 I'm going to
do today what I
almost never do, and that is talk about another blogger, one who I've
never met and, until a few days ago, had never heard of. Mark Brady at
Fourobouros (the name is a play on the alchemist's symbol of a dragon devouring its own tail, representing
a
state of constant flux and reinvention, and the search for value and
values) came to my attention while researching my post on
Corporate
Anorexia. Recently he has been writing
about this and also
about -- surprise! -- George Lakoff
(as have
I), and the Wal-Mart
Dilemma (as have I).
His recent post on Lakoff included the phrase "Don't
tell me, show me", while my recent post on teaching
children about nature included the phrase "we learn what we're
shown, not what we're told".
What intrigues me is that I'd never heard of Mark or his blog, I
suspect he's never heard of How to
Save the World, and our blogrolls have only two common links.
And when I looked at his bio, I found this remarkable passage:
After 2 years of ulcerated
struggle, I left the last [ad] agency and helped cofound a boutique
business development consultancy called Alchemy LLC, consisting of an
architect, an organizational specialist, and me--an ad guy, along with
a few alliance relationships in finance, process management,
head-shrinking and cultural anthropology. We're problem solvers, what
the French call Bricoleurs,
cerebral when we have to be, but ferocious simplifiers when at all
possible. We help small to mid-cap companies get healthy, and push
healthy ones to get outrageous. It's great fun and very rewarding. Our
clients are usually up aganst the wall and looking for fresh thinking.
We aim to please. People have come to us looking for a business plan or
marketing and we designed them a better distribution system or sales
approach, instead. We get angry neighbors to find common cause with
commercial real-estate developers, we help get VC's to see beyond less
than attractive balance sheets, and we teach kids in elementary schools
how to think creatively and middle schoolers to become balanced
leaders. We design work places, make TV commercials and help people
make nice and make money. People say we do these things well. One
long-time client introduced us to a CEO retreat by saying we're "at the
top of an industry that doesn't exist--yet." We like that. We're
immensely curious and, humble. We speak very candidly. We don't take
our selves too seriously. If you'll notice, all these things have one
element in common: moving people, figuratively and literally. That's
the real stuff. The rest is just tactics. I love what I do. I like to
share, hence this blog. Life is good.
Great, eh? Wouldn't you just love to work with these guys?
All of this, besides letting you know about a great blog and a
fascinating company, is my round-about way of making a point that I'm
going to blog about next week: The Next Economy, whether that be a World of Ends Economy or a Support Economy,
in which entrepreneurs will find and associate with each other to
provide innovative, deeply valuable services to customers in a way that
multinational corporations can never hope to match, depends utterly on
the Internet providing us with a powerful means to find like minds and
experts on anything under the sun. The bit of serendipity that I
described above that allowed me to find Mark is a perfect example of
how impossibly difficult that is with the tools, and shortage of
knowledge, we struggle with today. The issues are:
- How do we get people to post to the Internet (and keep
up-to-date) sufficient information about themselves in an appropriate
format to allow us to find them, easily, when we need them?
- What kind of tool is needed to filter, qualify and leverage
that information and (ideally, proactively and organically) connect us
with like minds and needed experts, kind of a context-rich audited
Yellow Pages of millions of people's individual interests and
expertise. We know that search engines and first-generation social
networking tools aren't up to the job. We need something completely different.
Time for some creative, very innovative thinking. Time to think how
nature would solve (or does solve) this complex problem -- I'm thinking
of the thousands of spring peeper frogs in my pond all calling out for
the perfect mate. The solution probably lies in that place where
parallel paths converge.
(Off for the long weekend -- back Tuesday. Take care of yourself.)
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
