Must. Be. AWESOME!!!

And now, the final video from my MountainRunner Institute talk at the “Now Media Seminar.” Let me know what you thought!

You can also find the slides from this preso by following this link.

Here’s Part 4 of my MountainRunner Institute talk from the “Now Media Seminar.” HOWF!

Also, you can follow this link to see the actual slides from the event.

Sign outside the lecture hall at the American Art Museum where Darwyn spoke.

I never got a chance to blog about Darwyn Cooke‘s lecture at The Smithsonian American Art Museum a couple months ago during the Snowmageddon. Instead, I thought I’d share a couple of the notes I furiously typed into my iPhone during the event and some pics I managed to snap. Apologies ahead: I own a first gen iPhone 3G and the camera sucks, so picture quality is kinda meh.

He speaks with a gravelly voice, like the chief of a newspaper or a Parker-like character from a film noir. He’s reed thin and possessed of a certain class, as if he’s living in the same ’60s of which he so adoringly speaks. He wears a crisp suit and looks comfortable and smooth.

Cooke did all his own lettering for his adaptation of "The Hunter."

He gets choked up when he speaks of Westlake. He’s visibly awed by the legendary writer’s effect on him, how Westlake became the wonderful person Cooke always hoped he’d be. His voice cracks when he mentions Westlake, and his droopy, hound dog face grows longer. There’s much love in this man.

Cooke regaling us with tales of AWESOME.

He tells a story of how he remembers the smell of his dad’s Old Spice cologne. His father would put on a jacket and tie to go dancing with his mom.

Cooke reads from Donald Westlake's original novel, "The Hunter"

Cooke’s 1960s is chock full of art, where furniture and cars are individual masterpieces along with typography, book covers, and more. To Cooke, things just looked good in the ’60s… as opposed to the boring little metal boxes people drive around in today.

A page from Cooke's "The Hunter"

Cooke shuns the label “creator” or “artist.” To him, he’s an entertainer. A storyteller. A workman-like view towards his chose profession: no nonsense and no pretense.

“You can’t sell Red Tornado comics to real people. They wanna read about… skiing!”

Regarding technology, Cooke spoke of how animated the title sequence to Batman Beyond on a Mac in his spare bedroom. It blew traditional animators’ and media techs’ minds at Warner Brothers, who had up until that time, shunned the use of such devices to develop new animation.

Darwyn Cooke, ladies and gentlemen.

Cooke pointing out the elements of AWESOME in his work.

Darwyn sketched Parker when he autographed my copy of "The Hunter"

Darwyn also sketched Green Lantern when he autographed my Absolute Edition of his masterpiece "DC: The New Frontier"

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One of the coolest personal experiences I’ve had of late involved meeting and hanging with a bunch of cats from Palantir Technologies, a Silicon Valley-based company that rocks a pretty cool data analysis tool. I’ve known about their software for some time, and I’ve heard good things about their products and services from some of their clients in the Intel Community and DOD. What I had not experienced, however, was Palantir’s AWESOME corporate culture.

I met Palantir’s Drew and Jon at the Gov 2.0 Expo in DC, where Palantir had spared no expense in setting up the biggest and baddest-ass booth in the entire expo hall. Instead of developing the same old tired convention booth marketing concept, Palantir had designed a cool little area in which to simply hang out and get to know their people. Drew described it as their “mullet booth: business in front, party in back.” While they flaunted the customary multiple widescreens on which to demo the Palantir system, the real draw of the booth was the pleather couches and full-on Wii gaming setup they had going on behind it. Oh yeah, and they were serving their visitors complementary beer. Motherfucker, JAM.

What Drew &  Jon showed me was a corporate culture that valued their people’s AWESOME way more than their products and sales of their products. As I learned, Palantir is all about its people. They let their teams self-organize to solve problems, and they provide tons of on-site perks that enable a creative, fun atmosphere. I got the chance to see this culture of AWESOME in action when I got invited to Palantir Night Live at Palantir’s Tysons Corner office last night.

Pro setup at Williams Sonoma? Nope. Just Palantir's AWESOME kitchen, complete with daily catering menu for its peeps.

Every month, Palantir Night Live features a rad speaker in the national security, intelligence, tech, or other related community that Palantir touches. Last night it was Michael Chertoff, former Secretary of Homeland Security and Skeletor lookalike. The event is a social one and underlies a key facet of Palantir’s people-based marketing strategy. The draw of this event has little if anything to do with the company’s products and everything to do with its culture. Palantir peeps are young, hip folks who enjoy socially building their business. So that means they value facilitating knowledge exchange (via AWESOME catering and bar service) amongst a variety of people in their social business circle. You saw govvies rubbing shoulders with bloggers at Palantir Night Live.

I would be greatly interested in seeing the sales leads generated from events like these, if those are even metrics Palantir tracks for the success of its marketing events. As a social business, I see Palantir experimenting a lot more in non-traditional selling, i.e. allowing its community of interest (customers, personnel, etc) to recommend the company within existing trust networks.

Skeletor-- er, Chertoff, draws the hotness of DC blogger "K Street Kate."

How well this works for the company’s business development strategy remains to be seen, but I can attest to the AWESOMEness of the culture. Their focus on people really underscores the value of a social business. Palantir doesn’t even use a whole lot of social media marketing because their in-person social marketing works so well.

I should also mention that a couple of my former Detica colleagues got picked up by Palantir when that company was unceremoniously acquired and assfucked. One whose work I respect a great deal told me how much he loves his new job and how he feels great working for Palantir. It’s people like this guy whose trust is based more on social culture than the old work-reward hierarchy that tells me there is something imminently special about Palantir. I would LOVE to work with these cats if given the chance.

For more on Palantir Night Live, check out the Twitter hash #pnldc and @palantirtech.

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The Gov 2.0 Expo has been a pretty amazing experience, speaking aside. I’ve met some really great people working at hyperlocal levels of government on extremely cool, forward-thinking means of connecting with their citizens. Sometimes you have to really have to embed at these events to get a good understanding of their value, and this one delivered.

I’ll write up a more in-depth analysis of the event once I’ve had some time to think on things. But in the meantime, here’s video of my 5-minute presentation from Tuesday’s Keynote Kickoff. (Thanks to the fine people at O’Reilly Media for recording, livestreaming and promoting this!)

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I am a huge proponent of the concept of social business design, or the calibration of a business according to social objectives (as opposed to profit objectives). The thinking in this area, oft spearheaded by people from The Dachis Group, addresses the social imperatives inherent in any use of social media or social networking technology.

Last week, I got the chance to participate in Social Business Edge, an event organized by blogger and thinker Stowe Boyd, that explored the furthest envelopes of thinking about social business design. The overarching theme of this event involved the very act of being social and how humans, as social creatures, must begin to structure their businesses to accommodate that fact. Social networking technology has enabled such enterprises of the future that industrial era business is slowly becoming more ineffective, unpopular, and unprofitable.

The ever-awesome Deanna Zandt and host Stowe Boyd talking about something rad.

Social business will necessitate a fundamental redefinition of “work.” People, for example, will trade productivity for connectedness every time… but this leads to previously unseen new levels of productivity.

Another common theme involved how business 1.0 used war as a metaphor. Social business, some argued, should be considered “village building” instead of “army raising.” The traditional business goal of achieving maximum profit margins was shunned in favor of collective dialogue between everyone in a business ecosystem: executive, employee, customer, and so on.

Baratunde Thurston, one of the chief minds behind The Onion, argued that creativity and humor sit at the center of social interactions. He used several examples on Twitter of how one can use humor on Twitter to galvanize community building. (Check out @baratunde‘s Twitter lists. One example is a “twitcom” where users came together to create an on-the-fly Twitter sitcom using many obvious sitcom stereotypes.)

I really responded to Baratunde’s in-your-face presentation. Here’s a guy who makes his living “not giving a shit and outright hating” his audience (his words!). He’s one more AWESOME influencer I can point to who catalyzes us to do our own thing… even when that thing is terribly foul. Despite the naysayers and the language police, Baratunde’s work on The Onion and elsewhere continues to bring in the clicks.

Baratunde Thurston telling people to get their fuck-off on.

The event featured several other amazing presenters including John Hagel III (who brainfucked me with his AWESOME talk about the future of knowledge in social networks); Venessa Miemis, a Twitter acquaintance who is harnessing the collective power of her connections (and their connections, thereby socially steamrolling) into a video chat-based Junto; and Lee Bryant, CEO of Headshift (a social business company that Dachis recently acquired). I think Lee’s preso best exemplified the themes and takeaways of the day, and he graciously made it available for embed below. Lee talked at length about why businesses should be social and how to recognize the individuals within an organization that will advocate social business change.

I had a great time in New York meeting and hanging out with the Social Business Edge presenters and attendees. This was a group of thinkers and doers whose influence challenges me to think in different ways about social business. I think one of the hallmarks of the social business age is an inherent ability to lean forward into one’s network and not absorb the knowledge that network transfers but act upon it and improve it. As a social animal myself, I already picked up conversations with many of these folks on Twitter (which seems to be the popular social media tool of choice for conversation-replicant dialogue). I can’t wait to “do some business” with these peeps in the near future.

Check out the hashtag #sbenyc for more livetweets from Social Business Edge. I have also embedded Lee Bryant’s video preso below. Below that, I’ve added a number of additional observations about the event that I collated in a trip report for The Rendon Group.

Additional insights from the event:

• Social business is not about closing deals; it’s about collectively enhancing your group’s social capital and expand the resulting relationships.
• Social businesses will attain social capital (and eventually profit from that) by opening their systems and processes to their communities and demystifying themselves.
• Customers will tell you how to sell to them if you treat them socially, as members of a greater community or ecosystem… and NOT as faceless masses.
• New business models are warranted: command-and-control structures create massive costs versus open and distributed models.
• Passion is equally proportional to connectedness. However, passion does not equal happiness. Some of the most passionate people in organizations are the most frustrated because they see what is possible and are unable to move the organization to attain those possibilities.
• Debi Klein of Communispace briefed a company case study on how she creates closed, researchable online communities to conduct market intelligence. For teenage boys, they do this for brands like Axe & Gilette by starting a private online community for boys to talk about getting girls. This listening technique is a valuable source of business intelligence.
• Unanswered question: How do you resource social business? Many of the techniques involved require lots of overhead and pre-investment. There was no discussion of how current businesses budget for such transformation.

Updated to include video of John Hagel III’s AWESOME talk. Pay attention to what he says about knowledge flows (versus stocks) and change driven by vision (versus threats):

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A friend of mine with whom I’m doing business coined an AWESOME term around the same time as we were discussing how to get my business, @Du4.llc, off the ground. I wanted to share that with you, O Faithful Consumers of AWESOME, and elucidate on the concept of Weaponizing Oneself.

Jon Iadonisi (or the more nefarious “Jonny I,” as I like to call him), with whom I’ve worked in a variety of irregular roles, once told me this:

“Du4, what you’ve got is unique, innovative and creative. The idea of Du4 is made up of all those things that people get access to when they ask you for your opinion on a white paper or your help ironing out a contract. You need to find a way to weaponize Du4: to take all those unique things do and put ‘em into a delivery mechanism that’ll get you PAID.”

I’ve never forgotten those words, and I’ve been thinking on them a lot since launching my own business. The idea of “weaponizing” oneself, I believe, emerges from an entrepreneurial spirit that galvanizes ones to capitalize on what’s most AWESOME about themselves.

Businesses or organizations may not want to hire you as a full time consultant, whether because of how much you cost or other reasons. But they still want what you got. So they’re willing to plop down something to take you out to the firing range, fire off a few shots, and see how you perform. They may want to buy a limited deployment of YOU and drop you into a project or business scenario to see what kind of damage your particular weaponized payload may deliver.

The bottom line is that you should start figuring out what it takes to weaponize yourself too. Find the unique mechanism that allows you to deliver AWESOME on the timeline and scale that YOU want. I can tell you this: it has been fuckin’ FUN figuring out how to deliver precision strikes of Du4 upon unsuspecting populations in Meagerville and Bullshitberg. No matter your trade, passion, or profession, I guarantee you’ll never regret it.

Here are a couple questions to ask yourself to help you pursue your own personal weaponization strategy:

• Who are you? Answer this question first. Really figure out who the hell you are and what you’re all about. Tyler Durden says you’re not your fuckin’ khakis. I say you’ve got some AWESOME in there somewhere.
• Who enables your AWESOME? Communities will always rise around subjects of interest. Who’s in your social circle that engages you about your passions? Find those people and spend more time with ‘em. Ask questions. They can help.
• Where do you want to go? Weapons have to be deployed, so identify the places you want to drop your Fuckbombs of AWESOME. Best thing I ever did was scrape together enough money to go to TWTRCON DC in 2009 and speak in the Open Mic Contest.
• What are you offering? When you launch your AWESOME Missile, you gotta have a payload already loaded. Is it consulting services? What kind? Are you writing papers, blog entries? Are you delivering physical items on Etsy? Figure it out.

One last piece of advice, at the risk of pissing off the gun control crowd: BE BOLD. Jonny I didn’t use the armaments metaphor to be cute… he did it to show me that I’M A FUCKING WEAPON OF AWESOME and MY BULLETS ARE LIFE CHANGERS. Weapons are loud and leave large swathes of damage, so don’t be afraid to kick over some enemy emplacements on your way to the arsenal. There will be a lot of naysayers and a TON of adversary fire coming at you. You’ll have to take a couple head shots and keep returning fire.

Only YOU knows how rad YOU are, and you’ve gotta make BIG SPLASHES sometimes to show people that your particular brand of machine gun rocks the house.

{Jonny I is only one-half the creative powerhouse of the White Canvas Group. I am also indebted to Tim Newberry for his guidance, mentorship, and partnership in the arts of creatively blowing your mind.}

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A wrench got thrown into my Gov 2.0 Expo preso planning while I was picking myself up a bride Down South. It actually made me question whether I wanted to go through with it at all. However, after some hard thinking, I’m putting on the smiley face and taking my cheek-splitters like a man.

Let me explain.

The Gov 2.0 organizers contacted me about my presentation, “Instituting a Culture of AWESOME in Government: The Case of the IED Task Force Tech Team,” a couple weeks ago. They told me that they were altering the format of the conference and that my presentation was being shortened from the originally proposed 50 minutes to FIVE minutes. Apparently, they thought it would be so much cooler if they bunched in a ton of 5 minute “rapid fire” presos around the keynote address. There were a lot of platitudes about how great my proposal was and how AWESOME it would be condensed to 5 minutes.

How do you “condense” a case study, which by definition is the result of an analysis? It’s like saying, “Hey, dude, I love your book! Can you give me a pamphlet version?” Considering how much effort I’ve already put into researching this topic, a FIVE MINUTE presentation does the material – especially this material – a disservice.

I wrote the organizers back expressing my discontent but also offering an alternative: how about I come up with something else related to creating AWESOME culture in government that I could adequately fit in the time limit? Apparently, the organizers really wanted the IED Task Force Tech Team case study but felt it wasn’t topical enough to warrant a full panel. They adamantly demanded I present the same topic as originally proposed. Basically, do it or hit the road, jack.

Now this all sounds like inside baseball and dirty laundry, but I’m recounting it to demonstrate something. Despite the sheer shittiness of the situation, it forced me to sit down and think hard about what I was being asked to do. Is it worth taking a stand against this tomfoolery? Should I risk standing behind my material if it means getting kicked off the ticket? Is it even possible to give a good presentation on my original topic under these new circumstances? Am I betraying my AWESOME if I cave to these new demands? In this case, can you still be AWESOME living on a compromise?

At the end of the day, I accepted… and here’s why:

• I can’t trade the exposure I’ll get at this conference at this stage of my career.
• It will be an even more challenging exercise boiling my preso down to something entertaining and valuable.
• I think I can still deliver an AWESOME preso.
• Who knows what I can get away with on the day of?

Don’t be mistaken though: I’m not compromising on this. I’m acceding to the organizers’ demands. I think that’s an important distinction.

All that said, though, I’m still gonna fucking ROCK this expo. Fifty minutes, five minutes, whatever. It’s just less time into which I gotta pack a more concentrated dose of AWESOME.

So bring a spare pair of panties– IT’S ON.

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Submitted for your consideration…

We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

This is Must. Be. AWESOME!!! Dot com.

A couple months ago, I told y’all about submitting a proposal to the Gov 2.0 Expo occurring in May. It is with glad jazz hands that I can tell you my proposal, “Instituting a Culture of AWESOME in Government,” was accepted by the Expo committee! I’m now listed as a speaker alongside some pretty frickin’ AWESOME company (like Gary V!).

As promised, I’m going to blog about this experience. It’s really the first time I’ve ever had the chance to analyze and put forth a case that’s totally unique (at least in my opinion), so I’m really excited about the opportunity. I am deep into collecting data for the case study, and one method I’m using to do this has been reaching out to former members of the IED Task Force Tech Team for stories, pictures, and other info that may help my analysis. It’s been a BLAST reconnecting with these guys. We had a lot of fun back in the Tech Team days, which is one cornerstone of that experience’s AWESOMEness.

I have gotten a crap-ton of fun stuff so far, a lot of which I hope makes it into the final preso. But to give you a tease, here is the first logo one of our Tech Team brethren, Shane Gilmore, cooked up back when we first went joint.

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