Ahead of the Curve

Speaking at the AAAA Transformation event in San Francisco today, Arianna Huffington suggested there needs to be a 5Es event rather than a 4As. She told the audience of senior advertising executives that media and marketers need to think about Engagement, Energy, Empathy, Enthusiasm and Enrichment.

The founder of the Huffington Post said that once-passive consumers are moving to self expression. No one complained when people watched 7 hours of bad TV but now observers wonder why everyone is spending so much time updating Facebook or a Wikipedia post. “People want to be part of the story of our time,” Huffington explained. “They want to participate in small and large ways in what’s happening in our world.”

The speed of change however leads to innovators dilemma, she warned. What worked yesterday might not work today. Huffington criticized paywall plans because they ignored people’s self expression and their “new entitlement.” Media owners and marketers need to realize that content is not the center of the universe. You have to look at how people are using and sharing the content they are consuming: “Promiscuity is the new reality, ubiquity is the new exclusivity.”

Repeat after me: It’s not what and how much you publish, it’s what people do with it that counts.

---> Create content for action not consumption
http://blumaya.net/2010/01/create-content-for-action-not-consumption/

You might not know nothing about basketball but you don't have to understand that great players just like great business steal ideas from the best of the best and adopt them to themselves.

And as the video above shows you become better by stealing from the best.

Who are you stealing ideas from?

This has got to be one of the coolest music videos ever, a creative mind grenade!

Video is from OK Go - This Too Shall Pass - RGM version

Found via @business_design

Email is still critical (40%) but according to ShareThis Facebook has overtaken it. What would be interesting to know is what exactly people are sharing.

What do you think?

Successful innovators have ways of seeing the world that throw new opportunities into sharp relief. They have developed, usually by accident, a set of perceptual "lenses" that allow them to pierce the fog of "what is" in order to see the promise of "what could be." How? By paying close attention to four things that usually go unnoticed:"

1. Unchallenged orthodoxies -- the widely held industry beliefs that blind incumbents to new opportunities.

2. Under-leveraged competencies -- the "invisible" assets and competencies, locked up in moribund businesses, that can be repurposed as new growth platforms.

3. Under-appreciated trends -- the nascent discontinunities that can be harnessed to reinvigorate old business models and create new ones."

4. Unarticulated needs -- the frustrations and inconveniences that customers take for granted, and industry stalwarts have thus far failed to address."

4 Lenses of innovation.

The answer, it turns out, is deceptively simple. It's the same reason fighter pilots can hit 5 G's without problem and acrobats can do flips and still keep their balance: They're used to it.

Joe Rosato Jr. at NBCWashington.com talked to a former pro skater, who keyed him into the secret:

Former National skating champion Shane Douglas said the key to getting over dizziness is to keep skating. "What we tell our students is keep spinning," said Douglas. "The more you do, the less dizzy you get." Douglas said it could take skaters about a year to get used to the dizziness.

So, skaters initially get dizzy, but then it becomes second nature. That's how we felt when we first got our monocle.

Techniques for initially dealing with the dizziness include staring at a fixed point, closing your eyes, and concentrating on something else.

Just like figure skaters can spin and keep spinning without any effects whatsoever, so can we get used to being creative every single day.

Why not?

So how does an on the spot cooking restaurant work like:

POSH serves a seasonal coursed menu, starting with 4 courses, up to as many as desired. How it works…we offer a list of main ingredients, requesting you to CROSS OFF which items you DISLIKE, then our creative chefs surprise you with the remaining selections. We have a spot at the bottom of the list to add additional dislikes or particular medical conditions (allergies).

And then: Voila!