BIF-6 Summit Book

“I’ve never had an experience as delightful, informative, useful, and FUN as the one that I just had at the BIF Summit.”

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Max Geiger, BIF storyteller

“Where else can you interact with some of the most talented innovators in the world?”

Bruce Nussbaum, BIF-5 co-host

“BIF is about as good as it gets when it comes to learning from smart people who can tell great stories. Confused? Come to BIF! You may still be confused, but you’re guaranteed to learn a lot before you leave.”

Alan Webber, BIF storyteller

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Welcome to the BIF-6 Summit

Five years ago, the first BIF Summit was held in a small function room at the Hotel Providence. We set up 75 banquet chairs around a small pop-up stage and took a giant leap of faith. We believed then, as we do now, that personal storytelling is an essential ingredient in creating a motivated community of innovators that is focused on solving real world problems.

Over the years, many things have changed. We’ve grown and brought new talent aboard. Our network has expanded in ways that we could not have imagined in 2005. Most importantly, we’ve seen our vision to build real-world laboratories come to life, creating spaces and places where our partners can design and test new ways of delivering value to those who need it the most.

2010 was a banner year for BIF. We expanded our Student Experience Lab and are now using our initial work to understand the student experience as a foundation for an exciting phase of design and solution development activity. This summer, BIF and Babson College launched an Entrepreneur Experience Lab, a collaboration that will create a real world laboratory to design, develop and test new entrepreneurship support solutions and systems.

Amidst all this growth and change, one thing has stayed the same: BIF’s obsession with using storytelling as a catalyst for innovation. This commitment to storytelling is reflected in every BIF Summit, even looking back to that cramped hotel ballroom in 2005 where we held our first gathering.

People have told us to scale-up the Summit. Go bigger. Add more “stuff.” But each year we say no. And

it’s not because we don’t think about how the Summit should evolve to reflect the changing needs of our community. It’s because we still believe that the formula works: Let great people tell great stories in an environment that supports connection and collaboration.

A lot may have changed in the last five years, but we still find great joy and satisfaction in storytelling.

For everything that is wrong with our economy right now, it’s a good time for innovators who are using these tough times to advance radical concepts that couldn’t get traction a few years ago. The need for innovation is now so great that people are hungry for bold, new ideas. The BIF Summit is the perfect forum for exactly this conversation.

Over the next two days, you’ll hear firsthand accounts of what it takes to challenge the norm, resist tradition and drive innovation. In the following pages, we invite you to learn more about the BIF-6 storytellers.

Most importantly, we urge you to connect with them, share your own stories and seek out ways in which you might collaborate.

Thank you for being part of our community and part of the conversation.

— Saul, Melissa, Chris and Tori

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Marla Allison

Mixing it Up and Making it New “I try to please myself in my paintings. Art is a business, but I’m trying to stay on that little edge that I can call my own.”

Marla Allison is trying to do something that hasn’t been seen yet. As an artist living and working in Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico, the influences on her work date back to the pre-Columbian era. So, it’s difficult to do something new under the sun.

Nevertheless, Allison brings freshness to ancient Native American artistic practices by putting her own twist on centuries-old patterns in pottery, painting and weaving, and by beautifully blending her traditionally-derived sensibilities with the best of today’s mixed media.

She has learned to thrive as a young artist by adapting. When she studied figure drawing in art school, she became frustrated that she could not draw a nude model realistically.

“Everybody could draw this nude model exactly right, but I could not get it,” she says. “I’m not a realistic painter at all. I could not make sense of it.”

Her teacher advised her to stop drawing in the same lines as the other artists in the room, telling her: “Make something that you can.” And so she began to draw in simplified lines, breaking up the body into segments that made sense to her: “I shattered the subject; I changed it to where I knew I’d like it.”

When she later learned that this style of painting was called Cubism, she realized that she shared a lens onto the world with the likes of Picasso and Duchamp.

Her art began to accommodate her particular sense of reality.

Allison’s entire body of work is deeply infused with the stories and impressions of the Laguna people.

Recently completing a research fellowship at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, she studied the symbols left by her ancestors on individually-made pieces of pottery or rugs.

The designs, she says, are handed down from mother to daughter, from generation to generation. She sketched them for herself so that she could understand what the artists were feeling when they were painting them.

“There’s no way to understand exactly what they were feeling, so I’m feeling it out and trying to decipher what those symbols mean to me,” Allison explains. “I adapt them to my own style. The thing that gets me is how each person changed the design in their own way to make it their own. What really excites me is that I get to do the same thing.”

Allison transforms those symbols and patterns, using them to embellish her mesas and Southwestern skies, tattooing them on the bodies that inhabit her canvases. She reshapes them in the hues and patterns of her own reality — not the one that was handed down to her, but the one she creates every day.

Four years ago, she experimented with her first multi-media piece by attaching a digital photo frame to

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a painting she entered in an art show competition. The pictures in the frame were changing against the static backdrop of her painting. While she was thrilled with the movement and depth the photographs gave to the painting, the judges were bewildered.

“They had no idea how to take the photographs,” Allison says. “Nobody really got it — it was too much of a new idea. But people came around later.”

The next year, Allison’s “Entertainment of a Storyteller” depicted a Hopi Pueblo woman sharing stories of her people. Through a hole in the upper right hand corner of the painting, a DVD played the voice of Allison’s grandmother telling stories as simple, childlike stick figure illustrations appear on the screen.

The piece won first place in the Mixed Media Category at the prestigious Annual Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market in Phoenix, Arizona.

“Now they’re looking at me like, ‘What are you going to do next?’” Allison says.

She attributes the enthusiastic reception of the “Storyteller” painting partially to changing attitudes about what constitutes art in the age of technology, but also to her own growth as an artist. She says she put a great deal of thought into the way she would present her next multi-media piece, particularly in the way she would design the connection between the painting and the DVD. She had no pre-Columbian models to go by this time. She had to do something that hadn’t been seen yet. In the same way that she learned to develop her

Laguna Pueblo-Cubist eye, Allison weaves technology onto her canvas to connect Laguna Pueblo storytelling to the visual component of her art.

“I try to please myself in my paintings,” she says.

“Art is a business, but I’m trying to stay on that little edge that I can call my own.”

Marla Allison is an artist living and working in New Mexico www.marlaallison.com

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Ben Berkowitz

The New Yeoman Farmer “The civic Internet looks more like what city planners had in mind when they planned the town green — everyone meeting outside the town hall, outside the bureaucracy.”

Ben Berkowitz wants to create a little disruption to keep government honest.

Along with three co-creators, he has developed a new mobile phone and web app, SeeClickFix, which enables citizens to instantly report local community problems to government officials and the media. Built on open source software and Google Maps, it provides a paperless, transparent hub of information about civic problems begging for resolution.

Specific locations are identified. Issues are discussed. Community and government reactions are reported and watched by users.

Needless to say, SeeClickFix has already ruffled more than a few town hall feathers.

But more importantly, Berkowitz says, the technology calls on citizens to own the problems in their local communities. It presents an existential question to all of us: You have at your fingertips the power to set in motion a chain of events that may solve the problem before you — will you do it? Or will you wait for some detached, faceless group of government officials to get around to fixing the problem — eventually?

“We as a population have become severely apathetic to the point where being a citizen means going to the voting booth,” Berkowitz says. “But there’s a greater responsibility as a citizen to participate. It’s more about making decisions about the things that impact your everyday life.”

With SeeClickFix, the people identify important issues. The people propose and bring about solutions.

The people govern themselves.

All of this takes place in real time and on a potentially huge scale, due to the limitless expanse of the Internet, according to Berkowitz.

“Instead of the distribution and control of information by an elite few,” he says, “the Internet allows for a many-to-many paradigm shift. It is not the responsibility of a centralized, institutionalized media to distribute information.”

Social media like Twitter and Facebook can open up critical discussions in the civic sphere. This type of networking has been called the “virtual town hall,” but Berkowitz prefers to think of it in even more democratic terms: “The civic Internet looks more like what city planners had in mind when they planned the town green — everyone meeting outside the town hall, outside the bureaucracy. The concept of these large, open spaces is more representative of designs for Gov 2.0. Let the people use the spaces for what they want.”

SeeClickFix is actually the technological manifestation of Berkowitz’s evolution as a community activist in his hometown of New Haven, CT. He first became involved with civic issues in New Haven after he purchased a condominium and was concerned about the lack of proper lighting on his street. Since then he has

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spearheaded several community-oriented projects that had fallen through the cracks of the city bureaucracy.

His actions spurred a community revival of sorts.

Getting the discussion going was half the battle in New Haven, according to Berkowitz. He met with strong opposition when attempting to revive a defunct civic association. “Everyone told me that it wouldn’t be possible,” he says. “But then all of a sudden everyone was just talking to each other as opposed to talking to government.”

Like many innovators on the Internet, Berkowitz speaks of the “promise of the commons,” envisioning government as a platform where citizens are not just voters but enlightened civic actors. And despite the impressive new technologies that make SeeClickFix possible, the spirit behind the project is actually centuries-old and classically American.

When Berkowitz advocates a government run by the many, rather than the few, he speaks to the original debate over what American democracy would look like.

The Federalists of the early American Republic argued on one side for government run by an elite group of educated leaders. On the other side, the Jeffersonian Republicans saw the purest expression of democratic freedom in a government run by the many — specifically, the yeoman farmers who were building the nation out of the land.

Berkowitz says he has been contemplating the Jeffersonian philosophy for some time now, searching for places where 21st-century technology might overlap

with the ideal of the yeoman farmer — the independent, self-sustaining citizen who, by tending his own small portion of land, protects the greater good of the nation.

“With many of the things we want government to help us with, it really makes sense to try to do it on our own,” he says.

To this end, SeeClickFix promises to build a selfsustaining community that ultimately serves the greater good — a community that perhaps even Jefferson himself could not have imagined.

Ben Berkowitz is the co-founder and CEO of SeeClickFix.Com @benberkowitz www.seeclickfix.com

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Jacob Colker

Have a Minute? Change the World.

“It’s more fun to be out in the thick of it day to day than just covering it from the fringes.”

Jacob Colker is part of the rising generation of entrepreneurs who prefers to shape the future rather than react to it. When he left the world of politics to co-launch The Extraordinaries, a crowdsourced microvolunteerism venture, he sensed a mass of human potential waiting to be tapped. He and co-founders, Ben Rigby and Sundeep Ahuja, acted quickly.

“We saw an opportunity, we became obsessed with it, and we chased it down,” Colker says. “If not us, then who?”

The idea behind The Extraordinaries is based on two assumptions about the current state of human nature: one, we all have a lot of downtime that we spend doing valueneutral activities (neither work nor play); and two, many of us have an urge to volunteer, but about 75 percent of us do not. With an iPhone and The Extraordinaries new app, we can change that.

Colker explains that we can “micro-volunteer” in small chunks of time — 15 minutes standing on line in an airport, for instance — by performing a few tasks on our iPhones. Those tasks would be based on our personal skills sets that match the needs of a non-profit group.

It could be as simple as making a few phone calls, or creating a new tag line for an organization in need of publicity.

“We’re trying to capture a few minutes of spare time and turn it into social value,” Colker says.

Some of the figures that he presents to support his

case are chastening: around the globe, people spend 274 million hours a day on Facebook and watch one billion YouTube videos. To put into perspective how much we might be missing by spending our time this way, Colker notes that it took seven million hours to build the Empire State Building.

With that amount of human labor, he says, “we could build 40 Empire State Buildings every day.”

In Colker’s ideal world, we could build something even better. He is interested in shaking up the status quo for the greater human good. He says his parents, whom he describes as “very inspirational, humble people,” have modeled this type of behavior for him all his life. Colker’s mother struggled for 10 years to leave communist Poland, finally immigrating to the United States in 1970. She always reminds her son that he was lucky enough to start out in life with an American passport. His father has worked for ShoreBank in Chicago for years, increasing community investment opportunities around the globe.

Through their example, Colker’s parents have taught him to think outwardly and to change directions, if necessary. He started a master’s program in communications at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. because he planned to go into television. But the local political scene drew him out from behind the camera.

“It’s more fun to be out in the thick of it day to day

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than just covering it from the fringes,” he says.

Working for a long-shot candidate in the 2006 Democratic primary race for Maryland State Comptroller, Colker learned what it meant to face discouraging odds. “Absolutely nobody knew who our candidate was.

We just said to ourselves, we’re fighting an uphill battle to get volunteers in the door — let’s figure out how to raise awareness; we’ll try just about anything. That was the environment we worked in.”

The volunteer recruitment strategy that Colker and his fellow 20-something political campaign staff settled on was to go straight to what he calls the “bread and butter” of most political campaigns — college students.

Rather than take the traditional route of wooing the leaders of campus Democratic clubs, they logged onto Facebook.

“By using social media,” Colker says, “we didn’t have to go to the Democratic clubs to recruit volunteers. We circumvented the hierarchies and went straight to several thousand kids on campus — people we would not normally have been able to get hold of.”

His candidate won. Not just the primary, but the statewide election as well.

With his political experience, social media savvy, and his natural gravitation toward community service, Colker seems destined to spearhead a venture like The Extraordinaries. He is inspired by the immense possibilities of crowdsourcing, or as he says, “one million minds all acting as one giant super computer.”

A great example of how we might pool our human

intellect beneficially, he says, is NASA’s “clickworkers” program that uses volunteers to view images of the surface of Mars and “click” a mouse to identify craters.

This project saves thousands of hours of labor for NASA scientists and is creating a comprehensive map of landforms on Mars.

We are only beginning to unveil the potential for this widespread community engagement that is now possible through your iPhone, according to Colker.

And it’s simple, he says.

“If you have a few minutes free, just log in and share your skills.”

Jacob Colker is the founder and CEO of The Extraordinaries @jacobcolker http://app.beextra.org

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Fabien Cousteau

Becoming One with the Ocean “We’re treating our oceans like we’re hunter-gatherers. It’s time to use aquaculture to fill the gap that we have created.”

While things change around us with frightening speed in this digital age, the Earth rumbles on in its slow revolutions towards some indistinct future.

Ocean explorer and advocate Fabien Cousteau says our planet will surely recover from the hard use it currently endures through industrialization, pollution and over-farming of aquatic life. But it may not do so during our watch if we continue on the path we have set.

We are changing the Earth in ways we may not like, Cousteau warns. It is time for a little foresight.

As the grandson of Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the pioneering filmmaker and marine conservationist, Fabien Cousteau has been highly attuned to the natural world since childhood.

His deep immersion — both literally and philosophically — in ocean life has given him an unusual perspective on a space that many of us tend to overlook.

“The planet is two-dimensional on a map,” Cousteau says. “We are chained to thinking on a twodimensional plane because we are terrestrial beings.

We go left, right, front and back. But the ocean is a three-dimensional system — it goes left, right, front and back — and also up and down.”

Most of the momentum of the environmental movement has been to “go green.” But Cousteau asks, why not go blue, too? If we can plant a tree, we can

plant a fish while we’re at it. And we must, he says.

“We’re treating our oceans like we’re hunter-gatherers.

It’s time to use aquaculture to fill the gap that we have created.”

Some basic statistics provide eye-opening evidence of the need for ocean conservation efforts.

Water systems represent 99 percent of our total living space. The oceans house some 97 percent of our world’s biodiversity. More than 70 percent of our daily intake of food is somehow derived from the ocean, even if we do not eat fish.

The immensity of our waterways creates a false sense of confidence that they will always sustain themselves — and us.

But a huge concentration of plastics weighing over seven million tons and covering an area the size of Texas is floating in the central Pacific right now. It is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and it is not the only one of its kind, Cousteau notes. “Every day, a million tons of plastics are dumped into our oceans.

We’ve been using our oceans as an infinite resource and as a garbage can.”

The oceans provide a stark mirror in which we can see the reflection of our human behaviors. Orca whales in the Pacific Northwest, for instance, are experiencing rising rates of cancer, spontaneous abortion, fetal deformation and behavioral problems that were

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extremely rare just a few decades ago.

“This just so happens to coincide with places where there’s a lot of human activity,” Cousteau points out. “The toxic on-loading of the orca is similar to what we are subject to.”

Cousteau creates a sense of urgency about our responsibility to the environment — a responsibility that often seems predicated on our own sense of convenience. But his greater concern is that we develop a holistic and intelligent accommodation to the natural world for our own sakes, as much as for the Earth’s. He reminds us that our water systems are deeply rooted in the fibers of our bodies.

“Think of what you spend your first nine months of life in,” Cousteau says. “You spend it in water. Anyone who goes over a sand dune and sees the ocean feels a very calming effect. There’s a certain connection that we innately have with the oceans, and for me, it’s much more powerful in a sense that I feel more comfortable in a water body than I do on land.”

Cousteau might revise his grandfather’s famous motto, “People protect what they love,” to read: “People protect what is part of them.”

Safeguarding the oceans requires a total awareness of the way its material reality affects us. Losing a sense of how the oceans infiltrate our existence means that we are largely oblivious to a crucial store of knowledge that could even benefit future technological or organizational design.

What we can learn from the oceans, Cousteau sug-

gests, is unfathomable. And yet, we have explored only five percent of them.

“We spend 100 times more effort going to look for little green men in outer space than we do exploring our oceans,” he says. “I love outer space, but a payoff there is about a thousand times less likely than in the oceans.”

Fabien Cousteau is an ocean explorer and filmmaker @fcousteau www.plantafish.org

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Sayantani DasGupta

The Healing Power of Story “You’re not Indiana Jones. A story isn’t a treasure that you’re going to dig up and hand to me. It’s a relationship.”

The deep human need for storytelling has fascinated Dr. Sayantani DasGupta for as long as she can remember. She feels the thread of a story holding together the various pieces of her life — her medical practice, her teaching, her writing and her family relationships.

“Stories are the way we all understand the world,” she says. “Story is the way so many of us frame all of what we do.”

DasGupta is an assistant professor of clinical pediatrics at Columbia University and co-author or editor of several books on narrative and health care. As a faculty member in the university’s Program in Narrative Medicine, she teaches literature and writing to medical students. She teaches them to read between the lines so they will learn how to listen closely to their patients’ stories.

“We would never graduate someone from medical school who didn’t know their pharmacology,” DasGupta says. “We also shouldn’t graduate someone who doesn’t know how to listen to a story.”

As the changing landscape of healthcare threatens to silence the patient, medical practitioners like DasGupta cling ever more fervently to the power of story.

As the theory goes, clinical training is only part of the process of making a physician. The doctor who can understand the whole patient — mind, body and soul —

will be a better healer.

Such understanding comes mostly through listening to the patient’s story. But DasGupta warns that it’s not always a simple process.

“You’re not Indiana Jones,” she says. “A story isn’t a treasure that you’re going to dig up and hand to me. It’s a relationship.”

The role of the physician is to elicit, interpret and act upon someone’s story. But as in many other fields, technology has a way of putting pressure on that human relationship.

The simple presence of a laptop in the exam room can considerably alter the way a doctor listens to a patient. New medical technologies will be helpful only to the extent that physicians practice evidence-based medicine and narrative medicine side-by-side, according to DasGupta.

“Let’s put them all in our doctor’s bag. Innovation can be potentially harmful to the doctor-patient relationship if it replaces deep listening. A story and an MRI need to be considered equally. You need both of them to do good healing. They are both necessary to each other.”

Empirically-minded medical students often feel challenged by the notion of stories as fluid, changing things. They may take a meticulous medical history of a patient one day, and be taken aback the next day when the patient tells a different tale to another physician.

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DasGupta says that patients modify their stories because that is the nature of human existence — it alters from moment to moment.

It is slippery ground, she says. “Stories change, depending on who is telling them and when. We have to allow for that ambiguity. You are interacting with people, and people are not fixed, undynamic entities.”

Listening is the experience of one human being attending to, being present for, or witnessing another human being’s story, DasGupta says. This intersubjective relationship happens everywhere, but especially in the clinic. Listening is also an act of “narrative humility” that calls for a readjustment of ideas of power.

“I’m very cautious and concerned about power in medicine, the way we utilize it and misuse it,” DasGupta says. “You need a certain degree of power to enact change, but the problem with power in medicine is that it is a hierarchy that impedes listening.”

Efforts to dismantle that hierarchy, she says, are already transforming medicine into the kind of collaborative endeavor that could be a model for best business practices anywhere. Physicians are looking beyond test results and medical charts to listen more closely to not only their patients, but to their colleagues as well. Sometimes called integrative medicine, medical collaboration draws together teams of physicians, psychiatrists, nutritionists and technicians to create a more holistic and tailored approach to healing.

Storytelling lies at the very center of this emerging medical trend.

One word that DasGupta frequently uses to talk about storytelling is “rigor.” Indeed, listening and being present for others is a deeply personal commitment that requires precision, thoroughness and generosity.

Such qualities, DasGupta points out, serve us well in any field or in any relationship.

“I’m interested in pushing the idea of story in all of its derivations,” she says. “Stories are the way that we all understand the world and the way all of our professions operate and thrive. They keep us self-critical, engaged. We’re all trying to figure out what it means to be present for stories, to receive them in meaningful ways, to co-create the stories of our lives and our world together.”

Sayantani DasGupta is a physician, writer and narrative medicine scholar www.sayantanidasgupta.com

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Dale Dougherty

It’s a Hands-on World “We’re reinventing a traditional event—the original fairs in England with farmers bringing products and animals to market to share ideas and look at the work others are doing.”

The image of the tinkerer in the garage, strapping together bits of junk or spare parts to bring an idea into the material world, has become a solid piece of Americana. It represents a heritage of frugality, raw ingenuity, free-wheeling creativity — and scrappiness. This sense of being resourceful and using what’s at hand has gone missing today in a growing consumer culture.

Dale Dougherty is trying to resurrect this “maker culture” to consider what we can create with technology. Currently the general manager of the Maker Media division of O’Reilly Media, Inc., which he helped found with Tim O’Reilly, Dougherty has spent the better part of 30 years writing about technology. His experience has shown him that the world is not created with ideas alone.

“You have to get hands-on,” he says. “That’s what maker culture is.”

Dougherty began his professional life as a technical writer just as computers appeared on the cultural horizon. He specialized in writing how-to articles and eventually began writing books about computers, most famously, his Hacks series. In 1993, he developed the first commercial Web site, Global Network Navigator (GNN), and in 1995, he developed the Web Review, an online magazine for Web developers.

After the burst of the dot-com bubble in 2001, Dougherty coined the term “Web 2.0” when he saw

that another generation of developers were looking to the Web as a platform for a new generation of applications. He says that Web 2.0 also mapped to Tim O’Reilly’s idea of the Web as a platform to harness collective intelligence. It would grow and improve with user participation. It would be open and scalable and infinitely malleable.

“To some degree it’s about technology, but it’s more about people and opportunity,” Dougherty says. “It’s about seeing what people are doing, seeing a pattern to it that others aren’t seeing — and seeing it early.”

In 2005, recognizing that software developers were looking at hardware and learning to hack the physical world, Dougherty started Make magazine which is dedicated to individuals with insatiable curiosity and dogged industriousness. It is a dream publication for closet inventors who feel compelled to build, experiment or simply play around with objects and ideas.

Interested in electronic origami? A dummy surveillance camera with a deceptive blinking red light?

Lady GaGa video glasses? Read the magazine and make them yourself.

The founding idea of Make is to create a community around the do-it-yourself enthusiasts. People who constantly want to know how to do something will find a profusion of projects and ideas that excite other like-

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minded individuals. Dougherty calls it “Martha Stewart for geeks.”

But if reading about the ingenious exploits of others is not quite satisfying enough, Dougherty brings all those creative sparks into the real world with Maker Faire, a huge gathering of tinkerers who congregate to share their resourceful — and sometimes quirky — handiwork.

This year alone, O’Reilly Media has organized three separate Maker Faires—in the Bay Area, in Detroit and in New York—with a combined attendance of over 125,000 people. Even though it’s a new phenomenon, Dougherty says it stems from some very Old World roots.

“We’re reinventing a traditional event—the original fairs in England with farmers bringing products and animals to market to share ideas and look at the work others are doing.”

People headed to Maker Faire bring things from their garages, displaying their wares for the purposes of sharing and discovery. “Maker Faire reflects the community and what individuals and small groups of people are doing,” Dougherty explains. “We bring makers together so they can learn from each other and get feedback on their work from a much larger audience.”

The very hands-on nature of what drives Make magazine and Maker Faire is an enhancement of the digital revolution we are experiencing. That is, digital discoveries don’t necessarily situate us more firmly in an electronic universe, walled off from the tangible

world in a self-created virtual space.

They also bring us out into the living world, a programmable environment that we can modify to adapt to our desires. Inventors piggyback off digital discoveries by applying them to everyday objects to create something new. Maps and sensor networks, he says, are examples of what can happen when we connect the digital to the physical.

Dougherty senses huge potential sitting in the garages around America. Through Make magazine and Maker Faire, he calls out to all tinkerers to share their industry and eccentric inventiveness and bring their ideas into the open.

“I want to build recognition for people who are doers, makers, producers,” he says. “There is a maker movement growing out of their combined efforts to create and make new things. It’s a hands-on approach to changing the world.”

Dale Dougherty is the editor and publisher of Make and the general manager of Maker Media division of O’Reilly Media, Inc. @dalepd www.makezine.com

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Ntiedo Etuk

Having Fun at School? Absolutely.

“The way in which we’re used to teaching kids is absolutely the wrong way to go about engaging a person.”

An old truism of educational theory is that the teacher should meet the students where they are.

These days, that would probably be in front of a video screen, with a controller in hand.

Software developer Ntiedo Etuk helps educators and parents feel comfortable with the idea of teaching from that place. He has been convincing school boards around the country that playing video games is a great way to learn.

And he insists that the method is not exactly new.

“We’ve always taught through games,” Etuk says. “It’s just that games have moved into a different medium. Adults tend to forget that.”

Etuk’s company, Tabula Digita, has already made significant inroads into major public school systems — including New York City’s — with educational gaming products that teach math, science and an expanding array of other subjects.

Video games have a great capacity to teach, he says, because they draw on many different levels of fun and engagement. Graphics, animation and sound offer far more visual stimuli than a textbook. Multiplayer games build communities; girls enjoy the social collaboration, while boys go for the action. And the sheer competitiveness of the games keeps player interest high, even if playing entails learning an algebraic equation.

Meeting students where they are in this rapidly morphing multi-media world will mean saying goodbye to some old school teaching methods. And that’s probably a good thing, according to Etuk.

“The way in which we’re used to teaching kids is absolutely the wrong way to go about engaging a person,” he says. “There are very few tools that get down on their hands and knees at the student level and say, ‘What is actually engaging you?

What is getting you to pay attention?’”

While the idea of “engagement” holds great currency in the digital realm, it is only now becoming a critical goal of the education system. And in this day and age of instant communication and instant feedback, capturing and holding the interest of a student has become an increasingly tricky task.

“Kids are different today,” he says. “They process, absorb and receive information completely differently from the way that we did when we were growing up.

We need to teach them in a different way.”

Discussion on this topic has been prolific recently.

Kids have shorter attention spans. They spend less time with their parents, more time with their friends and more time on the Internet. Information comes at them from a million directions, and they like the freedom to choose the medium through which they receive it. They expect to be offered print, graphics and sound.

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They want interactivity.

And dare we say it? They want to have fun.

That’s fine, says Etuk. It’s an important aspect of learning that seems to get lost in the harried world of educational achievement goals.

Etuk points out that most educational publishers and developers create products that are geared for teachers, to help them do their jobs better. But if the teacher doesn’t get the attention of the student, those pedagogical tools are worthless.

Tabula Digita has developed a modular gaming approach that enables players to move around topics, rather than having to follow an elaborate storyline and linear learning path. Etuk says the modular approach reflects what actually happens in the classroom because teachers “jump all over the place” when they actually teach. He likens the Tabula Digita learning environment to an “arena” where anything can happen, where one can bump into any problem type (within limits of course), and where things remain fresh and interesting.

The biggest asset of educational gaming, he notes, is that it draws on emotion. Adaptive technology — if you get it right, the next question is harder — builds confidence through what he calls “small, incremental emotional gains.” Current educational practices, he says, often miss this point.

“You need to associate emotion if you want to change,” he says. “In the typical education setting, we’re continually trying to push students into a place

where they don’t have any emotional response to doing a math problem. But in the educational gaming environment, every problem answered right is exciting and every problem wrong an incentive to do better on the next problem.”

The teacher stands by as a “support line,” Etuk explains, prepared with instruction that has immediate relevance to what the student is trying to accomplish in the game. Suddenly, the teacher becomes relevant as well.

Educational gaming will certainly challenge standard notions of what a classroom is supposed to be, perhaps shaking out some of the obsolete practices that can hamper vibrant learning. Mark Twain once said, “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” But in Etuk’s vision, schooling and education will be one thing.

Learning will be a more immersive, 3-D experience driven by the most important player — the student.

Ntiedo Etuk is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Tabula Digita www.dimensionu.com

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Jason Fried

It’s Simple. Until You Make it Complicated.

“Internet companies are known for hiring compulsively, spending wildly, and failing spectacularly.

That’s not us. We’re small, frugal and profitable.”

BIF-6 marks Jason Fried’s third time on the BIF stage. Expect the unexpected. During his first outing in 2007, the 37signals co-founder went toe to toe with Wall Street Journal columnist and BIF-3 co-host Walt Mossberg. It was one of the best onstage conversations in BIF history.

In Fried’s second appearance, he gave a fresh perspective — wrapped in a culinary metaphor — on unexpected sources of inspiration for building his business. The decade-old company focuses on a string of well-received applications like Basecamp; an online project management system; Backpack, a personal information manager; Highrise, a contact manager and simple CRM; and Campfire, a groupchat and collaboration tool. Their popular open source framework, Ruby on Rails, has over 100,000 developers worldwide. All tolled, more than three million people around the world use his products.

“Some people consider us an Internet company, but that makes us cringe,” says Fried. “Internet companies are known for hiring compulsively, spending wildly and failing spectacularly. That’s not us. We’re small, frugal and profitable.”

Fried attributes the success of 37signals to an unconventional business philosophy that celebrates doing less than the competition. He, and co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson, purposefully keep their service

offering barebones, avoiding the “feature creep” that bogs down so many other software companies. Instead, the duo takes a different route by focusing only on the basics.

Each application is built on Fried’s guiding philosophy: stay small and keep it simple. “There are too many options out there, too many features and too many products that try to do too many things,” he says. “Software has become complex and bloated. It grows for the benefit of the upgrade sales cycle, not the customer.”

Their target customer is small business enterprises. “I just love that small businesses don’t have to use crappy software anymore,” he says. “I love being able to build software for them.” Then, adding mirthfully, “‘They say you need to sell to the Fortune 500. Screw that. We sell to the Fortune 5,000,000.”

Doubters and nay-sayers should take heed. The 37signals strategy is paying off big time. Through its subscription-based model, thousands of paying users are providing the company with a steady stream of revenue.

After 10 years, Fried often gets asked about the pesky concept of scale — how do you keep growing?

How do you get bigger? His response: Why is bigger better? His penchant for small team environments, which began when he founded the firm, remains intact.

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With just 20 employees, perhaps the biggest decision Fried and his business partner make is when to add a new team member.

His independent spirit and willingness to dole out advice — which he’s been doing for years through his popular Signal vs. Noise blog — have given the man and his company a cult-like status among his legion of fans.

His contrarian opinions — which include “when good enough gets the job done, go for it; interruption is the biggest enemy of productivity; all the things you think you need, you don’t” — have helped shape the 37signals brand.

All this alternative thinking has culminated in a book called Rework — which is the topic of this year’s BIF story. Fried takes a critical look at everything from workaholics (“they create more problems then they solve”), to meetings (“toxic… often include at least one moron who inevitably gets his turn to waste everyone’s time with nonsense”) to venture capital (“spending other people’s money is addictive…and a bad idea”). He describes it as a cookbook for how to do business.

“I look to chefs for inspiration. Mario Batali is a great chef who invites a camera into his kitchen and shares his recipes. It’s a great business model. In the business world, people are proprietary — they’re afraid to share. Rework is our recipe for doing business.”

So can any company truly grow in the way 37signals has? Fried admits that industries differ and what works for software companies may not work for manufacturing, but in the end “people tend to make business diffi-

cult by worrying about a lot of things that don’t matter.”

“The thing we always say is, ‘getting to great starts by cutting out stuff that’s merely good.’ The idea is whatever you’re doing, cut it in half and keep cutting things in half. Sacrifice some of your darlings for the greater good. Because you’re better off with a kick-ass half than a half-assed whole.”

Jason Fried is the co-founder and CEO of 37signals @jasonfried www.37signals.com

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John Hagel

Working on the Edges “I believe that trust-based relationships are becoming more and more important, and I have a very strong belief that you don’t build trust without vulnerability.”

John Hagel used to reach out to people through ideas. Now he does it by letting down his guard every once in a while.

From his position as co-chairman of Deloitte LLP’s Center for the Edge, Hagel sees openness as an antidote to the volatility inherent in expanding global markets. A little ingenuousness builds camaraderie and generates a healthy interplay of human emotion.

“When people come at you with a facade as if everything’s under control, it does not generate trust,” Hagel says. “We’re all imperfect beings. We have flaws, things we’re struggling to find out about.”

Acknowledging — and perhaps even nurturing — our changeable, human natures can teach us to improvise and exercise tacit judgment. Whether we work in a cubicle, a research lab or a corner office, even the most routinized tasks occasionally involve ambiguity.

“We need the ability to respond to unexpected events,” Hagel says. “With intensifying competition on a global scale, stability is eroding and the manual doesn’t help you in that case.”

At the Center for the Edge, Hagel carefully observes the unexpected on the “edges” of business, where things bump up against each other to produce change. It’s an important place to watch, he says, be-

cause what happens at the edges transforms the core.

But for business leaders accustomed to delegating from that core, the edges can be disconcerting. Keeping things steady out there requires an act of faith.

“As I evolve my thinking about where we’re headed, I believe that trust-based relationships are becoming more and more important,” Hagel says. “And I have a very strong belief that you don’t build trust without vulnerability.”

Being vulnerable goes against the grain of American business culture, which has worked for generations on the principles of Taylorism — each worker does his or her allotted task while the manager ensures that they interact efficiently. There is no room for the human element in scientific management.

“Frederick Taylor figured out how to standardize and precisely define work so that it didn’t matter who the people were,” Hagel points out. “But now there’s mounting pressure on everybody, from the most senior executive to the junior worker, to create an openness to at least considering other ways of thinking and acting. There’s a sense that something’s got to change.”

Taylor’s “Efficiency Movement,” which gained traction during the Progressive Era, is part of what Hagel calls the world of “push,” or, the idea that business can forecast demand with reasonable accuracy and push its operations in that direction. It is an organizational

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model that drives many of our institutions — such as education and government — and that places a high premium on stability. But under this model, long term profitability trends are withering, Hagel notes. Since 1965, the return on assets of U.S. public companies has declined by 75 percent.

Why keep pushing in the wrong direction? Hagel suggests that instead of trying to predict what we need and risking miscalculation, we should be more open to making connections that will expose us to what we didn’t know we needed.

Hagel calls this the world of “pull.” It’s a place he’s been exploring at the Center for the Edge because of its high potential for the development of scalable pull platforms that reach across institutional boundaries to engage an expanding array of participants. His recently released book, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, delves into such flexible organizational models that morph with the needs of the market.

Hagel says the idea of “pull” is highly contingent on connections and the passion of the individual worker becomes even more important. “Passionate people are twice as connected,” he says. “They have an instinctive kind of urge to reach out to other people who share their passion.”

Supple markets that are girded with the stability resulting from trust-based relationships and driven by a passionate workforce create a space for something that isn’t often talked about in business: productive friction.

Companies, Hagel says, traditionally have sought to root out any friction in their quest for efficiency in operations. Yet, this quest ignores the fact that new insight is rarely generated without friction. “Bringing very smart and passionate people together from diverse backgrounds to discover ways to generate new levels of performance often generates heated arguments about the right approach,” he explains. “Yet if there is mutual respect generated by trust-based relationships, these arguments can often be extremely productive. New knowledge emerges and performance improvement accelerates. That’s harmony.”

A select group of highly adaptable organizations are beginning to master this convergence of friction and harmony across a growing number of participants.

Their success will certainly depend on attracting the right people and the right resources at just the right time.

It seems like luck, but Hagel says it’s serendipity that we can shape.

John Hagel is an author, and co-chairman of the Deloitte Center For The Edge @jhagel www.johnhagel.com

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Peter Hartwell

Saving the World in the Smallest of Spaces “Someday I will explain to my grandkids that I remember when there was a thing called a ‘switch’ we used to control the lighting.”

Sensor technology is coming in a big way. It’s already here, in fact, deeply embedded in the aerospace, automotive and marine industries. But most of us are only obliquely aware of this set of micro-tools as the devices that make airbags inflate or that read our tennis racket swings on the Wii. They even shift our iPhone displays from landscape to portrait.

As sensor technology gradually seeps into the fabric of our everyday lives, Dr. Peter Hartwell, a senior researcher at HewlettPackard Laboratories in Palo Alto, CA, is working to make it 1,000 times more sensitive and a million times more ubiquitous. He is doing it, he says, to save the world.

Hartwell, the leader of HP’s microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) team and a quantum science researcher, unravels the mysteries of the smallest spaces the human mind can delineate. What goes on in these spaces, he says, could have big implications.

He is currently developing a highly sensitive accelerometer (a device that senses motion or vibration) that can detect if something moves less than one-billionth the width of a human hair.

Simple motion censors already operate in automatic lights that turn on and off by looking for the heat signature of a person. Yet they can be unreliable and annoying, often causing people to disable them.

“Someday I will explain to my grandkids that I remem-

ber when there was a thing called a ‘switch’ we used to control the lighting. The key to this is a better sensor, like an accelerometer, looking for vibrations from someone moving into or out of the room.”

Still, creating a smart building where the lights are automatic and reliable is “low-hanging fruit” when it comes to the technology’s potential. Hartwell envisions a day when sensors will be scattered around the globe, transmitting crucial information to facilitate our decision-making across a broad spectrum. They will lie on the side of a highway to assess traffic flow. They will be pinned to a suspension bridge to monitor structural flaws. They will detect the presence of salmonella bacteria on a crop of spinach before it leaves the farm and spreads throughout the food distribution chain.

In Hartwell’s dream world, these helpful devices will also tell him if the leftover Chinese food in his refrigerator is safe to eat.

While there’s a part of him that may be too trusting of where this is going – “yes, I’ve heard the Skynet jokes,” he quips – “the reality is that some of this is going to have to happen as the population increases.”

The point of sensor technology, he says, is not to make computers or objects more self-aware, but to make them more aware of us. That way, they will anticipate our needs and actions in ways that are beneficial

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and that might help us to reduce consumption or save energy. Sensors are not yet as smart as they could be, according to Hartwell, who longs for the day when our computers will not slip into screen saver mode in the middle of a PowerPoint presentation. They should know what we are doing, he says, and behave accordingly.

HP’s most recent application of sensor technology is its Central Nervous System for the Earth (CeNSE), which the company calls an “information ecosystem” that will embed trillions of sensors in the earth and connect them with computing systems, software and services. Hartwell says CeNSE will enable us to listen to the “heartbeat of the earth.”

The most pressing challenge with CeNSE, Hartwell notes, is in the handling of the massive amount of data it will inevitably collect. Much of the data picked up by embedded sensors will be inconsequential. There will not be servers big enough to store and interpret all of it.

The human interface, Hartwell says, is the determining factor that will weed out important data at the level of the sensor itself.

“CeNSE is about measuring accurately enough so you don’t even know the technology is there,” he says.

This is precisely where Hartwell’s micro-perspective on the world has its most powerful impact. By harnessing the tiniest motions and the most minuscule packages of energy, he creates an infinitesimal ripple that gains in momentum as it reaches across the land-

scape and into our computers. Decisions made in the space between two atoms can make all the difference in how we relate to each other, and to the Earth.

Peter Hartwell is a senior researcher at HP Labs www.hpl.hp.com

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Lisa Hsia

Dispatches from the Digital Frontier “Bravo is blessed with an audience that is very passionate and is determined to get their point across.

And that engagement is my ‘Truth North.’”

Lisa Hsia began her career as a traditional journalist, producing Emmy Award winning news programs and documentary films. She travelled the globe as a producer for Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer and depicted what was happening through a lens of reporting and storytelling.

Those were the old days of journalism when the reporter’s vision was the governing spirit behind the story. Pre-Twitter, the 24-hour news cycle and citizen journalism.

“When I worked in news, I thought of it as a higher calling — a service — that I was drawn to,” Hsia explains. “It was about telling great stories, informing the world about what’s going on and giving context. Technology has really sped up that process because people now know instantly what’s going on.”

Today, Hsia is senior vice president of Bravo Digital Media where she doesn’t tell stories — she provides interactive experiences. And she clearly loves the digital whirlwind around her.

Hsia is quick to note that she didn’t have the “foresight” to move into digital media. In 2005, in an unexpected confluence of events, she left news and was offered a position at Bravo. Her directive: To grow and develop the network’s digital media components.

Put more simply, there was a digital “space” and she was supposed to figure out what to do with it.

“It didn’t feel like a gift at the time,” Hsia says of her unplanned career shift. Nevertheless, the change has been “transformational.”

Hsia is thriving in the viral, constantly changing world of digital media. “There is so much going on,” she explains. “It’s a daily managing of priorities. What are we capable of pulling off, given staff and financial constraints?”

Five years ago, Bravo’s website was primarily a marketing site with a program schedule and other basic information. As an experiment early on, the network posed a question to viewers about who should win one of their contest reality shows. Over 100,000 people voted in a matter of minutes.

Hsia paid close attention.

“Bravo fans like to share. They are very opinionated,” she says. “Bravo is blessed with an audience that is very passionate and is determined to get their point across. And that engagement is my ‘Truth North.’”

“I always have the faces of the users in mind when we’re building things,” Hsia says. “And everything is done with their experience in mind. What do they want to do? What do they get from the interaction? Will they take a gander at this innovation?”

Hsia continually experiments on multiple platforms to keep users seamlessly engaged with Bravo. She worked with “one-screen” technology using the cable

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remote to interact with content, which resulted in 25 percent audience participation. That evolved into the Infoframe, on-screen technology that enhances user interaction through polls, trivia and other activities, which allowed both programs and commercials to be interactive using a mobile phone.

Interactive offerings like this have intrigued advertisers and have helped drive the financial success of Bravo’s digital businesses.

A major focus in the last year has been on Bravo fans that want conversation in real-time. She noted that when Kanye West stormed the MTV Video Music Awards stage last year to “diss” Taylor Swift, everyone was instantly in on the viral conversation. “Social media drove that on-air rating big time,” she says.

So whether it be driving fans to viewing parties via their “Talk Bubble” or streaming the premiere party of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” on Ustream, Bravo threw themselves full force into the Twitter sphere, pushing social media virally front and center.

While Hsia is enjoying this wild digital ride, she says her finesse with the market did not come naturally. She recently completed her MBA at Columbia University, where she hoped to acquire the business acumen necessary to move Bravo forward. But the most critical knowledge she gained through earning that degree came from an unexpected source.

“I learned the most from my classmates,” Hsia says.

“Microeconomics and corporate finance are useful, but watching my 20 and 30-something friends and how

entrenched digital media is in their everyday lives is a learning seminar in itself. They live in a richly digital world.”

Hsia holds a supremely positive vision of what the world will soon look like. She sees the future as “platform agnostic,” meaning a television show is not just for television. “It can exist on your phone, in your book, on your bottle of wine. It can live in many different places.

Content and Bravo as a lifestyle brand will be everywhere.”

“There will be multiple screens taking you out into your life.”

Lisa Hsia is senior vice president of Bravo Digital Media www.bravotv.com

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Tony Hsieh

Work Life Happiness? You Bet. “Corporate culture is every bit as important as the bottom line.”

“The customer is always right” was the retailing innovation of Wisconsin-born merchant Harry Gordon Selfridge, who founded Selfridge’s department store in London in 1909. This traditional business mantra, once thought to ensure good customer service, has lost some of its appeal in a retail era dominated by volume, speed and impersonal mass marketing. But Tony Hsieh, CEO of billion-dollar selling online retailer Zappos.com, Inc., has changed all that — having found a way to return to the basics of keeping the customer happy. And he does it by focusing on his 2,000 employees.

“A tight-knit company culture and quality customer service are synonymous,” says Hsieh, describing the company he’s spent the better part of a decade building.

It hasn’t always been easy.

Many of today’s retail clerks have minimal product knowledge and even less interest in the success of the companies that employ them. With the rise of online shopping and the increased number of overseas call centers, the challenge of creating a positive experience for the consumer only increases.

But Zappos refuses to settle.

Between the rigorous training program and relentless approach to employee engagement, Hsieh has built something that, for a certain group of people, just plain works. The company’s annually published Culture Book contains hundreds of short essays written by Zappos

employees and vendors explaining what makes the culture so special and successful. “Corporate culture is every bit as important as the bottom line,” Hsieh says.

Much has happened in the two years since Hsieh visited the BIF community and most of it has to do with making the transition from entrepreneurial upstart to established corporation. In 2008, the company reached $1 billion in annual gross merchandise sales. Then, after debuting as the highest-ranking newcomer in Fortune magazine’s annual “Best Companies to Work For” list in 2009, Amazon acquired the company in a deal valued at over $1.2 billion on the day of closing. (The same year Zappos.com, Inc. celebrated its 10th anniversary.)

Hsieh’s meteoric rise to success and recognition led to another milestone — this one perhaps more personal than any previous business success — a memoir of his adventures titled (aptly enough) Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose.

A chronicle of both his early life as an entrepreneur and his journey growing the Zappos brand, the book shares various lessons Hsieh learned in business and in life.

From starting a worm farm to running a pizza business to launching LinkExchange (acquired by Microsoft for $265 million) and then finally taking the helm of Zappos, the book thoughtfully demonstrates how a very different kind of corporate culture can be a powerful

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model for achieving success. And from Hsieh’s standpoint, by relentlessly concentrating on the happiness of those around you, your own personal happiness grows dramatically too.

“So many people, when they go to the office, they leave a little bit of themselves at home, or a lot of themselves at home,” he says. “And while there’s been much talk over the years about work life separation or work life balance, our whole thing is about work life integration. Because, it’s just life.”

While Zappos’ Culture Book may be a cheerleader’s guide to why the company is awesome, Delivering Happiness aims to be much more. It’s a leadership manual for creating a business vibe that not only makes people around you feel like they’re part of something good — it also makes them want to contribute to its success.

Perhaps a sign of the times, the book has clearly hit a nerve, landing on the New York Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal best-seller lists since it debuted in June. During the book tour Hsieh often gets asked why he still remains at Zappos because so many entrepreneurs leave the company not long after an acquisition.

“One of the big reasons is because what we’re doing isn’t just about making Zappos customers, employees and vendors happy,” he says. “It’s about starting a movement and changing the world by inspiring and helping other companies to focus more on culture, core values, customer experience, passion and purpose — all without losing sight of financial goals.”

So is all this feel-good mojo truly transferable or is Zappos just an anomaly driven by one unique man?

“I don’t think that any two companies can have exactly the same culture and we’re not saying that the Zappos culture is the only culture that works,” says Hsieh. “The most important thing in creating a strong culture is that it creates strong alignment within the organization.

What the culture is actually doesn’t matter as much as the commitment to the culture and core values of the organization.”

Tony Hsieh is the CEO of Zappos.com, Inc. @zappos www.zappos.com

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Saul Kaplan

Ideas Worth Scaling “Spreading of ideas is critical, but the end goal is solving a problem or creating a new opportunity.

The real question is, can an idea translate into action and can it scale?”

BIF founder and chief catalyst Saul Kaplan doesn’t mince words when it comes to underscoring the difference between creating new ideas and creating new value. In differentiating innovation from ideas and invention, says Kaplan, “it’s not an innovation until it delivers value.”

The distinction doesn’t stop there. The kind of problems that keep Kaplan awake at night — things like health care, education and energy — also require innovations that scale, so that they deliver significant value to a meaningful percentage of the people who need it.

“Spreading of ideas is critical, but the end goal is solving a problem or creating a new opportunity. The real question is, can an idea translate into action and can it scale,” says Kaplan. “I think a lot about how to enable R&D at the business model and systems level, where we have the best chance of launching ideas that convert to scalable, transformative innovations.”

Kaplan sees the issue of systems change and scalability as a surmountable challenge, but only if we change the way we approach solving the big problems of our day. Important ideas worth scaling require systems-level innovation and not “tweaks” or incremental fixes to existing systems. Like steering an ocean liner, complex systems have a lot of momentum and are difficult to maneuver and change. So how do you

introduce needed change into big social systems at scale, and on a timeline, that delivers the value we all know is possible?

Experimentation, says Kaplan, is the key. “Real world experimentation is imperative to solve the big social issues of our day,” says Kaplan. “We need R&D platforms that enable systems-level experimentation, where disruptive ideas can be tested in real-world conditions while managing the risk associated with scaling new system approaches. Only by creating safe and manageable real-world test environments can we combine and recombine capabilities across sectors, industries and disciplines un-constrained by current systems.”

An aversion to trying new system approaches, especially those that require collaboration across silos, disciplines and sectors, is why most good ideas never make it off the white board into action, and even fewer scale to deliver value to a meaningful percentage of those who can benefit, says Kaplan. “We have the technology and platforms to scale new systems that deliver customized solutions to the individual but we are frozen in industrial era systems that only know how to deliver the same solution to the masses. We see this same pattern in health care, education and energy.

These are well-intentioned systems with outmoded business models and no capacity to experiment.”

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This realization was the impetus for Kaplan’s launch of the Business Innovation Factory. With BIF, Kaplan sought to build a place where partners from across the public and private sectors focus on solving social system challenges by designing and testing new system solutions in a real-world environment. Kaplan began by creating a community of innovators that is passionate about re-thinking how value is delivered across the public and private sectors and equally committed to leveraging the full power of experimentation.

Today, BIF focuses each year on a portfolio of projects in the BIF Experience Labs to help organizations experiment and collaborate across traditional boundaries to explore new business models and systems for delivering value.

“In the BIF Experience Labs, we are singularly focused on redesigning how value is delivered through R&D and experimentation that puts the focus on the end user, whether that end user is a student, patient or citizen,” says Kaplan. “BIF’s open innovation platform is enabling ideas worth scaling to deliver value to the people who need it most.”

Not satisfied with the early success of BIF’s Elder Experience and Student Experience Labs, Kaplan knows there is still a long way to go. “BIF Research Advisor, Roger Martin, says that the hallmark of innovators is that ‘they have a point of view to share but know they are missing something.’ We believe BIF is on to something with its passion for systems level innovation. We also know that we are still missing many ‘somethings’ to

achieve our goal of catalyzing system change in health care, education and energy. It feels like an exciting period is unfolding and I’m proud to be a part of it.”

Saul Kaplan is the founder and chief catalyst of the Business Innovation Factory @skap5 www.businessinnovationfactory.com

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Rita J. King

Muse of the New Digital Reality “Everything virtual to me is just an augmentation of the physical world.

I don’t distinguish between them. I think they are one in the same.”

If anyone survives the digital revolution, it will surely be Rita J. King. Through imagination and will power, she plans to come out on the other side of this, landing on two feet in an augmented version of our semi-unhinged world.

She is not the type to sit around waiting for someone to tell her what that new reality will look like or what her place will be. Instead of going along the path that is circumstantially dished out to us, we should create a path, she says.

King began her career as an investigative journalist reporting on the relationship between corporations and government, and the issues related to digital identity creation.

She enjoyed writing stories about people and learning about them in a personal way. But as technology transformed around her, journalism was changing and the job market was falling apart and she began to feel constrained in her storytelling.

“The industry was not shifting enough for me toward the digital era,” Kings says. “I wanted to contribute something toward creating better systems.”

What helped her move forward was her gutsy faith in technology’s potential to enhance human relationships as it improves work. Operating under the banners of Dancing Ink Productions and the company’s design arm, The Imagination Age, King now develops mixed media/mixed reality business strategies, content

and games for organizations that, like her, want to make creative transitions into the next economy.

And her high-powered positivity in this area has not gone unnoticed.

King is widely recognized as someone who can help us cross the bridge from this world to the digital realm. And her imaginative perception of the future relies heavily on her fluid sense of boundaries. She is currently leading a collaborative design team for a global storytelling game for the British Council that will launch in 110 countries this fall.

She is a fervent advocate of the online virtual world Second Life, which is used by major corporations (including IBM; King is innovator-in-residence at IBM’s Analytics Virtual Center) and scientific organizations looking to train employees, create collaborative terrain for workforce development or hold virtual conferences.

Through her avatar, Eureka Dejavu, King moves through Second Life unencumbered by physical or social constraints, transcending her own body to explore a wide open and culturally diverse world. On a practical level, she calls it a deep work environment that enables on-the-spot exchanges of embedded media like web pages, videos and graphic simulations.

As an added bonus, she says, the virtual dimension fosters greater interpersonal understanding

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because it encourages people to drop their guard. “The subtler thing about Second Life is that some people are shy and they don’t speak up, but here, they don’t get physically uncomfortable. Second Life eliminates intimidation and heightens creativity. It’s really good for innovation.”

King has been breaking down physical barriers not just in the business world, but internationally, through what she calls digital diplomacy. The centerpiece of her efforts is a project called Understanding Islam Through Virtual Worlds, developed with collaborator Joshua S. Fouts while both served as senior fellows at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

In the digital and borderless environment of Second Life, participants can take a Hajj to Mecca, visit ancient Mesopotamia or converse with an avatar protesting the violence in Gaza.

Ideally, these encounters enable an exploration of humanity without the hindrance of restrictive cultural norms.

In facilitating a global story, you start to see what the shared values are instead of imposing values, King explains.

Despite the virtual nature of Understanding Islam, there is still a very nuts and bolts dimension to assembling the infrastructure of such an endeavor. As a result, King spent an entire year traveling across four continents to promote the project and build it out.

“I make a lot of real world appearances,” she says.

“Everything virtual to me is just an augmentation of

the physical world. I don’t distinguish between them. I think they are one in the same.”

This is the essence of the virtual, according to King. It does not cordon us off into our own pockets of existence, but rather amplifies our connectivity. Virtual reality was created to make this world more expressive and interesting, not to provide a world of escape.

And the slipping away of physical boundaries can be a revelatory experience.

“I’ve always been in it for the adventure,” King says.

“I never pretend that the future is something we can understand with any degree of certainty, but I don’t believe that failure is an actual concept.”

Surely, King‘s supreme optimism and empathic intelligence make her the perfect muse to guide us into the digital reality that awaits.

Rita J. King is the innovator-in-residence at IBM’s Analytics Virtual Center @ritajking www.dancinginkproductions.com

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Josh Koppel

A Guardian of Content in the Digital Transition “The only way to see things in the world the right way — the way that you want to see them — is to build them yourself.”

Josh Koppel is hijacking one of the most controversial spaces in the digital realm: the e-book. When he last spoke at the BIF-2 Summit in 2006, he reported on the complexities of bringing liner notes to iTunes. It was an endeavor that didn’t exactly work out the way he had hoped.

Nevertheless, it was a “transitional moment” in his life when he realized that the way to succeed with mobile applications is to bring them directly to the device.

Koppel’s company, ScrollMotion, is currently the largest developer of apps for the iPhone. ScrollMotion has partnered with major publishers and entertainment companies to push the limits of what is possible on a small digital screen. The iPhone can display vast amounts of information that even the thickest textbooks cannot accommodate.

“When you reduce the need for physical space, you can give things the space and attention they deserve,” Koppel explains.

Despite the huge potential lying in a small digital screen, user acceptance is an ongoing challenge.

Digital reading has raised questions among scholars and cultural critics about the way the Internet affects our capacity to concentrate. The interactive textual experience created by hyperlinks and chat, they say, create distractions that are rewiring brain pathways

that took thousands of years to evolve.

“I think that’s hysteria,” Koppel says. “The scientific discoveries that are happening now are happening at a rate that has never been matched in human history.

This century has changed the landscape of the world more than any other century. From 1900 to 2000, we saw that man could fly — first in the stratosphere and then in space. We went from buggies to cars.

I feel like that’s what humans do. They continue to push forward the boundaries of what we know, what we can do.”

On the other hand, Koppel acknowledges that change, no matter how well-intentioned, can bring negative outcomes. For that reason, he says, we must take accountability for shaping the future we desire.

“The only way to see things in the world the right way — the way that you want to see them — is to build them yourself,” he says.

The trick is to translate one’s personal vision into something that others can readily absorb, to find the prototyping tools that people understand. People will carry the libraries of the world in their pockets only if it can be done with a tool that makes sense to them.

Herein lies Koppel’s strength.

“I figured out a way to prototype on an iPod,” he says. “That’s my secret. I tinker. I play with stuff.”

The stuff he plays with now includes applications

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for major textbook publishers like McGraw Hill and for children’s books such as the Curious George series.

Koppel is also the mastermind behind bringing the Tribune newspapers and several consumer magazines like Esquire and People to the iPhone.

This is only the beginning.

“The iPad and the iPhone are just the first in a class of social devices that treat media as a collective experience,” Koppel says. Even reading a book can become a more social activity if we can click on a passage and send it to a friend or chat about it with a group of likeminded readers.

Enabling content to live across a variety of media can enhance our user experience in ways we have yet to discover. But at the same time, Koppel says, some unique aspects of both content and media could be lost if we are not watchful, sensitive guardians.

“What is the best way for content to live in these new devices?” he asks. “How do you make sure that what is beautiful and wonderful about media is not lost or degraded to an experience that makes it lame?”

By “lame,” he means “undynamic.” It’s easy to put bland words on a screen to mimic the physical appearance of a book. But our digital, connected culture is clamoring for something more.

The biggest challenge now, according to Koppel, is to change the notion of what content is — to convince users that it is worth paying for. He predicts that all content will be sold one more time as it moves to the digital realm. With ScrollMotion, he is working to ease

the full transition to digital media that he sees as clearly inevitable.

“Whether digital will happen or not is not up to us,” he says. “It’s not a choice — this is happening. We have to support it by being critical, but also by staying engaged in the dialogue and still trying to push it forward.

“There is no going back. There is no regression for culture.”

Josh Koppel is the founder of ScrollMotion @scrollmotion www.scrollmotion.com

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Richard Leider

Finding a Reason to Get Up in the Morning “People want to understand their own bottom line. They want their lives to matter. They want to leave a footprint. Meaning is fundamental to our health, our longevity, our healing, and ultimately, to our happiness.”

For more than three decades, Richard Leider, founder and CEO of the Inventure Group, has been working with national and international corporations to help “ignite” their employees and bring more ingenuity and purpose to the workplace. Through a worldwide practice, he’s taught more than 100,000 executives and leaders from across the globe to “venture inward to discover their purpose and venture outward to make a difference in the world.” But he has seen a worrisome change in behavior and attitude over the years – a growing epidemic of corporate malaise.

Leider says the reason is simple: People have no burning reason to get out of bed in the morning. Before, business was business. But now “life has morphed into business.” Leider meets more and more people who hate their work. “I think that’s unnatural,” he says.

“We live in a complex world where the average tenure of a leader is about three years,” Leider says.

“They make an impact and they move on. Organizations are no longer committed to the long run; people are no longer committed to the long run.”

This set of circumstances creates an atmosphere of volatility and ambiguity, leaving employees in a state of flux, according to Leider. Without a long-term sense of where a company is headed, they find it difficult to nurture their individual gifts, maintain their personal

values and find a purpose in their lives. The end result?

They become less engaged with their work.

“You need clarity about what you’re doing with your time, your life,” Leider says. “Your work purpose is the answer to that question.”

The transitory quality of today’s corporate world works against a fundamental human need to safeguard useful knowledge, Leider explains. We no longer have elders who pass on the important wisdom we need to move into the future.

We are losing touch with people who can transmit their vision to the next generation, people who see what is essential and what is not. Such understanding does not come from massive amounts of accumulated information, Leider notes, but from experience.

“For tens of thousands of years, we’ve sat around fires trying to figure out the big picture,” he says. “But where are those fires inside of organizations? What we’re missing from organizations is any kind of glue that holds us together.”

The starting point for rectifying this situation is the re-cultivation of the incessantly busy, rushed and electronically absorbed individual. People are “always on,” he says — skipping vacations, multi-tasking, trying to manage their frantic lifestyles as if it were a new game.

“Volume-wise, more people are tuned in, but tuned in to what? What’s the point of the exercise? I’m for

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technology; however, it is hijacking the human moment, the wisdom moment.”

Leider knows that, fundamentally, people do not want to live like this. Since 1973, he has interviewed thousands of people over the age of 65, asking a deceptively simple question: “If you could do it all over again, what would you do differently?” Most people respond that they would be less busy and more reflective. They would be more courageous emotionally. More effective in their relationships. More vocal about their beliefs.

“People want to understand their own bottom line,” Leider says. “They want their lives to matter.

They want to leave a footprint. Meaning is fundamental to our health, our longevity, our healing and ultimately, to our happiness.”

As an executive coach, Leider employs a wide array of strategies to help people forge a connection between their work and their wider vision of the world.

But he realizes that he can only take them part of the way.

“The last of the human freedoms is choice,” he says. “We have to be more conscious and courageous about choice.”

As a powerful example of this truth, Leider points to the teachings of Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who treated fellow concentration camp prisoners suffering from extreme despondency.

Frankl discovered that even under the most sordid conditions, man has the potential to find meaning in his existence. Those who survived the camps saw their

meaning clearly.

It is this clarity of vision — and perhaps a certain fearlessness — that Leider urges us to maintain, especially in our everyday lives. We have to be sharp.

Awake. Ready.

“We have to act out of our consciousness,” he says.

Richard Leider is an author and founder and chairman of The Inventure Group www.richardleider.com www.inventuregroup.com

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Cassandra lin

The Unexpected Hero “We looked at an array of problems to see what we could solve in our own community.”

Twelve-year-old Cassandra Lin admires “the unexpected hero.” She loves the YouTube story about a young boy from Malawi who created windmills out of bicycle parts to generate electricity for his village.

“I think that was great,” Cassandra says. “Even though he never finished school, he built windmills. He learned on his own. Nobody expected a Malawian kid to generate electricity.”

And nobody expected a kid from Westerly, RI to create an award-winning recycling program that generates fuel for the needy in her community. But that’s exactly what this sparkly, no-nonsense seventh grader has done.

To Cassandra, it’s all no big deal. It’s what she does with her friends after school.

The recycling program, called Project T.G.I.F. (Turn Grease into Fuel), encourages residents to bring their used cooking oil to the town transfer station to be recycled. There, a contractor picks it up along with other grease from local restaurants that also donate oil to the program. A biodiesel company then processes it into biodiesel fuel. All of the team’s proceeds are donated to help heat the homes of needy people in Westerly.

To make it work, Cassandra and a team of classmates educated themselves about the biodiesel refining process, made their own biodiesel by mixing cooking oil with methanol and lye with proper protection (“It was very safe, don’t worry,” she notes reassuringly), won two

separate youth seed grants and convinced an array of community leaders to come on board with the project.

T.G.I.F. is an outgrowth of the Westerly Innovations Network (WIN), a student community service organization started by her father, Jason Lin, in 2002. And Cassandra is quick to credit her older brother, Alex, as a mentor in the project. Alex is a senior member of WIN and serves as the assistant coach to the group’s junior team. Like his sister, he has earned numerous accolades for his own service initiatives.

Cassandra explains, very carefully, how Alex motivates her. “I don’t want to just follow in my brother’s footsteps, but put my footsteps over his. I don’t want people to say, ‘Oh, you’re Alex’s sister.’ I want to make an impact. I want to be better than him, but in a different way.”

As it turns out, a little sibling rivalry has been good for Westerly.

The genesis of the T.G.I.F. project is a case study in creative pragmatism. “We looked at an array of problems to see what we could solve in our own community,” Cassandra explains. A few important strands came together: she learned about turning cooking oil into biodiesel when she attended the Rhode Island Green Expo in 2008; she knew her local community had a non-sustainable program to provide emergency heating for the needy; and she heard that local restaurants and residents were pouring fats, oils and grease (FOG)

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down their drains and clogging up town sewage pipes.

Cassandra and her team puzzled over how to combine these problems to devise a solution. An article she found on Google about SF Greasecycle, a municipal effort in San Francisco to collect and recycle cooking oil, clinched the deal. “All of our problems kind of snowballed together,” she says.

That snowballing is no accident. The different pieces that coalesced to form T.G.I.F. were gathered by a rare combination of forces: clear-sightedness, logic and a splash of ingenuity. Cassandra’s fearlessness lies at the center of these forces. Her mind is eager to apply itself to the world, and she does so with a cheerful, scintillating energy that would motivate the most confirmed nay-sayer.

Innovative people need to be encouraged, she says. “Their family should support them and not inhibit their imagination so that they can be as much as they can be.”

Not surprisingly, Cassandra says her parents have created a nurturing space for her by “cheering from the sidelines, giving good advice, pushing me further.” She adds, “They also expose me to a lot of things. They always want me to learn something new. My dad gives me articles from Time magazine and the Wall Street Journal to read. We also travel a lot, so our eyes have been open to the world from a young age.”

Cassandra is also aware that her parents have placed limits on certain things, although the reasons are fuzzy.

“I don’t have a Facebook,” she says. “I want one, but my parents won’t let me. And we don’t have cable because my parents think that —. ” She considers for a moment. “I don’t know what they think. They just don’t think that cable is a good thing.”

The mysterious ban on television in the Lin household thankfully doesn’t extend to the Internet, where Cassandra says she gathers important ideas, such as how to make biodiesel.

“It’s really hard to believe that YouTube only started in 2005,” she reminisces. “I was seven. I never really used YouTube until I was like nine or 10.”

Reminded that she herself is on YouTube, speaking as a delegate to the Tunza International Youth Conference held in South Korea last year, she responds like the unexpected hero.

“Am I?” Cassandra Lin is a 7th grader and the co-founder of T.G.I.F. (Turn Grease into Fuel) www.w-i-n.ws

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john maeda

Art for Innovators 101 “So many organizations and companies are downtrodden in this economy — they are dead inside — because they have lost the ability to imagine. They need something more vibrant, more emotional and more connected to being human. That’s what I think art brings.”

If returning BIF storyteller John Maeda could design a new curriculum for innovators, he would start with a pencil, paper and sketchpad. These supplies would not be for taking notes or brainstorming ideas.

Rather, Maeda would use art as a way to open the mind, stimulate creativity and cultivate truly radical ideas. He calls it “art thinking.” Maeda sees the concept — which he admits is still a nascent thought in his own mind — as a direct result of the experience he’s having as president of the Rhode Island School of Design, a place world renown for nurturing artists and designers of all stripes.

For Maeda, art thinking is a necessary counterpart to ideas of “design thinking,” an approach that has gained popularity as a potent way of helping organizations think more deeply about how people use products, experience services and interact with environments.

“If you think of design as a way of making ideas, I think art is the ideas itself. Art thinking is everything that design thinking isn’t,” he says. “If you think of an image, you have the image and then you have everything that sits in the white space. Art is the part that isn’t defined yet and I find that perspective quite exciting.”

When pressed to explain how art can help innovators solve real world problems, Maeda doesn’t flinch.

“So many organizations and companies are downtrodden in this economy — they are dead inside — because they have lost the ability to imagine. They need something more vibrant, more emotional and more connected to being human. That’s what I think art brings.”

Maeda is firm in his definition of art, and sees a distinction between creative doodling and the discipline of art. “If we teach organizations art, we must teach them that art is made through an arduous process of practice and skills-based approaches, and how art is made through a process of intense, passionate and personal critique,” he says. “This is different from the limited view of art as something ‘loosey goosey’ to make; it’s a disciplined art.”

Maeda’s shift to art thinking (instead of design thinking) is closely linked to his belief that American culture and our approach to innovation has lost its appreciation for thinking for thinking’s sake. “Design thinking is a process; it’s rationalized ideation and that’s a good thing. But making ideas for the sake of making ideas is also valid. The instinct of making things for no particular rational reason, I think, is pure, raw innovation. We need to bring back radical thought-breaking approaches and that means thinking how artists think.

Artists are about as radical as it gets.”

Yet what sources exist for people to hear about

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these “radical thought-breaking approaches?” Maeda says the Business Innovation Factory is a good start.

“BIF’s annual summit,” he says, “provides creative leaders from various industries and backgrounds the opportunity to be inspired and energized, and to apply ideas and new ways of thinking critically to their own organization or project.”

In the end though, can art truly help innovators innovate? Maeda recently put this thinking to the test and was encouraged by the results. In the summer of 2009, he was invited to lead a workshop on creative leadership in Geneva for the World Economic Forum Fellows program.

Maeda pulled no punches with his students, an elite group of young talent from across the globe. “For the first two hours I had them drawing pictures of their cell phones. At the end of that session many were wondering ‘who brought in the coloring professor?’

But, by the end of the first day, they were troubled by how hard it was to draw and think and compose. And many had begun to wonder how they could use this new discipline in their work,” he recounts. With the right context and coaching, says Maeda, the group was hooked. “By the end of day two, they were all on board.

Many were even inspired to consider expanding their studies to learn more.”

When asked to distill down to the basic principles of art thinking, Maeda thinks it starts with reacquainting ourselves with an “almost child-like fascination with the world.” Yet, he is quick to note that the idea is still

brewing. “It took [IDEO founder and design thinking champion] David Kelley 10 years to get design thinking down to something real, and I’m not ready for that yet.

I’ve just started!”

John Maeda is the president of the Rhode Island School of Design @johnmaeda www.risd.edu

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Carmen Medina

A Little Transparency, Please “The CIA will end up being the last secret organization in the world, and being the last of anything is usually not a good thing.”

Working for the Central Intelligence Agency for over 30 years has given Carmen Medina a sharp appreciation for the idea of transparency. Even the covert world of intelligence could stand a little more visibility, she insists.

Recently retired from her position as director of the Center for the Study of Intelligence and before that, as deputy director for intelligence, Medina is now enjoying the openness of social networking culture, immersing herself in Twitter and in her blog, RecoveringFed. She is exercising the freedom of platforms normally eschewed by her former employer.

The CIA is a “dinosaur,” she says, when it comes to transparency. “Their business is information and secrecy. For them to think about adapting transparency — it’s a theological issue. The CIA will end up being the last secret organization in the world, and being the last of anything is usually not a good thing.”

In her retirement, Medina has been spending time at her mother’s home in the hill country of Texas, where she says she basks in the luxury of thinking — and tweeting. Free from the demands of clandestinity and secrecy, she has become a Twitter fanatic.

“Twitter is an idea factory,” she says. “It’s kind of self-referencing — you not only see the ideas of people you follow, but they also get presented right next to

each other in your Twitter stream. Two people who don’t know each other at all might have thoughts that are totally unrelated to each other, but I connect them and that generates another idea for me.”

This is a new reality for Medina, who spent her professional life working in the most closed information network imaginable. She proposes a hypothetical situation to demonstrate the inefficiency of this system, even at the CIA. Suppose the agency identifies a terror threat from country “X.” It might then assign 100 analysts to examine every single piece of information related to that threat. But what if they haven’t scaled correctly? What if 100 analysts are not enough to adequately assess all the available intelligence? The expectation that the U.S. government will prevent 100 percent of the terror threats from country “X” will clearly be disappointed.

“Their business is to make sense of the world and it’s really hard to do that in a closed network,” Medina says.

Instead, she advocates an open network approach that would make the same intelligence available to thousands of other CIA analysts who might pick up on something crucial and make an unexpected contribution to the available data. “Let all that information flow through them,” Medina suggests. “They can scan it as a sort of backup to the primary problem. You could scale

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it much better and have a diversity of people to look at it.”

Having worked for the CIA for so long, though, Medina is somewhat forgiving of the agency’s lack of imagination, given the high reliability-high performance nature of intelligence. Taking risks is not an option. But she says businesses that can afford a little flexibility should jump in while they have the chance.

“My story is about what it’s like to be a person in an organization like the CIA and trying to nudge it; about doing what you can to shift it from that perspective,” she says. “Most other companies don’t have an excuse for not changing. If you’re not thinking of changing your business, then shame on you.”

Some people fear the transparency that Medina sees as the highlight of any change agenda. They see themselves giving up territory or becoming devalued in some way. Medina roundly dismisses this notion because we will always need a discrete group of individuals to work on particular projects, and that group will always need an expert manager. Higher visibility will simply enable peers to correct each other as a project moves forward, before a glitch turns into a major problem.

“I have no sympathy for the person who says, I want my work to be private,” she says. “When you are writing the great American novel, you get to be private.

The worst possible time to make a fix is toward the end of the project. In a transparent work design, the expert’s work will change and other roles will emerge.”

To Medina, the most tragic aspect of the old corporate silo is that ideas get trapped, sometimes irretrievably. And after three decades in the stringent hierarchy and formal channels of the CIA, she is hungry for ideas — she doesn’t care where they come from or in what form. She wants to “harvest” everything that’s out there and let serendipity do its work.

Carmen Medina is the recently-retired deputy director of intelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency @milouness www.recoveringfed.com

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Jana Sue Memel

Think Hollywood Meets Esalen “Maybe you don’t think that you have something to offer because you’re unconventional or you’re not exactly what you think you’re supposed to be, but that’s what people buy.”

Nobody grows up in L.A., but Jana Sue Memel did. Growing up in L.A. gave Memel an early taste for the entertainment industry. When she was five years old, she called up 20th Century Fox and offered her services to the switchboard operator. That career opportunity didn’t work out. But later, after a brief and uninspiring foray into the practice of law (“the six most miserable months of my life”), Memel became a Hollywood agent. Today, she is an Academy Award-winning film producer with a specialty in short films that tell a genuine story - without the commercialism and contrivances required in full-length Hollywood films.

“When I was a young agent, I fell in love with the movies I represented. I didn’t want to let them go,” she says. “But as an agent you work on them, you sell them and they’re gone. I hated that.” So she decided to leave the security of an agency paycheck and move into the ranks of independent producers.

As an agent, Memel had specialized in representing first-time writers and directors. As a producer, she kept up the practice. Chanticleer Films, the company she founded with a partner, made a deal with Columbia Pictures to produce half-hour movies to be directed by first-timers with industry experience in other areas.

Chanticleer’s very first film won an Oscar. Ten other

Oscar nominations followed, two of which turned into wins along with multiple other awards. Memel attributes the critical success of her films to one simple thing: “The stories are all relatable. They touch the audience on some emotional level — whether it’s to make them laugh, cry or scream— they make people feel.”

Memel is devoted to the storytelling behind the movie, and it is this quality that she brings to a more recent enterprise, The HollywoodWay, which conducts business presentation workshops with a focus on corporate storytelling. “Lack of emotion in business is a growing corporate pandemic,” she says. “You’re never going to be able to differentiate your product that much from your competition.

Buyers base their purchase decision on how they feel about the seller. Maybe you don’t think that you have something to offer because you’re unconventional or you’re not exactly what you think you’re supposed to be, but that’s what people buy.”

The HollywoodWay teaches five basic precepts that Memel believes will turn any speaker into someone who can sell tickets to a concert on the moon. They are: Preparation, the most important element of which is knowing your audience; Passion, which means loving what you’re talking about and making your audience feel that love; Presentation, which is the art of selling

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your passion in a way that causes your audience to emotionally connect to your story; Brevity, a concept that speaks for itself; and Breathing, creating a space where you, as a storyteller, can internalize your message so it doesn’t come out as a canned, robotic monologue but rather as the beginning of a conversation with the audience.

As both a filmmaker and a communication facilitator, Memel has a passion for reaching out to young women starting out on their professional path. As a single parent of three teenage daughters who grew up with no professional role models of her own, Memel says she is mindful about what she projects to her daughters. “It’s about living a life where you have to think about constantly challenging yourself to walk the walk that you talk. I can’t advocate listening to what people are saying and then shut down myself. I can’t urge speaking your mind clearly and honestly and then cut my daughters off when they do. “ “I have spent my entire professional life telling stories in the hope of moving people to take action - whether it’s to buy a ticket, shed a tear or buy a product. Now I teach others how to do that. It gives me great joy when I see a business school graduate unfold her hands, loosen a button on her blouse and jump up in the middle of a presentation letting loose with a ‘Girl, you should buy this ‘cause my mother told me it’s the best oven cleaner she’s ever used. You should see her scrubbing away and humming. I don’t get why it makes

her smile but it does.’ The day that business school graduate painted that picture in my mind of her smiling mother was the day I knew that I could teach people how to win by being themselves.”

Jana Sue Memel is an Oscar-winning film producer and founder of The HollywoodWay @hollywoodwaynet www.hollywoodway.net

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Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio

Bringing a Hungry Planet to Light “Even if you’re eating bugs, when you have a meal together, preconceptions and cultural filters start falling away. Food is close to everybody’s heart.”

For the past 17 years, the husband and wife photojournalism team of Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio has been collaborating to produce stunning books of photography with significant humanitarian and international appeal.

They say they complement one another. He is very “big picture.” She is the in-depth detail woman.

“A simultaneous front and rear assault,” he calls it. He was at Woodstock. She earned her stripes in broadcast news. He used to be a “one-man band.” Now they work together as “two people who totally understand the project.” She says he is “kind of amazing” in the way he deals with people. She deepens the experience by drawing out the people they encounter. “People like to talk to me because I like to listen. Women, especially don’t get listened to in the developing world.”

They say the collaboration has its challenges, but that the “end result is successful.”

Their first project, Material World: A Global Family Portrait (1995), examined the lives and material goods of a “statistically average” family in each of 30 different nations. Since then, they have gravitated towards telling the human story through food, most notably in Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, which chronicles the weekly diets of families in 24 countries. This year, Menzel and D’Aluisio debut their new book, What I

Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets, which will showcase one day’s worth of food for a culturally diverse set of individuals from around the globe.

Menzel and D’Aluisio put everything on the line for these labors of love. Nobody funds them. They borrow against everything they own to produce books that they hope will touch people. The goal is always to make back the investment within a few years of publication, but they’re never quite sure what will happen at the culmination of any project. The gambles are huge, they say. But they trudge on.

They say they do it to bring the world a little bit closer, to allow people a glimpse of someone else’s dinner table so that our own lives will be revealed in some way.

It is a lesson they might have learned from Upton Sinclair, whose 1906 muckraking novel, The Jungle, was intended to expose industrial labor abuses at the turn-of-the-century. Instead, the novel’s descriptions of sordid meat-packing practices nauseated the American people and led to sanitary reforms in the industry.

Sinclair famously declared, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

Menzel and D’Aluisio are taking a more effective — and more aesthetically pleasing — route than Sinclair in their efforts to generate awareness about enlightened stewardship of the earth’s resources: they are aiming

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straight for the stomach.

They say that sharing a meal with a subject, especially in the home, reveals that person’s inner nature.

“Even if you’re eating bugs,” D’Aluisio says, “when you have a meal together, preconceptions and cultural filters start falling away. Food is close to everybody’s heart.”

Each photograph in their books is intentionally laden with detail, a “deep contextualization” of the subject’s life that will, hopefully, provide many points of connection for the viewer. “We’re interested in taking our ideas and illustrating them with real people and letting the essence of the truth come out so that people can understand it,” Menzel says. “Pretty pictures will sell well, but very ephemerally, and they’re gone in a flash. If you give people a lot more information, they’re going to compare it to themselves.”

D’Aluisio notes that the contextualizing also prevents them from filtering what they photograph through their own Western eyes. Seeing the subject clearly is sometimes a very complicated task, she explains. She interviewed a woman from Yemen whose husband, a bank driver, was one of the very few Yemeni men to allow his wife to talk to the two American journalists.

Their female translator dropped out at the last moment so they used a male translator who was not permitted by reason of culture to speak directly to the woman, only to her husband.

“It can be really difficult to hear regular people in some societies,” D’Aluisio explains. “Saada’s story had

to be filtered through two men in order for me to get answers. It was really difficult to hear her voice through them.”

Regular people form the lens through which Menzel and D’Aluisio show how other cultures solve problems. Their hope is that such a perspective will give Americans and those in the so-called developed world a more realistic — even sobering — assessment of our own solutions to these same problems.

“There’s no place that is Shangri-La or perfect,” he says. “The Japanese figured out how to eat healthy and live longer and they still have a very chaotic, workdriven lifestyle.”

While they enjoy their extensive and always unique travel across six continents, Menzel and D’Aluisio say they love to return to their home and their garden in Napa, CA. But even at home, the nature of their work has its own ineffable rewards. D’Aluisio aptly sums up the beauty of a life devoted to photography since the writer began working with her photographer husband, for whom so much depends on the perfect ray of light.

“In 17 years,” she says, “I’ve seen every sunrise and every sunset.”

Peter Menzel is a photojournalist and Faith D’Aluisio is a writer www.menzelphoto.com

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Glen Merfeld

Talking Up Batteries “If you look at this trend toward electrification, and you look at expansion of digitization, increasingly the amount of money that people are going to be spending on energy storage is going to go up.”

An Iowa farmboy with a Ph.D. in chemical engineering may seem an unlikely person to talk about the latest — and perhaps most innovative — GE battery technology. But Glen Merfeld has a calling.

He just loves batteries and his expertise extends to battery chemistry, battery physics, battery research, battery factories and battery governing boards. Battery types, too: lead acid, lithium ion, nickel metal hydride . . . but his favorite?

Sodium metal halide.

This new type of battery is what he has been spending the past several years developing as manager of the Chemical Energy Systems Laboratory at GE. It promises to store energy in a much denser fashion — perhaps three times more energy than a lead acid battery with five times the length of performance. And while the GE battery may have potential use in passenger vehicles down the road, it is currently being developed for the GE hybrid locomotive, which Merfeld calls a “200-ton Prius.”

Originally hired as a “plastics guy” specializing in polymer research, Merfeld got involved on the front end of GE’s interest in energy storage about five years ago. Lately, he’s been puzzling over the amount of kinetic energy that is wasted when the hybrid locomotive brakes. “We’re trying to put a battery in there to capture some of that braking energy, to change that kinetic

energy into electricity to be used later,” he explains.

Merfeld thinks it’s all very “cool,” which may be why GE chose him to talk it up.

“I guess my enthusiasm comes across,” he says. “As a scientist, I don’t want to become a marketer, but at the same time, it’s very important that we take advantage of what we know and of our ability to take the intricate details and communicate them.”

Despite the global energy crisis that confronts us every time we stop for gas, the issue of energy storage technology is not on most people’s radar screens, Merfeld says. But as battery technology improves, and hybrid cars go longer distances between charges, the consumer landscape will soon look different.

“The world’s changing very quickly,” Merfeld says.

“If you look at this trend toward electrification, and you look at expansion of digitization, increasingly the amount of money that people are going to be spending on energy storage is going to go up.”

Replacing a lead acid battery in a car is relatively inexpensive, but as batteries get bigger and more sophisticated, the investment in them will rise accordingly.

With replacement costs of several thousand dollars, batteries will become a more central consideration in the purchase of a vehicle.

How soon that revolution will happen is uncertain, Merfeld says. But in anticipation of future reliance on

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high-performance batteries, he is helping GE to build connections to the local community around GE Global Research Headquarters in Niskayuna, NY by forging bonds with academic researchers, government leaders and business people. The goal is to create an environment conducive to the energy storage research he conducts when he is back in the lab. He calls it “inspiring collaboration” and “translating technology out of our research lab to the factory.” It is an emerging business model that will demand dogged perseverance to bring to fruition.

Again, Merfeld is the perfect candidate to spearhead the project. Along with his gusto for batteries in general, he loves hard work.

Growing up on a 2,000-acre grain farm in Independence, IA, Merfeld sometimes spent days at a time just picking up rocks out of the fields so that they wouldn’t break the equipment during harvest. On a farm, he says, you have to do “whatever needs to be done,” no matter how monotonous.

When he went to college, he selected a chemical engineering major because he wanted to study something that would make him a little uncomfortable — and teach him something new in the process.

“You have to work hard, perhaps when other people aren’t willing to,” he says. “It allows you to get to an advanced plane of capability. I’d like to think some of that value was instilled in me when I was growing up on a farm. You’ve got to learn how to enjoy that process of a hard day’s work, be willing to pay that price.”

The Iowa work ethic comes in handy in research, Merfeld says, especially when he’s looking for things that are not obvious — like rocks in a cornfield. “You might think that you are failing at first, but those things that you don’t understand are the things that you keep digging on.”

Glen Merfeld is the chemical energy systems laboratory manager at GE Global Research http://ge.globalresearch.com

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Bruce Nussbaum

The Education of an Innovator “We’re under a period of fast-paced, profound change. In every industry you look, the current gatekeepers are having a difficult time. It pisses them off and it’s just too bad.

I’m on the other side and I think it’s wildly exciting.”

Inventing something new is not the hardest part of innovation — the hardest part is inspiring change in people who are not particularly interested in it. Returning BIF storyteller and former assistant managing editor of BusinessWeek Bruce Nussbaum knows the problem well and has spent most of his career surrounded by innovators of all kinds; writing provocative stories that connected his readers with what the smartest companies were doing in the United States, Asia and Europe.

He’s now tackling a new and different kind of challenge — guiding the next generation of innovator. As professor of innovation and design at Parsons The New School for Design, Nussbaum has committed himself to educating young people on the concept of design. “There is a big gap between design practitioners (at least at the top consultancies) and design educators that must be filled,” explains Nussbaum.

Design is an area that Nussbaum knows all too well having written about it for the past 30 years. “There is no limitation to its power,” he says. “It’s a way of thinking about doing on a strategically big scale — a new learning experience for all children, a better health care experience for older people, a more honest political system for voters.”

He says there are many natural abilities built into

the design process that give it so much heft — from its capacity to create new products, services and experiences, to its ability to formulate deep understanding of people and cultures. Yet what makes Nussbaum so certain that design holds the key to change is its power to redesign large-scale social systems. Design gives people the ability to be one with the consumer culture — to be anthropologists and sociologists and deeply understand the myriad of cultures around them. “I firmly believe that humancentered, iterative, collaborative, prototyping, generative approaches to problem-solving must replace our old educational models, from liberal arts to business programs,” he says.

This spring Nussbaum will launch his third core lecture series at Parsons called “Design at the Edge.”

The curriculum focuses on the demographic, technological, cultural, economic and political changes that are disrupting our social organizations and personal lives.

Perfect for a student body that is truly cross-cultural: one-third of the student population comes from Europe and Brazil, another third from Asia and the remaining third from the United States. “I really want to push students to think widely about the forces shaping their lives,” explains Nussbaum. “Gen Y is perhaps the most dynamic cohort and it’s critically important that they

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learn to harness the tools and methods of 21st century design.”

To get students to understand these forces at play, Nussbaum invites some of the top minds in innovation and design to speak — people like Roger Martin, Jacqueline Novogratz, David Rockwell, Grant McCracken, John Thackera and fellow BIF-6 storyteller Marla Allison, to name a few. And in true cross-disciplinary fashion, the makeup of the class comprises students from all over The New School, including product, graphic, communication and technology designers as well as fashion and design management students.

“I’m blown away by the talent here at The New School,” Nussbaum says. “Creativity abounds. They are as good as any designer in Europe or the United States.” For instance, one group of his students developed an idea related to Gen Y communication that is worth “at least $1 million to a packaged goods company.” Another team came up with a sophisticated business plan involving a beautifully designed, cornbased water bottle that can be used for compost. Still another created an iPhone app that redesigned the museum experience.

For as much as he’s embraced his new role in academia, Nussbaum hasn’t entirely given up the writing game. This year he launched two online columns at Harvard Business Review and Fast Company. And he continues to find inspiration in the oddest of places, in search of people who demonstrate the unique power of the narrative. “It’s one of the reasons I’m at BIF-6.

The stories you hear can inform the business you’re in, the place you’re at and the paths that lay before you.”

So what’s next for Nussbaum? “We’re under a period of fast-paced, profound change. In every industry you look, the current gatekeepers are having a difficult time. It pisses them off and it’s just too bad. I’m on the other side and I think it’s wildly exciting. There are brilliant young people out there ready to take the reigns. And for me, this is a great chance to structure what I think all education needs to be — a learning experience that enables students to navigate our uncertain world using the tools and methods of design.”

And, he mirthfully continues, “the summer vacations aren’t bad either.”

Bruce Nussbaum is professor of innovation and design at Parsons The New School for Design @brucenussbaum www.newschool.edu/parsons

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John Rinn

Making it to the Stanley Cup Finals of Science “Science is something you do over and over, and you think, ‘What if I did this on top of that?’

You make creative leaps and you don’t even know where it comes from.”

In the ultra-competitive and high-risk field of genetics research, Dr. John Rinn says he makes his mark by “thinking like a 10 year old.” Rinn’s humble self-assessment refers in part to his fanatical love for hockey when he was growing up in Minnesota. Even by himself, he would play for hours on end, pretending he was in the Stanley Cup Finals and making that game-winning goal.

Today, Rinn applies the same level of intensity to his research in the pathology lab at Harvard Medical School, where he zealously absorbs himself in RNA molecules until someone calls him in for dinner.

“I’m just fascinated about what these guys are up to,” he says.

By “these guys,” Rinn means the formerly obscure lincRNA (large intergenic non-coding RNA) molecules that he discovered in the human genome, earning him the distinction of being named by Popular Science magazine as one of the “Brilliant 10” young geniuses shaking up science today. LincRNA works in the cell to guide proteins to their ultimate destinations — a finding that might provide medical scientists with critical clues about cancer growth.

Rinn made his discovery when large non-coding RNAs weren’t getting much respect in the research world, but he says his unique focus is what has made all the difference — while everyone else was looking at the entire human genome, he honed in on one particular

part of it. And he kept at it until something clicked.

His capacity for deep intellectual study was not always apparent, Rinn says, especially in his high school years. “After school, I’d go skateboarding for two or three hours and practice the same things over and over again until I didn’t have to think about it anymore.

When I finally started to apply myself to school, I applied that same rigor and discipline.”

His academic malaise seemingly disappeared as he began to study chemistry in college.

“Chemistry is like skateboarding,” Rinn says. Most people would disagree with this statement, but Rinn insists that the root training behind any endeavor is the same. If we do something enough times, we will reach a point where there is almost no thinking involved. Rinn says that’s when abstract thought emerges and creativity becomes possible: “If you practice a trick in skateboarding over and over again until it becomes natural, it takes on its own entity. When you do a 360 off a jump enough times, you become confident, and then you twist it and lean it and take it someplace new.”

Rinn applied his successful skateboarding techniques to reading his undergraduate chemistry textbook. “I read the chapters, and then I went back and made outlines, and then I made note cards until all these turns and other things were coming naturally.”

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It’s a formula that works for him, particularly in the world of science, where he estimates that 90 percent of research efforts don’t pan out. “You’ve got to keep at it to find that 10 percent,” Rinn says. “Science is something you do over and over, and you think, ‘What if I did this on top of that?’ You make creative leaps and you don’t even know where it comes from.”

Underlying Rinn’s praise for dogged persistence and rote practice is an urge to sweep away chaos and release the flow of ingenuity — on the ice, in the skate park or in the lab. Ideas don’t just pop up for no reason, he insists, but because we are constantly thinking about something, approaching it from different angles.

Keeping the flow in the lab is especially important, Rinn says. To this end, he takes his lab workers on research retreats to generate a congenial, lighthearted atmosphere that is conducive to in-depth exploration.

They work hard and play hard. “In the lab,” he says, “everybody has their own project, but there’s enough synergy and overlap that they have to come to together at some point. Having fun makes that part easier.”

How do a bunch of chemists amuse themselves?

“We make fun of bad data.”

Outside the lab, though, things get serious. The task of presenting research findings to a skeptical scientific community and the investors who fund research makes good communication important. “When we present our work, people will attack it,” Rinn says.

All the more reason to be passionate about one’s

labors. Rinn is not exactly sure where his passion comes from. But almost every day, he says, he wakes up with an immediate adrenalin jolt. “That adrenalin is inspired by the fact that I’m excited to get all these things done, to find a piece to a bigger puzzle.”

Plus, lincRNA molecules keep Rinn perpetually on his toes. You just never know what “these guys” are up to.

John Rinn is assistant professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center www.rinnlab.com

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Richard Satava

Looking for the Game Changer “I never see my patient. I never touch him. But the images I see by going through computer systems allow me to do things that I can’t do with my own eyes.”

Dr. Richard Satava has devoted his four-decade career as a surgeon to developing medical technologies that border on sci-fi. Robotic surgery and medical imaging, he says, are making possible an entirely new kind of operating room: one without a surgeon.

Satava, a professor of surgery at the University of Washington, insists that this not-so-futuristic environment actually brings him closer to his patient.

“I never see my patient,” he says. “I never touch him. But the images I see by going through computer systems allow me to do things that I can’t do with my own eyes. The systems are more precise. They allow me to scale up and scale down. They magnify an image so I can see much more than if I was standing and looking right at the patient.”

The game changer that produced this medical technology, Satava says, was the X-ray, a late 19th-century accident of research that revolutionized medicine. “For the very first time, we didn’t have to look at patients to see what was wrong with them,” he says. “It was a whole new world.”

Forever on the hunt for other new worlds, Satava has an unusually progressive vision that evolves from surprisingly conservative roots.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he grew up in a small Florida town of 2,700 people on the border of the Everglades. He describes his background as “working

class” and slightly retrograde. “When I got to Florida, it was like going back in time,” Satava says, “but I was too young to appreciate that. We had no exposure to art.

Art was going to the movies or a painting that was in the bank.”

The hardest decision he ever had to make was whether he should go out the front door for “skin diving” or out the back door for canoeing in the Everglades.

Of the 35 graduates in Satava’s high school class, only four went to college. He went to Johns Hopkins University with plans to become a surgeon. He says the urban culture of Baltimore burst open his world — for the first time, he met people who were Jewish, Muslim and gay. He found out what a musical was. His advisor was a Nobel laureate. And then there were the classes.

“It was like being in a candy store for four years,” he says. “There was something called philosophy, something called economics and time-and-motion studies. I was going from knowing virtually nothing to having an extraordinary amount of information in front of me. I opened my mouth wide on the funnel of knowledge and sucked in just about everything I could get, and it just hasn’t stopped.”

Satava says he has always been “profoundly affected” by new things. What thrilled him most at Johns

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Hopkins were the things he didn’t know, and on that score, nothing much has changed. He is still curious, audacious and supremely impatient with obstacles to the kind of productive research that brings novelty into the world.

Sometimes those obstacles have to do with human territoriality. But often, they have to do with money.

Having worked as a biotechnology project manager at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) from 1993 to 2000, Satava saw firsthand what research can produce in the rare instances when money is not an issue. A significant example, he says, occurred in the 1970s when DARPA and the U.S. Air Force allocated $50 million a year for three years to researchers working on low observable technologies in aircraft.

Three years later, they were looking at the Stealth Bomber.

It was the type of game changer, Satava says, that can only come through “largesse” in research. “Nobody’s willing to lose that kind of money except the government. Nobody’s willing to say, I may not even get one thing, but that one thing may revolutionize the field. But the military doesn’t have any stock holders.

It can invest billions of dollars, shut the door and let researchers do what they need to do.”

Imagine applying such unbridled freedom to medical research. As Satava sees it, researchers need to satisfy their capacity for wonder if they are to generate meaningful results. It is a question of producing an

unfettered state of mind — something akin to the sense of amazement he felt when he stepped onto the Johns Hopkins campus nearly 50 years ago.

This year, Satava makes a return trip to BIF to talk about his current fascination: simulation technology and predictive analytics. True to his nature, he is always most intrigued with the one thing in a million that doesn’t behave predictably.

“That’s where we get our clue. What is it about this outlier that didn’t fit the pattern? This is how we bring imagination to the scientific method. What doesn’t fit?

That’s the beginning.”

That’s the game changer.

Richard Satava is a senior science advisor at the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command www.depts.washington.edu/biointel

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Kim Scheinberg

A Generosity Among Gamblers “The term sheet usually defines your relationship and the way it’s going to end.

Why do I want a term sheet that defines how we break up?”

Kim Scheinberg was five years old when she first played backgammon for money at the Mayfair Club in Manhattan. Her opponent was Oswald Jacoby, the 1972 World Backgammon Champion. They bet a quarter.

A five year old who gets a game at the most elite bridge and backgammon club in New York must have connections.

Scheinberg says she grew up around “gamblers of various stripes,” including her father, who was a professional bridge player.

He came home from work every day, took a nap, and arrived at his evening game just before midnight. He played bridge to supplement his income as a management consultant specializing in computer systems. In 1970, he designed the first computerized daily-double and exacta betting systems for the Aqueduct Race Track in New York. He also computerized election returns for CBS and commodities trading for the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Raised in a world where placing bets was a fearless way of embracing the uncertainties of life, Scheinberg became a card player herself. In 2005, she edited Tales from the Tiltboys, a collection of anecdotes about her weekly poker games with a group of guys in Palo Alto.

In the book, she reports that her second son’s bris ceremony was performed on a poker table in her home.

There were “cards in the air” fifteen minutes after it

was finished.

Scheinberg says she looks at poker a little differently now that her sons are growing up. To succeed in poker, she says, you have to actively seek out people you would otherwise avoid. “I woke up one day not interested anymore. You have to either have a capacity for boredom or the ability to pay attention constantly to what’s going on. I did not have that focus.”

It’s a question of deciding where you want to play the odds, but the one thing that Scheinberg consistently bets on is people.

Today, she partners with longtime friend and poker buddy, Rafe Furst, in a unique venture capital enterprise that invests in promising young social entrepreneurs, especially the digitally connected Millennials who have exciting resumes, diverse travel histories and tons of philanthropic ingenuity. “These kids at 22 have done more than my most accomplished friends at 42,” she says.

Scheinberg’s fund, called Presumed Abundance, requires the usual return on investment, but with a twist: The social entrepreneur must make a commitment to take Scheinberg’s share of the proceeds and together pay it forward by investing in other socially philanthropic projects. The purpose of the future commitment, according to Scheinberg, is to continue the relationship created at Presumed Abundance.

“The term sheet usually defines your relationship

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and the way it’s going to end,” she says. “Why do I want a term sheet that defines how we break up?”

Having engaged many times in what she calls “unsatisfying philanthropy,” Scheinberg began investing in social ventures, but she says expecting a return on such investments felt “vulgar.” She had great empathy for the young entrepreneurs who were seeking her help.

“Even when we sat down and I had the check ready to hand over, it became an adversarial negotiation. It’s a finite pie and you have to cut it up. I became acutely aware of their feeling of scarcity in that moment, and I thought, this is ridiculous — they want to go out and do social good. Why do they have to make a rich guy richer in the process?”

But just giving them the money, Scheinberg says, is too much like your grandmother buying your Girl Scout cookies. The Presumed Abundance method of paying it forward creates a different “ecology of philanthropy,” where Scheinberg can partner with people who are realizing their personal dreams.

“It’s very Wizard of Oz because the message they get is not, ‘we’re giving you this money because we think you’re going to be successful,’ but rather, ‘we’re giving it to you because we already see you as successful.’ It’s an investment in their character. That’s going to stay with them.”

Scheinberg has had some success in the games of chance that have comprised so much of the fabric of her life. But it’s not all about winning for her. Taking risks suggests a certain confidence that good things will

happen. There is a “generosity among gamblers,” she says, that creates the feeling that there will always be enough.

“Gamblers are very odd people. They have a peculiar relationship to money. It’s hard to describe for people who haven’t lived it, but I do think there is a certain feeling of abundance — even when you’re broke, someone will lend you money to start over.”

Scheinberg is doing what she can to pass on this presumed abundance to the social entrepreneurs who are lucky enough to sit at the table when she deals the cards.

Kim Scheinberg is the co-founder of Presumed Abundance @funditforward www.presumedabundance.com

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LeN Schlesinger

Act...Learn...Repeat “There’s a whole way of thinking about the world that doesn’t include fantasizing about an 85-page business plan and 12-year forecast spreadsheet.”

Len Schlesinger says that the past two years as the president of Babson College in Massachusetts have been “an absolute gas.” The huge smile and breathless pace he brings to the position are only outmatched by the tenacity with which he adheres to the Babson motto: THE educator for entrepreneurship of all kinds.

“Many people would think this is a bold statement to the point of being outrageous,” Schlesinger says of the motto. “But this is our time. If we don’t seize it, we will spend the rest of our lives regretting the missed opportunity.

Entrepreneurial thought and action is at the core of much of what ails the world.”

Babson is consistently ranked number one in entrepreneurship by U.S. News and World Report. And Schlesinger says there’s a good reason for that and it relates to the broad scale “democratization of entrepreneurship” the college is committed to. Entrepreneurship, he says, is not an exclusive concept relegated to Inc. Magazine, Fast Company and self-congratulatory books. Nor is it about “hanging on with finger nails from a crevice, towing piles of debt and failed personal relationships behind you.” Anyone can do it.

“Millions of people are self-defining themselves out of the universe of entrepreneurism and that’s tragic,” says Schlesinger. “The fact is, entrepreneurial thought

and action can be codified and taught to anyone.”

This upbeat sense of urgency has served Schlesinger well in his long career on both the academic and private sides of business. In addition to teaching at the Harvard Business School for 20 years, he has held executive positions at Limited Brands and Au Bon Pain.

He has also authored or co-authored nine books and numerous articles on organizational management. He currently is co-authoring a book on applying entrepreneurial thought and action beyond business to every aspect of life.

Schlesinger says he thrives in new situations where he has to figure things out quickly because the world is changing fast and he’s keeping pace. He says he’s so productive because he has a short attention span. “At the end of the day, on the things that need to get done, my orientation is to get it done before it’s not interesting,” he says.

His drive and motivation to try new things are a result of his natural curiosity combined with the unconditional support given to him by his parents when he was young. Both of his parents were Holocaust survivors who “completely lived through their children,” he says.

“They reinforced whatever confidence I had, probably to the extreme. I was given lots of latitude to do lots of things when I was younger without someone looking over my shoulder critiquing everything I did.

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So when I got to college, there wasn’t much I thought I couldn’t do.”

This unbounded sense of potential saturates every part of Schlesinger’s personality. To say he is full of life is an understatement, and he expects the same liveliness from others. He believes in “stretching people.”

That’s why he’s determined to have every student, staff and faculty member he can find at Babson pitch in and keep the college moving forward at a vigorous pace.

Just don’t show up unless you’re ready to play.

Only “naïve organizations” try to get everyone on the bandwagon, but Schlesinger says you only need a large enough critical mass to get things done. “What I’m looking for is an emotional connection that spurs behavior,” he says.

Perhaps this is why BIF and Babson have such an affinity for each other.

This year the organizations embarked on a new partnership to create an Entrepreneur Experience Lab to accelerate the design of new entrepreneur support solutions. Schlesinger says that by developing a deep and ongoing understanding of the experience of entrepreneurs, new insights will be found to guide the next generation of programs and policies at Babson. “It’s about providing an authentic voice to those entrepreneurs who drive new venture creation nationally and globally,” he explains.

With so many people today paralyzed in the face of large-scale problems and high degrees of uncertainty

Schlesinger says the imperative for the entrepreneur is to just plain do: Start with the means, not the ends; define affordable loss; network like crazy (with people you like); and leverage contingencies. “There’s a whole way of thinking about the world that doesn’t include fantasizing about an 85-page business plan and 12-year forecast spreadsheet.”

It turns out, says Schlesinger, the construction of networks that drive entrepreneurial ventures looks exactly like a crazy quilt — fabric scraps that come together into something beautiful. “It’s radically different from what many people think to be the construction of an entrepreneurial enterprise. And we need different methods and approaches to support this new type of construction.”

He points to a research study of 50 successful partnerships. Forty-two of them started with people who got together and had no idea what they wanted to do. “All they knew is that they liked each other and wanted to do something,” he says. Indeed, that’s just the kind of emotional connection that drives us all.

Len Schlesinger is the president of Babson College www.babson.edu

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Jigar Shah

Taking on a Gigatonne of Change “Infrastructure doesn’t change because there’s a superior product, but because there’s a superior ground game that makes that product acceptable.”

Some people say Jigar Shah is a visionary. In 2003, he started one of the first successful solar energy companies, SunEdison, by figuring out a way to make solar power profitable. Last year, he sold the company for $200 million.

Today, Shah is the CEO of the Carbon War Room, a global entrepreneurial initiative that embraces battle metaphors and operates in a state of emergency to reinvent the “brand” of climate change. Up to now, he says, “climate change has been synonymous with sacrifice, but it is the largest wealth creation opportunity of our lifetime.”

The Carbon War Room is depending on Shah to forge a path into the uncharted, postcarbon world by drawing on his visionary capabilities.

But he insists that his knack for generating workable ideas for the future is nothing supernatural — he’s just “obsessed by infrastructure,” keenly observant of arrangements and connections. It’s the way his brain works, he says. “I tend to have the ability to be a better systems thinker than most people. When I see three or four different things happening, I can tell how they will manifest themselves in the future.”

Plus, he likes to roll up his sleeves and get his feet wet.

Born in India, Shah moved to Sterling, IL with his family when he was one year old. He describes Sterling

as a “very weird and amazing place” to grow up, a small farming community of 15,000 people. It used to be the home of Northwestern Steel and Wire, the seventh largest steel mill in the United States, and according to Shah, the mill brought a lot of wealth to the community before it shut down in 2001. But Sterling was also largely sustained by farms that employed migrant workers who comprised one-third of the town’s population. From this vantage point, he says, “I saw the industrialization of the country and I got to know the agricultural side really well.

I saw a little bit of everything.”

Shah’s interest in solar energy was born in this spot. And he credits the cultural and economic influences of his early environment for shaping his plain-speaking, practical approach to getting things done.

“That’s my Midwest sensibility,” he says. “A talker isn’t really worth a lot. My thing is, if you can see something, you have to be able to articulate it. If you can’t, maybe it’s useless. If you can see it and articulate it, you have to do it in a fashion that people can actually follow. If people can’t act on it in a way that’s material, then you’re not really successful.”

Manifesting the vision often means trying something 40 different ways, he says, changing tactics every week until something works. The best entrepreneurs will not only take a risk around their salaries, but

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around their reputations as well. For his part, Shah says he has been ridiculed by some very smart people about his solar energy ideas, but he knows the facts speak for themselves.

“You have to maintain the courage of your convictions, to keep saying something when people are laughing at you,” he says. “It’s not about people respecting me — it’s about people respecting solar.”

He brings this tenacious resolve into the Carbon War Room. While he admits there are some “peaceniks” out there who recoil from the war metaphor, Shah defends it. “War is not a bad thing or a good thing. It’s a thing.” A war room is a place of rapid response, he says, an antidote to the “sinister” tendency we have of trying to make change without showing up. But, he says, “That’s what war is — real individuals taking real, concrete actions along a battle plan and actually executing on it. It’s really doing the work.”

And revolutionizing energy use will take decades of “backbreaking” work, he predicts. Change may come fast and furiously in the IT world, but to Shah’s way of thinking, innovation is not an endpoint. “Infrastructure doesn’t change because there’s a superior product, but because there’s a superior ground game that makes that product acceptable.”

Changing the ground game is where Shah excels, and now his efforts have deeper repercussions than ever before. The Carbon War Room has taken an urgent approach to the G20 goal of reducing global emissions to 44 gigatonnes per year by 2020.

“We’re not even close to that trajectory,” Shah says. “At SunEdison, I was not responsible for solving climate change, or even for the solar industry. I was only responsible for making a good return for my investors. You can actually make a huge difference for your investor and not make a bit of difference in the world.

At the Carbon War Room, I have to make a gigatonne scale of difference.”

Jigar Shah is the CEO of the Carbon War Room @indiantiger24 www.carbonwarroom.org

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Don Tapscott

Rebooting Business and the World “There’s been a convulsive shock to the system that’s creating this burning platform in all of our institutions. This is it. This is happening now.”

Technology, in all its many forms and facets has been Don Tapscott’s life’s work. Once identified by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore as “a world leading cyber guru,” he’s spent the last 30 years as author, teacher, researcher and management consultant envisioning the technological convergence of computing, communications and content.

Tapscott, who brought the term “paradigm shift” into the vernacular in 1991 with his landmark book published under the same name, says that we are in the midst of another paradigm shift with profound changes taking place in the deep architecture and modus operandi of just about every institution in society.

From the corporation and the way we orchestrate capabilities to innovate, to our in-flux financial system, to a collapsing media industry, to outdated university structures, health care systems and energy grids, “the viability of how we’re placed on this planet is now being called into question,” he says. “We have 40 years to reindustrialize the Earth.”

Yet a doomsayer Tapcott is not. He’s just lived and studied too many paradigm shifts to say otherwise.

Tapscott began his career in 1977 arriving in Toronto fresh from receiving his master’s degree in research methodology. He landed a “dream job” position as manager of the Future Group at Bell Northern

Research and spent three months traveling the world with an unlimited budget talking to everyone who knew anything about computers and how they might change the world. He wound up at the doorstep of Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute.

Described by Tapscott as the “father of just about everything digital,” Englebart wrote a landmark paper in 1962 called “Augmenting Human Intellect,” which outlined a conceptual framework for how technology, especially computers, would provide answers to dealing with an ever more complex modern world.

“Englebart was remarkable. He dedicated his life to the pursuit of developing technologies that would expand our intellectual capacity. He wrote about things that we’re only now starting to realize. I came back from that meeting with the view that computers would ultimately change every institution in society,” says Tapscott.

After three years at Bell Northern, Tapscott left to pursue other interests. He founded and sold a few successful companies and wrote 13 books, including the best sellers Paradigm Shift, The Digital Economy, Growing Up Digital, The Naked Corporation, Wikinomics and most recently, Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World.

His latest book, to be published September 28, and once again co-authored by Anthony D. Williams, is

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MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World.

The book picks up where Wikinomics ended. “The same forces that are causing corporations to change are now forcing other institutions to do the same. It’s not just wikinomics; it’s a wikiworld,” Tapscott observes.

Tapscott says many of the ideas he’s been advancing over the years were ideas in waiting; waiting for a new Web, waiting for a new generation of young people for whom the use of technology is second nature — like the air we breath. “We have a new medium of social technologies that are enabling us to do everything differently and better. It’s more than just communication — it’s self-organization and this is leading to profound changes.”

But there’s something else. Tapscott says he’s convinced this recessionary period will not end with a return to the same old way of doing things. Systems eventually fail because “they’ve taken us to a certain point in history and can go no further.”

“There’s been a convulsive shock to the system that’s creating this burning platform in all of our institutions,” he says. “This is it. This is happening now.”

Despite the realities of the situation, Tapscott is incredibly hopeful about the opportunities that lay ahead and MacroWikinomics is a reflection of the growing appreciation that conventional wisdom isn’t going to cut it for success in this century. Instead, mass collaboration — in all its varied forms and functions — will revolutionize not only the way we work, but how we live, learn, create and care for each other.

The book profiles prolific innovators such as an Iraq veteran whose start-up car company is “staffed” by over 45,000 competing designers and supplied by microfactories around the country; a “micro-lending” community where 570,000 individuals help fund new ventures — from Azerbaijan to Ukraine; and an online community for people with life-altering diseases that’s also a large-scale research project.

“In this new age of networked intelligence,” says Tapscott, “businesses and communities are bypassing crumbling institutions and altering everything from the way our financial institutions and governments operate to how we educate our children to how the health care, newspaper and energy industries serve their customers.”

“This is a punctuation point in human history and with this book, my life’s work has come together around it.”

Don Tapscott is an author and chairman of nGenera Insight @dtapscott www.dontapscott.com

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Gerard Van grinsven

Healthy Living, the Ritz Way “This is a hospital designed to keep you well.”

Netherlands-born Gerard van Grinsven, a former Ritz-Carlton executive, has spent much of his career in the hospitality, food and beverage industry, traveling on an incredible global odyssey through many of the world’s most acclaimed hotels — the Mandarin in Jakarta, the Oriental in Bangkok, the Ramada Renaissance in Hong Kong, the Peninsula in Manila and the Hotel Inter-Continental in Berlin.

Wherever he goes, van Grinsven’s commitment to service excellence is legendary.

In all, he has opened 20 Ritz-Carlton hotels worldwide, each achieving the highest level of customer satisfaction.

“To be successful and provide great customer service, it all starts with creating a positive environment for your employees,” he says.

“If they feel like they are being treated with trust, respect and dignity and are empowered to make decisions, the service they provide to customers will be exceptional.”

With this philosophy of employee and customer engagement, van Grinsven parlayed his experience in the luxury hotel business to an industry where he takes care of a different type of “guest.”

In 2009, amid the worst economic downturn in more than a generation, the grand, $360-million Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital opened in West Bloomfield, MI. It’s a LEED (Leadership in Energy Efficiency

and Design)-certified, Feng Shui-designed hospital and community wellness center with private rooms overlooking a pond, landscaped courtyards and 160 acres of wetlands and woodlands. With 24-hour room service, WiFi and live feeds of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, it’s an extraordinary example of what health care in this country could (or dare we say should?) look like. And it’s all being managed under the leadership of now exhotelier Gerard van Grinsven.

For three years prior to opening, van Grinsven used his entire skill set to plan and design the hospital. “From the get-go, I said that the food in the hospital would be the finest in the country,” he says. Gone are the deep fryers and freezers; ingredients are fresh, and all meals are prepared on demand.

“Food in the old days was medicine; it was healing. We feel strongly that we must be proactive through food and educate the community on how to avoid or better manage chronic diseases.”

And the focus on wellness doesn’t stop there.

From a full-service wellness and integrative medicine center, Vita, to a destination healthy café, Henry’s, to retail shops focused on healthy living adjacent to a 90-seat kitchen auditorium that holds cooking classes for patients and the community, this is not your typical hospital.

All rooms are private and designed to accommodate family members who wish to stay overnight. All

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patients go to pre-assigned rooms when they arrive, rather than waste time in the lobby with forms. There’s a concierge to help stressed-out families with errands and a tea sommelier who touts the virtues of swimming marigold, tender lotus blossom and other blends.

There’s also a day spa and an indoor farmer’s market every Wednesday.

“We’re about to build a state-of-the-art green house which will give us another incredible opportunity to educate our community,” van Grinsven points out.

“In addition to the great clinical excellence we bring to the table, we are really creating a community center for well-being, instead of just a hospital,” says van Grinsven. “When people walk through our doors we have a window of opportunity to help them think differently about how they can change their lives.”

“Members of the community now come to us when they are healthy to learn about and participate in activities and programs that will help them in their pursuit of living a healthy, optimal life. This is a hospital designed to keep you well.”

Satisfaction scores since the hospital opened are in the 99th percentile nationally, an incredible feat for a hospital that just opened last March. And while the customers are happy, everything is being done to keep costs low.

Ultimately, van Grinsven is not interested in simply running the Taj Mahal of hospitals. Many of the innovations are geared toward improving outcomes and reducing costs. For example, having all private rooms

decreases the chances of infection, meaning less patients getting sick while they are in the hospital and a reduction in readmission rates and length of stay.

The ultimate goal, van Grinsven says, is for the hospital to catalyze the development of a new model for the delivery of health care, one that lowers costs through wellness prevention.

“If we combine the very best clinical programs with exceptional service and a focus on wellness, we can challenge the entire health care industry and set a new standard for care in this country.”

Gerard van Grinsven is the president and CEO of the Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital www.henryfordwestbloomfield.com

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Alan Webber

The Global Detective “Facts are facts but stories are how we learn.”

Rule number 1: When the going gets tough, the tough relax.

Rule number 18: Knowing it ain’t the same as doing it.

Rule number 38: If you want to think big, start small.

Rule number 43: Don’t confuse credentials with talent.

Alan Webber, co-founder of Fast Company magazine, former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review and returning BIF storyteller brings 52 of these rules to life in his new book, Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Yourself.

And while it may be hard to avoid coming off as just another series of banal platitudes, Webber has deftly crafted a handbook of great thinking merged with best practices to help people create a workable future in today’s troubled and changing environment.

Rules of Thumb is Webber’s answer to the questions: What are we going to learn from this economic meltdown and who will be our teachers? “Although we’ll certainly get through this current problem, will we arrive at the end having learned something that’s really worth learning?” he asks.

Webber says he personally confronted this challenge when he gave a speech on leadership to the CEO and top executives of a large company. At the end of his talk, the CEO asked his team a question: ‘Today, who in America has moral authority?’

“There was dead silence in the room,” Webber recalls. “Not one name emerged. Not one political leader, business leader, religious leader or social leader.”

Webber says he realized then that people desperately needed a new set of rules — “one that we write for ourselves and share with others”— to deal with the inflection point that’s facing the country.

He began to read through his past speeches as well as articles he’d written and notes he’d taken from jobs and experiences that span a career of some 40 years. His own path took him from Portland, OR where he worked with the mayor to make the city America’s most livable, to Harvard Business Review, where he learned from legendary professor Theodore Levitt, to Fast Company magazine, which he launched with his friend (and BIF-5 co-host) Bill Taylor.

“At every step of the way there were lessons — truths, really — that spoke directly to the rules we need to embrace today,” he explains.

Some of Webber’s lessons date back to 1989 when he spent three months in Japan at the height of the Japanese bubble interviewing a wide-range of nextgeneration leaders and envisioning a future as it was emerging from companies, laboratories, and offices across the country. He returned to the U.S. with the perception that the world was profoundly changing and wrote about four transforming shifts that were about to shape the business landscape: technology, globaliza-

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tion, generational and gender.

Twenty years later these trends have come back to tap us on the shoulder. “‘Hey look,’ they’re saying, “We’re back and this time around we’re bigger and more bad-ass than before,’” says Webber.

“Two decades ago technology changed where information was and how quickly it got from point a to point b,” he explains. “Today it’s all about participation. Web 2.0 is creating three-dimensionality across boundaries. Who’s in charge? Companies are suddenly abandoning long-held beliefs and ways of acting and not everyone will make it.”

That’s where rule number six comes in — which Webber attributes to his time working with Levitt: ‘If you want to see with fresh eyes, reframe the picture.’

“It’s a rule that applies to almost every troubled business and industry in America today: they simply don’t see accurately what business they’re in—they’re looking with old eyes at a dramatically different business landscape.”

Living in Santa Fe, NM Webber is “living the writer’s dream.” His biographical sketch on the Rules book jacket — which he wrote himself — includes the self-assigned title of “global detective.”

Ultimately, though, he’s a storyteller, traveling the world, intensely observing, listening and telling lovely stories. “Ah, that’s rule number 16,” he responds. “Facts are facts but stories are how we learn.”

A friend of Webber recently explained current events this way: “In 2010, if you’re not confused, you’re

not paying attention!”

“The only way I know to make sense out of all this meshugaas is to get together with smart people and learn from them,” Webber says. “And BIF is about as good as it gets when it comes to learning from smart people. Confused? Come to BIF! You may still be confused, but you’re guaranteed to learn a lot before you leave.”

A number of years ago, as business began shifting to the attention economy, the credo was that the way to make money and create value was to get people to pay attention to you. “My attitude is that’s backwards,” says Webber. “The way you create value and make things happen is by paying attention to other people.

That’s rule number 52: Stay alert. There are teachers everywhere.”

Alan Webber is an author and journalist @alanmwebber www.rulesofthumbbook.blogspot.com

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John Winsor

Let the Story Through “All of the best talent in the industry is freelancing for us. To me, that’s a radical paradigm shift.”

The best commercial tells a simple story. In the Mad Men days of advertising, hitting on the right story meant finding the ideal in-house account executive to research market trends, test ideas, develop strategies and pitch it all to a populace that waited to hear what the next new thing would be.

Very top-down and very yesterday, according to John Winsor, chief executive officer and co-founder of Victors & Spoils, the first creative ad agency built on crowdsourcing principles.

Sporting the tagline, “Power to the Brand, Power to the People,” Winsor’s new agency promises to get the right story by drawing from the best advertising talents in the global digital community, at a fraction of the big agency cost.

Crowdsourcing in advertising? Yes, really, Winsor says.

He is adamant that ad agencies today need to be more contextual, open and human. More bottom-up.

Brands need to behave more like the local merchant — out in the fresh air, in the open market — face-to-face with customers, who in turn, will make their demands perfectly clear.

Traditional ad agencies just don’t know how to get there.

They stifle talent, Winsor says, burying it in 500person operations that might have only 20 or so truly creative minds. And clients, who pay to maintain that

entire big-house infrastructure, are feeling increasingly nervous about relying on the intuition of small creative teams at the top levels of these agencies. They want more input into their marketing campaigns and product designs.

The Internet changes the advertising game with its billions of stories and its savvy population of users, Winsor says. People want a voice in the design and distribution of the products and services they buy. Clients expect ad agencies to take advantage of this huge opportunity.

And to make things even more interesting — or more complicated, depending on how you look at it — the number of people with advertising skills continues to grow.

“We’re moving from scarcity to abundance,” Winsor says. “Everybody has the tools and the knowledge to create logos and videos, they have video editing capability — there’s so much out there.”

Winsor believes that big, publicly-held ad agencies will always have their “platinum” clients, but he thinks most companies in need of advertising just want good work for a reasonable cost. Victors & Spoils can launch a new project for a tenth of the cost of a traditional agency, he says, because it operates from a spare base while drawing from the creative energies of more than 1,200 advertising professionals. Clients pay for product, not overhead.

“All of the best talent in the industry is freelanc-

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ing for us,” Winsor explains. “To me, that’s a radical paradigm shift.”

Selecting the best available talent through crowdsourcing allows agencies to meticulously design each project with seemingly unlimited resources. At the same time, freelancers enjoy matching their strengths to jobs that invigorate them. “People are stuck doing things they don’t want to do in big agencies,” Winsor says. “They want some kind of passionate outlet.”

There is more play for intuition, more room for the unexpected when corporate constraints are lifted.

Hollywood transformed itself in the same way since the heyday of the studio, Winsor notes.

“Movie studios used to contract with all the writers, producers and actors. They made one movie a week, but they couldn’t employ all those people, so it became more of a freelance game. Advertising is just going that way.”

All of this abundance calls for a different organizing principle, according to Winsor. He sees the need for a “whole new curator class” of people who sift through the information flowing across the Web. The curator becomes a lens through which to view it all.

“A curator is a creative director with an editorial role, a whole new kind of person who’s trying to make meaning,” Winsor says.

It all goes back to storytelling. And unlike the big ad agency of yesterday, a crowdsourced advertising platform gives clients an expansive field from which to pick their stories, to find the threads of meaning that

distinctively represent them. It puts a more human face on the brand. It creates a community.

“That’s how human beings have been bonded together forever,” Winsor says. “We all have a mythology, and the stories that seem to work best are the ones that are simple and all-inclusive.”

And the best advertisers, he says, are like the best storytellers: they have a keen eye on what’s happening, they find the deeper meaning, and they build the story from there.

John Winsor is an author and co-founder and CEO of Victors and Spoils @jtwinsor www.victorsandspoils.com

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Meg Wirth

Saving Mothers and Babies Through the Web “Innovation has to be continually directed and taken into where the gaps are.”

When a single idea can save the life of a mother giving birth in a remote pocket of the world, Meg Wirth gets the word out.

Wirth is the founder of Maternova, a new Internet “marketplace” for safe and simple birthing technologies that could mean the difference between life and death for mothers and newborns around the globe. According to Wirth, the site “organizes innovation” to keep key people — clinicians, designers, manufacturers, distributors and philanthropists — informed about the breadth of current technology in the field of maternal and neonatal health.

It is a potentially life-saving hub that creates a visual representation of innovations in this critical area of medical care.

“Innovation has to be continually directed and taken into where the gaps are,” Wirth says. The point is not to waste energy and resources when lives hang in the balance. Wirth notes, for instance, that there are several companies working on neonatal incubators, but not enough ways to prevent the postpartum hemorrhaging that causes most maternal deaths during childbirth.

Maternova helps to make this perilous gap more noticeable to people who might be able to close it.

The subject of maternal health care became a personal cause for Wirth while she was an undergraduate at Harvard University. Her degree was in visual and

environmental studies, but when she took a class with Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, the “Mother Teresa of economics,” she learned about infanticide and selective abortion practices that were killing huge cohorts of girls in cultures that privileged male children.

“It struck me that it was a tremendously important issue for human justice and human development,” Wirth says. “Within that whole issue, I felt that maternal mortality was something that tended to be overlooked. To me, it was the saddest way to die — in giving life. I think that’s why I was drawn to this issue.”

Wirth learned about maternal mortality rates when she later worked at a maternity hospital in Borneo, Indonesia. She lived in the hospital, a cement structure with roughly painted equipment, old beds and a cistern of water for bathing. Worms swam in the water. The partners in charge of the research project felt that it would be the safest, cleanest place for Wirth to live while she was there.

“If nothing else gave me credibility in the field, I suppose that did,” she says.

Despite the challenging conditions in the Borneo hospital, Wirth says she “learned from some phenomenal experts in global health.”

Since then, she has investigated health systems around the globe, from Vietnam to rural Kentucky, and has discovered that the most basic implements and

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ideas can save a pregnant woman’s life.

Innovations on the Maternova portal include an obstetric measuring tape to assess fetal growth, a plastic funnel to detect fetal heart rate, a string of colored beads to help women keep track of their menstrual cycles, and plastic bags to capture and calibrate postpartum blood loss.

But what midwives in underdeveloped regions desperately need isn’t always in the medical kit. What they get most excited about, according to Wirth, is light.

“Most deliveries happen at home, and at least half of them happen at night, but most places don’t have electricity,” Wirth explains. “There is a tremendous need for light to see the baby. And if you have tools, you have to be able to read them.”

Headlamps for midwives and solar-infused fabrics that emit light are helping to address this problem.

Maternova is already evolving. Originally conceptualized as a media platform, it is now moving in the direction of supply and distribution, according to Wirth.

“The feedback was, ‘that’s great—but I’m a nurse and I don’t want to read about those things, I want to have them.’”

Wirth says that Maternova is currently assembling a postpartum hemorrhage kit so that health care workers on the frontlines don’t have to spend precious hours trolling the Web for these life saving medical supplies.

Maternova is also developing a crowdsourced, interactive map of maternity clinics around the globe

to provide some concrete visual data on areas of need.

Wirth says, “We want to know where women have died, where women could have been saved.”

Wirth acknowledges that saving mothers and babies entails more than just tools and gadgets. Cultural and political practices are the biggest obstacles to promoting healthy births on a global scale. Yet she sees Maternova playing an increasingly crucial role in a fundamental human rights issue. So far, 180 countries have visited the Web site, mostly by way of physicians running clinics that are not yet charted on the Maternova map.

It’s all one big puzzle, Wirth says, and Maternova is working on one vital piece of it.

Meg Wirth is the founder of Maternova @maternova www.maternova.net

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melissa withers

The Words Really Do Matter “…Contributing to the world isn’t just about success or failure, it’s about finding the place where your talents make the most sense.”

For BIF executive director Melissa Withers, few professional memories are as vivid as the day her biology professor quashed her dreams of becoming a scientist. “After a semester of destroying lab samples and breaking equipment, I kind of saw it coming,” she remembers. “I knew that my work in the lecture room wasn’t enough to offset my dismal failure in the lab.

This guy was kind enough to give me the nudge I needed to consider an alternative career — one that didn’t involve the careful measurement of chemicals.”

This memory did not hold special significance for Withers until years later, when she found herself working at Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was working in the lab again, but instead of handling cell cultures, she was holding a notepad and pen.

Withers never did get a degree in science, opting instead to focus on writing. “I worked in a bookstore after college. The only upside to making seven dollars an hour was that I got to build out the store’s inventory of science-related titles. I was a voracious reader, which helped keep my interest in experimentation and discovery sharp.”

After a year, she enrolled in a master’s program at Northeastern University in scientific and technical writing, where she worked to marry her love of science

with an aptitude for writing. Her course work included a visit to Whitehead Institute. “It was love at first sight,” she recounts. “I was writing about a guy who discovered that mosquitoes infected with malaria behave very badly, taking more risks to get blood than mosquitoes who are not infected. The malaria parasite drove the mosquito crazy, as a way to aggressively spread disease. It was an awesome challenge to translate this into something the public could understand and appreciate.”

The meet-up at Whitehead turned into an internship, and ultimately a full-time job.

“After having been booted out of science for being really bad at it, it was a sweet irony to find myself working at one of the world’s best research institutes, neck deep in really complex science and producing work that I was very proud of,” she recalls. “The experience helped me realize that contributing to the world isn’t just about success or failure, it’s about finding the place where your talents make the most sense.”

Withers spent almost six years at Whitehead expanding the organization’s science communications program and developing activities that helped young scientists become better communicators. Withers and her colleagues won several national awards during this time, including recognition for work on the publication of the human genome sequence.

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She looks back on these early experiences as boot camp training for the work she now does at BIF. It’s another ironic twist on her failure as a scientist. “Working on projects in the BIF Experience Labs is one of the most satisfying things I have ever done. Our work is all about understanding and improving the human experience through experimentation, only minus the test tubes. I might not wear a white lab coat, but I still get goose bumps when we discover how to make someone’s life a little better.”

Withers is looking forward to taking the stage at the BIF-6 Summit to share an update on work in BIF’s Student Experience Lab. She’s been leading work in the lab over the past year and has learned much about what it really takes to build a real-world platform for innovation and new solution development.

“I got used to being an ‘un-expert’ a long time ago,” says Withers — a quality that has helped the Student Experience Lab dive deep into the education arena, where expert opinions and advocacy platforms run hot.

“For me — for BIF — it’s not about becoming experts in education. It’s about finding the student voice and developing a platform where we can experiment with new ways to deliver value. It’s hard to imagine that I could enjoy my work as much as I do had I not taken the path I’ve taken.”

Melissa Withers is the executive director of the Business Innovation Factory @melissaatbif www.businessinnovationfactory.com

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Richard Saul Wurman

On the Right Way to Peel a Banana “The only way to communicate is to understand what it is like not to understand.

It is at that moment that you can make something understandable.”

Richard Saul Wurman likes to simplify things to initials and numerals: TED is the Technology Entertainment Design conference he created; TUB is The Understanding Business, a company Wurman founded to capitalize on his theories of knowledge.

There’s also TOP, one of his publishing companies, along with Access Press, that produced books on “the topics that matter in our lives”—such as healthcare, wealthcare, travel and childraising; IA is information architecture, a field Wurman essentially launched three decades ago; or it could stand for Information Anxiety, his blockbuster 1990 book that foresaw the growing problem of data clutter and proposed a radical new means of organizing and presenting knowledge.

Then there’s 19.20.21., a massive undertaking to standardize the information available on 19 cities that are expected to reach 20 million inhabitants in the 21st century. In July of this year, his keynote to 14,000 photographers from 134 countries kicked off this 5-year project.

Wurman is also known for creating and sharing the TED conference he launched in the early 1980s, which brought together many of America’s sharpest thinkers in the fields of technology, entertainment and design for sprawling intellectual gabfests. Wurman is now running TEDMED, his new creative conference that ad-

dresses the opportunity for vast new convergences in healthcare. He’s also has been involved with all of BIF’s Collaborative Innovation Summits, serving as mentor, storyteller and host of the first two.

“I’m an aficionado of what happens when you get interesting people together and you make it easy for them to overcome their shyness and get them talking to each other,” Wurman says. “Unequivocally, the Business Innovation Factory attracts smart individuals who tell a fresh story about their passions, ideas and failures. Looking in the gray area between these stories is where good, inspiring concepts will arise.”

Once described by Fortune magazine as an “intellectual hedonist” with a “hummingbird mind,” Wurman – who turned 75 this year – has created an impressive body of work based on a single epiphany he had as a young man: Human understanding is held back by difficulties in the way writers, designers and publishers convey information. Driven by that awareness, he left the practice of architecture (where he apprenticed with the legendary Louis Kahn) for what he came to call “information architecture,” advocating innovative design and editorial techniques to make data more visual and comprehensible. Eighty-two books later, his outrageously eclectic library reflects those subjects or ideas that he’s personally had difficulty understanding over the years. From healthcare to football

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to child-rearing, “the things I do are my struggle to see if I can tell the truth,” he says. Several of his books are in the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. His latest book is called 33. With its Wurmanesque sub-title Understanding Change & the Change in Understanding, 33 is a fable re-imagined three decades after its original telling as a conference keynote address at the1976 AIA convention. It chronicles the adventures and musings of an eccentric (yet oddly familiar) character: the Commissioner of Curiosity and Imagination. The bemused, amused, and roundish imp waddles through the city of What-If in the land of Could-Be, trying to make sense of the myriad changes that have transpired in the past 33 years.

In Wurman’s original presentation, he told the tale of the Commissioner of Curiosity and Imagination who is hired to run a city and county for one year. In exchange for his services, the powers that be agree to do everything the Commissioner tells them to do. “What he did was look at everything that was going on and did the opposite – like change the laws of copyrighting to the right to copy” says Wurman. “The results were astonishingly favorable. In fact, everything he did was so successful that they banished him, as people would predictably do.”

“The only way to communicate is to understand what it is like not to understand,” Wurman has said. “It is at that moment that you can make something understandable.”

He likens this “opposite paradigm” to a recent interaction he had with a banana. “For my whole life,” he shares, “ I’ve been opening a banana the way you take it off a tree. And I’ve bruised the top a lot trying to get it open.” Yet by simply looking at the problem from the opposing side, Wurman found that a banana could indeed be opened from the other end—suggesting that the right way to peel it is actually from the bottom up.

Thus the banana becomes a metaphor for creativity and innovation: “Innovators spend too much time trying to design a better version of what already doesn’t work,” he says. “Why are we so focused on making things better – when instead we should be starting again? Is it terrifying? Of course. But is there anything more interesting?”

Richard Saul Wurman is an author and information architect.

He lives in Newport, RI with his wife, novelist Gloria Nagy, and their three Biblical yellow labs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. www.wurman.com

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Keith Yamashita

Change, to the Power of Ten “The biggest fallacy of business is that it’s only rational.

All business is personal and all business is human.”

When Keith Yamashita looks at the world, he sees complexity — a beautiful and rich one, if we can visualize our place within it.

As chairman of SYPartners, a consultancy that has worked with leaders at IBM, Apple, Facebook, Target, Blackstone, Target Financial Services, Bloomberg, Starbucks and the Coca-Cola Company, Yamashita is a master at helping people define themselves against the backdrop of a profoundly shifting business landscape. The task requires tremendous empathy, he says, a singular understanding of what clients need and want.

“The biggest fallacy of business is that it’s only rational,” he says. “All business is personal and all business is human.”

Yamashita is intensely curious about what makes people tick. Who are they? What are their deep aspirations? What do they need to be successful? What’s holding them back?

Ambition. Love. Fear.

The human component of consulting goes deep.

“We hope for people what they wish for themselves,” Yamashita says. “I’d like to think that when we show up in a room, we authentically care about the people in that room and that they sense that.”

Still, it is not enough to simply identify a dream, Yamashita tells his clients. The only way to stand out is to be fully aware of how you fit into a wider spec-

trum, to figure out what unique part you play, given the circumstances around you.

It is a notion that began for him on a smog-filled day in Santa Ana, CA, when he was eight years old.

Kept inside for recess because of the pollution, students were corralled into the multi-purpose room to watch a movie about math. Yamashita vividly remembers the nine-minute film, “Powers of Ten,” by the husband and wife designing duo Charles and Ray Eames. It starts with an overhead view of a couple lounging on top of a checkered picnic blanket in a park. The camera zooms out and appears to rise into the atmosphere, into infinity, marking off the distance from the picnic blanket in powers of 10, until it is far outside the galaxy. Then it zooms back in.

“Up to that point, I had no idea that anything existed beyond the three blocks around my house,” Yamashita recalls. “That film has stuck with me for the rest of my life. It shows connections, and how one thing here affects that thing over there.”

The Eames film is a remarkable demonstration of perspective and association. The sun is a mere pinpoint and a proton is a critical force; a micron and a galaxy carry equal weight in the vast arrangement of the universe. This is the vision Yamashita has for his clients — and for himself. A well-defined position makes one invaluable within a larger system.

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But there is an uneasy corollary to this reality: changes far and wide across that system reverberate, causing tremors underneath us. This is why, Yamashita cautions, we have to know exactly what role we play so that we can adapt intelligently when things take a turn.

“Because we live in a world that is more interconnected than it’s ever been, we are particularly susceptible to the dynamics at play,” Yamashita says. “People feel overwhelmed — it’s a natural outcome of the world we live in. There are more systems problems that require creativity than there are creative people in the world.”

To minimize the potential fallout from system shifts and to maximize the positive impact we can have on the world, Yamashita urges a return to authenticity.

He says it’s a question of unlearning bad habits and relearning what comes naturally.

“I do believe that people enter this world with a certain amount of greatness. So many people, through the pressures of society or the way we’re educated, unlearn that greatness. They fritter it away. They start limiting themselves. It’s really about reclaiming that greatness — people learning about how to be just themselves, fully alive and aware.”

The positive exponential effect of all this selfawareness arises when individuals begin working together. Yamashita encourages his clients to build “powerful duo relationships” that require one of the trickiest human emotions: trust. “The duo is the smallest atomic unit where trust is built,” he points out. “If

there’s only two people, you can’t shovel blame.”

With competent, self-aware individuals who relate to others on the basis of that trust, an organization has the potential to expand by the power of 10, just as in the Eames film. Zooming out, Yamashita sees a universe where companies design their own destinies by connecting purposefully to a wider array of players in order to work on a tougher set of problems.

Keith Yamashita is the founder and chairman of SYPartners and the Charles and Ray Eames brand fellow at IBM www.sypartners.com

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