…and your *ss will follow. Just saying.
The Diagram of the Human Mind, Robert Fludd, 1617
How do we bring smart people together to advance regeneration?
At the Regenerative Marketing Institute, our mission is to advance the Common Good by promoting practices that regenerate communities, ecosystems, and institutions.
To realize this mission, we are assembling a diverse council of strategic advisers — individuals whose depth of experience, breadth of perspective, and track record of leadership extend far beyond a single industry or worldview. Hopefully, these advisers are not symbolic; but instead are active contributors to the thinking and strategy that will shape how regenerative principles are understood and implemented.
Regenerative practice is still emerging as a field. Definitions, frameworks, and measurement tools are evolving. Guidance from a diverse advisory network helps refine the language and frameworks we share with practitioners, leaders, and organizations so that regenerative ideas are rigorous, inclusive, and impactful. What matters is that we understand and learn from each other, and catalog the various roads to regeneration out there.
No single discipline holds all the answers.
By bringing together advisers from academia, business innovation, systems design, sustainability strategy, and culture, we create a cross-pollination of insights that reflects the interconnected challenges we seek to address. Our strategic advisers help ensure our initiatives are not only visionary but actionable — embedded in real world dynamics and capable of influencing business, policy, and community outcomes. They help us design processes, events, research, and learning experiences that are co-creative, not hierarchical, ensuring that solutions are context-based and rooted in the needs and aspirations of people on the ground.
Of course, not all advisers will collaborate in the same way or at the same pace. It’s a strategic garden – a shared intellectual soil in which we nurture new regenerative thinking.
That is the hope.
Shortlisted: The Thinkers50 Regenerative Business Award
Our work on regeneration was recognized by the Thinkers50 organization. This helps validate our work at the Regenerative Marketing Institute and for that we are grateful.
Furthermore, we are glad to see regeneration as an emerging category in management thinking.
Our thinking is shaped by a very simple principle: there is no regeneration without the regeneration of the Common Good.
We have created monsters – by teaching extraction and exploitation. AI and robots, guided by these same principles will destroy what we call civilization. Machine capitalism and climate shocks are already leading to social collapse. Fascism has returned.
Governments and businesses will have to rethink everything.
Will government of the people, by the people, for the people perish from the Earth?
Our misleaders have failed us. It is up to us – starting with new leadership, new management, new principles, and new narratives.
Japan: Culture-watching plus Regeneration?
Regenerative Japan? I’m going to be traveling to Japan for the first time – visiting EXPO 2025 OSAKA JAPAN and culture-watching… Along the way, I expect to meet new friends to discuss regeneration and wicked-problem exploration – from a Japanese perspective.
- How do companies re-invent themselves in a time of collapse?
- What must governments do to prepare their people?
- How does collaboration work in a time of permacrisis?
- How do communities prepare for perpetual chaos?
- What is the job of the regenerative leader at this time?
- Is it time for Asia to lead?
These are all topics we are exploring at the Regenerative Marketing Institute with Philip Kotler and Enrico Foglia.
If you have the time to meet, ping me on LinkedIn, and let’s chat.
London Calling: COMMON HOME 2025
The theme of our COMMON HOME conference is “Regenerating the Common Good” and our goal is to help advance a sense of urgency – the door to survival is shutting and we’re trying to stick a foot in – to slow things down.
Accelerating extinction isn’t a good business plan for anyone.
Very thankful to UCL’s Paolo Taticchi for helping us put the conference together in London. Thanks to Enrico Foglia and Philip Kotler – nothing would be happening without them. Thanks also to Assoholding – a steady partner in turbulent times.
And special thanks to all the incredible speakers – grazie mille!
Download the event program here >>
Four Questions on Regeneration
– What is regeneration?
– Why is it relevant for systems change?
– What are the opportunities of regeneration for systems change?
– What are the challenges of regeneration for systems change?
These are 4 questions I’m supposed to answer for a webinar in a few minutes. By way of preparation here are my “answers” >>
What is regeneration?
Here’s our definition from our book:
Regeneration is a process of rebuilding or renewal of the Common Good – taking an asset, resource, ecosystem, individual, family, organization, community, or place, from crisis and collapse to recovery and regeneration.
There are 9 Domains of the Common Good: Social, Economics, Nature, Work, Culture, Media, Law, Technology, and Politics.
The process of regeneration follows indigenous traditions: to protect, repair, invest, transform and learn – rooted in the pastand looking forward, seven generations ahead. Regeneration includes 5 Worlds, interconnected and interdependent, the individual, community, work, the Nation, and the Planet.
Why is it relevant for systems change?
Because all our systems are interconnected –
and the root cause of why nothing changes is power and corruption. The Wicked 7 Project taught us that at the heart of all our problems is the existing power structure.
What are the opportunities of regeneration for systems change?
It’s not an opportunity – it is a matter of survival. As we collapse into fragmented regional economies, we’re going to find that systems thinking is the best hope we have for actually creating a life worth living – at a community level, or regional state level.
Here’s the before – our current state:
and the after:
Can you see why systems thinking is critical?
What are the challenges of regeneration for systems change?
The challenge is leadership.
Our current state of leadership can rightly be called misleadership – because it does not advance the Common Good, but instead promotes self-interest, corruption, hate, nationalism, and drowns out the voice of the Planet. Because of their inaction and their inability to face the world’s most urgent problems, humanity retreats to narrow, parochial survivalism – a world of war and brute force. The rule of law is once again discarded on the trash heap of history, as our governments turn inward and increasingly more authoritarian and corrupt.
The systems around us are breaking—socially, ecologically, politically, and spiritually. Our world is fractured by inequality, poisoned by extraction, and divided by misinformation. The Common Good—our shared dignity, wellbeing, and future—is under assault.
By now it should be obvious to the public that our leaders are (for the most part) not interested in serving the Common Good. They are engaged in an ancient form of misleadership – maximizing value for themselves and their sponsors. If there’s one attribute which separates the regenerative leader from the traditional leader, it is their focus on the Common Good.
Our regenerative leadership model is an attempt to bring all the pieces together – systems-wide, and 5 worlds deep.
You are the future.
Fight for it.
Wicked Problems: What can we do in a Time of Collapse?
There are enough wicked problems the planet has to deal with already, without adding or exacerbating the one we already have. Yet Comrade Trump and his fearless DOGE monkeys insist on breaking everything we hold dear as Americans.
What can be done?
Read our book. It’s timely and may spark a few ideas. There’s a reason the Republicans are banning books – they don’t want us to know that another world is possible.
Read as if our lives depend on it.
Read, and act.
Bye, Democracy! The Enshittification of Government
Today we begin the process of de-democratization across the institutions of the United States.
In “rocket-science” terms, our Democracy and the Constitution may experience a rapid unscheduled disassembly (RUD).
What will this look like?
What does a kleptocracy look like? A kakistocracy?
Big Biz bends the knee. Degeneration full steam ahead.
The enshittification of government is the hallmark of Crapitalism, but not limited to it; all forms of government are susceptible to enshittification.
Stay tuned for the Trump tragicomedy…
Are You Ready?
Dark MAGA is almost upon us.
Are you ready?
Hide your books, children.
How to Control Society
As the world spirals into crazy, do you get the distinct feeling that you are powerless. Don’t. Our world is just programmed to make you feel that way.
A few days ago I stumbled upon this – “If you were going to take over society and keep humanity from reaching its full enlightened potential, how would you do it?” The question was asked by Rob Sidon of Common Ground.
Sound familiar?
Before we turn into crazy conspiracy theorists, let’s pause for a moment.
Why is everything such a disaster: our politics, mass deportations, the climate crisis, Ukraine, Gaza. COP 29, the World Cup,? How is it possible that on almost every single problem in the world, we make the wrong choice> Is it our flawed decision-making? Nope. Our democracy is doing exactly what our system was designed to do – protect the status quo and make the hyper-rich even more money.
There’s a lot more here.
Stay tuned for our book – Wicked Problems: What can we do in this Time of Collapse?
What Next? Here comes Project 2025
Project 2025 is a roadmap for Trump’s radical-Republican administration to remove the guardrails on capitalism. It will eviscerate government as we know it.
Here are the fun bullet points:
- Federal Restructuring: Aimed at dismantling what is termed the “administrative state,” the plan seeks to consolidate executive power (the authoritarian strongman model). It proposes significant agency overhauls, potentially eliminating or slashing several federal departments (welcome to Argentina). The strategy includes making civil service roles more politically aligned through the “Schedule F” initiative, which would reclassify federal employees as at-will workers, removing their job protections (all government employees are now Trump employees).
- Immigration Policy: The document calls for extensive measures, including mass deportations and bolstering border enforcement (the ICEman cometh!). We will see private detention centers and concentration camps built to hold “targets,” separate families, and create life-threatening emergencies for the “illegals” – with massive government contracts with the private sector to build, operate and manage detention facilities (the American Gulag). It describes one of the largest deportation operations in U.S. history and promotes measures to curtail asylum options, while also focusing on the construction of more border barriers. (We are now free to pick our own produce, build our own houses, and fix our own highways… yay, freedom).
- Deregulation and Energy: Project 2025 will roll back environmental regulations to promote fossil fuel powered energy independence, ramping up dirty fuel (coal, oil, gas) production and reducing the regulatory footprint of agencies like the EPA (if the agency survives at all). It advocates for opening federal lands to more energy extraction and minimizing climate-related oversight (bye, fresh air and clean water!)
- Education Reform: The plan pushes for greater state control over education policy, aiming to reduce federal oversight and promote school choice, including charter schools and vouchers. Books will be banned. Guns will be part of the teacher’s toolkit. Let’s accelerate the dumbing down of society (bye, science!).
- Judicial and Legislative Strategy: New right-wing judicial appointments will cement long-term policy gains and steamroll Republican-controlled Congress legislation (women, watch out).
In short, we can kiss democracy goodbye. We will replace the bureaucratic deep state with Trump’s deep state.
How do we resist this descent into trumpfuckery?
Stay tuned.
Democracy or Fascism?
Is your company Democracy Positive?
Another green corporate buzzword is making the rounds: “Nature Positive.”
But what does this really mean? More hot air? More inaction? More distraction?
The outcomes are what matter (and they don’t look good):
I’d like to see this chart going back four hundred years…
For the billionaires and other anti-socials who support accelerationism, your children will curse you – if they survive.
For the rest of us, it’s time to fight.
Is your company democracy positive? Or is it actively promoting fascism?
Start by voting for democracy.
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.
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.
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 >>
Ukraine: Wicked Problems can be solved… but how?
Philip Kotler and I join MIM’s Vyacheslav Pokotylo to discuss wicked problems and community-based regeneration:
Cettina Martorana on Politics and Regeneration
This week I interviewed Cettina Martorana, a candidate in Sicily’s regional elections on the subject of regenerative politics.
Can politics be regenerative at all?
Martorana is a professional business woman who finds herself in an election because she was drafted by Caterina Chinnici – the candidate on the left for president of the Sicilian Assembly.
Here are five points I got out of our discussion:
- Nature must be at the heart of all future decisions.
- The climate crisis is an economic crisis and a social crisis.
- Regeneration is an alternative to polarization
- Regenerative politics is beyond left vs. right
- Regenerative politics is based on problem solving
If our politics don’t engage the youth, what’s the point in politics at all? Martorana’s idea is simple: ask the students what they want and find ways to create opportunities for them. She does this through an old media format – comics!
But her message is serious.
Here is Martorana’s tree of regeneration – a symbol to capture the interconnected nature of all things in the community:
Martorana’s unique campaign is based on a deep understanding and empathy for the plight facing Sicily’s youth. Jobs and employment are scarce, and now with COVID and climate change, things may get much worse. As a problem-solver, she aims to explain why regenerative politics is not just a word, but the way forward.
You can check Martorana’s ideas out at www.cettinamartorana.it – with the help of Google translate!
Regeneration: The Future of Community
This is the TEDxAthens presentation on regeneration – a preview of the book:
Steel Pulse: “Only One World (Wicked Problems)”
The legendary reggae band Steel Pulse (one of Bob Marley’s favorites) raises its voice to challenge the world to come together – a “movements of movements” – to save the Earth:
The song is a collaboration between Steel Pulse and The Wicked7 Project.
Special thanks to Jessica Lieng from the W7 Working Group for putting together the video. Maximum respect to Steel Pulse and David Hinds in particular!
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)
Webinar: “Power & Corruption”
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 >>
Brand Activism: The Indian Edition
The Indian edition of our Brand Activism book is now available. It includes a few examples of Indian businesses and we added the Pyramids of Hate and Love…
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 >>
The Wicked7 Project: Inequality
Check it out, and join the Wicked7 Project challenge.
Why is nothing happening?
The Wicked7 Project Meets the #ForkintheRoad
What are we going to do now? The #forkintheroad which Buckminster Fuller warned us about is here now >> “Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment… Humanity is in a final exam as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in the Universe.”
What will it take to leap across the chasm and undo the destruction we’ve caused? Why can’t the UN fix it?
We’re hurtling into a state of climate emergency whilst we simultaneously face the convergence of the Wicked7.
What are the Wicked7? The world’s most urgent problems.
We’ve distilled over 200 problems into the Wicked7:
- The Death of Nature
- Inequality
- Hate & Conflict
- Power & Corruption
- Work and Technology
- Health and Livelihood
- Population & Migration
You can’t solve wicked problems. That’s what we’ve been led to believe. And for years, we haven’t. Solve them, that is.
Well, if not now, then when?
Wicked problems must have virtuous solutions. If any lesson has emerged from this COVID-19 pandemic, it is this: we must address the urgent problems of the world now, or perish. Why? Because COVID-19 is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg… the ecosystem of wicked problems will not wait.
After working on this idea for over a year, Philip Kotler and I kicked off the Wicked7 Challenge on April Fool’s Day, 2021.
Our first challenge? The Death of Nature.
Join us >>
P.S. – Bucky Fuller was wrong. Thanks to Sonmoy, one of our W7 advisors, we now see that there’s a triple fork in the road, and utopia is simply no longer an option. What we must fight for is survival.
The Wicked7 Project
Join Philip Kotler and myself as we kickoff this project to “save humanity from itself.”
WEBINAR >> April 1, 2021 >> 4 pm EASTERN / 10 PM EU
REPLAY available here >>
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.
The Unmet Needs of Society
Multi-stakeholder Jobs to be Done
One of the points of the Wicked7 Project is to demonstrate how we have a shared responsibility — business, government, and social institutions — to work together for the future of the planet.
By definition, solving society’s most urgent problems is a balancing act between the various requirements and needs of the different stakeholders across all sectors. Our policy-making must be driven by this idea of balance if it is to create a sustainable and resilient society.
Read >> The Unmet Needs of Society: Introducing Multi-stakeholder Jobs to be Done by Christian Sarkar, Anthony Ulwick, and Philip Kotler.
From “The Ecosystem of Poverty” to “The Ecosystem of Wicked Problems”
In 2015, the late architect and teacher Abhijit De and I wrote an article for Thinkers called The Ecosystem of Poverty: Lessons Learned from the $300 House.
In it we popped in a chart that was constructed after days and months of debate with students, surveys and discussions with villagers in rural India, and the “experts”:
Soon after, we were working on the concept of a “smart village” – with the sobering realization that the problems of the poor are not going to be solved without solving other wicked problems. A few days before his untimely passing, we discussed expanding this chart.
Now, in 2020 – Philip Kotler and myself, along with a gracious cast of advisers, have embarked on this journey once more; this time we are looking to map the world’s most urgent wicked problems.
This “ecosystem of wicked problems“ is not going to magically vanish. It needs our attention, now more than ever.
And that’s the point of The Wicked 7 Project.
Join us >>
The Third Place: A Space for Community
In his book The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community, sociologist Ray Oldenburg suggests citizens should live in a balance of three kingdoms: home, work, and social. The social space would be the third place – a great, good place.
This is what the local “community center” was supposed to be. Some community centers succeed because of their inclusivity and community roots. Senior citizens go to the community center not to play bingo, but to meet each other and talk. The same applies to the kids who hang out at malls. Libraries, bookstores, and bars serve the same purpose.
This is what Starbucks‘ Howard Schultz had in mind when he imported the idea of the Italian coffee house to the US. The only problem with the model is the cost of the coffee. In some ways, we could argue that Starbucks is exploiting our psychological need for community to make excessive profits.
Here’s Oldenburg:
In order for the city and its neighborhoods to offer the rich and varied association that is their promise and their potential, there must be neutral ground upon which people may gather. There must be places where individuals may come and go as they please, in which none are required to play host, and in which all feel at home and comfortable. If there is no neutral ground in the neighborhoods where people live, association outside the home will be impoverished.
Is there a “neutral ground” in your neighborhood? Why or why not?
Urban developers and designers must be held accountable for the lack of public space.
So how do we begin placemaking?
The attributes of a “great place” are also the attributes of community building.
So why do developers ignore these when they design neighborhoods?
Development policy must not be driven by developer profits, and yet this is the case almost everywhere. Our leaders are not interested in building healthy communities. Their interests lie with their sponsors.
O, Democracy.
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)
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:
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?
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.
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 >>
Richard Branson: Business As Unusual
I don’t watch TV much but I just caught a clip of Richard Branson promoting his book Screw Business As Usual
What was funny was watching Branson sit there as the producers had him wait and wait for his three minute interview. He was clearly in distress – the anguish of the entrepreneur who can’t bear to waste time – as he smiled and waved every time they turned the camera on him.
The book is available later this month… have a Happy Green Christmas!