The Exquisite Scarcity of a Truly Good Day

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Robin Cangie

Me in my teepee

Today was a good day. Truly, exquisitely good. It’s important to hold onto days like these when you’re in the midst of a disruptive “growth period” (that’s a nice way of saying big, scary change), because truly good days are precious and rare and, when you keep them close to your heart, they will help soften the inevitable hard parts that accompany disruption.

As you may know, I’m in a bit of a disruptive state myself. I just moved to California for a new job, and for the next few weeks, I live in a teepee while hubby packs up our home, our cats and our entire life in Portland. It is very lonely and very hard and I was totally unprepared for the culture shock I’d feel from moving just one state south (things I’ve recently learned about California: amazing Mexican food, pervasive car culture, way more sunshine, and… dress shorts???). But it is also exactly what I need to do, not in spite of the fact that it’s hard but rather because of it.

Blogger Whitney Johnson remarks about disruption that “if it feels scary and lonely, you’re probably on the right track.” And that, especially, is why we must cherish the truly good days, the days when things make sense and the world doesn’t seem cold, confusing and uncertain. When the going again gets hard and your path seems strewn with obstacles, you can draw on the memory of good days like water from a spring, and they will carry you through.

Hold them close, these scarce, exquisite, priceless days. You will need them. And that is how you will know that your path is worthwhile.

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Balance Is Not A Happy Medium

Posted on August 24, 2011 by Robin Cangie

I’ve been thinking today about the tension between balance and extremes. This tension is, at the moment, deeply personal, because speaking of extremes, I live in a teepee while working as a Community Manager for a very forward-thinking start-up in the Bay Area. In other words, I spend my days immersed in social media, and I spend my nights with the crickets and the stars.

We like to say that balance comes from a happy medium, a place between extremes (drunkenness and sobriety, obligation and fun, hot and cold) that feels just right. But there is no such place. There can’t be, at least not for any length of time. You might think you’ve found it for a moment, but the harder you cling to it, the faster it slips away.

What if balance isn’t a happy medium at all? What if, rather than being a place between two extremes, we find balance in the extremes themselves? In the midst of this crazy, high-tech world into which I’ve very suddenly thrown myself, living in a teepee gives me a sense of balance because it is extreme. It’s quiet, a little dirty, and occasionally I find a beetle on the wall. This morning when I woke up, I saw Venus peeking through the folds of fabric, and there was no veil between me and the newborn air. It did not feel extreme at all. It felt, rather, like something close to sanity.

The problem with happy mediums is not the mediums themselves; it is our constant pursuit of them. What if we let go of striving after some mythical sense of balance? What if we said to hell with happy mediums and simply went about living happy lives? Who knows? If we cease to pursue it, we might even find that every now and then, the very sense of balance we were looking for comes and sits upon our shoulder.

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Future Self to Me: Take the Job (and the Teepee)

Posted on August 20, 2011 by Robin Cangie

I have big news, boys and girls. I’ve just accepted a position as Community Manager with a start-up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I’m moving to California on Sunday (!!!). But wait! There’s more. I’m also going to live in a teepee. The one pictured here, in fact. For reals. So, how did all this happen? Very suddenly.

First, it was a hard decision. Huge change = scary. But after not very much consideration and a short dialogue with my future self (she said, in no uncertain terms, to go for it, teepee and all), it seemed so easy and obvious that I wondered how I ever felt torn about leaving Portland. Talking to Future Me is a little trick I learned several years ago when I was facing another life-altering choice. Present Me was feeling very torn and confused and having a hard time seeing things clearly, so I imagined how Future Me would feel. Would she regret it? Would she be glad I took the plunge? Yes? (it turns out the answer is almost always yes) Let’s do it! This mental exercise has helped me through every major decision since, and I highly recommend it.

For the record, the teepee is only a short term thing. I’m moving down ahead of hubby to look for an apartment and scope things out while he packs up our old place (somehow I think I got the better end of this bargain). Thus for the next six weeks, I shall call this teepee home. If you happen to be in or around the Bay Area and want to meet up, don’t hesitate to tweet me or email me. I may be living in a teepee, but given that it’s in someone’s backyard, I promise I’ll still be showering regularly.

I absolutely intend to chronicle my teepee adventure here with thoughts, photos and hopefully some video. I’ll also continue to write about all the other stuff I usually write about. I’ve got some big changes in the works for this blog, too. So, if you’re in the Bay Area, get in touch. If you’re in Portland, stay in touch. And no matter where you are, stay tuned! :)

Posted in On My Mind | 10 Comments

How to Tweet Your Congressman (or -woman)

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Robin Cangie

This week, President Obama asked Americans to reach out to Congress and make their feelings about the debt ceiling known. To help, my friends at FearLess Revolution (disclosure: I blog for them regularly) have published a complete U.S. Congressional Twitter Directory, linking to the Twitter pages of every member of Congress. In addition to writing and calling your representatives, Twitter is one more way you can share your voice with the people who, crazy as it sounds, were elected to serve the public good. And not just in theory, either, despite cynical cries to the contrary.

Here are the guidelines that FearLess Revolution has laid out for tweeting members of Congress:

  1. Only tweet Senators and Representatives from your state.
  2. Be honest with your feelings, but don’t be rude or vulgar.
  3. Use the hashtag #FearLessForce.

As many stunning examples have already demonstrated, social media is most powerful when combined with real-world action. And so I beseech you: Please act. Reach out to your representatives. Join or start a peaceful protest. Talk to your friends. And please share this list with as many people as possible. The more ways we can spread the word, the better. Because believe it or not, our Congress was actually elected to serve. It’s time we reminded them.

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The Great Gatsby Is Too Great For ESL Students

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Robin Cangie

Macmillan Publishers has released a new version of The Great Gatsby, “retold” in half as many pages and with a greatly simplified vocabulary of about 1,600 words. The book is admittedly meant for ESL students, but the writing is nothing short of a travesty.

Like many of you, I first read The Great Gatsby in high school. It wasn’t the easiest read for a 16-year-old, but oh, the prose! Even when I missed the symbolism, I remember being profoundly impressed by Fitzgerald’s moving, lyrical prose, the tragic striving of his Gatsby unfolding like a song. At about the same time, I also read The Little Prince in my French class, a much more difficult exercise for a non-native speaker, though the prose, at least on the surface, was far simpler. I hated it at times, how few words I understood, how different this native French sounded from the carefully constructed sentences in my textbook. But I read it, and with the careful guidance of our teacher, I came to love it. Three copies now grace my shelf, and none of them are in English.

I shudder to imagine what an “intermediate” version of that beautiful book might look like. Though I surely missed a great deal that first time I read The Little Prince, with my worse-than-intermediate French skills and the help of a good teacher, I could nonetheless glimpse the beauty and depth of the story and understand some, if not all, of the nuances that run through it. I could even appreciate the delicate tenderness of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s prose, the love and heartache it conveyed. If nothing else, I cannot understate the confidence I gained from reading my first full non-English book.

A novel is much more than the story it tells, and this is especially true with Fitzgerald. Roger Ebert has posted comparisons of Fitzgerald’s original writing with the retelling on his blog, and it’s painfully apparent how much is lost. It is not merely watered down; it is sugar-coated, as well.

And that is the real tragedy, which speaks to something far deeper than a badly rewritten book. Whatever the language, teaching great literature requires care, attention and time. Those are not words that I would use to describe the U.S. public education system as a whole. The Great Gatsby retold speaks to an education system that has become institutionally lazy, one that would rather give students answers than teach them the skills to discover their own. One that teaches memorization rather than creativity. And one that gives students a simplified story rather than take the time to teach the full book, or, if they aren’t ready for the full book, chooses another book for which they are.

Canned teaching materials are a poor substitute for effective teaching. Here is a list of other “retold” great works that made my jaw drop. But spoon-feeding is not limited to ESL students. There were many times when, in my high school English classes, we would begin to study a great work and then, rather than finish reading it, just watch the movie. We had more worksheets than discussions. And far too much of our learning revolved around Scantron tests. Scantrons, in a literature class! And these were the advanced classes.

I’ll leave you with the “retold” ending of the intermediate reader. For comparison, read the original ending here.

Gatsby had believed in his dream. He had followed it and nearly made it come true.

Everybody has a dream. And, like Gatsby, we must all follow our dream wherever it takes us.

Some unpleasant people became part of Gatsby’s dream. But he cannot be blamed for that. Gatsby was a success, in the end, wasn’t he?

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Space Shuttle Atlantis and the Case for Chasing Wild Dreams

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Robin Cangie

Space Shuttle AtlantisToday is a bittersweet day for America. NASA has just launched its final mission into space, and with it, a powerful narrative of possibility has come to a close. In the midst of so many urgent global problems – unemployment, poverty, climate change, fiscal crises – it might seem trivial to mourn the decline of NASA. I can even envision a perfectly reasonable argument that we should stop chasing wild dreams of space travel and divert scarce government funds to more pressing issues.

But there is something to be said for chasing wild dreams. They bring forth the impossible and make it not only possible, but actual. They sustain us in times of pessimism and upheaval. Like a river through a canyon, wild dreams break against the edges of what could be and transform it into what is. Their power is sacred, even miraculous. We do not create wild dreams so much as they create us. And when we let them wither, the possibility of miracles withers along with them.

At a time when our sense of possibility is already dampened, when dreaming appears foolish and our troubles near-insurmountable, I’m deeply saddened to witness the withering of one of humanity’s greatest and oldest wild dreams, the dream to touch the stars themselves. Space travel was the great dream of the 20th century, a cornerstone of science fiction, the subject of countless “what I want to be when I grow up” essays, an assumed inevitability of daily life in the future. What vision of the 23rd century is complete without spaceships?

How naive that dream feels today, watching the space shuttle lift off for the last time, and with it, a narrative of possibility that captivated generations. Perhaps we don’t need space travel, but we do need narratives to help us articulate our wild dreams, to help us dilate the horizons of possibility and bring forth impossible miracles. Yes, there is something to be said for chasing wild dreams.

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What Can Sex Teach Us About Technology?

Posted on July 7, 2011 by Robin Cangie

There is a myth in Western culture that technology is morally “neutral”, that any morality applied to technology must rest with humans who choose to use it for good or evil. This is a dangerous misconception.

Technology is not neutral, cannot be neutral, any more than art, poetry, religion, economics, science, sex or any of the fruits of human creativity and human intention can be neutral. By their very nature, creativity and intention are not neutral forces. When we treat technology as neutral, we become simultaneously alienated from and blindly dependent upon the consequences of our creativity. As our way of life grows increasingly subservient to electronic connections and the devices that enable them, we cannot be blind to the implications of this dependence.

What does this have to do with sex? Sex, in particular, has a great deal to teach us about our relationship with technology. In this hyperconnected digital world, our behaviors and attitudes toward sex and technology have become strikingly similar. We are, in many ways, like awkward adolescents when it comes to technology, bewitched by new pleasures and possibilities but lacking the wisdom required for intimacy.

Like sex, technology is at once an intensely private and unrelentingly public source of fascination and controversy. It lies at the core of many of our social interactions, and so we have constructed an elaborate system of norms and taboos surrounding its use. We regulate and control it with laws and debate the importance of individual privacy. We use it to express power, to connect with others, to show love, to entertain and to distract. We oggle iPads as lustfully as we oggle breasts. It is not an understatement to say that our fate as a species has become as intricately intertwined with technology as it has been with sex for millenia.

Technology, like sex, both liberates and enslaves us. It enslaves when we use it selfishly, narcissistically, manipulatively or even merely without self-reflection. It liberates when we use it to create possibility and deepen human connections. Narcissism, liberation, enslavement, possibility. These are not the qualities of a neutral thing. Technology is anything but neutral.

In human terms, the opposite of neutrality is not partiality; it is intimacy. In the 21st century, the capacity to both deepen and destroy intimacy is what sex and technology have in common. It seems strange to speak of technology as a way to deepen intimacy when our existing technologies offer us little more than infinite paths to distraction. Hyperconnection is not the same thing as human connection, and right now, we have mostly the former.

Technology as we know it destroys intimacy. The more dependent I grow upon technology, the less intimate I become with my surroundings. Rather than step outside and feel the air against my skin, I check the weather online to know if it will rain. Rather than grow intimately familiar with the lay of the land, I use a GPS to tell me where to go. And rather than visit an old friend when I wonder how she’s doing, I check her Facebook profile. I’m not saying that any of these advances are bad or even undesirable, but when we treat technology as a mere resource or convenience, we become blinded to and alienated from the webs of relationships upon which we depend, even as we become ever-more dependent upon them!

The way we treat technology now leads us to a kind of death, not just the death of the natural world but the slow, sinister demise of our own capacity to form and sustain deep and meaningful connections, which is the death of intimacy. Rather than treat technology as a thing apart from and outside of us, that is, as neutral, we must recognize that technology is as dynamic, as inseparable, as intricately bound up with our humanity as sexuality.

This is not a manifesto against technology. It is a call for self-awareness, not just to the people who use technologies but to the companies that build them. Technology can be a powerful, even transformative way to build human connections and deepen intimacy, but only when we use it consciously. As long as we continue to use technology blindly and addictively, it will at best distract us and at worst divide us.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the relationship between intimacy and technology. Do you know of any organizations right now who are helping us become more intimate through technology, not just more connected?

Posted in Media and Technology | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

A Challenge to Facebook: Start Mattering

Posted on June 24, 2011 by Robin Cangie

Dear Mark Zuckerburg and employees of Facebook,

Facebook has incredible potential. I do not say this lightly. I am often critical of your company’s decisions, but I believe Facebook can and should become a transformational force for good in this world. But you are not there yet. Facebook’s attitudes toward information and user privacy are harmful and serve to undermine our autonomy. Up to now, Facebook has failed to create enduring, meaningful value in the lives of most users because you focus too much on information, too little on people. I challenge you to do better.

I challenge Facebook to open up possibilities, not preferences. Help us become more human, not simply more connected. And rather than dissolve our capacity for privacy, teach us to become stewards of our own information. I challenge Facebook to start mattering.

1. Open up possibilities, not preferences.

Do not filter information based on a narrow and often arbitrary set of “preferences” that you’ve identified about your users. Far from making the world more “social,” this ultimately transforms our social network into an echo chamber, making it easy to avoid ideas that challenge us and dramatically narrowing the scope of information and ideas available to us. Your vision of a world where “everything is social” is world where everything we encounter has been so filtered and tailored that it becomes a mere reflection of ourselves. This is not social at all, but deeply anti-social, even solipsistic.

Instead of narrowing our possibilities and cheapening our encounters with information, help us look outside of ourselves to see and even anticipate new possibilities. Do it openly and talk often about the implications of your actions. If you must filter the information we see, show us not the just familiar, the agreeable and the predictable but also the novel, the uncomfortable and the unexpected. Suggest friends, pages and groups that seem both like us and also different from us. If Facebook’s vision is truly a more social world, you won’t get there by filtering out disagreeable information. You will get there by opening up our worlds and helping us become more than what we are.

2. Help us become more human, not simply more connected.

I have been on Facebook since 2005, and I have, without doubt, become more connected as a result – to friends, colleagues, professors, classmates, distant cousins, old high school rivals, even my parents’ former co-workers. But digital connections are not the same as human relationships. For all its likes, shares, comments, status updates and tags, the Facebook self revolves around the I – what I like, what I think, what I want, what I share, and given the vastly increasing presence of brands, what I consume.

Stop reinforcing shallow notions of selfhood bound up with consumerism and egocentrism, and start helping us deepen our human relationships. Give us a place not just to connect, but to commune. Meaningful relationships are possible in the digital realm, but not when the focus of your platform is brands, likes and shallow interactions. You must empower your users to get more out of Facebook than that. You might say the onus is users to create meaningful interactions with one another; that’s what a lazy brand would say. A brand that matters would strive to help people to expand their potential through human relationships and deep, genuine, purposeful collaboration and interaction. OpenIDEO is an inspiring example of what a social network can be.

3. Teach us to become stewards of our own information.

For all its talk of transparency and openness, Facebook has been astonishingly bad at helping users understand just how little privacy they have on the Facebook platform. All that data may be a boon to brands, but if you are going to continue opening up the platform, you owe it to your users to help them navigate the treacherous waters of privacy in an increasingly transparent world.

Transparency and autonomy are not the same thing, though we often confuse the two. When you make changes to your users’ privacy without helping them understand the implications of those changes, you are actually making them less free, because you are robbing them of the capacity to make decisions with full knowledge of the consequences. Teach us to become good stewards of our information, rather than unconscious slaves to it. This is how you will cultivate more autonomy in the world, not by recklessly opening up more data.

So, Facebook, there you have it. You’ve got a lot of potential. If you want to remain merely useful, merely fun and merely shallow, then feel free to disregard everything I’ve just written. But if you want to transform an industry and become a potent force for deep, enduring betterness in the world, that is, if you want to matter, then hopefully I’ve given you something to think about. What do you say?

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Facebook’s $100 Billion IPO and the Disconnect Between Money and Meaning

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Robin Cangie

Facebook is preparing to go public in early 2012 to the tune of $100 billion, one of the largest IPOs in history. The news has understandably sparked a lot of discussion, most of it predictable. While tech pundits are busy with questions about Facebook hype and the next tech bubble, no one is talking about the bigger issue, which is the tremendous gulf between money and meaning that allows companies like Facebook to even consider the possibility of such a huge IPO.

I’ve been very critical of Facebook in the past, but I do find their service useful. It helps me stay in touch with friends more effectively. It’s also nice to know what my old college roommates are up to, even though we never talk anymore. When you account for the actual value that Facebook has (questionably) added to most people’s lives, however, it’s clear that valuing Facebook at $100 billion is way behind ridiculous. The company’s total profits were only about $600 million in 2010. The possibility of a $100 billion IPO for such a company demonstrates, very clearly, that the so-called monetary value of a business is becoming more and more divorced from any real social value it creates.

Next week, I’ll offer my thoughts on how Facebook can become a transformative force for truly awesome good in the world. In the meantime, I’m curious – how much value has Facebook added to your life? Enough to justify a $100 billion IPO? In my case, the answer is most definitely no.

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Why You Don’t Need a Chief [insert CSR buzzword here] Officer

Posted on June 10, 2011 by Robin Cangie

A couple of weeks ago, Coca Cola announced that it had created a Global Office of Sustainability and appointed its first ever Chief Sustainability Officer, who is tasked with integrating “Coca-Cola’s sustainability initiatives in water, climate protection, packaging and recycling.” The move may be well-intentioned, but it’s also misguided. Appointing a CSO reinforces the idea that sustainability is a program, a siloed issue that’s separate from the core business. When treated as such, even the most well-intentioned sustainability efforts, indeed any so-called Corporate Social Responsibility efforts, can never be truly successful.

Too often, institutions respond to problems, be they social, economic, cultural or environmental, by creating “add-on” programs rather than spurring systemic change. But if your institution is serious about becoming a positive force in the 21st century, you must recognize and act on your institution’s obligation to create lasting and meaningful value in the world. You can’t do this with a program or even a department. Programs and departments function as semi-autonomous units within an institution, overseeing certain aspects of business or governance in great detail while leaving other aspects to be more fully managed by the heads of other programs and departments But sustainability and social responsibility are core values, right up there with integrity, honesty, excellence and respect, and you can’t treat core values like you treat departments.

It would be obviously unproductive to task Sales with upholding integrity, Marketing with upholding excellence, Customer Support with upholding honesty, and Accounting with upholding respect. All of these departments, and indeed the employees within them and the vendors with whom they do business, must believe in and uphold all of these core values so that they become integrated throughout everything the organization touches. We must treat CSR (or whatever you want to call it) in the same way.

Institutional responsibility in the 21st century requires more a lot more than appointing a Chief [insert CSR buzzword here] Officer, donating more money to charity or imposing a company-wide recycling program; it requires a full-on, bottom-up institutional transformation. Everyone, from the receptionist to the CEO to the company that washes your windows, be onboard, invested and – this one’s crucial – empowered to become practitioners in this transformation.

For a detailed framework and real-world stories of what such an institution might look like, I highly recommend reading Carol Sanford’s wonderful book, The Responsible Business. For my vision of a 21st-century institution, read The Potential-Driven Institution: Create, Collaborate, Construct.

Your thoughts?

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The Potential-Driven Institution: Create, Collaborate, Construct

Posted on May 25, 2011 by Robin Cangie

Kandinsky Composition VI

The potential-driven institution is vibrant and dynamic, like a Kandinsky painting.

Everyone’s talking about the future of business these days. More and more, they’re talking about the future of work, too. But we need more discussion about the relationship between these two futures, for the future of work and the future of business are inextricably intertwined, and they both need reimagining. Our current institutional models make it nearly impossible for either work or business to encourage human flourishing in any meaningful way, and look at the consequences: employees are disengaged, and corporate profits ≠ societal prosperity.

The existing model may enrich a few in the short term, but ultimately, there is no such thing as a successful business that does not also nourish human potential, not only that of its employees but also its vendors, suppliers, customers and even society at-large. With that in mind, I’d like to propose a unified way to think about our ways of working and conducting business, one that recognizes their interdependence and is rooted in human potential, rather than profit potential. I call it the potential-driven institution, and it can be characterized in three verbs: create, collaborate, construct.

Create.

For all the talk we hear of employee “empowerment”, most organizations still divide their employees into “thinkers”, who make the strategy, and “doers”, who execute. A single, painful call to almost any customer service line proves the inefficacy of this approach. But the difference between thinkers and doers is largely imagined. In a potential-driven institution, everyone – employees, business partners, vendors, even customers – needs to be both thinking and doing. That is, everyone must have the authority to imagine solutions and the autonomy to execute them within their spheres of expertise. For example:

  • Zappos. Much of Zappos’ success comes from the fact that leadership trusts, indeed expects, its employees to be creative and exercise their own best judgment when helping customers. Rather than forcing them to stick to a script or crippling them with top-down corporate policies, Zappos gives employees the authority and autonomy to do what’s necessary to “Deliver Happiness”. The results have made Zappos into a customer service legend.
  • Threadless. Online t-shirt retailer Threadless is a great example of how to foster and empower creativity among external stakeholders in your business, both for their benefit and yours. Threadless works like this: People design and submit ideas for t-shirts online, the Threadless community votes on the submissions, and the top-voted designs are made into t-shirts. Anyone can submit a design or a slogan, and if your submission is chosen, you get paid a nice sum. Threadless proves that integrating creativity into your business needn’t and shouldn’t be limited to internal employees.

Collaborate.

First, it’s important to understand that meaningful collaboration is not the same thing as having lots of meetings, working on a project team, dividing up responsibilities or participating in “team building” exercises. Meaningful collaboration is about bringing forth the collective potential of individuals in the name of a common purpose. It requires trust and autonomy as much as it requires “team work”, because all ideas must be given space, and everyone must be trusted to bring their best work to the group. They must also be given the freedom to do that best work in the absence of micromanagement or death by committee. Importantly, in the potential-driven institution, collaboration extends beyond the organization to include external stakeholders such as vendors, suppliers, customers and even society. It’s not just a way of working but a way of conducting business. For example:

  • GOOD and Ford Motors. In a joint effort called Reinventing the Outdoors, forward-thinking magazine GOOD teamed up with Ford Motors to encourage outdoor sports and grant $50,000 to one of six socially minded non-profits. GOOD subscribers read the non-profits’ stories and voted for the winner. The campaign isn’t perfect, but it’s a good example of how two businesses can form an unexpected partnership and collaborate on something worthwhile, both for mutual benefit and the common good.
  • OpenIDEO. Started by design firm IDEO, OpenIDEO is an online platform where creative people can come together to brainstorm solutions to complex social problems, in the form of challenges sponsored by IDEO and its partners. Anyone who signs up can collaborate on a challenge. Ideas are proposed and vetted, and at the end of each challenge, a fully concepted solution is ready and waiting to be implemented by an enterprising organization or individual. This is a beautiful example of meaningful collaboration that transcends the traditional boundaries of business and focuses on unleashing human potential.

Construct.

Creativity and collaboration set the foundation for what matters most – constructing meaningful things. Umair Haque calls this “thick value“, aka “awesome stuff that makes people meaningfully better off”. All key stakeholders in the potential-driven institution – employees, partners, customers, communities, even governments – should not only benefit from this constructive, meaningful value; ideally, they should be empowered to participate in its very construction. It’s the ultimate bringing forth of human potential, a complete reimagining of the relationship between institutions and society. Very few organizations even come close to being truly constructive in this way. It’s not impossible, though, and when it does happen, it’s quite extraordinary.

  • COMMON. The best example I’ve found of a truly constructive organization, one designed explicitly and intentionally to bring forth human potential, is COMMON. Founded by Alex & Ana Bogusky, Rob Schuham and John Bielenberg, COMMON is, in the founders’ own words, “about connecting people together and harnessing the power of true, rule-breaking creativity to launch socially beneficial businesses. Businesses that are designed to spread love and prosperity to all stakeholders.”

    It’s not just a better way of doing business. It’s not just a better way of working. It’s both, and it’s so much more. COMMON has created a community where individuals can come together and share ideas, brainstorm and prototype possible solutions and transform them into world-changing ventures. In other words, a place to…

Create. Collaborate. Construct.

The potential-driven institution recognizes that the way we work and the way we conduct business are not two separate institutional challenges, but as related as leaves to the roots of a tree. It treats the business and its stakeholders, both internal and external as part of a larger, interdependent web and seeks to bring forth the potential within that web, for the betterment of all. While my discussion has focused mainly on business, the importance of building creative, collaborative and constructive institutions holds true for government, non-profits, education, media and our many other institutions that need reimagining, as well.

At present, these institutions are like a Socialist realist painting: drab, banal, rigid and riddled with ideology. The potential-driven institution is more like a Kandinsky: vibrant, dynamic, wildly creative, absent strict delineations and brimming with possibility.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. What does a potential-driven institution look like? And how can we make it the norm, not the exception?

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