Paysage Ephemerale: The Art of Anju Chaudhuri

I ended up in Delhi the day before Paysage Ephemerale – Anju Chaudhuri‘s solo  art show at the Art Magnum gallery.  I have a strong feeling for her work for several reasons: one, it is similar – in spirit and even form perhaps – to what I do, although I had never seen her work before, and two, she is a wonderful and caring artist who invited us to her studio in Paris in 2018 – which was a memorable experience for me.  I’ll come back to her Parisian studio later, so let’s look at Paysage Ephemerale – which translates to “Ephemeral Landcape.”

For me, these are not so ephemeral, and the landscape may really include mindscapes – different states of emotion.

close up of Anju Chauduri’s unique style

There’s a beautiful, controlled violence in her work – which I identify with across all her work. Zooming in let’s you see this. Up close, her work is not for the timid.

middle zoom – another view of the same work

The zoom-in and zoom-out views reveal the genius of her artistry – because there is a great intuitive symmetry that reveals itself at a distance. The randomness in not random.

zoom out – the complete work at a distance

At the show, Chauduri was surrounded by fans and well-wishers. Among them I saw Alka Pande, Romila Thapar, Raghu Rai, Probir Gupta, Jyotirmoy Bhattachary, Cecile and Thierry Mathou, Maite Delteil, and and other culturati I didn’t recognize.

Alka Pande and Anju Chauduri

View the full show here >>

Meaning

What do you do when the world is “evacuated of meaning”? This is the wicked problem Walker Percy concerned himself with.

The search is never over.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer on The Evil of Stupidity

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote this before he was executed at Flossenbürg concentration camp. Unfortunately, we did not pay enough attention then, or now.

Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed- in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.

‘If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid. We discover this to our surprise in particular situations. The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them. We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem. It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions. Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.

‘Yet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person. This state of affairs explains why in such circumstances our attempts to know what ‘the people’ really think are in vain and why, under these circumstances, this question is so irrelevant for the person who is thinking and acting responsibly. The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity.

‘But these thoughts about stupidity also offer consolation in that they utterly forbid us to consider the majority of people to be stupid in every circumstance. It really will depend on whether those in power expect more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom.’

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from ‘After Ten Years’ in Letters and Papers from Prison (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works/English, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010.

Carlo Cipolla’s 5 Laws of Stupidity

Across the annals of time, an influential factor has impeded the advancement of human well-being and joy. This force wields might surpassing that of the Mafia or the armed forces. Its ramifications resonate on a global scale, spanning from the highest echelons of corporate power to the corners of your neighborhood tavern.

That force is human stupidity. 

Carlo M. Cipolla, noted professor of economic history at the UC Berkeley, wrote an important book – THE BASIC LAWS OF HUMAN STUPIDITY – in order to detect and neutralize its threat. 

Stupidity is a complex problem, for many reasons. Here are Cipolla’s five laws of stupidity:

  1. Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
  2. The probability that a certain person (will) be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
  3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
  4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places, and under any circumstances, to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
  5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

And here’s how Cipolla charted stupidity:

The chart gives us four groups of people:

  • Helpless people contribute to society but are taken advantage of by it
  • Intelligent people contribute to society and leverage their contributions into personal benefits
  • Stupid people are counterproductive to both their and others’ interests
  • Bandits pursue their own self-interest even when this poses a net detriment to societal welfare (most of our billionaires?!)

An additional category of ineffectual people exist at the center of the graph!

What’s really interesting to me is that Cipolla applies his Theory of Stupidity to the rise and fall of Nations.

“Whether one considers classical, or medieval, or modern or contemporary times one is impressed by the fact that any country moving uphill has its unavoidable σ fraction of stupid people. However the country moving uphill also has an unusually high fraction of intelligent people who manage to keep the σ fraction at bay and at the same time produce enough gains for themselves and the other members of the community to make progress a certainty.”

And,

“In a country which is moving downhill, the fraction of stupid people is still equal to σ; however in the remaining population one notices among those in power an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of stupidity (sub-area B1 of quadrant B in figure 3) and among those not in power an equally alarming growth in the number of helpless individuals (area H in basic graph, fig.1). Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the σ fraction and makes decline a certainty. And the country goes to Hell.”

I would add that the stupid Nation is the one that has abandoned the Common Good.

NOTE: Prof. Cipolla retired from UCB in 1991, and died on September 5, 2000, in Pavia, Italy. His heirs have tried to assert control over the text of THE BASIC LAWS OF HUMAN STUPIDITY , but it was released to the public domain, and cannot be retracted.

The Common Good versus the Greater Good

The “Common Good” refers to the collective well-being, interests, and benefits of a community. It emphasizes the importance of community values, resources, and goals that contribute to the overall well-being of the community. Decisions and actions that promote the common good are those that consider the needs and rights of all members of the community and seek to create a fair and just society. A city council, for example, allocates funding to improve public infrastructure such as roads, schools, and parks. This benefits all residents of the city and contributes to the common good by enhancing the quality of life for everyone.

In our latest book, we define the 9 domains of the Common Good, tied to the essential freedoms they provide:

The “Greater Good” refers to a perspective that makes decisions and choices that might require sacrifice or compromise on an individual or smaller group level in order to achieve a greater benefit for a larger number of people. The concept of the greater good often involves ethical considerations and the idea that certain actions are justifiable if they lead to significant positive outcomes for a larger portion of society, even if they might negatively impact some individuals or smaller groups.

The problem with the greater good is that the decision-making for the sake of achieving significant positive outcomes – is left to an elite. And this elite may not be serving the interests of the common good.

Authoritarian regimes – both on the extreme left and the extreme right – have used the idea of the “Greater Good” to justify imposing strict controls on society, limiting personal freedoms, and suppressing opposition. This is done in the name of maintaining social order (harmony?!) and achieving national unity. 

Fascism and Communism both focus on nationalism, a strong centralized government and strongman leader, and often promote the supremacy of a particular race or nation. These regimes historically have justified their actions by claiming to pursue the greater good of the nation or the state, often at the expense of individual rights and freedoms. 

Thus, authoritarian ideologies can lead to exclusionary policies that discriminate against certain groups deemed as threats to the nation or its interests. The “Greater Good” might be invoked to justify these policies, claiming that they are necessary for the security and prosperity of the dominant group. Such regimes use propaganda to manipulate public perception and present their actions as necessary for the greater good. This can involve distorting information and suppressing dissent to create a unified narrative that supports the regime’s goals. 

At its worst, interpretations of the “Greater Good” have been used to advance ideas of racial or ethnic superiority, where one group is deemed as inherently superior and entitled to privileges at the expense of others.  It is the rational behind hate-based politics – leading to separation – apartheid, institutional injustice, and genocide.

Don’t get fooled by the Greater Good – or long-termism, another form of greater-goodism.

As we destroy the Common Good, we build a Zero-Trust Society.

What the fossil fuel industry doesn’t want you to know

Just because you don’t like Al Gore, doesn’t mean he isn’t telling you the truth:

“…the climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis. The solutions are going to come from a discussion and collaboration about phasing out fossil fuels. And there’s only so much longer they can hold this up and tie us down and keep us from doing the right thing.”

Fight. It’s time to regenerate this world.

Regeneration: The Future of Community

So our book is finally here. At one point – when we were at 500 pages – I almost gave up. But then I remembered Gail Mazur‘s advice: “anything worth doing is worth doing badly,” and decided to carry on. Now, at 320 pages, this book tries to cover the various angles and sights and buzzwords we see creeping into the regeneration ecosystem (pun intended).

The book’s original title was Regeneration: The Future of Community, but as we went on, it ended up becoming Regeneration: The Future of Community in a Permacrisis World.

What’s the big idea? Actually we think there are several.

Climate change is the greatest market failure in history. Its costs are not priced into market transactions because third parties overwhelmingly bear them – they are euphemistically called “externalities.” There is a fatal misalignment between what is in the interests of the economy and the incentives of the companies that comprise it. Nature, and the communities we live in, are nowhere part of the equation!

 Regeneration means regenerating the Common Good. Our position is this: The Climate Crisis and the Collapse of Society are both symptoms of the same fatal sickness: the destruction of the Common Good.  We cannot compartmentalize the climate and separate it from the rest of society or our activities. 

Here are the questions we – Philip Kotler, Enrico Foglia, and myself, asked ourselves:

The choice is clear. It is regeneration, or extinction.

Learn more at the Regeneration Marketing Institute >>

Do Americans care about Climate Change?

Americans experience a false social reality by underestimating popular climate policy support by nearly half.

Let’s break that down:

Americans experience a false social reality.

They underestimate climate policy support.

By half.

Here’s what people think about what others think . (The red line is reality.)

Pluralistic ignorance—a shared misperception of how others think or behave—poses a challenge to collective action on problems like climate change.

These are the findings of a study published in Nature.

Where does this false social reality come from?

Preliminary evidence suggests three sources of these misperceptions:

(i) consistent with a false consensus effect, respondents who support these policies less (conservatives) underestimate support by a greater degree; controlling for one’s own personal politics,

(ii) exposure to more conservative local norms and

(iii) consuming conservative news correspond to greater misperceptions.

Fox News destroys reality.

But reality does not need Fox News.

Cimate collapse is here.

Webinar: “Population & Migration”

Join us for the latest webinar from the Wicked7 Project >>

Join Philip Kotler and Christian Sarkar as we discuss the final wicked problem of the Wicked7 Project. With us for the webinar – a group of dynamic personalities from Palermo, Sicily:

Leoluca Orlando. As Mayor of Palermo, Orlando’s extraordinary vision and courage has changed our understanding of immigration, tolerance, and the fight against corruption.

Claudio Arestivo. A co-founder of Moltivolti – a unique regenerative business – which serves as an example for the future.

Melania Memory Mutanuka. An immigrant from Zambia, she is an emerging leader with a purpose.

Carmelo Pollichino. A passionate leader and the head of the non-profit Libera Palermo contro le mafie

Francesco Bellina. An award-winning photographer and artist whose brilliant work on the problems of migration and exploitation are featured in leading newspapers such as the Financial Times and The Guardian.

Thinkers50: Conversation with Philip Kotler

It was my great honor to interview the “Father of modern Marketing” on his lifetime of achievements in marketing.

Professor Philip Kotler received the Thinkers50 Lifetime Achievement Award for his work over the past 50 years. I am deeply grateful for his friendship and mentorship – and everything he has done to demonstrate how marketing must be a force for good.

Paul Polak: 12 Social Entrepreneurial Principles for Solving Poverty

Sometimes I wonder why we have forgotten these principles from the late Paul Polak. When I chatted with him about the $300 House, he wanted me to reconsider and make it a $100 House. His point was simple: affordability drives design.

Now, as part of the research agenda of the Regenerative Marketing Institute, I’m thinking about how these BoP principles and Stuart Hart‘s BoP protocol apply to the developed world — to communities trying to find a way back from the COVID-crash.

Here are Polak’s principles:

1) Go to where the action is. You can’t solve poverty from a World Bank office.
2) Talk to the people and listen to what they have to say.
3) Learn everything about the context of the problem and the people.
4) Think and act big. No reason to be modest. Small solutions applied thousands of thousands of times.
5) Think like a child to find the obvious solution people have missed in the past. (Irony of thinking big and like a child)
6) See and do the obvious. Emersing yourself in the problem helps.
7) If someone has invented it–you don’t have to. Find existing solutions
8} Make sure your approach can be scaled up.
9) Design for the poor. Affordability rules the design process with poor customers.
10) Follow practical 3 year plans. Must transform into effective work plan for 3 years.
11) Continue to learn from your customers. (Interviewed more than 3000 farm families, $12 solar lantern)
12) Don’t be distracted by what other people say (Almost every project I’ve done has had sceptics)

Let’s add another principle for impact innovation:

13) Design for justice. (The design schools don’t)

Regenerative Marketing

Can marketing be regenerative? And what would that look like?

Our definition >>

Regenerative marketing is defined as marketing practices which nurture communities and build local prosperity over the long term.  The outcomes of regenerative marketing include value creation for customers, employees, and local communities. Regenerative marketing practices must – by definition – build community wealth.

Read the article in The Marketing Journal >>

It’s time for a Movement of Movements

It’s time to put aside our toys – our ideologies and guns – and look at this time in history as our final exam. This is a test, as Buckminster Fuller said, to see if we, the human species, deserve to carry on. COVID has shown us that we cannot find consensus on how to deal with the virus. 

Time’s running out. Philip Kotler, Karthiga Ratnam, and I think it’s time for a movement of movements.

Learn more on the Wicked7 Project site >>

Leverage Points: Where to Intervene in an Ecosystem

Once again, it is useful to study the past to learn what applies here to our ecosystematic journeys. Of particular interest is the work of Donella Meadows, who taught us how to focus on having the most impact on a system (Bill Gates, listen up!) >>

Where to intervene:

12. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards).
11. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows.
10. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks, population age structures).
9. The lengths of delays, relative to the rate of system change.
8. The strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against.
7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops.
6. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to information).
5. The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints).
4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure.
3. The goals of the system.
2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises.
1. The power to transcend paradigms.

Read all about it >>

The 11th Type of Innovation

I still think of Larry Keeley‘s 10 types of innovation – and think about how the model can be applied to social innovation – to meet the “unmet needs” of society.

The 11th type of innovation is purpose – to what ends are your capabilities and talents being deployed? Are you inclusive or is your company supporting new forms of apartheid? That is what Brand Activism, and by extension – the Wicked7 Project – are about.

Politicians and Decision-Making

We are now at that point in history where collapse seems inevitable: political, social, environmental, civilizational. The decisions our politicians make are killing us.

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.”Proverbs 29:18

In Texas, we can applaud our fearless Governor Greg Abbott and his Republican mafia for destroying any pretense of serving the public good (see exhibits A and B). Every decision made by leaders in the Republican Party is made based on ideology, not reason, science, or even common sense. Some argue we live in the Age of Social Murder. The Democrats, for their part, are slightly better — but certainly not equal to the task which lies ahead.

It’s time to depoliticize decision-making.

Either that, or our time is up.

The Pyramid of Love: can we escalate peace and justice?

The work of leadership has never been more clear: it is to bridge the gap — across all boundaries — and to create a way forward for the common good. The pyramid of love reminds us that it is possible to resolve conflicts and escalate peace.

Says David Hinds of Steel Pulse: “Where there is no love, there can be no justice; and where there is no justice, there will never be peace.”

That about sums it up.

(RE)VISIONing

2021 has already shown us that the wickedness of 2020 was just the beginning. The “new normal” is that there is no “new normal.”

The job of leadership now is (re)visioning – rethinking what it means to live in an age of collapse.

We will explore this topic in an article we’re writing (Phil Kotler and I) on the leadership we need now. This is also part of the agenda for The Wicked7 Project.

RIP, Professor Christensen.

Clayton Christensen has passed on to a better world. We did not deserve him. I only ever met the Professor over the phone – in the early 2000s – when I did this interview with him >>

Clayton Christensen: 
The Innovation Catalyst

“You never want to ever say: ‘Well those idiots failed because they had the wrong strategy.’ 

“You have to ask: ‘Why did they have the wrong strategy?’ 

“Almost always, they’ve used the wrong process to come with the strategy.” 

— Clayton Christensen, author, The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution

What are your views on Nick Carr’s Harvard Business Review article, “IT Doesn’t Matter”?

Clayton Christensen: In chapters 5 and 6 of Innovator’s Solution, I talk about how you start out in the early era of an industry’s history when the functionality and reliability of the product aren’t good enough. The way you compete is to make more reliable and higher performing products. In order to do that well, you need to have an interdependent architecture that’s a proprietary system. You then get to the paint where you’ve overshot what customers can use. 

At this point, a process of commodization begins to set in. It has two dimensions: First, having overshot you keep trying to improve the product. People will accept the improved product; however, they won’t pay much money for the improvements. Customers often don’t need all of the improvements. 

The other dimension of commodization surrounds the argument of now having to compete differently. You’re faced with the need to market so that every customer gets exactly what they need when they need it. If you achieve this, you can responsibly market to smaller and smaller niches in the market. To compete at this level, you need to have the architecture of the product evolve from a proprietary interdependent one to a modular architecture. When you have a modular architecture where the product’s performance is really driven by the subsystem that you snap together, like your personal computer, then modularity finishes the commodization job. You can no longer differentiate your product from the others on the basis of product performance because everyone has the same modules. 

In the first realm of commodization, the functionality and reliability are determined in the architecture of the product. The component themselves don’t make much of a difference. In the other realm of commodization, the components or the subsystems make all the difference and the architecture doesn’t make much difference. 

In chapter 6, the very move in this direction at a stage of value added precipitates a reciprocal of decommodization of the adjacent stages. Usually, that where what’s not good enough gets resolved. 
Carr’s point is a little bit consistent with this view. There was an era when you could gain a competitive advantage by having information technology that (1) others didn’t have, and (2) you had processes within your company to integrate that technology into your strategic planning, product development processes, and pricing better and faster than others. Now, the ability to capture that information, process it, and deploy it to the people who need it is almost modular, in the sense, any company can get it. Carr overstates this point a bit. Things are headed in this direction, and thus the information technology becomes a commodity you must have. You just can’t differentiate yourself.

Let’s talk about a specific example- about five years ago, StorageNetworks built an IT infrastructure from commercially available hardware, raised more than $200 million, and offered organizations a third-party source for immediate storage, likened to that of a public service utility. EMC validated the concept. StorageNetworks couldn’t make a go of that business and offered backup stores and eventually started licensing its software. StorageNetworks went Chapter 11 and couldn’t given find a buyer. What went wrong here?

Clayton Christensen: I haven’t really studied this company in depth. So, I can only surmise. With the caveat that I haven’t crawled inside, I will tell you some of the things I worry about as I watch that. First, Chapter 8’s key assertion is the only thing you know for sure at the beginning you don’t know what the right strategy is. Likewise, you don’t know who are the right customers, and what job are they trying to get done. You start out with a deliberate strategy where you think this’s the right thing. You almost have to know for sure you are wrong. Therefore, you have to get in the market quick with a little of this and then figure out what’s work. 

In Chapter 8, I cite a colleague’s study of 400 Harvard Business School graduates who started new companies. Half have been successfully; half haven’t been. The half that succeeded didn’t entirely trust the strategy they used when they raised money. They ended up selecting another strategy that enabled them to succeed. Ninety percent of this group said they ended up doing something completely different from what they intended to do. The difference between the successes and the failures wasn’t the successful ones got it right the first time. They just had money left over after they got it wrong. They learned from their mistake in time to shift gears. 

In Chapter 9, I talk about good money and bad money. Bad money is a lot of money flowed into something with the willingness to accept big losses. You have the expectation that the more you spend, the more you will earn later. The money is spent in the expectation your strategy is right.

We would be in error to say that somewhere in that space where StorageNetworks was there wasn’t a great business opportunity. It’s more accurate to say, like everyone else, there initial strategy wasn’t right. They spent a lot of money pursuing that strategy. The problem they employed a deliberate strategy aggressively from the beginning, and spent to get big fast.

How do you fix the disconnect between upper management’s ideas and what the market will accept?

Clayton Christensen: It is a combination of Chapters 8 and 9. Too much money is a huge curse. Enough money can get you into the market as quickly as possible. In Chapter 3 talks about segmenting the market by the job people are trying to get done. The faster you can get into the market and get people to pay real money for real products, then you need to figure you what were these people trying to get done for them when they hired your product. You can then begin to focus on helping them get the job done better and better. As you learn what works and how the customers are using your product, you reach the point where you can aggressively spend money to grow. It’s the premature outlay of huge amounts of money in pursuit of the wrong strategy is the thing to avoid. You need to have an experimental mindset. 

In my own language, I try not to use innovative and non innovative. Most company’s are innovative, but in different ways. An established company is usually very good in the sustaining innovation track. Usually established companies pull off radical sustaining innovations. Some times they overshooting and flaming out. The disruptive innovation is a different kind. I would rather work for an innovative company. The question is which ones.

As I live with the ideas in the Innovator’s Solution, history might judge the concepts in Chapter 3 — segmenting markets in ways that cause us to fail – might judge this to be the most important chapter in the book. 

We always have an overwhelming tendency to frame the market we are targeting by the boundaries defined by product categories, or product points, or the demographics of the customers. We think about industry verticals. When we target products that markets that are defined by demographics of customers or by the product characteristics, we are playing the crapshoot game of determining whether or not there is a valid customer need. We define our business as helping a customer get a job done – one that he is already struggling to get done and has no satisfactory means of doing it – the probability that product will contact with the customer is very high. You need to look at what is the customer trying to get done and does it help him or her get it done better. Or, does it make it easier for them to do what they aren’t trying to get done. The latter is a failure. 

We give a little example in Chapter 3. It’s about investments in Internet-based or electronic learning technologies which are oriented as trying to help college students learn more. These technologies usually never work. If you think about what college students are really trying to do, they want to pass the course without really having to study. If the same effort was focused on crammed.com, making it easier for them to cram, you help them try to do what they are already trying to get done. This works. 

Carr makes the comment about commodization (Oracle and SAP struggling to sell better products at higher and higher prices). If the IT industry has lost a bit of its luster, history will show IT vendors have cut to segment the market by product categories and by the attributes of customers, rather than the fundamental jobs people are trying to do in organization. An IT professional who wants to know should I join this organization or this organization I am working with have high potential. If there’s a deep of what the customer is trying to accomplish, then I would be excited about working there. 

What are the symptoms of a business or an industry that’s ready for disruption? You mention companies that produce products with features no one uses. What are some of the other attributes to look for?

Clayton Christensen:There are two types of disruptions – low-end and new market. The possibility that a low-end disruption, which is covered in Chapter 2, might occur only if two conditions are met: There have to be customers at the low end of the market who don’t value and won’t pay for further improvement. The second condition for that to happen is that someone has to figure out a lower-cost business model that can be attractively profitable at the discount prices required to win the business of those customers at the low end. If these conditions are met, then a low-end disruption most likely will occur. 

The new market disruption is based on an entirely new market sector. If there is a population who are trying to get something done but they can’t to do it for themselves satisfactorily because they don’t have the skills or money to buy the product, they have to rely on the expensive and inconvenient help of experts. If that population exists, that is the requisite condition for new market disreputability. The second reason for new market disruption is can I technologically come up with a market that is so afford and simple to use that I can enable this new population who are trying to get it done, but can’t. If these two conditions exist, then a market is a new market disreputable.

Your company- Innosight- is a disruptive company in the management consulting space. How do you differentiate yourself from the McKinsey’s and the Bains?

Clayton Christensen: The trajectory that the consulting firms are on is higher billings, per partner, per client. Partners make more money by putting more people on the ground. These projects tend not to be strategic related, but operations effectiveness type consulting in mergers and acquisitions and integration. That has become the bread and butter of those companies. The way we try top to help a company is to go in and spend a day going over theory. We have this conviction that theory is a very useful thing. It’s a statement of what causes what and why. Managers use theories every day. In a way, we give them virtual glasses so they can see these theories. 

On the second day, we have them make a list of 20 or more of the new business ideas or growth product ideas that have been kicked around in this company. Let’s look at each one of those ideas through this lens. Almost always, there are three or four that just pop out and managers say we haven’t been giving this much thought because it is not a sustaining innovation. However, when you look at it through the theories lenses, the ideas have enormous potential. As we go through the day, we say it has enormous potential, but the way we’ve been thinking about doesn’t meet with what we say in Chapter 3. Most likely, they’ve been studying the wrong customers for that idea. You can take an idea and start to shape it so it conforms to the pattern of disruptive successful companies. 

By the end of the second day, they have several products which they say could be successful. Then we have them go through a market study phase where we try to send them to market by the job customers are trying to get done. They need to answer how big is this market? It does involve finding some people to watch and then to ask them a unique set of questions. When you just hired that product what job were you trying to get done? And when you don’t hire that product, what else do you hire to get the job done? There’s a methodology for converting those insight into an estimate for how big is the job. 

The third is to work with the team to create a business plan that can get funded and implemented.

When creating businesses to commercialize high-potential innovations, you have six questions, six decisions you ask people to make. Can you go over them with us? 

Clayton Christensen: The questions are fairly simple:

1) Whether the new business should be set up to operate autonomously. Opportunities that require developing new skills and using new business models ought to be kept separate from the main business.

2) The activities the company should build versus the activities it should buy. The new business needs to control activities that allow it to improve performance along dimensions that matter most to customers.

3) How the new business should interact with “value network” participants, such as suppliers and channel partners. The new business must help its value network partners move up their own improvement trajectory. People don’t do what doesn’t make sense to them.

4) Which managers should be appointed to run the new business. Managers should have wrestled with challenges (attended “schools of experience”) they know they will encounter.

5) How the new business should set its strategy. In all likelihood, the new business needs to use an “emergent” strategy process that lets it experiment and learn from the marketplace.

6) Who should fund the new business. The new business needs investors whose prioritization criteria match the business’ needs. For truly disruptive innovations, this typically means being patient for growth but impatient for profits.

People assume an answer to these questions without really asking. They often don’t have a theory or strategic framework to think them through. You never have a one-size fits all answer. There are no best practices. Best practices is flawed thinking- it causes innovation to fail. 

For example, should the business be autonomous or not? There is a model in Chapter 7 of resources, processes, and values. The organization needs to be autonomous if its normal processes of prioritizing things would place other priorities over this one. The organization can’t succeed if the responsible people are over prioritizing. You can do the same thing with processes. A process is designed to do a particular thing. If the process won’t facilitate success, then you need a different process. Then you need a separate team.

The concept of getting the right people is one of the most important ideas for an organization. You shouldn’t segment markets by the attributes of the product. You shouldn’t segment people by their personal attributes. You need, instead, to segment them by the way they solve problems during earlier times in their career. You make a list of what kinds of problems this management team is going to comfort. Once we know, we have to make sure we have people on the team who’ve seen problems like this before. 

You never want to ever say well those idiots failed because they had the wrong strategy. You have to ask “Why did they have the wrong strategy?” Almost always, they’ve used the wrong process to come with the strategy. We show two fundamentally different processes: one is a top-down analytical project that is followed by implementation, and the other way is get into the market to try to experiment what works and what doesn’t.

Who should fund the business? During the era of being out in the market experimenting, then the money has to be patient for growth and impatient for profit. Once you have it figured out and you know what strategy is going to work, then the money can demand growth.

Christian Sarkar: Thank you so much.

Years later, I interviewed Clay again – still not face to face – for The Marketing Journal >> “Branding as a Job to be Done” – An Interview with Clayton Christensen

I am grateful for everything you did for us nerds, Prof. Christensen. We will not forget you. See this from Harvard Business Review >>

A Defense of Philip Kotler

Recently, my dear friend and mentor – Professor Philip Kotler (yes, that Kotler!) got entangled in a squabble between Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, and Rahul Gandhi, the dynastic leader of the Congress party.

The fun began when Professor Kotler presented the Prime Minister with the inaugural Philip Kotler Presidential Award, an award that recognizes Shri Narendra Modi’s leadership qualities on the global stage.

Because his physician had advised him not to travel, Professor Kotler chose his friend Professor Jagdish Sheth, an eminent marketer in his own right, to present the award on his behalf.

The award was presented by a delegation led by Professor Sheth on January 14, 2019. Also part of the delegation were representatives of the World Marketing Summit which had held a conference in Delhi in December of 2018.

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The Reaction

The next day, this tweet from Rahul Gandhi poked fun at the award, seeking to undermine not just the PM, but, more importantly for me, the integrity of Professor Kotler as well:

Almost immediately, the comments inspired by the post fell into two categories – insults and praise; insults from Rahul Gandhi followers and praise from PM Modi supporters.  The tone of these comments was shrill, with many attacking Professor Kotler directly.

Professor Kotler and I were shocked.  The article questioning the award was written by a leftist outlet which casts doubt on the award:

The government’s press release makes no mention of jury members, nor the exact organisation behind the new award.

The media pounced on the story and added to the controversy:

Even one of my literary heroes – Shashi Tharoor – piled on, going so far as to call the award a fake.

Questions & Answers

As questions were raised, I decided to collect and answer them:

Is the award real? (“…little information has been shared about the provenance of the latest award, or the organisation presenting it.”)

Yes, it is real.  And why would people like Tharoor assume it was fake? The “journalists” in Rahul Gandhi’s tweet did not follow the first rule of journalism which is – check your facts with the source.  How easy it would have been to Google Philip Kotler and contact him through his Northwestern faculty page.

Who is Philip Kotler?  What qualifies him to give this award?

Along with Peter Drucker, Professor Philip Kotler is considered to be one of our greatest management thinkers. Who is the leading business scientist in history? According to the Hirsch-Index its Philip Kotler with an h-index of 163, followed by Michael Porter with 159.

Ask any MBA student anywhere in the world, and you will find that they have studied Professor Kotler’s books. He has received 22 honorary degrees from around the world, and published over 70 books. His 50+ years of work with the Kellogg School of Management has resulted in building the #1 Marketing department in the world.

Professor Kotler is a man with great integrity and openness. He is also one of the smartest thinkers to grace the planet. He is in the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame (2013), and is featured as a “guru” in the Economist.

Who chose the award? Why is there no jury?

Professor Philip Kotler made the final decision after a committee for the World Marketing Summit came up with a list of possible candidates.

Professor Kotler explains via a letter published on his blog:

lettertopmmodi_small.jpgWhy is Kotler’s twitter account not verified?

Because Twitter has stopped verifying accounts, and Prof. Kotler never thought to ask. I messaged Jack Dorsey to ask him if he could make an exception for Professor Kotler.

Why was there no mention of the award on the Kotler website?

Professor Kotler’s site is not updated often. When the Indian press started questioning the authenticity of the Award, Professor Kotler tweeted about it:

Why was the Indian site for the World Marketing Summit taken down?

After an event is over, often times the microsite that’s used to describe the event and/or register participants is usually taken down.  The global site for the World Marketing Summit, Kotler Impact and Kotler Awards are still running.

What could Professor Philip Kotler possibly know about India?  

Professor Kotler is not just the “father of modern marketing.” He is an economist and studied with some the greatest Economics teachers on the planet.  His involvement with India began in 1955, when he spent a year working on his PhD thesis in India. If the journalists bothered to read My Adventures in Marketing, they might have known that. Since then he has visited India often to teach and speak.

What could Professor Philip Kotler possibly know about democracy?

Professor Kotler has published books and written numerous articles on capitalism and democracy.  See: Democracy in Decline and Confronting Capitalism.

How to Argue 

Bottom line, I’m disgusted with the trash-talking that I see from the left-leaning Indian journalists and social media participants.

Too many of our disagreements fall in the bottom two layers of Paul Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement:

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If someone wants to question PM Modi’s track record, they would do far better through Refutation rather than Ad Hominem and Name-Calling.  Let that be a lesson for you, young Rahul, and for all who would seek to look childish: focus on the substance instead.

Professor Kotler, please excuse the mess caused by this controversy. 

DISCLOSURE: I have worked and continue to work with Professor Philip Kotler on several projects, including The Marketing Journal, ActivistBrands.com, and FIXCapitalism. We’ve written a book together titled Brand Activism: From Purpose to Action (the print version is forthcoming).  No one asked me or paid me (in India, as elsewhere, paid-journalism is a thing) to write this.  I simply felt compelled to stand up for a learned man of great integrity. 

Brand Activism: From Purpose to Action

Professor Philip Kotler – the “father of modern marketing” – and I have co-authored a book: Brand Activism: From Purpose to Action

Brand activism is driven by a fundamental concern for the biggest and most urgent problems facing society. The main idea here is that when government fails to do its job, business has a civic responsibility to stand up for the public interest. It’s what a good citizen does.  

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available in the following countries

US UK DE FR ES IT NL JP BR CA MX AU IN

The book introduces the reader to regressive and progressive Brand Activism, and shows how the best businesses are making the world a better place because their activism is a differentiator – for customers, for employees, and for society at large.  We also examine the role of the CEO.  

Here’s a look at the table of contents:

Screen Shot 2018-11-22 at 5.54.07 PM.pngThe book includes the Sarkar-Kotler Brand Activism Framework, a toolkit for business leaders looking to transform their companies and institutions.  

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The book also includes interviews with leaders from various fields:

  • Scott Galloway
  • John Elkington
  • Raj Sisodia
  • John Ehrenreich
  • Christopher Davis
  • Stephen M. R. Covey
  • Hennie Botes
  • Stuart L. Hart
  • David “Dread” Hinds
  • Clark Fox

and 

Philip Kotler

Finally, we’ve launched a separate website to help individuals who want to learn more – www.activistbrands.com.  We hope you find it useful.

How Marketing Guru Phil Kotler Stepped Up to Confront Capitalism

The Founding Fathers didn’t envision corporate personhood, or Citizen’s United.

In fact, I wonder what they’d think about capitalism as an enemy of democracy and a grave threat to the very survival of life on Earth.

Is democracy doomed?

What must we do to save capitalism from itself?

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Enter Phil Kotler. The legendary marketing guru is marketing a new sort of product these days. He is trying to fix Capitalism, a system he believes has helped create more wealth for more people than any other economic model.

Says the esteemed Professor Kotler (he’s taught at Northwestern for 50 years!) >>

“Capitalism must evolve to serve the needs of all citizens, not just the very affluent. Our goal is to discuss the 14 Shortcomings of Capitalism and systematically analyze the problems and potential solutions. We want to gather opinions and recommendations from everyone – and begin the process of saving capitalism from itself.”

It’s great to see one of the greatest capitalist minds working on reforming capitalism with a capital C.

According to Kotler, the current state of capitalism is falling short because it:

1. Proposes little or no solution to persistent poverty

2. Generates a growing level of income inequality

3. Fails to pay a living wage to billions of workers

4. Doesn’t create enough human jobs in the face of growing automation

5. Doesn’t charge businesses with the full social costs of their activities

6. Exploits the environment and natural resources in the absence of regulation

7. Creates business cycles and economic instability

8. Emphasizes individualism and self-interest at the expense of community and the commons

9. Encourages high consumer debt and leads to a growing financially-driven rather than producer-driven economy

10. Lets politicians and business interests collaborate to subvert the economic interests of the majority of citizens

11. Favors short-run profit planning over long-run investment planning

12. Should have regulations regarding product quality, safety, truth in advertising, and anti-competitive behavior

13. Tends to focus narrowly on GDP growth

14. Needs to bring social values and happiness into the market equation.

So that’s my latest project – helping Kotler and friends get the word out and make a difference.

Like the $300 House Project, I’m helping build an “ecosystem of concerned folks” to face the challenge.

We began by enlisting the Huffington Post as our media partner. 

We now have a FIXCapitalism channel; we’re slowly beginning to get some attention with these articles:

Check out our FIXCapitalism website, read the book, like our FIXCapitalism Facebook page, and follow us on Twitter.

The future is too important to leave in the hands of the corporations and their paid stooges – the politricksters in D.C.!

Can you help? Connect us to others who are interested – who may have a point of view they want to share – and can help move the conversation forward. Join us!

Help spread the word!

IT Still Doesn’t Matter: Why aren’t CIOs influencing business strategy?

In McKinsey‘s latest survey on business technology, few executives say their IT leaders are closely involved in helping shape the strategic agenda, and confidence in IT’s ability to support growth and other business goals is waning.  Furthermore, “executives’ current perceptions of IT performance are decidedly negative.”

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This sort of criticism of IT is not new.  

In fact, it goes all the way back to Nick Carr‘s 2003 IT Doesn’t Matter article in Harvard Business Review. At the time, Carr managed to infuriate the CEOs of numerous IT companies, including Craig Barrett, Intel’s CEO, along with Bill Gates and Larry Ellison.

“My point, however, is that it (IT) is no longer a source of advantage at the firm level – it doesn’t enable individual companies to distinguish themselves in a meaningful way from their competitors. Essential to competitiveness but inconsequential to strategic advantage: that’s why IT is best viewed (and managed) as a commodity.”

Nicholas Carr

At the time, there were numerous rebuttals to Carr’s view, but none more powerful than the one from John Hagel and John Seely Brown.  They argued:

  • Extracting business value from IT requires innovations in business practices. In many respects, we believe Carr attacks a red herring – few people would argue that IT alone provides any significant business value or strategic advantage.
  • The economic impact from IT comes from incremental innovations, rather than “big bang” initiatives. A process of rapid incrementalism enhances learning potential and creates opportunities for further innovations.
  • The strategic impact of IT investment comes from the cumulative effect of sustained initiatives to innovate business practices in the near-term. The strategic differentiation emerges over time, based less on any one specific innovation in business practice and much more on the capability to continuously innovate around the evolving capabilities of IT.

According to JH3 and JSB: far from believing that the potential for strategic differentiation through IT is diminishing, we would maintain that the potential is increasing, given the growing gap between IT potential and realized business value.

So how does IT become more strategic?  

The Wall Street Journal‘s Rachael King recommends:

CIOs also need to bring some transparency to their operations by sitting down with business leaders and going over the budget and setting priorities together. The CIO needs to also actively market how the IT department is driving value in terms that business can understand. For example, Intel CIO Kim Stevenson recently published an annual IT report where she detailed how her department implemented advanced data analytics that helped drive $351 million in revenue for the company.  

The ability for Ms. Stevenson to demonstrate the value of her organization’s work in dollars and cents is changing how IT is perceived in the company. It changes the relationship from that of a service provider, a department that helps people set up servers or configure PCs, to one that uses technology to solve business problems.

CIOs must demonstrate and quantify the business value of IT.

What does this mean for the sales people of IT company’s trying to sell to CIOs?  It means that the role of the CIO is often supplanted by business executives.  (In my discussions with our clients, I often emphasize this point.)

IT is so strategic, one could argue, that it is no longer left to IT.  Often it is CMOs and other non-IT business executives who are actively pursuing the mobile, social, and analytics strategies that are creating the organizational pull for new approaches to rapid application development, and as a by-product, the cloud services offerings needed to enable those strategies.

The new generation of IT will support new business strategies. This means that any vendor selling IT solutions will have to speak the language of business strategy.  And most importantly, the vendor will have to show the client how to achieve the “promised” benefits of IT.

So here’s the takeaway: CIOs must work on getting a place at the strategy table.  When they do, they are viewed as effective business partners.  What must the CIO do to be viewed as a strategic partner?

Ask:

– Does your company have a clear view of how advances in IT (Big Data, AI, IoT, Cloud Computing) is likely to reshape your relevant markets over the next five years?

– What areas of business growth can IT contribute to?

– Does your company have an equally clear view of the implications for the changes you will need to make to continue to create value?

– Are these views shared effectively among your senior managers across the organization?

– Does senior management recognize the risks and uncertainties as part of the decision-making process?

– Has your company been sufficiently aggressive in using IT to improve strategic areas of your operations?

– Are there opportunities to use IT to improve operations around existing products and services?

– Are their opportunities to use IT to significantly reduce costs and cycle time in existing work processes?

– What are the data sources? How will you monitor them? How do you trigger events based on the intelligence gathered from the data? Is there a profit or cost-savings optimization opportunity?

FURTHER READING

Why CIOs should be business-strategy partners
Feb 2015, McKinsey

Most CIOs are Not Seen as Influencing Corporate Strategy: Report
, Feb 2015, Wall Street Journal

Public Cloud a first choice for minority of projects: Gartner CIO survey
, March 2015, ARN

The Search for the Sources of Innovation

How does innovation happen? Most company’s struggle to understand how innovation works, often confusing creativity with innovation. In today’s tacit, knowledge-based creative economy, innovation and differentiation rarely come from one distinct source. Rather, innovation evolves from:

  • new ways of thinking,
  • new business models,
  • new processes,
  • new organizations (or new collaborative inside/outside team structures),
  • and new products (offerings including services)

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In his classic book – Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the late Peter Drucker found seven sources of innovation. The first four sources were internal, inside the enterprise, whereas the last three are external, outside of the company.
1. The Unexpected
2. Incongruities
3. Process Needs
4. Shifts In Industry And Market Structure
5. Demographic Changes
6. Changes In Perception
7. New Knowledge
A good description of the seven sources is here. Unfortunately, not everyone stumbles into innovation like the legendary 3M Post-It notes, or the unexpected discovery of Aspartame, but innovation can, and should be pursued in a systematic way.
Larry Keeley‘s Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs gives us a glimpse into how that might be:
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Here is an added insight from Keeley and friends: the things we love in the world–the services and systems we value and use–are the ones that make it easy to do hard things.
What does all of this have to do with business results?
Clearly there is plenty of room for innovation when it comes to designing superior, differentiated experiences for customers.  Every interaction with your customer can be differentiated, integrated with the purpose of the customer.  Make it easy to do business with you, said Jakob Nielsen, the web usability expert, many years ago.
What about the power of ecosystems?  At the individual level, ecosystem thinking can help you create better ideas. it’s all about disorganization.
Ideas need to be sloshing around or crashing in to one another to produce breakthroughs:
  • Research shows that the volume of ideas bouncing about make large cities disproportionately more creative than smaller towns.
  • Having multiple hobbies allows your brain to subconsciously compare and contrast problems and solutions, forming new connections at the margins of each.
  • Similarly, reading multiple books at the same time vs serially lets your brain juxtapose new ideas and develop new connections.
  • Wandering minds are more creative.
  • Studying a field “too much” doesn’t limit creativity — it does the opposite. More ideas banging about just produces even more ideas.
  • The “accept everything” mantra of brainstorming doesn’t work. Debate is far more effective. Let those ideas fight.
  • ADD and bipolar disorder are both associated with greater creativity. When you’re drunk or exhausted your brain is poised for breakthroughs.
  • Even with teams, it’s better to mix up experience levels, familiarity with one another and other factors to keep things rough around the edges.
And at the organizational level, there’s ecosystem strategy.  That’s a post unto itself…
Ask:
– How do you make it easy for the customer to do business with you?
– What outcomes do you want to see?
– What is required to achieve those outcomes?
– What must be done? What needs to change?
– How do we make innovation a embedded process?

Inclusivity: Will America Find Its Soul Again?

I know what some of you are thinking – “Well, did America have a soul to begin with?” I happen to think it did. For me the soul of America is “We, the people…”

Furthermore, I’m quite sure that people, as defined by our founders, did not mean corporations. (See what Charles Handy has to say >>)

But to get back to the topic of inclusivity, I’d like to make a shameless plug for our new book, co-authored with University of Michigan’s Professor Michael Gordon, called Inclusivity: Will America Find Its Soul Again?

inclusivity bookbuy now

BUY now >>

So what’s all the fuss about? The book is about asking questions:

  • How can companies take better care of their employees–and thrive?
  • Why don’t they see the opportunities in creating social value?
  • Do Americans think we have a fair distribution of wealth?
  • What are new means of putting our collective talents to work?
  • How can communities take the lead in creating opportunity?
  • How can public education prepare all students for the future?
  • How can better health care be made available without doctors?
  • How can communities do something about global warming?
  • How can you make a difference?
  • Why should you care?

Inclusivity: Will America Find Its Soul Again is a book of questions, hints, and suggestions about creating more opportunity for more people–starting with the USA, but looking at and learning from the rest of the world.

The very idea of the “United” States is based on the principles of inclusivity–all men and women are created equal under the law. But we seem to have lost our conviction that inclusivity is possible or even to be desired. The current divisive political climate, along with economic uncertainty, has fostered an atmosphere of fear and narrow-mindedness across the country.

What can we do in the face of this reality? The choice is not easy, but it is clear. Either we will decide to be more inclusive, or we will turn against each other – finding reasons to divide ourselves, not just from each other as citizens, but also from a shared future.

The USA, unless we decide otherwise, will become simply the SA.

This book is dedicated to an inclusive future for all our children, including my daughters M and K, and the idea that the United States is still the last best hope for democracy and inclusivity. We won’t have one without the other.

The book includes the following sections:

  • What Is INCLUSIVITY?
  • Inclusive World
  • Inclusive Entrepreneur
  • Inclusive Economy
  • Inclusive Cities
  • Inclusive Education
  • Inclusive Health
  • Inclusive Leadership
  • Inclusive Future

Let us know what you think!

P.S. – We don’t want this, do we?

Design Your Life, Change the World

Michael Gordon‘s book, Design Your Life, Change the World: Your Path as a Social Entrepreneur [A GUIDE for CHANGEMAKERS] is for changemakers – the people and organizations that want to make a difference in the world. 

book

The book tries to answer two questions, says Professor Gordon:

1) How can organizations best address important societal problems such as poverty, inadequate health care, sub-par education, and an unhealthy planet?

2) What’s the best advice for students who want to address these issues and still live lives of relative comfort?

The reason I’m helping the professor is because now, more than ever, we need the brightest students to tackle the world’s biggest problems. And the oil-coal-nuclear lobby isn’t making things any easier…

Are you a changemaker?  Go find out >> 

P.S. – you can download the PDF version here >>