“To me, the problems of greatest interest are things that you cannot explain with the current prevailing theory.”

I often wish I could ask him about items that flash on my screen, eg Is the US Bankrupt and Nobody Knows?  Are the Feds finally facing the reality of the ‘recession’?

This recent article from Strategy & Business is a treat: a highly accessible and altogether inspiring peek at C.K.’s genius.  While he tended to write about large systems, everything he says is as relevant to micro-business and non-profits as giant multinationals.  I invite you to take a moment, step back from whatever you’re working on, and let C.K.’s thinking have its way with your molecules.

“What is the essence of entrepreneurship?…Having aspirations greater than your resources.”

Sound like a good fit to your current reality?

Management thinking prior to his writing looks medieval.  Remember how organizations appeared before the concept of core competence?  When resources were purely financial? Or strategy took place in a fixed world? In their groundbreaking 1994 book, Competing for the Future, he and Gary Hamel

“argued for strategy as a stretch: by definition, creating a misfit between your resources and your aspirations… If you want to create entrepreneurial drive in a large company, you have to create aspirations that lie outside your resource base…”

“Gary and I said strategy is about creating new competitive space. This foreshadowed ideas like strategic architecture, shaping your future, expeditionary marketing, and so on.”

Having addressed  those small matters, in The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, C.K. went head-on with what seemed impossible: profitably serving the [then] 2.5 billion people living on less than $2/day. I’ve often wondered about the source of that thinking; it’s revealed in the excellent S&B interview by Art Kleiner.  When asked how he came up with such different ideas,

“…both are about the movement of ordinary people into new relationships with power.”

“I started as an industrial engineer, but all along I’ve been struggling with the same question: What makes societies work?”

“Conventional strategy didn’t even consider individuals. When a company looked at its resources, it considered its financial situation: could it afford another employee or not, for example, rather than what kind of new employee must it bring aboard.”

“But when you look at an organization’s core competencies as its most valuable resources, you can begin to think of learning, creating strategy, and innovation as parts of a single long journey. The journey is iterative, interactive, and full of small steps. Nobody gets a big aha one day. Instead, there is searching; there are missteps, experiments, and doubt.”

Perhaps a nice dose of C.K. will put you in shape to redesign how you’re putting your resources to work?

Exchanging with others is how we humans thrive. We have a strong desire to contribute – it’s in our biology. Not surprisingly, our brains are well-equipped with wiring about exchanges, both as contributors and as recipients. Much of what goes on ‘inside our heads’ is about where we stand with others, the value we provide and what they provide us, who we can trust and for what, and whether people genuinely know and care about us.

We can spark ingenuity by focusing on others’ vulnerability and how we want to serve them – and we quickly becoming energized. As a Business Anthropologist, I would like everyone to view commerce as an opportunity. Though the brain can’t do that in the context of a threat, fear is automatically trumped when we’re faced with ‘our people’s’ concerns. We’ll jump into a freezing river, or whatever it takes.

Day-to-day commerce is somewhat less heroic – to the consternation of some and the relief of others. In the modern world, we are called upon to articulate what others can rely on us for. During most of human history – the 3 million years when the brain and society were evolving together – our ancestors knew their trading partners their entire lives. They did not have to design new exchanges, articulate brand promises, and engage in sales conversations. But we do. Much as we might like it to be otherwise, other people do not automatically know what we can promise. We have to tell them if we want them to know.

Though it may not get your adrenalin spurting like an emergency plane landing, being current with the value you add is your primary responsibility. Worse, in a shifting world – though you may not like ambiguity nor view it as an opportunity, peoples’ concerns change, and as they do, you’ll probably be called upon to update your promises. I invite you to ask:

• What do you want others to rely on you for?
• What’s the most valuable promise you can make (and reliably deliver?)

Fortunately, our brains are highly wired for that very question: to both make the promise and to consider the value of others’ promises. (We’re built to orient ourselves to exchanging with others.) Promises reduce ambiguity. Being mindful of what you promise will increase your value and make you a desirable trading partner.

What might you promise this year, this month, this week, today, to address others’ concerns?

Asked why his original 1987 book is still a must-read (probably by someone who hadn’t read it), he politely pointed out that the subtitle says it all:  The Battle for Your Mind.  He went on to clarify yet again that marketing takes place in the mind of the prospect. 

It’s remarkable to me that so many marketers – some highly paid – still don’t get that point.  The 12 bloggers in this recent eBook - including yours truly –  implore marketers to learn to tune into the mindset of their customers in 2010.  This is still a necessary reminder after all these years???  Trout jokes in the podcast that even now, when he’s brought in to ‘fix’ a brand [one assumes for significant fees], many on the marketing team are obviously counting the minutes till he leaves, when they go back to doing exactly as they were doing before he got there

There’s little doubt that prospects’ worlds have shifted significantly in the last 18 months.  The question  of repositioning certainly seems warranted.  How might each of us serve those new mindsets?

Another imperative to Reposition came across my screen same day,  in a new article in Strategy and Business  

We already know that companies with an articulated purpose that goes beyond simply the expediency of “making more money” have fared much better in the downturn. They will also fare better in the recovery. 

I’m off to buy the book.

The illiterate of the 21stcentury will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

                 -Alvin Toffler, Rethinking the Future 1999

Since he wrote those powerful words, 9 years after the publication of Senge’s Fifth Discipline, web 2.0 has exploded, and the challenges of choosing where to learn and what to learn are bursting exponentially -changing patterns of trade and social power on the planet. 

Jim Collins says it well in a Fast Company interview:  

FC:  What has changed if you’re building a business now, as opposed to 10, 20, or 30 years ago?

JC: The skills. You need to be continually learning. For example, if you accept the idea that work is infinite and time is finite, you realize you have to manage your time and not your work. You need a laserlike focus on doing first things first. And that means having a ferocious understanding of what you are not going to do. The question used to be which phone call you wouldn’t take. Now, it’s the discipline not to have your e-mail on. The skill is knowing how to sift through the blizzard of information that hits you all the time.

As a Business Anthropologist, I am fascinated by how social media are changing the world of learning.  Sunday’s New York Times re-iterates how Twitter works as a learning portal – for approximately 10% of its users, according to a 2009 Harvard study.  With over 1000 user-designed applications, no one has quite figured out how many people that is… a telling commentary. 

Close to the beginning of the revolution represented by social media, I undertook a study of 50 top performers, asking about how they rejuvenate.    They recognized that, 

The ability to be a ‘beginner’ is a key factor in sustained top performance….Forty eight consciously keep their curiosity sparked through exploration and learning.

“What I’m doing now was totally beyond me 12 months ago.”
                        – Entrepreneur, age 72

In my 3 decades in the trenches with business leaders, nothing seems to have gotten easier.  Most would agree that the changes of the past 15 months demand more skill than ever, and a new kind of skill: being nimble in the face of uncertainty.   

I cast my vote with Senge, Toffler and Collins: the ability to learn is our single best strategic investment. The evidence goes back to the first human communities.  

Our ancestors have done it for millions of years.  We can do it again.  How will you choose your strategic learning investments this year?

A number of innovations have changed the face of commerce in my lifetime.  Credit cards greatly enabled commercial exchanges.  Email and FedEx both sped up communication and reduced cost.  The internet both transformed information transfer, and introduced people around the world who would not have otherwise found each other.  In each case, exchanges – the fundamental unit of commerce – became easier.  Barriers were lowered and trade flourished.  

Are social media another facilitator of trade?

One of the aspects of social media that I find most fascinating is the proliferation of free – non-monetized, and non-negotiated – exchanges.   There’s an ethos around that practice, to which participants are finely-tuned.  It’s OK to make commercial offers, and to be compensated for touting others’ products,  as long as a) you’re up-front about it,  b) it’s deemed appropriate to the specific site and subject , and c) that’s not the only kind of stuff you talk about.  In the recent surge of activity around the Iran election on Twitter, for example, those few who sought to reach participants with anything commercial were immediately and soundly slapped.

There is plenty of commercial activity on social media. Even so, many corporate marketers are not so happy with its power  – the loss of control is counter-cultural for them - while small businesses are faster to use it to advantage .  The explosive growth of Twitter confounded the pundits and sparked controversy for months.  Much of that chatter quieted when the State Department asked Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance soon after the Iranian election.  

I’m struck by the way social media simulate community.  The earmarks of community are 1) Shared concerns and 2) Free exchanges addressing those concerns, in addition to monetized or quantified trading. In the 17 years I had my office in Napa, CA, the river flooded half a dozen times.   People of all ages jumped in to assist – with whatever equipment and know-how at their command – with no thought of quantifying the exchanges.  And they loved it; stories abounded for years.  The mood of the entire country shifted when a now-famous commercial airline pilot landed in the Hudson in January of this year, and locals leaped into every available craft to get people out of the water.   This month, untold numbers of people from all over the world changed their Twitter profiles to confuse Iranian secret police, and offered proxy sites as internet communication inside the country was disabled.  

I suspect that our forebears lived by means of free exchanging – in ordinary life as well as in crises – starting with the earliest communities – perhaps as long as 350,000 generations ago.  Human groups are characterized by coordination and cooperation.  When did those exchanges become widely monetized?  After the Industrial  Revolution, perhaps 12 generations ago.  So for 349,988 generations human communities thrived by virtue of exchanging [mostly] without quantification.               

I’m not speaking here of Free as a ‘new radical price’, like the book of that title, though I agree that trend is important.  I’m speaking of exchanging freely, with abandon, the way children learn in play.  Sparking curiosity and enabling Neuroplasticity: the power of our brains to move with the new, in the moment – perhaps the most important skill of this century.  

From Fast Company, “Enterprise MicroLearning”,   

Twitter, a public micro-sharing network used by many early adopters, has become an integral part of my own professional practice and personal brain-building. I use it to connect, share, and discover information far beyond any other network. I’ve grown to realize the field might better be thought of as micro-learning where the conduit is tiny and the lessons spread are vast. Across an enterprise — be it around the globe or down the hall — the learning potential is endless, while the opportunities to connect to knowledge are exploding in number and variety.

I use it in a way similar to how I touch base with my friends and family, briefly and frequently, and I now extend that level of care to involve my coworkers and business partners. I can find someone to review an article as effortlessly as I can offer personal experience to a colleague on how to select a webinar platform or which organizations have successfully launched their own brand Wikipedia. This is all akin to the magic of open-source software, created through public grassroots collaboration.  

                                      – Marcia Conner, Pistachio Consulting, www.twitter.com/marciamarcia

The two comments below, in response to my blog post, “Harvard Study Confirms That Twitter is Unique”, point to that same synergistic learning:   

…for me Twitter is like being in a perpetual book store…yet many have some pretty strong perceptions and opinions about Twitter despite having never even tried it.

One other practical ‘value’ I would add to your list that I honestly didn’t think about when I first started using twitter…are the new friends and people with whom I have shared interests with that I have met thru twitter, and in some cases started to get to know in a deeper way than others that I meet in my typical day to day business dealings. And over time, these new ‘friendships’ can blossom into live face to face meetings and collaborations…Pretty amazing to think about speaking or I should say tweeting to people a few times a week that you never met before, yet overtime, you become ‘friends’ and collaborators etc.

                 - Ellen Hoenig-Carlson, Advance MarketWoRx, www.twitter.com/ellenhoenig

 I get news, commentary, inspiration, information and a view into the collective consciousness from Twitter.

The Twitter experience for me is like seeing clouds from above… Once a rare treat that has become more accessible to more people over time.

                                                – Janet Johnson, O’Johnson Partners, www.twitter.com/janetleejohnson

Those who are bewildered by social media are often those who haven’t enjoyed a good sample.  They haven’t yet noticed a simple – but powerful – factor:  it feels good.  Recent brain research shows that helping others – including mentoring, and donating money and energy to charities – stimulates the same part of the brain as sex and chocolate.   As far as I know, as of this writing no one has tested to see if free exchanges on Twitter show up in the same place on an fMRI.  But hang on, I bet it will soon be forthcoming.

In this sense, social media may be more than an innovation: they may be revolutionary in their disturbance – as corporate marketers fear.  Exchanging freely feels good.  It’s rich. The results may not be easy to measure, but they’re a form of wealth with a very long history.      

And don’t make the mistake of trying to fool anyone.  Our brains are exquisitely sensitive to community.  People can tell whether a proposed contribution or a free offer is real and sincere, or not.  The punishment of pretending to be part of community is likely to be harsh.