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Jamming: The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity by John Kao

rating: 3 of 5 stars
I purchased this book based on a sign that a former boss made for a team brainstorming meeting. It was a "Jam Rules" sign for a brainstorming session and it had three rules: 1) Think big, 2) Blurt, 3) No questions. I asked him where he got the ideas thinking they were maybe from a previous gig or another brainstorming session and he credited this book with the idea. I knew I had to get it. This book is also a fave of Josh Linkner, founder and CEO of ePrize. We discussed it at an ePrize client conference a while back...

I think the book is pretty good. It advises to use methods that are well know to jazz improvisation within the hallowed halls of business to stimulate creativity and ultimately, better results. It is a quick read and worth your time. It's tough to find these days. I think it has been out of print for a while. Not a "top 10" business or creativity book but a worthwhile read that can inspire you to bring more creativity to your workplace and provides some nice analogies to how successful jazz musicians collaborate to guide you along the way.

I’ve been thinking a ton about digital marketing for global brands as I prepare for 2010 business planning. My perspective on the importance of “where” experiences happen has shifted in the past year. In addition to the experiences we create on rented, loaned, or borrowed space on others' websites, brand marketers need to create meaningful digital destinations of our own. I believe this is critical.

I used to think that location of interaction was relatively unimportant. “Fish where the fish are.” was the best strategy. Quality of outcome and the number of the “right”consumers reached were what mattered. I now believe location of the interaction can be equally important. Who are your partners? What is their role in your overall strategy? What do you expect from your brand owned properties? How will your partners help build your brand owned properties in the long term?

What if you didn't focus on building your own presence for consumers and staked your brand’s primary community claim on myspace? How would you be feeling when what would have been inconceivable three years ago happens? Would you be concerned when myspace announces a layoff of 30% of staff (around 420 employees)? Maybe you didn’t invest heavily in myspace. I’m sure facebook is a safe bet today. Really? Things change and they change fast for digital marketers. Jim Banister thinks facebook will fail. He makes some good observations about specific approaches winning over time vs. general approaches. Will facebook be able to deliver “specific” without ruining the “general” it so clearly excels at? Only time will tell.

How about video? Surely we can continue to rely on YouTube as the place to consolidate our video views. Or can we? Silicon Alley Insider (with data from Credit Suisse) proposed in April that YouTube may be doomed because it will lose close to $470 million in 2009. NY Times (with data from RampRate) says YouTube’s loss will be only $174 million in 2009. Either way, those are losses that someone must be paying attention to. Do you want your entire video strategy to rely on YouTube when radical business model changes could be right around the corner for the video portal?

Maybe YouTube and facebook will win. Maybe myspace will stage the comeback of all comebacks. Something I've learned through experience as a digital marketer is that the digital invincible sometimes fail and longshots occasionally win. The best way brand marketers can be prepared for the success or failure of whoever comes and goes is to build something you OWN that is awesome. Build something exclusively focused on your brand, that your consumers/fans can count on over the long-term, and that is open enough to connect to whichever external general purpose platforms win in the future. And I mean OPEN with all caps. Maybe true openness will be a future post.....

I usually listen to the Grateful Dead, Phish, 90s jam band music, or even older stuff... Neil Young, Clapton, you get the idea. I'm in a time warp. But every now and then something really catches my ear. And no, it's not Lady Gaga...although I've been known to rock the occasional "Poker Face".

Thanks to Red Bull Records for introducing me to Black Gold. This isn't just a Red Bull shill. I really, really like the album Black Gold - Rush. I'm listening to it more and more and it is *really* becoming a favorite for me. Including a bunch of links below for you to check them out. Let me know what you think!

Here's a video for the first single, Detroit

Download Black Gold - "Detroit" MP3 free at Spinner.com where Detroit was free MP3 of the day

You can listen to the whole album, Black Gold - Rush, streamed here at buzznet

And if you like it like I do, you can buy the whole album for $2.99 at Shockhound (use discount code REDBULL)

I have lots of good friends who participated in the Tide social media night. They include both P&G peeps and agency folk. Looks like they all had fun, that the P&G marketers learned, and that a charity benefitted. That's a win-win-win. And I'm not jealous Peter Kim. I can meet with most of the people who participated anytime I want, especially those that are good friends. I've also been invited to talk with P&G marketers as recently as last week so I'm not feeling left out at all.

That said, I didn't really like the Tide exercise. It ruined the vibe in my social neighborhood for several hours. I resented Tide doing a live experiment that I couldn't escape from without shutting down my social tools. I issued a snarky post, I'll admit it. When I did, I received more than one direct message from friends who were participating advising patience and that it was just an experiment. Seems that even some of the participants knew the exercise was super annoying but they were whoring out their friend lists and networks for the P&G marketing lab anyway. The messaages kind of reminded me of an NPR pledge drive except for the fact that NPR *gives me so much* every day that I don't resent the time needed to solicit pledges at all. P&G wasn't giving me any value here and they haven't built up the daily goodwill and personal connection that I have with NPR. Tide was just sucking up my neighborhoods social bandwidth and filling what was left with offers where I have the opportunity to pay them money to wear the Tide logo and make a tiny contribution to charity.

P&G friends please forgive me but..... I didn't want a Tide t-shirt.  I'm all good on charitable contributions and not looking for additional opportunities to give. I was bummed that the quality of the content from people I follow went to zero for several hours during the exercise. I'm glad P&G marketers learned but it left me liking P&G less for doing it. Whether it is for charity or not is immaterial, it's just annoying uninvited brand messaging being thrown at me by typically awesome folks who were temporarily Tidejacked and it makes me less a fan of Tide (and in some ways, the participants) than I would be otherwise.

Update on Saturday, March 14, 2009 at 6:39AM by Kevin Doohan

Check the comments link below for more discussion on what I'm calling the Tidejack. Thanks for reading! Please leave comments of your own if you're inspired.

the idea in brief:

• "Modern" management, much of which dates back to the late nineteenth century, has reached the limits of improvement.
• To lay out a road map for reinvention, a group of scholars and CEOs has created 25 ambitious challenges.
• Unless management innovators tackle those issues, companies will be unable to cope with tomorrow's volatile world.

Harvard Business Review just keeps the great stuff coming. Just finished the February 2009 issue and loved the HBR at Large piece titled: "Moon Shots for Management" (link to executive summary).  What a super idea. HBR invited 35 management scholars and practitioners to spend two days in California identifying the sorts of changes needed in management principles and practices to build companies that are truly fit for the future. Participants included: Gary Hamel (The Management Lab), Eric Abrahamson (Columbia Business School), Tim Brown (IDEO), Steve Jurvetson (Draper Fisher Jurvetson), Kevin Kelly (Wired), Peter Senge (MIT), and many more...

After the event, a subgroup synthesized the master list of challenges that Hamel describes in his HBR article. There are 25 challenges and each is described in some level of detail in the article. What I'll do below is simply list "Management's Grand Challenges". Readers can add your own perspectives on what each means for you. I bolded my top 5 from the list of 25. The article is worth purchasing to have at hand or if you know someone with a copy, borrow it and read the piece.

1. Ensure that the work of management serves a higher purpose.
2. Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems.
3. Reconstruct management's philosophical foundations.
4. Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy.
5. Reduce fear and increase trust.
6. Reinvent the means of control.
7. Redefine the work of leadership.
8. Expand and exploit diversity.
9. Reinvent strategy making as an emergent process.
10. De-structure and disaggregate the organization.
11. Dramatically reduce the pull of the past.
12. Share the work of setting direction.
13. Develop holistic performance measures.
14. Stretch executive timeframes and perspectives.
15. Create a democracy of information.
16. Empower the renegades and disarm the reactionaries.
17. Expand the scope of employee autonomy.
18. Create internal markets for ideas, talent, and resources.
19. Depoliticize decision making.
20. Better optimize trade-offs.
21. Further unleash human imagination.
22. Enable communities of passion.
23. Retool management for an open world.
24. Humanize the language and practice of business.
25. Retrain managerial minds.

I selected my top 5 because I believe that passion and imagination are the most important factors for achieving success and winning.  I also believe that collaborative goal-setting and transparency when reasonable create an environment where hierarchy matters less and the team is bought into the mission and objectives. Which from the list would be your top 5?  Why would you choose them?