What many haven’t yet realized is that within this same city is another equally creative centre — one that attracts some of the greatest minds in technology — the third largest technology centre in North America.

Most don’t realize that when they are riding the subway or walking down Yonge street,  they could be standing beside some of the giants of the tech industry.   To take only one example, how many average Torontonians know  their city  is home to Mark Surman.  Who is Mark Surman?  For those who don’t know him,  Mark is the Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, which, among many, many things brings us Firefox.  You might not know Mark, but you would have to have been vacationing off the planet to not know what Firefox is.  But did you know how it’s linked to our city?  Probably not.

In fact, most Torontonians really do not know how much prosperity the tech sector brings to the city.  How much prosperity?My friend and Allan Wilson and I were trying to guess how much this was.  Over a glass of red, we did our “off the cuff” calculations.   There are literally thousands of technology start-ups in this city.   While some are tiny,  a portion  of these companies go on to be giants like RIM.  Those “Cinderella” stories get a lot of attention.  But for every RIM, there are many, many others  who achieve a more  modest footprint.  We decided to be very conservative and peg that at the bottom level of  5 to 10 million in sales. This is not a huge sales figure for a moderately successful early-stage tech company.   Here’s where it gets impressive.  If only 100 of these companies reached those numbers, then they alone would account for a billion dollars of sales in the Toronto economy.  A billion dollars.  Without all the other spin-offs, even that would be impressive.  As one politician once remarked, “a billion here, a billion there — soon you are talking real money!”

But the reason we don’t know about these companies is that for the most part they are heads down, hard at work, trying to survive and thrive in a hyper-competitive global economy.  There’s not a lot of time for flag waving or even socializing.

That’s why events like Technicity are so important.   For those who don’t know it, Technicity is a once a year event sponsored by a number of groups — including the City of Toronto and IT World Canada – publishers of CIO Canada and ITBusiness.ca  and a number of corporate sponsors who support this great endeavour.   The event brings together people from the technology community, business and government to step back for a moment and  focus on the bigger picture.  In the words of Mark Surman, we can look at how we can make the type of environment that will help Toronto’s technology community make “Toronto like Venice in the Renaissance”.

In all the recent doom and gloom of the past years.  With all lost jobs, economic downturns and billion dollar bailouts — when was the last time that you heard a story about growth and vibrancy in an industry sector?  When was the last time you heard of a home grown sector that was taking on the world?   That’s what we heard in the audience.  And it wasn’t just opinion.  A series of presenters brought us the facts and figures that showed us the facts.  They showed how important this industry was and what a promise it held for the future.

What a breath of fresh air. Not only that, but  the organizers did a brilliant job of keeping the facts and figures that we needed into short, focused packets of info.  That left time for a series of breakout sessions designed to facilitate dialogue and information exchange.

The energy, the interaction and the spirit literally poured out into the hallways.  It permeated the conversations.  It facilitated impromptu sessions that filled every nook and cranny as the participants talked, networked, debated and imagined new ideas and possibilities.

I watched as one of the organizers valiantly tried to get participants back into the main session so the next event could start somewhere within the scheduled time.  Her job was tough — almost impossible — although somehow we did keep on schedule.

Keeping us organized was harder than you would think.  One thing you have to know about the Toronto tech community is that it firmly resists structure.  It’s a gloriously eclectic, creative, chaotic and at times almost anarchistic group.  As a veteran facilitator of industry sessions, I can tell you that the tech sector in this city makes the Occupy movement look rigid by comparison.  Even the  fact that Technicity manages to bring this sector  together once a year is an accomplishment.  The fact that it also facilitates some discussion throughout the year is a triumph.  The fact that they kept us on schedule is a miracle.

The entire event is a tribute to the organizers’ ability to, as I once heard it described, “herd butterflies”.   This group – this industry — will not be contained.  They choose where they will be, where they will meet and where they will live.   When you realize this, you realize thatToronto’s  leap into the world stage in technical innovation was not planned or created. It grew organically.  Why? Well,  in large part the tech sector is here for the same reason that Margaret Atwood or a host of artistic giants choose to be here.  They come here by choice.  The come here  because this is a great city to live in.  Things like funding and infrastructure are necessary — but they are not sufficient. On panel after panel you would hear the same thing — the best talent in the world comes here because it’s a great place to live and work, because it is a hive of activity and creativity.

I was struck by the parallels with the creation of the arts community in this city.  There is a necessary amount of funding and infrastructure, much of it provided by governments of all levels.  And there is the usual wringing of hands by those who decry this as a waste of funds.  In the midst of all of what is great, they will find the tiniest extravagance, the silliest anomaly and tout it to the world as proof that government has wasted what it spends.   There are those, to quote Oscar Wilde, who “know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Others realize the potential.  They see the  amount of economic activity it generated.  In that context, the amount of government investment is preposterously modest. In fact, in a world where governments are frantically trying to created 21st century jobs, where they will spend or risk millions and billions to save old world jobs — it’s hard to imagine anyone begrudging the modest support that this group has required.

In that context , supporting  this industry is not always easy for governments.  The  benefits are not easy to quantify.  Other sectors like the financial sector are huddle close to the city core in large towers.  It’s hard to miss their presence and their impact.

The tech sector, on the other hand, refuses to be bound by civic boundaries.  While there are areas of focus, it is spread out from Markham to Spadina.  In fact, if  truth be told — it extends all the way to Kitchener/Waterloo.  Civic pride might create the boundaries — but  the tech community moves easily and seamlessly across the gridlock of the 401 to work, collaborate and create.  They work in everything from lofts to warehouses.  For many, work and home life bleed together.  I heard one company talk about how the founder needed a bigger condo to house all their staff.

Some like it this way. For others, it is a necessity.  Many startups just don’t have the money.  Despite where they end up — almost all pass through very early stages where they are little more than great ideas, brilliant minds and energetic collaboration.  Those that grow  find that the journey from idea to revenue is a long one.  The successful learn to conserve cash.  Unless they need premises to make sales or to be near a customer — fancy offices are a luxury that few can afford.

It’s why many of us believe that Starbucks is the largest technology office space in Toronto.  The coffee is expensive, but it’s cheaper than rent.  There are tables to work on and the bandwidth is free.   It’s not a joke.  It’s also not always optimal.  It’s a meeting place, but it’s not an infrastructure that you can use to develop a company.  It doesn’t provide what so many of take for granted in other industries.  Even at the rents they pay, even with the gridlock there are reasons why so many companies stay in the downtown core.  One reason is the elaborate underground system that  means that even in winter you can wander around and meet people in your “neighbourhood”.   Chance meetings, networking and collaboration all happen in a “small town” within a huge city.

The tech industry, despite it’s anarchistic tendencies, craves something like this. Time after time I heard  people looking for ways to meet, to work, to network and to build collaboratively.  Let me be clear. Nobody that I talked to was looking for more structure.  While they spoke with respect and even gratitude for the many “incubators” in the city, nobody seemed to be looking for another of these.

Not surprising for an industry that has grown up on the the web — what they wanted was not a fixed structure or organization.  They wanted something useful, ubiquitous and transitory.   They wanted something  with the freedom of   “open space”  with the permanence to support them as needed.  Fitting to an industry that is exists because they are imagining the future not predicting it  – they wanted something that might not have been invented yet.

As I set my mind to thinking about how you plan something like this, an idea came to me.  I thought about the idea of Grid computing.  Remember that?   To quote grid computing.com, “Grid aims at exploiting synergies that result from cooperation–ablity to share and agregrate distributed computational capabilities and deliver them as service”.  Grid is also  wonderfully anarchistic, collaborative.  It’s also an idea that simply won’t go away.  Whether the original concept was successful or not, I’m not sure.  I do know that the immense power of the huge cloud networks – Amazon, Google and others — would not have been possible without it.

I wondered if that was more the model of support that our tech sector needs.  Could we have a “support network” on that same model?   Could it not be  highly structured, but instead fit the needs of the players, regardless of size?  Could it be done not by adding new resources, but by using the the unused, the temporary surplus —  resources that had a negligible incremental cost but tremendous value.  If you think of the average corporation, most have to be structured handle peak volumes and demands.   From bandwidth to premises, like the computers on our desks, we often have excess capacity.  For most of the time that extra capacity is unused and wasted.  So in the same way that the Grid computing movement sought to use wasted computer capacity – could we find a way to use other capacity in the system?

What would that be?  One obvious would be space – companies often need that, at least temporarily.  Another might be bandwidth.  These are the obvious.  The potential is enormous and goes beyond space and bandwidth. Once our ears were attuned to a new concept, we will hear and see more and more needs that one could try to imagine in this new way.   One company talked about the need for graphic design.  Another talked about the need for management expertise.  Once you start having the conversation in these terms, our own innate desire to innovate takes over and the possibilities are endless.

Once my mind started to embrace the concept, my healthy skepticism raised its head.  Questions arose.  Okay, it’s fine to think about sharing, but how would you make that practical.  If you take the idea that corporate resources are like nodes on a network, each with some spare capacity — you have to figure out how to traverse the inevitable “firewalls”.  After all, these are businesses.  They don’t let just anyone in.

Another thought. Is this all about taking?  Do we have to totally depend on a sense of altruism or civic mindedness so that companies would offer these “surplus” resources?  Isn’t there the possibility that these new and budding companies could be more symbiotic?   Wouldn’t they have things to offer — even if that were only a fresh spirit of innovation and new ideas?

How would we manage this — both the security and the “value exchange”?  How would we implement this in an industry that resists the old “command and control” necessary to build a formal structure?

This will require some  real out of the box thinking.  But again, the paradigm of the network comes to mind.  We have structures in place that trade ideas and information for services.  Hundreds of free services require us to trade time, information and sometimes attention for infrastructure.  Our digital identification is enabled by a number of structures from tokens to cookies to “open id” structures that let others know we are safe to deal with and even to store value from the exchanges.  There are literally hundreds and maybe thousands of examples of this — one of the largest is Gmail.  We happily trade information and attention, we sign up for ids on the this system.  In return, we get not just free email, but a host of collaborative applications.  There’s enough to run a business and it’s there for the taking.

From Google’s point of view, it’s certainly profitable.  More than that, the bigger it gets, the cheaper it is to add one more person.  The marginal cost keeps going down and down in response to volume and Moore’s law.  The value keeps going up, responding to volume and Metcalfe’s law.

So I ask the question.  Could we create something that filled the needs of the tech community based on this idea of a network.  Could we create a token an identification  – a passport to innovation?  If we did, what would it look like?

I’d love to to have your comments and ideas on this.  Drop me a note on the blog or via linked in or twitter.  You can reach me at @therealjimlove

That’s what we imagine. Excitement builds. We’ll get the best people, from the best schools, people who are “up and comers”! Get me the “A” performers! No “dead wood” on this team!

What a load of crap.

First of all, it rarely happens. Most of the time, in projects or when you take over a department, division or even an company, you get what you get.  And while you can imagine in your dream world – or in some business book – that you can “clean house” and put in your own team of the very best, life doesn’t always work out that way.

You can’t just fire people at random and put in your own team.  You need to figure out who should go and who the “keepers” are.  You need to know the repercussions of any action you take.  It takes time to do an assessment.  It’s harder than it sounds. When the new guy or gal takes over, everyone has an interest in influencing your opinion of them and others.  Don’t expect to get objective facts from anyone.  Figuring it all out is tough.

Or if you have a project team that you are assembling from scratch, reality rears its ugly head again. Usually, the “very best and brightest” are also the busiest. Sometimes – as Mick Jagger said, “you can’t always get what you want.” So if Sarah, the high flyer is too busy, maybe you get Bob the, uh — “not so high flyer.”  Sometimes you get that person that the French so cutely call “un cadeaux” — a “gift”.   Most of the time you get lame excuses.  I can hear it in my mind. “Did I promise you Sarah?  I guess I did.  Sorry – that was before we got this new client.  But Bob is a real gift to any team…”

The only time you get the clean slate is in a work of fiction or a business book – which are often the same thing.

Unfortunately, I business happens in the real world. But if we didn’t – if just for that one wacky time, where we got chance to hand pick our team, and instead of Wally from Dilbert we got nothing but “A” performers – what a disaster that would be!

What? Did I just say disaster?

Yes.

Think about it. Or live it, if you ever get the chance. Because this may be something you can only learn from experience. Sometimes even the best schools graduate people who talk a great talk, have excellent grades, networked out the wazoo, maybe even head of their alumni association –  but are, to coin a phrase, “as thin as piss on a plate”.  Sometimes the “high flyers”, who’ve been promoted time and again aren’t everything they are cracked up to be. Yes, some do good things.  Few people walk on water.  And some are a flash in the pan.  It’s possible to have a string of apparent successes without any other clear talent than luck and the ability to escape before disaster hits.

So you might not get the god of commerce that you have dreamed of.   But even if you do, you may be in for a rough ride.  Have you ever tried to facilitate a group of “A” performers – it can be challenging to say the least.  I once ran a global consulting practice and I can tell you, some of my toughest times were when I pulled together the top consultants from around the world.  There was a reason we had a theme for one conference which was “check your ego at the door”. Unfortunately, just like in real air travel, not much of the baggage was checked – and a lot of people brought their egos as “carry on”.

I don’t expect you to believe me.  Maybe you’ve had different experiences.  But sometimes the “dream team” can be your worst nightmare.

So it may be fortunate that you don’t get a lot of opportunities to build these mythical “dream teams”.  Most of the time, business is like poker. You play the cards you are dealt.  Yes, there are rules that let you discard a few and pick up a few new ones. But over the course of the game the real winners make the best of the hands they are dealt.

That’s been my strategy. I work with what I have, even if it’s what everyone else calls the “B” team.  In fact, I prefer the “B” team even when I have my choice. Why? Because I get great results from them and over the years, it’s a strategy that’s worked for me.

Time and again, I’ve taken over departments where the team were regarded as under performers.  They (not me) turned things around in an incredibly short time. I’ve hired from the middle of the class in great and in simply good schools.  I’ve found people who were used to working hard to keep up, people with a real desire to learn and above all, I’ve found people who were coachable. Yes, coachable. They listen.

Funny, when my friend Doug Sparkes and I are asked to mentor entrepreneurs, we have two criteria to judge if we’ll take on a new entrepreneur.  It’s not the obvious.   It’s not their great idea — frankly, great ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s not their marks.  It’s not their connections or network. And it’s certainly not the fact that they present well – some days we’ve wanted to poke out our eyes with a fork rather than take one more powerpoint slide.  Nope. We look for two things – drive and coachability. Do they really want to succeed more than anything? And do they listen?  Everything else can be taught.

As a formula, it’s worked pretty well. Listeners succeed. Not just by listening to us. It’s listening to their other advisors, to their partners and colleagues and above all to their potential and current customers.

Listening doesn’t mean that you always agree.  It means you listen and think. In fact, a team that is always “on the same page” is a big danger, no matter how smart they are.  You need diversity, questioning and even challenging to make sure that good ideas are really good.  Some of the dumbest ideas in history have been floated by teams that had all “drunk the kool-aid”. Because it was “social media” or “mobility” or “Web 3.0” nobody questioned whether what was being presented was really a good idea.

My “B” teams are full of questioners. They ask questions — not so they can show what they know – but because they don’t have to hide the fact that they don’t know some acronym or buzzword.  They don’t have to believe everything because it’s a new hot trend.  That’s how they fought their way to the middle of the class. These people ask good questions and they listened to the answers. When you have one of these guys or gals on your team, he or she will ask — “why is that so good? What can it be used for? Why would someone buy that?”  Great questions.  And if you experience a wisp of annoyance, maybe it’s time to check your own ego and realize that they may have done you a hell of a favour.  Maybe you haven’t communicated it well.  Or maybe (actually all too many times) the emperor really does have no clothes.

Another wonderful thing about “B” teams.  They are full of real people.  Some have quirks, many aren’t the fastest talkers, they often haven’t read “Dress for Success”, or maybe they aren’t from the top business schools. Some have come up through practical programs.  Some of come up through the school of hard knocks. They are real, authentic people – some of whom only need to be given a chance.  Some need coaching and mentoring if they are going to advance.  Some are comfortable being just a team member, and have no ambition to lead (in the classic sense). Some wouldn’t be caught dead making a speach or presentation. Some have been told they shouldn’t.  But for all of these supposed “disadvantages” when you look beneath the surface, there is a lot of talent there.

But lets also be real.  Not all business is rocket science.  B teams can deliver. In the drudgery of day to day discipline and the mundane part that is every job, they do it and get it right. It’s wonderful to have great idea about how you can improve things. It’s better to do the real spadework to prove and implement an idea.

I remember back when I was starting out and got my first national role for product development and financial control. I had not studied business at that point.  I felt very insecure about it. It was only later that I went back at night to get my degree.  I was smart enough to get a book and read up on financial analysis. I could make sense of it, in fact it didn’t look all that hard, but people train in this stuff for years.  They get very expensive MBAs.   So I thought I was missing something. So I hired an MBA from a great school (that shall remain nameless) and set him to work.

What a disaster that was!  He nearly caused a mass uprising. In those days, the heart of our business was data entry.  As was common at that time, it was mostly women who had high school and not much more.  They worked all day doing the same thing over and over – accurately and quickly. That’s how we made money. Because I’d never studied at a good management school, I thought the way to train our new recruit was the way I was trained.  I put him to work doing data entry.   I had often gone down to work with them when we were short staffed or just to help out with high volumes. Sometimes I just got them coffee.  I could almost keep up on key punch although I never matched the top performers.  But I’d try my best to compete.  I didn’t think that this was doing very much.   But I did get the feeling that they while they might not walk over hot coals for me, they would stay late and put in that extra effort when needed.   For someone from the executive floor, I was almost human.  In turn, I appreciated and respected them.

The first day my new recruit was down in that area, the supervisor came to me to tell me to “get that brat out of her area”. His moaning about what a “dead end job” this was had gotten on their nerves.

To make matters worse, the new recruit wasn’t doing a particularly stellar job on the financial reporting and analysis I’d hired him to do. It turned out that although he’d passed his course on stats he hadn’t really paid much attention. Imagine my surprise to find that I had to coach him with what I’d learned from a book and some common sense. I showed him to the spreadsheets that I’d devised with great pain and with lots of weekend work.
I don’t think he ever really got it.  Fortunately, I didn’t have to fire him. Amazingly, some other department really wanted a “A” performer like him. Great school. Nice clothes. Knew how to talk. Had the right attitude. He went off to join someone’s “dream team”. I was left with my “B” team. We made money for the company and got the job done.  My rudimentary financial analysis showed that

That was a learning experience.  The first of many.

Later, as I went back to school at night to study the business and technology that I was living, I would learn that a lot of what I had picked up by observation and by simply trying to be a real human being was the best way to manage.  I learned  about things such as the Hawthorne Effect – where simply paying attention to people could generate improvements in performance.  I learned that you needed to appreciate people, to learn to inspire but more often to be inspired by real people.  I learned that by looking for the best in people, I would find it.

Time and again this proved out and my career took off — thanks to all of those “B Teams”.

But I never stopped learning – so as I struck out on my own to head up a boutique consulting company, I used the same learning and the same wisdom in my consulting.   For example – I was in a call centre a while ago. Everyone had told me that this was a dead end place, nobody cared, they should just outsource it and be done with it. It was true that they had their challenges – there were a lot of complaints.  But instead of reading reports I went to see them work. While I was there, something happened.  In a very short period, the calls spiked and the queue grew incredibly. I would later find out that there were some problems in the operation that drove huge spikes of calls into the call centre with little preparation and no training at all.

I watched them valiantly handle each and every call. Intent. Hard working. Frustrated at times, but persevering. And then I watched as the last call in the spike was handled and they crossed back to regular volume. When that call had been handled, they all stood and applauded the person who took the last call.    It was an amazing experience and one that I’ll never forget.  So much for “not caring”.  These folks were fabulous.  And watching them pointed out where the real problems might lie.

And I was confident that I’d find those problems.  I knew that this “B Team” would help me succeed — if I let them.

So keep your “dream teams”.   Give me real people who care and listen.  We’ll do great things together and I’ll be proud to be on the “B Team”.

The phrase hit me like a brick.

I’ve been a consultant for over 15 years – half of my career.  It’s funny, you don’t get into this game unless you have some desire for feedback. Given how competitive consulting is, you also have to be a bit of an over-achiever.

I confess.  Yes.  I was that kid in school who had all the answers — the one the teacher eventually stopped asking, or looked vainly to each side of hoping for someone else to raise their hand, eventually returning defeated to reluctantly accept the offering of the impatient know-it-all in the front row.  For anyone who worries about my social status, you can rest easy — I got over that part. In university I became the guy sitting at the backs.  Still an over-achiever, but now a rebellious one — I learned to be cool and disdainful.   But I still knew the answer.  At least that’s my perception.

I was so full of myself, I’m not sure how the profs would bear it.  I remember one prof – Barry Callaghan — a man with an ego bigger than mine at the time (a considerable feat in those days).  Barry proudly proclaimed that, “nobody in his class got a A”.   I stuck up my hand.

“Are you telling me,” I said, “that although I’ve got an IQ that’s north of 140, I am stupid enough to have signed up with a prof who is so terrible that he can’t teach me enough to get an A?”

Barry let me live.  Just.  And, yes…I got the A.  He made me sweat blood to do it, and I worked my butt off.

Affirmation was important.

Many times in my life, I’ve seen or heard people welcome critical feedback.  Only if we know what we do wrong could we improve.  I would, on command, mouth those words, and even appear sincere.  I didn’t have the nerve to question this.  It sounds so — stoic.  So right.  But inside,  I never believed it.  It shames me to admit that I always struggled with negative feedback.  I’d sit, trying to appear interested, all the while churning inside, hearing little of what was said until one nugget, one positive — I’d hear that, I’d relish it.  I’d cling to it like Gollum with the ring.

It’s not that I shut out all criticism.  I’m my own worst critic.  Nobody is more devastating or hard hitting than me.  Even while I’m listening to praise, feeding my addiction to affirmation, my own internal critic is at work.

I once described this to others using a picture out of a comic book.  It was like I had a little angel on one shoulder listening hard fo every nugget of what I was doing right.  On the other, was a little devil telling me what I was doing wrong. For years I would try to focus on the one and ignore the other.

It wasn’t until many years later that I learned that the trick, at least in consulting, is to balance the two.  You need the self confidence to tackle tough problems.  You have to work your butt off like I did in that university class, to defy the odds and to come up with a great solution.   For the first part of my career I got that perfectly.   It was only in later years that I realized that I needed to listen equally to both the applause and the critic.  I needed  humility to take advice, especially when I was absolutely certain I was right.

That lesson was painful.  But I learned it.

It doesn’t mean that I enjoyed criticism.  I just learned — painfully and by brutal experience that I needed that feedback — as painful as it was.  I never learned to like it.  I did learn to  “suck it up” .

But eventually a light went on.   One learning for me was watching others, often consultants who had not learned this lesson.  I’d watch people so certain they were right, with clear and easy answers taken from books, making pronouncements and waiting for applause.  The best were devastating in managing any critique of their great solution.   It took years, but eventually this behaviour was a mirror — one in which I began to see my worst failings.

When I moved from industry to consulting,  I knew that the mirror sat on the other side of me.  The client was my mirror.  I had to speak the truth.  I had to give credible advice.  Yes, I needed he ego to do that.  But I had to have humility.   I promised myself that if I ever lost the feeling of what it felt like to sit on the opposite side of the desk — in the client’s shoes — I’d give it up.

Truth be told, I’ve probably broken this vow at times.  But if I did, something would give me a wake up call.  Today’s comment from this marvelous lady — who spoke of the “strangers” — spoke to me.

The strangers?   They were consultants.  This lady worked for a company where consultants were brought in.  Strangers.  And she didn’t trust these strangers.  They were giving all kinds of advice, maybe even some of it good.  From the sound of it I presume that in their meetings with senior managers, these consultants were getting applause for their work.  As there were more and more of them appearing, they must be finding some favour.

I knew what that felt like.

But I wondered — did they know how little they were trusted by this lady?  Did they care?

I’ve always known the names we’ve been called over the years.  In my early days with a CA firm, some clients called us the “suits” – in reference to our uniform of blue suits and white shirts.  I enjoyed the joke, quipping back that that we got to wear grey suits on casual day.  The clients laughed.

Over the years, I’ve heard a million jokes.  When told in good humour, I could usually laugh along.   Sometimes I would exploit this humour to bridge a gulf.   I remember in Indonesia when I invited a group of the staff to my house (unheard of, I’m told).   That night, I made a joke about the name that they called us expatriate consultants.  It’s a little difficult to translate, but let’s just say it wasn’t flattering.  When I mentioned it, they looked shocked.  I laughed.  Then they did too.  It broke the ice.

In the days when everyone was on planes and you couldn’t work in your own home town, we were nicknamed the  “seagulls”.  We flew in, did what seagulls do and flew out.  I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.  Funny?  Yes.

I laughed when I heard that as well.

But I’ve told you that criticism still stings and as much as I laughed,  I also heard what was behind the humour.  It reached me in a way that direct criticism sometimes didn’t.   It mad me think.  And I think that that saved my consulting career.   Arrogance is the death of good consulting.

I remember one day when we were discussing an outsourcing project and I questioned how we had got to our cost savings over the current costs that the client has.

“Easy” said one of the young turks at the table. At the time, he wore red suspenders under the blue suit.  The mark of a true rebel.   “You just cut 25% of the staff.  You get rid of the dead wood.”

I resented  the glibness.  These were people’s lives.

So I asked my young turk colleague, “Have you ever done a mass firing before? (I purposely didn’t use the word lay-off.  I wanted this to have punch. ” Have you ever looked someone in the eyes and told them that they were fired?”

“No.” he said, “but I’ve been involved in it.”

I didn’t even ask what that meant.  Instead I muttered some glib line about the difference between the chicken and the pig.  The answer is, of course, when it comes to breakfast, the chicken is involved.  The pig is committed.

But after my anger faded I was left with a realization.   I could be as smug as I wanted.  But if I was honest, I’d been in industry a long time.  I’d done layoffs.  I knew that lay-offs may very well get rid of some “dead wood” but more often – you slash cut a lot of live trees.

So while I could try to find the moral high ground here, it’s a lot like the old joke?

“Would you sleep with me for a million dollars?”

“Yes.”

“Would you sleep with me for ten dollars?”

“What l do you think I am?”

“I think we’ve established what you are.  Right now, we are only negotiating price.“

I could be as indignant as I liked.  But I had done what he was only talking about.   The fact that I felt bad didn’t give those people their jobs back.

I could judge his arrogance.  Or I could use it as a mirror.

Those are some of the memories that came back when this marvellous lady talked about the strangers. It still wasn’t comfortable.  After all these years, I’m at best a “recovering praise-a-holic”.   I take it one day at a time.  And I don’t like negative feedback — but I do love good advice.

And I was getting some good advice.

I could resist it, or I could use it.  I could look in this mirror and ask myself,  “have I been a stranger?”  Not for regret.  Not for self-flagellation, but as a learning experience.  Maybe I’m maturing?  Who knows?

Here’s the learning that I got.

As consultants, we may have the ear of the most senior executives — but that’s not where recommendations are going to get implemented.   Peter Drucker – the great management consulting thinker of our time said it clearly.   “The best and the brightest are volunteers.”

So as I started the session, I thanked the lady who made the remark about the “strangers”.  If there was any danger of me having anything glib in the session that I led with this group, it went out the window.  As I had in my university days, I worked my butt off – only now, not for the marks or the praise, but because I was reminded that I had a choice.  I was the “expert” – but I needed their trust.

We were in this together.  I couldn’t succeed being a “stranger”.

I dug deep.  I did my best to listen.  I offered honest advice.

As it turns out, it was a great two days, at least in part because of that great comment.  As I said good-bye to them all, I couldn’t help thinking of that old parting line — “don’t be a stranger”.

Good advice.

Music.  Poetry.  And the speakers!  Wow.

To take a line from the great band “Broadway Sleep” who played four great tunes in the morning — we were “pilgrims on a shopping spree”.

Here’s my glimpses of TEDx Toronto and a link so that you can see some of the pre-recorded talks.  Read on…

Here’s my take on some of the presentations.  See for yourself at http://tedxtoronto.com/ – they’ve already posted three of the talks online.
A Jihad Of Love – Boona Mohammed

I didn’t know what to make of poet Boona Mohammed as he took the stage with his “jihad of love”.  “Push the boundaries of what is considered normal,” he told us.  And he did.  He teased us with his stories.  We saw ourselves.  We laughed

“Why would you hate, when love costs less?” was his unassailable logic.  Even “fundamentalism begins with fun” he quipped and shattered the barriers between us and the world, if only for a few minutes.

A Return To Purpose – Bruce Poon, Gap Adventures

Social media has made it possible for small companies like his to conduct “destructive innovation”.  But as his company has grown to be one of the largest in its field, he has seen another perpective.

The current mantra of a “triple bottom line”  (People, Profit and Planet) is not suitable for large companies.  His solution?  We need to redefine sustainability.

In his own area of eco-tourism he opened my eyes to some of the realities. By 2020, international tourism will involve 1.6 billion people. (UNWT 2008 report)  In the 40 poorest countries, he said that tourism was second only to oil as a leading source of income.   Yet of each $100 USD spent in developing countries, only $5 stays in the developing country.

How to change this?  How do you take people who “just want a simple holiday” and take them from eco-tourism to responsible travel which improves the lives of the local people?  How to you go from there to sustainable tourism?

He advocated a “return to purpose and passion” as a strategy that should resonate with even the largest companies.  he pointed out the transformation of the Dove brand from a bargain soap to a beauty brand.  It’s a case where large companies start to behave more like small companies.

His approach mirrors mine.  I’m increasingly an advocate for what I call a “grass roots strategy” that by its nature requires a return to purpose.

He claims that you can engage our customers to a higher purpose.  One of the innovating examples he gave was how his company made more employment opportunities for women – often an ignored group.  His company created a weaving cooperative that ended up being a perfect synergy.  His tourist guests loved to visit and purchase and the women gained employment and income.

Even his approach to “outsourcing” was affected by this idea of responsibility.  At one point, he did what many companies do in foreign countries.  He franchised out services to local providers.  It didn’t work.  The service quality was inconsistent and even poor.  He continues to use local people, but now his own company hires locals directly and runs the business.  I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a lesson for those who outsource overseas? Our company outsources as well, but we go through great lengths to make the employees we take feel as if they are employees of our company and fully on our team.

Can we engage our customers to a higher purpose?  Perhaps.  But only if we have a higher purpose.

Imagine your last hamburger

The day was interspersed with TED videos.  One of these (I missed he name of the presenter) informed us that “meat causes more emissions than all transportation combined, yet we eat twice as much meat as we did in the 1950′s.

Our presenter was always going to give up meat later.  Later never came.  Instead, he did something practical.  He ate vegetarian during the week and meat on the weekend.

The Lollipop Story – Drew Dudley

“Leadership cannot be taught.  It can only be learned.”  (Who said that?)  Drew urged us to move from making leadership an attribute of only “special people” where we compete with others to be that mythical leader. As long as we make leadership something greater than us, we’ll never find it.   Instead, let’s consider leadership as something we all do, not as someone who takes the centre of attention, but as providers of inspiration.  “Inspiration,” he noted, “is creating new ideas in other people.”  To achieve this, we have to let go and realize that there is no world, on “6.5 billion understandings of it.”

Drew went on to tell us what he called the “lollipop story” – a story of an encounter where he had really touched someone in his life.  I can’t do it justice in a column.  You have to hear it for yourself.  I’ll try to find a link to a recording of this and put it in the blog.

One In Five Of Us -  Christine Zahn of CAMH

Spoke on behalf of the 1 in 5 of us who will have a brush with mental illness.  She brought it right into the room as she pointed out that in our crowd of several hundred people, 3 of us will have schizophrenia.   The she took us from the room out into the big world where “1/2 a billion people are not living their best life.”

Here advice came from her teenage son who advised her to “discover discuss and demand” better.

What’s Missing Is Dignity – Neil Hetherington, Habitat for Humanity

I thank god I’m not the only one who hates those  “extreme home makeover” shows where someone comes in and does a home reno for some poor person.  Only now I know why I dislike them.  “What’s missing,” said Neil Hetherington, “is dignity.”   Habitat for Humanity doesn’t do things for people, it invites them to “come build with me”.  They can overcome the “disintegrating emotion of self-pity” and we return to the nobility of community.

Coalitions of Unlikely Allies – Amanda Sussman

Spoke on the “art of the possible” and urged us to build “coalitions of unlikely allies”.  She spoke of breaking the myths. You don’t have to be famous.  You don’t have to know people.  Politicians don’t have all the power.  And all governments are not corrupt.

The real problem?  We have “too many radicals and far too many reformers.”   The problem is that both already have the answers.  They ask questions without realizing that how you ask a question determines its answer.

We need more “unlikely coalitions” and those who make progress one step at a time.  Real change doesn’t happen top down or bottom up.  It happens when both occur at the same time and when we build these unlikely coalitions.  She ended with a perfect symbol of this – a picture of her and George Bush together.  I didn’t question it.  It would have framed my answer:-)

There was more.   There were others speakers as well.  This is what I had in my notes at the end of the day.

But it wasn’t just speakers.  It was the energy in the room and the great discussion.  In the many network breaks, I answered email and returned calls. But I also got to meet some very interesting and wonderful people.  We shared lunch, conversation and email addresses.  We said we’d keep in touch.  Let’s see if we do.  Or maybe we’ll just meet next year at TedX.

I phoned my cousin Mike yesterday to make arrangements for dinner.  We were about to compare calendars and I was stalling while Outlook came up on my machine.  Mike laughed.  He was ready.  All he needed was a date book and a pen.   He laughed and said — “I’m 51 and I still use a date book.”

Of course, as always happens whenever there’s a challenge like this — Outlook took it’s sweet time loading.  Actually, it hung for a minute, as if to prove the triumph of high over low tech.  Mike took the moment to gloat.  So he should.  And it’s okay.  In this circumstance, keeping track of a few social engagements — an electronic calendar is overkill.

But I don’t keep track of 5 or 6 things.  I have 20 or more events happening some days.  Some nights I have 2 or more meetings.  I have calls and records of calls.  I could make 10 or 15 in a day.  Each one of those could lead to several items – documents, tasks – often spread out among staff and business contacts.  Many of those people want to book appointments with me via their calendars – sending me electronic invites.   All of those contacts want me to remember them.   So I really want to link dates and events to contacts and be able to easily pull up a great deal of info.  Last, but never least, I have to keep track of a multitude of times and details from the hours that I bill to the mileage and expenses that our government (and she who keeps our books) must have as proof of even the most meager of expenses.

So my calendar is — shall we say — complex.  It has a number of components – Outlook synchronized with our CRM, my smartphone, Google for several calendars with organizations I work with and now – for those who I work with over the web, I’m experimenting with tungle.me.   As complex as all this sounds, it works.  And I’d be lost without it — it’s saved my ass many times, this mass of electronic organization.

With all of this, the guy who can’t remember what he had for lunch yesterday can remember where I have to go, who I have to see, what I did three months ago on Tuesday afternoon and — oh, yes, it’s Mother’s day on Sunday (phone mom) and Happy Birthday Phill  (Saturday).

The point?  You have to understand the task before you comment on the technology.  Yes, cousin Mike’s book may be appropriate  for him, but it’s hopelessly inadequate for me.  This system can be updated and more importantly, can be retrieved from any computer anywhere — or one of my two smartphones.  Okay, that might seem like overkill, but we develop apps for both Blackberry and iPhone.  Got you there, didn’t I?  You thought I was just a toy loving geek.  Which I am.  But there is a rationale for everything.  Not a rationalization.  A rationale.

Mike thinks I’m nuts.  That’s okay.  He doesn’t understand what I do.  That’s where the danger lies.  You have to understand how the technology is used before you can decide if I’m a prisoner of technology or liberated by it.   My cousin Mike will never understand.  Even if he did, he’s still laugh at me.  Mike is a sweet, loveable luddite and although he kids me, I know that he’s actually proud of the stuff I do.  But he has to kid me.  That’s what cousins do.

But there’s another Mike.  Michael Enright.  He has a national radio show on CBC radio.   I was listening to it a few weeks back and heard him say with disdain, “I don’t tweet — or whatever it is.” He said this with the smugness of someone who was “above that sort of thing” and with great pride.

Here’s where I draw the line.

Enright’s smugness bugged me.  Why?  Well for one, he works for the CBC – one of the most sophisticated of broadcasters with some of the best use of technology anywhere.  Their podcast library is amazing.  Their technology journalism on programs like Spark — fantastic.  Picture a show which is created from it’s blog and a mass of people linked by technology.   That’s Spark.  But it’s not just shows about technology.  Another favourite of mine is called Tapestry and it has the most incredible shows on philosophy and spiritual thought that you will hear anywhere in this world.  How do I know?  I listen around the world, thanks to technology.

Enright’s disdain was not just at technology, it was at his fellow journalists and his audience.  The social media revolution that he was poo-pooing was the very wave that was revitalizing his industry and making public broadcasting not an anachronism, but a leader in the the new world of journalism.

When I tweet a Spark episode — or when I email Tapestry or next week, when I can use our new PodPoster app to post my comments, I’m participating in a medium that is increasingly collaborative and far less a one way broadcast.  Enright is dissing — and missing — all of that.

What a shame.  Especially since Enright came to fame because of a show that exploited technology — the telephone.  Years ago, he was a stallwart on a show called “As It Happens”.   That show brought us all around the world to events and people using telephones and recording technology.  It broke the mold for journalism at the time.  It was new, brash and — damned interesting.

Which makes Enright’s little luddite lullaby seem sad.   I pass on Enright’s monologue and click on a Spark podcast — the one with the longer, unedited interview.

I won’t change Enright.  I just tune him out.  Too bad.  He’s a bright guy with a lot to offer.  But if he dropped off the air, I wouldn’t miss him.  Not like I miss Andy Berry.  He hosted the morning show which I could get anywhere in the world.  Andy Berry, who, to the time he retired was still embracing new ideas and new technology, regaling us with stories of is iPhone.  No surprise that he went out at the top of his game.

Staying receptive to new ideas — that’s the ticket to reinventing yourself.  Whether it’s a radio host or a radio network.  Even if your base is a technology that people thought was dead and gone, if you stay open to new ideas, that fusion of new and old can still keep you out in front.

I’m not as old as Andy or Enright, but I’m no kid either.   I hope that I stay open to new ideas — even when they are uncomfortable.  Whether it’s rap music or Twitter, I hope that I don’t close my mind before I really try the experience and even if it’s not for me, I hope I can try to appreciate why it might work for someone else.  Because it’s not always about me.  That’s a lesson that I learned a long time ago.

It’s my hope and my silent prayer.

Because you don’t always realize it.  When you start to calcify, you don’t think that you have a problem, you think that the rest of the world does.  Kids these days!  Or worse, “common sense”.  All those things that we use to hide our denial — when what we really mean is, I’ve closed myself off from options.

Who knows?  Maybe one day it will happen to me.  But for now, I’ll thank my luck stars that I’m not a digital denier.

At 54 there’s still hope for me – and my crazed calendar.

I love Prine’s work.  Why?  Because, especially as I get older,  at least part of me becomes more an more like his characters.  I look back nostalgically at a past where things were simpler,  more understandable.  I think to some extent, most of us do.

That idea of a time when things made “common sense” is one those archetypal memories.  You find it throughout history – a yearning for that simpler time.

So it has a seductive appeal.

So why isn’t it more prevalent?  Why isn’t common sense more …. well, common? 

You have to know what I mean.  All of us use the phrase at one time or another – usually to describe the behaviour of someone — or more often — something else.   Because in many cases, the people who don’t have it — or don’t get it are part of large organizations.  Big companies.  Big beauracracies.  Big government – especially big government.   These are the usual suspects, the groups that prove that common sense isn’t – if you know what I mean.

And it frustrates us.   It frustrates me, anyway.  Even though I know it’s not true.

Little known fact – I’m also a song writer.  It was once part of my livelihood.  I actually have a gold record hanging on my wall.  But that was, like my longing for common sense, a time long ago.  Now music  is more  of  a hobby.

But I did write a song that responded to John Prine’s melancholy appeal to the days of yesteryear.   My song started like this:

“Things ain’t like they used to be, in fact they never were…”

And it’s true.  There was no halcyon days when common sense reigned supreme.  It’s a fiction.  Think about it.  When was this golden time.   Let’s go back.   Was it the 1980′s – the disco era?  I’m not even going there.  Sorry.

Was it the 1960′s?  Peace, love and all that?  Well, no.  The 60′s were chaotic.  Nothing made sense.  Trust me.  I was there.

Was it the 50′s?  I don’t think so.  You might believe it — if all you knew about the 50′s was from “Leave it to Beaver”.   The 50′s was a tremendously uptight time, with McCarthism, ideas that you could win a nuclear war and a type of civil repression that Martin Luther King would fight against a decade later.   I could go back.  Hitler.  The Depression.  World War I and on and on.

There was no great time when common sense made sense.   The world has always been chaotic and often troubling.

So why the appeal of “common sense”.  Why do we yearn nostalgically for it?  Well for one reason, it does take us back to a time when we were more certain.   For many of us, that represents a time in our youth.

“Common sense” is just all the predjudices that you accumulate by the age of 18.”  Albert Einstein said that.

Yet, if you have children who are around the age of 18 — or even if you are just honest about how “right” you were at that age, you have to be a little aghast.   If you have an 18 year old you’ll shake your head at how “black and white” the world seems to them.

Now that’s okay — if you are 18.  You have an excuse.  You don’t have the benefit of experience to teach you that things are not always as simple as they seem.  As a part time university prof, I spend a fair bit of time trying to convey this to my students.  Things are not always simple — or black and white.

Some of them get it.  Some don’t.

Even with the benefit of years of experience some don’t get it.   They somehow go through life and never appreciate the real complexities.   It’s as if some people reaching my age have 30 years of experience and others have 1 year of experience repeated 30 times.

Again – what is the harm?  Well, if it makes you nostalgic, there’s probably not much harm.   I no longer believe that the solution to global military conflict is to simply “give peace a chance” — but I do appreciate the sincerity of those views and I respect them to this day.   But I realize that thigs are more complex than that.    But even if you don’t get it.  Even if you sit at the dinner table and rant about how things used to be — if your delusions are your own, there’s probably not that much harm.

Where the harm comes is if you have those views and you are in a position to influence an organization, a company or god forbid — a country.  That’s where the harm comes in.

I could bring up a ton of examples of why common sense just doesn’t work in complex situations.  But I saw a great example this week on the TED talks.

I’ve kept a link to the video here.  You can watch it for yourself.   For those who want the bluffer’s guide, the presenter beautifully shows how our common sense approach to motivation flies in the face of scientific evidence.  He shows, quite conclusively, that when creative approaches to a solution or task are required, external rewards or bonuses are not effective motivation.  In fact, he presents pretty clear evidence that this type of reward system actually decreases effectiveness.

The science is not new.  The experiments that Dan Pink refers to in the video date back to 1945 and as he rightly points out, form the basis of most modern behavioural theory.   Most but not all.  Why hasn’t it made it’s way into management science and compensation theory?  Can in be that those who are engaged in compensation are untrained?  Could it be that they have not studied behavioural science?  It’s possible but not likely.  Are they recommending the right solutions but being ignored?  Possibly.

For whatever reason, flying in the face of good science we continue to see the one trick pony of compensation being used where it is proven to be least effective — with creative jobs and knowledge workers.  Want performance?  Offer a bonus.  The fact that the science doesn’t support this?  Nonsense!   Common sense will tell you…

And off we go.  Back to a world, as Peter Senge once described it, where a group of people with IQs over 130 go into a room and make decisions that you would expect with an IQ of 80.  Even confronted with the facts, people will go back to what they term common sense, which is, as Einstein so aptly described, merely their own prejudices and sometimes their own agenda.   Denial, as my friend John Thorp says, “is not a river in Egypt”  – it’s a fact of modern corporate life.

That’s why we still claim that salaries and bonuses are so important in attracting and motivating senior employees and knowledge workers.  After all, that’s common sense, isn’t it?  Unfortunately, it may make good sense but it doesn’t make good science.

We aren’t going to change the game using “common sense” – however seductive that idea is.  “Common science” might do the trick.  We’d be better off paying more attention to that – even when it tells us things that we don’t want to hear.

Check it out — and get real life stories every Monday night at 8pm ET on http://BlogTalkRadio.com/GameChanging    It’s better in person.  You get to ask the questions if on our forum, on Twitter or even live by phone.  But if you miss it, you can hear the podcast by download from the show page or via iTunes (just search podcasts for GameChanging).

Seeya there

I remember when we first started on the internet back in the last century.  I’d already been living with corporate email for almost a decade before the internet hit full steam.  So I laughed a little at the analogy that the internet of the early 90′s was like “drinking through a fire hose”.   Anyone else remember that line?

I was a voracious reader.  I was a quick study.  I could stay up later than anyone.  I could keep up.

No more.

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to yell “give!”

For the first time in my life, this last year has overwhelmed me.  Yes, I take on too much.  Yes, my fascination with many things keeps me over-committed.  But for the first time, no amount of working harder will get me out of it.  It’s been a brutal year in that regard.

So I have to get smarter and better.  That’s not a New Year’s resolution.  It’s a necessity.

But it’s not all hopeless.  I’ve started to develop some strategies for dealing with all of this.  I’ll be glad to share them with readers of this blog.   But in the coming year, I’m going to be looking at ways of — changing the game on this issue of too much information.

I’d appreciate your help and input.

What game changing strategies have you adopted to help you cope?  How have they worked?  What obstacles have you found?  What are the real issues you are confronting.

C’mon.  Share.  Leave a comment on the blog.  It only takes a few minutes.  Spelling doesn’t count.
Let’s work this out together.

And have a great Christmas — and a wonderful, stress free New Year.

But sometimes our experiences play tricks on us. We don’t see the real problems and the real solutions. We’ve been conditioned not to see that solutions do exist. We’ve been trained to play the game a certain way. We can only see the solutions that are “acceptable” or fit the “accepted wisdom”.

Someone once said that “for every difficult question there is a simple, direct answer. Unfortunately, it’s wrong.”

I’ve found that to be so very true. As I work with process transformation using LEAN techniques, I’ve been struck by how many times the real, lasting solutions to tough problems are counter intuitive. They go against traditional wisdom.

I’ve learned that you have to balance these contradictions. I’ve learned to do things that seemed outrageous at first but really work. You have to slow down to speed up. I’ve learned that bigger isn’t better – that you can produce more efficiently in smaller units which are produced at the rate they are consumed. I’ve learned that you have to give up control to get a disciplined regulation of an organization. Sound like nonsense to you? That’s okay. I didn’t accept half of this stuff at first.

It took me a long time to realize that biggest impediment to problem solving is the way we stick to the things we “know” and rule out new and novel solutions. We do this even when our existing solutions are what is causing the problems.

What makes it more more insidious is that we don’t even realize what we are doing this until, for the lucky few, someone comes along and shows us that the emperor has no clothes.

The problems we face are large and important. If we merely show that our current wisdom is leading us off an abyss, we have not solved the problem. We’ve created another — hopelessness. When people fell hopeless and helpless, they simply go into denial. What we need is the faith and belief that there is a solution, if only we can see it.

How do you get people to try new solutions which their whole education and all general wisdom tell them are “pie in the sky” or “dreams” or will just plain never work? I said earlier that I’ve seen the results and now I have faith. But in our scientific and logical world, faith and belief is not enough. It’s rare that any of us have the position to bring a group or an organization along solely on the basis of faith. Real leaders can sometimes do this. It takes tremendous courage.

For the rest, we need to have some proof that if we let go of our current blinders, we can find solutions to even apparently insoluble problems. Only then do we stand a chance of helping others to rid themselves of the the baggage that is obscuring the solution from their view.

The proof is out there if you want to see it. I encountered that today. I’d like to share it with you.

I saw Bill Clinton speak today. If you ever want a perspective from someone who has seen and continues to see difficult, global problems — an ex president is the place to go.

I was so amazed as he spoke so frankly of the enormity of the problems that a president sees. Clinton was amazingly candid about his perception of the world’s problems and how all of it hit his desk in his years as president. It would be – it is – easy to be crushed by the sheer weight of it all. Global warming. Genocide. Poverty. Disease. Nuclear threats. And more.

I was a little bit crushed just hearing about it all. Especially since he spoke with such candor and with such knowledge about the details and the true complexity. Some politicians make it seem that all we have to do is follow their ideology and difficult problems will go away. I remember the Nancy Reagan line for solutions to the problems with drugs and addiction — “just say no”. Someone quipped to me that her solution for the problem of homelessness would be “just get a home”.

But it sounds like such “common sense”. Remember what I said? Every complex problem has a simple solution – unfortunately, it’s wrong.

So if you want a simple, ideological solution, Clinton isn’t the speaker for you. Folksy at times, yes. But he gives us more of what I’d refer to as “complex sense”. He respects the audience enough to give them a bigger picture. No easy solutions.

No surprisingly, he talked about global warming. He pointed out that although its received very little attention, scientists are increasingly pessimistic about global warming. Where the general wisdom was that we were facing a 4 degree increase in average temperature by the end of the century, many scientists believe that we may face more than twice that – a 9 degree increase. (Farenheit) That would result in global catastrophe and a reshaping of our societies and human habitation patterns. At a minimum, our coastlines will no longer exist the way they do today. We’re not talking only about threats to low lying cities like New Orleans, or some of the islands in the world that will simply disappear. We are talking about coast lines that will be moved back, eliminating huge areas of land that will be under water. A global catastrophe equal to anything you’ve seen in one of these blockbuster disaster epics.

From there Clinton went on to talk about international conflicts. He spoke with knowledge and absolute authenticity. At one point he shared a poignant, moving confession. He felt that he could have saved hundreds of thousands of Rwandans in the genocide that went on when he was president. He pointed out as a fact, not as an excuse, that his people were blind to the problem. How does the world’s greatest intelligence gather system miss the genocide that affected close to a million people? It didn’t fit their way of seeing problems. It fell into their blinders.

All of that data, all of that information coming in. Everyone so into “group think” that they couldn’t see the problem emerging? No. I don’t believe it. I believe that the information came forward and that someone in the chain of command decided it wasn’t important. And when that happened, there wasn’t enough openness, enough leadership or enough organizational courage to challenge that sort of thinking. Hundreds of thousands of people died.

Clinton practically had me in tears. He refused to push the blame to someone else. He simply said that he’d have to live with that mistake for the rest of his life. Wow.

But if that had been all he did, I would have walked out of that room depressed. Instead, I left feeling elated. He didn’t simply rub our face in the hopelessness of global problems. He gave us some practical advice with the same power and authenticity that he conveyed in defining the problems.

He urged us not to get caught up in what defeats politicians. He said that the problem with politics is the way that they posed the questions. Politicians, he said, focus on asking “what?” and “by when?” They should be asking “how?”.

I think what he was trying to say is that when we ask the wrong questions, we can easily blind ourselves to real and creative solutions. When you are tackling a difficult problem, you have to be very careful in how you phrase the question. Each question, to some degree or other, restricts its own answer.

Then without really realizing it we are not in search of a solution, we are playing the game of admiring the problem. A game with a predictable ending. We start with optimism and end at the insurmountable problem that has defeated those before us and will now defeat us as well.

Given this repeated pattern, we can all be forgiven sometimes if we despair. How can one little person can make any real difference in this world? When someone who has been the most powerful person on the planet confesses that they have felt frustrated and powerless, it makes it even more believable.

It would be easy to throw up your hands in defeat. You could believe that the individual is dwarfed by global politics, international business, global geopolitical realities — and in the face of that, we are truly powerless.

Bill Clinton doesn’t accept that.

And bless him, he gave us some answers which proved that individuals can make a real difference – if they choose to change the game.

He gave a number of examples, but here’s one that spoke to me in particular.

We could easily say that poverty is impossible to address. We already give enormous amounts but its never enough. Is there any way to truly help people? In the midst of this never ending demand, can we really make any difference at all?

It turns out that we can – and many do. Clinton talked about a modern miracle called micro-lending. For those who don’t know about it, micro-lending focuses on loans to those who banks would never loan money to – individuals in poor regions, those in poverty, those with no assets to secure the loans.

Instead of lending massive amounts of money or aid, micro-lending lends what for us might be small or trivial amounts. But for those who receive the loan, that money is far from trivial. For them, it is the way of fulfilling a dream. lifting themselves out of poverty or changing the face of an entire community.

The classic wisdom that you need huge programs, massive amounts of money, that we need to send large contingents, that it takes organizations like the world bank to go in and tell these people how to run their economy — it turns out that this is nonsense. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a lot of cases where these macro solutions actually worked their way down to the average person on the street in terms of benefits.

Micro-lending, on the other hand has incredible and measurable results. It delivers effective solutions directly to those affected. It’s not us swooping in to help some poor unfortunate. It’s about enabling them to find their own solution.

According to Wikipedia, it’s not a new idea. It’s been around since the 18th century when Jonathan Swift inspired the Irish Load Funds. It gained world attention since the 1970′s when it was tried by organizations in Bangladesh. For those who don’t go that far back, Bangladesh was the “poster child” for poverty, with starving people, distended bellies and pencil thin limbs. The “mega solutions” were tried. Rock concerts were held. Charities showed awful pictures of starving children and brought in millions.

I don’t know how much of that (if anything) really worked. I know that people give millions and millions. How much really reaches those in need? I don’t know.

I do know that micro-lending gets right to the people in need. Why? Because you can see it directly. The money that you donate turns up in terms of loans to real people. You can see it.

I also know that in 2006, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameem Bank for their work in developing micro-lending and in particular, focusing that on the development of Low Cost Housing.

Micro-lending works. You can prove it with hard, unbeatable facts. For one thing, the default rate is close to 0. Yes. Zero. Nada. Nothing. It’s incredible. These loans to the poorest and most disadvantaged are far, far more secure than say a load to individuals or even large companies. I’ll bet GMs bondholders would like to have place their money where it had a zero default. It’s not just a tribute to the their honest. The money truly has a return in terms of their standard of living. They can afford to pay it back.

This is not charity. These people and the small businesses that are recipients of loans pay back the principle, often with a fair although not crippling, interest rate.

A marvelous thing happens when you empower people to succeed and have high expectations of them. I saw the power of local business first hand when I worked for a wonderful guy named Jim Gowans in what was then Inco’s Indonesian mining operation. I’m not an apologist for big business. I’m talking about this leader and his team. I remember Jim Gowans focusing on local business. He pushed his staff to learn the local language. He expect the company to provide support for local businesses with its purchasing power. But he did it as a business person. If there were local businesses that could do things profitably and sustainably, he wanted to see us move heaven and earth to support them.

It wasn’t charity. It was responsible business.

Micro-lending is the same.

I’ve long been fascinated by micro-lending. To be able to do it is one of my dreams. I’ve often thought that if our business ever really took off, or if we won the lottery, that’s how I’d use that money. I dreamed of being able to one day be able to make a difference.

But I’m not the president of a huge business with millions of dollars of budget to allocate. We do well but we don’t have hundred of thousands or millions. And I haven’t won the lottery yet.

I was thinking about “what” and “by when”.

Clinton shook that apart. “Did you know,” he said, in that folksy Arkansas manner, “of a group called Kiva.org? You can be a micro-lender with as little as $25.00.”

He spelled it out clearly for us and challenged us all. You don’t have to be a millionaire or a former president. None of us can solve the entire problem. No solution is perfect. But if we all do something, the power is enormous. He pointed out that Obama’s average donor gave approximately 50 dollars. Many were poor. In the end, the Obama campaign was a juggernaut, with more than enough money to finance a great campaign.

What if we could harness that force to fund micro-lending? It turns out that we can.

I got home and checked and he was right. Kiva is a micro lender that allows an individual with as little as $25.00 to be a micro lender. You put the money in, you select the project, you get to monitor it. You pool with other individuals to create larger loans, just like banks syndicate to fund loans of a large size for them. It’s not a charity. It gets paid back and you can put it back to use again and again and again.

You can see the pictures of the people who you help. You can hear their stories. You can have a direct impact on their life.

It struck me how imaginative this business model is. It is truly a creation of the web. It adopts the networking capability, the peer to peer approach, viral marketing disciplines and leverages a web site to manage it all.

Yet there is nothing extraordinary about the technology. Nothing I could see in terms of function that couldn’t be built for next to nothing. You might even find open source programs to do most of it.

The technology is not astounding. The creativity is. A global problem. But one person can make a difference. They changed the game.

I’m sold. I’m in. I’m going to become a micro-lender. I urge you all to do it. Let me know if you do. Tell me how it works out.

So my thanks to Bill Clinton. He gave me an amazing example of technology and of social networking using a new business model. He shattered the common wisdom that one person can’t really make a difference. He showed me someone who had really changed the game.

Score one for the good guys. That was a gift for my soul.

He also left me with a business lesson These people have tackled a intractable world problem that has defeated huge governments, large organizations and others with way more resources than any of us will ever have. They did it with the same tools that are available to all of us. Our company could have built their solution on a shoe string.

But by simply changing the business model to leverage the power of technology, people and process in new ways — they issued a challenge to us all. The next time you want to complain about the recession, or your lack of resources or of how the problems you have are insoluble, it may be time to step back. Stop asking “what” and “by when” and start thinking of “how” — how you can change the game.

You can. And if you do, let me know what you did. Please. I am really interested.

So I got real value from my ticket. I learned how I could fulfil a dream and do some real good in the world. I also took away a lesson about how you can beat the world if you are willing to step away from the same old, same old and really take a creative look at solving your problems.

I got million dollar consulting advice. I’ve passed it on to you for free. Don’t thank me or pay me yet. Go and become a micro-lender for $25.00 Help some other entrepreneur. Because no matter how tight your business is, you can find that amount. It’s worth it to get the answer to so many big problems…

If you want to solve a big problem, think small. Change the game.

Thanks, Bill.

As always, I’m interested in your comments and issues.

We all repeat this by rote like a demented parrot. How many actually believe it? And if we do, why don’t we act like it?

The cynic would say that the reason we don’t actually allow people to fail is that companies lie. They say they want to encourage taking chances but they really don’t. They simply do not want to pay the price. I suggest that it’s not hypocracy, that gets in the way. The problem is we don’t know HOW to fail. The good news is that you can learn to embrace failure – and reap the rewards.

Viagara? A failed heart drug. Despite the fact that it failed, someone noticed that it had an interesting side effect. As much as we might giggle about this one, who among us wouldn’t like to have our product or service find such a compelling need. It’s just a hunch, but I’ll be sales of Viagara are recession proof. They probably keep rising. okay, I’m sorry, I had to have at least one pun.

Post it notes? Made with a failed adhesive. It didn’t stick well enough. Heck, it would come off without even leaving a mark. Someone trying to keep track of pages in a book (a hymnal, I think) put two and two together. Once again, we might cut back on some things in the office, but Post-It’s get bought. I’ll be their sales are holding their own as well.

A little more esoteric. The Sony PlayStation. Born out of a failed agreement with Nintendo that resulted in Sony having access to some of the most highly prized games. Kutaragi – the man who saved Sony with the profits from this best seller was described recently in a Wall Street Journal article as a “renegade” who “went over budget on development costs”. He was almost ousted in the early development of the Play Station when it went over budget and substantially underperformed in sales. That might have been a bigger mistake – since this failure went on to generate 40% of Sony’s profits in the 1990′s.

Intellectually, we get it. Anyone who has had a first year course in marketing probably knows a couple of additional stories. Heck, you’ve probably heard some motivational speaker, perhaps even one hired by your own company, espousing the benefits of failure.

The problem is that we don’t really seem to believe it. We know it’s true, but we don’t how to deal with it.

Because truth be told, we don’t want failure. We just want the success that follows. No pain, no gain? Yeah, right.

I had an initial meeting with a prospective client where I talked about how much I’d learned from my mistakes. He nodded and made all the right noises. Then he turned to me and said, without batting an eye – “of course, we’d prefer it if you didn’t learn anything here.”

One of my favourites, when I was at Ernst & Young was on time when the head of our firm mouthed the words that we needed to take some chances and learn from our mistakes. One of the great things about a partnership is that when you are close to retirement, you get to say what you want. One of the more senior partners challenge him on this, asking if we really wanted our people out there “failing” at the client. The head of the firm, without missing a beat, said “no, I don’t want our people failing.” Full marks for honesty. You be the judge about the leadership shown.

I admin it’s not easy. I once had to give someone a speech that I’d read and admired intellectually. There’s an apocryphal story about an executive who failed big and was brought into the CEO’s office expecting to be fired. Instead, the CEO promoted him. I find the next part hard to believe, because I would have taken the promotion, thanked him and gotten the hell out of their before he came back to his senses or realized that it was me he promoted.

In this story, the exec confesses that he thought he was in there to be fired. “Fire you?” says the CEO. “After all the money we spent teaching you never to make that mistake again?”

I like this guy – even if he’s not real. I’ve told this story. Then one day, someone did fail big. They were competent. They were remorseful. They didn’t deserve to be fired. This person didn’t even work for me. But I saved their job and took them into my area.

I almost made an enemy out of the person that was about to fire them – except that I saved him the severance and it took a lot of fence mending. So this wasn’t an easy one for me.

The person thanked me – they were apologetic — they promised that they would work hard for our area. But in the back of my mind, was I 100% certain that this was a good thing? No. I was really worried.

And in case you think I’m a saint, forget it. I’m not. But a long time ago a guy named Eugene Fuoco saved my sorry butt after I messed up BIG TIME and offended an SVP who wanted my head on a plate, never mind firing me.

Fuoco placated this guy with the same wisdom. “He’s not going to do this again.” He could have made me clean toilets for a long time. Instead, he gave me another chance to shine at a big company event. I pulled it off and Ray (my nemesis) had the stones to come up and congratulate me. Even though I’d been a jerk, I did a great job. I was back in the land of the living.

I’ll never be able to pay Eugene back for his leadership and courage. But I had to honour it. So I fought my fears and did the right thing. Was I worried? You bet.

Did it work out? Actually it did. Years later this person has a great career, they are a friend and when they were in my area they were fabulous. The problem that I worried about never happened.

But that’s not the point. Even if I had a problem, it was still the right decision.

So why didn’t it feel right?

Part of it is our programming. Nobody likes to lose. We don’t really reward losers. Just listen when you hear the words “failure” or “loser”. It’s burned into our culture.

I once heard a comic refer to a silver medalist in the Olympics as the “number 1 loser” and I laughed.

The second reason is certainly the risk. When I saved that person’s job, when Fuoco saved mine, or when the executive at Sony sheltered Kutaragi — their actions were risky. Can you imagine what happens when you reward failure and then the person fails again? I mean, how do you explain that one?

There’s a real and present risk.

I can’t give someone a courage transplant. I’m not sure I have enough moral authority to do that. So let me give you a reality lesson instead.

Everybody fails. Even the ones who don’t highlight it. Yeah. Really. Actually, the ones who don’t mention it fail at least twice. The second one is the failure to tell the truth.

At best, it’s a little bit of organization cowardice that we all live with. At worst, it’s a cynical little game of doublespeak. It’s like the job interview question, “tell me about the failure you’ve had and what you learned from it?”

“Well, my biggest failure is that I care too much and I work too hard. Sometimes, people say, you have to get more work life balance. But damn, I just care so much about my clients and I love my work so much, I can’t help myself….”

Does anyone believe this?

I did a presentation to a group a month or so ago. I presented two situations. One was a real success, the other was one that didn’t go so well. Just for fun, I said to them, “I bet you think I’m going to talk about the success. How about we do something different this time?”

I told them about the challenges that I had faced and what I’d done with them. Now, even here, this failure went on to ultimately succeed – but it was still a risk. I’m convinced that I lost a big job this same year by being too honest in the final presentation and I was still recovering from that. So why did I try this “failed” strategy again? I considered how I’d approached it last time, I tried to figure out why it didn’t work, and I went back to it.

This time? We won — against a lot of competition. Would we have still won without this strategy? I don’t know. I don’t give it full marks, but I do credit it with being one part of a successful presentation.

There’s no certainty. That’s the point.

And even when we are given permission to fail — “Get out there, try it and learn.” – we don’t really believe it.

So there’s the dilemma. It is a “damned if you do, and damned if you don’t” situation.

As always, I don’t have all the answers. But I have given this some thought and here’s one way that is working for me. I have a couple of key things that I do. Here’s how I’ve learned to fail successfully.

Diversify:

It works for investments. Why not for corporate work? When I’m asked to do something risky, I never do just one thing. I try three pilots.

Why threes? I don’t know. I’ve just found that if I do three small projects, one will knock it out of the park, one will be okay and one will be a “learning process”.

Keep the cost down:

Use the power of pilots and prototypes. There is a price point we all have – organizationally, personally — where we are willing to throw away the cost and we can live with it. It sounds obvious, but I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen people bet the farm on a large investment. Don’t.

Manage expectations

Another reason for pilots, proof of concept and prototypes. These are set up as learning vehicles. We expect to have lessons learned and throw away results.

The expectations are low, so whatever you come up with will work – if you do it in conjunction with the first point – fast and light. I try to learn this lesson over and over again.

Think about it. If your boss or client asks you for something, what happens if you do it quickly? It’s short, to the point and matches the time you spend.

When you respond quickly to a request, you can jot down a quick message. Yes it has to be clear and have quality. But it doesn’t take a lot of verbiage, pictures, format or structure.

But what happens if that same event sits on you to do list for a week? Suddenly, you (and your boss) have bigger expectations. If it took a week, it had better be good. Then “thud factor” takes over and you look for more and more reasons to make it look like you’ve spent your time well.

Trust me, these behaviours are unconscious, but they are there.

So respond quickly. Use templates. Keep it brief. Stay late if you have to.

Manage the Message

Always remember that you are speaking cross culturally. People don’t want to hear about failure, really. So when you talk about it, even if you think that people are receptive, assume that you are giving bad news. Manage your message.

As my friend Shelle Rose Charvet will point out, if you want to give bad news, you do it by first stating the negative, put in the word “but” and then follow with the positive.

So it’s “we tried two pilots that had challenges, BUT the third showed that under the right conditions, this can be successful. We know the risks and how to manage them.”

So don’t fail to learn — learn to fail. In fact, fail your way to higher profits, greater agility and long term success.

And if I’ve failed to cover all the points, there must be two of you out there at least who can fill in what I’ve missed. Right?