I sat down beside him. His lower legs from a few inches below the knee had been amputated as had his left arm just beneath the elbow. I was relieved to see initial reports were wrong and that his fingers on his right hand remained and his eyesight seemed ok. (Video here. Contains graphic content.)

I sat with him for a while. His father cried next to the bed. He had lost his lower right leg to a landmine during the war ... now his son was suffering a seemingly worse fate.

On the way back from the hospital the staff and I discussed next steps. His amputations were in good locations for prosthetics and we will see he gets them, and they'll be paid for by us. We already informed the family on my visit that we would be covering all his medical expenses and setting up a scholarship fund. A home assessment was made today to see if the family needs construction work to make the house handicap accessible.

I know he will thrive someday, because we visited two other young people that have been through our program and are now walking. At one point it looked like they may never again.

I want to thank Tom for providing me with this forum. This will be my last post as I head back in a few days to the States. I will dearly miss my life here ... this work IS my passion. Thanks, Tom, for all your inspiration over the last 10 plus years (Marth and I celebrate our tenth anniversary in May!) ... I am so proud to call you a friend.

Thanks to all for your comments! I wish you all the best.

Shameless plug: www.cpi.org

The photos below are of Ha and Rot ... the kids I visited today ... their stories are worth a read.

A Renaissance from the Ruins

Hello to Tom and to all from Quang Tri Province, Vietnam. I recently said goodbye to the student/teacher/parent group I was leading across Cambodia. I will now spend the next two weeks here in Vietnam working on updating a beneficiary database of those recently injured by bombs and landmines left over from a war that ended here thirty years ago.

While still in Cambodia, we visited with an old friend of mine that I met while attending a boarding school in Maine in the mid 1980s. When we met he had just recently escaped from the Khmer Rouge and had been rescued from a Thai refugee camp by a man who would later adopt him. I was fifteen years old and had no way of knowing that this boy, whose flute playing of Khmer Rouge propaganda songs saved him from a certain death, would impact my life in such a drastic way ... and 20 years later would be one of my closest friends.

Arn Chorn-Pond is an emerging Cambodian icon. He has won a closet full of well-deserved humanitarian awards and in the year 2004 was the subject of an award-winning PBS documentary called "The Flute Player". The film documents his imprisonment by the Khmer Rouge, the murder of his family, how he learned to master the flute to save his life and his eventual escape (by foot to Thailand) from the front lines of a war in which he was a frightened child soldier forced into fighting the Vietnamese.

The latter part of the film shows how Arn has returned to Cambodia to help resurrect the performing arts that the Khmer Rouge nearly destroyed. Artists and intellectuals were high on Pol Pot's list for destruction in his quest to create the perfect communist society. As Cambodian arts were traditionally passed on from master to student by oral tradition, and not via any written methods, Pol Pot and his murderous followers nearly succeeded in wiping them out forever.

When Arn returned to Cambodia a few years ago, he went in search of any remaining masters that may have worked with his father who was an opera star. He was heartbroken to see those who were not killed had become alcoholics and cigarette vendors on the streets. These were people that once performed for royalty and were famous across Cambodia. He found them forgotten and living out the remaining years of their lives in the gutters of Phnom Penh.

Since then, Arn has formed Cambodia Living Arts. This program has gathered masters of opera, traditional music, and dance to teach young children the arts so they can keep them alive for future generations. This is not done in theater with a stage, or even in a high school. These gatherings of students and teachers of Ancient Khmer (Cambodian) culture take place in a squatter slum community surrounded by garbage piles and dilapidated apartment buildings.

I witnessed four classes amongst the most some of most severe poverty I have ever seen. The contrast was stunning, if not overwhelming: a wealth of culture taking bloom in such extreme squalor.

Sadly, these people that have nearly nothing are threatened with having even less. The government is poised to kick them off the land and this threatens to destroy the budding renaissance of arts arising from the ashes of Pol Pot's sickening legacy.

There is beauty here amongst the fetid garbage heaps and corrugated steel homes. The one thing Pol Pot could not destroy, the resilient, enduring nature of artistic expression, is thriving somehow and because of that, an ancient culture will live to see another generation.

Wow! Projects: The Panama Canal

I've been helping my 9-year-old son research and write a report about building the Panama Canal. It was an engineering project that was so far-reaching, requiring a knowledge of managing workers, budgets, healthcare issues, politics, finance and weather, it's hard to imagine how the Americans pulled it off. The French couldn't.

It started with the French sending their legendary engineer, Ferdinand de Lesseps, just fresh from the success of building the Suez Canal, to survey Panama in the sunny season. Big mistake. Panama has nearly 250 days a year of RAIN, read mudslides. And then there were terrible problems with malaria and yellow fever. And the conditions for building the Suez Canal couldn't have been more different from those in Panama. The French lost many workers to illness and death, couldn't cope with the impossible weather and finally just gave up, leaving behind piles of construction vehicles stuck in mud, rusting in the jungles.

What's so interesting to me is how the Americans came in, challenged all assumptions the French had made, and turned the project around. The American in charge was an engineer named John Frank Stevens, a railroad man, who quickly realized the primary issue was making his workers happy and healthy. He had a ninety percent turnover rate in his workforce when he arrived.

He knew there would be no canal building until he built proper housing, hospitals and instituted worker-friendly policies to keep people there and keep people alive. He allowed his workers to bring their wives and families to Panama and poured lots of money into medical facilities and research. Happy workers = WOW! Project.

I've been reading children's history books on the subject, but here are some links to adult titles:

The Path Between The Seas—David McCullough
How Wall Street Created A Nation: J.P.Morgan, Teddy Roosevelt, and The Panama Canal—Ovidio Diaz Espino

[I haven't read these books yet, so feel free to tell us in our comments if these are your favorites, or about other books you might recommend on the subject.]

Talk About A Political Football

Reuters reports that New York is opening up the bidding for the Jets Stadium site.

New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority on Tuesday opened up the bidding for the West Side stadium site sought by the Jets football team and rival Madison Square Garden, which owns its own sports teams. (more here)

Got any good ideas about how to pull off a very complicated, high visibility, many players, big money project like this?

Gates!

"Gates" no longer just means Bill.
Try Christo!

Drop what you're doing!
Buy a discount ticket to Manhattan!
See Christo's Gates in Central Park!
Write it off: "Research on WOW Projects"!!

Lifesavers with Wings

It made my heart soar to read yesterday's entry at WomensWallStreet.com, "The Daily Cents." It described a program that takes innovation and strategic partnering to the skies. Based in White Plains, New York, Corporate Angel Network CorpAngelNetwork.org arranges free air travel for cancer patients, and for donors and recipients of bone marrow transplants, to help them get to treatment centers across the country.

At an office donated by Westchester County Airport, approximately 50 part-time volunteers and a handful of paid staff work with patients and families, physicians and treatment facilities to coordinate thousands of flights a year. They also work with major corporations that donate money or, even better, seats on their corporate jets. Over 500 top corporations, including a number from the Fortune 500, take part in the program.

It's good to know that there is a story of good will and generosity from America's business community, along with all the stories of greed and corruption we read so often (Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, et al.). Let your heart soar. Visit their website and consider contributing to their efforts.

Thanks, Teri! (I Guess.)

I was in residence on the Na Pali coast of Kaua'i for New Year's. My neighbor is Teri Tico—celebrated social activist (Save Our Seas, etc.), renowned trial lawyer, champion wind surfer. She sidled up to me at a cocktail party and said, "So, Tom, what are you going to do to change the world this year?"

How in the hell does one respond to that?!

I have no immediate (hence glib) answer, but it did lead to my 2-part NYResolution2005:

TomResolution2005 (full year): Every project, small or large, this year will have to answer the question, "Does this change the world?" HP ran a banner ad, "HAVE YOU CHANGED CIVILIZATION TODAY?" I'll make that the first & last question I ask myself each day!

TomResolution2005 (within the next 10 minutes): I will be "hall monitor" for my attitude concerning each & every human contact I have this year, starting ... IMMEDIATELY. Do I exude Passion & Optimism & Connection of the sort that invariably engages others? (Hint: This applies as much to the 30-second exchange I have with a checkout clerk at Shaw's grocery in Manchester VT as it does in a speech to very senior execs in Zurich on January 11.)

Oh yeah, thanks Teri!

DreamStuff (More)

You are a Project Manager.
You have a Dream for your project.
How will you know you've sold it to your TeamMates? (That TeamMates have become DreamMates?)

You'll know when your TeamMates/DreamMates say:

"Makes me proud to be part of this DreamTeam!"
"Works for me personally!"
"Worthy of my Emotional Commitment!"
"Cool!"
"Wow!"
"Who'd have thought we could ..."
"Makes me Giggle!"
"Can't wait to tell my best pal/spouse/significant other/the guy sitting next to me on the subway!"
"Can't wait to recruit my friend Jenny!"

Do you pass this test?

Check It Out

Join the thread around the 0920 post "Alas (Barf)." It's a great discussion about the presence and absence of "Wow" in the World of Work and beyond!

Alas (Barf)

There are things I'm simply incapable of understanding. And I don't mean quantum mechanics. I took part in a discussion with colleagues about the idea we so cherish: Turning every task, no matter how humble, into a "Wow Project." I think it's possible. And I think it is, moreover, a Minimum Survival Skill in the insane times in which we participate. But, I was told, "Tom, a lot of senior and middle managers flat out don't understand what 'Wow' is."

Ye gads!

Alas, I trust their reports. But ... YE GADS!

What happened? Where did "We" go wrong? (As parents?) (As a society?) How could any idiot not understand the meaning of (AND APPROPRIATENESS OF) "Wow" in the context of Business Process Redesign ... as readily as in an Olympic venue?

Could it be true (TELL ME IT'S NOT SO) that there are human beings who aspire to Less-than-Wow?

"Wow" may not be the universal result (there's many a slip ...) ... but to aspire to less than Wow? Ugh! Fool! Sad soul! Pathetic person! And, no, do not (DO NOT) try to tell me there are people who don't even know what "Wow" ... MEANS!?!?

Aargh!

Barney's to Buddha ... WOW!

Opening October 2, the Rubin Museum of Art will turn a darkened Barney's in Chelsea to what the New York Times calls "a glittering showcase for a reclusive spiritual art from the other end of the earth." As the story goes, Donald Rubin, businessman and collector of Himalayan art, noticed the vacant building while stalled in a cab and immediately decided to turn it into a museum like no other. Six years later, this gift to curious minds should garner lots of good karma for Mr. Rubin.

From Tom's Emails

Some links to stuff—recommended by, written by, sponsored by—those who write to Tom.

Proposed innovation conference in Australia
Simplicity is the Key, a book written by a Tom fan
Vermillion, a WOW website/consultancy
Grainesdechangement, a WOW project for French-speaking readers
Don't You Just Hate That?, an amusing little book

Millennium WOW!Project

Today's Wall Street Journal beautifully tells the story of Chicago's new Millennium Park. Nothing other than WOW! can describe this 24-acre landmark. Take a few moments to compare it to another millennium project, the dome in Greenwich, England.

Leadership by Committee

In reference to Ground Zero, the Wall Street Journal's drama critic Terry Teachout describes perfectly the kind of unwowified projects that result from committees:

The Freedom Center is one of those self-evidently silly ideas that only an underemployed committee could have conceived, a portentous-sounding Museum of Nothing in Particular destined to present blandly institutional, scrupulously noncontroversial exhibitions. No doubt the center will draw plenty of squirming grade-school kids sentenced to compulsory field trips, but I'd bet next month's rent that tourists will steer clear.

WOW Project, 1639

"I then beheld a most agreeable spectacle ... a perfectly circular shape ... [where] the limbs of the Sun and Venus precisely coincided."—Jeremiah Horrocks
He entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, at age 13 as a poor scholar, taught himself astronomy, corrected Kepler's calculations (how cool is that), measured the moon's size and found its elliptical orbit, and turned in the best-to-date estimate of the earth's distance from the sun, all before dying at age 22.

Re-imagine Small

Harold Craighead, an engineering professor at Tom's alma mater, Cornell, is working on virus-sized things. Nanoelectomechanical systems (gadgets the width of three silicon atoms) measure masses on the virus scale of 10 attograms, which is a billionth of a billionth of a gram (if my math is right). Big ideas about very tiny, very powerful things.

What Is Fast Prototyping?

Tom's 1999 Fast Company article on WOW!Projects explains it best.

The fastest, smartest way to get your project defined and refined is to practice the art of quick prototyping. Don't keep your project hidden in some private skunk works until you can hone it into a perfect deliverable.

Tweaking Tom

Our friend Heath Row at Fast Company riffs on a Tom article on projects from a past issue, then lays out six components of the perfect project team.