There are several things that bother me about this sort of logic. Of course there are a number of risks in anyone using social media. As a society we are collectively still getting our heads around how we should approach the fact that we are increasingly living our lives in the public eye. We do have to be concerned about how we behave and the image we are creating for ourselves. The fact is there are very few things that are private in modern society. However, the problem is not that we are or are not users of social media – the issue is that we in general have to understand how to play by an evolving set of social norms and rules.

In this new society connectivity is an asset. It provides access to  information, relationships, and opportunity. Cutting out entire media classes would be foolish and extremely limiting. From the teacher’s perspective it is not about limiting themselves from the use of a media type rather it is a change in the traditional leadership style the suggestion of limiting presumes. Teachers should not be leading by positional power alone – they should be leading by the value that they create in the classroom.

I am not suggesting that positional power is completely dead. As we become an increasingly global society, and study culture around the globe, we will see that in different societies positional power and Power Distance as described by Geert Hofstede hold very different roles in the cultural interactions of different societies. In both the US and most of Western Europe positional power is becoming far less important. What is important is that we look for ways to connect and collaborate. The role of the teacher is becoming less the sage on the stage and more a facilitator of learning.

Bottom Line: Managers and Teachers should be human. There are socially appropriate things which can and should be shared on Facebook with colleagues and students. It is up to us as professionals to understand what the limits are and to use the media as a point of intersectional learning and collaboration.

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I believe Dr. Krugman is clearly falling under the power of the Affect Heuristic and Intentional Blindness. The Nobel Laureate Daniel Kaherman (2011) points out that most people are much more likely to believe data/arguments that support an opinions that they already hold and ignore or strongly discount the value of data/arguments that are counter to their beliefs – he called this the Affect Heuristic. The Nobel Laureates Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons (2010) point out in complex situations we also have a tendency to focus only on the things in the environment that interest us and often we ignore obvious elements – they called this Intentional Blindness.

Dr. Krugman likes to point out that the bottom 80% of the population makes about half of the total income in the US. He uses this as an argument that to suggest that education has no affect on the income that college graduates make. He states “while even the well-educated can no longer count on getting jobs with good benefits”. This argument is clearly counter to the data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statics and the Census Bureau which show that there is a direct correlation between the level of education and employment / salary (see my post – Occupy Wall Street – What’s the Point?).

What I find even more curious is that Dr. Krugman fails to see the direct relationship between the number of those Americans with a baccalaureate degree, about 27 percent of the population, and the upper 20 percent of the population that earn 50 percent of the income. It would seem that once we factor out college graduates with degrees that have historically low employment and salary rates (such as social work) we will find the correlation is even stronger.

The real flaw in Dr. Krugman’s argument is that he seems to frame this as a US only issue. An economist should realize that a significant portion of the jobs in the bottom 80 percent of the income scale are now part of a global marketplace. The money earned is not concentrating at the top due to an evil conspiracy – these are market issues. The vast majority of the worlds adults do not have a college education; therefore, the vast majority are competing with Americans who don’t have a college education. The global market is putting pressure on every American to create value. That means we can charge more for our labor if the global market decides that what we are producing has value – and value in excess of what a person somewhere else is willing or able to provide.

We might not like the reality that we are competing globally and that is putting pressure on us to compete – but it is the reality.

References

Chabris, C., & Simons, D. (2010). The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us (1st ed.). New York, NY: Crown Archetype.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Krugman, P. (2011, November 3). Oligarchy, American Style. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/opinion/oligarchy-american-style.html?_r=1

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One could also understand how these facts, coupled with a few years of high unemployment, could create an environment where a number of people would feel disenfranchised and angry. This would certainly seem to be the case with the Occupy Wall Street crowd – although they have done a horrible job of communicating their message. I, like many other Americans, have been searching the news reports looking for a consistent message in their protest, and a clear vision of what they expect the results of this protest to be.

All that seems to come through is that they are angry – and maybe an undertone that they feel that they are participating in a movement that will hold a place in history. There is a natural desire to discount these protesters as lunatic fringe. To that end I have begun to hear people describe them as the Democrat’s version of the Tea Party; which really not a fair comparison since the Tea Party has a clear agenda and a clear set of goals – whether or not you agree with them.

As someone who studies innovation I am always concerned in scanning the fringe of any environment. The fringe is where the disenfranchised and the underserved cluster and disruptive innovations develop to meet their needs.  The fact that we have the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street crowd is a feeling that people are being underserved by the current paradigm. Those of us who have studied Kuhn (1962) understand that it is not uncommon for people to hold on to broken paradigms for long after they have stopped working – that is until a new paradigm presents itself and we can easily replace one with the other.

In addition, we know from studying Rogers (2003) that the first to accept a new paradigm are usually thought of as very strange and not really someone to be followed. So looking at both these groups we might notice a general level of discontent that might be dangerous for the status quo to ignore. Even though the Occupy Wall Street crowd has a small number of radical followers, an extremely confused message, and they have no clear end game in mind, both they and the Tea Party are showing that there is room for a more mainstream change to begin to occur.

I do not however believe this change will look remotely like what either group expects. Both groups seem to be clamoring for a change in the environment that will change will benefit them without requiring them to change themselves. This simply won’t happen. Many of the changes that these people are complaining about are not purely domestic in nature – and it is not necessarily caused by an evil cabal that is looking to oppress the population.

We are competing in a global environment and in such an environment jobs will naturally float to the part of the world that has the most favorable conditions. Therefore, the first jobs to leave will be those that require the least amount of skill and where other parts of the world can actively compete – like in manufacturing. Those jobs that are difficult to replicate or require more skills will be harder to move and will generate more value. At issue is how we align our economy for value and how we align ourselves to generate value within that structure.

For example, if we breakdown unemployment we see that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate is approximately 14 percent; however, the unemployment rate for those with a bachelor’s degree is about 4.2 percent. The problem is that 85 percent of the adult population has a high school degree and only 28 percent have a bachelor’s degree or higher – and only 10 percent have a graduate degree.

I am not suggesting that formal education is a cure for all ills – however there is a significant correlation here. Of course there are plenty of individuals with degrees whom have suffered from long term unemployment for a variety of reasons, and there are plenty of people who are employed who are not making the kind of income they feel that they disserve. But when we look at the employment and income charts from the BLS we will see that on the whole if we invest in ourselves we will develop valuable skills that are compensated for in some way and we will likely be employed.

Bottom-line: yes the Occupy Wall Street crowd is the lunatic fringe – but the lunatic fringe is often a bellwether for change – our current paradigm is showing signs of being broken – so it is possible that a dramatically new paradigm could develop and could replace what we know in a relatively short period of time (5 to 10 years) -but this will not happen while the lunatic fringe is sleeping the a New York city park and matching on Wall Street

References:

Kuhn, T. (1996). The structure of scientific revolution. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations (Vol. 5). New York, NY: Free Press.

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In the first three months of the calender year, as high school seniors wait for their college decision letters, we are typically inundated with articles on the increasing cost of education – and the inevitable question on whether or not it is all worth it. Lately I have seen far too many articles that parade out the same antidotes about the high tech executives – Steve Jobs, Larry Ellision, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg – and suggest that they achieved huge success without the advantage of a college education. You might even conclude that these men were simply blessed by providence to be leaders of vast technology empires, and just about anyone can be just as lucky given the right circumstance.

Even a cursory look at the history of these men would turn up the fact that throughout their lives they have been compulsive self educators. For example, while in high school Bill Gates was purported to sneak out of his parents house in the middle of the night to go to the local university data center to get free time on the mainframe, Steve Jobs dropped out of college but continued to take classes outside of his major in things that interested him – which developed a love for design thinking and applied engineering, Larry Elision is famous for his extremely broad and deep knowledge of the internals of database design, Japanese art, and sailing, and Mark Zuckerburg was taking college classes while still in high school and seems to be following the path of his tech predecessors in veracious self educations. All of these man have spent tens of thousands of hours following a passion and a dream. So to suggest that their success was simple providence boarders on an insult to these titans of tech, and a horribly misleading story to put in the minds of those who are attempting to make life decisions about the direction of their own education.

We know from the research of Anders Ericcson of the University of Florida that it requires at least ten thousand hours of focused work in order to be an expert ant anything. Some people can do the ten thousand hours on their own. You might have a grandfather who worked as a delivery truck driver who could recite more poetry and classic literature than the average graduate with a literature degree (my mother’s father). Or, you might have a friend who knows more practical engineering and computer science than three or four college educated computer science graduates put together (my friend Bob). But these people are rare. Why? Because Ericcson points out that true expertise takes more than just time it takes focused effort in pursuit of a goal. Most people will not only require a little bit of a push now and again they will need coaching. Even the best self educated individualizes would likely have reached their goals easier or have gone farther with a coach to help them past the rough spots.

It is also important to remember education is not always about material success, or simply preparing yourself for a job. It is about make the most of the human experience. Being able to see the and understand the world in context, or being able to have a broader perspective on a situation make it more real and more vivid. For example, this month I was in Paris and had the chance to visit the Louvre. Walking through Napoleon’s apartment, touching Egyptian antiquities, or seeing the Mona Lisa is much more vivid when you understand the significance. Or if we take the time to go to a good library and are exposed to Sun Tzu,  Miyamoto Musashi, or Niccolo Machiavelli our perspective on world events is likely to radically different than it was before we read these masters of war and military discipline.

Suggesting that education is something some of us can do without robs those who miss out some of the important parts of the human experience. What is worse is to suggest that some people are not capable. The numbers that are truly not capable is very small. There are many who are not prepared – which is more an inditement of our K-12 education system than the true ability of the population. However, I could write several post on that. Bottom-line being that there are community college, and remedial programs, that can get the majority of the ill prepared up to speed. It might take them longer since they have failed to lay the proper foundations but it is not an impossible dream.

Education allows us, as Newton said, to stand on the shoulder of the giants that came before us.   Yes, it is expensive. Yes, it takes time. Yes, it is difficult. But there are few things in life are of value that don’t take time, and are difficult, and most things ova value are expensive. How much less wonderful would life be if we avoided everything that was hard, expansive, and time consuming.

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So does God have a brand? What got me thinking along these lines were my experiences this morning while attending mass in Paris. It was a sung mass in Latin and the scripture readings were done in French – and of course I don’t speak either of these languages – so it was all very beautiful but I did not understand a single word. Since I was determine to fulfill my weekly obligation I figured I had two choices: sit there completely lost, or find a way to use this moment constructively.

What this has to do with branding is dependent on what your definition of a brand is. One could define brand as a specific set of customer experiences. Under this definition a church has a brand. If for example if you are a Roman Catholic, you can travel to just about anywhere in the world and you can find a mass, and the basic structure and feeling that come out of that mass will be the same as anywhere else in the world. The mass has a spiritual element and a ceremonial element.

I tend to find myself in agreement with Brother Guy Consolmagno (2007). He suggests that ” our religion fails us if it substitutes itself in the place of God”, and for the most part I do not believe that the church as a whole has any intention of replacing God with itself. On the surface it would seem to be a classical branding effort for a cause. By this I mean that the church conducts ceremonial acts, confers sacraments, and venerates icons that build a brand – the connection to God. Our ability to move to a spiritual state becomes Pavlovina over time, the elements of religious ceremony begin to become triggers for our state of consciousness. The garments worn, the incense burned, the architecture of the building, the singing of hymns, and the performance of specific gestures all lead to a state of mind that brings us closer to God. We look how we classically build brand we use icons, shapes, building, gestures, and even music to represent a feeling we wish to elicits. So I guess . . .in a good way . . .God might be a brand .

Reference:

Consolmagno, G. (2007). God’s Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

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This than lead to a series of questions: Am I a college professor? A college administrator? An entrepreneur? A consultant? A writer? . . . . .The gnawing fear I had was if I couldn’t even define who and what I wanted to be, then how can I be the best at something? I guess what it came down to is I wanted to move forward efficiently – but I was unsure of the metric.

One thing I was sure of is that the default paradigms of money and power had left me wanting more. I like money and some of the things it brings. I am not a rich man by typical materialistic standards, but I have always been able to live comfortable lifestyle by the standards of western society – and I can honestly say I have never really wanted for much. In fact by many measures I have been very successful: I have a wonderful wife. I have three tremendous kids. I have earned a terminal academic degree. I have had reasonably successful business career. I live in a very nice neighborhood. I am constantly presented with new academic and business projects. . .

Looking at my life slowly I began to realize that I have never been comfortable with other peoples definitions of who and what I am, or who and what I should be.  I am my own archetype. I am an academic, an entrepreneur, a academic administrator, a writer, a father,a  husband, a teacher, . . . More importantly what ever definition I came up with for myself today would only be satisfactory for this moment in time. With each new experience, with each new skill, I have more assets to steward and more to maximize.

I realized that attempting to be part of an existing archetype is in some ways an attempt to be a good copy of someone else. In many ways it is not genuine, nor does it maximize the set of individual assets you have. Not that archetypes are valueless. On the contrary they allow us to get our heads around what is possible and where we might look to stretch ourselves, but archetypes must be tempered, combined, edited, and developed to match who we are, the assets we have, the environment in which we find ourselves in, and our vision for the future.

For far too much of my life I have been hyper critical of myself based on an archetype that I applied unfairly to the situations I have been in. I don’t believe I will ever be any less demanding on myself, nor will I ever stop wanting to be more than I am at any given point in time. However, what I hope I can do is to allow myself to be the best me I can possibly be without worrying how someone else might judge my performance. That I can develop a vision for a life well lived, and that I can stay true to that vision.

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On November 4th Microsoft released Kinect. This product allows users of Microsoft’s highly successful XBox to interact with their gaming systems without the use of the standard game controller.Through the use of cameras and sensors, Kinect allows users to interact with their gaming system simply by moving their bodies – reminiscent of Tom Cruise in the Minority Report.

It seems, this product caught the attention of programmers as well. Several programmers quickly developed interfaces to connect the Kinect to PCs, and hacker publications and websites set up contests to see who cold come up with the best application for this new input device. Microsoft reacted initially by suggested that it would work with law enforcement to prevent this sort of “product tampering”; however, it soon backed down when the there was a reaction from the developer community. It is understandable that Microsoft would want to protect their product. However, it is fairly obvious this is really not a threat to them in anyway, and could prove to be a grand benefit.

What bothers me about this is the a developing mime of strict compliance to the original vision of the original developer, patent holder, or copyright holder – and the willingness to use litigation to guarantee this compliance. Innovation is about see paradigms in a different light, and about combining paradigms in new and different ways – ways the original  developers would have never imagined. In almost all cases, innovation is not about lone developers working in seclusion. The reality is that the vast majority of innovations are built by extending the ideas of others. It is all about leveraging and combining the intellectual assets in the environment. In its very nature it is collaborative and communal. Sharing cultures and cultures that are will to break rues are the ones that are most innovative. Innovation is about the wisdom of the crowd not of the individual or a single organization.

This is not to say that innovation instantly becomes the property of the masses. There should be compensation for those who toil to develop something new. However, as with most things this can be taken too far and move from the realm of protection, to the realm of barrier, and on the realm of compliance and elitism.

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Brands are about promises. They are about the promise of what the ownership experience will be like. They are a promise of a specific level of quality. They are a promise of a specific level of  consistency, in product, service, and ownership experience. And, most importantly they are a promise of total customer value.

As with any promise, we naturally can consider the source of the promise. If we have a friend who is constantly late for social events, we might not believe them if they promise to be on time for the next social event we plan. However, if we have a friend who constantly goes above and beyond we are more likely to  believe them in the future. Our friend are either building our destroying their own personal brands.

Brands, and the associated brand promises, instill a feeling about the brand experience. Everything we do either creates brand building or brand entropy conditions. All of this results in the conscious experience of the brand and a specific level of brand equity (value created and held by the brand) .

Logos, icons, colors, and other graphical identity tools need to consider what they customers perceive the brand to be and what the company or individual intends their brand to be. They cannot be in conflict with each other or the brand will loose potential value. In addition, graphical identifiers need to change over time in order to support the maturation of the brand or changes in brand intent.

This is of course a very high level description and there is plenty of important detail that I have chosen not to include. However, I do believe that it at least sets a high level direction.

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The blind men teach us that the world is so large, and so beyond the scope of our senses, that our experiences often do not provide us with the full understanding of what is really going on. Worse, we just as often don’t realize we are seeing a non-representative sample of the whole. We have a tendency to look for answers that matches the models of the world we are already familiar with, with a solutions so simple it would make Occam wince, or some Platonic ultimate solution – and we just love to assess cause on to situations on some pretty circumstantial evidence.

In 2004 Malcolm Galdwell gave a great speech at the TED conference what where he described the work of the psychophysicist Howard Moskowitz, PhD. According to Galdwell, Moskowitz developed his career around the point that there is no perfect tomato sauce - but there are perfect tomato sauces. His great contribution was to make it clear that the idea that there is only one way to make tomato sauce, or mustard, or cola is crazy. You might argue with me that my taste buds are unsophisticated, or that I am incapable of understanding the subtleties of something as well as you, but there is nothing that makes your taste or perception better than mine. My senses, life experiences, and comfort zone are different than yours – not better or worse – just different. Just like the blind men, my experience of the same stimulus is different than yours, simply because I am me – with all of my specific senses and life experiences. So saying there is only one answer to anything, and it is your answer, should be a bit troubling to me - especially if it is simple. I am not suggesting that there are never simple cause and effect relationships, I am suggesting that we should be careful not to over simplify for the sake of convenience.

On September 16, 2010 the New York Times had a cover story seeming to associate the waring of New York Yankee hats with criminal activity. Their evidence was a series of anecdotes of criminals who were waring Yankee hats or paraphernalia while committing a crime. I instinctively asked myself  how many criminals ware sneakers, jeans, or t-shirts while committing a crime. Since the Yankees sell over three time the amount of logoed material than any other MLB team one might expect that they might appeal to a pretty broad population including all sorts of people – good and bad. So it seems this might have crossed the line into sloppy cause and effect, and sloppy journalism.

Whether we are blind men, food scientists, or journalists it is easy to see a pattern in the world around us and assume that it constitutes a rule, or that there a some cause and effect related to it. It is hard to accept that we are more often than not seeing the whole picture and we are part of some larger system.

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