Social Media and Cultivating Relationships

Today, I am in a grateful mood. I am thankful for all of the dynamic and inspiring relationships with friends, family, co-workers and business associates over the years. It's really important to cultivate them over time. I will use a metaphor here which is a little obvious and blog related. Cultivating relationships is a life long journey. It's never complete nor fully realized. Especially now in these challenging times, sometimes all we have are these relationships and not much else. What's interesting is the word relationship means in one sense to relate to one another, or between entities or things, thus communicate. The ability to communicate and interact then is the glue which connects people, organizations into relationships, be they personal, business, philantrophic, or something in between.

From a marketing and business development view, relationships are essential. Where we would be without them? I find the need to cultivate and nurture relationships an essential part of daily life regardless of the area. Plus, with today's work culture our personal life is blending into our worklife and vice versa. It's unavoidable. I know I have a lot to learn about being in relationships, and often realize I have friends I haven't said hello to in years or the last six-months. Using social/professional media elements such as LinkedIN, Plaxo, Facebook or Twitter to stay in touch is very fruitful. One simple thing I really like is wishing people happy birtday when I remember to do it and say a quick hello usually via email. Our social media services are very good at telling us about birthdays. It's an easy step to take once a week and send well wishes to a handful of people you care about now. And, it has secondary benefits beyond the primary one of being in communication with one another, relating to each other. It shows you are present in someone's life so they know they can reach out to you, whether for personal, professional or other reasons.

So, cultivate those relationships today. They really matter!

(image is from a walk I took with my family near Southwest Harbor, ME in Acadia a few years ago)

The Ten Faces of Innovation, Tom Kelley and IDEO

AN INFLUENTIAL BOOK

About a year ago I found this book. It was after I had read The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley, an earlier book published in 2001. The first book took me a year to finish. The Ten Faces of Innovation, published in 2005, took me a month. Tom Kelley wrote it over a period of many years while working within IDEO, a unique and transformative, multi-faceted internaltional design consultancy.

The book opens by reviewing how damaging the devil's advocate process or activity is to innovation and suggests offers alternatives to the dreaded devil's advocate. What I like about the book is it sketches Ten very useful character traits helpful, no essential, for innovation. The motivation for this is the fact no organization can rest on its laurels of past successes but keep aspiring to capture or embody innovative concepts or ideas or work processes which might propell their business forward. The ten faces are organized into three rich categories: Learning Personas, Organizing Personas, Building Personas.

• LEARNING PERSONAS - Organizations need to constantly grow and develop their knowledge base and enrich their informational context to serve their customers, thus learning personas are super critical:

  The Anthropologist -

  The Experimenter -

  The Cross Pollinator -

• ORGANIZAING PERSONAS - Individuals in organizations who like to pull together information, factors influencing a design or operational challenge and enjoy helping to orchestrate strategic and/or tactical interactions to achieve results and stay focused.

  The Collaborator -

  The Hurdler -

  The Director -

• BUILDING PERSONAS - They pull together insights gained from the Learning Personas and Organizing Personas into a rich tapestry of experience in innovative combination together and unlikely, unique value added outcomes.

  The Experience Architect -

  The Set Designer -

  The Storyteller -

  The Caregiver -

WHY YOU & YOUR ORGANIZATION MIGHT NEED THIS:

Innovation is a collective, collaborative activity. The character traits or personas identified in the book taken independently, while still valuable, are no match for their power in combination together. Think about your work teams and your role(s). You wear many hats over the course of an average work week don't you? Tom Kelley renames the hats we wear. The personas are poignant descriptors of activities essential to building innovative processes within your workplace. What would happen if you read together this book as a team, discussed the various personas together and reflected on your work process together and asked how could it be redesigned or incorporate these ideas. You might quickly identify yourself with a number of the personas, but also realize you are a collection of personas which at various times rise to the surface to meet a specific need. It really helps to see the proverbial hats you wear through these characterizations. So often we try to be everything to everyone. The next time someone speaks up in a meeting and says, "Let me be the devil's advocate here", you'll have a shared background together and say, "Hey, rather than trying to burst the bubble on the idea right now, let's look at this like we're an anthropologist, or experimenter and try this out for a bit in conversation and see where it goes, it might lead someplace unexpected for us."

SOME INNOVATION APPLICATIONS

Fact finding / Data Collection Activities

Brainstorming / Design Charettes

Strategic Development Meetings

Connecting Values & Brand Inseperably

Workplace Design and Interaction Between Work groups

Product & Services Development

Enriching Your Customer Experience

Public Relations and Marketing your Business and Your Story (I really like that)

The book's website has reader stories sharing how the book influenced their worklife. It's really provacative reading to see how the book inspired other readers interested in further developing their worklife design strategies and work culture.

SO WHAT'S NEXT:

Transform your creative practice by exploring ideas such as one's in this book. Add value to the clients or customers you serve by growing your abilities to think strategically about their needs, how they operate and how they could be better, much better, perhaps even astound and amaze in the arena they operate. Explore and expand your strategic thinking abilities and alternate ways to see the big picture while knowing how to dig deep and really understand what motivates your customer, their stakeholders and move things forward. Most of all enjoy the process of trying new things and learning from what works and what does not!

Dan Reicher from Google Spoke at Yestermorrow

Last night I attended Dan Reicher's illuminating lecture at the Yestermorrow Design Build School in Warren. He spoke to a overflow crowd of summer program students, area professionals and interested public. He was there as part of Yestermorrow's weekly lecture series.

As director of Energy and Climate Initiatives at Google, former Assistant Secretary of Energy under the Clinton Administration and team member on the Obama transition team he offered a wide ranging yet extremely well-informed discussion of global energy issues, how they're connected to our local context in Vermont (He used to live in the Mad River Valley) and how Google intersects with them. He participated on helping originate key ideas in the Economic Stimulus Package pertaining to Energy and spoke also about the Climate legislation before congress right now.

He had some interesting quotes for slides, one of them from Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel who said, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste". He spoke to the potential for rapid transformation and change given our current systemic economic problems and how the economic stimulus package provides dramatic opportunities and funding sources to drive energy conservation and efficiency R&D to examine alternative and promising energy fuel options. What's interesting I think is how subtle and imperceptible stimulus related change is to us in Vermont. What we see is heightened activity on our local roads and highways and read about awards of grants and programs to non-profits in affordable housing, agricultural economy and health centers among a few examples. Dan spoke how the arrival of the Obama Administration really is changing the energy policy game in Washington. Their arrival and focus on these issues has released eight years of pent-up demand where alternative energy sources, energy efficiency and other key factors were routinely level funded and poorly supported by the former administration. Things really are different now and it's evident from where he sits.

As Director of energy and climate initiatives at Google, Dan is participating and shepherding some interesting projects along. One project relates to plug-in electric hybrids. He discussed Google's plug-in electric car initiatives where they modified Toyota Prius' aftermarket with additional batteries and installed plug in stations at 'Googleplex'. They made the cars readily available to staff to use as they wish. The gas mileage results were astounding for typical everyday driving at 93 MPG (Done by professionally trained drivers to model typical behavior) Googlers got 73 MPG in average googleplex short trips of 1-2 miles per day. Google envisions in 10 to 15 years possibly millions of such vehicles on the roads. Along the way, battery and electric charging technologies will in his mind no doubt improve.

He also spoke about Enhanced Geothermal Systems which I'd never heard of before. This is the kind of system which takes advantage of the earth's natural heat well below the earth's crust, kilometers below the surface. Water is pumped into the wells and run into the hot areas below and channeled back to the surface to produce electricity. He showed slides displaying the Geothermal energy potential in the U.S. at 3KM, 5KM and 10 KM below the surface. It's a promising technology getting lots of publicity and funding right now. Some issues though were enhanced seismicity (meaning prevalence for earthquakes) related to drilling deep wells although he said this is similar to oil and natural gas drilling where similar issues exist.

An over-arching theme emerged from this where he said virtually in any emerging and existing energy technology there are environmental and societal downsides which must be carefully considered. This is a pervasive theme and it's up to society and political systems to debate together the cost-benefit equations to determine the contingent 'right' answers. He did argue which ever alternative technologies are successful they would be working together and there was no magic new single transformation technology out there. No matter if it's wind, solar, enhanced geothermal, wave energy, traditional oil and gas extraction, bio-mass or cellulose fuel sources there are down-sides in to all of them. He share an anecdote about how public opinion is fickle in regards to this. He reminded us about the recent devastation near a coal plant where coal sludge literally despoiled an entire valley down south last summer and how public opinion didn't seem to get ruffled. This is in comparison to the passionate debate about Nuclear Energy and nuclear power plants and fear of plant accidents. You have two kinds of technologies both effecting the environment and people potentially disastrously with inconsistent concern and fears.

He spoke about the promise and obstacles facing deployment of industrial scale renew ables and plugging them into the smart grid. The biggest issue he said the smart grid effort faces is getting power lines to hook into future and existing generation sites. The permitting and entitlement process for power-lines is lengthy and potentially slowing of the roll-out of large scale generation. The other side to the equation is in the meanwhile, micro-grid power generation such as residential and small scale wind, solar, geothermal are very easy to deploy and likely will find success in the market place simultaneously to the slower development of the smart-grid and power transmission. Thus for all of us here in Vermont and elsewhere committed to small scale projects this is a great sign of promising times ahead.

The last thing I want to mention which was important I think to me and perhaps most importantly is Energy use of Google search at data centers behind our everyday searches. Dan mentioned how the search marketplace is extremely competitive and aware of its energy footprint and that great strides have been made to dramatically reduce power usage levels at Data Centers both at Google and with other search providers. He emphasized how Google really is focused here and as well, more importantly he hopes, on the bigger energy picture. He tried to convey how Google is committed to being involved in large scale energy related projects going forward. I think he did that very well.

Thanks Dan and Yestermorrow for a fascinating looking into global and local energy issues!

(I included an image from Google's 2006 Earthday logo to spice up the post)

National Life Group building earns LEED-EB silver certification

I'm proud to say a local business the National Life Group of Vermont in Montpelier, VT where I live recieved silver certification in the USGBC's LEED for Existing Buildings Program. The three building campus is among the largest in Vermont and employs many in my community and the surrounding area. It's fantastic to see a large corporation plunge into the LEED-EB process and complete the journey. They demonstrate yet again why they are a model VT business, setting examples for others to follow in the state and in their greater insurance industry.

The LEED-EB program purpose is to recognize exemplary performance upgrade efforts to existing buildings in energy efficiency through lighting upgrades and mechanical system optimization, reduction of water use, internal sustainability efforts such as green commuting programs, recycling and waste reduction among many factors. A silver level is the second level in a four tier recognition system, beginning with certified, then silver, gold and finally platinum. Each step is for increasingly better performance and efforts by the building owner.

To read more about the effort and those involved, including Tim Shea who helped lead the charge internally at National Life please see the link to an article at VermontBiz. As part of the effort, they installed at 73 KW solar electric photovoltaic array making it among the largest in Vermont. NRG Systems in Hinesburg has a 141 KW installed between it's two buildings and is also among the largest in Vermont. What's great is not who has the most PV installed it's that it's happening right here in cloudy New England and it's financially viable over the long haul!

The bottom-line is National Life's continued committment to Greening their facilities is another reason to pay attention to Vermont Businesses and the Green Valley of Vermont.

Reflecting on a Past soon to be our Future Again

Last summer seems so long ago now. It was a different world then. We were in the last few months of the outgoing Bush Administration, heavy into the Presidential campaign. Gas prices were still extremely high and there was a pervasive sense of urgency for change. It was especially so about energy use and moving as fast as possible towards energy independence and leaving behind a reliance on a fossil fuel based economy. Do you remember? How were you and your family behaving? We were kind of scared, spooked. We were all madly carpooling, riding bikes, looking seriously at buying hybrids and changing our daily behaviors in many other ways. Food costs were skyrocketing. Necessary staples like gallons of Milk and bread were at all time highs. Anything with corn as an essential ingredient was involved in the ethanol conversation and resource scarcity issues.

Reflect again. Now, a year later, we're in totally different place. Obama is our President. Global warming legislation passed in the House a few weeks ago and now moves to the Senate. Stimulus funding is making its way to States and local municipalities. (Who would have known a year ago any of this would be happening?) It's surreal. One thing which has changed though, is our collective sense of urgency has diminished. Gas prices at the pump have returned to pre-summer '08 costs. We're driving more, car pooling less. Prices in the supermarkets have lowered substantially. Houses are starting to sell again, albeit slowly. However, many of us are unemployed or underemployed. It's excruciating how much the economic meltdown has effected us all. Many of us are barely making ends meet. So many of the things we took for granted even last summer have all come into question. It's going to take a long while to dig out from this downturn and return back to some kind of normalcy. We are in a depression or at best an extremely deep recession.

I know it's not fun to reflect back to another time around 9/11 but remember the few days after the attack when the skies were quiet from commercial air traffic. It's was so quiet it was un-nerving. This not to subtle change in the sky signified a generational loss of innocence but I also feel that time of quiet serves clearly as a metaphor for me for how last year has been. So...

Reflect on your feelings from last summer. I bet you were behaving differently. Try to channel your memories from that time into sustained, substantive and positive action today. The time for change is as urgent as it ever was and the opportunity for change is the best it's been in a generation.

If you haven't done so already weatherize your home, your church, your business, your school. Until you weatherize your building, upgrade your insulation, service your heating and cooling systems stay away from sexy improvements such as solar panels or other advanced energy saving equipment. Change your light bulbs to compact fluorescents lighting (CFL's). Call your local congressperson, your mayor or electric utility and find out about weatherization programs, tax incentives, grants you can participate in to lower your energy bills this winter and create greater energy independence for you and your family for seasons to come. Re-examine your commuting habits, your consumption of consumer products and try your best to shift your behaviors on a personal, professional and community level. Take baby steps. Be brave and search for inner discipline to make the hard choices to change your habits. Don't be complacent and don't look back!

If you lost your job find out about green training and workforce training programs in your area. Take your existing skills and see how you can fit into the emerging green collar economy. Whether installing solar panels, weatherizing homes, replacing windows, teaching others new green skills, learning to build green, working to build the smart energy grid and local interfaces at the community level this is a time of unparalleled opportunity. Find manufacturers participating in the renewable energy economy and work for them. It is in all of our interests to do these things. Much of this will help power our new smarter more sustainable economy. For those of you in workplaces where change is needed, ask around, see if there is a sustainability or corporate responsibility committee taking every day necessary actions to make your business or organizations better stewards of the environment while also helping your bottom line.

You can't afford not to act. We must step up for the sake of the next generation to follow us and those after them.

Maine Hannaford Grocery Store Earns LEED Platinum

A Hannaford's store in Augusta Maine, which is opening tomorrow, is a model example of a green grocery store in our northeastern climate. It recently received LEED for New Construction Platinum Level certification for it's efforts to redesign supermarket retailing in an environmentally, socially and financially sound manner. It has all kinds of innovative design features including a green roof, a super-insulated building envelope, 50 skylights, healthy non-toxic building materials, interior finishes, exemplary daylighting and I believe 41 KW of solar electric panels, likely including some solar hot water. For those of you who wonder if Solar panels are useful in northern climates for energy generation this is yet another example reinforcing it's possible to do so.

Hannaford's Website has alot of information about store, you can go on a virtual tour of the building to see for yourself. Please let other's know, especially your retailers in your area. You can learn about Hannaford's efforts to further it's goals in taking care of people, planet and profits, part of it's triple bottom line approach to business.

Apparently Hannaford's is using this store to be a test bed for innovation and environmental exploration for it's other existing stores and a model for new store in other locations. So if you are traveling in Maine near Augusta, perhaps check it out for yourself and patronize the store!

I will post a picture of the store once I contact Hannaford's and get their permission to do so. But remember, with all of the green features aside, the number one thing you can do to your new and existing buildings is tighten up your building envelope, reduce air leakage and upgrade your insulation. That's your best upfront investment for the best payback.

Bill Strickland Jr., Manchester Bidwell Corporation and WMCAT

A few weeks ago I met Bill Strickland Jr. at NEOCON, World's Trade Fair in Chicago June 15-17th. It was at Steelcase's Green Giant's Monday Night Reception where he spoke about his inspirational work building Manchester Bidwell Craftsman's Guild and Corporation in Pittsburg over the last generation. He told the story of how he followed his passion in making pottery into an organic improv journey of creation of alternative educational programs in the inner city neighborhood of Manchester. He turned the impossible into the possible so to speak and lit up the minds and hearts of underprivileged young people and adult learners along the way. As years went by he built momentum and enthusiasm for his work by galvanizing the local private sector when public funding and support waned. He turned this into a powerful process of continual reinvention with his team of talented educators where they reached out to industry and provided needed various kinds of workforce training to fill demand in local corporations in exchange for program and operational support.

He won a Macarthur Genius grant, started the grammy award winning MCG Jazz Record label and created nurturing student centered learning environments and facilities. He also wrote a book which I recently read on my vacation to Michigan titled "Make the Impossible Possible" which is found on his non-profit website.

His message where we all have something really valuable to offer our world and to follow our dreams and our passions. By building bridges and seeking sincere relationships with others of shared viewpoints inspired me to visit a program in Grand Rapids modeled on the MBC and Bill's visionary work, the Western Michigan Center for Arts and Technology. It opened in 2005 and in 2007, I believe received it's USGBC Leed for Commercial Interiors Silver Certification signifying a strong committment to providing a quality, healthy learning environment for area high school age arts students and adult learners gaining skills in medical technologies.

I didn't have too much time for my visit but I took a look around the front lobby / reception area and ducked into various learning spaces as well as enjoyed the central commons area where there was a cafe like setting. The central downtown location was literally across the street from the City Library, other businesses, a YWCA and other services. There was a children's museum across the street. Visiting WMCAT really reinforced Bill's message of the importance of creating world class environments for learning. As I couldn't visit Pittsburg this was the second best I could do to experience the MBC philosophy in action, adapted to Grand Rapids. WMCAT is really important because it shows the adaptability of the MBC model here and for other areas of the country.

Harvard Business School has been Studying the work of MBC over the last 10 years or so updating and refining a series of case studies first examining the initial programs and ideas but now looking at the replication of the model to other communities around the country. I can think of the MBC model being useful for those in my community in Vermont as we ponder the future of education and workforce training of our children and adult learners some who are seeking alternative careers due to job cuts and other drastic effects of our economy. I bet the Green Workforce training initiatives being discussed in Washington and State Capitals around the country could learn from the public private cooperative initiatives MBC has championed over the years and create good well paying sustainable, useful jobs for the next generation. (Photo of Bill Strickland courtesy of Bill-Strickland.org, Building Photos by S. Frey)

A Recipe for Regeneration

Speaking of Regeneration in another field. Go see this link on Fast company's site.

A Recipe for Regeneration

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