Artivism as Activism in Laguna Canyon

It was only recently that I learned of the term “artivism.” It came to me through a friend by way of an amazing project and a book. The project emerged from the mind of Mark Chamberlain a California artist who used his formidable photography talents to mobilize a community. With the efforts of hundreds of citizens and through the lens of a mural, the beauty and history of their landscape was forever preserved.Screen Shot 2018-09-30 at 12.18.39 PM

In the newly released book, The Laguna Canyon Project: Refining Artivism we are immersed in an inspiring story of how the power of photography combined with activism can prevail.

Mark Chamberlain drove west in the winter of 1969 from Iowa to the sunshine promise of California. Eventually he was stopped by the Pacific Ocean at the end of Laguna Canyon. He found his new home. At that time that area of California was populated by a small art colony that began in the early 20th century. There he stayed, making the project certain.

In the 1920’s, Hollywood studios were accelerating their output and found Laguna Beach a convenient and beautiful shooting location. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and the 1954 version of A Star is Born are just two of the dozens of films and tv episodes shot there. Several actors used it as a respite from the stress of the industry with many of them eventually settling in. The canyon also hosted music festivals and counter-culture gatherings that grew larger and larger crowds each year. They made the city leaders uneasy and moved to shut down these events, but an awakening had already begun.

As commerce expanded to the south of Los Angeles, developers created a master plan to eradicate orange groves, build housing, business centers and of course strip malls. The locals wanted to preserve the natural beauty and protect the environment, but began to feel their power waning. The Laguna Canyon project gave them a focal point to band together, increasing their power.

Mr. Chamberlain put into motion a multi-phased plan to photograph the entire nine mile canyon stretch as well as collect garbage (dubbed a “garbological” study) to create an immense visual archive. In the book we are taken from phase to phase, complete with images of the time, as the community comes together to make their cause known.

All the work and effort culminated in a 636-foot long sculptural mural consisting of thousands of photographs of ordinary California life. The mural is essentially a wall with a wooden supporting skeleton where these photos would be placed. When viewed from a distance it took the shape of a reclining female figure. The mural was named “The Tell,” taken from the archeological term referring to a mound of earth that has buried civilizations over time.

Screen Shot 2018-09-30 at 12.34.20 PM.png

The timbers for The Tell superstructure cost over ten thousand dollars, January 1990

 

Screen Shot 2018-09-30 at 12.37.09 PM.png

An overview of The Tell under construction

The result was astounding. As most of the images were small snapshots, the mural resembled a neo-impressionist painting of tiny dots. The genius was how the images were sorted and assembled. Content, color, character and many other criteria were taken into account and helped determine where the images would be pasted on the surface. Needless to say, hundreds of people volunteered their talent and resources to achieve the visual language goal of the mural.

Screen Shot 2018-09-30 at 12.40.38 PM.png

Diving Figure in the early stages

Over time the natural elements worked their own magic, slowly shaping the experience by washing out or enlivening the colors of the photos themselves. The mural became integrated into the beauty of the canyon – claimed by the land – thereby increasing the power of the work, which in turn broadened interest and attention.

The project was so effective that in 1990, ninety-eight percent of Laguna Beach residents approved a vote to increase taxes enough to purchase the land outright. It is now a key part of a 7,000 acre wilderness park.

Although it is a slim volume, it packs a cultural punch and a reminder of the power of collective art. It combines Mr Chamberlain’s personal thoughts integrated with supporting contributions by Mark’s long-time partner, Jerry Burchfield, along with academics, advocates, writers and artists. The images chronicle the journey from beginning to end and provide a genuine sense for the scope of the project.

Screen Shot 2018-09-30 at 1.12.06 PM.png

Mr. Chamberlain on June 21, 2010. He passed away April 23, 2018 at the age of 75. Photo by Diana Drake

Order your copy directly from Laguna Wilderness Press.

More about Mark Chamberlain by Liz Goldner.

All unattributed photographs are from the BC Space archives.

Career Opportunity at Discover Bank

Career Banner 3

 

THIS ROLE WAS FILLED ON JUNE 13, 2014

I’ve recently changed roles at Discover and am working on building out my digital team. There’s already a solid group of professionals in place shaping a best-in-class banking platform, but we are rapidly growing and I need more help.

This is a Senior Manager role with three direct reports, reporting to the Director which would be yours truly. I have worked at Discover for almost 15 years. We have a terrific culture and are recognized as one of the best run financial services companies in the country. We have a great credit quality portfolio, are well capitalized with strong profit and stock performance (NYSE:DFS).

We are located in Riverwoods, Illinois, just north of O’Hare airport and have a Chicago city satellite office.

Job Description

  • This position leads a team responsible for developing and enhancing a best-in-class banking web interface for Discover Deposit products. This person will work closely with a peer to drive the current and future state of the user interface across all digital platforms. It is critical for this person to steer and coordinate cross-functional groups that include Product Teams, Marketing, Business Technology and multiple external agencies to create and deliver innovative, simple, highly functional and aesthetically pleasing interfaces based on user-centered design principles. This person should be keenly aware and passionate about emerging design and usability trends across web, mobile and tablet, as well as the evolving digital payments ecosystem.
  • The Digital Experience team’s primary role is to understand business requirements and goals, and then work with external agencies to develop wireframes and design comps that will deliver the business results with a superior customer experience.
  • The Senior Manager must be analytics focused and able to leverage web tracking to inform design and enhance functionality already in production. It is important to be able to weigh quantitative and qualitative data before design begins.
  • Time to market is critical. The candidate must be comfortable operating in an agile development environment and make strong judgment calls based on the information and alternative scenarios.

Qualifications

  •  Bachelor’s degree required. Specialization in human-computer interaction, graphic design, product design or interaction design is a plus
  • 7-10 years leadership experience in user-centered design, usability and development, preferably with a Fortune 500 company or leading digital firm
  • Seen as a thought-leader in creating best-in-class digital customer experiences for full site, mobile and tablet interfaces
  • Experience leading and/or observing user research and usability testing and translating insights into design decisions
  • Demonstrated ability to lead cross functional teams in the development of scenarios, workflows, site architectures, interactions notes, wireframes and designs
  • Experience in developing processes to manage complex activities
  • Demonstrated ability to translate business requirements into meaningful interactive experiences
  • Ability to effectively prioritize project requests based on clear methodology
  • Strong analytic skills and experience with web site behavior tagging and tracking
  • Effective communicator and comfortable with presenting to senior managers
  • Lean Six Sigma would be a plus.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and do not discriminate against applicants due to race, ethnicity, gender, veteran status, or on the basis of disability or any other federal, state or local protected class.

If you’re qualified and want to work for a highly respected company you can apply here.

Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age: Book Review.

j9941A search on Amazon of “Nikola Tesla in books” will repaint your browser with 1,872 choices. A Viemo search on Nikola Tesla will yield 552 videos across 56 pages. That’s too much content for me to absorb with my busy schedule so I did what I always do when faced with so many choices. I chose carefully.

My choice was Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson. I selected this book because the author is a professor of science, technology and society and has a long history of being published and well regarded in the technology field. It was a bonus that his three areas of interest, science, technology and society are closely connected to my interests of society, media and technology.

Mr. Carlson is an academic with a strong research ethic and that seemed most appropriate to unpack some of the mysteries of Tesla. I wanted to read through the eyes of a historian who understands technology. I got that in this book.

The book is big at 500 pages including a thorough index. A good index is always a sign of a serious writer. If there is no index in a work of non-fiction then we have been given the right to label him or her as lazy.

I’ve come to realize through the reading of this book and the sampling many others, that Tesla had a magician’s flair trapped inside a brilliant, visionary mind of a meta-physical scientist. I’ll stop short of sorcerer, but part of me thinks he would have liked being placed in that category.

Tesla worked very hard his entire life, tirelessly pursuing his dream to bring wireless power to the world. He was his biggest fan, always looking for just a one more round of funding that would finally close the very narrow gap between his desire and reality. It’s been said that he was ahead of his time. Perhaps he even felt that way.

The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter – for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way.

He had a rare condition known as Synesthesia. Synesthesia is a perceptual condition of mixed sensations: a stimulus in one sensory modality (hearing) involuntarily elicits a sensation/experience in another sense (vision). Likewise, perception of a shape (number or letter) may cause an unusual perception in the same sense (color). This allowed him to fully design all the details of an invention in his mind and actually run the test or experiment. Since he was completely clear in his mind he often did not fully document his designs, and so the Tesla archive is not as complete as it is with other inventors.

It was an amazing life for sure, but not one any of us would likely want to lead. He made perhaps the biggest contributions to the world we share today with our indispensable soul mate, electricity. As I read through the book I jotted down a list of Tesla’s major accomplishments.

  • Mastering Alternating Current (AC). Tesla’s inventions drew interest from the likes of George Westinghouse and J.P. Morgan toward him for investment purposes. Edison was not a fan of AC after seeing men electrocuted by its power. Today’s world is electrified by alternating current.
  • Tesla’s input into the Niagara Falls power project led to that team adopting AC as their power choice to send large amounts of power over long distances.
  • Invented the photographic process for producing X-rays (X for unknown) weeks ahead of Wilhelm Roentgen who is officially credited with the invention. Tesla discovered X-ray photography, but failed to realize it at the time.
  • Tesla was the first investigator of electromagnetic waves which was then furthered by Marconi and resulted in the invention of the Radio. Tesla devised circuits using capacitors and coils that improved Marconi’s invention.
  • Other inventions: Induction motor, rotary transformers, high frequency alternators, the Tesla coil, the Tesla oscillator.

The writing of this book is thorough, but dense. The material is very well organized and written in a consistent style throughout, which for a book of this length and a life this diverse is quite an accomplishment. It’s not an breezy read. One must be determined to learn about Tesla to make it through to the end.

Tesla in France
Tesla lecturing at the French Physical Society and International Society of Electricians (Paris, March 1892)

Mr. Carlson takes us back to Tesla’s earliest years. He recounts a difficult childhood that included the tragic loss of a brother and a challenging sickness. Later Tesla began to blossom while attending Joanneum Polytechnic School in Graz, and his first introduction to electricity and motors. One of his professors said of Tesla.

Tesla was peculiar; it was said of him that he wore the same coat for twenty years. But what he lacked in personal magnetism he made up in the perfection of his exposition. I never saw him miss a word or gesture, and his demonstrations and experiments came off with clocklike precision.

From there Tesla never stopped studying and experimenting. It was the age of the dawning of the magician and he fit right in. He would organize elaborate stage productions to showcase his latest inventions, captivating the crowd with his prestidigitation skills and the magic of electricity. He was viewed as a showman. People didn’t fear him but they did consider him a genius which carries with it a certain amount of eccentricity.

Tesla Receiver
Receiver used by Tesla to detect electromagnetic waves (1890)

To the end, Tesla always believed that wireless power was possible. His work at a Colorado Springs laboratory brought him as close as he would ever be to achieving his dream. But he was not a particularly good businessman and despite his abilities for showmanship, it did not translate well into a cogent story or proposal. His genius just wasn’t taken serious.

He was never rich, but his inventions over the years meant he had ongoing but modest royalties that kept him going through the last decade of his life. Sadly he died nearly penniless in room 3327 of The New Yorker Hotel at the age of 86 in 1943. He never married and there is almost no record of his being involved with a woman at any point in his life.

It’s fitting that Tesla Motors, maker of the pre-eminent electric sedan is named for Nikola Tesla. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, is following in the footsteps of Tesla, but doing so with business smarts and Silicon Valley speed. If you want to know more about Nikola Tesla and have some time. I would recommend Mr. Carlson’s book.

Check out my experience as a Tesla Model S Driver here.

Outside In: Forrester Customer Experience Forum 2012

Last week a steamy New York City hosted the Forrester Research Customer Experience Forum, Outside In: The Power Of Putting Customers At The Center Of Your Business. The forum content was carefully designed to support and provide real world examples connected to the upcoming book Outside In by Kerry Bodine and Harley Manning. I was stunned at the number of people in attendance. Certainly holding the event in New York contributed, but I think firms are beginning to understand the gravity of the situation. Speed, paradigm shift (sorry), mobile, social and big data are the beacons of change today. As with all Forrester Forums there was a a ton of information, case studies and technology solutions. No one could possibly attend every session, so I boiled down some nuggets that caught my attention.

Customer Experience Needs to be Unified

Consumers are  literally all over the map these days. Brands orchestrate platforms on devices and interfaces, but consumers ignore all that hyperbole. They just want to get things done.  In his talk, The Unified Customer Experience Imperative, Ron Rogowski (@ronrogowski) spoke about complex customer journeys and the even greater complex challenge it presents for brands to understand and deliver across this new landscape. Things used to be much simpler. He showed this chart that illustrates what brands need to consider.

Consistency has always been a critical path for success. Forrester has tweaked that term and now calls it unified. Unified but not uniform. This is a very important nuance to understand. We wrestle with this notion all the time, having spent a decade plus working the ever-expanding big canvas of a full site, we now must make tough decisions on what to do on handsets and tablets.

This means make it similar, not the same. In order to get better at this, the entire brand will need to begin to understand and inflect their work to meet this new challenge. It will be important to get everyone on board, or we will face a series of never-ending discussions across the organization each and every time we want to add content, features and functionality to interfaces that are not full site.

We will need to continue to listen, collect and categorize the voice of the customer in each channel, but find ways to do an experience mash-up VOC to help inform and guide how we design and deliver experiences in the future. Relevance and real time data should be our mantra.

There has been a lot of discussion about responsive design recently and this forum was no different. It is promising, but there are lots of challenges and some big decisions that must be made. I can’t imagine converting a massive web site to be all responsive, but it does make sense to begin to experiment and learn. Bottom line. Get moving and bring everyone along.

The World is Mobile

We hear it all the time, mobile first. Julie Ask (@JulieAsk) said it right at the outset of her talk on The Future of Mobile. It’s tricky, because if you are an established brand with millions of customers, your full site traffic and usage likely dwarfs your customers coming to you via mobile. Julie explains that designing mobile first doesn’t mean abandon full site or prioritize mobile above all else. It means your designers and CX people for mobile will need to be fully aligned with your full site team. I suggest you make them the same team, otherwise you risk an unhealthy diversion of experiences. Julie has a sharp eye and she trains it on the future. Phones will continue to get more powerful and bandwidth will improve. This will lead to a host of new technologies that will be mobile. She is careful to not restrict these new technology advances to handsets or tablets. They might extend to contact lenses or cardio stents.

No one can say with certainty exactly the order of advancement, but it’s clear that mobile will diverge even further from the PC experience and become the dominant device for service brand and shopping. The landscape will be a convergence of context, intelligence, contextual dimensions and completely new ways to navigate.

Design Still Matters

Understanding how consumers use interfaces is even more critical than ever. This used to be much easier than it is now and so expertise must be developed in house or contracted. It’s time to re-double our usability tools use to uncover struggles within interfaces as well as ensure that users can connect with your brand across devices no matter where they are. Bill Albert of Bentley University, provided one of the most concise summaries of UX tools and when to use them. Loved this chart.

Four years ago I wrote a post on neuromarketing. This is a set of emerging techniques allowing us to get at the physiology of consumers. By measuring heart rate, galvanic skin response, even body movement, we will get better data from consumers to help guide us through design. The equipment is getting better and the costs to field these studies is coming down. Add this to your big data chart.

Big Data is Really Big

Tim Suther of Acxiom laid out a nice summary of how they think about big data. Big data does not mean lots more data. There is already more data than we can mine. We all know what we need is more insights, but that is getting much harder to come by. Big data means new data sources at the most granular level that can be accessed through existing CRM systems and will be largely digital and behavioral in nature going forward. Segments are a thing of the past. People is where we need to go. How people use and interact with today’s social networking experiences must also be included.

No one signal consistently describes or predicts consumer behavior. Activate and evaluate these signals at scale with speed. – Tim Suther

Along with Tim, Richard Char of Citibank talked about their efforts to harness big data and deliver relevant offers. He spoke about Lifestyle Enabled Marketing (LEM) which he uses to push his company to gain a more compete view of the customer. He had a lot of interesting slides, but I think this sums up the shift we are trying to manage through. Somewhere where the arrows meet is where big data will be the most help.

It’s the Customer, Stupid

Amazing as it sounds, we are still learning how to deliver great customer experiences. It’s not that no one is trying, it’s that the customer won’t hold still, keeps getting smarter, more fickle and less loyal. Hard to blame them as they are constantly being tempted by the next shiny object and brands continue to stumble.

Forrester’s forthcoming book Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of your Business offers lots of great information and practical approaches to better understand the evolving consumer. But perhaps more important, how to work inside your own company to shift the culture to be more customer focused, and therefore more successful.

They lay out six disciplines of customer experience; Strategy, Customer Understanding, Design, Measurement, Governance and Culture. They posit that getting customer experience right can add billions to the bottom line of businesses. This is challenging to measure and we all know how difficult attribution can be. But having finished this book in galleys this weekend, I’d have to say they have broken some new ground and provided us with a way to think differently, plan and act.

They speak of the rise of the Chief Customer Officer, and indeed this position is beginning to pop-up. I personally believe it will be some time before it’s a common job description and routine hire across corporate America. I do believe it will evolve, forced actually, as consumers become more independent, technology advances and competition changes battlefields from marketing to experiences.

Photo: Steve A Furman 

Apples will Continue to Fall from Trees

It’s not so much that Steve Jobs has stepped down as the head of Apple that saddens me, it’s the reason why he is stepping down. Cancer invades so many people’s bodies and it’s a ruthless scourge. Regardless of which side of the technology war you are on, no one should be happy about the fate that has befallen Mr. Jobs. Go ahead and despise Apple, but keep Mr. Jobs on the good side of your thoughts. I had a brush with cancer a couple of years ago, but was one of the lucky ones. I am completely cancer free now and expect to remain that way for a very, very long time thank you.

With or without Steve, Apple will continue to grow and thrive. It’s not simply a computer manufacturer any longer. It has evolved well beyond the days when Macs were found in the occasional household. Apple has transformed the music industry and the personal computer industry, redefined the handset into a smartphone, remade retailing and introduced the tablet.

How did they do it? They broke with conventional wisdom and overcame the inertias that weigh down firms and industries. But the main ingredient of success in my opinion, is they made products that worked with people’s daily lives. Seamless integration and updates. No tribal language code. A near flawless user experience that are beautiful to look at. Not always plug and play, but pretty close. If you make products that people can use and fills a desire they have, you are more than halfway there. Apple actually went the full mile, closing the last 50% by making what they delivered emotional. They then amplified those products with superior positioning and marketing.

But most of all, they never gave up. No matter how dark the investor and pundit predictions were, or how large and dominant Microsoft became, they came in everyday and worked at it. Admirable.

Remember when no one wanted to copy Apple? Now everyone covets and races to copy them. Was this in large part the work of Super Steve? You bet. But there is no way he did this alone. It takes a village, and he has built a really big one.

Tim Cook, now the leader, did some amazing things. He got Apple’s on hand inventory down from months to days and is credited with being the supply chain wizard that allowed the firm to bring out so many products so often and quickly. Does he have the vision of a Jobs? No, no one does. But he does have a vision, and Steve is not walking out the door. He will be around and he will have more ideas and the wise folks in Cupertino will listen. His fingerprints will be on things for quite some time. It’s quite possible that not being CEO will give him even more time to be creative. That could actually accelerate Apple’s momentum. Perhaps he should have resigned sooner.

Don’t write off Apple or Mr. Jobs.

Can Customer Experience Drive Business Decisions?

Companies are getting more serious about delivering a better customer experience. Thanks to research firms, passionate consultants and champions inside company walls, senior executives are more aware of CX and willing to support staff and programs to improve it. So how far will they go? Right now it’s about making business decisions and then trying to wrap a better customer experience around how that decision plays out. This is a good start, but probably won’t be enough long term. More on this later.

Why the hesitation? Pretty simple. Senior execs are comfortable with the notion that a good customer experience will mean a positive brand experience in most cases, and they will even extend that thought to believing that this will cause a customer to be more loyal. But the data to support that is slippery. Not necessarily because it’s not there, but because it’s more difficult to track and prove. All of us need help here.

I respect and closely follow Bruce Temkin. He is a real customer experience transformist (his word) having spent time at Forrester Research and is now out on his own. He seems to have devoted his entire life to defining and championing great customer experience. In 2008 he set forth a collection of fundamental truths (according to him) about how customer experience operates. Here are his 6 Laws of CXP:

  1. Every interaction creates a personal reaction
  2. People are instinctively self-centered
  3. Customer familiarity breeds alignment
  4. Unengaged employees don’t create engaged customers
  5. Employees do what is measured, incented, and celebrated
  6. You can’t fake it

I would encourage you to read his blog, Customer Experience Matters on a regular basis to get first hand observations, research reports and opinions from a true professional in the CX space. There is no doubt that he has a guaranteed spot in CX Heaven, if there is such a place.

Back to the corporate world. Yes we must.

Some big companies are beginning to appoint a customer experience leader, give her authority, a budget and the ear of a very senior exec so there is bite to the bark. This is great, but it cannot be the “flavor of the month” or a “one year program.” Employees see right through this. They will play along, but will not seriously internalize it into their daily routine. You either make it part of what you do and how you do it, or not, long term. It’s that basic.

A great customer experience can be difficult to define, but everyone recognizes it when they see it. This is the core of CX and why data is so hard to come by. It’s at the whim of human interpretation. But it’s important to recognize that it’s not magic and not always emotional. It’s what’s right and people know when it’s right. I’m frequently tempted to say Human Experience, not Customer Experience. You heard it here first. People design the systems, functionality, rules, policies, and basic standards that a company creates on a daily basis. Empower your people to create what’s right and you will be well on your way.

How will you know when you are making progress? When you CEO or President or CMO comes to you and says something like, “I want to make business decisions based on how we can deliver a great customer experience.” The best strategy could be faxed to your arch rival and it would be useless to them because they either wouldn’t know what it meant or couldn’t possibly execute it themselves. Right now, today, if you had a real customer experience strategy you could fax it to  your competitor. That is if you could fax it.

Graphic courtesy of sylvainpaillard.com.

Performance Management Time

If you work in corporate America then right about now it’s Performance Management time. As a manager I spend quite a bit of time talking with my team members, taking detailed notes throughout the year and then reading their self evaluations. I’m fortunate to have a wonderful staff that works smart and gets lots done, which means I look forward to this time of year. It gives me a chance to communicate up to senior management the talent and accomplishments on an individual basis.

I’ve been a manager of people since 1979, when my mentor put me in charge of a retail bookstore. I had seven employees to begin. Then it grew to three stores with 27 employees, followed by eighteen stores and a General Manager title with nearly 175 employees as my responsibility. Man was I in over my head. My mentor knew I could handle it. I made lots of mistakes, but learned so much.

Less Than Model Employees

One year we had a large shrink (retail term for losses, like shoplifting or fraud) in a big volume store. I had to hire a firm to give polygraph tests to the employees. It’s sobering to read the confessions people make when under that kind of stress. Everybody took something along the way. Certain people left and guess what; problem solved.

There was another store in Chicago, with even bigger losses. I drove by the store completely by chance late one night and saw the lights on. The manager was recreating an entire day’s transactions one at a time on the registers. He would stop several hundred dollars short of the actual day’s receipts, replace the real ones with the fake tapes and pocket the difference. That is of course the extreme case.

Most of the time I have had the great fortune to work with first class individuals. I can’t stress enough how critical it is to spend the time and energy in preparation for an energetic and meaningful performance discussion. This is not a time to short change effort or communication. It’s absolutely critical you don’t end up in a Dilbert cartoon.

My Approach to Performance Management

  • Refer to those copious notes you’ve taken throughout the year. If you’ve done a good job you will be doing a lot of cut and paste.
  • Focus on the positives and strengths. If you dwell on challenges you will actually suffocate motivation.
  • Be thorough when cataloging accomplishments. What someone did in January can be just as important as what was done in October.
  • Use clear examples to make it real.
  • Always solicit peer feedback but don’t put it in the review. Read the good ones aloud. Yes I love the drama.
  • Nothing should be a surprise unless it’s good.
  • Don’t over think or over write.
  • Now is the time to leverage that team exercise you mandated during the year that further reveals who your team members really are. Use that as another lens to refine leadership evaluation.
  • Be sure you close by asking for feedback on yourself. What specifically you can do to help.

I’m not a performance management expert or consultant. You can find wonderful frameworks and much more talented people in lots of places. But if you manage people then you are a professional manager and your staff relies on you to act like one.

High Performance Attributes

Since I gave ink to the less than stellar employees, here is a list I’ve compiled over the years that I believe exemplifies a high performance employee. In no particular order.

  • Leadership / Inspirational
  • Analytical Ability
  • Strategic Thinker
  • Partnering Skills
  • Management Insight
  • Thought Leader, Not Status Quo
  • Exceeds in Delivering Business Results
  • Effective Communicator
  • Innovative
  • Curious / Inquisitive
  • Catalyst
  • High Energy / Highly Motivated
  • Aspirational
  • Problem Solver
  • Change Agent
  • Comfortable with Ambiguity
  • Knowledgeable / Recognized Expert
  • Understanding – Active Listener – Bridging – Negotiate

Take it serious and spend the time. Your staff will repay you beyond your imagination.

The Digital Planet – Brands Should Prepare for Arrival

globe

I’ve spent some time pouring over Razorfish’s latest study FEED: A Digital Brand Report. In the past they have studied how consumers alter their behavior to adapt to new digital technologies. In this installment they look more closely at how consumers interact with brands online. With each one of these studies I read the stepping stones to the digital age grow larger and come closer together. Here is what I think are the most important findings and insights.

The Emergence of Digital Primacy

We are at a tipping point in how consumers live their daily lives. Digital is becoming first and in many cases the most important channel to consumers. Please fasten your seat belt, we are departing Planet Analog. We will navigating a broad and exciting cosmos to our final destination, Planet Digital. The analog world was safer and more familiar of course. We were cocooned and protected. But man will not be bound. Individual humans are painfully aware of our physiological boundaries (mortality) and limits. But the human race wants more. We gravitate to things that are boundless and infinite. It’s not a surprise we are embracing the digital world. It allows us to topple previously unscalable walls and sets us free to more easily travel and connect.

Digital Fluency is the new Language

Being online was once a privilege reserved for computer scientists. Browser development made it easer for more people, but you had to learn to be a netcitizen. Online was used primarily for communication and getting information. But the digital language continued to evolve and more people could do more things. A big step, but digital was still largely a place for companies that had the funds to invest and develop. The average person’s browsing experience (speed for instance) was better at work than at home. Now we are fully fluent in digital. It’s fast, easy and everywhere. Personal computers and other devices offer a much better experience than the locked down corporate environments. The language of digital adapted to people, and people, especially the young, didn’t have to go to class to learn it.

Digital Consumers / Digital Commerce

These data points are telling indeed. We are beyond a trend here folks. Consumers have landed on a new planet and there is no return space shuttle back to the old place. Will brands follow and set up shop to serve these new colonies?

OnlineExperience
Has an experience you have had online ever changed your opinion (either positively or negatively) about a brand or the products and services it offers?
OnlineInfluence2
Has that experience influenced whether or not you purchased a product or service from a brand?
FirstPurchase
Have you ever made your first purchase from a brand because of a digital experience (e.g., a web site, microsite, mobile coupon, email)?

If you are a brand you are probably doing things online. Or at least you think you are. You have a web site, send e-mail, add functionality regularly, maybe even dabble in mobile. Great. Now go back through your last three annual expense plans. Do they show yearly increases of funding devoted to digital development and marketing? What’s your Social Media expense line? Do you discuss digital as often as you discuss broad media advertising, direct mail or the call center?

Consumers are making digital their preferred language. If brands don’t learn to speak it and fluently, they will have a very difficult time communicating with their customers. Let me re-phrase. They will lose customers and employees on a steady basis until only a few corporate non-believers are left to perform one last analog act; turn out the lights.

FEED 2009 is available directly from Raorfish here. The illustration style chosen for this report is quite a departure from past editions, and I really didn’t find them very compelling. I Tweeted about that and one of my friends, who works at Razorfish, read that Tweet and immediately sent me good old fashioned hard copy. It’s a perfect bound book in a compact trim size. In my opinion the illustrations work much better in that form factor. Maybe there are still some flickering lights back on Planet Analog.

Charts and Data:  Razorfish FEED 2009. Digital Primacy and Digital Fluency are concepts from FEED.

Globe Image: Social Networking Wiki