Shuffling Ideas Into New Combinations

Something with which I am often credited in my former profession of community marketing needs clarification.

I was only among the first DMO executives to deploy technology across all office applications when we did that in Anchorage in the mid-1980s.

From there, when we started the DMO in Durham in 1989, we just stumbled into being the first to make technology a core strategy - a form of differentiation - that let us leapfrog far more established competitors.

Stumbled is the word I use when asked how and why, because back then we didn’t know we were the first to do so.

I’ve tried to unearth influences but as Brown University Taubman Center fellow Marc Dunkelman wrote yesterday in the Harvard Business Review,

“As most corporate executives know, good ideas don’t strike like bolts of lightning.  Quite the opposite: They are unearthed when existing concepts are shuffled and combined in new ways.”

What we had done back then began to make sense to me in retrospect, a few years later, when I read a 1997 article written by someone who nearly thirty years earlier happened to be a classmate of mine at BYU.

In 1970, I sat behind Clay Christensen in an Introduction to Economic Principles and Problems class.

He was in his first year and I was in my second, after a more than two year hiatus, but it became his major while I was the one to go on to make a career in visitor-centric economic and cultural development.

By the way, if anyone is wondering because I wrote about grades earlier this week, I got a B both semesters for that course.

While I am name dropping, Mitt Romney was also in that class, who I had come to know in a group called Cougar Club, as was Kim Clark, who I had known playing church ball while growing up in the Pacific Northwest before he went on to start for a rival high school.

I was the over-achiever of the four (smile,) meaning I was always in over my head, while they were each destined for greatness, Romney in private equity and politics and Clark first as head of Harvard Business School and now BYU-Idaho where my nephew attends.

Now sitting behind Clay was a bit of a challenge because he is 6’8.”  In fact, his son Matt came to Duke, which is based in Durham where I live, five or six years into our community marketing start-up here, and played on the 2001 national championship basketball team (#41.)

Matt may not have started much but the way he was treated by Coach K and his assistant coaches back then played a significant role in why Jabari Parker attended and played at Duke last year before becoming the NBA’s overall #2 draft pick a few months ago by the Milwaukee Bucks.

Matt is now CEO of Rose Park Advisors in Boston, a firm that invests in disruptive innovation (named after the Salt Lake neighborhood where his grandparents lived and his father grew up.)

I remember how bright his father was, but he seemed very quiet in that economics class.  Now I know it wasn’t because he was in his first year.

You know how some of us ask questions to get answers, but there are always a few who ask them just to show off and then continue the practice later in life to get free publicity?

Well Clay was different.  I know now that instead of listening to the answers he was listening to the questions asked and analyzing what made some questions so great.

It an idea that dates back to management guru Peter Drucker.

I didn’t know Clay that well back then but I often drew attention because of another friend who was even taller, the late Krešimir Ćosić who had enrolled that year at BYU after playing for KK Zadar in his hometown along the Adriatic Sea in what is now Croatia.

We struck up a friendship while cooling down one day from a run around the Smith Center track.

Ćosić revolutionized college basketball at the time because, at 6’11” he was a “big” who could also shoot from outside and play three different positions when needed.  This was very unique at the time.

He was also the first foreign player here to be inducted into the Hall of Fame.

But it was his unbridled enthusiasm, even when opposing players did well that made him truly unique.  He had already won an Olympic medal when he enrolled at BYU that year.  Kreso never met a stranger but at barely 6 feet I may have been among his shortest friends.

So what does this walk down memory lane have to do with unwrapping the influences that led me to stumble on making technology a core strategy for DMOs?

I read many articles he authored in Harvard Business Review including one in 1997 when he coined the term disruptive innovation but it wasn’t until I read Clay Christensen’s paper and subsequent book The Innovator’s Dilemma that I began to understand how I may have stumbled on that strategy so early in DMO circles at least.

When I was completing the Anchorage DMO start up in the 1980s and jumpstarting one from scratch in Durham in the 1990s, as most still do today, most DMOs tried to perform by merely emulating others.

Dr. Christensen would explain that this occurs in any business where there is no technological core.  The same is true of front-line DMO beneficiaries such as hotels, retail stores, performing arts centers etc.

For any eye-rollers who made it this far and think this is only about ancient history, the guy has been named the #1 management thinker in the world for two years.

It is why so many of these stakeholders objected when Durham’s DMO jumped out in front with a website in 1995, thanks to Vicki Isley who got her start in community marketing in Durham before heading marketing for Tampa, Washington DC and now Bermuda, after a stint as an executive with Destination Marketing Association International.

It is why even today, many visitor related businesses try to pull their DMO back into the dark ages of traditional advertising even when those community marketing organizations are generating exponentially better results from things like search optimization, responsive design and Google Ad Words.

At the foundation of what we did in Anchorage and then Durham was create a culture of innovation and continuing and never-ending improvement and that led naturally to making technology a core strategy in community marketing.

There was nothing genius about it and definitely no lightning bolt.  We just kept reshuffling the deck into new ways of thinking.  I can see all of that looking back now from retirement.

But, believe me, it wasn’t nearly that clear when we were shuffling those existing ideas into new ones in an attempt to leapfrog more established competitors.

My advice to anyone stuck in the emulation mode or struggling to keep from being pulled back into the dark ages by stakeholders, is to keep shuffling and be open to new combinations.

Oh, and pay attention to the people sitting next to you in class (smile.)

Through A Different Lens

Secretly, journalists had to be asking themselves why more people weren’t up in arms in Ferguson, Missouri last week as “lookie-there” reports circulated about the tiny number that were torching the private property of neighbors in response to a grand jury report.

I don’t mean to be cynical.

Virtually no one on the front lines in that highly competitive and breaking news-obsessed line of work has the luxury of mindfulness or even personal accountability when it comes to fueling the “rush to judgment” these story feeding frenzies create.

Nor do they seem to ever go near the issue of personal responsibility unless it is white collar crime and related to a fall from grace.

Take away the relatively small number among us on either side of that tragedy that made up their minds with far too little information and then further subtract those of us who seemed to have formed an opinion just to reinforce a larger point and we’re left with the vast majority of us who simply have compassion fatigue.

From the beginning, even after I passed through there at the height of turmoil last summer, none of the narratives in the Ferguson case fully made sense to me.

Not even the incredible job ProPublica did on crunching data seemed to go anywhere near deep enough to draw conclusions beyond better policing.  The topic of race seems to inhibit any effort to look for deeper social influences.

I’ve always got the impression I am slightly progressive leaning as an Independent because of my concern for social justice but it is increasingly clear at times like this that I may be among the 10% of voters who truly are straight up Independents.

Part of the reason is compassion fatigue brought on, in part, by well-meaning folks who want to do right but pile on seemingly without a clue.

Are there rogue cops?  Yes, but not nearly as many as there are on TV shows or in movies where the predictable narratives skew either that way or to superhuman.

Is everyone who acts out in response to authority, guilty of something?  Not unless you throw in those with mental disabilities and those who are just being jerks.

I’ve sat in enough rooms over the years with very well-meaning people, including those who are or have been underprivileged, to know that the latter have compassion fatigue too, but more so, they hate to be patronized.

I remember having a discussion about adopting a metric to measure closing gaps in school achievement when a county manager began to lecture me that studying and publicizing gaps would be racist.

A friend among one of the groups we were discussing quipped, “Are you kidding?  Do you really think we aren’t fully aware of the problem and want to do everything possible to close it?”

No one deserves to die but everyone involved plays a role when these things occur.  Focusing only on police restraint or latent racism by either party seems to fall short.

More than a decade ago, a friend of mine in education would often explain to groups that closing the achievement gap in schools had to take place between kindergarten and third grade because some children started out already more than a thousand books behind.

Unspoken though, because no one wanted to go there, was why were they so behind and how do we change that?

The seminal influence begins before birth (no pun intended.)

During the events in Ferguson, I reread a updated edition of a book I had read back then entitled, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life by Dr. Annette Lareau.

It is based on in-depth observations over time of 88 African-American and white families across the spectrum from middle class, working class and poor families with children ages 9 and 10, of which twelve are discussed in the book.

There were families of each race in each class but the definition of class was a combination of both household income and education level.

Lareau and her researchers also did a follow up ten years later.

She found that all of the parents wanted their children to be happy and to thrive but they fell along a spectrum of parenting about how to do that.

At one end, there is extreme “natural” parenting and at the other extreme “concerted cultivation” parenting.  In the extreme, both styles have pros and cons.

For example, during my pre-school years, my parents had a natural style but as I grew up, it evolved more toward concerted cultivation. But either way they were probably always more to the center of the spectrum.

I also had a number of friends raised at each end of the spectrum. Looking back now, my parents, one of whom did not complete high school and both of whom worked more than one job at times to pull themselves barely into the middle class, did a very good job.

Lareau wasn’t looking for an either/or answer but a correlation to what would predict an upwardly mobile trajectory for those in poor or working class households and what links there might be for keeping middle class children from downward mobility.

For a quick video overview of the times per week the researchers spent observing the children both in school and within the home as well as the follow up ten years later click here.

I have found that many people talk about this study without ever having read either edition of the book so I definitely recommend reading it cover to cover more than say an overview such as the one linked here.

The positive links she found to upward mobility or sustaining middle class status once achieved vs. cycling downward didn’t relate to race as much as they did social class and parenting style.

A third of Americans raised as middle class (income) fall out of the middle as adults including 38% of black men and a somewhat lower proportion of Hispanic men.  Achievement gaps on test scores play a role.

A lot of things can affect how things turn out for us as adults but Lareau’s studies are particularly fascinating because they provide insight into the interplay of parenting, neighborhood and institutional influences.

For parents who are poor or working class, a natural style of parenting becomes the default because the logistics of housing safety, clothing, doctors appointments, getting to bed and ready for school, not to mention putting food on the table often take precedence.

The natural parenting style tends toward directives and completely unstructured and undirected play time.  But it isn’t just less intensity about organized leisure or learning activities that differentiates the natural style.

There more likely isn’t the time to interact by answering questions with questions and exploring options such as certain behaviors or coaching on how to deal with authority and institutions or how to question adults….or reading books.

Clearly the boys in Ferguson not only knew how to blow off authority and social norms but apparently may have also over reacted.  It doesn’t excuse shooting them either, but there has to be some accountability on both sides.

Police restraint is not the panacea.

Of course, many of us see when the concerted cultivation style goes awry, e.g. domineering helicopter parents, a sense of entitlement that it is the job of parents to make sure a child is never bored and far too little unstructured time.

But the true value of the concerted cultivation style is having conversations with children where they explore feelings, thoughts and options as well as learn to learn by reading books well in advance of formal schooling.

Any effort to ensure social justice, including addressing poverty, needs to be informed by Dr. Lareau’s research and others.  She talks about race and distrust of the police regardless of class.  But she sees more potential solutions looking at class.

My friends on the left often point to the robotic, lockstep manifest by many on the right and they are right to be concerned.  But even among those deeply concerned with social justice it is important to guard against becoming brittle, rigid and kneejerk in its pursuit.

And those who react forcefully to the notion that poverty can become a culture need to come to the realization that not everything is about race.

Much Bumpier Than Remembered

My mom only remembers that I graduated from college with honors.

Mothers are like that but, perhaps to keep me humble, she kept each of my report cards from grade school through high school.

As I took the helm of my first community marketing organization forty years ago she passed them on to me with that characteristic twinkle in her eye.

Over the years, as I came across them I would thumb through them, and come back down to earth, especially whenever I got too pleased with myself or frustrated with others.

Mrs. Bratt, my first grade teacher, wrote in the periodic notes for my parents on my report card that year, “slow to adjust at first,” “capable of doing good average work,” “reasoning poor in workbooks,” and her last entry as I moved on to second grade, “changeable.”

Whew!

By the third grade, I was getting mostly B grades with one A- and a troubling C, ironically knowing one of my lifelong interests, “Nature Study.”  My only “very good” was for “personal cleanliness,” a relief for my mom for sure.

All A and B grades in fourth including a B in nature study.

Good grades in fifth but check marks for accuracy, effort and study habits, meaning “improvement would probably follow if attention were given to matters checked below.”

Little work over the summer and in sixth grade, I got check marks for “high quality work” for “study habits” and “personal growth,” but only a “enjoys participation” for P.E., of concern I am sure to my dad.

That summer, as I shot up in height but not weight, I was all elbows and knees and got cut from my little league baseball team.  Something wasn’t right and it would get worse before it got better.

My dad struggled with school but by the time he graduated from high school he was a star in four sports.  I didn’t have his build but I made up for it by eagerly jumping into every sport I could.

I lettered in two sports in seventh grade and got my share of As and Bs but received a D one quarter in science and falling from an A to a C in arithmetic pretty much cancelled those out.

But in eighth grade I disappointed both of my parents, bringing home all As and Bs again, except for one term with a C in each of the areas where my mom and dad excelled, music and P.E.

I still remember my dad’s face as he looked up incredulously after reading my report card across the dinner table.

“How do you get a C in P.E.” he said incredulously.

“In P.E,” he repeated, still in misbelief.

I didn’t have an answer, but the incredible growth spurt I had gone through for 18 months was beginning to moderate when I suddenly quit the football team.

I had lost both my confidence and my enthusiasm for sports, but what would soon become clear is that by trying much too hard, I had ruptured my Achilles tendon.

By the end of that year I had a B in both music, my mom’s passion, but I was failing miserably at filling my dad’s shoes, going into school early instead for whirlpool as my recovery was monitored.

It is then that my dad suddenly started to emphasize college like never before, like there was never an option.  Oh boy.

The next year, with my body’s coordination restored and the tendon healed, I set a record that stood for a few weeks in the 440.  Apparently, the forward kick I had developed to protect it paid off.

By the end of my Junior High tenure I had all As and Bs, except for a stubborn C in science, but a relief for all, I was also awarded a certificate in front of the entire student body for “Outstanding P.E. Improvement” and a standing ovation.

Not exactly the one I had hoped.

But I kept my parents guessing all the way through high school.  Honor Roll one semester, while acing geometry, followed by inexplicable slips such as a C in French.

My senior year began with a C in typing and physics but a B overall. Then, right after taking both the ACT and the SAT, my grades took a nosedive as I found other interests.

I finished with a four Cs, and the timing couldn’t have been worse.

I was accepted by several colleges including BYU, probably thanks to doing well on the ACT or because someone realized that my last semester of high school had to be an anomaly.

Continuation of my inauspicious, interscholastic athletic career had tanked after partially tearing the patellar tendon in my left knee while coming down awkwardly with a pass and taking the full force of a low tackle there.

I stubbornly delayed surgery until that summer so I entered college on crutches.  There were no ADA back then so it was with irony that a couple of times each week I had to take several hundred stair steps down and back again to the old Smith Fieldhouse, ironically for adaptive P.E. (therapy.)

No complaints here.  I knew just how close I came to blowing getting admitted anywhere, let alone BYU.  I had learned my lesson.

I stayed at or above a 3.6 throughout college, finishing well above.  But to give my parents one last jolt perhaps, I got a C+ my final semester in an upper level microbiology course during a period of personal turmoil.

However, I also got an A that term in Beginning Tennis (smile.)

My parents always focused on being resilient.  To them that was the final test, foretelling studies now that show that grit and learning from setbacks are better markers than grades.

They followed the ups and downs of my chosen career in community marketing, never regretting that I chose it over law.  What mattered to them was that I was excelling at meaningful work for which I had passion.

They probably also know that I continued to get my share of Cs along the way but no one ever doubted my relentless desire for continuous learning and improvement.

And I always had those old report cards to help keep me grounded.

It is also why I am always so impressed at how resilient my daughter has been throughout her life and when I see how hard my grandsons bounce back from setbacks academically or in sports.

A Coincidence of Spirituality

The experience recently of my oldest grandson and his mother brought to mind one I had by happenstance 47 years earlier when I was eight years older than he is now.

Due to the genes I inherited, I’m probably fortunate to have avoided depression, but September 1967 is the first time among a handful that I slipped briefly into that state.

Even as infrequent and relatively shallow as my experience has been, I can vouch for the argument made by Andrew Solomon that “the opposite” of depression “is not happiness but vitality.”

For anyone stuck with the impression this is only sadness, listen to Solomon or click here for a short video on the science of depression.

That first time, I was having a crisis of identity and spirit.  I felt strongly that I shouldn’t be in Lyon, France, but rather 8,000 miles further east fighting in Vietnam alongside side friends and family.

A both/and alternative didn’t seem possible with the state I was in.

When I finally found my way back home and tried that other path, it was betrayed by the seven inch scar down the right side of my left knee.

No matter how many times I tried to enlist in various branches of the military, or how successful the rehab had been in 1966 after a tear in my patellar tendon from playing football, the answer was always no-go.

I grew up a Mormon surrounded by a wide range of cultures in that Yellowstone-Teton nook of my native Idaho.

But I was not just Mormon.

I descended from sixteen lines of ancestors who, 120 years before my crisis of spirit, had endured incredible hardship and journeys of thousands of miles to congregate at various points on the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains.

I was born at the most northern outpost of this meridian of my DNA but carried the full length of its expectations on my shoulders.

Ironically, however, I found solace and rediscovered my spiritual center one bright late September day when a friend and I slipped into the very back pew of the darkened sanctuary of the Basilica de Fourvière and heard the Gregorian Chants of a midday service.

This link to the vocalizations of group formerly known as Anonymous 4, came closest to approximating what I heard that day high on Fourvière hill.

Another I listen to is the group Trio Mediaeval.  It is hard to say why these chants meant so much to an Idaho boy who had never set foot in a basilica before or since.

For nearly four decades, my church attendance has been walking through nature with music such as this playing in my headphones.

The official choir of that Lyon basilica is now Les Petits Chanteurs de Saint-Marc, a children’s choir that can be heard singing at this link and here singing the contemporary Pie Jesu, a segment in a requiem mass Andrew Lloyd Webber composed in memory of his father.

I experienced that level of depression three more times over the next twenty years, just enough to help me empathized with the 4.1% of Americans who suffer it deeply.

It was relatively mild each time but I understand those who describe it as a “slower way of being dead” or as Solomon writes, “a funeral in your brain.”

It wasn’t Les Petits Chanteurs de Saint-Marc I heard that day but more likely a more impromptu group such as the one heard at this link.

What is now called the Basilica’s children’s choir was formed two decades after we dropped into its sanctuary first as the focus of a two year practice choir at l‘Ecole Sainte Ursule, a part of Le Centre scolaire Saint Marc a Lyon .

It is three miles down the Saône River on the other side of Vieux Lyon  from where I lived that September in 1967 on rue du Bon Pasteur.

The Basilica is atop the steep Fourvière hill looming abover Vieux Lyon and you can see the panoramic views behind me in the image in this blog by viewing the video at this link.

It was hazy that day, but on other days I could see Mount Blanc, 140 miles to the east and the highest point in Europe.  It was one of the areas my dad skied at the end of WWII on leave from chasing down Nazis trying to escape through the Bavarian forests into Austria and Switzerland.

But the thing about depression even at the relatively minor degree I was experiencing it is that you don’t seem to care about anything anymore.

I didn’t mean to ramble on about that moment in time which lasted only a few weeks but seemed like a lifetime, but these essays are written, in part, as memoirs for my grandsons.

They have been attending the Madeleine Choir School, one of a kind in North America but patterned, in part, on choir schools like that one in Lyon.  It is a Catholic school that teaches a complete curriculum with the choir at its center.

It isn’t the first brush with Catholic schools for our gene pool.  My grandparents sent my mom 250 miles south from where they lived to a Catholic High School in Salt Lake in a failed effort to separate her from my dad in the months before he left for the war.

Every other year, the “big” choir at Madeleine takes a week long concert tour to Italy singing in numerous Basilicas after studying their architecture, history and the geography surrounding them.

This year my oldest grandson, chaperoned by his mom, was eligible to take this extraordinary trip.

The capstone was singing mass at St. Peters Basilica in the Vatican, within earshot of the Papal apartments, and then watching Pope Francis give the blessing above the square outside.

The tour began in Venice, 28 miles south of where my second cousin and dad’s best friend growing up was shot down over Susegana, Italy when the B-26 in which he was a tail gunner was hit by AA fire and exploded during a bombing run to take out bridges across the Piave River supplying the German Army.

Edward Bowman was buried there and his dog tags hung over a cross in an orchard by a farmer, until my dad found the grave and brought his remains home for burial on our ancestral ranch.

He was only twenty-two years old.

The tour by my grandson’s choir also included Florence, Assisi and many other locations.  Given my memory of how I felt stepping into that sanctuary above the Roman ruins of Lyon, I can image the feeling of spirituality that permeated their trip.

A star soccer player, my grandson was a “walk-on” of sorts for the choir but by the conclusion of the tour he figuratively made the varsity and lettered.

Scientists have isolated a gene that is shorter in people who experience depression.  I think the one that I must have was much less severe than it was in my father and his mother.

Just like the one that results in essential tremor, which has yet to be discovered, both were probably handed down to my offspring.  My prayer that they skip the boys may be in vain but, if so, they have already been offset by other inherited traits such as grit, determination, and drive.

It is important to remember that inheritance is not destiny. It is how we express our genes that makes the biggest difference.

I can read the worry in letters to me from my parents and sisters during that time of spiritual crisis forty seven years ago.  It wasn’t the first nor the last time they probably felt helpless while watching me experience pain.

But I’ve lived a life well worth living and for that I owe them.

Finding Myself Going In Opposite Directions

As devices go, I find myself going in opposite directions.

For different reasons, my cell phone just got a lot bigger and my tablet smaller.  The iPhone 6+ is a lot easier to read and the mini-tablet is a lot easier to handle.

Research I will get to suggests I will soon be shedding some devices.

For me, the size of the keys on the keyboard of the 6+ is more important than making or receiving phone calls, partly because when I do, I am in the Jeep where it happens via the sound system or on speaker mode.

Very rarely do I raise the phone to my ear anymore and the larger size works just fine when I do.

Even for people north of age 65, such as me, only 18% use their cell phones a lot for phone calls compared to 38% of the general population, according to Gallup.

Among Americans overall, 18% rarely use cellphones a lot to make or receive phone calls, compared to 27% who rarely use them for text messages and 29% who don’t use them to read or send emails.

More telling though, is that more than half of Americans now rarely, if ever, use a landline.  More than 64% rarely, if ever, use a landline at work now.

Even among those in my age group, only 17% still frequently use a landline from home.  Of course, all but 7% of those under age 30 are probably looking up to find out what a landline is.

By the way, for anyone who wears a leather belt-loop holster to carry their phone when not in use, I have a recommendation for where to get one, especially for an iPhone 6 or 6+, and even more so if you use a protective case.

Alyssa Nott, an artist up in Fort Wayne, Indiana makes these to your specification and she does wonderful work.

In 2012, friends who learned I had read several books on my cellphone during one of my annual cross-country trips since retiring five years ago, thought I was crazy.

I didn’t realize I was among only 8% of people my age who read e-books, available from numerous apps including one from local bookstores, and even as loaners from some public libraries now.

But that same study showed that by 2012, a quarter of Americans who read e-books did so on a cellphone, including 41% of those ages 16-29.

I always read a bit before going to sleep, often just reversing the screen from white with black type to black with only the type backlit.  I have found myself, without realizing it, using the iPhone 6+ instead of the tablet.

It isn’t inconceivable that I won’t buy another television either.  I am one of the nearly 8 million Americans who only stream when it comes to television and I have to say, watching on an iPhone 6+ is pretty impressive.

Those who measure television viewership are scrambling right now to do a much better job of capturing metrics across all screens as well as digging deeper into things like engagement.

A report this month showed that mobile apps are surpassing television in minutes per day.  In part, this is because television viewership is “graying,” and nowhere more than cable.

Click on the infographic shown in this post to see an illustration.  Click on the chart at this link to see the growth in “app events” (action completed inside apps, not just opening and closing them) just since I retired at the end of 2009.

Time spent on mobile devices in the US grew 9.3% over the last nine months to an average of almost three hours a day, while time spent on television was flat at 2 hours and 48 minutes per day.

But a Nielsen executive last month noted that the drop in prime-time television ratings is the result of people watching on other devices.  It just hasn’t reached agreement on how that will be counted.

This sounds a little like newspaper executives a decade ago who were arguing that circulation has been level since 1991, just as advertising revenues, which translate more to the bottom line, were going into a free fall that continues today.

Millennials still watch television, just not traditional television and especially not television news.

By location, 98% view video at home on a smartphone as do 58% at a friend or significant others home.  Half view it on a smartphone while on vacation, more than a third while commuting, and a fourth will at a restaurant or bar.

They are watching television, just not on a television set, and just not live.  My career in community marketing reaches back to a time when it was important to note whether hotel rooms had a television, a color television.

I can now see the time when having an in-room television will be as obsolete as that landline telephone they still have.