So some ways you might:

1. Travel. These days when so much work can be done over skype, phone and in one’s pajamas, its often unclear why you need to board a jet plane. But it’s exactly the meta context that makes “live” incredibly important. Remember that over 50% of the US population doesn’t work for “the man”, by being either freelancers or solopreneurs. That means that we all need places and occasions for serendipity to occur. I believe live events take on more importance in the Social Era because we need places for individuals to find and connect with others. And, importantly for our careers, we need to budget both time and monies for this. I allot 20% of my annual budget for what I call “serendipity creation”. Serendipity is what allows for newness — new ideas, new people, and new connections. If you’re always hanging with the same tribe, you’ll always think the same thoughts.

Action item: How will you create more serendipity? And, do you know how much are you willing to budget for it?

2. People. I spend about 40+ hours organizing and pre-planning a trip that takes 3 days. Why? Because I’m teeing up the conversation to be a good one — by sharing what I’m interested in already, why I want to meet, sometimes sending content ahead of time, and definitely studying up on the other person’s interests. Doing all that prep work means we can go deeper into discussion. Drake Baer, a fellow writer, and I met this trip and a few key nuggets from that conversation fundamentally illuminated the work I’ve done thus far, and what I’ll work on next. The setup ahead of time was central to making our time together work. It’s not like we’re starting from scratch of “who are you”, and “who are we to one another”… Once there, I also make sure to choose a great place to meet, and then to confirm the night before that we’re on. All of that sets up the context of a great exchange. I’ll just say that meeting Drake Baer alone sparked an inspiration deluge that will fuel several weeks of ideas. I met about 10 people this trip that filled the brain, aka my journal, with new things to think about.

Action item: Are you intentional about who you need to meet and to set up those meetings with good context setting?

3. Books. So I meet a lot of people who say they are lucky if they read one book a year. On a trip like this, I packed 5 research papers. I read them each twice, and then took copious notes. Then, I went through all those notes to create a summary note to myself on what I learned. That step-by-step process is how I digest information and especially new research in the field of management. Now you could roll your eyes a bit and think, but… Nilofer, thinking (and the resulting writing/speaking) is what you do for a living. But to say that is to miss a key point: in the social era and our modern day economy, thinking new thoughts and connecting ideas / people together is what allows everyone to create value. Reading blogs is all fine and good but most will not enable you to have a trans-formative idea. By its very nature, most blog posts are skimming or representing an older idea. Those creating easy lists will motivate or inspire for a few minutes, maybe even a day. Those creating pithy comments will remind you of something you already know to be true. All good, and fine. But if you are going to be a source for value creation… you need to be thinking. And, fersure, you won’t even be thinking about an idea for long enough time to formulate an opinion, connect it to another idea, or to have your old opinion changed if you’re not reading. Long-form reading of research or of books is about letting you meditate on an idea, to let it ruminate inside you and then to let that shape you.

Action item: Make a budget of an hour a week or an hour a day to let yourself grow through books.When will that be? Honor it.

If the industrial era was about building things, the social era is about connecting things, people and ideas. These three action items will enable you to do that. And perhaps even create for a you a real problem: an inspiration deluge.

What will you do to fuel your own ability to connect things, people, and ideas?

The post 3 Ways To Fuel Your Own Growth appeared first on Nilofer Merchant.

This is a delightful tiny, but busy bakery.  Everyone in town either knows first-hand how good the bread is or has been tipped off by Yelp.

I was visiting from Houston (recently relocated) and yearning for some sourdough.  These friendly ladies sold me and my friends a sourdough baguette ($2/baguette) and to top it off, they gave me some sourdough starter.  For free.  You need to bring your own lidded, airtight container, and if they have enough starter to give away, they will happily fill your container nearly to the brim.

This sent me on a quick run to the Walgreens on San Pablo Avenue and Gilman,  and they did not have any plastic containers!  I headed over to REI where I almost paid for a $10 hardcore camping-style container.  I told an employee my story, and he ran upstairs to give me a Pilot gas station plastic mug with a lid.  He found said cup in the employee lost and found bin.  I washed it next door in Chipotle’s bathroom and then returned to Acme where they filled it up.  (You can see I was desperate and willing.)

Fast forward three weeks: I fed this sourdough for three weeks in Houston and baked delightful bread.  I followed instructions from King Arthur Flour for sourdough baguettes.  All of my Cali-transplant coworkers in Houston are digging the sourdough, too, now.  We all say it tastes better and more authentic than any “sourdough” you can get in Houston.

Thank you, Acme Bread Company and kind REI employee, for my delicious sourdough.  I promise to send all of my friends, family, and fellow Yelpers here (both to Acme and REI) as much as I can!

You don’t get this kind of care and passion by hiring simply for a job description or by asking people to fit into a box. No way. People are not cogs and they don’t thrive if they feel treated as such. Every leader knows that success comes from how you bring together talent, purpose and culture. Purpose brings out the best in people and the best people. More on that thread here.

Of course, I’ve written about REI in the Social Era and I hope I can always talk about them with this much enthusiasm. REI rocks because they embody their purpose, which gives their brand (and their people) meaning.

Do you have similar stories of other companies? Share ‘em below. We ought to celebrate them.

The post Why I Love REI appeared first on Nilofer Merchant.

The measure will shape the e-commerce space, certainly affecting Ebay, Amazon, Etsy and others.  The bill still needs to pass the GOP-controlled House of Representatives and receive the signature of President Obama, a supporter, to become law. The legislation would require Web-based retailers with sales of at least $1M to collect sales taxes for the states where they ship goods and merchandise.

E-commerce accounted for $225B in revenues in 2012, according to the US Department of Commerce. To put this in practical terms using my state… California would experience between 15-20% of that volume, at 9.25% tax rate, so … well, it’s easy to do that math and know why this is a big deal. Amazon, which until recently was dead-set against a national online sales tax, now embraces it as it looks to expand its physical operations across the USA. eBay, Amazon’s rival, argues the tax would hinder its sellers who do more than $1 million in out-of-state sales annually. In a recent letter to eBay sellers, Chief Executive John Donahoe pushed the suggestion that the law should exempt any firms that have fewer than 50 employees or make less than $10 million annually on out-of-state sales. With no national way to establish the tax base, calculating taxes could become it’s own nightmare of a business problem (and I could imagine both Amazon and Intuit offerings to address the need).  As you might imagine, national and regional chains are tired of being showrooms for shoppers (hello Best Buy!) so they’ll be lobbying hard to pass this legislation and thus change the market dynamic. They are sick of having customers shop in their stores and then search on their smartphones for lower prices to buy it online. (That said, I think the regional chains are mostly deluding themselves to think this is the core issue of their problems.) According to a recent University of Tennessee study, states missed out on over $11 billion in uncollected taxes in 2012 from online purchases.

There are many times when being small, and Gazelle-like is an edge in the Social Era. But this legislative issue is one that benefits the Gorillas’ of the world. It means that small independent players *need* the efficiency and capabilities of a big platform like Amazon or Ebay to be able to do their business, ideally handling this tax payment issue on their behalf. That makes me think that this tax issue changes the relationship from an interdependence to a reliance. Power will jump to the platform players like Amazon.

And that sound you are hearing is the tide changing. Ecommerce used to be the cheapest way to buy, but no longer will be.  One to watch.

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Earlier this week, I shared with you the backstage story of nervousness just as I was about to give my talk at TED2013. Two hours before I was shaking violently. In the moment itself, I had a smile on my face and showed up fully alive. What happened in the middle is a trick you can use next time you want to really resonate with a crowd or even just one person.

A month before the talk, someone I hadn’t yet met in person wrote a note asking if a few people could take me out to breakfast the morning of the talk as a way of showing support. I was pretty sure I would have thrown up on their shoes that morning of, so I’m glad I never said yes. Instead, I suggested they wear a bright color and sit up front in the audience. When you see a few friendly face, you remember how much a community wants you to do well. Whenever that happens, I can stop fretting about remembering every idea I had on the topic, and instead just connect. I was counting on this technique to ground me, so that I wouldn’t mentally run up the ladder into my head. When I speak from my head alone, I am going to try and impress with braininess. When a speaker combines head and heart, they not only inform, they resonate.

As I walked into the hall, I made eye contact with Jane McGonigal. If you don’t already know of Jane, you should. She’s a fellow TED speaker, the NYT best-selling author of Reality is Broken, and a brilliant game designer. (I met her years ago playing Werewolf, which is a weird strategy game, at something called Foo Camp at 1:00 in the morning or something like that.) She made a heart with her hand, and gave me a big smile from a few rows away. (Here, in this picture, she’s reproducing the moment for posterity … just caught on my cell phone camera).

I calmed right down.

So that’s the trick. It’s so simple, perhaps even too simple to believe. But research shows people listen better when they connect with you, emotionally. No faster way to do that than to smile. or Laugh. It’s a stance or asana you can use anytime. In family life, in meetings, and if you are ever lucky enough to address a crowd. Just lift up one corner of your mouth and then the other.

The post The “Trick” to Calm Your Speaker Nerves appeared first on Nilofer Merchant.

Language encodes our thinking. To write a new future, we need to use a new language. Let’s stop focusing on the overly narrow term “social media”. Let’s simply be social.

Instead of capturing value, let’s find new ways of creating value, together.

Think of collaborators as those you work with. Let’s have co-creators design what to build. Let’s ask communities to create scale. And, when we embed this new social language — words such as collaboration and purpose and community — into our discussions, value creation will flow. Relationships are to the social era, what efficiency was to the industrial era. And we all remember what relationships are built on, don’t we? Trust. After decades of building business on capital, oil, land and silicon, trust will be our foundation for what we create next.

Get the full article by going here: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/03/ideas-bank/we-need-a-new-language-for-the-collaborative-age

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Critics: These are smart people who know something about your field. They are taking a hard look at your work and are not loving it. You’ll probably want to listen to what they have to say, and make some adjustments to your work based on their thoughtful comments.

Lovers: These people are invested in you and are also giving you negative but rational feedback because they want you to improve. Listen to them, too.

Frenemies: Ooooh, this quadrant is tricky. These people really know how to hurt you, because they know you personally or know your work pretty well. But at the end of the day, their criticism is not actually about your work—it’s about you personally. And they aren’t actually interested in a productive conversation that will result in you becoming better at what you do. They just wanna undermine you. Dishonorable mention goes to The Hater Within, aka the irrational voice inside you that says you suck, which usually falls into this quadrant. Tell all of these fools to sit down and shut up.

Haters: This is your garden-variety, often anonymous troll who wants to tear down everything about you for no rational reason. Folks in this quadrant are easy to write off because they’re counterproductive and you don’t even know them. Ignore! Engaging won’t make you any better at what you do. And then rest easy, because having haters is proof your work is finding a wide audience and is sparking conversation. Own it.

And so for those of you that wonder if I have ever read any of my YouTube comments, the answer is No. I suspect but have not given into temptation to see if my TED.com talk has gotten trashed over at YouTube. That’s because I saw what it did to friends who have gone before me.  The people who are (as my friend Brene Brown would say) in the Arena of Life, showing up to fight for what they love… they are worth listening to.

For your own personal mastery, you need to get feedback that is constructively shaping you forward. So, don’t give the wrong people permissions they haven’t earned.  For family, friends, colleagues, or strangers — look at the classification and decide if they have earned the right to criticize, and then decide whether to listen to their point of view.

P.S. So if you happen to see a friend’s video on You Tube, don’t start the conversation about their hard work they are putting out into the world with “those idiots on YouTube…” You are simply not putting your mouth where your heart is.  (And, yes, this happens more than you might imagine and so there is plenty of evidence that this doesn’t bring two people closer together.)

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I can hardly believe it.

People always wonder if speakers are nervous. The question is, with enough practice, does this level of professional speaking ever get easy? I myself have had that question, wondering if I was “the only one” who got super nervous for big venues. As I got ready for TED starting, I looked around at my fellow colleagues who were going to speak in the same session. There in one corner was the rockstar, Bono, a former governor, 2 superb economists who teach at top schools (and therefore audiences all the time), and so on. Some were still rehearsing hand gestures in their seat before going on, others were pacing like crazy, one looked like she was going to throw up. Even Bono’s full-surround entourage couldn’t hide the fact that even he was breathing a little uneven.

About two hours before heading into the hall, I was a mess. I hadn’t had enough coffee. My hair was still wet because I didn’t have time to dry it. I was running late to the green room. As I was scurrying around, one errand I had to do was meet a fellow conference attendee, so I could borrow her earrings.

As I was taking off mine to swap, I could barely do the simple task. I wondered what was going on, and then I looked down at my hands. I was shaking violently. “I never do that”, I thought. Well, apparently, I never do that unless I’m facing the red-dot of TED, 6 cameras, 2,000 people live (and countless others watching elsewhere) in this epic arena.

But you know what I’ve learned? Nervousness says you care.

I had no desire, let alone ability to be anything other than my authentic self. I cared.  I wanted the idea to be so clearly delivered, so the idea could spread. What I wanted that day was to show up, fully alive, and be heard.

Well, you can see for yourself how that went.

(I’ll share more what turned the nervousness to calm, in a future post. My hands are shaking a bit, even now as I share the news.)

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(image source: TattooArtists.org)

There’s an idea I’ve held inside my brain, like some kind of brain tattoo, indelibly stamped. It’s been there for some 30-years now. It goes something like this: “You’ll feel better when it quits hurting”. I’ve applied this to all sorts of things from business to personal. It came to mind as I was scaling organizations, or launching products on unreasonable schedules, or dealing with people issues. And for sure, it came to mind whenever I was trying to change some personal habit, especially fitness-related stuff. Though I credit it for a certain kind of perseverance and resolve, I realize it also forms a blanket ideology that everything worth having also has to be hard.

To have a braintattoo is to let an idea or construct inform everything.

Tattoos were once considered permanent, but no longer. It’s now possible to remove them, even if partially.

I’m thinking the same must be true for Brain Tattoos. To remove a brain tattoo would be to remove a belief system you no longer wish to inform everything else. Perhaps that belief system served for a time, but it no longer does. Perhaps it is an outdated notion. Perhaps you have grown beyond it.

Certainly I’m ready to let go of the “it must be hard” brain tattoo. But then, I started to wonder if I could choose a tattoo to imprint on my brain, what would it be?

What would yours be?

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What is a source of fulfillment in your life? Is it work? Or perhaps a non-profit you work with? Or perhaps the family you are raising? Whatever it is, I bet it is something you personally value. Sometimes that comes from our paid work, our careers, and sometimes not.

From my own experience of 20+ years working with or in “corporate” Fortune 500 work and in the research I follow — work satisfaction was nearly obliterated by the pressures of deadlines, of work that went no where, of overwork, of bosses demands that made no sense, of being told what to do without asking what you know that could solve the problem.

So it was through that lens that I watched this recent talk by researcher and professor Dan Ariely. Some of you might know of him — a behavioral economist who has written Predictably Irrational & Others. This talk is on the meaning of work:

Ariely points out that when we think about work, the “usual” thinking about motivation is tied to payment. In other words conventional thinking is that money is why people work.  He shares a series of specific projects he’s been doing that *proves* how much meaning, engagement and ownership change our experience of value creation. It’s a great set of stories about how much we care if someone will use our work, how much we fundamentally care about the thing we’ve made ourselves. Like I said in Social Era, value creation has changed; You don’t have to sell me the thing I helped make. In other words, when people co-create products and services, it disrupts the thinking of traditional strategists and their “value chain”. In the Social Era, value creation derives from commitment, not a transaction where the consumer is at the end of a long supply chain. Meaning, co-creation, overcoming challenges, sense of ownership, relationship to our personal identity, and — of course — pride all matter in how value is derived.

There’s plenty of empirical data to support the strategic direction Ariely talks of. Gallup, the research firm, recently did a meta-analysis across 199 studies covering 152 organizations, 44 industries, and 26 countries. It showed that high employee engagement brings an uplift of every business performance number. Profitability up 16%, Productivity up 18%, customer loyalty up 12% and quality up an incredible 60%. I wrote about that a few years back, here, in the piece called People are Not Cogs.

Seeing this talk has me thinking and asking:
How do you create your own pride, and motivation at work? Or, with your kids?
Are they one and the same, or different and how?
What is it you measure this value creation by?

Many times over the last few years — since I have moved from running a company to having a portfolio career — I wonder how to measure “success”. I can believe I am purpose aligned but still feel unclear if “success” is happening because I lack a “hard” metric. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. The reason many of us struggle with the meaning / ownership / pride thing is because it’s hard to measure. Which is why I think many  cling to the paycheck as a proxy for value creation measurement.

What do you think? What say you on this thread of how we measure fulfillment at work?

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But what is it that is said about the people who ultimately change the world?  “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”- Ghandi

Larry Lessig, if you don’t already know of him is one of the original creators of the Creative Commons. Creative commons lets any individual creator manage their rights to content, fundamentally updating the original notion of copyright to be less-lawyer intensive and right-sized for the Social Era. Since then, he’s gone one to support the Sunlight Foundation, aimed at opening up transparency to who is financing what. More recently, he’s been focused on dealing with political corruption, at RootStrikers.

His TED2013 talk at TED was, well, a stunning talk, one of my top 5 that I’ve been waiting to share…and it went live on TED.com today. Although it’s focused on the US, the issues it raises apply far more broadly.

“I get this sense of impossible, but I don’t buy it,” Lessig said. “This is a solvable issue. Think about the issues our parents tried to solve in the twentieth century–racism, sexism, or the issue we’ve been fighting this century, homophobia. Those are hard issues. You don’t just wake up one day no longer a racist,” he describes lyrically. “This is a problem of incentives. Change the incentives and the behavior changes.” When Connecticut first adopted the system, 78% of elected representatives gave up on large contributions within the first year.

Lessig closed with a story that I have been incredibly struck by. He said that he had kids, and he imagined a doctor saying ‘your son has terminal inoperable brain cancer. There is no doubt he would die, and there’s nothing you can do.’ He then asks … Would I do nothing?  Would I just sit there? Of course not. I would do EVERYTHING I could do because this is what love means. “The odds are irrelevant. You do whatever the hell you can, the odds be damned.”

And the note I made to myself that I want to pass on to you:

What is it you love SO MUCH that you are willing to fight for it?

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