It occurred to me as I finished up The Whuffie Factor and was traveling around talking about it, there were parts of my message that were valued by business leaders and other parts that were glossed over. Those that seemed to make people squirm were the touchy-feely ones like Embrace the Chaos and Find Your Higher Purpose, which IMO are the most advanced ones. They require a major shift in thinking from being very traditional business thinking to being very human-centric. For me, this is a no-brainer. It’s key. Businesses sell to humans, why shouldn’t they align with human needs. But what I discovered as I delivered my message is that I seemed to be speaking a foreign language. And not only was it foreign, but it was undervalued. “Where is the 101? Should we have a Facebook page or a Twitter account or both?” “How do we measure ROI?” was thrown back at me like nothing I said had sunk in. I was told by colleagues that my message was too basic. Huh?

That’s when I began to realize that there is a deeper misunderstanding here than the economics of social currency – which is what TWF is all about and I started preaching in 2006. But as I heard more and more social media types describe these social economics (whether they used Whuffie or Social Currency or Social Capital or…), something wasn’t changing: the business approach to online communities. Social capital wasn’t being described as a currency that works differently, but in tandem with market capital, it was being described as a thing to be mined…a justification for a social media strategy. “Look at all of the social capital we can leverage to make more money!” This was so not my intention.

And then the lightbulb went on! I realized that what was wrong with the whole picture was the gap between the underlying values of business:

• Profit
• Process
• Efficiency
• Return on Investment
• Risk Management & Planning
• Maximize Resources, Minimize Waste
• Reliability
• Accountability
• Growth
• Hierarchy
• Competitiveness & Winning
• Dedication & Loyalty
• Control
• Etc.

…and the underlying human values that drive community:

• Compassion
• Generosity
• Connectedness
• Freedom
• Love
• Truth & Authenticity
• Courage & Fidelity
• Charity
• Wisdom
• Stories
• Openness
• Personal Growth
• Beauty
• Etc.

Certainly, there is reason to some of these value-gaps. As business has grown and the ability to reach wider, global audiences has increased, efficiency and process help drive the planning for expansion. And with profitability at the core of all these values, that is necessary. But as businesses started to move into a very sacred space (and I like to compare our online communities to that of the forests of Pandora on Avatar in my presentation), these values begin to poison the very human interactions we have there. All of a sudden, things shift and the things we hold so dear are being ignored (or de-valued “tweeting about what you are having for lunch is so inane!”), co-opted (community members, themselves, becoming ‘personal brands’ or what I call roboticized) or exploited (community sourcing is the process of exploiting generosity). And this is not the direction we need to go in IMO. I believe strongly that, rather than business injecting business values onto our communities to business ends, we really need to turn the tides and teach business how to espouse human values again…or as Gary Hamel writes in his excellent column, put soul back into business. It is human beings, after all, that are necessary to the success of any business (whether employees or customers).

Which is why I DO mind the gap between business values and human values and why this has become the focus of my most recent work and presentations:

As the presentation states, we humans are growing less and less trusting of where we are spending our money and our time (working), but we still desire that connection. No, we don’t want to be chummy with companies, but we are seeking out those brands that espouse human values to spend our time and money with. And that is the key here. It’s not just a nice thing to do, although I believe that without this shift, the world is going to get a whole lot scarier – think the current economic crisis but worse. It’s also a smart business move. There is much more business can learn from the values driving the growth of online communities than where to target the next generation of buyers. Call it a revolution or a paradigm shift or what you will, but it is happening and it needs to be said over and over until the shift is made universally. This doesn’t just make for a better future for humans, but for business as well. Like it or not, we are living in a consumer society and we may as well make it a harmonious relationship.

So, yes, I DO mind the gap and so should everyone else. We spend a great amount of time on connecting, sharing, being generous and creating beauty. This is incredibly valuable and IS making the world a better place. Let’s keep it move in that direction.

[photos by: shutterstock]

Do you have to sacrifice love for greatness? And, if so, what would be your choice?

And yes, I do believe that the sacrifice has to be made especially for women. Statistically, the realm of love and family falls more on the shoulders of women according to research from many sources. According to research by the Boston Consulting Group, the majority of married household responsibilities still fall on the shoulders of working women (and a larger percentage for those with kids). In Why She Buys, author and expert on marketing to women, Bridget Brennan, discusses the fact that more women are delaying marriage in order to get ahead in their careers and focus on themselves. And a special issue of TIME Magazine on the State of the American Woman in October of 2009 uncovered research that showed that even though 40% of women are the primary breadwinner in the household, they are also the primary caregivers in the household.

And it would be all well and fine to suggest that the role of women in family is necessary to the well-being of the family, their community and the world, but it just isn’t really valued. There is much lip-service paid to the importance of family and child-raising, but when we take a look at the way it is treated in North America, money isn’t put into that realm. I can’t find the article, but over a year ago, I read an article by a prominent business success leader (as described in the intro) who said success required sacrifice: time and chutzpah and really prioritizing one’s worklife (if you can recall this article, please let me know). Then Clay Shirky recently wrote a highly controversial post ranting about women and their lack of taking risks. And though I think Clay was partially right (the more risks I take and the more chutzpah I have, the better I’ve done), women just aren’t socialized to be that public and it’s partially because we spend so much time taking care of our private lives.

And then I take a look at the history of women who have achieved what I deem as greatness: changing the world in significant ways. Women throughout history like Joan of Arc, Elizabeth I, Jane Austen, Florence Nightingale and Susan B. Anthony were never married and those who were, like Amelia Earhart, Marie Curie, Indira Ghandi and Katharine Hepburn were very untraditional in their approach to marriage (Amelia Earhart called her marriage a ‘dual control partnership’) and married later on to equally powerful, impressive men. Even our current heroine, Oprah, remains unmarried and focused very much on her career.

And I don’t necessarily conflate business success with greatness, though the two require a similar amount of dedication to one’s goals. That dedication takes a great deal of time and energy – time and energy that most people don’t have after a day of working to get by, then working the second shift at home. Believe me. I’m a single mom and if it weren’t for the help of my family and my son spending many of his early years with other family members (including his father), I wouldn’t have got the leg up on my education and early career I needed to get ahead.

So what is there to choose here? Love or greatness. On one hand, you will have a life partner, someone to lean on and grow old with. Someone to keep you warm at night and share those beautiful moments with – like silently reading together, sharing a crossword or slow dancing in the middle of the street spontaneously. Someone to grow with and share experiences with. Someone you can trust with your deepest desires and secrets and who makes you feel safe and warm even on the coldest winter night. That’s love. Amazing connectedness to one person (and potentially a few little people). On the other hand you take the world on your shoulders. You dedicate your passion, love and energy to many – often to people you don’t even know. You will be told you are doing something futile or, even worse, selfish. You will be told you are wrong. Every day is frustrating and, yet, so rewarding. You connect with many people – but often drift off to sleep alone at night. I think of Spiderman all of the time. He had to do this, right? He had to give up Mary Jane to save the world. Batman had to give up many loves to become the Dark Knight. (and yes, both Batman and Spiderman are obviously men, but they are also fictional) If you are able to be a superhero AND have found the love of your life, rock on. You have a rare experience.

Greatness sounds awful and lonely and like a huge burden. It’s no fun and the hours and pay are bad. You have no guarantee of achieving anything significant in your lifetime. And you certainly never know if what you are doing is 100% right because you have your own idea of justice. Joan of Arc learnt that the hard way. Who in their right mind would choose a path of greatness over love?

Well, I would for one. Not that I don’t think about the love path everyday and envy those who choose it. And when I made that realization, I genuinely mourned letting go of any semblance of normalcy in my life. Whenever I think of dipping my toes into the love pool, I’m reminded that it’s an uncomfortable temperature for me. I can’t help but rant on a first date. I’ve canceled many other dates because I was getting into yet another big project and couldn’t be bothered to dress up. And I’m sure that talking to any number of my exes would bring out stories about the extreme pressure I put on myself and others to meet my ideal of the world. But at the same time, I’m surrounded by amazing people who I love and love me – just not romantically. And I would be miserable on any other path than this one. If I’m not working on something to change the world or talking to somebody about how we should do proceed, I get depressed. I feel lost. Food tastes blah. Colours dull. As soon as I have a purpose, my community of friends and supporters and a path, I come alive. My turn-on is a fire in the belly. My intimacy is a meeting of the minds. And my love is a wide net of compassion and support.

What would you choose?

And though I dislike the term ‘consumer’, the truth is that in today’s world, that’s what it resembles. It’s transactional, impersonal and more often than not marginalizing. It’s as if it is in the DNA of business to push the limits on how badly it can treat the customer to maximize revenue. And over the years, it seems, that limit has been creeping further down the rabbit hole of customer hell. Pain limits are pushed to a level where the customer *almost* decides the transaction isn’t worth making with the business, but when the customer gets used to that pain level, the business pushes the pain further. And so on until we are so used to poor treatment, the simplest gesture that makes us feel empowered again feels like a win.

With online soapboxes like Twitter, blogs and Facebook, though, the individual has the ability to connect with other individuals to get a better deal, and the bigger the soapbox, the more we are empowered. The only problem is that business has got wind of this soapbox and works strategically on shutting it down.

I was working away at my computer today when my phone rang. I picked it up to hear the friendly voice of a representative from CIBC, the bank I deal with in Canada. “How are you today, Miss Hunt? I’m calling to see if I can help you with the issue you were having with CIBC the other day.” I paused to wait for it, “You know, the one you posted about online?”

Bingo. CIBC is using some tracking software to pick up mentions on Twitter and the blogs (most likely will reply to this post, too) and then saw that I have over 30k followers and that particular rant started a rather large conversation. Because of this, my ‘issue’ was escalated to a personal service department where I now have a personal service agent who I may call at any point with issues. Awwww. Isn’t that nice?

No. It’s strategic. And it’s a lovely and nice way to try to silence me. Like attracting more bees with honey. Or being the sun in the parable about the wind and sun in competition to remove the coat from the man. And the gentleman I chatted with at CIBC was awesome and said he’d relay all of my suggestions to the proper decision makers and gave me his personal number and released some money from the hold, but I’m still not satisfied.

Because, well, I don’t take bribes (#12) even when they don’t look like one. I want change. I don’t want to see change for me, I want to see change for everyone. I want banks to stop experimenting with how far they can push us before we cry ‘uncle’ on their policies and start thinking about how they can help us achieve our dreams with customer-empowering policies. I want business to invest in technology that streamlines and helps the customer experience, not technology that spies on us. I would even go as far as sitting down with executives at CIBC for FREE to understand what the hold up is and to consult with them on improving their system for customers. I’d even connect them to the right talent to implement the system. Hell, I want this so badly I’d even pay for this to happen.

Every business starts facing a decision to make: are we here to serve customers or are we here to get rich? Conventional wisdom, set by standards that are unproven and short-sighted, leads most businesses to pick the latter. But picking customer happiness as the core driver to your business is actually the better way. It leads to satisfaction, loyalty, positive word-of-mouth, efficiency and, ultimately, riches for the business. Happy customers means you spend less on customer acquisition and retention, employee retention and recruitment, innovation (you are more innovative, but use less resources), and operations (happy customers lead to more efficient operations as you, by definition, become more efficient). You’ll beat the competition every time because they can’t figure out why customers flock to you while they have rock bottom prices.

As I‘ve been quoted saying, ‘Designing your product for monetization first, and people second will probably leave you with neither.’ As the market tips more and more towards the whims of the customer, this will ring more and more true. Now is the time for us to use all of the power we have to move business in the direction of customer-centric thinking. It’s good for everyone.

The White House has once again announced its commitment to immigration law reform in early 2010. So far, however, there is no sign that the administration, the Congress, or any other national leaders have learned the lessons from past attempts on this issue, most notably the ugly debate and legislative failure in 2007.

Ask people on the street what they think of when they hear the word “immigrant” — particularly with 10% unemployment in the country —- and you will hear statements like: “They take our jobs,” “They bring crime,” “They steal our health care,” “They don’t learn English.”

Americans hear the word “immigrant” and imagine the worst. They think of illegal immigrants, competition for jobs and the stamping out of American culture.

They don’t think of the tendency of immigrants–especially today’s immigrants– to create jobs, to revitalize communities, and to adopt and strengthen American culture, because no one is reminding them of this.

Humanitarian arguments to legalize 12 million undocumented immigrants dominate the public discourse on immigration law reform. This is a mistake.

Instead of focusing on illegal immigrants, policy-makers should focus on legal immigrants–the vast majority of all immigrants–and their power as an economic engine. Economic policy has never driven immigration debates —- that must change.

In the new book, Immigrant, Inc. —- Why Immigrant Entrepreneurs Are Driving the New Economy (and how they will save the American worker) (John Wiley, November, 2009), which I co-wrote with Robert L. Smith, we document how immigrants have created millions of jobs for Americans and now represent the most powerful job-creating force today.

Consider the following:

• Immigrants are almost twice as likely as native-born Americans to start a business.
• Immigrants are twice as likely as native-born Americans to file for a U.S. patent.
• Immigrants constitute the majority of Ph.D. candidates in many science and engineering programs at U.S. universities.
• Immigrants founded more than half of the high-tech companies in Silicon Valley, and twenty-five percent nationwide.
• Many brilliant immigrants are turned away from this country because of an immigration system that does not value their skills.

To succeed in a knowledge-based economy, America needs an advanced-degreed, entrepreneurial, and globally-connected population. Today’s immigrants bring these skills to the table — with aces. Their world-class talents translate into the creation of new industries and generations of new jobs for Americans.

Immigration reform would also inject billions of dollars into the economy. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that $66 billion in new revenue over 10 years would have been generated if supporters of the 2006 immigration reform bill had succeeded in legalizing most undocumented immigrants.

Jobs and fiscal responsibility —– this should be the message —– not earned amnesty and candlelight vigils.

Recently, syndicated columnist Neal Peirce of The Washington Post Writers Group argued that a new line of thought could drive a more productive discussion. “The mere fact that immigrants are an asset, not a liability, puts a whole new face on the Lou Dobbs-style attacks on America’s 12 million undocumented immigrants,” he wrote.

Welcoming immigrant innovators and entrepreneurs is “a virtually guaranteed stimulus to our economy and to our creative capacity for this century,” Peirce argues.

The problem is, it’s hard for the innovators and entrepreneurs to get in. The current immigration system reserves only 9% of the coveted “green cards” for highly-skilled or investor immigrants. Instead of waiting in a years-long line, more and more super talent is leaving the U.S. or deciding not to come in the first place. That’s why reform is essential.

So, while the right-wing begins the public outcry on undocumented immigrants or problems with H1B visas, the pro-immigration side should not allow the powerful, economic issues to be forgotten.

A job-creating message will soften the conversation, inject rationality into the discussion, and increase the chances of something getting passed. The White House should help coordinate a public education campaign that explains how smart immigration is good for America, especially in a smart economy.

To get that message out, they should employ the services of some immigrants who have been quite busy lately: People like Sergey Brin, who co-founded Google, Andy Grove, who gave us Intel, or Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

The President could talk about immigrant-founded companies like Dow Chemical, DuPont, Pfizer, Proctor & Gamble, Carnegie (later U.S.) Steel. He should remind America that immigration has historically been our competitive advantage.

That’s a fact that is more real today than ever before.

* * * * * *

Richard Herman is the co-author of Immigrant Inc.— Why Immigrant Entrepreneurs are Driving the New Economy (and how they will save the American worker (John Wiley & Sons, November, 2009)

The systematic and expressive nature of the grammar and pronunciation patterns of the African American vernacular has been established by numerous scientific studies over the past thirty years. Characterizations of Ebonics as “slang,” “mutant,” “lazy,” “defective,” “ungrammatical,” or “broken English” are incorrect and demeaning.

When this resolution was widely agreed to, the internet was still quite young. The term blogging wasn’t even coined, Twittering was nearly 10 years away and text messaging in North America was pretty much unheard of. Oh, and my son – who is quite representative of what we call Digital Nomads – was not yet 4 years old. A community that spans a country, without the web to drive a vernacular, had established a new dialect widely enough used to be brought to the attention of a ’society of linguists’ in a Chicago meeting that ostensibly put a stamp of approval on its existence. I’m not going to start to examine what the validation means, but I do think it is an incredibly awesome thing that this happened 13 years ago.

Grammar has always been an awkward thing for me. This is mostly due to the pressure I feel from the existence of what I (and many others) call the grammar police. Hell, I’ve even mis-spelled the word (eg. Grammer). As a blogger, there isn’t a post that goes up that isn’t riddled with over-zealous commas and dangling participles not to mention the mis-spelling of a word here and there (it’s/its or effect/affect and the like). But I am writing in my own voice, usually a casual one, in order to allow the ideas to flow. To stop and think about my grammar is to stop that flow of ideas. Sometimes I read the post over after I’m finished to make sure it’s understandable, but even then I’ll miss words and sentence structures that are amiss. That’s not my strength. That’s why I had a damn fine editor for my book.

But whether I miss a typo or misuse a word doesn’t much matter to me. If I was speaking to someone F2F about a subject, our conversation would be full of pauses and misused words and grammatical errors and I like to think of my style of writing as conversational. The only thing I hope is that the core message of my post makes sense. And that is the way I read posts as well. Unless there is a glaring error (I laughed heartily over techtonic shits), I never stop to think “Should there be a comma there?” I just read the post. Which is why the linguistic shifts that are happening right now are exciting to me.

Is there an equivalent to Ebonics in online culture? Or are we still speaking in ’slang’ or ‘lazy’ or ‘ungrammatical’? I’m not talking about throwing all grammar to the wind. We still need basic pieces of the structure of language to be able to understand one another, but we can certainly stop being so damned uptight about it. There is a point at which we stop helping people improve their grammar and start being downright annoying. Judging someone on their mastery of the language rather than the content of their message is another form of classism.

Consider these examples:

• As an Anglophone living in Montreal, my Francophone friends are kind enough to speak with me in English. As we talk, many of them speak with frequent grammatical errors, none of which register with me as significant. Sure, I could spend the entire conversation being really annoying and correcting them in order to “teach” them better English, but that would be jarring to the conversation, I understand what they are saying anyway and (the most glaringly obvious) I’m actually the ignoramus who hasn’t learnt enough of their language to put together a full sentence, so I should keep my trap shut.

• I’m a big fan of The Wire, which takes place in Baltimore and includes in-depth dialogues from the police, the people who live in a poor neighbourhood (including the drug trade), politicians and news reporters. They all speak English, but different dialects of it. Switching back and forth between the dialects made me dizzy in the beginning of watching the series, but made me smarter by the end of it. Why? Like any other aspect of culture, linguistics tells a story. The politicians speak English, the police speak in a cross between Ebonics and English and the drug runners speak in pure Ebonics. The police build a bridge. Certain characters of each group cross over. The CTO of the drug organization, Stringer Bell, speaks English while his boss, Avon Barksdale, speaks Ebonics. Power structures appear between the languages. Classism and racism run high beyond skin colour and through language. I became smarter about the culture because I started to understand all dialects.

• About 3 years ago, my son (now nearly 17 years old) began texting rather than calling me. At first I had no clue what he was trying to ’say’ to me, using oodles of acronyms (ROFL, WTF) and abbreviations (ur, l8, 4). I thought he was writing me in code. But slowly I learned the acronyms and abbreviations myself and found them 2b not only useful for quick typing, but useful for relating to my son. When I typed his language, I gained his respect. I also began to understand the breadth of change in language and culture that we are about to encounter.

• Business language has long been riddled with acronyms, abbreviations and buzzwords to describe broader concepts. Depending on the context of using this language, you sound either brilliant or like a ‘douche’. In the boardroom, I learnt, structuring a sentence with a series of buzzwords and acronyms, such as “We need to broaden our horizons, breaking through the clutter with a value add to this paradigm shift while using best of breed practices to capture mindshare and increase our ROI” will bring on respect and promotion, whereas if I used that in a blogpost or tweet, I would be laughed at and called names. The use of any ONE of those buzzwords would strip me of my street cred. Alternatively, speaking in my son’s lingo in the boardroom brings puzzled looks and potential discredit to my message. It will be interesting to see how the business world will cope with the Digital Nomads because as Jack Lynch says in A Lexicographer’s Dilemma, “the crimes-against-the-language rate is going to skyrocket here in the electronic age“.

• Something I learnt during the editing process on my book is that, apparently, Random House has a very different grammatical system than Penguin than does Wiley than does the Department of English at Penn State. Funny thing that none of the experts can really agree on sentence structure, punctuation and proper spellings and capitalization of things like the Internet…or is it the internet…or maybe they prefer the Web? Who knows, but after having an outside editor look at my manuscript, everything changed and then changed BACK once returned to Random House. What a funny bunch the English experts are! What I love about English grammar standards is that there are so many to choose from.

David Mitchell in a rather fun column describes the reality of the rules of the English language:

I should have said that correctness in language is vital to avoid unintentional ambiguity. But it usually isn’t. No one ever accidentally bought more potatoes than planned because they were told to buy less rather than fewer. Of all the times I’ve typed: “Hopefully see you then” in an email, no one has ever subsequently complained that, when they saw me, I didn’t seem hopeful. We sticklers say we fear confusion of meaning but it’s the feeling that we’ve learnt and obeyed a set of rules that doesn’t matter that really spooks us.

But goes on to say:

In the end, though, the rules do matter – it’s just that obeying them doesn’t. They need to be there to create a tension between conservatism and innovation.

And I (sorta) agree. The absence of rules is not the way to approach English grammar either. The tension is good to keep us at least partially understanding the gist of what we are trying to get across.

Language changes and morphs, both resulting from and driving cultural shifts. If it didn’t we’d still be speaking in Olde English like we did a goodly length in times past (p.s. there were way more commas back then). On top of that – and much like web ’standards’ – people disagree on what is proper and up to date anyway (wait, does up-to-date have hyphens?). There really isn’t one source anymore, nor should there be. There isn’t one English anyway. Not in the same country. Not even in the same city. But somehow, unlike the Tower of Babel, we manage to survive it. Is it the rules, like Mitchell points out, that keep us from throwing one another to our deaths? Perhaps, but I’d like to think it’s more than a group of the highest ranking grammar police ordaining from above us all that keeps us understanding one another. I’d like to think it’s a sense of community, where when I say Staycation, even the first time you’ve ever heard it, you understand what I’m getting at. I did. And it stuck.

[p.s. I know that some of you will think you are being smart alecs by correcting some part of this post's grammar.]

I love how the relationships I form online are pretty much exactly the same as the relationships I form offline (even before the internet). It begins with someone appearing here and there. They retweet me, @ me and are included in some of my friends’ conversations. At first, I don’t notice because I’m pre-occupied with conversations with current group of friends, but after a while I start to think, “Hmmmm, who is this person?” and I pay more attention. I start conversing back, looking deeper into his/her profile. Maybe even Googling him/her.

Then we get the chance to really connect – either through a deeper conversation or I start following him/her and find out little nuances about him/her that connect me. She is a startup entrepreneur and a mom. He went through a rough divorce last year. She likes to surf. He listens to R&B. I start to comment back. We connect more and more. Then the next thing you know, we interact like old friends, joking around, supporting one another through tough days and maybe even finally meeting up when given the chance.

This is much like how people enter our lives offline. They show up at events or coffee shops or other public spaces where at first you don’t notice them. Then they become familiar (a similar story is actually told in Julien and Chris‘ Trust Agents) and you start asking, “Hey, who is that guy/gal?” and the interaction begins until you are hanging out for beers on a Friday afternoon on the patio talking about the crappy week you had.

But I really love that what the internet HAS changed is that the whole world is my coffee shop and/or event. I can grow a rapport with someone sight unseen (except for an avatar). As Bruce Sterling once said, “National borders, they’re like speed bumps.” I’ve met people in person (usually at SXSW) that I’ve ‘known’ for years online. And there is no awkwardness about it. It’s like we’ve been hanging out in person for that whole time. I can’t wait to see people like Elizabeth Weinstein and Jorge Jaime in person. I’ve been interacting with both of them online for a while and I bet there will be hugs and squeals from minute 0.

Like any relationship, it’s taken time to get to that point, but I feel like I know them as well as any of my new friends offline. And though I’m a little unsure as to what my point was when I started this post, I just wanted to say that I’m excited about the sprouts of relationships that I have with all of you and can’t wait to see them emerge organically over the next few years.

I love disruption, especially when one is disrupting towards a positive end. When there is the ability to disrupt a dominant system that discriminates against people or favors those already in power – such as well, North America – I love it even more. So firstly, to outline what I propose to disrupt:

1. Stereotyping – somehow, even though we examined stereotypes eons ago, the attitudes seem to persist. The problem is that now they persist in more subtle ways. Not so easy to put our finger on it and call it out, which is an issue.
2. Individuality over community – this one is easy to spot and many will tell me it’s a good thing. I don’t think it is. There should be a balance, but if anything, I believe the balance should tip in the favour of community. Many studies have shown that putting community interests first actually benefits the individual more in the long-run. See: Non-Zero and The Origins of Virtue.
3. No-Choice Consumerism – I’m not referring to monopolies as much as I am referring to the lack of choice we actually have in choosing to opt-in or opt-out. I love to shop. Anyone who knows me knows I have a bit of a passion for it. But when I do, I struggle to keep in charge of my own experience and outcome. There are too many situations where pressure, scare tactics, smoke and mirrors and general exploitation come into play while I’m trying to make a decision.
4. Life Inc. – Also the name of an awesome book by Douglas Rushkoff, it’s also the reality of a world of people emulating corporations. I see this all of the time: people concerned about their personal brand, creating an elevator pitch for their lives, choosing friends based on ability to connect to powerful people, creating an image they can never live up to and when it falls apart, they try to sweep under the carpet. It’s emotionless, inauthentic and getting really boring if you ask me. I wrote about it a little here.

There are a few other themes, but I want to move along to the disruptions. Disruptions are unlike movements or protests or even flashmobs. They don’t require a great deal of organizing and you can’t really plan when you are going to perform them. The one thing they DO require is courage because they are about being hyper aware of the moment in which you see one of the above themes playing out and then questioning the theme openly – at the expense of being called a party pooper. But the awesome part of disruptions is that they are extremely powerful. When someone tells a racist joke and, instead of laughing, you say, “That’s not funny,” they will think twice about telling that joke again. So…here are 15 easy everyday ways to disrupt a system:

1. Flip around your pronouns when storytelling, especially where they have been heavily gendered. Refer to a man caring for the kids/doing housework, refer to a woman as the CEO, etc. Not only are you breaking the cycle of bias in the brains of your listeners, you will get their attention. Like Chip and Dan Heath say in Made to Stick, the #2 way to make your idea stick is through unexpectedness.
2. When talking to someone who uses gendered pronouns (or having someone tweet or blog gendered pronouns), gently suggest they read the previous suggestion. OR you can answer back flipping the pronoun if you want to be more subtle. It will make them think about it from that point forward.
3. Look people in the eye and smile at them as you walk by them. Add a nod or ‘good day’ once you get the hang of it. This one is super simple and incredibly catchy. Research has shown that smiles spread.
4. Diversify your examples. Find out what is happening beyond the whositwhatsits in your professional world and educate yourself on the people doing great work at the edges. In technology, it’s me looking at what’s happening in India, Europe, China, etc. as well as what’s happening in Silicon Valley. Bring up these examples in conversations that highlight the whositwhatsits over and over again until people spread it onwards.
5. Call out sexist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic or any other ‘minority group as stereotype’ jokes, references, slurs or language. This sounds like a d’uh thing, but it’s really hard. Doing so makes you look like a party pooper. But really, the person making those comments should know that they look like an arse. You are doing everyone a favour.
6. Don’t buy products from companies that offend you or treat you badly. Most of us do this already, but sometimes it’s really really convenient. Hell, I have a plan with AT&T. I need to not do that anymore. And I buy from American Apparel, even though their ads make me really angry. I need to stop that, too. It’s inconvenient, but important to send the message through not spending our money to support bad companies.
7. Take the time to talk with people with vastly different opinions. This is really hard. I usually get about 5 minutes into these conversations and want to scream and run away, but persistence (and patience) pays off. The first step is to stop trying to get them to listen to you and listen to them. Find a point of connection. There is usually more than one of those. Hear them out. Understand where they come from. Believe it or not, we usually want the same things, we just disagree on how we get there. Once the defenses are down, you’ll find great solutions together and inform your own opinion.
8. Take the time to get to know people with vastly different experiences of the world. This always blows my mind. I learn WAY more from having conversations with people who don’t fit the ‘mainstream’ experience of the world than I do from bestsellers.
9. Start taking people to task who talk about new media marketing in the same way Mad Men used old media marketing. If I see another new media guru use Don Draper’s creative style as the ideal to uphold in marketing, I’ll scream. No, that ‘carousel’ episode is still the epitome of how things ‘were’ (creating some sort of illusion to sell a product) and does not represent really connecting to one’s customer. The real power in online communities comes from the ability to connect with new friends and old on a human level. Emotional. Real. It’s less about how a company can co-opt and exploit that and more about what companies can learn from this. (more about this at a later date)
10. Admit to your mistakes. Openly. Brutally honestly. And take responsibility for them. Then learn from them.
11. Get to know your neighbours. Even the crab apples upstairs who tell you to turn down your bass. Spend time getting involved with your neighbourhood associations, events, etc. Reach out and create a supportive community. This is something else I need to do. I find this really scary. I don’t know why. The benefits outweigh the potential rejection.
12. Don’t take bribes. What I mean by this is don’t take a free voucher or delivery or whatever a company offers to you alleviate the pain they caused you with your transaction with them. Instead, ask for them to fix the problem. Take them to task and offer to give suggestions that may help them improve their service. For instance, I ordered a microwave from Future Shop and then got totally dicked around by their awful call in center. When they figured out I had >25,000 twitter followers, they contacted me offering all sorts of things, but I refused. I said, “I don’t want you to fix this issue for me, I want you to fix this issue for everyone.” Who knows if it’ll be effective. I haven’t shopped there since. I told them to call me when the call center is fixed and I’ll try them again.
13. Leave product reviews. There is a reason why sites like Yelp, Chowhound and Amazon are so popular. It’s because of people like you and I leaving product reviews. I rarely buy anything – even offline – without checking the Amazon reviews. Yelp and Chowhounds are my personal foodie guides wherever I go. And in Montreal, I found this amazing list of restaurant reviews. Generous people sharing their knowledge everyday makes the world an easier place to navigate.
14. Demand your data. Why? Because if this awesome group has their way, the future will be driven by the customer and then you’ll want all of the content and reputation and identity and history you’ve been depositing around the internet for years. It will be valuable for your experience and for YOU to leverage your own power. So, click on that little ’suggestion’ tab or ‘feedback’ button and say to the networks you are making more interesting with your contributions: “Hey, have you thought about giving me the opportunity to export my reviews/tweets/photos/connections/shopping history/preferences/etc to use elsewhere?” The more requests they get, the more they’ll be pressured to do this.
15. Use all the tools available to you to call out injustices and bad experiences. The beauty of the web is that there are literally hundreds and even thousands of others who have experienced similar situations. If you get pissed enough and have enough momentum, you can even start to do something about it. The United Breaks Guitars videos did an amazing job of getting dozens of people to share their experiences (and also refused to take a bribe by asking United to make a donation). And as I wrote here, even spreading the word through blogs and tweets makes a difference.

Of course, these small steps are only icebreakers to apathy, but we all get so busy that starting somewhere that fits in our schedules yet is bigger than a tweet is a good start. And each of these small disruptions packs a big punch. Good disrupting!

As Erica D., Erica O and Ruth have pointed out, we have been picking #themewords instead of (or in my case in addition to) setting down resolutions since LifeCamp2007.

When chosing a themeword, one needs to be incredibly careful. My first year, I chose the themeword TRANSITION, which turned out to be a doozy! When I was *thinking* transition, I was imagining transitioning into my next awesome step in life and moving forward. What I didn’t imagine was that a transition also meant that many things big in my life would come to an end. My long-term relationship ended abruptly, my son decided he wanted to move in with his father (thankfully, he moved back after 8 months), my business and clients slowly melted away (they were all connected to the relationship as we owned the business together) and life as I had previously known it kind of fell away. Of course, it all turned out positively, but not before I had a bit of an existential crisis.

So as 2009 approached, I chose THRIVE as it was safe and warm. It also happened to be the campaign themeword for Kaiser Permanente, which I didn’t connect at the time. This didn’t mean it wasn’t positive, but there was no real challenge in it. Thriving was a sort of chugging along action word. I had a great year, of course, with the book being released, the Whuffaoke karaoke roadtrip, a fabulous move to Montreal and many speaking gigs, but it wasn’t until the end of the year that forward momentum started to kick into gear.

Which is why I’m choosing a very strong, definitive word for 2010: ACHIEVE. I have laid down a good amount of groundwork for both a challenging and rewarding year. Now I have to focus (a word that was in the running, but I figure I need it to achieve nonetheless) and drive forward towards my goals. And I have many of them. I want to finish writing that second book that has a great outline and a couple of rough chapters dangling, launch and grow Shwowp, the startup I’ve announced alongside Jerome Paradis, guide a conference about putting people at the core of business in Montreal, learn French and maybe even figure out this dating thing once and for all. It’s all about big achievements and pushing myself to do more and talk less. I’m excited.

So, what is your #themeword for 2010? My friend Erica O’Grady lays out a great guideline to helping you set down and follow through on your #themeword here:

How to Pick Your #ThemeWord for 2010

1. Think of a word that reflects your hopes and dreams for 2010.
2. Share your ThemeWord with friends on Twitter, Facebook, or Your Blog.
3. Be sure and use the hashtag #ThemeWord.

What I love about boiling the entire year down into one word is that it helps focus everything else. It’s also a fun exercise. Be sure to tweet and tell me yours.

[champagne glasses photo from shutterstock]

…or so my recent experiences would demonstrate. The awful stereotypes that rotate through our culture that women are emotional, dramatic and needy while men are jerks who just want sex and space fall apart when we shift overall power dynamics.

Let me explain.

Scenario: Being that I’ve settled into a new place and am in a good place in my life, I decided that dating would probably be a good idea. However, I spend most of my ‘going out’ time with mostly men and a few women from the technology scene. This makes it difficult to find time to go out on my own and meet people outside of my field (people who I can casually date without rumors flying around). So, I turned to what most modern singles turn to in our day and age: online dating. I looked at a few sites, but they just seemed so cheesy until I came across OKCupid, a hip and fun site that is also without those awful ’sign up for 3 months to be able to talk to anyone and give us all of your information while you are at it’ caveats.

This was in October. Then I got really busy with travel and work so I didn’t check in for a long time. While I was offline, I had a few messages that I missed and that sort of thing, but a few of them had me baffled. I logged onto find a couple of threads where I got not one, but multiple messages from the same men. They started out sweet and chatty, moved into ‘Hello? Hello?’ territory fairly quickly, then spiraled into crazy, dramatic, “Listen here you snotty beotch…you think you are better than me?” depths within a couple of days. Okay, so I could dismiss these threads as troll-like online behavior.

Then as I was checking these messages, I got pinged in the IM feature by someone who had just joined the service. I was procrastinating anyway, so I decided to give it a whirl. Now I KNOW most men out there understand this, but leading with overly sappy comments is a sure fire turn-off for most women. I had to tell him, “Dude. You don’t even know me. How could you say that I’m the woman of your dreams? Hell, I could be a guy!” We finally got into a regular conversation until he asked me to phone him. I told him I had work to do (I did) and that I didn’t phone people I just met on the internet (I don’t) and said that I had to go (I did). I woke up this morning to a similarly crazy spiraling message on how I was missing out.

There are several other instances since I’ve gotten to the point in my life that I have enough self-confidence to not need a boyfriend or the external validation of anyone else where some degree of this has happened. I find myself blocking texts, ignoring emails and sometimes having to sit down with men I barely know to let them know that their behaviour is not helping the situation. I genuinely try to give them advice for ‘the next woman’ they want to woo…advice that starts sounding a great deal like ‘He’s Just Not That Into You‘ or ‘Dating Without Drama‘. Advice that was meant for WOMEN.

But I’m still a woman…and the dozen-odd cases I’ve encountered in the past 6-8 months are, well, men as far as I can tell. Men of many ages. 20’s, 30’s and 40’s. Varying incomes and stages in life. Good looking in general. That sort of thing. So what is the difference?

Power.

The dynamic shifted for me this year more than ever. Between doing a great deal of soul searching, CBT and just getting to a point in my life where I’m not feeling like I need someone to complete me, I have started to occupy the control position in relationships. (not controlling, but ‘I make my own decisions and I will survive if the other party doesn’t reciprocate’ control position) Therefore, I have power in many situations. And when another party approaches someone with that power, the human reaction to that often comes from a place of defensiveness. A rejection manifests in hurt, anger, sadness, drama, neediness, etc.

What’s most interesting to me is the genderedness of these situations. I am aware of the odd reaction from these guys because I don’t expect it. I expect a shrug and move along. I’ve been completely flabbergasted. And I certainly don’t advocate women en masse turning the tables, but I do think this gives a good example of how gendered behavior can be unpacked. It’s not actually due to being a woman or a man at all. The reaction comes from a loss of power over a situation. A loss of control. In a world where power was balanced (not only between genders, but between cultures), drama and emotional outbursts wouldn’t be attributed to a stereotyped group of people, it would be attributed to a reaction to feeling disempowered. Which is, in the end, what it has always been.

The ‘men from mars, women from venus’ thing and all of the other self-help battle of the sexes books out there mainly reinforce the power dynamic that already exists. They teach us to game the awful system we exist in where one gender DOES hold more power than the other when we SHOULD be questioning it. It’s why we hear things like, “Men love bitches” and why women often won’t date the ‘nice guy’. Personally, I aim to question it and continue to experiment with it as long as I have the ability to, while at the same time being aware of where I’m at and how I can help balance the dynamic for future generations.

The thing that bothers me most about branding, be it personal or otherwise, is the whole consistency item. When learning about branding in the 90’s while I was at University, it was taught to me that going ‘off brand’ was a big no-no. Going ‘off-brand’ would confuse your customers, alienate the people who identified with your company and cause some major implosion to your company. Companies like GAP and Apple were upheld as being brand geniuses because we could look at a logo-less advert for 5 seconds and know instantly that this must be one of theirs.

I always questioned the value in that idea. Okay, so I recognize the ‘look and feel’ of this advert. Must be the GAP. And? I know that consistency is equivalent to comfort, but I am uncertain of the longevity of that particular strategy. GAP was awesome in the 90’s and early 2000’s. The consistency of their clothes – jeans, fitted sweaters, khakis and an array of colourful t-shirts – WAS comforting, but after a while it became so comforting that it became common, then commonplace. Now when someone is wearing an entire GAP outfit, people snicker behind their backs, implicating that person as a follower and unoriginal.

And unoriginal is no longer going to fly in the ‘I-want-it-my-way” era of the personalizable, customizable, nichified, tribe-ified net. Choice is king here and the ability to craft a style based on a person’s individual ‘brand’ is the key. Nobody wants to look like they stepped out of the window of any particular store any longer. Sure, the tee can be from the GAP, but the boots are from Fluevog, the pants are Hudsons, the sweater is vintage from a little second hand store in the neighbourhood and the scarf was a gift from my BFF who bought it in Amsterdam for me. All pieces become unrecognizable as any particular ‘brand’ and become part of a person’s style.

But what of personal branding, then? Is that where it’s headed. God, I hope not.

I’ve heard so much of the term ‘personal branding’ batted around lately in reference to people like Gary Vee and Julia Allison and Chris Brogan, etc. (they even have their names as their websites). People are lauding this exercise of creating a personal brand as the secret sauce to their success. I can’t speak for them, but I know when I told a friend the other night that I was working on a book called ‘Happiness as Your Business Model‘ and he responded to that by saying:

“Well, it’s definitely on brand for you.”

I cringed. It made me want to throw it out and write something like, “Taking Advantage of Your Customers for Big Bucks”. I recoiled at the consistency of who I’ve become. Am I a broken record? Please, God, let me be more than a personal brand!

And I am. I know that. I may be consistent in my passion and what I believe in, but I’m terribly inconsistent in my actions. I talk of empowering customers, yet I’m the biggest sucker for a sales pitch you have ever met, spending most of my time impulse buying, then regretting. I may go on and on about women getting in front of parades and dispelling myths, but I’m incredibly anti-social most of the time, embarrassed to take credit or do any pro-active self-promotion (I’ve been lucky enough to have amazing friends and supporters who do this for me). I go on and on about how important relationships are, yet I am terrible at keeping in touch with friends, spending enough time with my family and getting out from behind my computer to meet new people. Yet, I really display the opposite. Nobody who “knows” me online would agree with how I’ve characterized myself here. Funny that. It’s me. 100%. The teensy group of people I let in know this.

We talk about authenticity, but people rarely want to see the negative side of a person. When I’ve been truly honest – angry, sad, scared, belligerent, grumpy, negative, depressed or anxious (and I keep it under control, but I have terrible anxiety) – people get nervous. I lose followers. I get long emails from people asking me to stop being self-indulgent. I get messages from concerned friends saying, “Don’t you worry about damaging your brand?”

And that’s it. Do we want authenticity? Or do we want branding? One of the most memorable lines in a movie for me is from Magnolia, where Claudia says to Jim:

“I’ll tell you everything, and you tell me everything, and maybe we can get through all the piss and shit and lies that kill other people. ”

I love that line because I think it’s what we all want to do, but are afraid to do it. We love people who represent the ideal, the perfect, the imperfectly perfect, the happy, the successful, the amazing, positive, go-for-it, wa-hoo in life. And I’m not saying those people don’t exist. They just don’t exist as much as we think they exist because there are so many bloomin personal brands out there that are inspiring the crap out of us that we lose the fact that behind the scenes, they are probably falling apart now and then.

Much like not wanting to look like we stepped out of a GAP ad, I don’t believe any one of us wants to look like we stepped out of an episode of Leave it to Beaver, either. We also don’t want to look like we stepped out of an episode of Absolutely Fabulous, but real life represents all of these scenarios.

I don’t have a personal brand, I have a personality – complete with crazy moments and drunken nights, super highs and heartbreaking lows. And every single one of those moments define who I am. Now. Who are you? A personal brand or a personality?