Lovemarks? I prefer the rhythmn method.
A/K/A: Diverge, Converge, Reemerge, Repeat

Yes. What the world needs now, is love, sweet love. But maybe a few less marriages of convenience would be a good enough start.

Johnnie Moore comes back in comments about a part of the previous Lovemarks/Modesty post:

I particularly liked the thought about curiosity and honesty. That speaks to both being clear about what we DO know, and about the stuff we have yet to learn. The first grounds us, the second moves us forward.

He's talking about this bit:

The ingredients are curiosity mated with honesty. The mixing bowl, if you will, is a company structured to exalt and serve up to people--customer and employee and world--the fruits of those ideals, consistently and well executed. The result is an enviable confidence or sureness of identity rooted in common human purpose. With this primary goal in place, one could switch from making tires to toasters tomorrow and, beyond the expected technical obstacles, be reasonably assured that people would have no problem believing in the worth of what they do.

"What we DO know... stuff we have yet to learn."

Yep, honesty and curiosity = Exploration. Minus true curiosity ("come what may"), you're just playing at it, eh? And a deep primal human urge and highly leveragable business talent is denied, lost, sacrificed. Absent the honesty part, we find ourselves saying "There's gold in them thar hills" when there isn't. Maybe this is because we thought there was or hoped there was. Maybe, we said there was and when we got there we wuz wrong. So we fudge it, either because we don't want to look stupid or, because we truthfully, really, only had a lot of dungarees and shovels we wanted to sell. Bad mojo, any way you look at it.

Okay, so Johnnie and I are sympatico. No surprise there. Then I bump into this from Naina at Aside Innovation Blog.

...Virgin itself is also a good example of mutation and adaptation. The music retail business was created when a postal strike threatened to shut down the fledgling mail order record company. Virgin Atlantic was the result of an unsolicited approach from outside the company. Virgin Blue (a low-cost airline in Australia) is a similar story.

In my experience, what makes Virgin innovative is a strong sense of self, an ability to experiment, the skill to cross-fertilize ideas, and a willingness to change. The company has largely grown, not through the unfolding of some master plan, but through an accumulation of learning and ideas caused by threats, accidents and luck.

So, if external events and adaptation are the driving forces of biological evolution, is it possible to develop an innovation process that seeks out accidents and mutations?

Ooooh. Curiosity. Honesty.What we know, and don't know. Darwin. Sense of Self. Threats, accidents, luck. External events. Adaptation. The accumulaton of learning and ideas. Evolve or die. Eat or be eaten. Freedom... Or prison.

Choices, choices.... Time for some art.

[click image to enlarge]

If you clicked the image, you see The Problem. And an alternative, one which lay in admitting the difficult but inevitable: Systems get out of phase. And they do this mostly for reasons of vanity: the strange belief that breakdown indicates failure and requires shame or blame. So we hide, metaphorically speaking. And we end up as victims of Stockholm Syndrome, prisoners of protocol, shackled to our wheezing ideas and processes--our default position--because of this:

[click image to enlarge]

Eww. Who hasn't ridden that merry-go-round? More bad mojo. Jon Katzenbach wrote a nice book on the syndrome: Why pride matters more than money. It points out one of those simple and old truths mentioned here: When it comes to strategic decisionmaking or even just tactically deciding things like "do we give bonuses this year?" many of us become economic irrationalists viewing it more wise to throw money at a problem or situation, because our organizations do not sanction or structure themselves to allow us to throw ourselves INTO a problem or work. But collectively, we don't and won't do any throwing when bosses like you or me insist on ghostwriting every bit of the dialogue and scripting "acceptable" denouements before the adventure's even begun. The result? We end up "exploring" environs about as fulfilling as a seaside Goofy-Golf -- fiberglass volcanoes, pretend rainforests and all. The strategic and executed result has all the natural feel and flow of QWERTY.

On his first model, [type-writer inventor Christopher Sholes'] "ABC" key arrangement caused the keys to jam when the typist worked quickly. Sholes didn't know how to keep the keys from sticking, so his solution was to keep the typist from typing too fast....The new arrangement was the "QWERTY" arrangement that typists use today. Of course, Sholes claimed that the new arrangement was scientific and would add speed and efficiency. The only efficiency it added was to slow the typist down, since almost any word in the English language required the typist's fingers to cover more distance on the keyboard.

Uh-huh. There's gold in them thar hills--Need some shovels? Who knows, maybe the first thing he typed was "It's not personal, it's business."

Sholes is just a frumpy ancestor in a tall family tree filled with taller tales, each breathlessly denying the gravity and import of authenticity and conscience. In this great post, Johnnie refers to the personae--hollowed out frontmen and frontwomen peddling plastic reality--as "marionettes."

When asked for an opinion, they tell you what the organisation thinks, or what their boss thinks, and not what they think. When you get to meet their boss, they need to brief you for 15 minutes on what you can and can't say to them. Mantras about accountability, core competences, ROI are trotted out with apparent vehemence - but if you ask them to give specific examples, they can't answer, because they don't actually know that these mantras actually mean to them.

Perfect. And a shame. And a waste.

When the work or brand or company is framed as an extension of our own inner ideal and ambition, the demands for corner offices, free donuts and Benzes for Junior Associates disappear. And from the other side of the cash register, you begin hearing fewer transactions begin with "Yeah, yeah--what's your discount?"

In other words, one needs to fix this egregious state of affairs...



So much for the problem. What's a "new" dialogue do and look like? Well, it sorts out what matters. And what sustains. It crystalizes group ideals down to a concentrate that you should sprinkle like Miracle Gro on the process of finding opportunity and creating marketable and meaningful difference.

The goal is to add coordinates of feeling and dimensionality--seems humans appreciate this kind of stuff--to that paper construct called "company" or "brand" or "mission." Kinda looks like this...


But be warned: If your idea of doing business and talking business is to be "all business," and, to snicker or scowl when employees do in the office what bosses only do over many scotches away from the office--that would be, umm, bitch about lost horizons rather than stop digging, dropping the shovel, and climbing out of the damn hole--well, you're probably gonna find ways to take your red pencil and frustration to even The Gettysburg Address. Bite your tongue. Put down the pencil. Think a minute. Give yourself a chance...

[click image to enlarge]

What matters. Between employee and management and consumer. What removes the desk, physical or metaphorical, between you and your audience. What matters to you. To your people, your market, your board, your customers, your grandma.

Products and services are enablers to a larger purpose--a means to an end. They are the excuse to build relationships to achieve greater meaning. Have you thought about that? Have you thought about what it means, relative to your company or efforts? Why not?

The circut and cycle that is your company is an engine creating one thing: Good feeling. A consumer, by having parted with precious economic wherewithal will come out the other side feeling enriched, improved, and more self-realized. They want to like you, appreciate you. If you did it right, often and appropriately enough, they may love you.

Do you let that good feeling die on the vine? Are you aware of it? Do you talk about t? If not, you may have moved a SKU, but you have not been a good samaritan. If not, you have done "business," but you have not done good.

Pursue that conection, in myriad forms of your choosing. That customer will come back. And that customer will talk.

Now, if the above cyclical ebbs and flows of diverge then converge then repeat (in the correct order) seems alien, try looking at how some of us around here view where we are and how we got here. And how, culturally, Shift-Time is inexorably here...

[click image to enlarge]

You might disagree with that final graphic. Or any of them. No sweat. They will have succeeded anyway: you will have begun to delve into, synthesize, and provide usable context for two things that affect 90% of your efforts, and get 10% of your attention--if you're lucky:

1. Your understanding of a past and present you were dealt.

2. Your evaluation of a future you can create.

If you're in a hole, or simply orbiting a Goofy Golf, you'll perhaps have just begun mapping out your escape. And maybe, just maybe, begun looking for a comparable and meaningful egress and ambition for a lot of others.

Now get out of here and go chart some graphs of your own. Off you go.