We’re wary of using pop culture references to make management points. When you do that, even with pieces of pop culture that are, in part about business and management, like the television series Mad Men, you usually get articles about how to become better managers from thinking hard about a television show, or, laughably, something like this.
But let’s stick with Mad Men for a second. It’s a show about work and one of the things it shows is how people are passionate about that work. In this past weekend’s final episode, which even one of the smartest management thinkers we know is raving about, the show’s star tries to convince his boss to come along with him on a new endeavor. He says:
“I’m sick of getting batted around like a ping pong ball. Who the hell is in charge, a bunch of accountants trying to turn a dollar into a dollar ten? I want to work. I want to build something of my own, how do you not understand that?”
This is art, not real life, so let’s not go overboard on drawing management lessons from a few lines of TV dialogue. But he has a point. He wants to work. He wants to build something. That’s a good pair of goals for any manager, real or fictional.
P.S. We can’t find an embeddable clip of Draper saying those words. Please let us know if you see one.
I had the great pleasure of attending the first day of the BIF-5 Collaborative Innovation Summit, held in Providence, Rhode Island, by the Business Innovation Factory. That’s a lot of jargon for just the names of a conference and its sponsoring organization, but more to the point is the tag line for the event: “A good story can change the world.” Those are strong words, but, at its best, the packed Trinity Rep in Providence worked hard to live up to them.
I’m embarrassed that such a strong conference takes place almost in the backyard of MIT Sloan Management Review and I didn’t know about it until year five, but “BIF,” as the organizers call it, is full of ambition and purpose. Like similar conferences TED and PopTech, BIF offers what it hopes are world-changing ideas. But, unlike TED and PopTech, which celebrate a wide variety of disciplines and are as intent on entertaining as educating, BIF is all business.
It’s a wide definition of business knowledge. Last week in this spot, I mused on leadership lessons from unlikely places. BIF was all about inspiration from unlikely places, with reports from the frontlines of freelance diplomacy and someone whose job it is to figure out what would happen if a pirate fought a knight. But more than unexpected sources, BIF was about unexpected attitude. Late in the first day of the conference, Saul Kaplan, the event’s “founder and chief catalyst,” said “innovation requires a vulnerability most people are not comfortable with.” Like many good stories, the ones told on the stage of BIF were ones in which the principals revealed their vulnerabilities and then revealed what they learned from them.
The whole day was filmed. These talks will find their way onto the net and we’ll point to them. For now, here are a handful of the highlights from a long, deep day:
The New York Times recently argued that the term “curator” is being overused, but Museum of Modern Arts senior curator Paola Antonelli made a compelling case for curating, in its widest sense, as the activity in which all knowledge workers will engage. “Curating is no more than sifting,” she said, “sifting, so people can organize information in the best way.”
Harvard Berkman’s Ethan Zuckerman, introduced as “the geek’s geek,” talked about building cultural bridges, with examples ranging from Paul Simon’s Graceland to the videogame World of Warcraft, and used a not-new term that the business thinkers in the room marvelled over: “xenophilia.”
Author Don Tapscott gave a variation of his usual talk about digital natives, but added a telling wrinkle. He told of his son building a Facebook group for one of his books and the self-organizing community quickly growing and feeling its oats. One member of that Facebook group asked pointedly, “And how exactly will Mr. Tapscott be contributing to our community?” It was a trenchant note regarding how much ownership community members can feel.
Helmut Traitler, vice president of innovation partnerships at Nestle, discussed the nuts and bolts of managing open innovation projects. Some companies “give out problems in a disguised way,” he said, “but you have to give out openly to get back more.”
Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management, talked about fixing MBA education so it no longer produces, as The Economist calls them, “jargon-spewing economic vandals.” He spoke in detail about moving the MBA curriculum from shallow to deep, narrow to broad, static to dynamic. Similarly, ex-MITer John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design, talked about how fundamental “hand-based” knowledge is being lost as part of our transition to new technologies and new models.
In a small, packed room, it felt like these notables were, with minimal dressing, simply sharing what they were thinking about lately and telling stories that illuminated their ideas. Early in the day, Kaplan talked about what everyone seems to talk about these days: Twitter. He talked glowingly about its applicability to sharing ideas early on. “It lets you get stuff off white board and on to the ground,” he said. A good conference can do that, too.
Where do you find inspiration? From great management thinkers like Peter Drucker? Political or military leaders? Great artists or musicians? Or, maybe, a gaudy wedding chapel on the strip in Las Vegas?
That last one probably doesn’t rank high on your list. But maybe it should.
In 1972, our neighbors at MIT Press published Learning from Las Vegas, by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steve Izenour. It was a can of gasoline thrown on modernism in architecture, arguing that what “common” people like is more important than the elevated tastes and predilections of architects. It made not only an economic argument for the lowbrow, but an aesthetic one as well. What is considered ordinary or ugly by elites, they lay out, may be more useful and lasting than the designs their contemporaries considered heroic and original. The book nudged architecture into post-modernism. It is still influential and relevant. Last year MIT Press published a new volume of essays on the book and its impact.
But you’re a manager, not an architect. What does this have to do with managing? Here at MIT Sloan Management Review, we’re firm believers that the future of management is, in part, built on discovering new ideas and seeing how they fit into the work we do on a daily basis. What is most exciting about Learning from Las Vegas and why it’s so inspirational even to us non-architects is that it’s an example of a bunch of smart, committed people looking at the mainstream of their field and shouting, “No! You’re looking at this the wrong way!” Especially in uncertain economic times, when even the acknowledged experts don’t know what’s coming next, it’s important to think twice about what everyone else takes for granted. That’s a profound management lesson. Look around. You never know where you’ll find inspiration for your next great idea.
Gibbert, Hoegl, and Välikangas first wrote on the link between resource scarcity and innovation for MIT Sloan Management Review in 2007, in an essay called “In Praise of Resource Constraints.”Now they’ve revisited the topic — in light of the current recession. They observe in their new essay:
In times when you may not be able to afford the tool or service that was designed for the purpose you have in mind, look into other assets that you already have “at hand.” Engage in (playful) bricolage — tinkering with and reusing whatever assets are available. Remember, as a child, using mere wooden sticks as perfectly good dolls or soldiers?
What helps managers think in that kind of creative way? “We believe constraints, especially resource constraints (of which there are plenty in a downturn) are key,” the authors state. “Think of them as boundaries that incite creativity.”
In other words, if your budget is tighter than it was, don’t think of it as a budget crunch; think of it as a catalyst for creative thinking!
(Follow all of MIT Sloan Management Review’s TED coverage.)
TEDsters smile through financial meltdown. That’s the headline of a blog post WIRED’s Steven Levy wrote yesterday, essentially arguing that all the optimism in the presentations ignored the multi-trillion-dollar elephant in the room: the current financial horror. TED curator Chris Anderson took that on from the stage first thing this morning. “There might be issues in our world more important than the Gross Domestic Product,” he said. “Market cycles come and go. Good ideas last forever.” To underline that final point, he pulled out a John Maynard Keynes quote from 1930 that felt like it could have been written today:
“This is a nightmare, which will pass away with the morning. For the resources of nature and man’s devices are just as fertile and productive as they ever were. The rate of our progress toward solving the material problems of life is not less rapid. We are as capable as before of affording for everyone a high standard of life … We were not previously deceived. But today we have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand. The result is that our possibilities of wealth may run to waste for a time — perhaps for a long time.”
The point of the conference, I suppose, is to think beyond the current catastrophe to what may lie beyond. That’s how Juan Enriquez started the conference on Wednesday, and that’s how the mostly sober panels today ended it.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it, Alan Kay (once a TED speaker, naturally) said famously, so it’s not surprising that these makers of the future are interested in predicting it, too. The first session today took on the notion of prediction from a variety of angles. It’s a topic our magazine has covered intensely recently (see our most recent issue).
The first predictor up was Nate Silver, who became everyone’s favorite statistician during the last election cycle with his website fivethirtyeight.com. Silver has a point of view — he’s left of center (no surprise; I’m guessing there were more mosquitoes than Republicans at TED this year) — but he seems much more interested in where the numbers take him than in making political points. And his interests are wide-ranging: before he turned to politics he was best know for his sabermetric research. As with so many TED speakers, Silver started his talk with a provocative question — “Is racism predictable?” — and used presidential election results from 1996 to 2008 to back up his argument that it is. His evidence wasn’t particularly surprising: uneducated, rural whites who have little interaction with African Americans are most likely to be racist, the numbers show. This being TED, Silver also took a crack at how to fix the problem. The most provocative of his suggestions was an intercollegiate exchange program between urban and rural colleges. These might seem far-fetched, but they illuminated Silver’s basic point that what is predictable is also designable.
Political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita was more grandiose. A consultant to the CIA and Department of Defense, he uses game theory to predict the future. Some of his more famous predictions weren’t particularly revelatory (everyone saw the second intifada in Palestine coming), but he agreed with Silver’s predictable=designable premise, saying “you predict the future so you can engineer it.” His provocative question was “What will Iran do?” Bueno de Mesquita argued that full development of a bomb is unlikely and President Ahmadinejad is likely to see his power lessen in the years to come. He “backed up” his hypothesis with plenty of charts, but unlike Silver, who labelled every slide meticulously, he offered up some charts that didn’t even bother to mention what both axes stood for. I hope his prediction of a relatively accommodating Iran is true, but I also took photos of all of his slides just in case. Trust, but verify.
Two MIT-associated speakers rounded out the session. Media Lab giant Nicholas Negroponte gave a brief talk about the status of his One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project that managed to be both angry and optimistic. It was part rant against the makers of tiny “netbook” laptops, which dominate the market OLPC created, and part vision for the future of OLPC. Both parts were entertaining. “The commercial markets will go to no end to stop us. Netbooks didn’t steal the right things from us,” Negroponte said as he tossed two of the sturdy OLPC devices across the stage. They landed hard and unharmed; you could count on regular laptops to do only the former. The next step in the development of the OLPC is to move to open source hardware: build hardware with open specifications that everyone can copy. It’s a canny move, changing the playing field when the current one isn’t yielding ideal results.
“From counterintuitive to conventional wisdom” is also, in a sense, the dream that powers TED. Ideas are launched here and sometimes, as with, say, Al Gore’s initial climate crisis presentation, the world accepts them. Some may be put off by the event’s optimism and elitism — and there are good arguments against both of them, but the ideas are stronger than any inadequacies in attitude. As fellow TED attendee Paul Kedrosky twittered earlier today, “For all TED’s flaws, criticisms, etc., it remains a magic thing.” Now let’s see what happens to the ideas from this year’s TED over the next 12 months.
Where do new management ideas come from? At TED, they come from the most surprising sources. For example, yesterday there was a brief presentation (from the Palm Springs simulcast) by comic and actress Christen Sussin, who shared her four rules of improvisation:
Say yes to everything.
Follow and see where it goes.
Make eye contact.
Choose what you want to know.
She’s clearly talking about comedic improvisation, but at least some of those lessons seem to apply to management improvisation as well. And her first rule, about being open to everything, seems to be one of the best ways to generate new management ideas, too.
While it’s probably not healthy to consider everything in your life as the source of a new management idea, it’s fascinating how so many of the talks here have management implications if you consider them in a certain way. Architect Daniel Libeskind talked about how he tried to make his work expressive rather than neutral, unexpected rather than habitual, memorable rather than forgettable, communicative rather than mute, democratic rather than authoritarian. And Rosamund Zander, reading from an upcoming book about personal fulfillment, delivered some rules — “take responsibility for everything,” “embrace different patterns” — that are just as applicable in the office as at home.
The day’s talked ranged from Evan Williams (that’s him to the right) telling the story of Twitter (so far) to Evan Schwartz revealing a mystery behind The Wizard of Oz; Jennifer Mather revealing the intelligence the octopus to an unveiling (by yet another member of the MIT Media Lab) of a fascinating new children’s toy. More on all that later (the first morning session begins shortly). Sustainability has been an enormous theme at this year’s TED; we’ll be covering some of those talks on MIT Sloan Management Review’s Beyond Green blog.
The day ended, of course, with a lavish party. You know it’s going to be a good party when you’re met at the front door by a flowered rendering of a large green elephant.
For a conference that’s supposed to be about long-term ideas, those ideas sure get spread at record speed. Thanks to blogs and especially Twitter, reports from the first day of this year’s TED conference (here’s a TED primer for managers, if you need one) began flowing within seconds after a speaker noted something particularly noteworthy. As I write this post before dawn the following morning, I see that there is plenty of good, almost-instant coverage, particularly from Ethan Zuckerman, BoingBoing, and the official TED blog. Rather than deliver a blow-by-blow list of everything that happens, which can get tedious quickly and allows for hardly any reflection, the idea here is to identify the most important parts of the long day and night (with 48 speakers or performers, events started at 8:30 a.m. and ran past 11 p.m. — and that’s just the official events) and give a sense of what it is like to be here.
The two stars of the big morning session were Juan Enriquezand Bill Gates. Enriquez is the sort of polymath made for a diverse conference like TED: he’s done everything from run the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business School to serve as a member of the peace commission in Mexico that negotiated the cease-fire in Chiapas’ Zapatista rebellion. He’s best-known, perhaps, as a presenter: I’ve witnessed him speak engagingly on everything from why schools in the Arabic world used to be the best in the planet but aren’t anymore to why being knowledgeable about genetics is just as important as being digitally literate.
Back in October, just as the political and business leaders were starting to understand the ramifications of the financial crisis, Enriquez delivered a raw, whirlwind presentation at the Pop!Tech conference that focused on what the then-yet-to-be-elected new president needed to do, with an emphasis on austerity. I don’t know how long it will be until Enriquez’s talk yesterday is posted to TED.com, but those who want a taste of it can see an earlier iteration from Pop!Tech:
Enriquez started his talk and the conference by jumping straight into the economy. TED is 25 years old this year, and Enriquez was the first of many speakers the first day to couch his analysis in terms of a 25-year cycle. He’s updated the talk substantially since its October debut; its tone is now more optimistic than its shell-shocked counterpart at Pop!Tech, with a persuasive argument that, in the long term, technology is more powerful than the current financial catastrophe. He identified our ability to engineer cells, tissues, and robots as the economic engines that will outlast the downturn. Among his most compelling examples was a realistic robot from Boston Dynamics that comes astonishingly close to moving like a human:
In a later presentation, coincidentally, another speaker cited the same robot in a talk about the future of war: most technology is neither inherently good nor evil. It’s all in how it’s used.
Bill Gates needs no introduction: he’s the most successful capitalist and philanthropist of his time. And, in keeping with the theme of the event, he stated “I am an optimist” (why shouldn’t he be?) and spoke fluently and passionately about two of the big questions his foundation is trying to answer: how do you stop deadly diseases spread by mosquitos?” and “how do you make a teacher great?” He spoke with both anger (”there’s more money put into treating baldness than malaria”) and disbelief (in some school districts, teacher contracts require that a principal can only enter a classroom once a year, with advance notice). But the blogosphere and twittersphere (there has to be a better word than this) were, er, buzzing with a stunt Gates pulled while discussing malaria, the deadly disease spread by mosquitos:
“Not only poor people should experience this,” Gates said as he opened the jar and let a pair of (malaria-free) mosquitoes into the room. Several prominent blogs referred to Gates “unleashing a swarm of mosquitoes on his audience” but I don’t think two counts as a swarm. The move did lead TED curator Chris Anderson, who’s got a background in publishing, to crack that a good headline for the talk would be “Bill Gates Releases More Bugs Into the World.” Anderson also said that Gates’s talk will be posted to the TED website later today. We’ll point to it.
The pick of the afternoon sessions included talks by co-chairman of Infosys, Nandan Nilekani, filmmaker Jake Eberts, MIT’s own Pattie Maes, and Interface CEO Ray Anderson. The morning sessions start soon, after a breakfast appointment, so for now let me offer some highlights (more detail coming later in the day):
Nandan Nilekani spoke about his upcoming book, Imagining India, in which he endeavors to consider the wild disparities of India in terms of four types of ideas: ideas that have arrived, ideas in progress, ideas in conflict, and ideas in anticipation.
Filmmaker Jake Eberts showed a nine-minute rough set of excerpts from Oceans, a new film from the team that made Winged Migration about the underwater world. It was jaw-droppingly beautiful and earned a standing ovation for its thrilling shots of jumping whales, forests of jellyfish, and (apparently) friendly sharks. There’s no link available yet for the video; the film isn’t coming out in the U.S. until April 2010.
Pattie Maes, who runs the Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab, showed off an early version of “Where Ur World,” a multitouch system developed with Pranav Mistry that seeks to combine online information with real-world interaction in surprising ways. The example that left the audience smiling was one in which Pranav shook hands with someone and a tag cloud relating to that person was projected onto that person’s shirt. The website for the project is still under construction.
Almost-president Al Gore offered an update of his Inconvenient Truth talk (summary: things are getting worse), but more compelling was Ray Anderson, founder and chairman of Interface, who spoke of how he’s turning the world’s largest manufacturer of modular carpet into a model of sustainability. Anderson had plenty of useful nuts-and-bolts information about how companies should think about sustainability, which we’ll spell out later, but his money quote came from Amory Lovins: “If something exists, it must be possible.”
The sun is up, the day is beginning. I have much more to pass on about Day 1 of TED (yes, I waited on line for food with stars; yes, the Long Beach experience is different from Monterey) and I will as the day progresses. But right now I’m interested in learning more from Ray Anderson, which is why I’m signing off and going to interview him.
Much more to come …
(Housekeeping note: someone has asked what the “#TED” in the headline means. It’s a hash tag, intended to make it easier for people to search for, in this case, blog and Twitter posts about TED.)
This week, MIT Sloan Management Review is in Long Beach, Calif., for this year’s TED conference, which starts tomorrow. We’ll report daily. Now in its 25th year, TED remains an unclassifiable event. The letters of the name originally stood for technology, entertainment, and design, but in recent years the tag line for the event has become “ideas worth spreading.”
The event is certainly an elitist one. It’s expensive, hard to get into, and you’re just as likely to bump into web inventor Tim Berners-Lee as Overboard star Goldie Hawn in the food lines. If nothing else, TED is a trip. The veteran conference (this reporter has been to six of them) has gone through many permutations. Under curator Chris Anderson, TED is still full of technology, entertainment, and design, but it has really lived up to the change-the-world rhetoric that was always a bit more under the surface during Richard Saul Wurman’s ace stewardship. One high-profile example: Al Gore’s warning about global warming turned into An Inconvenient Truth after a movie producer saw him deliver the talk at TED. Last year E.O. Wilson debuted here the first iteration of his Encyclopedia of Life, funded by a TED grant.
The change-the-world attitude gets a bit out of hand: there’s plenty of talk about how for the past two years the gift bags, by Rickshaw Bagworks, have been constructed from 100-percent post-consumer recycled beverage bottles, but hardly anyone points out that the bags are overstuffed with non-essential items that have a much greater impact on the environment. Indeed, TED is a place for conspicuous consumption, even if it’s relatively sustainable consumption; it’s the only conference I’ve been to in which I’ve seen anyone drive up in a Tesla. (I’ve seen two today here as well as an even more cutting-edge vehicle.) Those with similar ambitions to TED’s, but a more limited budget, may wish to consider attending the alt-TED BIL, which is also in Long Beach this week (and which I hope to visit while I’m here).
For many years, TED was held in Monterey, Calif., but success has brought it to a larger venue farther south, in Long Beach (there’s a smaller, parallel, event being held east of here, in Palm Springs). At Monterey, most of the conference took place in one area. Here, with banners everywhere and events more spread out, it feels like the event has taken over the town, like Sundance does in Park City, South by Southwest does in Austin, and Davos (aka the World Economic Forum) does in, well, Davos. We’ll see how that works.
Especially if that optimism is realistic. Except for its entertainers, TED is an irony-free zone, a place where earnest speakers talk about fixing the world as if it is not merely possible, but mandatory. As we’ll see during the conference, the speakers here have a pretty good track record at improving one or another part of the world. The theme for this year’s event is “The Great Unveiling,” which refers in part to the conference’s new location, but also to new ideas due to be debuted here.
So why should managers care what’s happening here? Because the best new ideas helps make good managers better. The joke among TEDsters (an annoying term, yes, but it has stuck) is that attending the conference is an endurance sport. It’s one thing to be in a room listening to spectacular insights for a few hours. It’s another to be doing so for half a week. Nonetheless, part of the experience you get from being at events like TED is that feeling of being overwhelmed: someone just said what feels like the smartest thing you ever heard — and then the next speaker says what feels like the smartest thing you ever heard — and then … well, you get the idea. It’s intellectually exhausting, but it’s also thrilling. And, during the best talks, you can’t help thinking: How can I act on this?
MIT: What can we learn about the current and upcoming copyright and innovation wars from how they’ve gone in the past?
Lessig: What we learn is there’s a lot of crying and screaming at any moment of significant technical change. Those who are flourishing and prospering from the current technology are the loudest screamers. But the market quickly figures out how to profit in the context of the new technology, and pretty soon into the battle, the competitive system drives people to focus on how to make money rather than how to try to stop progress. That’s what’s beginning to happen right now. And that’s what really makes Remix optimistic.
MIT: How does this hybrid economy that you posit in the book change the definition of the word “original”?
Lessig: In a hybrid world where lots of people are developing and spreading remixes, the question of originality is very important. But in fact it becomes harder to demonstrate your talent or your creativity in this context because your creativity comes from your ability to demonstrate a deeper understanding of the material that you’re working with. People who’ve never done remixes, or have never gotten close to people doing remixes, think it’s easy. They think it’s all about just copying. But to do it well requires some pretty significant talent. It’s different from writing a song from scratch but it still is a talent that’s going to be creating a significant amount of competition among people trying to do it well.
MIT: There have always been cover versions in which the performer totally re-imagines the original. How is what’s happening now different from that?
Lessig: In one sense it’s exactly like that, in one sense it’s about how do you re-use or remake an earlier bit of creativity. But rather than it being one bit of creativity, like one song, or one album, it’s mixing together a whole bunch of different bits of creativity and creating something new out of it. What we need is what people who do cover versions have the right to, non-discriminatory access to the bits of culture that might be put together to produce something interesting or new and compelling.
MIT: Many examples in Remix come from the entertainment business. Can you give us some good, kind of pithy examples of how the notion of a read/write culture is relevant to the non-entertainment businesses?
Lessig: It started with the free software movement. GNU Linux begins with Richard Stallman launching the GNU movement to build a free operating system. Then Linus Torvalds coming along and provides the kernel so that by 1994 or 1995 it begins to be good enough that it could compete with Microsoft as an operating system. At that point, commercial entities like Red Hat come and say, “Wow, here’s a great opportunity for us,” and they try to leverage that sharing economy through a commercial entity. Red Hat was just one of many to produce value for the commercial entity. That’s a classic paradigm of a hybrid. A company like Red Hat needs to make sure that it innovates in a way that doesn’t poison the sharing economy, that’s contributing to the production of Linux. They’ve got to encourage openness in the way they function so they don’t begin to seem like the enemy. The rest of the creative world is going to look more like Red Hat or Ubuntu in the future, than it looks like IBM or the Microsoft of 10 years ago.
MIT: Web 2.0 is famously about harnessing this sort of collective intelligence, particularly from data that people cast off rather than input directly. What do you see as the most compelling examples of products or services or works of art coming out of data that people cast off?
Lessig: The most compelling example is Google. Google’s enormous power comes from the company figuring out very early on that if they captured every bit of data, they could build an enormous value on top of it. When you search Google, Google’s giving you something and you’re giving Google something. The search itself isn’t giving Google anything. But when you then respond to the results of the search by picking a particular link, Google learns something from that, and when Google matches that to everything else you’ve done, Google learns an enormous amount in addition to what you’re giving, what you give just by clicking a particular link. It’s architected to make it so that when I’m doing what I want to do I’m giving Google something of enormous value that it can then leverage. Economists will say this is not new to the market. Financial markets function by trading on the value produced by information produced by people making trades in the marketplace. I learn something when I start seeing prices going up on a certain stock. I learn something about that company that I otherwise wouldn’t have known. The people who are making the trades, because of the rules of the marketplace, can’t help but reveal that information. They’d much rather be able to trade it secretly and not reveal the price exchange, but the market imposes that constraint so that the whole market benefits from the revealing of that information. It’s not like this is the first time we’ve found ways to begin to produce value out of information that’s unintentionally or, as a by-product, revealed. But I think that the Internet lets us leverage that value much more than we ever have been able to before.
For more on Lawrence Lessig’s work, visit his website. A free, Creative Commons-licensed version of Remix will be available there shortly.
Lawrence Lessig thinks there’s a war against innovation going on. Back in February 2007, at the TED conference, he presented a remarkable talk on the topic. The champion of copyright reform and founder of Creative Commons began his rapid-fire talk by noting how John Philips Sousa, the master of American march music, was chagrined a century ago by the invention of the phonograph because he feared it would end entertainment as a form in which amateurs could be the stars. It limited choices, he fretted: an argument one could make about large media companies today. During a tour de force presentation, Lessig galloped through a century of the battle between rights holders and innovators, inexorably moving to today’s ascent of user-generated content. Thanks to such mashups, we’ve got a high-tech realization of Sousa’s dream , amateurs getting heard.
Especially when he examined how BMI killed the ASCAP monopoly on music copyrights back in the 1940s, Lessig made a point worth noting now: The technology may be different and the money in question may be larger, but the current battles between rights holders and innovators are mirrors of ones that have played out over at least the past century. But don’t take my word for it: See the talk for yourself:
Lessig has just published a new book, Remix, that extends his TED presentation. Tomorrow in this space we’ll talk to him about it.
Transparency, accidental innovation, trust, collaboration — as sustainability affects how the world works, so will it affect how business works in the world.
We’re wary of using pop culture references to make management points. When you do that, even with pieces of pop culture that are, in part about business and management, like the television series Mad Men, you usually get articles about how to become better managers from thinking hard about a television show, or, laughably, something like this.
Then 
The day’s talked ranged from Evan Williams (that’s him to the right) telling the story of Twitter (so far) to Evan Schwartz revealing a mystery behind The Wizard of Oz; Jennifer Mather revealing the intelligence the octopus to an unveiling (by yet another member of the MIT Media Lab) of a fascinating new children’s toy. More on all that later (the first morning session begins shortly). Sustainability has been an enormous theme at this year’s TED; we’ll be covering some of those talks on MIT Sloan Management Review’s 
The day ended, of course, with a lavish party. You know it’s going to be a good party when you’re met at the front door by a flowered rendering of a large green elephant. 
This week, 
