TinkerX

John Moore, who writes for and edits the excellent Brand Autopsy site/blog, has started a seasonal spot called The White Elephant Blog.

This is what the Internet is for.

No, this is not one of my stupid metaphors. I’m being perfectly literal.

OK, yes, it’s also one of my stupid metaphors. But I’m also being literal. I love that John took the scant couple of hours it now requires to set up a decent looking blog in order to pay homage to a wonderful little cubicle-land festivity.

The White Elephant Party should be honored. It should be satirized. It should be blogged. It should be commented on. All at the same time. Somebody needed to do it. The Internet is where we should be doing it. I don’t have a campfire. And if I did, the nice gal in the next cube (Hi, Heather!) would make me put it out.

What I got is the Web. And blogs.

So pass the s’mores, and tell John and co. about your White Elephant experiences.

Thanks, John, for moving the ball forward again.

In 1979, Coke aired a commercial where a tiny, young, Caucasian boy approached an enormous, African American football player to congratulate him on a great game. After initially rebuffing the kid somewhat gruffly, the player — Mean Joe Green — swigs a Coke that the boy hands him in a long series of gulps, and then, made friendly (one assumes by the tingly, sweet concoction), calls the kid back and throws him his jersey. The kid shouts, "Thanks, Mean Joe!" and they share a nice moment. All courtesy of Coke.

Somewhat standard American advertising fare, sure. But it struck a nerve in the American public’s mind at the time, for whatever reason. Maybe it was the contrast in size between the two — the kid couldn’t have weighed 60 lbs. soaking wet. Maybe it was that the sugar water "melted" Mean Joe’s heart (I’d been told by Mr. Frost, my 7th grade Social Studies teacher that Coke could dissolve rust off a bicycle chain, so I suppose that melting an NFL player’s heart is no big deal). Maybe it was a nice moment in race relations. Maybe it was a combination of all of these, or just a really well written and well shot ad.

Whatever the reason, the commercial proved so popular, that it was turned into a made-for-tv-movie, "The Steeler and the Pittsburgh Kid."

I am not kidding. They made a movie based on a TV commercial. That’s why I included the IMDB link in the preceeding paragraph. To prove it to you. When I have this conversation live, I often get the, "No freakin’ way," response. Here in cyberspace, I can put my hyperlink where my mouth is.

I use this event to date the beginning of the wonderful weirdness of modern genetic content mutation.

Yes, I know. Books were made into movies and plays and musicals long before 1981. Same for songs. In fact, I’m tempted to go back and revise my date to 1976, and to the making of the movie, "Ode to Billy Joe," based on the 1967 Bobbie Gentry song of the same title. I’m tempted… but I’m not going to. "Ode to Billy Joe," is weird, yes. But songs have had stories in them, well… forever. The leap of creative evolution to take one and turn it into a movie doesn’t quite do it for me in terms of calling it "mutation."

Turning a commercial into a movie though… yeah, baby… that’s a mutant love child.

Was the TV movie "The Steeler and the Pittsburgh Kid" a good film? Hellll no. That’s not the point. The point is that, as Forest Gump’s mama might say, "Content is as content does."

If you create something that causes an effect… it can live in other media. It can mutate and change and have a effect elsewhere, if you know how to take out the pieces of the DNA that can live in another environment. Or, as I like to ask my students, "How can you put that on a T-shirt?"

I don’t mean that statement literally, of course. Usually.

Andy Warhol saw pop and commercial culture as art. Ba-da-bing. Before that, pop and commercial culture had borrowed from the world of fine art, but had rarely been seen as art per se. Why not? Because the worlds of "art" and "business" were kept apart by people who stood to gain from doing so in most cases, either monetarily, psychologically or culturally. I don’t mean this as harsh criticism, though it comes out as such. It’s an anthropological fact, and not a judgement — people look at the segments of the society they are given and are hard-pressed to de-segment them. Church = religion. School = education. Home = family. Art = culture. Business = economics. You play on the playground, you drive on the freeway. The white zone is for the loading and unloading of passengers only.

The problem for artists, writers, marketers and other creators, is… this kind of thinking is linear and predictable. It leads to the same place it started, often with the same results. And the same results are… well… boring. And boring is the enemy of creativity.

Mean Joe Green and Andy Warhol. Keep them in mind when you try to think of new ways to put your stuff on a T-shirt.

Peter Ferdinand Drucker
November 19, 1909 - November 11, 2005

You owe it to yourself to bookmark Nova Spivak’s "Minding the Planet" blog on its own merits — he’s always interesting and often highly creative. But you also should check out this post in particular, because in it Nova speaks very candidly and with great feeling about the life, and recent death of his grandfather, the legendary Peter Drucker.

My blog, now, is about creativity. But many of you who have read my former stuff — chiefly in the field of legal marketing — know that I go on at great lengths about goal oriented marketing. Focusing on measurements. Process improvements. The quest for truly rigorous management principles. We owe much of our learnings in these areas to the great work of Peter Drucker.

The name of my consulting company — Sanestorm — is meant to symbolize the balance between reason and energy. The idea that you can achieve the most when you work on strengthening both the artistic and business sides of your creative nature. I think Peter Drucker epitomized that balance.

Check out an interesting article over at Wired News about the new digital film-making technique known as "Machinima." This is an artform where the creators utilize the animation engines of 3D games in order to create films. The article focuses on the upcoming Mackies Awards — the equivalent of the Oscars for the genre.

There are interesting questions of artisitc quality vs. story quality, fanfic, cost-of-production, copyright law, etc. in the piece. Here’s what really grooves my squirrel, though; we now have an art form that was originally designed as interactive — computer games — being turned on its ear by the players (the audience) to go back and create content.

We have gone from passive entertainment (videos, books, etc.), to active entertainment where the player is a character in a world created by the programmers (video games), to entertainment where the player becomes a creator him/herself, using content delivery tools to turn around and create content. The "4th Wall" of the theatre has truly been broken when the audience can get up, coopt the stage, props and cameras, and begin crafting an entirely new piece of art.

Reminds me a big of blogs; using what was once generally a content delivery mechanism (the Web) as a content creation mechanism. Much more interactive. Much more participatory. Much more 360-degrees-of-involvement.

In the words of Artie Johnson’s "pop-up-German" character on Laugh-In… "Verrrry interesting."

You heard it here first, folks — I’m changing The Rule from, "He Who Dies With the Most Toys Wins," to "He Who Dies With the Best Content Wins." And it’s getting less and less important where your office sits in relation to Hollywood or Madison Avenue or Paris or Nashville or wherever… as long as you’ve got the Flux.

When my son, Dan, was about three years old, we were sitting in my big recliner, watching "Thomas and the Magic Railroad," for about the 209th time, and he asked me, as James, the Red Engine, was being pused towards almost certain doom by the evil Diesel engine (whose Christian name escapes me):

"Will James be OK?"

"Yes, Dan," I replied. "James will be fine."

We kept watching, and Dan kept asking questions about upcoming plot issues. Will this-and-such happen? Will they find the gold-dust? Will the giant rats feast on the living brains of the graduate students (that may be from a different Thomas the Tank Engine movie… they all run together in my head)?

The point being… he kept asking questions about a movie we’d watched together many, many times.

Finally, I asked him, "Dan. We’ve seen this movie before. Do you understand that it will be the same every time?"

"Oh," he replied. "No. I didn’t know that. OK."

"He’s never asked me questions like that again about movies he’s seen before."

It was an absolutely explosive moment for me as a father, and as someone who thinks about thinking and learning and creating.

Why should a child — new to the world, and new to our very fast-paced, media rich world — have any idea that a movie will be the same every time? We, of course, as adults understand this implicitly. But a child’s world is different everyday. And not in the same way that our days are different — they discover the world every day; we just experience it.

So until we learn that a movie — or a book or any recorded media — proceeds along the same line each time, we have no way of establishing that this is, in fact, the case. It makes no more sense to assume a thing is one way as opposed to another.

The Buddha called this state of being, "The Beginners Mind."

The Beginners Mind is incredibly important to the creative experience. Why? Because it is, essentially, the blank canvas. Assumptions are deadly to creativity, both in one’s private, personal art, and in the art of business, marketing, commerce, etc.

My son, Dan, is now in Kindergarten. And he’s having a grand time of it. We were afraid, at first, that he wouldn’t. He goes hot-and-cold on structured learning activities. He loves picking stuff up on his own, and, if he becomes comfortable with a teacher or group of other kids… goes gangbusters. But if something makes him uncomfortable, he can really zwang off into a corner (both emotionally and physically) and avoid participation. But his teacher and  class — a public-school in Columbus, OH — are doing a great job at providing what I might call "non-threatening structure." Which is, frankly, what the Kindergarten model has been about for quite some time.

Kindergarten was invented around 200 years ago by a young German academic named Friedrich Fröbel (good article about Fröbel  at Boxes and Arrows). Before that time, it was generally assumed that kids younger than seven were unable to think and learn in a fashion appropriate for schooling. They were, from an educational standpoint, ignored.

Frightening, eh? We know, now, after two centuries of developmental psychology and physiological study, that children’s minds are most active and open to learning during their first five to eight years. So, ignoring them until they are seven or so, is not only a bad idea, it is, in fact, totally wrong-headed and counter-productive from a cost-benefit standpoint. It is, frankly, the absolute worst thing you can do.

But it took Fröbel to figure out that it wasn’t kids who couldn’t learn, but school — the old-style school for older kids — that couldn’t teach. He needed to apply the Beginner’s Mind to the subject of the mind itself.

How meta is that?

What assumptions are you making in your creative life? Who are you continually correcting or challenging, when, really, you may simply be seeing things from very different perspectives? What basic views do you have that need to be examined at a root level so that you can wipe your creative canvas clean and reinvent your process?

If you don’t start fresh once in awhile, you may be losing out on major opportunities.

There’s a very interesting article over at Harvard Business School’s "Working Knowledge" site about how "adaptive leaders" share many talents and attributes with artists. The basic idea being that working with the resources and media of your business — money, logistics, personnel –  may require as much creativity as working with the media of traditional fine arts — clay, paint, the words of a poem, etc.

I love this article for three reasons.

1. I love it for the same reason I love most of the stuff that comes out of Harvard’s presses, especially HBR. It’s well written, highly informative and so much more interesting than 99.5% of the dreck that passes for "business news" out there.
2. It’s true.
3. It’s in agreement with something I’ve been saying for years.

Hooray! Harvard agrees with me!

I’ve been giving a speech/talk for about three years now (you know… the kind that they drag you into doing when you’re on a committee and they can’t find anyone to fill the lunch speaker slot at the last minute) on the "Creative Split" between artistic and scientific creativity. I won’t go into the whole she-bang-a-bang in this post, but the basic point is that around about the end of the 17th century, folks started to really differentiate between the types of thought used for creating art vs. creating other stuff. Ever since, we’ve kept them sort of… well… apart.

Remember Leonardo DaVinci? Great scientist. And a great artist. He was, in many ways, the model for the "conjoined mind." Somebody who didn’t think about creativity as having to be either "one thing" or "t’other." It just… was.

We go on a bunch in our culture about left and right brain thinking. That may be part of it. But I don’t think so. There’s plenty of "right brained" creativity going on in science, engineering, technology and the business world. But do we automatically think of that work as "creative?"

We should. You should.

I had a friend in the Finance department back at Verizon who would joke that he wasn’t creative, and shouldn’t be, because, "Nobody wants us engaging in ‘creative finances.’" He was being cute, of course. But he was also one of the most creative thinkers I’ve known. He was always helping the business design new ways to approach billing and pricing issues. He was an artist who used Excel as well as my designers use Photoshop.

So… when you think about how you want to improve your own creativity, or that of your company, make sure you remember to include the boardroom in your plans. Not just the artroom.

[Note: as a Cornell alum, the jumping-up-and-down, hands-pressed-to-face, tearful joy of the title of this post is meant to be more than a little ironic. I do like HBR... but wasn't ever going to change my tune if they didn't agree with me.]

Among School Children, Part VIII
William Butler Yeats

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance? 

I’ve been playing around with Second Life, an online, massively multi-player non-game (although there are games available within) over the last couple weeks. I tried it more than a year ago, and the tech wasn’t up to par with the current set of MMORPGs. I felt like if the owners/publishers couldn’t get their act in gear and put their cyberworld at least within shouting distance of Everquest or World of Warcraft, the time was not ripe.
I read recently that it had been pretty massively upgraded last June, so gave it another go with a free-trial subscription and have been pleasantly surprised, at least in terms of the improvements in technology. This is all, at this point, just a curiosity from my point of view as a gamer/designer/game anthropologist of sorts.

But, while looking at various fansites for SL, I found a site that has also provided an in-game analog (can you have a "digital analog?") that tries, as much as possible, to precisely mimic a 3D, contructed, navigable structure that presents the same materials as are available on the web site. The site, and the virtual library, provide fiction and non-fiction works, art, music and "spaces" to chat and leave messages.

Very cool. Very weird. Very much something that I think we’ll see more of. Real worlds and virtual worlds smack-dabbing each other in various ways. Another example I’ve encountered in SL already is art galleries where real-world (called "First World" in-game) artists scan and provide looks at their art to in-game residents. You can often buy in-game, SL copies of the art to put in your SL domain, and/or get in contact with the artist to obtain the real world version of the art, too.

If you haven’t read Neal Stephenson’s "Snow Crash," now is a good time to do so. It’s on my list of Top 10 Best Books of All Time, is the 2nd best cyberpunk novels ever — bested only by the seminal "Neuromancer" by William Gibson — and has one of the clearest, most compelling visions of how the real world and an online world (called the "Metaverse" in "Snow Crash") might interact and collide. Right now, Second Life is probably the closest thing to the Metaverse that’s actually up and running.
One of the biggest players on Second Life, whose avatar is named Anshe Chung, earned over USD$100,000 last year by buying and selling "real estate" in Second Life. Yes, real estate. If you want a permanent house for your avatar, or a shop to sell your art, or a spot for your library, you need land. And buying it from the publishers of the game in big chunks is cheaper. And so selling it off in smaller chunks — or renting it — can make you money, using Linden Dollars, the in-game currency. And there is an exchange system, by which you can trade LD for USD. There are other folks making high 5-figure incomes designing clothes, bling, architecture, games and gestures for in-game use.

Oh brave new world wide web that has such people in/on/inside it.

Makes me wonder even more about the longevity of paper, when people are willing to pay real money to buy virtual clothes and virtual jewelry for their online personnae.

Then again, perhaps people would pay real money to interact with a librarian avatar who could help them find what they are looking for in a SL sim-library…