AT&T has a new film out about the stupidity, selfishness and yes, death, associated with texting while driving. It's directed by Werner Herzog and it's quite moving.
It's not going to work.
Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die or be maimed because it's physically impossible for us to deal with the cultural imperative to stay in touch on our phones–and drive at the same time.
The reason a movie isn't going to solve the problem is that it is competing against several cornerstones of our culture:
- The culture of the car as a haven, a roving office, and a place where you do what you like
- The culture of the Marlboro man, no speed limiters in cars, 'optional' speed limits on roads
- The culture of connection and our fear of being left out
- The culture of technology, and our bias to permit it first and ask questions later
If you get a marketing assignment where you're out to change even one of these deeply held beliefs, consider finding a new client. All four? There's no marketing lever long enough to do this work.
There's a technical solution, one that might work. The are two solutions I can think of actually, both cheap and fast and effective.
The first is to require the phone to automatically alert every person you're texting or emailing at the moment you use your phone while moving. As we've seen, knowingly interacting with someone who is driving is a crime in many locales, and yes, you should go to jail for it. We need to change the cultural imperative, and we can't do that with laws alone and we can't do that with movies. Technology, though, can fix what it broke.
The second solution is even simpler: when a phone is moving, don't permit it to accomplish certain tasks.
People won't die as a result.
It won't cost the companies a penny in profit.
And defenders of the status quo will scream about freedom and access and rights and how it used to be. They will worry about people on trains or passengers in carpools.
But you know what? It's better than being dead. Better than being the victim of the one out of three drivers I see who couldn't wait…
I have no illusions that we will find the will as a society to insist that a technology be used to alter our culture. But we could.
/rant
September 5, 2013
At the grueling Iditarod, there's a prize for the musher who finishes last: The Red Lantern.
Failing to finish earns you nothing, of course. But for the one who sticks it out, who arrives hours late, there's the respect that comes from finding the strength to make it, even when all seems helpless.
Most parents (and most bosses) agree that this sort of dedication is a huge asset in life. And yet, as we head back for another year of school, I can't help but notice that schools do nothing at all to encourage it.
The coach of the soccer team doesn't reward the players who try the hardest, push themselves or put in the hours. He rewards the best players, by playing them.
The director of the school play puts the same kids in leading roles year after year. After all, the reasoning goes, we need to have tryouts and reward the best performers, just like they do in real life.
But school isn't real life. School is about learning how to succeed in real life.
Natural talent is rewarded early and often. As Malcolm Gladwell has pointed out, most of the players in the NHL have birthdays in a three month window, because when you're 8 years old, being six months older is a huge advantage. Those kids, the skaters with good astrological signs, or possibly those performers with the genetic singing advantage–those are the kids that get the coaching and the applause and the playing time. Unearned advantages, multiplied.
If we're serious about building the habits of success, tracking is precisely the wrong approach. Talent (born with or born without) is not your fault, is not a choice, is not something we ought to give you much credit or blame for.
How do we celebrate the Red Lantern winners instead?
The man who invented modern art lived two hundred years too early.
Look at some of his work. It's incredibly fresh and relevant. At the time (1600!), El Greco was a radical outlier, and his most impressionistic paintings didn't resonate… not with most of the market, nor with his peers. As a result, it wasn't until the 19th century that impressionistic paintings like his became the new 'ism'.
It's entirely possible that you're too soon. That your riffs, your book, your blog, your invention, your product are just so far ahead of the sync that you will not find the market acceptance you seek.
It's your fault, of course, because the market is the market. You can lead it, but you cannot force it to change.
Given the market you've got, are you just far enough ahead?
No one can doubt the genius of El Greco. But if you want impact, you need to go beyond genius and work on your timing.
Real change happens when we're in sync. Just a little bit ahead. Trusted and connected and leading. Too far ahead is a form of hiding.
[Please don't confuse "too far ahead" with bold, or daring. The real lesson of El Greco's timing is that for every person with the guts to be too far ahead, there are 10,000 who are too far behind. The worst thing you can do is decide that the lesson of El Greco is to back off and not be bold. Please don't!]
September 4, 2013
Here's a quick tactical overview of what Krypton offers:
- Every month, a new course.
- Each course is based around the work of an author/teacher/scholar/speaker… someone with something to say and a track record doing it.
- A PDF with links to online and offline content (videos, essays and books) along with questions gets posted a week or so before the course starts.
- Each course has a local leader (hopefully, that's you) and about a dozen friends and colleagues who sign up to participate, in person.
- The group meets every week for four weeks.
- The dynamic is simple and powerful: meeting in a group raises the bar for the discussion, pushes each participant to have a point of view and creates an enjoyable and energizing way to dive deep into the content.
Over the next few weeks, I'll describe these elements in detail, but wanted you to have the tl;dr before we start. As you may remember, it's all free. Stand by for more…
September 3, 2013
I'd like to invite you to find out about a new project, launching in beta soon.
4H, Toastmasters, AA, book groups, Meetup, midnight basketball, community college, jazz bands, …
There's a pattern here.
We learn best when we learn together.
It's not merely the logistic efficiency of putting people together in a room. Now that the internet replaces that efficiency, we see that 'more for less' is the least of it. Learning together serves a crucial function… it makes learning happen.
The dropout rate of massive online courses is higher than 97%. It's easy to be exposed to education, but actually quite a challenge to learn. Access to education isn't sufficient… something else is going on.
I think it's important for many of us to step up and lead and organize and teach. I led a project this summer designed to explore how that might work.
If you'd like to know more about what I've been working on, sign up for the Krypton newsletter/blog with the box below today (or click here to sign up if the form doesn't work on your device). I'll share the details of this experiment with those that sign up over the next three weeks.
The first project launches October 1. I hope you can be part of it. (It's free and I'll never share your contact info).
Shortcut to form
Our series continues with my book Tribes. It's nice that we're featuring it on Labor Day, a holiday in the US that celebrates some of the most impactful tribal behavior in recent history.
It's easy to gloss over the key points of the book, because for some, it's frightening to realize that each of us has the ability to find and lead like-minded people to make real and powerful change that matters. Lead, not manage. Like-minded, as opposed to converting those who have no connection to us, to each other or to our goals.
As we shift from an economy dominated by mass marketing of the mass produced, this ability to lead is fundamentally transformative.
The selfish nature of the industrialist (hey, I made this, how do I get people to buy it?) hasn't gone away. Whether it's a small coaching service, a non-profit, a local window cleaning business or a big company, the most misguided assertion is, "I have a tribe, how do I make it bigger?" In fact, you might very well have customers, but it's unlikely you have a tribe, not if you haven't intentionally worked to engage at this level.
So, the question… "One of my favourite passages from Tribes is:
People don’t believe what you tell them. They rarely believe what you show them. They often believe what their friends tell them. They always believe what they tell themselves.
My question – what is the best way to join the conversation that is already taking place in the minds and hearts of your tribe? What is the best way to seek out members of your tribe that have the same beliefs as you?" Thanks to Giovanni Marsico for the question.
We just celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, and understanding how the organizers that led that singular event succeeded can help us understand how tribes work. They didn't create this movement by merely organizing people who already believed in the urgency of the civil rights movement and were ready to march. No, they organized people who already believed in their community, who already cared very much about what their neighbors (not everyone, just the circle of people from their church, their town, their community) did and thought. Only after they organized were they able to embrace their shared understanding of the enormity of racial segregation and respond to the leaders who made the urgency of the moment so clear.
So they began with the bravest early adopters, the few who held the worldview that it was not only their responsibility to take action, but that taking action now was urgent. Early adopters have a worldview different from their neighbors. They ask themselves, "what's vitally important and how soon can we start?" They gave these folks a path, coordinating and reinforcing their actions.
The next step, so critical, is that they amplified the social connections and media cues that would spread the idea of urgency to neighbors, to people less inclined to take action. "People like us do things like that." It's not an accident that the civil rights movement was lead by a pastor, and that much of it was based in churches. Those churches were a natural nexus, a place where people were already coming to see what people like them were going to do next.
Worldview isn't sufficient, and worldview isn't impossible to change. But what worldview does is give you the bridge, the ability to engage people in the tribe, and then, and only then, do you have the privilege to change the conversation.
The goal isn't to find people who have already decided that they urgently want to go where you are going. The goal is to find a community of people that desire to be in sync and who have a bias in favor of the action you want them to take.
A long blog post, but worth it I hope: You don't build a tribe about the thing you want to sell. You don't even build a tribe about the thing you want to accomplish. You build it around the community and experience that the tribe members already want to have.
September 2, 2013
There are two ways to make your shoes scuff-proof:
1. You can invest in a chemical process that involves an impermeable shine and be on high alert to avoid anything that might be damaging to that shine
or
2. You can wear well-worn, authentic shoes that are already scuffed
When we know and understand you and your brand, warts and all, it's really unlikely that a new scuff is going to change our opinion of who you are and what you do.
Initiated during a two-week summer project in 2013, Krypton is a beta project designed to explore a new way of combining online education with in-person learning.
Find out about the founding team here.
Team members:
Rachel Ilan Simpson rachelilansimpson.com
Grant Spanier twitter.com/grantspanier
Josh Long twitter.com/JoshLong
Stefany Cohen facebook.com/stefany.cohen
Sankalp Kulshreshtha sankalp221.com
Sean O’Connor brightful.ly/
Barrett Brooks twitter.com/BarrettABrooks
Carlos Ignacio Lagrange Delfino carlosxcl.com
Rachel Fagen twitter.com/rachelfagen
Jeremy Wilson jeremycwilson.com/
Tim Walker GetLifeboat.com
Thato Kgatlhanye twitter.com/Thatchick_Thato
Monique Fortenberry moniquefortenberry.com
Leslie Madsen Brooks lesliemadsenbrooks.com
Erin Lee twitter.com/erinandcode
Crystal Chang hoverboard.io/crystal
September 1, 2013
That's the only kind of new there is.
Unlike used, old, established, tested, discarded or broken, new is always temporary.
Tomorrow, we start over and you get another opportunity to do something new if you choose to.
Is there any other market that open?
