John Winsor

Selective Memory

Charlie, one of my ten year old sons, got a homework assignment last night. He was to use a dictionary to find the Guide Words for dfferent words. I had forgotten what Guide Words are. If you're like me, they are the words at the top of the page in a dictionary that guide the search for the word you're looking for. Guide words are an artifact of the analogue dictionary and not really needed using an online dictionary.

So, that meant finding a Dictionary. First our house. None. Then 3 nieghbors. Nope. The fourth nieghbor is a high school drama and english teacher. Sure enough, he had a few. I asked to borrow one but he kindly suggested we keep it snince he hadn't opened it up in years. I had forgotten how beautiful a great dictionary is. 

While technology changes our access to new ways of doing things exponentially culture tends to change much more slowly and incrementally. There's a lot of tension between these two growth curves. And, with this tension comes selective memory. 

Thank You

Those are two words I don’t say enough. I was reminded of that this last week with the passing of my father-in-law, Harry Johnson. Harry was an amazing guy. He was an entrepreneur and had a career that spanned a few different industries.

The most inspiring thing about Harry was his infectious positivity. He was always interested in you. You were always the center of a conversation with him. There was always a little chuckle. Always a smile. And, a deep sense of gratitude you could see in his eyes.

One of the favorite Johnson family stories was that no matter who showed up to the front door, a friend of one of the kids or a door-to-door vacuum salesman, they were always invited in for dinner. To Harry, family was the center of the universe. And, everyone was family.

It’s not about what we do for a living, how good we are at something but it’s about being human and sharing the infectious positive energy that we as humans have, if we only let ourselves tap into it.

Thank you, Harry. What a wonderfully positive influence you had on me and everyone else that knew you.

 

How Do We Shrink?

Sitting here tonight watching CNN and thinking about the looming US Government shutdown. We have always been a culture of growth. We grow our communities. We grow our businesses. We grow the size of our houses. We grow our incomes. We even talk about growing emotionally. The philosophy of growth is so engrained in our collective conciousness. In fact, we fundamentally believe that:

Growing = Winning

and

Shrinking = Loosing

But, is that really true? What happens when things need to get smaller. I was struck by the wonderful NY Times article about the downsizing of Detroit. How does Detroit shrink? What city services will be delivered to which neighborhoods? There are hard decision to be made.

What would happen if we lived in a smaller house? What happens if our incomes shrink?

In business, technology creates deflationary pressure on almost everything, how do we accept shrinking in a culture of growth?

My sense is we're looking through the wrong lens. It shouldn't be a trade off between growing and shrinking.

Maybe it's about setting up our businesses and our lives in a flexible way so that we can deal with whatever comes our way.

 

The Power of Creating an Ecotone

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why companies are successful in the long-run. It definitely has to do the size of a company’s ecotone.

Ecotone, you ask? This is something I wrote in Flipped to explain it.

Many models can be used to aid the thinking about the relationships that exist in any community or ecosystem and how they might inform a bottom-up strategy and prompt real innovation. I like to think of this eco-system approach in terms of an “ecotone.”

An ecotone is a place where two different, distinctive ecosystems meet, such as where a forest and a wetland meet. In this zone, the ecosystem is neither a forest nor a wetland, but has all of the attributes of both. Ecotone is used to describe a place where evolution happens, where a natural dialogue is occurring. In the business world, all brands live in an ecosystem made up of many components. An ecotone from this perspective can represent the opportunity that lies within the overlap of a business or brand and its market.

The bigger the ecotone – the more overlap between the two ecosystems internally and externally – the deeper the dialogue and the greater the opportunity is for the business. For most companies, it is at the fringes of the organization that the ecotone exists and where all the growth in understanding and meaning happens. This is also true in natural systems where an organism or ecosystem expands at its fringes.

While every brand’s ecotone is different. I’ve been thinking lately that maybe the brands with the largest ecotones, ones where internal cultures and external cultures mirror one and other. These brands deeply understand and interact with their customers in a seemless way. Think about Harley-Davidson, Nike, Apple and Patagonia. These cult like brands have two advantages. They have a deeper, more defensible, relationship with their customers. Both employees and customers are part of the same culture, something that’s bigger than the brand itself.

Maybe instead of spending a lot of time trying to convince customers that you’re product is better than your competitors it might be worth creating an internal culture that is a matter of creating Esho Funi.

Esho Funi?

It certainly deserves it’s own post.

My Favorite Ads Worth Spreading at TED

It was an honor to be a judge for TED's first annual Ads Worth Spreading Intiative. This feels like a really important project. As we become more digitally connected what an ad is has changed. When I had a chance to look at all of the great enteries I was most interested in ads that couldn't have been made before the explosion of digital connectivity. This has brought on a new way to collaboratively produce new kinds of messages. A couple of my favorites that exemplify this new shift are The Wilderness Downtown.

and The Johnny Cash Project

   

While these two are a product of a new medium, lot's of others with more traditional story arcs really struck a cord for me.

First, was an amazing ad for the Topsy Foundation:

And, this great ad for Dulux:

As advertising creativity change accelerates it's important to have a new kinds of encouragement, like TED's Ads Worth Spreading Initiative.

Is This the End of Advertising?

Deb Roy was one of my favorite speakers at this year's TED. What started as an exploration into how his son begins to speak and develop language. Deb has begun to point his tools towards public media creating both a content graph and a social graph. This segment starts at 11:00. So my question is when we can objectively connect every piece of content with every social conversation and track real media consumption, engagement and behavior, how will advertising compete with everything all the other content?

My sense is that advertising that can quantifiably effect cultural change will be worth a lot more and all other advertising will be worth a whole lot less.

Art Can Inspire Change

Being at TED last week was mindblowing, as always. I'll be sharing some of my favorite talks here. To start with check out JR and how he's changing the world through his photography.

It's time for all of us to take the tools we have and use them to promote postive social and cultural change.

#1000: Some of My Favorite Posts in the Last Six Years

For the past few weeks I've been stuck on post #999. I was worried about what to write for post #1000. It seemed so monumental, in a small way. I started blogging back in 2005. It's been such a great place to collect my thoughts.

It wasn't until I was having a beer with Faris (@faris) and Rosie (@rosieiman) last week and they broke the log jam. Faris said something like, "Reaching the 1000th post might be important to you but probably not for everyone else." He has it so right. Thanks, Faris.

Going through my posts the ones that resonated weren't about work but more about life. So, in the spirit of looking backwards for a moment here are some of my favorite posts over the past 6 years. Enjoy.

1. The Age of Soloing has Begun

2. Context 

3. Time?

4. Engaged Disconnection

5. Quit Trying So Hard

6. Pay Attention to the Small Stuff

7. In-Security

8. Are You Trapped?

9. Love Love, Love Hate

10. #Give 5 Things Away

11. In Media Vita

12. Dare to Fail

13. Go Backwards

14. Be More Human

15. Cultural Obesity

16. New Insights

17. The Power of Falling

18. Learning to Lose

19. Techno-Lonliness

20. Way Deep

21. Deep in the Heart of the Matter

22. Take off Deep

23. Harry And Boeing

24. Being Core

25. L > C

 

Good to Have the Powder Back

EVC 1.09.11 from john winsor on Vimeo.

I love powder. Deep, thick, choking powder. It's nice to have it back.

Are You Trapped?

I'm sure the CEO of American Airlines can see Southwest fly over and sees the need for change. But, he has too many legacy commitments to make it happen.

Would you rather play defense, defending outdated business models, or play offense and create new ones?

You begin to become trapped by your own devices when you hire your first employee, you commit to your first office space. The goal, in the age of abundance, is to become unshackeled from these restrictions.