Monthly Archives: December 2013

Divine obsolescence, Sustainability & the silent S in Business Transformation.

31 Tuesday Dec 2013

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Mention to a sustainability person that their career trajectory should be hurtling them towards some form of divine obsolescence and the reactions are suffice to say, mixed.

The idea of them passing through some blissful reinvention to rise phoenix-like, only stronger and wiser, in some new primary function at the heart of the business doesn’t always ring everyone’s career bell.

The fact that they should wish to render their current position and the status they derive from it obsolete – a planned professional obsolescence – seems confusing to some, demeaning to others and otherwise simply quietly terrifying to those who have been on the S mission for so long.

Success for most Sustainability people (and their CSR cousins for that matter) is surely achieved at the moment that all of those smart systemic cultural, operational, environmental and social practices, policies and processes they have been championing for years finally become an invisible seamless part of the standard functions of the business. (Or as one Kellogg ELT member said to me once in a meeting – simply just the way that business does business.)

I would go further: I would celebrate that ‘moment’ with some form of International Award system and accreditation that recognizes the real Transformation the moment augers.

The award would celebrate the transformation (both of the person and the business itself) heralded by a Sustainability person moving their S skills and expertise invisibly and indelibly to the heart of that business. Also because it would show that the sustainability profession can move from a support to a leadership function. In that way each sustainability person develops a new focus, seeking to be the living embodiment of the right kind of positive obsolescence.

Of course there will be teething problems. When any one party finally shakes off the mindset and strategies of opposition to take on a leadership role, it takes some time for it to also shake out those who ‘hide’ in opposition; rather the provocateur in the shadows than the leader in the stark light.

In that way the sustainability profession would finally become a true reflection of the qualities in both products and lifestyles it compels the rest of the world to embrace: either that of a singular sturdy, unwavering and enduring utility designed for fluid existence from cradle to cradle – or that of a single thing that propagates multiple by-product life-cycles and strategies of reuse, recycling, repairing or re-tasking.

This ability to build in positive obsolescence should not be a stretch for any of us professionally as it seems to present few issues to us personally.

In our own private lives, the slightest whiff of our obsolete selves wafting into view and suddenly we’re a whirlwind of re-creation – everything thrown at a new model us – starting with a new look, a makeover, a killer pair of shoes; a new hairstyle. Then it is support pants, shaving and waxing (come on gents, don’t be coy, you do), non-surgery lifts, strenuous gym regimes, 2 day starvation diets replaced by Neanderthal diets and then nips and tucks abound. (Or at its least, a chin gym from a catalogue perhaps?)

There are trillion dollar industries wholly based on the fact that we’re mostly quietly terrified of being ousted by a better smarter genetic model of humanity in our everyday life.

So why not perhaps point a little of that at one’s professional persona – especially if one works in the one profession which should know better than most what smart obsolescence looks like – one based on transformation, regeneration and improvement.

In doing so, sustainability people would be applying the smartest evolutionary strategies they know to themselves. If they don’t, the brightness of the future becomes questionable. There are many specialist sector and discipline professionals who can tell them what it feels like to miss the evolution train; many who now the price to pay for refusing to adapt; many who are now contemplating the professional landfill stretching out in front of them.

Sustainability people need to apply all of their brain-power and every ounce of diplomatic skill they have (or that they buy in) to render their own ‘Sell By’ date obsolete.

They need to ‘opt in’ to being an inextricable part of the transformative and regenerative engine in every brand and business. They need to be sitting at the heart of the action when a brand or business is trying figure out new qualitative growth strategies, not clinging to an outmoded professional signifier or tribal colour, abdicating the trials of leadership to some other, and then sitting at the edge in some fit of professional pique

Hopefully 2014 will usher in a new evolutionary professional dawn – or there might just be a lot of babies on that bathwater landfill.

Brands, Palm Oil & The Ugly Face Of Beauty

20 Friday Dec 2013

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After the recent piece regarding Palm Oil and the depredations its industrial cultivation rains on the heads of one of our most wonderful simian cousins, if there is anyone in the beauty industry or from one of its agencies that read it and didn’t end up feeling anything other than a creeping, yawing shame climb up their neck I would be staggered.

Sadly, whether they give enough of a flying arse to do or say anything about it has more to do with income, career, the unassailable truth of an utterly disinterested management structure and the luxury of distance.

The management of these corporations know that the desperate human psyche is obsessed in ever increasing degrees it seems with looking like something they’re not. Or once were.

And the masters of those businesses keep a firm (serum tightened) eye on supplying the relentless demand for sleights of hand in the human genetic condition department – primarily around the strands that:

a) make us look the way we do

b) make us smell the way we do

b) force us to age

The simple fact is, when it comes to holding the pedlars of the beauty myth to task, our vanities render us mute.

How could we say anything? We’re all still queuing up to slather umpteeen variants on a palm oil theme over our selves to the point of sociopathic self obsession and distraction. Once we’ve lathered (palm oil) conditioned (palm oil) scrubbed (palm oil) primped (palm oil) buffed (palm oil) BB’d (palm oil) Eye-lined (palm Oil) and glossed (palm Oil) we’re hardly likely to suddenly have a lot to say about the relentless abuse, dislocation and death of a distant orange relative (the Orangutan that is – not the 23 year old with the addiction to a high-street chain of tanning shops called the Electric Beach).

Curious given that we all get very upset in the UK about the ill treatment of animals – if you tried (I dare you) to replay the scenes set out in the article about the brutal treatment of oranguans by plantation farm hands on a more home grown creature in your local park, the retribution would indeed be swift and brutal.

If you were to pop down to a county market town somewhere on a blustery saturday, identify a suitable creature – a classic labrador bitch perhaps with a pup in tow – and then set about her with a club with such force that it killed her: at which point you are liberated to kidnap and sell the orphan pup for £6 down the pub, I think we all know what would happen.

It is doubtful that you would even get the club-stick over your head before an outraged brawling scrum of sturdy county women, art students, Chuggers, the vicar, a couple of bloodsports types, a Big Issue seller and the odd till lady from WH Smiths have hurled you to the floor and set about taking your clubstick and turning you into a lollypop.

“I simply didn’t realise! And the little orange people are all the way over there aren’t they dear! And what could little old me do anyway”. And so slap, slap, slap, slap happy, we carry on regardless.

The measure of Distance from or Proximity to crimes against any species, human or otherwise, has always had a direct relation on the measure of both empathy and action against those crimes. Twas always thus. In the old days empires happily wrought bloody havoc all over the globe BUT to the happy, buoyantly nationalistic and highly civilised folks at home, nothing. By the time the news arrived on their breakfast table, it had been boil-washed, scrubbed and swaddled in the white spotless shroud of po-piety and the moral high ground. BUT in our joined up fibre-optic world when the news arrives in nanoseconds in myriad formats and content forms across multiple channels most, of them served directly into the palm of our hand, that little excuse has worn a little thin; much like the veneer of respectability and humanity that exists in corporations large enough to do something about furry orange genocide.

So, all in all, if we have to put anything under some brutal scrutiny, the modern concept of beauty and the manner in which we ‘ape’ the myth we’re presented with by the movies and magazines, is worthy of a little more rigour.

The toxic nature of the pursuit of it as played out on the world stage by stretch faced harridans (both male & female – lets hear it for Christopher Guest!) who have lost the ability to express any emotion in their faces (how surgery reveals the inner soul perhaps?) and their effect on the young mainly women bullied into low self esteem, eating disorders and galloping dysmorphia, toxic and sometimes fatal tanning, relentless plucking and, on a lighter note, an approach to the sexual mores of bodily hair that owes more to porno and paedophillia than it does to any pure aesthetic perceptions of the physical sexual potency of mature adults with all the incumbent accessories – like normal pubic hair!

In the end I suppose one has to decide what one finds beautiful regardless of whether one’s focus is particularly on the human face or form or some other derivative shade of what constitutes a canvass for the beautiful and sublime.

We also have to decide what price we or anyone else for that matter might pay for the pursuit, attainment and maintenance of that beauty: both individually and collectively.

In individual terms, some will just quietly destroy themselves in pursuit of this unsustainable illusion, others loudly and visibly. Some will destroy those immediately around them, their loved ones and friends; some will simply bankrupt themselves in the process either through a bathroom full of age defying cremes with science defying benefits and means defying price tags or through the insidiously addictive and ultimately disfiguring process of plastic surgery.

But all of us, as a collective; as a global nation of beauty chasers, destroy things far afield every time we pick up a beauty product that relies on Palm Oil to deliver itself to the world. And that’s not pretty.

This is not to say there are not other myriad reasons for the sheer scale and dizzying growth in the Palm Oil trade. Its classing as a biofuel allows some of the more destructive or venal farmers to alleviate their conscience while alleviate the primates of their habitat.

But the beauty industry needs to become beautiful on the inside as well as the outside – and it has a world of ugliness to attend to to do it; because our orange cousins deserve more from us as a relative and we deserve more for our money from the brands that serve us..

Banality, Insanity & The Human Condition. The Life Chamber: a short story (virtually)

16 Monday Dec 2013

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Dan stood expressionless at the mouth of the walkway.

Ridiculous. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d made a decision by himself. Perhaps he never had. But then again, fuck it. The Chamber was there. Why not use it.

To be fair, no-one he knew ever made a decision – a big one anyway – without ‘immersion’ – the slightly baptismal name for a quick session in the Chamber.

And using the Chamber was just so damn easy. A quick questionnaire and background was all that was needed. Provide Your Avatar; your DNA PIN, faith (passive or active) social network; your game personas and your economic and geographic bearing and you were ready to roll. (Dan was already a Gold Tier Traveller.)

The Chamber was a pretty cool piece of kit. Its Possibilities software programme offered a number of primary, secondary and tertiary consequences so large they had to write a second programme to help them reduce the time it took to calculate across the consequence matrices of the first. Nice.

Why was it so popular? Well, no brainer really – in more ways than one.

It allowed you, from the Right Here Right Now, to see how life might play out – it projected your future by playing out in a multitude of actions and consequences, with every action rooted in your previous behaviours and tendencies, digitally correlated to your past and both what you may have done and did do with it and in it. The Chamber played those future possibilities out from the next second to a millennia hence- based on the chain of events you would ignite by any decision you acted upon.

And boy did it open your mind.

When you first went in, all was pretty dark – just a low lit walk way to a central glass platform that seemed to hover in the middle of the air. You had no idea of the construction wrapped around you at this point.

Once you were on the platform, your sight-line was directed by a small amber pin-prick light in the distance. Once you’d locked on that – pow – quick iris scan and you were off – and off was the right word.

After the first few tests they had quickly developed a more gentle fade up timeframe. It seemed the sudden appearance of a thousand cosmoses of opportunity and consequence were so shocking to the human guinea pigs experiencing them that one had a heart attack, two soiled themselves and the fourth reached a rather inappropriate state of arousal (psychopath apparently!)

Anyway, when it rise up in front of you, the effect was so exhilarating it was hard not to just hurl yourself off the platform as, surely, life could never be filled with more wonderment than that which was spread out before you now. The Chamber was a sociopath’s dream.

Look up and you could see your potential for exceptional success rising high above and around you, in front and behind of you – a bright dome of possibility; the fully illustrated illuminated text of the best of you – rendered in one seamless trajectory from the day of your conception to the day you expired. (there was a second Chamber for Posthumous Possibilities and Consequence) Equally all you need do was look down around and about your feet and you had set out before you exactly how bad the failure could get.

Looking forwards was OK but you could kinda figure that out by yourself – the picture of what could be if you carried on as you were.

The really, really brilliant thing happened when you looked left and right – and to what degree and angle you did so.

If you looked to your right, the Chamber would reveal to you what Could Be: and by looking to the left all that Should Be. Slightly nuts – and the theory of it did in fact pitch Dan into a dreadful two month period of insomnia riddled with the brain worms of How on Earth…!?.

Part if its massive impact and WOW factor was in the way the visual technology seamlessly played out what were in effect quintillions of cause and effect strands that all overlapped and informed each other but in such a way as you could actually consume what you were looking at in any way that made any sense whatsoever. Cleverly, they synched everything to the iris lock directional software that drew the part you were looking at into perfect focus while allowing the squillions of slightly shaded variations of the same consequence in its immediate proximity fall out of focus.

It was utterly overwhelming the first few times he used it. He just wasn’t wired that way. Dan’s brother was the gamer, not him. To be able to look around and see how actions he was yet to take might play out in so many ways was frankly insane.

The obvious ones in a straight line stretching out in front of you were easy enough. They were almost pedestrian.

It was the Maybe!? and What if? on the left and right, above and in front of you that really blew your mind.

The Could Be hemisphere offered up visualisations or opportunities – potential decisions based on myriad trajectories from where he was in life right now, drawing in his past actions and outcomes; and calculating the consequences they could deliver going forwards (allowing for all the other 15 billion people stuffed on the planet and their own set of infinite possibilities and his colliding at any given point). Genius.

The Should Be hemisphere was, on the other hand a whole different deal. Whether they admitted it or not, it was basically judging you – a moral, ethical and humanistic filter that was more to do with what you deserved as a human being – a value judgement on you and how you lived your life – and the right of entitlement to nice things happening to you those would deliver.

There were still a lot of naysayers out there about the Chamber and its toxic and addictive nature. Whatever. It made total sense to Dan. There was a sublime logic about the Chamber.

What did they think was going to happen when all that data digital mobile virtual stuff finally met in the middle anyways? Brain Implants Avatars Full immersion virtual experiences, future genome and DNA mapping, data petri-dishes…and all that…STUFF – what did they think was going to turn up?

The number of gamer software programmers out there had been left to their own unaudited devices for decades: developing intuitive algorithms that could meter out infinitesimal shades of cause and effect in real time – organic consequences from any number of human actions and reactions, across multiple players and combinations in any circumstance. When they revealed how far they’d got – effectively developing a parallel universe that our Avatars could live in on their own sweet evolving terms, the proverbial and virtual really hit the notional and legal fan. Once the furore had died down (and that took a while) the Senate agreed that all of the programmes and supporting data would be secured by one host – them funnily enough.

And it wasn’t just the brain bit of the gamer stuff. The platform graphics had learned to keep up. Why wouldn’t they? They were smart evolving programmes too. When they synched that lot with the digital mapping of the planet – elevator madness.  The upgrade impact in virtual experience was initially immeasurable. (They had to subsequently upgrade the neuro-science monitors to read the new wave cadences.) Let’s just say that the ability to capture and render every shade of material environment in 4D alone, had become so sophisticated that some of the scientists managing the programme ended up literally not knowing what planet they were on– and has to be sent on a ReLocation Centre to wean them out of the virtual world they lived in back into the real one.

So:

That eventually, some smart arse would think it was a great idea to take all the uber-advanced human plastics generation technology, genome and DNA mapping, intelligence banks, A.I., gamification programmes and consumer data banks as well as every organic and plastic materiality index and put them in one place was no big surprise. That the said smart arse would also think to converge them into one huge intuitive evolving thinking machine with out first having figured out to what use to put it was a When? and Who?, not an If? or a Why? conundrum!

But two things popped up to save the day on the Why anyway.

A) the Vivisection & Animal testing pressure groups won in the Global High Court. So when the geeks said ‘hey let’s create some virtual humans to experiment on!’ it was high fives and whoop de whoops all round, followed by a sudden urgent and surprisingly coincidental need to develop virtual humans with enough random characteristics in them and undefined cause and effect strands to render them plausible as test moneys .

B) Poor Time-poor first worlders had become so concerned about the degradation of their optimal decision making abilities, compromised by the new speed of life and its attendant devices, that they lobbied successfully for an institution to be established in the public good to enable them to stay, well, optimal.

But because everyone was so tense about the whole ethics thing, every platform, strand and data organism designer was compelled to build an ethical monitoring system and a kill switch into their technology and supporting programming to ensure no mutating toxic or belligerent strands were allowed to develop, rise and prevail. A sort of systemic Do Good Do The Right Thing value programme.

Dan had always thought this was kinda funny – that the scientists that had chased the old God out of the old universe had in fact become the architects of a new him/her/it in their new one.

The really scary bit though had come from the really basic data stuff that had slowly been building up in the vaults of the big consumer companies. Their ability to know and capture in malleable data bundles the banalities and nondescript details of the human condition – when a razor was binned, the speed at which someone crossed a given space, the number of times they recharged the batteries for their sex toys, the fallibility of the individual (wrong turns, punctuality, household breakages), their attitude to risk (heathy purchase of Savlon and Junior Sun Screen?) –  had become so sophisticated that the Big Bank (the human data centre) could actually cut the data in such a way as to predict when a certain post-coded 34 year old Latino guy called Miguel was most likely to forget to pick up something his wife ordered dependent on from which direction he approached the mall.

So, anyway, take all that stuff, and fuse it together some killer polyhedrous curved screen innovation and bingo. The Chamber.

The passive fibrillating sensation bought Dan back to the now. Dan flicked his ThumbMic. It was Cheryl.

CHERYL: You sound weird. What’s up? [ PAUSE ] Don’t tell me? Dan you’re not in that place AGAIN? You’re in The Chamber aren’t you?

DAN: Yup.

CHERYL: For chrissakes! Dan. Its just a birthday present. For a 4 year old?! Surely you can figure that out all by yourself. Jeezus!

CLICK. The line went dead.

Dan pondered a moment before walking down the low lit walkway. It hadn’t been going terribly well with Cheryl recently.  But what to do…what to do?!! Dan dropped a quick note on to his palm screen to book anther Chamber session for next week.

Needs Must and all that.

SUPERDIGICALORIFICTXTMEAPPITROCIOUS! Supersize living &; the rise of digital obesity.

15 Sunday Dec 2013

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Speed of Life is a wonderful thing. Progress, and the inexorable march of on line living, technology and the sprawling social networks that have come with it, has slung shot those who can afford it into a 21st century filled with an endless stream of content for the highly emerged and highly demanding Right Here Right Now digital citizen.

It’s not hard to see why Businesses and brands desperate to stitch themselves into the fabric of the new consumer consciousness have come to see leaping into this new digital wonderland as a magic answer, inspiring, resolving and delivering all of their dreams, issues and woes at once.

Digital ‘stuff’ can illuminate and expand brand presence, overcome budgetary and operational challenges and polyfill inadequacies all in one shot. Genius. What’s more the captive audience is awesome. There’s a heaving mass of relentlessly connected creatures out there superglued to one device or another, as brilliant as the 3D graphics on our android touch screen and as unlimited as our mobile package, bound in an electric cat’s cradle of joined-up-ness.

And in a world where People talk to people; machines talk to buildings; homes talk to owners; bus-stops chat to commuters, cams speak to police stations, clouds speak to cables and ideas speak to reality through 3D printing technology, the opportunities for businesses and brands to inveigle themselves are seemingly endless.

Our kaleidoscopic ability to multi-task our multi-life and its many personas, searching a holiday, gaming, booking a table, sending an email, grabbing three music downloads (illegally of course) while txt avoiding a tricky mother and recently downgraded BF between wi-fi hotpots presents a wonderland for every experience, service, product and platform designer, innovator and engineer out there.

For a business looking to:

  • build an authentic meaningful and differentiated social brand
  • Improve Reputation and NPS scores
  • stimulate appropriate and meaningful innovation that creates and captures real value
  • move from a bought media to earned media model
  • embrace the game changer mechanisms and communities of the not for profit social entrepreneurial brands

this new rich dynamic and fluid world with its social networks, causal platforms apps, communities of interest and endless playgrounds of content offers a host of opportunities and an infinite number of occasions at which a business can create added value, improve customer centricity and reach a new audience from a myriad number of angles and directions.

The only issue that faces them seems to be that of deciding which conversations to join, who to love up and where to aim the super rainbow gorgeous gun of digital first.
Even the Newtonian truth of our shiny new gig-enabled universe seems to offer salvation and an opportunity to do a Cloud worth of more Digital ‘stuff’.

The toxic underworld that doesn’t feature in the Unlimited Me brochures – the quite unpalatable opposites to our electric speed of life can be turned into a positive in our newly connected world.
A number of businesses and brands have already seized on aspects of the digital distemper:

  • The loss of real human connection and community
  • The dislocation of the poor and the elderly
  • The rise of cruel digital anonymity – e.g. cyber bullying and sexting
  • The collapsing quality of content at ever increasing speed and volume.
  • The as yet unanswered question heavy mobile use’s potential to micro-wave our brains

turning them into the gift of a higher purpose beyond profit for the brand or business, taking them up as a new causes to fight, using the networks and platforms to play out off set strategies for social cohesion, volunteering schemes and outreach projects, delivering apps that donate and micro-fund community action and real impact, and galvanizing employees on and off line to ‘give back’

 But there is a danger in this Bad Into Good model for me. Because I believe it has the potential to disguise or wholly obscure the exacerbation of a far more insidious malaise – the one thing I believe presents the only truly equal and opposite force to that positive powering our hi-speed digital lives – the condition of digital obesity.
We are, in digital terms, becoming morbidly obese – and businesses and brands asserting their digital persona in the world will only make the condition worse.
To grasp some measure of the potential ‘tonnage’ of digital stuff coming our way in the not too distant future, one only has to look at the seismic budgetary shifts in both marcomms investment from traditional to new media channels and in operational emphasis to online customer retail and service models.
And as with their friends in the fast food retail sector, businesses and brands cannot simply lay the responsibility for healthy levels of consumption at the door of those consuming it.
In our supersize-me digital world they have engineered a plethora of ever greater choice – a curse that we seem incapable of undoing or casting off for fear of not being or being seen to be ‘connected and ON’.
We’re in an endless lock-in at the All You Can Eat big byte buffet and we’ve eaten the key.
We are becoming increasingly immobilised by our mobile selves, screeching to a halt mid stride, sentence, hump or sleep to answer the seductive vibration and ping of another pointless digital missive.

We are stuffing our faces with gigabytes of links, looks and lazy emotion to the point of nausea.

We are increasingly crippled by the devices sitting in front of us, paralyzed by the mere thought, let alone the actual loss, of power or connection. We sit slumped in bars watching the bars on our mobiles flicker in and out of range. We find ourselves frozen in silhouettes, stupid people holding smart devices to the sky, some half open window or the door in some desperate search for connectedness and meaning.

More and more of us are quietly and invisibly suffocating under the sheer weight of our fabulous unlimited-ness – rolled in fold upon fold of multiple personas, accounts, passwords, profiles and the multitude of screen devices that serve them. For some, digital citizenship is crushing, both physically and spiritually – a crisis of wellbeing.

We are getting less emotional bang for our digital buck – becoming spiritually diminished by the ever increasing and relentless consumption of the over illuminated text of content, connection and correspondence – the Windows to our soul now come with a Microsoft logo seared into the lids.

There is even a nihilistic dimension appearing; with grown adults oppressed by the SKY Plus listings – the endless chore of deleting all the things they will never have time to watch delivering a harsh reminder of their own mortality. There is no 27 Hour Day App you can tap to make it alright

People in business are doing less with a 24/7crackberry habit than they did by walking down the office floor and only answering calls in office hours. We now manage tsunamis of emails playing pass the parcel and administrating the professional persona we want the world to see, not who we are or what we’re really worth.

Even at our current level, If bytes were calories some of us would quickly become the lead feature in a tatty real life story magazine with larger than life pictures of our larger than life body now unable to leave the chat-room other than by crane and low loader HGV once some walls have been removed.
We are indiscriminately consuming supersize portions of content and correspondence at greater speed and greater volume than ever before and to such a degree as to create the very opposite of the nirvana our interconnected togetherness promises.

Both we in our digital neediness, and the brands and providers that serve it are driving a culture of digital consumption that is both overwhelming and unsustainable – and ultimately destructive.

We are becoming immune to massive deliveries of every type of content, our hunger becoming harder to satiate, the digital version of a stomach stapling lying just around the corner for some of us.

And this immunity will only in turns frustrate and further inspire the brands and businesses seeking our favour to double their efforts and outputs.

We need divine editing and de-selection tools, not another shed load of low quality tat shoved down our pipe – a role that businesses and brands could well embrace to amazing effect on both their constituencies and their reputations.

It is the responsibility of any business that is considering or already peddling and utilising the digital fix to authentically embrace to a greater degree the role of divine editor physician and life coach on the behalf of societies they thrive within.

So perhaps, the next time the strategists and consultants both inside and outside your business are assessing the value of wrestling with the muscular ‘cut’ colossus of our godlike digital selves, standing astride the world wrapped in electric pixel pants packed with gigabyte greatness, they should spare a thought for its troubled twin, stuffed into ill fitting velour sports leisure wear, sweating and wheezing, roll after roll of uncontrolled content pouring over the top of its go-faster waistband as it shuffles at a snail’s pace to the supersize fridge of byte-size snacking on its collapsing peta flip-flops.

In pursuit of exploring the edges and impacts of digital obesity I would invite the sharper and more inquisitive brand and business minds out there and the big brains who serve them to get out the weights, measures slide rules and calipers and get to work on a truly transparent assessment of the situation.

Social and digital strategists both on the operational and the brand sides of business must honestly consider the more toxic downsides of our digital brilliance. They should pass a colder eye over the subtler psychiatric impacts of the nihilistic nature of our consumption when plotting a new digital dimension, otherwise they are not representing the potential for impact both good and bad that the digital virtual world has to offer.

Only then could we all leap into this amazing new world with a clear understanding of what we are getting ourselves into and what a sustainable and healthy digital citizen really might look like.

FOOTNOTE

An abridged version of the above featured in the Guardian Sustainable Business last April:

http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/digital-obesity-high-tech-health

and featured as a theme in the UK Dream Wellbeing workshop I facilitated. It has subsequently been picked up the University of Surrey as a potential 4 year research piece – Digital Divinity and the search for an enlightened digital life – in search of a top up corporate sponsor.

Seaquities – Salt Water Equities & the democratization of our Oceans

13 Friday Dec 2013

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Screen Shot 2013-12-13 at 17.06.09In the face of potential Oceanic meltdown, how do we use brands, technology, a sense of ownership and a good old fashioned bit of market trading to make us all ‘at one’ with the sea again?

How do we democratize the expanses of water that surround us? How do we give everyone a vested interest in the wellbeing of the 7 seas?

Simply by giving everyone an invested interest in them perhaps.

Currently the whole deep blue sea is an ocean away from people’s everyday lives. We need to put some salt water in their pocket to remake the bond. Something they sense the value of in real time and their lives.

So what if we created a commoditized and tradable asset of the oceans – purely as a virtual trading currency? And create a share issue around it. Just for fun.

Then we draw people towards them, exploring them, seeking capital gains and dividends from the complexity and the stratifications inherent in our oceans .

If we have a digital 3 dimensional map of the oceans that we can pixelate, we can plot them, and draw people into their world with the offer of ownership, even if it is only virtual. (We do it with teddy bears and stars for God’s sake, so why not oceans?) Why not create billions of pixel kilometers of ocean that then get virtually traded? An oceanic version of equities.

Lets call them Seaquities.

Let’s create a global virtual trade in Seaquities. And as with global Equities, the big fish take the big block buys and distribute as they see fit to their stakeholders – right down to the everyday people buying the odd one here and there

These would create a central fund of immutable mutuality around our oceans with multiple dimensions where everyone can play. Parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts could purchase small swathes of water for their little sailors to virtually sail and trade.

Communities and Corporations with a vested interest in the sea, either on which they ply or base their trade or from which they seek their livelihood could buy up blocks as a legacy statement of intent.

And we could grade them – with the deepest ocean Seaquity pixels being the most valuable (rich as they are with any marine life left that we haven’t killed off yet, as well as the underwater mineral riches embedded in the underwater mountain ranges) – and with those from the shallowest waters being offered to the fashion industry (only joking).

Brands could then use their global voice, constituency and distribution channels (on pack on shelf on mobile on line) to spread the word. And technology can build the trading platform where everyone plays.

Gamification would be critical to the success of this. Bringing play into this most serious of issues in such a way as to appeal to the Planet Me sense of personal rewards and relevance as opposed to the Planet We ‘cupped hands stroking polar bears’ version is vital for it to fly.

If Zynga can create a sense of market force around Farmville and virtual coins: and bit coin can trade things of immeasurable value simply using virtual algorithms then surely Oceanville and the market trading of shares in it cannot be beyond the wit and the intellect of us all?

And the educational aspect that the exploration of ones own portfolio of Seaquities would bring could be mindblowing.

Who knows; if we could get a few Vampire Squid traders go long on ocean Seaquities while they short everything else, now that could be transformative.

That really would be a new form of Trading Futures!

Part 2 of Big Fish, Little Pond & the art of oceanic happiness. 

Big Fish, Little Ponds & a big brand guide to oceanic happiness – Part 1.

13 Friday Dec 2013

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Having just read something on the degradations of the oceans I am inspired to get a little Wonka-ish to make a point.

It seems that how we consume life especially in, around and out of the oceans are going to return those oceans to the primordial soup we climbed out of but a few million years ago.

What we do and how we live affects the oceans and seas in some way or another immediately or eventually, chronically or acutely, directly or indirectly.

So, whoever we are: the lady in a diner in Boise Idaho chowing down on Big Lite Ceasar Salad with anchovies; the bloke in the Birmingham café eating pilchards on toast; the dad flushing cotton Buds down the loo; the farmer slooshing phosphates into the Yangtze; the African 8 year old re-skinning 2nd hand rubber tyres; the skateboarder in Berlin dumping his cola bottle in the Spree; the turkish fisherman using dodgy nets – its our business.

But who’s going to tell us that. And more importantly who’s going to help us act upon our new-found responsibility even if we accept it.

We need to find a way to democratise the oceans – give even the deepest most distant point of them as much meaning to every one of those people as the small bit they might have paddled or swam through on their last holiday – give them meaning to every person in their everyday lives.

So I say hands up global brands.

According to CSIS’s 7 Revolutions & HBR – “A well-run businesses that applies its vast resources expertise and management talent to problems that it understands and in which it has a stake can have a greater impact on social good than any other institution or philanthropic organization”

Which in my world makes the Oceans every global brand and corporation’s business.

Global brands can help us in closing the gap and popularizing the plight of the oceans and seas but for them to do so we need to demonstrate the value to them; and the value and stickiness to their customers of any partnership.

The most important thing we need to do first is to make people feel the ‘pull of it’ and we need them to feel responsible for the health and vigour of that emotion and the source of it – we need to frame the oceans in such a way as to be both emotionally and physically relevant and important again to the people on our planet – especially those in the first world in a position to have the luxury of being to do something about it in so many simple ways. Global brands have the voice the reach and the channels to make those connections.

But which ones?  Again I have a childishly over simplified answer.

Take a photo of the trash washed up on an un-tended beach on the weather side of a pacific island and look at what’s on it.

Plastic bottles. Millions and millions of plastic bottles – so I say, if leadership goes to the biggest fish in this pond and we’re rummaging in the plastic bottle department – stand up the Happiness factory and join the mission. Because, even if those bottles aren’t the property of those busy teaching the world to sing out there and being an arms length from everyone on the planet, they are manufactured by ‘wannabee thems’. So biggest fish, step up.

And ooh look: Trainers – so we’re walking on water it seems. Again, I apply my biggest fish in the global pond metric here? Tick.  You’ve got it. Stand up Nike. Say nothing – just do it.

Oh, and a few car tyres. Fabulous. Bridgestone? Michelin? Continental? Who’s the real player here? Roll up roll up. Your name is on the boat.

Which brings me to my other super childish starter for ten. And this is in the ‘what do we ask those brands to do?’ department.

I say lets start with something big; big enough to be seen from space – the huge islands of plastic and debris floating in a couple of the oceans. (And, please; scientists, oceanographers, marine biologists and engineers; tell me the following idea is impossible because if it isn’t, that no one has started developing these already almost constitutes a global act of aggression against the human race.)

If we can build super tankers to traverse the oceans – and we can engineer deep sea wells and deep tide dredgers – how come it is so far beyond us to develop an open mouth surface dredger to start hoovering up these islands of crap?

Funding? Well I point us back to the logos on the debris on that weather-side beach.

We know that the Happiness Factory feels that a global CSR play has to be BIG! Nike are the Just Do It kids. And every tyre company is about mitigating risk in the wet

And right now, from where I’m standing, suffocating oceans and the death of the living seas will soon overtake fat kids, heart disease from lack of exercise and substandard stopping distances on the world agenda of “whoops this isn’t going to end well” biggies.

So I say, get in a room, get your cheque book out and, I don’t know, build a very big dredging boat or something; and at least start to do something.  I know that it is not the answer to the highly complex problems facing the oceans. But draw that kind of big brand attention to this kind of problem and the democratisation of the oceans will begin. Start the conversation and the journey. It will be worth it.

Part 2. Coming soon.

 

 

The New Jones’ – A 21st Century Green Movement & the power of keeping up with ’em next door

08 Sunday Dec 2013

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OK so we’ve had the Original greens – hard-core activists and connected liberators of all of us from the yoke of consumption destruction and overbearing human right of entitlement – dibs on everything that isn’t our rarified species.

Then we had the Blue Greens – sustainability experts and big brains born out of the smart set modelling living ecosystems and developing everything from clean tech, by-product life-cycling and social networks to those reframing CSR and doing the right thing as imperatives for a better total life – not just tree hugging. Suddenly we’re viewing the world holistically not only on environmental but economic social and cultural measures of wellbeing.

Then came the Greenback Greens – the money monster advocates of sustainability practice protecting future growth and profitability, stimulating qualitative growth and, at its very, very least, driving economies and efficiencies into the business through rigorous and inspired supply chain optimization – and who, if you tick those boxes and play nice, won’t short the crap out of your business.

But the green thing has warn thin, even in the early adopters – and there is certainly no green movement on a mass scale unless of course you include the twitter feeds and face books of Kermit, Yoda and Mike Wazowski

85% still aren’t listening to green living or any other colour of conscience driven consumption for that matter – they’re all working on a different tip on the other side of the chasm and we’re just not crossing yet.

So I’d like to inaugurate a new back to the future green strategy for tomorrow. One rooted in a primal powerful truth – that of the human gene pool imperative of climbing the procreation ladder and securing gene survival and immortality. And it is based on the purest and most human green behaviour of all.

Envy.

Lets hear it for the power of envy to drive everyday people to drastically change their behavior sometimes inexplicably mid flow, and do audacious courageous and sometimes socially down right insane things in the name of ‘me-too’. Envy actually changes the way people are wired and not always for the worse. Recent studies have demonstrated that inciting envy actually changes cognitive function; boosting mental persistence and memory.[7]

Bertrand Russell believed that envy was a driving force behind the movement towards democracy and must be endured to achieve a more just social system.

So perhaps, given that psychologists believe that there are two forms of envy – one toxic and one benign – could we not seize on the power of the benign form to shift the hearts and minds of that 85%?

Desire is the only true emotion that seems to be still missing in most of the communications and lifestyle framing around a more sustainable lifestyle for us all

But this is a clear brief: stimulate potent desire around something – products, actions and behaviours – that is a component part of a more sustainable world.

Find the dimensions in the story telling that make it ‘ping’ the bell in the mind of the 85% – set yourself to the real task of turning the gene pool purchaser green with envy

No more furtive apologetic or overly protective do the right thing mantras and less of this and much less of that.

Just feisty shiny confident “why woudn’t you? coudn’t you?” stuff – all built to trigger the green eyed but in this instance wholly constructive monster.

Using the same strategies that were applied to transform the post war American Industrial machine from destruction to consumption through the championing of the Consumer Citizen leads us to weald a very simple blunt tool – show people living a desirous life all around you – and in the end the gene pool rule applies.

Transforming what the mass find desirous in others around them when those things are cool, smart examples of lighter living makes the old toxic nature of keeping up with the Jones suddenly alright by me.

And if we get a decent number of people to go ‘ohhh yes please I like it’ – and use every tool in the box – feature the desirous life as a back drop – in soaps, films, magazines, and adverts: bingo. Yes, that’s the creak of populist desire you can hear.

In this way we start to re-imagine a new prosperity and sense of aspiration – a really attractive, sexy one underwritten by invisible sustainable truths to stop the wheels falling off of it – one built to endure.

But fulminating on the power of envy in trite terms denies its more academically and philosophically viewed immutable human truth.

Schoek sets out the power of envy as “a drive which lies at the core of man’s life as a social being…[an] urge to compare oneself invidiously with others.” And in turn “We need envy for our existence, though no society that hopes to endure can afford to raise it to a value principle or to an institution”.

Envy’s potency is the true and only social strategy – its power unmatched, if it can be harnessed the right way.

So perhaps knowing that when it comes to the human condition, Envy lies at the heart of why we consume life the way we do; and knowing that it is a standing condition of the human psyche; and accepting that it is one of the most powerful drivers of behaviour, perhaps there is some merit in boldly using the good version of envy; the envy of a smarter lighter lifestyle lived by others as a better and more honest way of transforming the bad social norms of consumption for better.

Just a thought.

A darkening sky: Madiba and the quiet brilliance of true purpose.

06 Friday Dec 2013

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Today I find myself so quietly sad and a little defeated. Tomorrow will be fine: beautiful, exceptional in the rising of its sun and life continuing.

God knows there is enough in the world to be sad about beyond the passing of one old man who has lived an amazing life, transformed worlds and lived with such rare brilliance, poise and dignity. We should celebrate his life and all his achievements.

But my sadness is at the space he leaves and the extinguishing of his light in the world.

I struggle to see any leaders of his humility and magnitude at large.

I see swagger, I see psychopathy, I see hubris, I see celebrity, I see megalomania, I see the sophistry and fakery of the mediocre everywhere, roosting in positions of power that should otherwise demand such exceptional qualities of the individual. But so few truly seem to understand that one has to be silent: un-remarking of one-self to be truly remarkable – the most powerful proof of that silence played out in the gift of the words and honours of others – not your own.

I do not see wisdoms layered in the leaders set out before me. I certainly do not see leadership of his depth and steely conviction and unwavering purpose.

In what I do I see so much written about ‘purpose’ and I cannot help feeling at times like this that someone should take words like purpose and those of the traits that characterise it – that of the ability to endure and prevail against all life brings. They should be taken out of the mouths of those who are not worthy of them.

A purpose driven business is everyone’s favourite catchphrase for what constitutes a spiritually and materially healthy and successful business – driven by a need to focus on more than just profit. I would be the first to agree.

But on days like this I feel a powerful surging need to apply a filter across the corporate lexicon – and extract these words – words used to describe this extraordinary man – from the mouths, slides and corporate PR releases of their emollient strategists until the people who run these businesses come within at least a light year of presenting even the tiniest evidence of the spiritual stature, eviscerating intellect and wilful optimism that flourished in Nelson Mandela.

So my sadness is not for him. He lived a life that some of us can only dream of – overcoming everything life threw at him with regal understatement and humility, untouched by any resentment or hatred for those that did so much to extinguish his brilliance.

It is for us I am sad, left, for now, with the shower of stunted flailing egotistical spiritual dwarves that lead us – those flailing fools we call leaders. I was happy while the brilliance of him cast such a bright unkind light over them – holding their flaws and failings up in such cruel relief. I am certain some will be happy that that kind of light has faded for now at least.  

Unbearable Lightness of CEing: a tongue-in-cheek look at lighter leadership

03 Tuesday Dec 2013

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Chief Executive Officer – Chief executive of Stuff – Managing Director – Business leader – ExCom  –  C Suite  – Def Con 2 – West Wing. The over use of militaristic nomenclature like Chief and Officer is a small pointer to why people struggle to apply a lightness of touch in their leadership. The rhythm, weight and emphasis of their belicose language and physical nature of the culture around corporate leadership (Spartan workouts are VERY popular with ‘leaders’) also gives us a reasonable pointer – that of the Psychopath let loose across a PAYE infrastructure.

Recent trends have pointed to the Female Leadership Advantage and the 7 traits that define it – Empathy: Vulnerability: Humility: Inclusiveness: Generosity: Balance: Patience: as being far more likely to deliver and sustain growth and innovation in the new business landscape. Their collaborative, co creating, humane and inclusive nature and behaviours illustrative of the decline of old world, one dimensional model of paternailistic leadership in favour of a kinder smarter workplace – so for that we can be increasingly thankful – anything to offset the alarming number of David Brent’s out there.

Much like politics, corporate leadership in its old form is one of those things where everyone who willingly gallops towards it, or seems desperate to attain it should be roundly shot before they get anywhere near the interview room, let alone a company filled with normal people and lives and families.

Granted ‘normal’ people are wholly capable of taking ‘lighter, kinder’ natured leaders for a complete ride. (The Right To Entitlement is the new religion – with millions of disciples all praying at the altar of ‘but I deserve so much more!!!!’ though usually forgetting to quailify on what basis or by what right other than simple existing)

But as they pass around ‘crap boss’ anecdotes in the pub, if you look beyond the small element of agenda settling and general grumpiness there do seem to be a recurring set of behaviours and traits that might constitute a list of watch-outs in the dodgy heavy handed leadership department:

  • Over indexing on Presentation courses and Life Coaching.
  • Far too over- excited at the wrong parts of Wall Street’ The Movie.
  • A tendency to use the phrase ‘C’mon people let’s get to work here’ even when faced with Jean from Accounting, The Call Centre manager and two sales guys in a small windowless room in Bromley
  • Inappropriate Fascistic tendencies at child’s Little League football matches ( though actual attendance of anything other than ‘business’ stuff is a positive sign)
  • Bossy approach to arranging relentless holiday activities
  • Ridiculous Pub Quiz over achievers
  • Talk about themselves in the third person – ‘MMmnnn Peter’s not happy…‘ (smacks of the rather unpleasant habit of speaking through a Ventriloquists Dummy)
  • Refer to themselves as Alpha something…anything

Additional watch outs come in various forms. Platitudes like ‘I’m straight talking and no-nonsense’ should come with a health warning; they are the leadership equivalent of turning up in a T Shirt that has “I’m funny” emblazoned across it.

Funny aside, there is a paradigm shift coming in the realms of leadership and it is not only augured by the rise of Female Leadership traits, knowledge economies  and softer industries driving our future. I believe it is also being driven by the our moving into the Age of The Polymath.

The Polymathic nature is ascendent in almost everything that surrounds us. The old one product one function world has been set aside in favour of one packed with a noisy self confident multi-tasking scrum of look at me multitaskers . The new product universe comes with multiple functions + benefits + rewards (both emotional and material) built into every quarter – shops that are clinics, phones that are cameras, cars that are playgrounds, holidays that are educations, games that make money. This multiple function nature of so much that illuminates and elevates our lives is I believe creating a new demand for a very different type of leadership in the businesses that deliver them – leadership shaped by the new realm of integrated big data, multiple colliding landscapes of human engagement and experience and ultimately the ability to view a business through the filter of multiple function and reward  in such a way as to relentlessly create and capture value in it.  A leader needs to be at least as multi functional as a smart phone! Even if, like smart phones, the business only uses 5% of that functionality most of the time!

In the CSIS overview ‘7 Revolutions’ they set out the leader of the future as follows:

The effective leader will jettison vertical integration information hoarding and dogma in favour of optimization, recalibration and negotiation.

In an increasingly integrated world ‘the big picture’ requires a daunting breadth and depth of knowledge

The new model compels the leader to master the transition from Clipper Ship to Flying fish – It is less about the expeditious propulsion and safe passage of trade increasing across a distance – a more quantative measure – as much as it is the expeditious propulsion of and securing of talent spreading across a network – the qualitative.

Interestingly the ‘ation’ words back there – optimization, recalibration and negotiation (across the nation, generation – apart from starting to smack of a bad reggae song) seem to demand a very different creature – one focused on a far more horizontal and myriad skill set. This is echoed in recent reports showing that the new C Suite leadership positions are being filled more often with candidates demonstrating greater horizontal skills (leading amongst equals) than vertical ones based on the old vertical climb to the top.

Anyway, it just seems that everything is pointing to a more nuanced renaissance person able to use multiple reference points to plot a smarter course – with the laws of audacious diversity being applied – the greater and more varied number of perspectives, intellects, and skill sets focused on one pure goal, the more likely the goal is to be achieved – and with gusto.

So the leadership model, influenced as it is now by greater diversity, more feminine traits and behaviours, a less recidivist and machismo heartland and by the shifting landscapes driven by our polymathic age, is lightening up – and thank any god for that.

Perhaps the last word on lightness of touch needs to go to the Tao Te Ching – where Lao Tzu writes that one should rule a large ‘something’ (country/corporation/culture) the way one cooks a small fish. Too much poking, spoils it.

I’ll have the Black Cod please.