My purpose is to serve
to enable and to empower
others and ourselves
to expand our realm of the possible

My purpose is to unlock
the creative force
in myself
in my team
in my community
in my world
so we can give each other license to dream
to dream big
to dream bold
to dream crazy

My purpose is to fly
the freak flag of freedom
evangelize
radical freedom
freedom in the agility that comes
from embracing unexpected outcomes
the joy
the ecstasy
of serendipity

My purpose is to believe
to preach
faith
faith in alternatives
to our reality
faith in what is beautiful
faith in what is true

My purpose is to doubt
spread doubt like a virus
doubt about our preconceptions
our prejudices
doubt that the injustice that is
must be
doubt that I have all the answers
but we
come closer
to finding them
together

The Analog Underground article got me thinking, and made some synaptic connections in my head that I am still trying to full grasp.  The author of the article, Ashlea Halpern, mentions the nostalgia as well as novelty value of anachronistic objects, which I totally get.  But she also labels this analog phenomenon a “neo-Luddite counterculture”.  I’m not sure if that label was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but I really don’t think “Luddite” correctly captures the motivations behind this trend.

According to Wikipedia:

The Luddites were a social movement of British textile artisans in the nineteenth century who protested – often by destroying mechanized looms – against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution, which they felt were leaving them without work and changing their way of life.

I don’t think the so-called analog underground is rebelling against industrial capitalism.  They aren’t embracing the nostalgic novelty of vintage analog gadgets because the new digital ones are threatening their craft or livelihood.  I think the motivations are more personal, and inward focused.  Maybe it’s just an aesthetic thing.  Many people, from hipsters to old money trustfunders have favored old or vintage things for a long time now.  But maybe there are deeper psychological and spiritual needs too.  A need for a more physical, tactile connection with our objects.  It reminds me of the New York Aquarium ad I have been seeing in the subway that has a picture of a girl petting a starfish and the line “no screen, just touch.”  Maybe in the age of touch screens, we just want to touch something real.  Something analog.  The physical and the analog have a kind of permanence that ethereal and ephemeral cloud-based applications do not.  And we can really own them, hack them, and personalize them.  We don’t really own the apps on our iPhone or any software as service apps we run.  Somehow perhaps, all of these motivations are a reaction against the increasingly black box nature of technology.  We can’t open things up and see how they work.  After the magic and the seduction of these new shiny digital black boxes fade, what is left?  Alienation from our devices?  A desire for the real?  I don’t know, but it’s something to think about.

Other manifestations of this broader cultural phenomenon include the popularity of sites like Etsy and the spread of the Maker Movement.

Slimwhitman’s comment on the article really resonated with me:

The analog will always be more a more complex code than the digital, which has to approximate its curves, where the nearly infinite realm is. Although that sounds like pop-metaphysics, all you have to do is recognize how the record industry collapsed, it made the analog compressible into any digital file system and degraded our relationship to music. We went from live music to analog waves made in vinyl and magnetic tape to essentially finite squares out of binary codes. In order for a computer to synch with a neural net, like a brain or group of brains, it will require waves that cannot make errors or be approximate. The digital will never be the sole entrancer of humans, and probably, we will have to eventually build analog computers to achieve anything of value in the post-PC age.

I think there really is something to that observation. I have been feeling the same way in my own creative practice as a musician, but Slimwhitman’s articulation of the issue really gelled things for me. While I have been making electro-acoustic music since I was a teenager, and digital tools will continue to be important to how I work, I have recently been immersing myself in the analog music world by playing acoustic instruments. Even the joys of playing the humble ukulele has a kind of humanity and expressiveness that is quite different, and in many ways more accesible and immediate for me, the player, than any of my complex high-tech music making gadgets.

I’m still waiting for the analog blogging platform though.  Until then, I’ll still be sticking to my iMac and WordPress.  ;-)

For a more in-depth summary of Tribal Leadership, check out Wikipedia.  The basic point the authors Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright make is that tribes are the basic units of any organization, and tribes are at one of five different stages.

The five tribal stages are:

Stage 1: Tribal members exist in a state of alienation from goals beyond mere survival. They use language to describe their place in the world that asserts that life in general is unfair, perhaps resembling Thomas Hobbes’ imagery of “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” In short, “Life Sucks!”

Stage 2: Tribal members exist in a state of victimization. They use language that describes their place in the world that suggest that they are powerless and oppressed by forces outside their control. In short, “My life sucks.”

Stage 3: Tribal members exist in a state of self-aggrandizing competition. They use language that describes their place in the world as great by virtue of the fact that they have won positions of status and power. In short, “I am great, because you are not!”

Stage 4: Tribal members exist in a state of mutual cooperation around a common goal, which is typically characterized by competing against other competitor organizations. They use language that describes their place in the world as meaningful because they are positively contributing to achieving outcomes valued by the tribe by cooperating with other members of the tribe. In short, “We are great (because they are not)!”

Stage 5: Tribal members exist in a state of flow. They use language that describes their place in the world as intrinsically meaningful and focused on the good of the universe. In short, “Life is Great!”

Each stage has a predominant mood that describes the quality and the core value of the relationships between tribe members.

At Stage 1: members are alienated from each other, and the relationships are undermining.

At Stage 2: members are separate from each other, and the relationships are ineffective.

At Stage 3: there is typically personal domination of one member over others, and relationships are developed for their usefulness

At Stage 4: stable partnerships are attained, as relationships are deemed important. A tribe member is successful only if all members are successful.

At Stage 5: a team of stable partnerships exists, and relationships are vital.

Tribal Leadership is an easy read with anecdotes and actionable synthesis points for any leader who wants to move their organization up to a higher stage.  I would also recommend it to anyone interested in group dynamics.  In my work at Purpose, I have been particularly interested in how the culture has developed and evolved as we have rapidly grown from a 5-person operation to a 40-person+ company.  One of our challenges is maintaining and cultivating a creative and mission driven culture as we get bigger and more diverse.  I will definitely be sharing this book around the office.  But before I do that, I feel like I need to live with Tribal Leadership a bit longer so I can digest and synthesize it, so it will be living on my nightstand for before bed perusing for a few more days.

A big part of thriving organizational cultures is making strong connections, both between people and between ideas.  Here are some connections I made while I was reading Tribal Leadership.  I also happened to be reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life. In chapter 6, of Finding Flow, Csikszentmihaly talks about relationships and the quality of life, and also highlights the importance of interconnectedness with a group.  Reading both Tribal Leadership and Finding Flow have been helping me better understand how the actualized individual fits in and interacts with the thriving tribe.  To be better connected as groups, we need to let down some of our own personal barriers and become vulnerable.  As Brené Brown puts it in her TEDxHouston talk on wholehearteness and vulnerability, “In order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen — really seen.”  Another TED talk to check out in this vein is Steven Johnson’s talk about where good ideas come from.  In Johnson’s view, good ideas and creativity are combinatorial and require cross-pollination that arises from environments with a certain degree of social density and diversity.  These kinds of environments can be cultivated, and Tribal Leadership can be part of the equation.

Since I am writing this post on the Fourth of July, I would like to conclude with an image from the time of the founding of the United States (before I head out to a BBQ and maybe the beach).  For me, it’s a poignant symbol of group unity, which is necessary for survival itself.  Join, or die.

Get the book on Amazon: Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization

Can a company really deliver happiness?  That is a question that Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh tries to answer in his new book, Delivering Happiness (out today!). He certainly delivered happiness to me as a blogger when I received a free review copy of the book a couple months ago.  With that disclosure taken care of, let me go into what I hope will be a fair review.

Delivering Happiness was a quick and easy read.  Hsieh writes in a casual conversational style and claims in the introduction that he did not employ a ghostwriter.  I finished the book the night I got in the mail.  Despite his own self-deprecation about his writing ability, I appreciate the conversational tone and the authenticity of his personal voice.  As far as books written by CEOs of successful companies go, Delivering Happiness is definitely not douchey.  I have to admit, I don’t usually read business management books, nor have I ever shopped at Zappos, but I was intrigued by the offer of a free book.

Hsieh delivers sage business advice in a simple and earnest way while interweaving it with his own personal narrative. As a brief aside, in the spirit of Hsieh’s personal narrative style, I’ll interweave some of my own personal narrative into this review.  Hsieh and I have a lot in common.  We are both the sons of Taiwanese immigrants who grew up in suburbia.  Both of our last names start with H.  And speaking of the letter “H”, to drop the H-bomb, we both went to Harvard. We were both forced (um, I mean, strongly encouraged) by our parents to learn piano and some sort of string instrument growing up (in Hsieh’s case the violin, in mine, the cello).  I have to admit, as someone who didn’t grow up with many Asian-American role models outside of my own family, these kinds of commonalities made me really identify with Hsieh’s story and personal journey.

Hsieh emphasizes the importance of building a strong and distinctive corporate culture as the path to business success.  He has done this at Zappos by maintaining transparency and a personal touch in management, and hiring and training employees in a way that infuses Zappos with its distinctive culture.  For example, Hsieh talks about how prospective employees are asked questions like “how weird are you?” and how Zappos offers new employees $2000 to quit after their training period just to make sure they are getting people who are really committed.

Just so I don’t come across as a total fanboy, the last paragraph will be critical. There were a few awkward bits in the book.  One is just a slightly typography technicality, but my designer side can’t help it.  There are several fonts used in the book, but the one used for quoting the Zappos Core Values Document (page 159), was a bit hard to read for such a long excerpt (maybe they have changed that for the final publication version though).  In terms of content, the part about Hsieh’s first experience with rave culture could have been shorter, and might have been a bit self-indulgent, but once again, I appreciate the personal, almost naive candor and honesty, and very much jive with Hsieh’s persona as a “hip, iconoclastic CEO” (I got that one from the book cover).  At the same time, the side note about how much Hsieh loves Red Bull was just plain weird (tacky product plug, or just an over-enthusiastic fanboy?).  Then again, if I ever get the chance to write a book about myself, I would welcome gladly the sponsorship of any of my uppers of choice (any matcha or yerba mate producers out there reading this?).

Don’t take my word for it though.  Delivering Happiness is a breezy entertaining read for anyone interested in building different kind of corporate culture, that optimizes both financial success and, well, happiness.  I’m happy I read the book and happy that you made it all the way through my review.  Have a nice day!

Delivering Happiness Official Homepage

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Dagens Nyheter, a Swedish newspaper, came out with an article yesterday about the internet phenomenon (and now book) Stuff White People Like.  It’s got some great commentary and a precious interview with the SWPL author Christian Lander.  Here is the original article (in Swedish) My rough translation below:

Photo caption: Christian Lander makes fun of white people’s desire to recycle, eat healthy, like “indie” and to do things outdoors.

The White Will to be Unique

The well-educated, liberal and self-righteous upper-middleclass are the subject of ridicule in the successful blog “Stuff White People Like,” which is also now in book form.  Author Christian Lander explains for DN (Dagens Nyheter, a Swedish newspaper) why this group is so fun to make fun of.

People seem to have always liked to put each over into categories.  “Us and them,” is probably the most basic of these.  If we break things down in more detail, not only are there groupings based on socio-economic class (upper class, working class, etc.) but also groupings based on appearance and interests (stekare [preppies], Emo, kulturtante [women of a certain age who like the theatre and culture], hipsters).  Charles Dickens did just this in 1836, when he published a collection of essays under the title, Sketches by Boz.”  The book begins with a rather dry and ironic description of a number of characters in Victorian London.

One-hundred and seventy-two years later, Christian Lander started his blog, “Stuff White People Like,” mostly as a joke after a discussion about how he would like more white people to watch the TV show “The Wire.”  On the 18th of January this year, he posted the first entry, “Coffee.”  After six weeks, the visits counter had reached 300,000 visitors a day, and was up to a million earlier this summer.  The latest entry on the list was number 106, and is about Facebook.

“The growing popularity of the blog was totally viral,” explains Christian Lander by telephone from Los Angeles.  “People told their friends about it, posted links on their own sites, and spread the word more widely.  If I had understood the fully [how big it would become] I would have sold my work for a lot of money to a marketing company, but unfortunately I didn’t do that.”

The white people that Lander caricaturizes belong to a well-educated American upper-middle class.  They lean towards the left and concern themselves with the environment, culture and the world around them.

“One thing that sets them apart the most is perhaps organic food.  They are out for recognition that what they are doing is right.  There is definitely a certain measure of self-hate there; as if they have to undo all of the evil that white people have done historically.  But at the same time, they also look down on other people who don’t do as much good as they do.”

The blog’s popularity led to publisher taking notice, and last spring Lander landed himself a contract that allowed him to quit his job as a “kind of copywriter.”  For the last few weeks, the book version has been number 17 on the American bestsellers list.

Christian Lander is himself guilty of many of the descriptions in the book, which he believes to be one of the reasons for his success.  He is obviously white, with an unfinished doctorate in literature (#81) and has studied abroad (#72), has a beard (#95), glasses (#140), and a nice bicycle (#61).

“I know that I am pretentious and silly with a lot of those things, but I can’t help it.  I am in fact looking out for myself for the most part.  If I can’t make fun of myself, then it wouldn’t have been all that funny.”

Lander’s book is an heir both to Dickens and to earlier classics in the genre.  Lisa Birnbach’s “The Official Preppy Handbook” in 1980 dealt with the dresscodes, drinking habits and mating rituals of the American northeastern upperclass.  Three years later, literature professor Paul Fussel put out “Class. A Guide Through the American Status System,” which investigates, among other things, why the upperclasses prefer small balls and the lowerclasses big ones.

In recent years, we have been able to read the same kind of comic anthropology applied to hipsters in “The Hipster Handbook,” and the filthy rich in “The Filthy Rich Handbook.”  And now we can read about the group Lander caricaturizes with the subtitle, “The unique taste of millions.”  For one example of this, one only need to go to the side muxtapestumbler.com, which is search function linked to the popular internet service Mutape, where users upload songs to their own “personal” mixtapes.  One quickly realizes that there are extremely few users that get even close to being original.

“Yup, that’s a good example,” says Christian Lander

“The funny things is that the people I talk about think that they belong to a awfully special minority.  They forget in fact that there are actually millions of people out there that also have that ‘alternative taste,’like ‘indie,’ read books and watch movies.”

You’ve studied in Copenhagen.  Do you have anything in particular to say about Scandinavian white people?

“They are what all American white people aspire to be.  You are fantastically socially progressive, you are physically fit, you speak several languages.  Yes, you are the ideal.”

But is the book meant to be a guide for becoming a white person?

“No, no, no, it is a guide for how to take advantage of white people.  What you want to do is to use their weakness to get them to do favors for you.”

What can one get them to do then?

“You can get them to paint your house, give you a lift to the airport, cook you dinner.”

And if they cook dinner for you, will that be a good dinner?

“Absolutely.  As long as they stay away from trying to do your national cuisine.  In that case, there is a risk that they will fuck it all up.”

By Agnes af Geijerstam

Translation by Lee-Sean

1. Where is your cell phone? Pocket
2. Your significant other? Spidermonkey
3. Your hair? black
4. Your mother? same
5. Your father? same
6. Your favorite thing? Exploration
7. Your dream last night? Gorillas
8 Your favorite drink? Tea
9. Your dream/goal? Recognition
10. The room you’re in? Cubicle
11. Your hobby? Travel
12. Your fear? Boredom
13. Where do you want to be in 6 years? Jet-set
14. What you’re not? you
15. Muffins? tops
16. One of your wish list items? Murakami
17. Where you grew up? Scottsdale
18. The last thing you did? click
19. What are you wearing? Uniqlo
20. Favorite Gadget? Crackberry
21. Your pets? none
22. Your computer? MacBook Pro
23. Your mood? happy
24. Missing someone? soon
25. Your car? subway
26. Something you’re not wearing?  fur
27. Favorite store? IKEA
28. Like someone? sure
29. Your favorite color? clear
30. When was the last time you laughed? today
31. Last time you cried? recently

Is this meme the gift that keeps on giving?  Like syphilis?  I think this might have to stop with me.

The Wine Trials is an upcoming book that describes of a series of blind tastings that I took part in last year. The tastings were great fun. We were encouraged to come up with creative, uncensored descriptions of wines. I thought one of the wines tasted like cat pee. The book recommends 100 wines under $15 that beat $50-$150 wines in the tastings.

I’m all about the cheap wine, like the 3-buck chuck from Trader Joe’s, or the 4-dollar Spanish table wine I got from JUSCO when I lived in Japan. These days, I get my cheap wine from Fresh Direct. They have a great 7-dollar vinho verde and an 11-dollar cava that are regular fixtures of my wine stash.

This week’s issue of Newsweek has an article about the book on page 12 of the magazine, the text of the article is also online.

You can pre-order copies of The Wine Trials from Amazon.com.

Burma, China, North Korea – should travelers visit oppressive countries with bad human rights records?  I read this article this morning while I was waiting at the dentist’s office.

In her April 2008 article, “See Mo’ Evil,” Outside senior editor Stephanie Pearson rebuts Nobel Prize Winner Aung San Suu Kyi’s call for tourists to stop visiting Myanmar. What does Pearson think is the best way to respond to a travel boycott in a human-rights-violating country ruled by an oppressive regime? Go there and check it out.

Every country in the world, including the US, is guilty of human rights abuses to one extent or another, so if I wanted to be totally consistent, then I wouldn’t travel anywhere. With all the photos, video and reports of human rights abuses in Burma, I don’t think it is necessary to go and visit to “see for myself.” I find the whole idea of “disaster tourism” a little bit distasteful. I guess it is ultimately an individual choice. Personally, I would respect the wishes of Aung San Suu Kyi and avoid traveling to Burma until there is real substantive change.

Here is my first attempt below:

Amy was doing cartwheels on the lawn. Dog days of summer. Sprinklers turn on. Johnny washing his car in the driveway. Lemonade stand across the street. Damn neighborhood kids riding their bikes through my flowerbeds. Damn punks with their music too loud. So I throw my garden gnome at them.