Power Engineering = Ease of Use : A rather late comer to the app (no excuse when the founder is an old friend, Alain Rossmann), I must admit that I am blown away: it’s the highest quality video streaming around for mobile device with a fantastic recommendation engine suggesting videos, users and topics to follow; it includes SMS and iMessage to invite and tag friends. Klip stores my videos in the cloud and provides unlimited uploads for free. To make it short, Klip is the state-of-the art choice to create, store, and share videos on an Iphone. Clearly super high-tech brains can make gorgeous and easy-to-use apps.

Now Privacy = Circle Management: Klip just released its 2.2 version that adds one of the best implementation of privacy I have seen on any mobile app: Circle-based privacy.

The norm up to now for video app privacy has been very basic: the video is locked and you are the only one who can see it — or the way to open up is to an undiscoverable url that you can email to friends. Kind of lame and certainly not scalable.

Klip changes all of this.  You control privacy by adding or removing followers from your personal circle. Video uploads can be marked as visible to everybody or to just to your personal circle and circle videos are automatically restricted to the members of your circle. It is private sharing the way it should be: a breeze to use while still providing tight control. I love the fact that comments added to a private video are only visible to members of the circle and that only the owner of a private video can share it with others on social networks.

So when you look at your feed, popular videos, or latest videos you automatically see in real time the public videos and the circle-only videos if you belong to that circle. Each person has a personalized view of popular, latest, etc. You have a view that depends on the circles you belong too, all in real time. All the video metadata (comments, likes) are automatically restricted to the members of the circle. Also, and this too is really cool: If you add somebody to your circle all your prior circle videos become instantly available to him/her (and if you remove them, they can’t see what they used to see…).

Klip creates magic by combining  brilliant real-time cloud computing with a gorgeous, fluid Iphone interface. So don’t wait, get the free app here and tell me what you think.

Meanwhile, enjoy this clip! http://www.klip.com/view/riwWoS8gzg

Matthew is part of a new breed of business innovators that I call urban arts entrepreneurs.  This group combines fervent advocacy for the arts and passionate community activism with a strong business sense; they dedicate their lives to impacting specific urban geographies, bootstrapping complex partnerships between heterogeneous entities – local government officials, businesses, institutions, financiers, artists, arts organizations, community organizers, and influencers of all types. Just like most entrepreneurs, urban arts entrepreneurs start with limited resources, and create a “product” for people to enjoy or a service that serves a specific need.  It’s a huge task, and given that they can’t afford an armada of employees, urban arts entrepreneurs must wear multiple hats and show an exceptionally broad spectrum of competencies. The minute you get that, you won’t be surprised by the amazing complexity of their personal trajectory.

The making of an urban arts entrepreneur such as Matthew is by no means a linear process. It starts with a deep love for the arts and personal artistic talent. Matthew was classically trained in trombone and voice, went into musical theater and performed with high level amateurs and semi-professional troupes starting at a young age. Such experience as a practitioner is a plus if you want to directly or indirectly manage artists — individual contributors with their own strong ideas. Now, managing people requires more than just empathy. You also need leadership, a natural talent that Matthew had, yet was considerably strengthened at a college of his own choice, Deep Springs College, a small organization whose goal is to prepare its male students for “a life of service.” You also need a serious cultural and liberal arts background, something that Matthew acquired at Harvard where he selected to major in philosophy – while remaining very active as an artist.

Where do you go from there? Matthew decided to move from the East Coast to Seattle, with two goals in mind: land a day job and pursue his performance work. And he did both. His day job was at Microsoft, as a Program Manager for embedded systems (incidentally, Matthew’s hobby since he was a kid was to write code…), and he continued to work both as an artist and as a production coordinator and consultant to arts organizations… Until he felt frustrated as he kept on witnessing arts organizations facing the same structural problems over and over again. So he decided to create a business incubator for arts and entertainment groups, uniting his passion for business and the arts. He started the Capitol Hill Arts Center (CHAC) on 12^th Avenue in Seattle in 2002, that provided a common infrastructure — “like an operating system,” Matthew adds — where people were able to share space, personnel and other commonly needed resources to lower overall costs, creating efficiencies of scale by satisfying the needs of several small organizations with a shared infrastructure. The organization presented hundreds of shows of all types in the course of the six years of its existence.

The creative economy: Arts in the City make businesses thrive

Capitol Hill Arts Center was a success. The biggest problem the organization ended up encountering is that it didn’t own its building, which placed it in a strange paradox.  The existence of Capitol Hill Arts Center had changed the surrounding real estate, making it more desirable, evidenced by private developers advertising CHAC as a perk in their marketing pitch to sell commercial real estate. But when CHAC was offered an opportunity to extend its lease, Matthew tried to purchase the building to capture some of this value—but the owner of the building didn’t want to sell. That’s when Matthew realized that as an urban arts entrepreneur, he was, in reality, in the real estate business, and that the model of CHAC could be extended to be relevant for public policy making and neighborhood real estate development. There was a paradox: while arts businesses are not large money-making operations, they create opportunities for other businesses around them to make money based on their work, and public support.

This conundrum spurred him to work with the County’s cultural development organization to rally a large movement of artists, real estate developers, lawyers, companies and business owners to show up at City Hall demanding that the City start thinking of the development of the arts, entertainment and culture in a different way. At the request of Seattle’s City Council, Matthew helped form an advisory committee on urban planning and cultural districts. “It had become clear to me,” Matthew adds, “that understanding the relationship between the private and the public sectors was key, and we had to demonstrate that investment from the public sector leads to an increase in value on the private side. In this situation it becomes the responsibility of local government to channel this increased value into the public good.” While Matthew had experimented in many different industries and businesses, he commented wryly to me: “It also became obvious to me that I needed to get an MBA to learn what other people already knew about this economic relationship and what I could learn from them.”

As a result, Matthew graduated with honors from The Wharton School last May with an MBA in Real Estate and Finance, and has started his new company, QBL Real Estate. The name may sound like a cabbalistic file extension, but its purpose is to focus on the needs of arts/entertainment organizations, artists and cultural/community space developers as well as the role of the arts in enlivening business districts and revitalizing neighborhoods. His clients include, among others, the City of Ottawa, the City of  Austin, the Kimmel Center of the Performing Arts (Philadelphia) and King County’s Cultural Development Authority. In the video below (about 40 minutes – Matthew being introduced after 6 minutes), he discusses the quantifiable impact of culture on the value of private real estate and the positive outcomes for communities at large.

What is remarkable about this video to me is how Matthew translates his unique perspective on the role of the arts into a prescription for downtown urban development as a whole — arts-related or not. He is able to apply principles from economics, geo-spatial theory, business strategy, creative economy and other diverse fields. To me, this is Matthew’s true value-add, and that of many entrepreneurs: they are synthesizers.

Cities and neighborhood can benefit from the holistic approach that Matthew brings, as well as his passion and determination to solve the recurring question of the role of the Arts and culture in our society. A brilliant speaker about the role of culture in downtown business districts, real estate financial models, cultural economic development policies and the changing face of corporate philanthropy, Matthew is also hands-on as a consultant. Ultimately, he believes that the social value of public goods such as schools, parks and (of course) cultural institutions cause a corresponding increase in surrounding real estate prices. It is clear after talking with him that culture will be a key part of future urban economic development practice, as well as an essential tool for the savviest real estate developers to positively impact communities both socially and economically.

If you are interested in social media and community management, you probably read Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy on a regular basis – and if you don’t, subscribe now! Jeremiah, an industry analyst and founding partner of the Altimeter Group, has been analyzing social media trends and technologies, as well as their impact on corporate marketing strategies, since 2007 when he joined Forrester. How do you become one of the most knowledgeable people in the field in three years or so? By combining a long-nurtured passion with long working hours: Jeremiah did not jump into the field overnight. His immersion into social media dates back from the time he joined Hitachi (2005) and became their blog program manager and blog evangelist.

Perform, Inform, Transform: That might well be Jeremiah’s motto. Perform in all senses of the terms, actually. Jeremiah comes from a musical background: he started to play the piano at age four and graduated in music performance from San Jose State. “I realized that wasn’t my calling and there were other ways of fulfilling my desire to perform,” he says. So he went for bachelors in business administration, market research, and Internet marketing at San Francisco State University School of Business, and decided to perform on a different type of keyboard, the computer keys.

Music performers draw their energy from the combination of an inner strength and their ability to connect with an audience. So do high quality social media performers. “I draw my energy from interactions online or in the real world,” Jeremiah says. This energy is itself supported by an enormous amount of foundational work. Three years ago, he was tracking a handful of companies; now in many of the social media categories he has created, he sometimes has over a hundred companies to track. Two researchers help him out, of course, but most of the legwork he does himself before sunrise, and he takes about three to four hundred formal briefings per year – and this does not include the continuous informal briefings he gets at all times, in social media conferences and meetings of all kinds. That’s a lot of diffuse energy to manage and absorb, for sure, yet one of Jeremiah’s most remarkable treat is his calm – as well as his exquisite politeness.

Jeremiah’s heedfulness is a major reason for his ability to distinguish trends from fads, separate the wheat from the chaff and provide meaningful market categorizations and advice for entrepreneurs and companies alike. So don’t expect him to endorse your company just because you believe it’s cutting-edge or groundbreaking. If it really is, he won’t forget you at the right time. His blog is definitely one of the most detailed ones in the social media industry and I haven’t seen him miss anything of value – even better, when he does, he graciously addresses any lapse. Because his purpose is clear: to inform, provide insight to make a difference, and ultimately help companies transform the way they communicate with their customers.

Living by Objectives: When I was thinking of this post, I was considering something around the idea of “Jeremiah Owyang unscripted” only to realize that it didn’t really make sense, for Jeremiah doesn’t follow a prepared script in the first place, and therefore doesn’t have to stray away from any. You can’t really split Jeremiah into a public persona on the one hand, and a private one on the other with a different character. He isn’t a split individual. It’s as simple as that. Such personal unity shows a lot of strength and courage – starting with the guts to do something you really like! His life gravitates around his job — and he did choose what he does: “I was tired of working at Corporate for other people. There is no such thing as a career path. When you take a look at a career path and you compare to an org chart you know what you notice? The org chart gets smaller at the top; so if everybody is given a career path, that means that most of them stop.”

And Jeremiah wasn’t going to let his destiny fizzle out: “You are your own CEO. You are in charge of your destiny and career; you are responsible for educating yourself, marketing yourself, supporting yourself, training yourself, leading yourself and protecting yourself financially. Even if you make 30K a year you’re still your own CFO, you should be protecting your monetary assets. Your time is very valuable and the way you use it to grow yourself. That’s my belief.” By doing so you can include into your professional life everything that might otherwise be called “leisure time.” That’s the purpose of the Operation Blue Water. “It’s a personal goal,” he explains, “not tied to any organization. Here is how I see how to work and fun. A lot of people work all their lives and when they retire they want to go to the beach or travel the world. My point is: if that’s your goal, integrate it into your life now. Make that part of your job. Don’t wait! Whatever your passion is. I love Hawaii and I want to be there 30 days a year. The trick here is this should be net positive, meaning I am not paying to be there. I told everybody about my goals and people got very excited, and a few of them hired me. The interested thing about personal goals is that you may not always hit them, but at least you did more than the year before. I am always going to do one or two weeks out of the 4 weeks. It’s a start. I love traveling and get paid to travel.”

Leadership outside starts with leadership inside. With Jeremiah, what you see is what you get: focus and an authentic kindness. Careful, however: kind and focused people hate to waste their time – That’s what the culture of performance is about!

Incidental note: We all know that the Silicon Valley is a melting pot of nations thriving on an earthquake bedrock. Very few people have deep roots here, but Jeremiah does. He is a 5th generation Chinese American Bay Area. His grand-father’s grandfather was the Chinese Consul General in San Francisco between 1890 and 1913. His great grandmother, Faith Sai So Leong, was the first Chinese woman dentist in the country.

Andy Hertzfeld has recounted the story of the black flag at the center of which Susan Kare had painted a big skull and crossbones in white that was floating over Bandley 3 in 1983 until early 1984. Yes, for the Macintosh team “it was better to be a pirate than join the navy.” In the early nineties, black pirate flags were still hanging here and there around the Borland campus, the company created by Philippe Kahn (a phenomenal sailor himself). These are two of the companies where James Bach, the author of Secrets of a Buccaner-Scholar (subtitled “How Self-Education and the Pursuit of Passion Can Lead to a Lifetime of Success”) started a career that made him one of the most established “gurus” in software testing.

This book is the personal and intellectual autobiography of a high-school dropout. Thirty years later, James relives his allergy as a kid to “schoolism,” i.e. “the belief that schooling is the necessary and exclusive way to get a good education.” He educated himself differently, at his pace, of his own volition, rejecting indoctrination and institutional frameworks, but at the same pursuing his passion for discovery to the fullest – and often ending up working much harder than any person with a “normal” education. He was (and still is) an explorer, venturing into the world of knowledge as boldly and free-spiritedly as the privateers and corsairs of the seventeenth century. He is a buccaneer-scholar, i.e. a person whose “mental windsurfing” capabilities make him/her want to live a purpose-driven existence, build up a talent, and create a reputation – a reputation based on facts and achievements, not on degrees or any form of social entitlement.

This book is remarkable for two main reasons:

A clear analysis of what dropouts are about: Regardless of the reasons why kids happen to drop out, look at dropouts as people who first and foremost need to feel self-reliant as well as leverage their uniqueness and their independence in their own way. Don’t judge them. The best thing to do is to accompany them on their own road, mentor them smoothly and non-dogmatically as they identify opportunities that work for them. As James Bach recounts very well through his own history, dropouts are not anti-social. They simply hate precepts and authority: “the independence of buccaneering is independence from authority, not from humanity.” As a result, buccaneers welcome ideas and are thrilled to feel needed. Look, James loved the Apple II that his father gave him and made the best out of it – again at his own pace and in his own way. It’s true that “life is less convenient for those who chart their own course,” but trying to speed up or thwart that course can only make their lives harder. So help kindly! That’s what mentoring is about.

Guidelines for all people who want to reconstruct their own creativity: As autobiographical as this book is, James Bach doesn’t come across as self-absorbed. What’s clear is that James Bach does not despise people with degrees who were well-adjusted students, and instead contemplates the possibility that they might become buccaneers at some point in their lives, and want to rekindle a long-time buried “unstoppable curiosity.” Then all the schemas that implicitly or explicitly governed James’ life - ranging from the principle of peripheral wisdom, creative procrastination where ideas mature as a background task, to obsessive scouting, or heuristic questioning - are potential rudders for anyone. You may want to see this book as a set of tools for the reconstructive introspection that will make you get into the “next big thing.” Yes, “new industries are perfect for a buccaneering mind,” and in turn, you may want to become a buccaneering mind to estrange yourself from what you know all too well and experience the naive jubilation of newness.

This book is one of the best books I have read recently around the themes of self-motivation and creativity. Definitely the most heartfelt. Thanks to David  Arscott to handing it to me the other day as we had breakfast at Coupa Cafe!

And it so happened that coming back home, I found my early copy of Seth Godin’s Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? in my mailbox. This book is for the people who want to be more than a “faceless cog in the machinery of capitalism” (the “factory”), as well as any company who understands that it needs more than “two teams (”management and labor”) and intends to create “a third team, the linchpins,” i.e. people who “can invent, connect, create and make things happen.” As was the case of Tribes, this book sits in between several genres: it’s a socio-political pamphlet, a manifesto for individual development, and a call to a new workplace.

The book starts with a reference to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations that focuses on the division of labor. Yes, “what factory owners want is compliant, low-paid, replaceable cogs to run their efficient machines.” But “great bosses and world-class organizations hire motivated people, set high expectations, and give their people room to become remarkable.” So unlock the genius in you. Interact with people. Inspire. Expose your artistry, and invent new rules. In many respects, Linchpin is a sermon in the original sense of the term, a speech addressed to believers whose hopes can be rekindled, and whose beliefs can be linked together. If you are a linchpin – if you can answer “yes” to the question “Are you indispensable?” – and if dozens, thousands, hundreds of thousands do the same… in other words, if there is an insurrection of talents, what will happen? The end of pointless “factories.”

Seth Godin’s bibliography at the end of the book is quite remarkable. He refers to real books with real messages. His diehard optimism and his fervent iconoclasm, however, also reminded me of one of the most fascinating assailant of the concept of factory, the Russian Prince Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921) who similarly invited his contemporaries to read again the Wealth of Nations’ first chapter, in Fields, Factories and Workshops. He added that “the artist who formerly found aesthetic enjoyment in the work of his hands is substituted by the human slave of an iron slave,” and advocated for a novel “integral education” to help reshape the future. Such future varies based on any thinker’s present. In our time, this future will be designed by the change agents that Seth Godin calls the “linchpins,” i.e. people who want to make a difference and for whom “dignity, humanity and generosity” can transparently intersect. 

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

 Twitter: @mddelphis

There is often a very special high energy about startups — all types of startups. That’s what I felt when I arrived at the RESONANZ opening gala. A non-profit organization, RESONANZ is starting its first year as a new three-weeks program for young singers in Albany, N.Y.

How do you start something in the midst of recession times, in a domain that’s not the most popular genre on the planet, in a city that’s not a destination for tourists, in a Summer season where the town has been emptied from its regular students and retinues of the State’s elected officials? How can you even think of doing this when performing arts in the region essentially means the Tanglewood Festival in the Berkshires, the Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, the Bard College Summerscape… to name just a few famous centrifugal forces? “Well, when you want to do something,” says Heidi Skok, the founder and Artistic Director of RESONANZ, “you don’t sit on all the reasons not to do something, you look at all the reasons to do it, and for me, all these reasons boil down to one: I live in this community, I am happy to live here, and I want to contribute to the life of this community as meaningfully as I can. My thing is music, and more specifically opera. So, I can do two things: bring people to Albany, both students and faculty, who would have never known how great this town is on the one hand, and bring opera through young voices to people who don’t know they could enjoy it. After years of performing in various places, years of teaching voices, I have come to the conclusion that the vast majority of people don’t like opera simply because they know nothing about it, but the minute you bring it to them, they readily admit that they didn’t realize they could enjoy it. If every classically trained singer were to bring opera back to his/her community, the performing arts wouldn’t be in any form of crisis whatsoever. I completely agree with what Russell Willis Taylor said in an interview you posted on your blog earlier this year. Just as any professional, we have to do a better job of showing the unique value we add, and reach out to our own communities if we want them to come to us.”

The project started as a an idea in Heidi’s kitchen, in Glenmont, just seven miles away from downtown Albany, as she was speaking with a student, Katherine McDaniel who had come from Texas for private lessons last Summer. The idea matured quickly and by February, the company was incorporated as a non-profit, had a Board of Directors, an Executive Director, Diana Hernandez, a budget and a fully-fledged program, and a Web site — created by another student, Jessica Utset. Think of the rush to get students, build up a faculty, find a place and a few grants to be up and running on July 19^th! The result is that students signed up from various parts of the country (and not simply students Heidi knew from before, as was the case for my daughter, Sophie, whom she taught at the New England Conservatory). Heidi and Diana found a great location: The College of Saint Rose (how many voice programs have access to an Olympic swimming pool?), and were able to attract the interest of the Albany community on a definitely short notice. What I saw at the gala is that the donors had already made the program theirs. Heidi has assembled a remarkable faculty, including Susan Harwood, Sheryl Woods, Bill Neill, Jeremy Frank, Martin Hennessy, Roger Malouf, Arlene Shrut, as well a meditation guru, Lance Brunner (also Associate Professor of Musicology), MaryBeth D. Smith from the Feldenkrais Center of Houston, and local yoga instructor Susan Hoffman. Incidentally, William (Bill) Neill, who has traveled the world, taught and coached many well-known singers (including Ben Heppner), a Don José who spoke to Carmen in multiple languages, did admit to me that he had never visited Albany… and not yet its most famous restaurant, Angelo’s 677!

A few students backstage (photo MaryBeth Smith)

The program, coupled with a Concert Series of seven performances open to the public, is noticeably different from what is most customarily offered to young singers. “Young singers, singers altogether, aren’t just machines that you crank up and bang! they sing. They have a body, they have a soul, they are human beings, and the voice is the expression of who they are as a person. It’s unfortunate that schools and conservatories rarely include meditation, yoga, Feldenkrais, and sports as part of the curriculum as I believe they should. I want the students to be in a situation where they can give the best of themselves at any stage of their personal development. It’s just as hard to be a singer as it is to be an athlete. We have to help them build a personal discipline, care for them.” And it’s clear that RESONANZ cares. In fact, I was very surprised to find out that the site doesn’t only provide bios for the Faculty, but also for the students! In short, they are not simply anonymous entities paying for tuition fees.

Heidi Skok and Diana Hernandez are already outlining their strategy for the months to come and definitely plan to continue this Summer program.

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

For more information:

About RESONANZ: http://resonanz-rasif.com/Home.html

About Heidi Skok: http://www.heidiskok.com

Heidi refers to a post that I wrote in March 2009. Russell Willis Taylor is the CEO of National Arts Strategies: http://delbourg-delphis.com/2009/03/the-recession-an-awakening-experience-conversation-with-russell-willis-taylor/

Part 1: Tribes are more than a trendy phenomenon

Part 2: Urban tribes and digital tribes, two simultaneous phenomena

The Convergence of Tribes: The Obama Campaign… While analog and digital tribes appeared independently at the same period, they converged about ten years ago, and are now increasingly hard to dissociate. Even though the expansion of digital tribes does not change the definition of what a tribe is, it certainly modifies the fabric of our social environment. When individuals seem to belong to one given urban tribe only, it is easier to categorize them. When they belong to several tribes, it is much harder. Which is the tribe or combination of tribes that best characterizes any given person? For example, what’s the best way to address that person as a voter?

Godin wrote before the election of Obama, and therefore only indicates that “in today’s world, Barack Obama can raise $50 million in twenty-eight days.”  In fact, Obama raised $500 million over his twenty-one month campaign. A record amount, for sure. How is it that Obama was so extraordinarily efficient, and that neither Hillary Clinton (during the Democrat primaries) nor John McCain (during the presidential campaign) could benefit from the Internet in similar proportions? Such a question is all the more worth asking as the Internet has long been an important tool for electoral campaigns: John McCain was the first candidate to raise $500,000 online in one day in 2000, and the 2004 Democrat candidate for the primaries, Howard Dean, already leveraged social networks – Meetup in particular. All these politicians being leaders in their own rights, we can’t simply assume that Internet miraculously served Obama: after all, Obama had to create his Internet presence for the 2008 elections, while Clinton and McCain already had one. To win a national election, Obama had a lot playing against him: his color, his age, his name, his short time as a senator, a limited influence within the Democrat apparatus, and his lack of funds. It is not because of the Internet in general that Obama was able to compensate for his shortcomings and shatter the political establishment, but because of the way he used Internet. David Plouffe, his campaign manager, ascribes the success of his candidate to the candidate himself, of course, but also and unambiguously, to the innovating management of three linked components: people, data, and technology.

The Obama campaign proved successful at building up the levers that Seth Godin speaks about — and taking advantage of them. Until 2006, the Internet was primarily a medium whose function was to inform and reach masses, with the assumption that the larger the net, the better. With Obama, it operated as a platform to target differentiated networks of fans, micro-movements of activists, very dissimilar tribes, but, in the end, as the means to interconnect them all around one message. This message, expressed through real-time pieces of information, has worked as a sort of communication protocol establishing a common language. The Internet users addressed by the Obama campaign were not only millions of eye-balls, but a myriad of small tribes within each of the 50 states in the United States, each tribe having the ability to identify one way or another with the Obama global tribe.

In a speech at the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) in April 2009, Plouffe provides details about his methodology. During the primaries, and contrary to what had been customary in both parties for decades (”organizations that destroy the status quo win,” Godin says), the Obama campaign focused on one single state, Iowa for almost a year, in order to establish a technology strategy and an organizational model that could be replicated in all the other States. They didn’t try to reach everybody simply because the Internet is a universal platform: “What we did differently,” Plouffe says, “was based on the belief that it would allow people to organize on their own and that they could move a message [...] As we spent the entire year on Iowa, in the rest of the country, our supporters were organizing on their own. By the time we placed staff in the other states in the fall of 2007, these states were already working because these states, these people were already doing it through MyBarackObama.com. We empowered them in a way”. In other words, the Obama campaign implemented the key principles described by Godin to create and orchestrate micro-movements: “Our online organization,” Plouffe continues, “became a home for people. We gave them the tools to succeed, and hundreds of thousands people were spending hours on our site.” Tools of all kinds, ranging from the technology to register voters to the ability to forward a message to your entire address book in order to instantly address any attack coming from adversaries.

This approach, Plouffe adds, “unleashed the imagination and talent of millions of Americans to help shape the outcome.” These millions of Americans made the Obama message their own. The Internet was not simply a means to broadcast a directive to everybody, but a message for people to translate into their own words on the field, which is quite different. As Godin writes: “What leaders do: they give people stories that they can tell themselves. Stories about the future and change.” The Obama campaign addressed people as they are in their real world with their ideals, their prejudice, and their personal way of expressing their beliefs:  “We have a crisis of trust out there,” Plouffe says. “People don’t accept information like they used to, from their media, from their government, from their businesses; what they trust is what their neighbors and family members have to say. They live the same kind of life. And we put a huge premium on this in our campaign. Nothing is more important that Gary talking to the six or seven people he might talk to on any given day.” In the end, the Internet was not so much a net to catch millions of fish at once, but rather what I called in a conversation with a group of entrepreneurs, a Local Impact Positioning System (LIPS), enabling people to tell the right story to the right public at the right time. In short, the Internet is the ideal tool to scale traditional grassroots marketing.

Neither the Internet nor the social networks changed the American electoral map by themselves: it’s the people who leveraged these tools to get heard. By establishing a complementary relationship between the analog and digital realms, a geocentric Web, Obama was able to attract younger voters as well as older ones in a different way. As reminded by David Plouffe, had Obama addressed the same pool of voters in the same way – those who had participated in the Bush-Kerry duel in 2004 – he would have won over McCain by only one percent. Which means that Obama might not have won at all. This one percent might not have even existed, because the opponent to McCain would have most likely been Hillary Clinton.

What’s important may not so much be that a tribe is always a tribe, whether analog or digital; what matters may be the type of cooperation that a leader establishes between his/her tribe in the physical world on the one hand, and the Internet representation of that tribe on the other. The Internet side of a tribe is its organizational architecture, allowing everybody to know what to do and enabling immediate communication at all times: the Internet enables a type of dynamic responsiveness simply impossible to imagine off-line. As a result, it can drastically change the impact of any given tribe. The physical side of the tribe is where people execute, which, in turn, enables corrections and adaptations on the organizational side. In the end, and well apart from the current Web numbering efforts that primarily serve marketing purposes, this geocentric Web (a Web with its feet on the ground) made the Obama tribe the fastest profitable start-up ever. In any case, it was the most efficient fund-raising apparatus since the beginning of the Internet and drew the largest number of fully engaged users in the shortest timeframe – a level of performance that could inspire the business model of many entrepreneurs.

The Web –  a world of differences… The Web connects people. That’s a truism, yet a complex one. The Web connects people who, at a given time, and showing a given facet of their identity, agree to connect to others. The Internet connects people who belong to a same tribe. As much as it is a participative architecture, the Web is equally a differentiating platform, a place where myriad of tribes of all types and sizes want to affirm their uniqueness. In 1993, when Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina created the browser that popularized the World Wide Web, Mosaic, the Web had only 200 sites. Today, the fragments – the tessellae as specialists call them – that constitute the Web mosaic are also an infinite and changing mirror of the extraordinary social and human complexity, of a galaxy of tribes that each wants to have a say, sometimes at expense of others. So, how is it possible to fill the space between compatible (or loosely compatible) tribes, and eventually give some of them a common purpose? That’s when leaders are needed, leaders that able to not only lead one tribe, but able to coordinate multiple tribes at once.

The diversity and heterogeneity of digital tribes may not necessarily lead to a new War of the Worlds. The simple fact that each of us is well aware that as individuals we are also a collection of characteristics that we can express by joining distinct digital tribes may also be the best way for us to prepare to join a complex tribe in the real world, even when it does not reflect us entirely. After all, gays in San Francisco massively voted for a president who never claimed he was in favor of gay marriage; African-Americans massively voted for a man who didn’t have their history, and for many American Christians “Barack” ended up meaning “blessed” and “Hussein,” ”elegant.” Ultimately, the digital tribalism detour that enables people to speak their mind may reveal itself to be more efficient than any direct democracy at reflecting the American diversity and multiculturalism, eventually dispelling many preconceived ideas about the Unites States and accelerating history. Who would have been able to seriously predict that the United States would have a black President only forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King? “It seems that we rarely get to see leadership in action. We tend to notice it after the fact or after it’s gathered steam. That’s because it starts where we least expect it,” Seth Godin notes in a section that he titles “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” 

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

For more information about Seth Godin: http://sethgodin.typepad.com

French version of the book: http://www.diateino.com/livres.php?livre=120

Urban tribes and digital tribes, two simultaneous phenomena… Godin rightfully reminds us that the creation of a tribe, and its goals, are independent from technology. Tribes didn’t appear yesterday and did not wait for the Internet era. Many of the examples of tribes selected by Godin can exist without digital support — and generally speaking the definition of a postmodern tribe is pretty close to definitions provided by anthropologists and historians. A tribe is first and foremost a connected group on a mission championed by a chief/leader. Therefore, the best technologies in the world are downright irrelevant if there is no leadership, and proficient facilitators that can be leveraged by a leader. This is where the Internet becomes such a powerful factor: “There are literally thousands of ways to coordinate and connect groups of people that just didn’t exist a generation ago.”

Meanwhile, it so happened that postmodern tribes in music, cities, and fashion (I myself explored the non-aligned looks of the late seventies/early eighties in one of my books of the history of fashion), emerged at the same time as digital tribes, even though there is no correlation between them. In the eighties, tribes are obviously part of the Zeitgeist, and since then, we have all witnessed the growing tie between analog and digital tribes.

Digital tribes have their own history. In the early eighties, efforts to optimize the interconnection of computer networks (initially started by RAND Corporation in the fifties to facilitate cooperation between its research teams in Pennsylvania and California) came to fruition, and the need to unify communication protocols led to the adoption of TCP/IP in 1982 — along with the definition of the word “Internet.” However, Internet or not, technology-enabled interconnections of geographically dispersed people had already started to expand beyond research organizations, reaching sundry university groups. The first real digital tribes appeared with the first NewsGroups: Usenet was conceived in 1979 by two American students from Duke University (Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis). Discussion groups multiplied: in 1981, Ira Fuchs created BITNET (acronym of “Because It’s Time Network”) for liberal arts professors, and by 1984, it was connecting over 150 campuses. In 1986, Eric Thomas, then a student at l’Ecole centrale de Paris, invented LISTSERV, an automated mailing list manager that enabled users to join a list without the need for human administration; this introduced the concept of a list owner.

Throughout the eighties, services proliferated. User forums sprang left and right on CompuServe, or you could favor the Apple route via AppleLink, for example. Then, in the course of the nineties, everybody progressively adopted the Word Wide Web, a system of interlinked hypertext documents using TCP/IP, that Tim Berners-Lee and Roger Cailliau had set up in 1989/1990 to enable researchers at the CERN to share information. The increase of Internet users expanded and modernized the concept of NewsGroup. That’s the key to the success of companies such as eGroups, started in 1997: eGroups had 18 millions users when they were acquired by Yahoo! in August 2000 and integrated within Yahoo! Groups — itself launched in 1998. The eGroups phenomenon prefaced the explosion of social networks: Friendster and Meetup created in 2002, MySpace, Linkedin, Rize, Tribe.net, Hot or Not, Yafro in 2003, Facebook in 2004. Dozens of others appeared at the same time and more later, from Advogato to Zoo.gr, including Ning, imeem, Last.fm, Classmates, Flixster Twitter, Ning, Odnoklassniki, Orkut, YouKu, Tudou, ou 56.com, Tagged.com, Plaxo, Habbo, BlackPlanet, MyHeritage… the list is nearly infinite.

These days, there are digital tribes for every possible domain of interest, addressing virtually all the aspects of who we are personally and professionally. As Michel Serres said in his lecture at Stanford (May 20, 2009), “our identity is the fuzzy intersection of all the places we belong,” and it is by no means a homogeneous reality – no more than we are an individual in the strict sense of the term, that is, an indivisible entity. Our “identity” is distributed across multiple environments, defined by multiple factors and scattered across multiple activities. The Latin word tribuere (of which the word “tribe” is derived) means to divide, share, assign, allocate (and the Latin “tribe” is the arrangement of people into groups). In short, each of us, to paraphrase Michel Serres, is the fuzzy intersection of tribes. This, by itself, is not new; what is new, though, is that each of us is now able to easily express this multiplicity via the Internet — to choose to belong to several tribes either as leaders or as followers. While it is true that tribes, as well as the motivations that lead us to create or join them do exist outside the digital world, the digital world has allowed people to express themselves more easily and freely (with the added bonus of pseudonyms) and to strengthen connections with peers in real time. Today, the Internet amplifies tribalism in huge proportions.

Part 3: The Convergence of Tribes: The Obama Campaign

Given that Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us came out at the end of last year, the book has been reviewed extensively, and if you haven’t read it yet, I can only recommend that you do. I recently translated it into French and wrote a foreword for it — of which I made the English adaptation (three posts). 

Published in French by Diateino (http://www.diateino.com). Available for pre-order. Hardcover – Sept 1, 2009; eBook available at http://izibook.eyrolles.com (July 22, 2008).

Seth Godin’s Tribes has been an Amazon.com best-seller in the Leadership et Business & Investing categories since it came out (October 2008). This is not surprising. The book is short, easy to read and, like all of Seth Godin’s books, both entertaining and educational. 

A book that wakes you up… The book sounds like a motivational speech meant to shake up anyone who “would like” to start something – anything, a restaurant, a musical group, a company, a new product line, whatever – but who doesn’t feel up to the task, either afraid to jump in or terrorized at the idea of failing. Seth Godin passionately urges you to rid yourself of your fears and get going. To stimulate rather than reassure you (you are not allowed to do nothing), Godin slays a number of preconceived ideas regarding what constitutes an ideal leader. You don’t have to be a stud, a social butterfly, or a fashion plate. You can speak softly, even be somewhat reserved, like Meghan McDonald, a Team Rock coach in New Rochelle, NY; you can have a big ego like Steve Jobs if your creativity offsets its negative side effects; you can be low in a company’s totem pole, like Jim Deligatti, the third-tier McDonald franchisee who invented the Big Mac. Anybody can become a leader.

Leaders have no common traits, except for these: a constructive rejection of the status quo, the drive that enables them to change things, and optimism that provides a platform for people eager to go their way – to follow them. Because you won’t be a leader alone: you need a tribe, i.e. “a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.” So, create your tribe – or find a tribe that needs you. Opportunities are endless. Godin gives a multitude of examples as he writes, often randomly, in unstructured sections that flow in and out of each other. His message, however, remains unwavering: to stimulate his reader’s desire to get out of the business-as-usual mentality — when you pretend for days on end that everything is fine and dandy, yet are bored to tears.

You can read this book in several ways. At its simplest level, it sounds like an eloquent marketer’s declaration of faith sparklingly presenting the facets of two trendy words, “tribe” and “leadership.” Yet do not discount the value of the book by thinking “that’s sheer marketing” … or revise your opinions about marketing. If you have mixed feelings about public speakers paid to deliver motivational lectures, a pep talk of sorts, remember that the world that surrounds us is full of depressed masses who don’t know where to start to break free from the doldrums. So why not boost them a bit? “ Yes, you can,” was Obama’s slogan, sure, but also the 1972 rallying slogan popularized by César Chávez et Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers, a California farm workers union: “Sí, se puede”. After all, fervor is contagious before being pestilential! But there is more.

Tribes are more than a trendy phenomenon… More than a trendy phenomenon that can be grabbed to provide a book with a catchy title, tribes are a societal reality, most patently epitomized today by the popularity of social networks everywhere in the world, and of course, in France. Last February, a study performed by comScore, Inc. “showed that 22 million French Internet users visited at least one social networking site in December 2008, reaching 64 percent of the total French Internet audience.” This is up 45 percent from the previous year – even though the social media reach is still lower in France than in the UK (79.8 %) or Spain (74.6 %). Of all the social networks, Facebook is now the most visited, followed by Skyrock, and then Copains d’Avant, MySpace, FlickR, Trombi, hi5, Netlog, MySpace, Viadeo, and Badoo… to name a few.

Skyrock is a somewhat special case. Although apparently toppled from the top spot by Facebook as a social network, Skyrock is still ahead of Overblog and Blogger as a blog platform, not only in terms of unique visitors, but also because of the time spent by those visitors (54 minutes in average versus 10 minutes and 7 minutes for Overblog and Blogger respectively). Worth mentioning also is Skyrock’s unique position in the history of social networks in France. Created in 1986 by Pierre Bellanger (one of the most notorious contributors to the “free radio” movement who started Radio Paris 80, an early symbol of the media tribalism), Skyrock embraced the various forms on Urban Music in the 1990’s, then followed its audience to the Internet, created a blog platform in 2002, and positioned itself as a social network in 2007. In fact, Skyrock exemplary evolution illustrates both the diversity and the continuity of the notion of tribes since the 1980’s — that is, when the use of the word  “tribe” spread massively outside the sphere of anthropologists. 

Why, though, did people revive a word – or maybe a metaphor – that evokes a social connection predating the industrial era? Because it symbolizes a type of emotional, social bond that is smothered by abstract political institutions and national and international economic organizations that frame our daily lives. It expresses a need that Michel Maffesoli analyzed in a landmark book in 1988, The Time of the Tribes, The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. At the time, Maffesoli described the emergence of what he called a “post-modern archaism,” showing how individuals were evolving from the position of being functional entities within contractual groups towards emotion-based communities, “affectual” tribes, where they could see themselves as persons with a meaningful, fundamental role. This trend was described by Maffesoli as a shift from a primarily mechanistic social order to a complex and predominantly organic structure, and was illustrated by a simple, yet forceful diagram:

What people are looking for is not participating in a democracy where they are asked to vote once in a while, but be part of an environment where they can have an active role as leaders or as followers, dynamically sharing goals and emotions with others.  As an alternative to an overly rationalized society, people are tempted to choose the empathic atmosphere of tribes.

            As Maffesoli noted in the very early 80’s, these micro-movements primarily started as urban tribes – and, since then, the notion has been discussed in a number of books, one of the most recent being Ethan Watters’ Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family, and Commitment (2003). While various factors have triggered the formation of these initial micro-movements, the influence of music has always been the most noteworthy. It’s no wonder, then, that Seth Godin mentions the Grateful Dead’s pioneering importance early in his book: “ Forty years ago, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead made some decisions that changed the music industry for ever. You might not be in the music business and you may never have been to a Dead concert, but the impact the Dead made affects almost every industry, including yours.” The Grateful Dead’s emblematic power encompasses multiple aspects. In the mid 60’s, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were dominating the airwaves. The Grateful Dead broke away from music styles for the masses supported by the media, but also from the cliquey structures of counter-cultural, underground, or bohemian circles – instead, they moved music into the street. Street parties and open-air park events enabled the Dead to connect with their fans as well as have their fans connect among themselves. They also removed the barriers between musical genres, and developed a composite style that associated psychedelic rock, progressive bluegrass, country, blues, classical music composition structures, traditional and electronic instrumentation, and improvisation. By the end of the 70’s, the Grateful Dead following had solidified as Deadheads, one of most loyal, yet most diverse, fan clubs that has ever existed on the musical scene. (Patrick Leahy, elected to the Senate at 34 in 1974, and the current Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee was, and remains, a Deadhead!)

            The picture is clear: tribes, big and small, are among us. Twenty years ago, Maffesoli had to overcome the skepticism of a significant number of established European scholars when discussing the decline of individualism. He therefore burdened his analysis with rhetorical schemes that no longer sound relevant. Today, the collapse of ideologies and corporate organizations primarily worries those who are paid to maintain them, those who live off the status quo that Seth Godin slams throughout his book. The postmodern tribes that Godin addresses do not generate chaos; instead, they express creativity and entrepreneurial drive. His message is simple: stop getting hankered down with a factory mentality, waiting for a manager (who isn’t any more motivated than you are, but is merely following the motions) to give you orders. Stop wearing yourself away in a bureaucratic world where you are only meant to follow abstract instructions. Become a leader and win the support of others by creating your tribe, or find the leader capable of rekindling your enthusiasm. Be ready to turn into a “heretic” or to follow one, to initiate change, break rules, and question conventional wisdom. Outside companies, but also within. Tribal entrepreneurship is both a haven and a springboard for innovation, and grassroots initiatives do fuel change: “In an era of grassroots change, the top of the pyramid is too far away from where the action is to make much of a difference. It takes too long and it lacks impact. The top isn’t the top anymore because the streets are where the action is.”

 However enthused he may be about the rejuvenating power of tribes, Godin still acknowledges the repressiveness of older tribes — tribes that have grown too big, become too bureaucratic, whose mission diluted over time. That’s what makes the difference, according to him, between the American Automobile Association (AAA), with its millions of members, and the much smaller National Rifle Association (NRA). The challenge for a tribe is to keep its focus, keep an active leadership capable of dynamically updating its purpose in a world that moves quickly –this differentiates the postmodern tribes that Godin describes from interest groups, feudalisms, cliques, and casts that mainly cater to maintaining their image or their statutory advantages. Yet, the latter are also tribes, like it or not. As true as it is that any tribe tries to foster a sense of brother/sisterhood, fraternity between tribes is a whole different story.

Part 2: Urban tribes and digital tribes, two simultaneous phenomena

Part 3: The Convergence of Tribes: The Obama Campaign

The recession is bad for everyone. But is it worse for arts organizations? Yes and no. “We are in tough times in the arts just like everybody else,” says Russell Willis Taylor, CEO of National Arts Strategies. “Access to capital has always been difficult, and it’s not going to get easier. Even rich people don’t feel rich right now. Sure, that’s a big problem. But non-profit arts organizations, just as any other organization, also have to take a hard look at themselves, reassess their strategy – because strategy, in its essence, is do less, and better.” Despite this grim landscape, Russell remains confident (”I am not worried, but indeed am confident about the future of the arts”), but is calling for action: “Organizations will have to focus. Pick the things you do best and do them better than anyone else.”

Meet Russell Willis Taylor: From for profit to non-profit organizations (NPOs): Faulkner said he loved Virginians “because Virginians are all snobs, and I like snobs.” Well, Russell was born in Virginia and she is definitely not a snob and that’s why I like her. She is first and foremost an amazingly hard worker with an impressive track record in both commercial and non-profit organizations. I suspect that NPOs ended up interesting her the most because they are a continual challenge: “The non profit sector has a different layer of complexity. When people come from the commercial sector, working with big numbers and tough deadlines, they tend to believe that an NPO will be a snap. You soon realize that when you have virtually no access to capital markets and you don’t measure performance in numbers only, it’s actually quite complicated to run a non-profit. What NPOs can learn from the for profit sector has to do with adequately supporting your endeavors, hiring people who are the right fit, aligning people’s skills to the task at hand, paying them decently… but I believe that the for-profit sector can learn from the NPOs that mission-driven organizations who really spawn value are the best businesses.” Wherever she has served, as the director of development for the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art early in her career, as the initiator of the fund-raising department of the prestigious English National Opera (ENO) that she later rejoined as executive director, as a special advisor to the National Heritage Board in Singapore where she resided for three years, and since 2001 as the CEO of National Arts Strategies in Washington, D.C, she has successfully championed operational efficiency and organizational leadership, and one simple, yet powerful mantra: Make meaning!

Navigate inside and through this zoomorama (you can zoom-in/out the pictures and videos as well as see them in full screen). Note on 4/6/9: Temporary problem with the videos due to an unexpected change in YouTube policies. Zoomorama is addressing the issue.

Making meaning in a world that has changed: It’s not enough to simply state that NPOs must be run more like businesses. “‘What business do you have in mind?’ is the question I ask to many NPO executives,” Russell says. “Do you want to be run like Enron or Worldcom? What we do is help organizations contextualize information from the graduate schools of business and make it useful to people who are running NPO businesses. For some subjects, 90% is what you learn in an MBA program and 10% of it is need to be contextualized and for some other subjects, maybe 50% is what you learn in a business school and 50% has been customized to the topic at hand. This 10% to 50% is where an NPO brings a specific value – where it makes meaning. That’s the hard part, and where many traditional arts organization are having the biggest problem.”

In a good economy, a so-so company, whether it is commercial or non-profit can struggle along for years. But recessions often end up revealing a variety of undersides and flip sides, and dismembering business-as-usual attitudes. As unwelcome they may be, they are a time when companies can’t sweep latent problems under the rug and hope for the best – the best won’t happen miraculously. So how does this translate for the arts? “Although the arts in America are doing great,” Russell says, “lots of arts organizations are in a tough spot because they have to address several issues at once. They must determine what their optimal size should be, based on their financial resources, as well as redefine their market, and by doing both, define their goals.” A turnaround of sorts.

Financial resources are the most visible part of the problem. “A lot of NPO’s are undercapitalized. Most medium-sized art organizations (between $5M and $25M) would be tiny businesses in commercial terms. Many don’t have reserves. They don’t do pure income budgeting, they do project based budgeting. If you are in performing arts you have a really tough problem because you have to commit long before you have the revenue and signing contracts that are three years out to get the singers you want or the directors you want, for example, but you can’t always plan your revenue that way, and, as a result, these companies are very high risk businesses, inherently.”

This inherent risk can endanger NPO’s when combined with an over-provisioning or mis-provisioning of a given market, two issues that have been plaguing the arts scene well before the beginning of the recession and were often left unattended by organizations – which have kept doing basically the same things they did in the 90s’, i.e. what was done in the 80’s, i.e. in the 70’s (when NP Arts was a thriving young industry). And yet, over the last 10 years, commercial arts have changed significantly, sometimes pulling the rug out from under NPO’s feet: “The NP arts have been extraordinarily successful in establishing a national niche market and we thought that we had the moral high ground because what we do is of the highest quality. The finest commercial companies couldn’t enter that market because you couldn’t make money in it, so we were OK, but now with new technologies, new distribution systems, and with changing customer behaviors, commercial companies have found ways to make money making high quality products. Twenty years ago, a regional theater’s biggest competitors were other performance venues within a 100 miles radius; now its biggest competition is HBO. Vertically integrated companies have intensive marketing, spend a lot of money on a creative product, and realize the gain from it over a 3 or 4-year period. You can have HBO, you can have Sundance for films – there is a way to make money out of high quality products. You can now make profitable niche marketS in the arts. We used to view ourselves as the arbiters of taste and the only people able to provide non-commercial high-quality artistic products. It’s not true anymore. We can choose to stay on the ice that we occupy that is getting smaller and smaller, like polar bears with global warming, or we can use our creative intelligence to invent how to bring meaning to people. If not enough people want to come and sit in a symphony hall, does that mean that people are not interested in classical music? No. It doesn’t. The first symptom of an industry that is in trouble is when it blames its customers. When a symphony orchestra has trouble and we say that people are not appreciating arts, we are blaming our customers. It’s not the appetite for music that goes away. People only expect different delivery modes or different programming, and ultimately a better integration into the social fabric.”

The other meaning of the word recession: ceding back: The problems that NPO’s may experience during a recession are no different from the ones experienced by commercial organizations. “What we are seeing is what economists refer to across the globe in every market, not just the arts, as a brutal rationalization of the market and it’s not going to be fun for anybody, and I am not dismissing it. But no recession, no depression ever killed the arts. I think we are doing a lot better in articulating the unique value we add. For so long we have been talking about the instrumental benefits of the arts in order to get legislators, city council people, and federal government people, with the goal to make it OK to support us –and we need to get more comfortable with the intrinsic language again — talking about our work in a way that matters and doesn’t just refer to economic benefit. We make communities, communities of joy, of thought, of debate — it’s important work on its own terms.”

At a time of an economic recession, it is only appropriate to also remember the other meaning of the word “recession” as the act of ceding back. I would venture to say that arts organizations are not designed for the mere preservation of the arts or the employment of the people who run them – no more that commercial organizations are aimed at only pleasing its executives and a bunch of shareholders. The primary goal of an organization is to satisfy its customers and users, and reach out to them – i.e. ceding back their feel of ownership. That’s what multiple initiatives have been able to achieve well before our current recession. “Look at enterprises like Community Musicworks in Providence. Wow Are they amazing! It’s a quartet. They decided that they were interested in completely changing the quality of life of that 20% of the population in Providence that doesn’t know anything about classical music. So they opened a storefront school, and they work with the community. Sebastian Ruth is one of the most extraordinary, charismatic people you will ever meet. He is not charismatic in a big loud way. He is incredibly intense. They are incredible musicians. People get on the train from New York to see them. They are doing these concerts with the kids from the neighborhood who had never picked up an instrument before they went to see these guys. They are unbelievable. They are doing this because they believe that great art has the power to change lives. The quality of their work is superb. And of course look at El Sistema. The founder, José Antonio Abreu is an economist and amateur musician. When he founded the Social Action for Music, he believed that they only way to affect poverty was to make it possible to young people to create something of beauty. And his program is now probably the most successful social program in the world!”

Russell is definitely optimistic: “People are going to be coming together for the kind of experience that the arts provide that doesn’t cost a lot of money but means a lot. I think the community is not simply a nice thing, it’s the only thing, and arts organizations have a premier role to play in creating the sense of community. There is a Starbucks at every corner. There is a Walmart in every town. But you know how you know where you are when all towns start to look alike. You know where you are by the art that is being enjoyed and created — that is what gives us that important sense of place now.”

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

For more information:

About National Arts Stratetegies: http://www.artstrategies.org;

Russell Willis Taylor’s detailed bio: http://www.artstrategies.org/about/staff/Taylor_Russell.php

Community Musicworks (Providence String Quartet):http://www.communitymusicworks.org/quartet.htm

El Sistema: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Sistema

José Antonio Abreu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_Antonio_Abreu

I also wrote a post on the impact of the recession for start-ups a few weeks ago: http://delbourg-delphis.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=116