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Over the last 45 days or so – I have had the privilege of traveling around the globe talking with and engaging some of the brightest minds in the worlds of academia, business, politics, media, sports, cinema, music, military and diplomacy. It’s been a whirlwind that started in Istanbul and took us through Moscow, San Francisco, Bern, Amsterdam, Washington, New York and Los Angeles, not to mention Cambridge and Concord --
-– and I learned something. Actually, a lot.
Through the generosity of our friends and clients, through interpreters, translators, water pipes (Turkey), vodka (Russia), chocolate (Switzerland), and sushi (LA) – I learned what real leaders want.
Note: Amsterdam redacted ;)
Our best ambassadors, our most successful entrepreneurs, leadership of global 100 companies, and the heads of the biggest, baddest movie studios and record labels in the world tell us essentially the same thing – they want desperately to escape their bubble. I’ve said for some time now that it’s not a coincidence that the most successful presidential campaigns (not administrations) of my lifetime were created outside the bubble that’s Washington, DC: Jimmy Carter and his team were from Georgia, Reagan’s team from California, Clinton’s from Little Rock, Bush 43’s was led by Karl Rove and Mark McKinnon from Austin and we all know that Obama’s 2008 path was guided by Chicago’s David Axelrod. Outside the bubble is where the best ideas come from – it’s where the game changes.
The ingredients for true innovation -- the ability to see both vision and detail, perspective, ingenuity, passion, and a little fearlessness -- is so hard to come by when you spend every day talking with the same people about the same things.
I thought it was interesting that during Mark Zuckerberg’s return to Harvard last week that he mentioned more than once that if he had to do it over again – he’s not sure he would have taken Facebook to the bubble that's Silicon Valley – might have stayed in Boston instead.
The frustration levels from some of the biggest names in Hollywood we met with yesterday were palpable when we talked research, insight, and strategy. Every big-time movie and artist comes with millions of dollars of marketing muscle, reams of data, hundreds of pages of tables, graphs and narrative – and unfortunately lots of hedges from industry advisors. You could do this… You might want to do that…
Too dependent, I am told, on old methods and matrices. The leaders we spent time with yesterday – like the 3 and 4 star military generals we met with before that – want nothing more than to learn, inspire and create. What separates them from most others is that they’re not afraid to fail. I literally heard, “Let me be your guinea pig” – more than one time yesterday from some of the legends of the business; folks I thought I would never meet. They were also incredibly honest, and so generous with their time and perspective – incredibly refreshing and inspiring for me.
As we prepare to head into our 6th year at SocialSphere (the idea was hatched over Thanksgiving in 2006) – maybe that’s the elusive positioning we’ve been looking for. Sure, we bring insight into how the world’s biggest generation thinks, works, communicates and shops. Yes, we offer the most rigorous online and offline social influence mapping in the world, with a collaboration platform to engage your constituencies – but what we really do is burst bubbles – we re-connect the greatest minds and businesses in the world with the citizens, consumers, stakeholders and fans around the world who pay their checks and make the difference every day between winning and losing.
Its been an insane few months of travel and opportunity – and the other thing I learned as we head out for some rest over Thanksgiving is that the spirit of the world – from Millennials in the US to the emerging blogosphere in Moscow to the future of art and music -- is very much alive. I can feel the connections and synapses everywhere; they’re beginning to fire up as we think about 2012.
Happy Thanksgiving.
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