One of the best storytellers I've met: Now easy and cheap to study with Doug Rushkoff

I am a huge fan of Douglas Rushkoff -there's little that he says that doesn't deserve mulling over at least. On top of that, he's one of the loveliest, least pretentious, and committed people I've ever met.

And what a storyteller: economics is usually dry.  Not this material, ever.

Doug is now giving classes that anyone can take. As of this Fall, he'll be a Full Professor of Media Studies at CUNY/Queens, the public university of New York City. He's teaching undergraduates as well as helping start a new Graduate Program in Media Studies, specifically targeted at activists and others who want to create change through media. You can study with him easily and cheaply - how fantastic is that?

See: http://www.qc.cuny.edu/Academics/Degrees/DAH/MediaStudies/Pages/MAinMediaStudies.aspx

This is what Doug says about the programme
Disclaimer: I get nothing from this except the pleasure of evangelising about someone worth listening to:

The idea is that media studies for the 20th Century was largely about reception: how we can “read” media such as TV and radio in order to better assess its intent and influence. Now that we’re in an interactive era, I think media studies has a lot more to do with how we create media, from email and tweets to journalism and movies. As I explained in the press release about the new program, “the essential skill in a digital age is to understand the biases of the landscape – to be able to think critically and act purposefully with these tools – lest the tools and companies behind them use us instead.”

It’s a truly fabulous department with an activist and intellectual bias, from Richard Maxwell (the leading scholar in the environmental impact of digital media devices and production) to Mara Einstein (Compassion Inc and Brands of Faith) to Amy Herzog (working on peep show arcades of 1970’s Times Square) to filmmaker Zoe Beloff to feminist and queer studies genius Joy Fuqua. And those are just the ones I’ve gotten to meet so far.

[Cheap and easy - what a world!]

You can take undergraduate or graduate courses at CUNY/Queens as a non-matriculated student, which means a la carte. That’s one of the main reasons I picked this school. I get a few emails a week from people asking how they can study with me, work on projects, or do some reading with me. Most schools require students to be full-time, and charge tens of thousand a year for the privilege. I wanted to be able to look into the faces of students across the seminar table without worrying that I was putting them in life-long debt.

So now is our chance. The undergraduate course is almost full, but the graduate course is not. Here they are, as well as how to register. You can also find application materials to join the program and get a Masters degree - in class schedules designed to let you have a job while you study.

Undergraduate Course: Media Studies 350: Propaganda
In this 15-week course, students will be exposed to the practice of propaganda as well as the assumptions underlying its use. What does the intentional application of propaganda techniques say about the governments and institutions using it, and what does its effectiveness say about the populations on which it is being practiced? Instead of taking a strictly historical approach, we will explore propaganda by venue and medium, including spectacle, atmospherics, television, and social media. For instance, in studying the use of spectacle we will compare the Roman games to the Nuremberg Rallies to an NFL football game. Our study of atmospherics will include Victorian The Crystal Palace, the 1964 Worlds Fair (which took place next door to this college), and Disneyworld. We will give particular focus to the migration of propaganda techniques between governments and corporations, as well as the way propaganda changes the greater media landscape of a society.

Graduate Course: Interactive Media Theory
The emergence of interactive technologies has profoundly altered our relationship to media and art from the position of passive spectators to that of active players - at least potentially. For longer than we might imagine, cultural theorists have foreseen these shifts, feared them, fought for them, celebrated them, and, clearly, misunderstood them. In this seminar, we will explore the thread of interactivity in cultural media as well as the opportunities and perils posed by the associated rise of mass interpretation, authorship, and bottom-up organization. It is our purpose not only to understand theories on interactive media as they emerged, but also to be capable of developing and arguing our own theoretical approaches.

How do you enroll? If you are already in a CUNY school, just sign up through the course catalogue. I will be accepting qualified undergraduates into the graduate seminar for the first semester or two. If you want to take either of my courses as a non-matriculated student, apply for non-matirculated status here http://www.qc.cuny.edu/admissions/graduate/applying/Pages/Non-Matriculation.aspx (they make it look hard but it’s very easy), and then, simply email me and I’ll put you in the course.

What banks can't do for themselves: Reuters offers innovation for financial services

Most of discussion about innovation focuses on tech inventions and billion-dollar exits. This story of creative thinking demonstrates that the bigger the business, the bigger the pay-off.

Despite the ubiquitous, continuous fall-out of the global financial crisis, and the continuous challenges within banking practice, there have been very few effective solutions offered.

To be fair, regional challenges take up a lot of our bandwidth. In the UK, we had a hard time agreeing on how to handle problems as local as a couple of beavers who showed up, unannounced, and are causing quite a row among conservationists. Once this is solved, try working your way up to the NHS lack of funding or benefits, and it's hard to see how it will all come out.

Now move to something with the enormous impact on everyone globally - say, transparency in global financial practice. And don't give up.

Cross-disciplinary innovation is probably the most effective because it brings with it a kind of perspective that an industry can not have for itself. So despite the crazy agreements required among stakeholders across countries and continents, Reuters has begun to make a real dent in the problem that the banks themselves have not been able to. And they've done it in less than a year.

Anna Mazzone is primarily responsible: she's worth checking out.

UK Research Council's Conference on the Digital Economy

A scary smart friend and client, David Stokes, has raved about a December conference that might be of interest. I write about it here because it won't get the kind of publicity that the more commercial events get.
It's called the DE2014 Symposium, and it's the prinicipal annual event of the Research Council's UK Digital Economy programme.
From what I'm told, the symposium is unique in bringing together the UK’s most innovative research thinkers with key members of the industrial, entrepreneurial, creative and finance communities.

It is not just for scientists, but is also aimed at entrepreneurs and basically anyone involved in the digital economy.
 
Check it out - more information than this, even, will be fully up next week at the same url.

Follow up on delivering information exactly when needed: this time, in person

Following from the last post, there's a reason that we need information delivered exactly when it's useful online: it's the way we think everywhere.

The best way to learn how to fish - or anything else, for that matter - is to master the skill in one context so that we can think fluently around all aspects of the problem we're solving.  Until we've got a lesson down in one area or kind of situation, human beings are not great at transferring learning among contexts.

It's a mistake many coaches make when they take people off-site: we might feel free and creative out of our normal work environment, but how do we sustain it when we trudge back into the office on Monday?

Terri Mcclements, a great thinker from PwC where I used to work, wrote about it here.

Despite press, start-ups aren't just for 20-somethings

No surprise that founder confidence has a huge effect on a start-up's success. As in most press, the focus is digital natives. Diversity, when measured at all, is measured by industry, gender, nationality and race rather than age.

The failure rate in young start-up companies that is higher in the younger population than in the older.   It's not clear exactly why, although there has been much attributed to the determined energy that carries the inexperienced into new ventures with less back-up and know-how than older colleagues who understand more of what it takes to build a business.  Knowing a little - in the exuberance of youth - can be dangerous.

Time for the over-50s to jump in with both feet. There are certainly perceived barriers to entry, most of which are age-related in a digital economy inhabited in greatest numbers by people who are the same age as their kids.

This perception won't last forever. As technology continues to move from rarefied to ubiquitous, the business experience that these people bring, and the desire to work for themselves (equal to that of their younger counterparts) will transform the economy.

Michelle Sellinger, The Internet of Everything, and Learning More Effectively - For Life.

Rereading Michelle Selinger's piece on the Internet of Everything and Learning worth a go.  And it's not just for kids.

Children's educations tend to suffer most obviously sitting in a classroom with chalk and talk.  But adults - from surgeons to financial managers - could benefit enormously from getting the right information at exactly the right time.  Motivation soars as people get what they need to know when they need to know it.

Storytelling works, but only in the right context.  And because we all learn differently, the most certain way for us to all get what we need from stories (which, in themselves, are abstract) is not in advance or after the fact: it's at the point of application.  In other words, the right context is as important as the right information told in the right way.

Michelle doesn't talk about this as storytelling - but it is.

In addition to co-founding with me a traveling business communications academy called Shmooze, Michelle is helping me design an online course on pitching for investment.  Her experience is invaluable, and her work is inspiring.  Dr. Michelle Sellinger is definitely worth knowing about.

Rushing to Discover: The Only Way to Innovation

Deborah Mills-Scofield has framed beautifully the challenge of our cultural habit of rushing to results before enough thinking has gone into the data around the problem. 

Deb calls it Rushing to Discover.  It's exactly right.

In my 8 years at PwC, years before and after with clients at universities, schools, entrepreneurs, and larger businesses, my goal is always to help them (more) comfortably spend time in unfamiliar territory, on observation before rushing to judgement. Without time in unfamiliar territory, you end up rearranging the same data points in different patterns.  

This is worse than trying to innovate and failing: this will prevent innovation from happening.  Ever.

Thanks, Deb - What a great way to sum up my favorite part of work.

Amazon's Smart Phone: Not so smart?

When I started as an early adopter in the agency world in the early mid-90s, Silicon Alley in New York corporates rushed to create websites once they realised the web was here to stay.

The good news was that they understood that a web presence was a competitive necessity - they knew everyone else had one, and the Internet was here to stay. The bad news is that they didn't understand what an effective presence actually entailed. So brochure-wear won over smarter ways of engaging clients and sustaining conversations.

Smart Phones seem to be going the same way - IHS has come out with a rather damning report about Amazon and their attempt to get into the market. Take a look.

Small world lessons: Reach out and hit someone important

I tell my clients, when on a plane, train, or automobile: just reach out, and you'll hit someone important.  Just try not to hit them too hard.

While you're apologising for dislodging a hat, why not start a conversation?   If you're persistent, you'll find a fan.

Something along these lines worked for Broad City,   It's a great example of how Abbi and Ilana use storytelling on the Web to get around establishment industry obstacles.  It's not just the web itself that is making the world a smaller place: it's also the pop culture we share on it that creates a bond that TV could never do at the same scale.  Their show gave everyone a big tap on the shoulder.

Take advantage of how small the world is. If you just reach out, you will hit someone important who will make it happen, if you keep pitching. Excellent business case: Broad City US TV phenomenon from web serial.

Is Everyone a Really a Gamer?

For those who would like to understand gaming more but prefer a good film, NPR has a nice piece on what they call "games for the intellectual set" Modern Video Games Go Beyond 'Jumping Blocks'.  

 

Bad title.  Most people already know this.  What's great about the piece is that it focuses on games many people don't know about, the kind that would appeal to film fans - from art house to blockbuster.

 

Regardless of NPR commentary, it's clear to everyone who has played online is that the distinction among games is not about brain power - it's about taste. That's why my clients and I spend so much time crafting the right stories for each set of listeners - and make them flexible to adapt. No surprise - people love a good story - find the right one, and you'll engage anyone. 

 

As my friend once said on his answering machine, "The mind craves narrative: tell me one after the beep."

Fighting City Hall: How do you change the story so you win?

I live in a leafy suburb of London on purpose: after spending my infancy, childhood, and (til now) adulthood in Manhattan, I needed a break from relentlessly urban.

I love neighborhoods South of the river, and Shoreditch is very chic, but I crave more green space than they can provide.  Even in New York, I made sure I lived near the Park, no matter how many Superintendant doorbells I had to ring.

(It used to be that one way of finding an apartment in New York is to walk up and down the streets of the neighborhood you want and talk to Super's directly.  Sometimes you gave them "key money", sometimes they just didn't advertise an affordable flat and it was yours.  This I did for 3 months on until I found my home.)

In the name of housing shortages, there are plans to build a huge building in my 'hood that will not only block out the light in our local green space but also create the kind of wind tunnel one usually only feels when entering some tube stations.  That will be the end of our outdoor market.

The planning document is a sham - there are so many untruths, either from fraud or neglect, that it's untenable according to English law.  Despite the disproportionate amount of money on the builders' side, however, the neighborhood might well defeat them.

I haven't heard anything like it in New York since the 1970s.

So What?

What does this have to do with storytelling, leadership, and all the usual topics in this blog?  For justice in the US, the answer to a bad man with a gun certainly isn't a good man with a gun.  The answer is blasting away a credible but false story with a credible true one.

(Would someone take on that gun story, for a start?)

It's not news that politics is all about which story is most persuasive to the right people to win the day in the same way that history belongs to the victor.

In New York, we call countering the dominant narrative "Fighting City Hall."  Here, I guess you'd call it arguing with the local council.  Has less of a ring to it, but it actually could be more effective.

Why?  There's a transparency in England, I've found, not available in the US, probably because of the difference in scale.  If a story is not true, there are more people closer to the centre of power who can expose it.  When the story breaks, all the news is national.  It is even more quickly international because many in the US who get their news from BBC Worldwide.

In the US, who lives within 4 hours from the White House?  In England, who doesn't?

English culture is built on a premise that the US lacks, and it's equally important in the fight for transparency of storytelling: people here believe that things should be fair.  It's not just an inward complaint, either.  When I approach friends, they say, "Of course things should be fair.  What are you talking about?"

My Fellow Americans, can you imagine a country where everyone believed in a reality that prioritised fairness, if not always in practice, than at least in everyday theory?  How many of the stories that you know are false would you stand up and fight with a better story - from local or federal government, from corporations, from people trying to get you fired, from anyone who's lying, really?

*For anyone interested in helping fight developers who will come to your neighborhood next, please keep your eye on 100 Avenue Road in Camden.  Link to follow.

When Navigating Investment, Good to Know What's Out There

I came across Private Capital 101 and thought I'd share.  The article is selling something called The Pitch Book, and I'm not endorsing buying anything at all.

 But it's a hard road out there.  Good to know what's available, in case it's for you.

Marketing Reboot: Join Us Next Week with a Discount

I've had the honor to work with Tamsin Fox- Davies as a speaker next week in the Marketing Reboot.  Love the idea of shaking off the cobwebs and creating some momentum for 2014 in the midst of January blahs.  

Added bonus: you can have close to a 30% discount on the event if you enter ANNETTE20 when you register.

Here's Tamsin's blog post about what we're up to, and please join us if it catches your fancy.

How a Marketing Reboot Will Help Your Business in 2014, in Three Steps

What is a Marketing Reboot

A Marketing Reboot is when you take stock of your marketing to date, see what’s working for you, and make a plan to rework and restart it.

A New Year is a great time to do this because most of us have the time over the Christmas & New Year lull to think about our businesses properly. The hamster wheel has stopped for a little while, you’re not getting quite so many customer emails, and your brain has time to breathe.

The start of a new year also just feels like a good time to try something different and 2014 will be no exception.

Rebooting your marketing is all about assessing the best ways to get new customers into your business and encouraging existing customers to come back to you again. You’ll look back over the past year and see what’s worked and what hasn’t, and also give yourself a clean slate to work out what’s possible for the upcoming year.

Why you need to reboot YOUR small business marketing

If I was being blunt, I would tell you that you were in a marketing rut – doing the same old things, over and over again, with little awareness of whether you could do things more effectively for better business returns.

That may be taking it a little to far, as a ‘rut’ sounds like a bad place to be, although actually it can be quite beneficial – keeping you on a simple track that allows you to keep moving without too much thought or effort.

In reality, both of these things are true. Your marketing rut both helps and hinders you – the help is that you can get it done and you know what you’re doing, and the hindering is that you don’t try anything new or look for different things to experiment with.

With the increasingly competitive small business market, nobody can afford to keep doing the same thing. This is because our customers expect us to evolve – even if they love our long-term values, they want to see a steady improvement in how we implement them.

This is where a Marketing Reboot comes in. Instead of carrying on with the same-old, same-old, you’re going to look at your marketing as a whole and take proper stock of where you are.

It’s not as hard as it might sound, and there are three easy steps you can use to get going now.

N.B. Constant Contact is running a great free training programme throughout January to help you learn new things and put them into action too. More details & booking here.

Three steps to doing your own Marketing Reboot

1.       Commit:

Intentions are not good enough. Make a commitment to DO this. The best way to do this is to be accountable to someone. For some people who like to be accountable to themselves alone, it’s enough to put a daily reminder in your mobile phone, write it on a sticky note and pin it on your notice board, or to say it out loud.

For others, getting a marketing buddy will be more effective. All you need to do is find someone else who runs a small business and wants to reboot their marketing too, and commit to do it together. Figure out how that’s going to work – are you going to email or call each other once a week with an update? Will you set goals together? Are you going to share a reward when you hit a target or milestone? You will be able to figure it out together, and if you don’t already know someone who could become your buddy, come along to our Marketing Reboot conference on 30^thJanuary and find yourself a buddy there.

2.       Make a plan

Motivation alone won’t carry you through this process – you need to figure out exactly what you’re going to do in your reboot.

I recommend the following stages, but how you put it together is up to you (and your buddy, if you have one):

• Take a sheet of paper, whiteboard or flipchart and write up everything you’ve done to promote your business in 2013.
• Decide what worked and what didn’t, and annotate your list accordingly (if you don’t know for sure, take a guess).
• Take a new piece of paper (or whatever you’re using to make your notes) and write down all the things you think you could do to promote your business and create great customer relationships in 2014. This is where a buddy with fresh eyes can really help, as they may think of things that you wouldn’t.
• Look at the two lists side-by-side and compare. Is there anything that worked for 2013 that isn’t on your 2014 list? If so, why? What is new on your 2014 list?
• Put the combined list in priority order.

3.       Set aside regular time for marketing (and use it)

Now you know what you’re going to do, you need a timetable to get it done. Look at your list, and work out when you are planning to achieve each one.

Start with the items that relate to specific times of year, e.g. Valentines Day, Mothers Day, Bank Holiday promotions, and put them in first. Then work back and fill in the gaps to see where your other items will fit. You can use our free marketing calendar  to help you work this out.

Now decide when you’re going actually DO this stuff. I recommend a regular appointment with yourself. Block it out in your diary and keep to it (this is another time that your marketing buddy can help to keep you on track).

I find it easier to block out a small amount of time (say 15mins) every day, rather than to try to put aside something like a whole day once a month, or a half a day a week. You may want to try some different schedules out and see what works for you however.

These three steps will ensure that you can get your Marketing Reboot planned and actioned – bit by bit.

Rebooting your marketing means a better chance at building those customer relationships that matter so much, creating more sales for your business, and drawing existing customers back to you again and again.

If you want to find out more about rebooting your marketing for 2014, how to do it, and some of the key marketing techniques that you should be using, join us for our Marketing Reboot series of webinars and the one-day conference in January. 

Find out more and book your place here

Blogging Around Chatham House Rules: Windsor Castle Consultation

Because I am a Fellow at St. George's House, Windsor Castle, I have the honor of introducing highly interesting people into high-level discussions that go on there.

Such was the case with Hermann Miller's innovative thinker, Mark Catchlove.  And the event that came out of the introduction was almost as dynamic as he.

Chatham House Rules prevail, so I can't say much.  But I can link you to Doug Shaw who attended, and facilitated, and he will share more as it becomes available.

Catching up in India: International presentation training and more

It's often difficult to find a balance betweeen being active and reflection, as my clients often tell me.  

I work with people who are so close to the details in the work they do every day that it's hard to see the big picture.  Generally,  our work together gives them both time and a new set of eyes to remind them of the value they have forgotten to include in the way they present their businesses and themsevles.

This Autumn, working with Cisco and UCL at IDEALondon, Constant Contact, Microsoft Ventures, FriedFrank, UKTI, Virgin Media Pioneers, WAYRA, BBC Labs, TechHub, the Clean And Cool Mission, and others I can't name - plus private clients who are on the verge of IPO, it has taken a trip to India to sit down and consider the past few months.

I'm in India working with an Auroville social enterprise that wants to grow and with Chennai's UKTI and TIE entrepreneurs.  The time continues to prove an excellent adventure.  Despite the fact that busiensses operate every day but Sunday, often until 8pm, life away from work in India seems to be more separate in the minds of people with whom I work than in the UK where people work until 5 or 6pm and have the weekends off.

In fact, my clients here turn off their business heads at lunch and in the middle of the day and seem entirely present with their friends and family.  The mobile phones are neglected except to text about social plans. 

I can't say whether or not this behavior is representative in India.  But what I can say is that my Indian clients have been quicker to complete training with me and present their business propositions engagingly. 

I suspected this is because they have access to more than one way of thinking every day, more than one way of experiencing their identities and relationships with priorities.

This seems to be true.  "I just think of the converstaion about family I had with my sister at lunch," said one entrepreneur when I asked how she transformed a rather flat monologue into an engaging presentation so quickly.

"Sometimes I forget that there are people who need to understand what goes on in my head," she explained.  "Then I look back on my day, and I remember that everyone hears what I say from a different perspective."

For the entrepreneurs I've worked with here, embedding emotional intelligence into every day seems to be useful for meditating on business.  "It's a practice," said my client, "and it takes discipline to enforce on myself.  But when I do, I know I work smarter."

A Mention in The Guardian

The Pitch Live seems to be everywhere.  They were written up in The Guardian, where you can see some of the things we all did and said.

An honor to be quoted among some of the other talented people participating.  To name a few, the article discusses the value of excellent pitching with words from winner, Arthur Kay from Bio-Bean and judges Lara Morgan and Heron Capital.

Laughing is the best way to learn: What NOT to do with slides

This video was sent to me kindly by my client, Alex Webb, at Clean and Cool Mission UK after I did a video for their teams as an aid to a pitch learning day we'll do together in November.

If no one every helped you with a pitch, or if you haven't been able to find the discipline to create a deck that really works, you'll enjoy this.  And if you've got rid of bad habits, you'll enjoy it more.

Here's the best way to create a slide deck by avoiding everything you could do wrong.  And remembering why.

The Pitch - Live - In Bristol

Reporting back on The Pitch in Bristol from London, I'm not sure where to start.  Thank you to everyone who participated in my keynote workshop before the festivities began.  I was told by many that each of you helped the others enormously not just by showing mistakes but also by demonstrating your strengths.

It's not easy learning new tricks right before performing.  I congratulate you all.

Second of all, what a wonderful addition this year to add 275K from investors to companies they choose, whether or not they win the pitching event.  It felt like a very friendly room with everyone giving

The Pitch was not only a lot of fun for me, but those pitching had a great time.  I got more email from this event than from The Entrepreneur Festival a few weeks ago, even though the Pitch participants numbered a quarter of the other event. Here's something on BBC Radio as well.

How to Raise Money from Investors: Learn to Communicate First So There's Energy for the Rest

Many of my clients come to me initially to hone a one-off pitch for investors.  Their logic goes something like this: if I can impress the right people with my messaging, I'm in!

What everyone quickly realises is that far from having quick results, fund-raising requires a long, long slog.  An engaging 3-minute monologue is not enough.  Effective fund-raising also requires the ability to impressively answer investors' questions, command an hour-long meeting, talk to the press, and network with high-level individuals.

The pitch is just the beginning.

Paul Graham's article describes the level of focus it takes to raise money to keep your company going.  If you get your business communication right first, the rest becomes a lot easier.

An Event in Bristol: The Pitch Live

Today I'm going to Bristol to give the opening talk at The Pitch Live.  We'll be going through a check list to make sure the teams have everything they need as well as getting them inspired to perform with confidence.

Looks like a great group of companies, and it should be a fun. 

Stay tuned for the winners.