The COMRADITY Journal

#Fraternite

There is little coverage in the US Sunday news shows of the Paris Unity Rally. So here's a link to the live coverage on the BBC.  In Connecticut's Cablevision it is channel 104.

Here's to the power of the "we" over "I", a theme we have been encouraging in The COMRADITY Journal:
Our appeal to Ariann Huffington that she personally responded to and invited us to publish in the Huffington Post.
An inspiration to realize that a positive purpose will compel the "I's" to contribute to "we".

Good luck to all of us.

When the CEO is THE Customer . . .

According to the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland: "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it."  So when the headlines report that Facebook, Blackberry, Google, Apple are among "The Breakaway Brands" of the last three years, keep reading - you haven't found the moral of this story.

The real news is that Clif Bar beat out Facebook to be the #1 "Breakaway Brand" and Kraft is #9.  The moral of this story is that when the CEO is THE customer, the business will grow - whether a new product or one of the oldest brands in the country.

The survey, conducted by Landor Associates using Young & Rubicam's BrandAsset Valuator database, measures brand momentum over three years.  Presumably the results reflect US attitudes.

Clif Bar's success is remarkable.  The snack/confections market is by far one of the most competitive markets, with thousands of SKUs competing for shelf space and customer attention.  The co-CEO's, Kit Crawford and Gary Erickson, make a product which they would buy.  (What a concept!)  And launched it where they would look for it, in cycle shops and health food stores.  According to the Forbes article: "By practicing what it preaches, Clif Bar is a classic story of the little brand that could--and did."  As a result the founders decided to not succumb to an offer to purchase from Quaker after 10 exhausting years of hard work managing a fast growing company.  According to the Wall Street Journal:"We really value the ability to steer the company and its values, and we just can't see that happening if we don't remain private."

Likewise, the idea that Kraft, one of the oldest brands in the US, is a Breakaway Brand is also truly remarkable.  Every Fortune 100 "Consumer Packed Goods" (CPG) Company is struggling to maintain relevance in today's marketplace of abundant choices - let alone be a "Breakaway Brand" among the likes of Apple.  Most of these companies are run by men even though women control the bulk of purchases in this market. Forbes credits one of the few women leaders, Chairman and CEO, Irene Rosenfeld:"Kraft Foods' Chairman and CEO Irene Rosenfeld set her sights on differentiating this classic American-cupboard stable of brands in the minds of modern consumers, and her efforts have paid off."  The article goes on to explain that Kraft has increased its relevance by "successfully integrat(ing) its product offerings into our daily lives in new and innovative ways." 

The refer to the use of custom digital publishing, in which brands publish websites to place brands in contexts which showcase relevance.  Kraft is not alone in shifting advertising and promotional dollars into custom digital publishing.  Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Anheuser Busch, and many others have experimented.  The Kraft approach is more straightforward and transparent (kraftrecipes.com) than, for example, Procter & Gamble (dinnertool.com).  Is this more transparent approach more appealing to women?  I guess that's what the marketing people and agencies concluded when their image of the customer is the CEO of the company.  When the CEO is the customer, as in the case of Clif Bar and Kraft, their express and symbolic leadership makes sense, breeding trust throughout the organization and all the way to the customer. Trust may be the most important factor effecting the decision to choose, as we learned from Sheena Iyendar in The Art of Choosing. 

Maybe this is why Forbes just named Rosenfeld the second most powerful woman in its annual ranking, placing her ahead of people like Oprah and even Lady Gaga.

Zuckerberg's Facebook - a new low or a new high?

[Also on Huffington Post here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katherine-warman-kern/zuckerbergs-facebook-new-_b_739215.html]

Facebook and particularly Mark Zuckerberg are in the spotlight.  The movie, which premiers this week-end, depicts the founder as being untrustworthy.  Despite his lack of integrity (or because of it?), Mark Zuckerberg has risen in less than 2 years to the number 35 richest individual in Forbes, surpassing Steve Jobs.   Displaying total confidence that his net worth will never disappear, he just gave $100 Million to the Newark, NJ school system.  Even the Rockefellers and Fords waited a little longer before setting up their foundations, didn't they?

Is it all based on myth or is Facebook really that magical?

Business Week/Bloomberg’s long article, by Brad Stone, “Facebook Sells Your Friends” explores both possibilities. 

Facebook’s financial success is largely due to adoption by advertisers, including brands like Pepsi,  Coke, McDonald’s, and Nike.  There are two parts to the formula to generate advertising value: scale + response rate.   Advertisers know that you can increase response rate by targeting the message for more relevance, but that limits the scale or increases complexity (producing a different message for many targets). The dream is to generate a higher response rate with one message targeted to the largest scale possible.  

Combining mammoth scale and high response rate is the dream Facebook promises to deliver. 

First scale:

Speaking at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival this summer, Zuckerberg said that reaching a billion members is “almost a guarantee.”

This is about double the current global 550 million monthly Unique Visitors (according to the article) and about 6 times the US monthly Unique visitors, which the article claims is now up to 165 Million.  This remarkable growth rate versus the three month stall at about 110 Million, December 2009 – February 2010, has been going on since Facebook made everything you publish public (unless you “opt out”) and introduced the Like Button on partner websites across the internet. 

We have asked comScore if the timing of the Like button and the growth in Unique Visitors is a coincidence or if clicking the Like button on a Facebook partner site (which is automatically published on your Facebook page) counts you as a Unique Visitor even if you never directly access your page on www.facebook.com.   But we haven't received an answer yet.  UPDATE: According to Comscore representative, Stephanie Flosi, the answer is: “NO, they would not be counted unless they actually visited Facebook.com”.  Unfortunately, this means that Facebook’s low conversion rates for advertisers are low because in fact people don’t respond to ads.  And if Nike’s World Cup campaign did receive high response, raising the average presumably, that means everything else receives in even lower response rates than the already low reported average.

. . . the average ad is clicked on by less than a tenth of a percent of the site's users, according to advertisers and analysts, including Greg Sterling, a San Francisco-based Internet marketing consultant.[For alternatives to Facebook read more here.]

This incredibly low response rate suggests that Facebook’s ad targeting isn’t improving response rates.

But, Facebook acts as though the low response rates are not due to lack of people on the site, but because of ads with low recall – in other words, the ads aren't compelling enough for people to notice them.  So they encourage “engagement” ads which invite people to hit the “Like” button.  If individuals do press the “Like” button, Facebook then moves the ad into the users stream which is syndicated on all their friends’ pages - “So and so liked this ad”.  In case those friends miss your “Like” in their stream, Facebook also places the ad in the advertising area on friends’ pages, adding: “your friend(s), so and sos, liked this ad”.  The article reports that Nielsen detects a significant difference:

Nielsen, which started measuring the efficacy of Facebook ads a year ago, says that if users see their friend "likes" an ad or has commented on it, they are up to 30 percent more apt to recall the ad's message.

If the click through rate also increases by 30% that isn’t going to move the needle. 

• A 30% increase on a tenth of a percent is an increase from .001% to .0013%

This may be why small business owner, David Belden, didn’t have the revenues to continue marketing on Facebook even though he thinks it is so magical:  

David Belden, founder of Residential Solar 101, a San Francisco reseller of solar panels, knows exactly who his customer is: male, around 55 years old, and with an environmental conscience often demonstrated in the ownership of a hybrid car. That's right in Facebook's wheelhouse. "I can target my exact audience, rather than trying to come up with a proxy for it," like looking at search terms or which websites people visit, says Belden, who was spending about $4,000 a month on Facebook earlier in the year before he was forced to rein in his marketing expenses because of budget issues. He adds: "If I was bidding on expensive Google keywords like 'solar,' I'd be going against guys with a much larger marketing budget."

But it may be that competitors with the much larger marketing budget and the reach of television have the advantage on Facebook as well. for example, Nike's World Cup "Write the Future"campaign, which represented probably over $300 Million in league sponsorships and actual media investment. 

. . .Hundreds of millions of people saw ‘Write the Future’ on television. Before it blanketed traditional media, however, Nike launched the video on Facebook, the Web's dominant social network.

The video started as an ad on the site. Then it was passed from friend to friend, often with comments and members recommending it. In the resulting discussions, the clip was played and commented on more than 9 million times by Facebook users—and helped Nike double its number of Facebook fans from 1.6 million to 3.1 million over a single weekend. Getting the ad onto Facebook cost a few million dollars, according to the companies. All that passing around was free. David Grasso, Nike's chief marketing officer, says Facebook “is the equivalent for us to what TV was for marketers back in the 1960s. It's an integral part of what we do now.”

Facebook is given undue credit for the success of the Nike’s World Cup campaign.

When there is the fan engagement of the World Cup event, the appeal of the talent in the ads which Nike pays enormous amounts of money to have access to, the reach of Nike’s television advertising, and the entertainment value of Nike’s creative,  Facebook may give a marketer a chance to actually see and measure the "water cooler" multiplier effect of those combined assets, for "a few million dollars". 

But clearly this “case study” is hardly replicable by almost anyone else, especially not small to medium sized businesses.  Whatever the multiplier effect Facebook mirrors,  it only creates value if there's something to multiply.  (multiply any number times zero and you get zero) 

At the WARC Future of Advertising Research conference, “Ernie Kim, senior VP at the marketing research company, said that online channels' effectiveness is  . . . often overestimated”.   This article entitled: “Researchers Warn on Media Measurement” goes on to recommend the importance of studying the impact of marketing mix.  Certainly the use and timing of different media channels can alter the impact of any one medium’s performance.

Instead of encouraging media to fight each other over the shrinking advertising pie, by building a case that one medium is better than another, the brands and the media companies may find mutual benefit by identifying how one medium can multiply the response rate of another.  Once a new higher benchmark is established, then the individual media would be motivated to collaborate with each other to continue to find new highs. 

This would be much more productive than motivating the creation of myths to cover up new lows in response rates.   

Change the Game.

[Also published on Huffington Posts here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katherine-warman-kern/change-the-game_b_733589.html]

I've posted about the "Unrecognized Risk of Coupons" because they are so irresistable to media and business looking for a linear, direct, measurable way to prove they can impact sales.  In that post, I introduced the idea that couponing (like any discount, including the "free" internet market) create a game in which the business and the customer are adversaries.  Either customers win by getting more than they paid for, or, business wins by finding a way to take advantage of the customer.

For example, the business which coupons during slow periods, but charges full price when they can be assured of seasonal demand.   May seem fair to the business, but the customer is thinking, next year I'll remember to load the pantry so I don't have to pay full price.

Or the free internet, where, as Alan Patrick says, ". . . someone is subsidising everything, and if you can't see the free lunch then it's you :-)"  Many internet companies say they are winning that game, but who knows how many active Facebook users there really are or how meaningful the information shared is to advertisers.

People like games.  Unless or until they think the adversary has an unfair advantage.   When the game is between business and customers and the business takes the advantage, the customer will quit.  There is no love lost and getting the customer back is very expensive.  Ask the financial community what it takes to win back customers who were screwed during the economic collapse.

People like to be "wooed" too. As I mentioned in the above post about coupons, another reason they don't work is because sales is not a "linear" process.   It zigs and zags.   As I remember Sarah Barber, an early interactive marketer, saying, " you wouldn't ask a girl to marry you on a first date, would you?"  Sales is more like the game of courtship.  Businesses entertain customers because when you get to know a customer in a more relaxed environment they say things they wouldn't have told you in a formal meeting.  

There are other business models that "court" people.

When a business invests to create something of value for the customer and it shows.  Think Apple.  Who knew people would pay for music? 

When customers invest money, time and assets and get a return on that investment - something better than they started with. Think about a CD cabinet carefully organized by genre replaced by something the size of a business card you can listen to anywhere.

When the game is risk-free play value. Think about the touch screen technology on the I-Phone and I-Pad.

Change the game:  from an economic game like the bait and switch of couponing and most internet business models -> to the game of courting the customer, where trust is the only way to win,  and returns exceed the time, money and assets shared by both business and customers.

The "Dog Look"

[Also published on Huffington Post here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katherine-warman-kern/the-dog-look_b_709488.html]

Ever get the “dog look”?  Here’s an example shared by Adriana Lukas: A Doctor’s office attempts to fix a problem - patients are sitting on hold waiting endlessly to schedule appointments - by buying a turnkey platform designed to speed up the process online.  But this solution creates a new problem.  Namely, personal data is requested which could make patients vulnerable to identity theft.  When a patient, Mary Hodder (the editor of Napsterization.org) calls with concerns, those concerns are met with the “dog look”. 

I totally agree with Mary’s concerns about the risk to the patient.  But importantly, we need a better way to innovate than this vicious cycle of trial, hope, & error.

There are exceptions to every rule, of course, but dogs naturally want to please.  If you’ve ever experimented with putting more emphasis on rewarding good behavior than punishing bad you find that you get fewer “dog looks” and more “aha, oh this is what you want me to do.” 

The purpose of this metaphor is not to suggest that we should reward error with positive reinforcement.  This metaphor is about business and customers cooperating for better outcome for both parties.

Comradity has a theory that when mass production, mass communication, and mass distribution transformed the US economy from local markets to a mass market we lost a “Culture of We”.   

The mass marketplace operates on scale.  Transactions are numbers.  The identity - business or  customer  - is not always obvious.  Moving more quantity is more important than the very expensive challenge of improving reputation or convincing consumers to share more information.  So business does it more efficiently by taking information the customer hasn’t offered to share, despite the fact that businesses has yet to develop an efficient way to handle all that information on a large scale to create value.  Customers expect the worst, refuse to give the benefit of the doubt, believe rumors on the internet before they believe articles in traditional media or ads. 

In a local market, the transaction is human.  Identity, buyer or seller, is obvious.  The interests, assets, and intent are transparent.  Both business and customer benefit when business does the right thing for its reputation and continues to improve in response to customer communication.   So there is cooperation - customers and business share information, costumers are receptive to business education, relationships are cultivated – not just between customer and business, but among happy customers who reinforce each others satisfaction. 

Either we considered the loss of the local market "Culture of We" a trade-off to gain the mass market advantage - making quality of life affordable for more people, or, we just took for granted that business-costumer cooperation would still play a role. 

But now that today’s interactive technologies make it possible for customers to communicate directly with business, we’re confronted head on with the elephant in the room – the mass market has created a “Culture of Me”.  Customers complain they don’t trust business and business complains that customers are fickle.  But customers aren’t going to start making their own cellphones or stop talking on them.  And business is still producing enormous quantities which they hope will sell at a profitable price.  Although they count on each other, they resent each other.

Many say that this is what is and nothing will change it.  That’s not the clueless “dog look”, by the way, that’s a dog that’s been abused and only knows how to be abusive right back.  These are not innovators.

Innovation makes change possible.  It does not accept or excuse the negatives of the status quo.

So if you are still with me, the first change we need to make possible is a Better Marketplace for Innovation.  A place where big companies - who want to support innovation that goes beyond trial, hope, and error - can discover new ideas and those with new ideas can learn what it takes to change the game instead of just creating more problems.   Specifically, a place where everyone is less threatened and in a defensive “me” mode and more confident and in an outgoing “we” mode:

1. Start with a promise that if you share information, you will discover where you'll get the best reception. 
2. Use the information to visualize where individuals fit in the community.
3. The roles participants play are obvious.  
4. Customers initiate contact when the timing is right for them.
5. Business can see the interests, assets, and intent within cluster they intend to satisfy and anticipate how to capitalize when they are contacted.
6. Each participant, business or customer, controls the information they share, with whom, in what context and timing - when it may be released or destroyed.
7. Communication tools maintain a sense of security that sharing information will not make one vulnerable to exploitation.

UPDATE: I recently received a McKinsey Research Report [registration required] which says that over 80% of executives say innovation is very important to their company's growth but only 55% say they innovate better than others. Reportedly, the most typical challenge is organization.  A better environment for innovation could be a strategy to transform an organization of individuals in the "me" mode into a "culture of we".

Will VRMCRM2010 disrupt ambiguity?

[Also published in Huffington Post here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katherine-warman-kern/will-vrmcrm2010-disrupt-a_b_695227.html]

Off to VRMCRM2010 (http://vrmcrm2010.eventbrite.com/) in Cambridge, Massachusetts today.

The concept has the potential to disrupt the ambiguity which is the hurdle to innovation in the media and marketing industry.

VRM stands for Vendor Relationship Management (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/Main_Page" target= ) Essentially the idea introduces a whole new business model by flipping the traditional B2C (Business to Consumer) way of operating to C2B (Consumer to Business) - The notion authentically consumer-centric. However there are many hurdles to innovation, as I've been discussing in posts here. Doc Searls ( http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doc_Searls?wasRedirected=true" target="_hplink), a co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, has been championing Project VRM.

Collaborating with the CRM community is a good step forward. One sign that this workshop could be productive is the attendee list. The commerce side is represented by Best Buy. Social networking is represented by Facebook and Acquia. Acxiom is a sponsor. And culture is represented by several non for profit journalism and media entities. Stay tuned for what happens at the conference and next steps.

Innovation is Relative

[Also published in Huffington Post here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katherine-warman-kern/innovation-is-relative_b_681293.html ]

In John Kao's Book, Innovation Nation, he says: "breakthrough technologies regularly set the stage for staggering waves of innovation."

In other words, he is establishing that new technology isn't innovation.  It is creates the potential for innovation. 

This is a critical distinction.   What are the factors that make the potential created by new technology realized?

Alan Patrick, an author of the "Big Potatoes: The London Manifesto for Innovation",  provides a summary of the research he did on the pace of innovation:

" . . . I looked at . . . the history of innovation over the last 100 years, from 1909 to 2009. If I had a hypothesis before starting it would be that there was an accelerating pace of innovation. The results - so far - tell me that is not the case, and it is probably cyclical. In fact, one could argue that innovation in 1909, 1949 and 1969 was greater than 2009."

Alan told me that my Grandfather (1989-1990) probably experienced more "Future Shock" than I have. 

But while discussing this with my Grandfather's daughter (my "early-adopter" Mother who rightly says she has been much more likely to try new technology than her father ever did), I understood what John Kao meant when he said that "Probably, the most widely shared misconception about innovation is that it's all about science and high tech."

My Grandfather really didn't have a reason to be motivated to use many of the technologies which emerged in his lifetime.  As a Dentist, neither the telephone nor air flight were critical to expanding his revenue potential.  He had plenty of business in his hometown to fill his calendar.  No need for conference calls by telephone.  All phone appointments were made through his assistant.  In fact, he was never comfortable talking to me on the phone even when I was hundreds of miles away.  He preferred letters. 

So he didn't experience so much "Future Shock".  In fact, when interviewed by the local NBC affiliate on his 100th birthday and asked what the most important advancement in his time was, his answer - "The Forward Pass." 

Why would he think allowing the forward pass in American football was the most important advancement in his time when automobiles, air flight, telephones, radio, television, film, etc. were introduced?  Because football was his passion.  The memories he cherished the most from his life were when he played football for his college team (picture scenes from the movie, Leatherheads) and coaching football as a High School teacher before he went on to study to become a Dentist. 

This implies that a factor that transforms a new technology into an innovation is the reason to use it.  In other words, innovation is relative to the reason as much as the technology. 

This makes sense when you consider that people need a reason to be highly motivated to leave behind what is comfortable to discover new possibilities.  What are the reasons that disrupt the ambiguity of the pros and cons of risking something new?

In a previous post, I gave the example of  turning a loss into a positive.  In a subsequent post, I discuss the evidence that innovators and creators are playing it safe because the perceived risks are too high to explore possibilities with unknown outcomes.  Next I will explore examples of reasons that have motivated people to "disrupt the ambiguity" created by new possibilities.

When the Innovative & Creative "Play it Safe"

[Also published in Huffington Post here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katherine-warman-kern/when-the-innovative-creat_b_675790.html]

Continuing the challenge of reflecting the state of innovation, in my previous post "Turning Loss into a Positive", I referenced an article in the New York Times which makes the point that truly innovative medical research projects do not get funding.   Ironically the title says it all: "Grant System Leads Cancer Researchers to Play It Safe".

"'The problem in science is that the way you get ahead is by staying within narrow parameters and doing what other people are doing,' Dr. Brawley said. 'No one wants to fund wild new ideas.'" (Brawley is identified in the article as the Chief Medical Officer of the American Cancer Society)

But science isn't the only risk-averse arena. So is the creative industry, all the way down to the lonely, independent screenplay writer.  In a speech at Chautauqua Institution, August 7, 2009, Frank Pierson, (identified as the artistic director and distinguished filmmaker-in-residence at the American Film Institute the local newspaper covering the speech ) shared his concern that the quality of today's film industry suffers from independent, freelance writers practicing self-censorship - "Why would a writer spend a year to write a screenplay that no banker would finance?"

Meanwhile, after several years of lackluster returns, the Venture Industry is also playing it safe.   According to Mark Suster, "The VC industry has performed terribly over the past 10 years.  Many firms didn’t even return LPs (Limited Partners) their original money let alone a profit."  Mark explains, the industry is reducing risk by playing the numbers game - investing seed money in more lean start-ups and play the odds that something will take off.  The example many are looking to is Y Combinator on the West Coast - a seed fund for young people with ideas for start-ups. 

But here's a surer bet than the "spray it against the wall and hope" strategy: Go Back to the Future.

1) If necessity is the mother of invention, then experience is a goldmine.  When innovating, some of the best ideas come from the people who have spent a career immersed in the problem - consistent with Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which posits that it takes 10,000 hours to be really good at something.

For example, Dr. Eileen K. Jaffe is featured in the NYT article.  After 25 years of scientific research, she "stumbled upon results that went against textbook explanations, suggesting that it might be possible to find an entirely new class of drugs that could disable proteins that fuel cancer cells."  But in a system that plays it safe, she could not find funding to pursue her theory:

"But her grant proposal was rejected out of hand by the institutes of health, not even discussed by a review panel. . . Dr. Jaffe is just conceiving her project; it is much to soon to know whether it will result in a revolutionary drug. . . 'They said I don’t have preliminary results,' she said. 'Of course I don’t. I need the grant money to get them.'"

The benefits of investing in Jaffe's unproven hypothesis probably go beyond what Gladwell documents in his examples. The benefits probably go beyond what Gladwell documents in his examples.  After all, when immersed in a business over a long period, not only is the current problem "digested" in the whatever side or layer of the brain is responsible for creativity, but also the potential "unintended" consequences of potential solutions are intuited.   As a result, experience can contribute good solutions and those which are fundamentally more executable.

2) It takes a "culture of we" to bring an idea to life.  Frank Pierson, credited with the screenplay for "Cool Hand Luke", as a contract writer for a Studio, claims that movies like this were:  "'the product of creative cross-fertilization, in a social setting that valued and encouraged good  storytelling before raw profit.'"

In his speech, Frank described the atmosphere of contract writers who were, literally and figuratively,  thrown together to produce a creative product.  The camaraderie that comes from collaborating may be a lost secret to productive creativity.  Furthermore, these writers weren't self-censoring out of concern for "profit".  They were paid salary as contract workers, whether they produced or not. 

The effectiveness of this model is consistent with Daniel Pink's surprising summary of research on motivating "cerebral" productivity . . .
Net, by "playing it safe" we risk disrupting creativity instead of disrupting the establishment.  To break the cycle of lack of innovation success, an untapped opportunity is to go back to the future with three strategies: engage those who have been immersed in the problem and have a passion to "fix it", create an environment where the camaraderie of collaboration can work its magic, and improve productivity with a base compensation plan instead of the pure back-end reward.

Turning a Loss into a Positive

[Also published in Huffington Post here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katherine-warman-kern/turning-a-loss-into-a-pos_b_666495.html]

It takes a purpose with high expectations  to motivate the  "culture of we"  necessary for real innovation. 

And this is the first "riff" I'll improvise on from John Kao's book, Innovation Nation, How America is Losing Its Innovation Edge, Why it Matters, and What We Can Do to Get it Back. 

“My own definition of innovation is both integrative and aspirational.”

A purpose which aims to vindicate a loss and maintain the status quo will not motivate people to take action.   Probably because, intuitively, most people know that when there's a loss it is futile to try to restore the status quo. 

To motivate people to adopt a purpose that is bigger than "me", it takes a more positive vision.

Some think (as evidenced by many politicians' strategies) that threats which inspire fear will galvanize our polarized society to work together.  I suspect they have misinterpreted the factors effecting innovation in response to WWII and Sputnik. 

When you consider the outcome of ramping up for WWII and going to the Moon, it reveals a much higher purpose - to excel, not to react out of fear.   The patents developed and exploited, the factories built to manufacture equipment and goods didn't exist before the war and are still businesses today - some Fortune 50 companies.  I suspect no one has documented these stories.  

It has been so long that our expectations have been so high that I think we forget what it feels like.  So here's an example from a recent personal experience. . . 

Friends of ours lost their son at the age of 30, in the prime of his life to Lymphoma.  Turns out, Lymphoma is the number 1 killer of men 18-34 because when it attacks during this phase of life it is just so virulent. 

These friends have turned the loss of their son into a positive by starting a foundation that has raised about $7 Million to fund research that can quickly make a difference.  The idea was inspired by a conversation in the hospital cafeteria between the Mother and a medical researcher who told her that significantly more time is spent raising money by writing grants for research than actually doing research.  So when her son died, they decided to make a difference by leveraging their resources and connections to raise money to accelerate the research process and to focus on research that is difficult to raise money for.   (The NYT published an article in 2009 revealing how difficult it is to raise funding for truly innovative medical research - even by seasoned researchers - which I can't find but will keep looking!)  Both of these purposes are gamechanging!

At the annual fundraiser for the foundation, the lead Doctor told us they have made so much progress in the last 6 years that if the son were to arrive at the hospital today for treatment, they would treat him completely differently. 

And you can only imagine the ripple effect  now and in the future. There are so many people who have participated: people who donate money, the clinicians, patients who participate in studies,  caregivers, and those who benefit from the well-being of patients and their caregivers - children, employees, students, etc.  They have all benefitted in some way or another. 

The implication is that a purpose that turns a loss into a positive sets expectations high enough to focus on something bigger than "me".  That's how a "culture of we" starts.  And real innovation is distinguished by the depth and breadth of the ripple effect beyond the original purpose.  This is what a "culture of we" feels like. 

"Turning a loss into a positive" is the first example of  "Disrupting Ambiguity", a theme I will continue to explore.

The Challenge

[Also published in Huffington Post here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katherine-warman-kern/the-challenge_b_666489.html]

I was invited to by Arianna to blog on Huffington Post because of this email I sent regarding her review of John Kao's book, Innovation Nation, How America is Losing Its Innovation Edge, Why it Matters, and What We Can Do to Get it Back.

The title of her review is a challenge: "Complacent America Needs to be an Innovation Nation".

She explains that John Kao points out that we haven't really had a major innovation period since the ramping up for WWII and going to the Moon.

I agree with her that a hurdle is the "culture of me" . . .

“innovation that is not informed solely by a desire to invent something that will make you rich, but to invent something that will enhance the overall good of society.”

. . . and I applaud her for reflecting a "culture of we" by finding something to agree with conservative David Brooks about:

“Brooks details how revolutions on both the left and the right have led to ‘an atomized, segmented society’ — one that needs to be replaced by a society ‘oriented around relationships and associations.’"

But I also challenged her as a representative of the media . . .

"But I am compelled to write to you, Arianna, and others in the media, because we need more than a one-off “sermon”. The media has contributed to the culture of me for a very long time by promoting the benefits of celebrity, nurturing the myth that happiness is found when it is 'all about me'. Instead of trying to manipulate or control culture, the recommendation is to reflect culture."

And she is challenging me right back, by inviting me to blog on Huffington Post.

Here it goes . . .