a hundred avatars

Struggling Nuyoricans

This story on struggling Nuyoricans was interesting. It turns out that Puerto Ricans in NY tend to be far more likely to live in poverty than others, including other Latinos.  Could be selection error (i.e., Puerto Ricans who have done well have left the city and moved elsewhere, thereby making it seem as though the community hasn't progressed) or could be accurate, but either way it's interesting.

Puerto Ricans are some of the most prominent figures in New York politics and culture, so some people are surprised when they hear that, overall, Puerto Ricans are among the poorest and least educated New Yorkers. Almost a third in New York are living in poverty.

It's particularly relevant since Puerto Ricans tend not to have many of the same apparent difficulties other Latinos have: most speak English, have been here for many generations, are citizens, etc. Yet despite these advantages, they've remained behind. As mentioned before, this could be nonrepresentative sampling or it could be the result of bad luck (PRs in NYC since 1950 in summary: come to work in factories, factories close, move into projects, projects deteriorate, NYC melts down in the '70s, crack epidemic in the '80s, gentrificiation, etc). Bad luck indeed.

Either way, 2010 leaves us holding the bag. The powers that be in NYC (many of whom are Puerto Rican, need to keep this in mind and create development that responds and builds other communities in a way that they avoid the challenges Nuyoricans have faced.

Planning killed the connections star

Maybe or maybe not. No time to respond really (and i've been meaning to read this for weeks anyway) but I quite liked this presentation from Gareth and Jason. Apparently connections planning needs some fixing. Hear hear. What doesn't? ;-)

Connections Planningness

View more documents from Jason Oke.

Smart Hyundai

Speaks for itself. Smart intervention because Hyundai understands the social web and why people might love the brand.

Management vs. Self Direction

Dan Pink makes an argument for autonomy, mastery and purpose as a way to motivate people involved in 21st century tasks and beyond (yes, money too, but we need more.)

SPEWing good ideas

Tom O'Brien recently tweeted a link to Neal Stephenson's Spew, a piece in WIRED from what is essentially the dawn of time, 1994. What's crazy about it, given when it was published, is how prescient NS was on where we would be 15 years later.

Go ahead. Read the piece. It's really good, in the way that a cyberpunk piece called 'Spew' from 1994 is good. I know sometimes the links don't come through when these blogposts pop up on Facebook, but Google it if you don't see the link and read it.  I'll wait...

OK, it's not the Baroque Cycle or even Snow Crash, but it's sort of what we do for a living (or should be), right?

Anyway, a few things occurred to me while reading the piece:

1. Why don't people move more quickly? TV networks, publishers or advertisers don't respond to niche opportunities anywhere near as quickly as they do in the piece. I don't understand why, unless ennui, inertia or fear are fair explanations. There's no good excuse why, and we can accelerate how we move against opportunity. We just need a better infrastructure.
2. Try harder to find it: finding insights that are actionable.  Frankly in this day and age it's not hard to find information that matters, but honestly a lot of what we see in the business world is more often than not the result of outdated models that measure something that we all agree matters as opposed to the things that actually are happening. Not sure why this is the case.
3. WTF? Do you think anyone who read this piece 15 years ago really understood what NS was talking about? Did he? Did pieces like this create our reality (which is pretty spot on, at least from the perspective of what is possible) or was NS just so hyperaware that he intuited the next 15?
4. DIY: NS captures where culture really comes from perfectly.  As much as in his future there seems to be some sort of corporate-entertainment-technology complex that produces 'everything' they need to be culture vultures to find out what is really happening.  Technology that centralizes culture doesn't actually centralize culture creation but rather paradoxically just seems to help figure out what's really going on. Then the 'centralizer' can figure out how to take advantage (or not) of what's going on.
5. Intuition and in person: As much as the character in Spew has access to all the information out there, he's not purely quant driven in his approach.  He knows  "something is there" without being able to put his finger on it and really can only find out by going to where the target is and seeing it in person. Data feed doesn't replace human touch.

Twitter is for old people and apparently so is boring research

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6703399.ece

I thought this article was interesting, as much for the (half baked) insights this kid has as for the idea that one kid, texting a bunch of friends can make a piece of research that is more valuable that all the other stuff a huge investment bank is generating.

Kind of makes you wonder if we or our clients are using our intuition to dig for consumer insights or letting 'corporate constipation' stand in the way of digging for good ideas.

Anyway, it was interesting and sparked some very good ideas. (thanks Eliza for sending it to me.)

More advice, these via the armed forces

From a random conversation with a friend who's an ex-Marine (can you be an 'ex' Marine?), via a friend of his (I think) who is a full bird colonel in the Air Force.

Two pieces of advice:

When the balloon goes up it goes up fast

• in other words,  when change finally happens or when the thing you think was about to go down finally goes down it goes down fast. So always be prepared for the worst and be ready to move fast.

When the shit hits the fan, wind your watch.

• Pause before moving.  This is a lesson I've been remembering getting into playing tennis this summer. the first thing to do is wait, not swing. It reminds me of something Bruce Lee would say (yes, I just quoted Bruce Lee) about what made him a great fighter. He had the instinct and the speed to beat almost anyone, but what made him great was the learned ability to hang back and watch where others would attack.

Network structure

All the rage in visualization of ideas and information need not be overcomplicated, as I realized today. I thought this was a nice and simple visualization of why interconnectedness matters and how it works.  As he says himself, I'm not convinced this is totally accurate or if there should be more dimensionality between the layers. Maybe it should be arranged in a less hierarchical way?

He makes an interesting point in the  'voice over' of the visualization, which is that even though we assume it's better to be high up in any hierarchy that's presented to us, there's more engagement and 'love' in the lower levels.  As he puts it

Which means more to you personally? Discovering a funny video that's already on the top of the Most Popular page on YouTube? or Finding a funny video on that weird niche blog that none of your friends know about?

To some extent this explains the need and interest in multicultural advertising and creating culture for brands in languages other than English, in channels outside the traditional. By reaching more deeply into slightly less populated realms of media, we engage more deeply.

Lots of interesting thoughts too, insofar as at different levels the size of the dots should be of greater or lesser importance than the big white dots that are at the center now...

America's Most Wanted

Nada, nothing new, but I really enjoyed this bit with the guys from Nortec Collective during this episode of Kurt Anderson's Studio 360. 

Never ceases to amaze what openness happens when people ignore borders and follow hearts and instincts.

There's also a great interview with Toumani Diabate, who is the 73rd generation of his family in Mali to play the kora. 

In this case following the borders follows the heart. It would be cool if Nortec started to work with him, since both interviews mention Bjork. But the Nortec guys didn't work with her, they just had a taco together.

The Future is Bright, But Badly Distributed

Hard times lead to great ideas. Business Week sat down some futurists to predict what the next 10 years will bring. Their guesses were interesting but nothing that would shock you if you're a regular reader of, say, PSFK.

Still, a fun exercise, which led to some things I want. Only one thing you can be sure of:  the real future will be much better and much worse than you see here. We can do better.

Lots we can do to make some of this happen today. Doing your part?