Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

On the road

 
When I'm on the road, doing my speaking gigs or just travelling to work with folk far away, I find things are a bit clearer.

Maybe it's view from 30000 ft, maybe the tiredness, maybe the isolation from the daily round but it always reminds me why I do what I do and why it matters. (props to Hugh)

And why not doing it is impossible (or at least not possible for me - check the middle 8 here for more details)

The Real Value of Content

 

Gareth's done a nice post in response to this piece on where the money is going in the Music Industry from the Times Lab in an age of downloading.

The real decline is in money earned by the labels on recorded music. As G says "if your business model is purely one of content distribution it's perhaps time to exit.

Of course, I heartily endorse his comments about the fundamentally social nature of music (and linklove) " this is perhaps evidence of the fact that we tend to enjoy doing stuff together.  Perhaps music is the ultimate social good, rather than the private good record labels would like it to be"

But maybe what we're also seeing is some kind of re-adjustment of business models. Did a great interview with the awesome Lance Weiler recently where he suggested that Hollywood and the music biz need to go back to a time when only a small part of the value lay in the story being told and rather more in the telling and retelling; less in the song being sung and rather more in the singing and its resinging; it's less the content created, packaged and protected by IP and more in what the audience does with it. 

Great content is fine but it's only the start...it's a social object, folks

Irony alert: nice to see that this comes from the lovely people who've been a. telling us that quality content deserves proper payment b. scraping blogs for free content to pass off as their own.

Purpose ideas are not just for Christmas

  

Pic c/o Hugh

Struck forcibly by how much interest in the higher echelons of business is now being showed again in the idea of purpose in business

Here, here & here for starters.

Even the lovely Jamie gets in on the game here.

But - as we've always said - a purpose idea is not just for bad times, good times or Christmas: it's the heart of modern marketing. Job 1 = find, understand and learn to live out the purpose of your business.

But it's not just for the bad times or the turnaround or the tricky situations; purpose is for ever.

[Btw just remembered. The inside of the waistband of my howies jeans says this: "if you don't stand for something, you'll stand for anything"]

Influence: the eyelines have it

 
Pic c/o NASA

Just sent off (late, natch) my chapter for Art of Conversation III and without giving the whole piece away I wanted to share a simple thought I had recently that's included in the piece.

So the problem is this: we look at influence as push- rather than a pull thing. It's something we think people do to each other (rather that something they choose to accept from each other).

But if folk can't see (literally and metaphorically) what other folk are doing or getting excited about then there's not going to be any influence happening because the followers won't have anyone/thing to follow

The eyelines have it, indeed.

Superfreakonomics?

 
pic c/o Landscaping.biz

Interesting lunchtime chat yesterday by The Stevens - authors of Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics at the RSA

Was struck by their criticism of a lot of those (like er...me) looking to unpick the rational choice model which lies at the heart of so many of the behavioural sciences. 

I think they have a point in suggesting that much of the experimental evidence that is used to demonstrate e.g. our species' innate altruism in fact serves merely to support the general principle that behaviour tends to be context dependent.

That said, I think they then - like most of their ilk - go on to miss the really big point that most of the time the key aspect of the context for most human behaviour is other people and grab back instead onto the old individualist model. Given our soecies' social nature, considering any aspect of human behavior independently of the social context seems to be...missing the point...

Remembering together

 
Today is the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down. An event which marked significant turn in global politics.

I found it interesting to see not just how folk in Germany but also those all around the world are remembering the event and its aftermath together

Just as with Remembrance Sunday last weekend, it's an act of collective and distributed memory.

Actually, it's more common than it seems. You been to a birthday party recently?

Greatest Hits

 
Love this idea of Kevin Duncan's.

A blog about a book he's written which reviews the best Marketing and Business books (1-page each).

In other words, a blog that gives you the content of the book that you might or might not choose to pay for which itself gives you the content of the books it describes which you might or might not go on to read or re-read (phew!)

Brilliant!

Reminds me of that great Myles na gCopaleen gag about a (fictional) service that preloves your library's contents for you so you don't have. Think it's in this collection of his satirical columns for the Irish Times.