- Greg

In my experience, any political/union mobilization talent worth their salt can TKO any given CMO on any given day—because they do for zilch (http://www.zilchbook.com/) what the status quo would far sooner take six months to mull over. I live in a small arts community/blue collar town in SW Ontario (Stratford, home to the big theatre festival) where innovation in the arts, IT and digital media (http://stratfordcampus.uwaterloo.ca/) is taken very, very seriously…and it happens, because the scale of things is do-able here. The politics of innovation is as important as the innovation itself (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works)

An example from the politics of food: Fair Trade coffee’s tipping point wasn’t the decades of small-scale activism from all across Latin America and North Africa, essential though that ‘dripdripdrip’ from below was.

No: it was when Nestlé’s decided that value-add ‘artisanal coffees’—the value-add often being the social activism of the coffee hacienda owners on behalf of their workers (from school uniforms to soccer balls to subsidized healthcare)—were (duh) where the margins were.

The elephant rolled over; Fair Trade took off. This is however a simple example. Your cautionary reference to Thomas Kuhn in http://www.digitaltonto.com/2012/when-is-content-king/ suggests to me there are indeed ‘tectonic plates’ to the structure of every revolution, vectors of forces sometimes exceedingly difficult to parse out.

Point is, the status quo is far more vulnerable than we think; inertia is, after all, a state of inactivity. Activity destabilizes the status quo; focused activity moves it; focused activity dedicated to real change breaks the game open.

Here’s a bird’s eye view of inertia moving at full speed, as it were: the Soviet-led Politburo debates on what to do with Czechoslovakia in 1968: http://library.thinkquest.org/C001155/documents/index.htm

Enjoy.

- Greg

- Greg

- Greg

love this:

And it is the hacking that produces change. There is no plan to guide it nor a metric to evaluate it, because it arises when plans and metrics leave needs unmet.
So, if you want to create an innovation revolution, don’t go in search of a messiah, find your tent city instead. You can be sure it is close by, but it is usually hiding, waiting to be set free.

- Greg

Great story – and insight. I had a chance to visit Russia in the ’70′s – and saw some of the black market “hacks” first hand. I was briefly detained for trying to exploit one – but that’s an entirely separate story. Safe to say I survived – passport intact.

Thanks for sharing. I may elect to quote from this (with links and reference of course) as a part of the coverage I do in the healthcare space. There are some similarities that are worth noting – and like much of global history – we seem forever doomed to repeat it in both large and small ways.