Peering over, Shenandoah National Park, Luray, Virginia

A couple things I’ve enjoyed lately:

• CrisisCongress in Washington, DC, July 16th. Loved. And this is why: How CrisisCommons Is Helping the Tech Community Help Others. A unexpected but great experience.
• #kaizenblog last Friday, July 23 about “Ignore Failure at Your Own Peril”. Elli St. George Godfrey recapped the chat, Ignore Failure At Your Own Peril-#kaizenblog recap. If you’re wondering, hosting a blog chat is hard. New-found respect.
• Continued growth of NOLAlicious, Citizen Gulf, adventures, and well, everything else that’s great in the world.

We form ourselves more by the routes we take than the destinations we reach.

Failure.

Failure is a rich word, a simple word with a rich vein of thought, opinions, lessons and advice behind it. Every single day, we hear stories about failure, advice about how to deal with it and lessons of how people and organizations have recovered from it. And sometimes, we experience it ourselves.

When you experience failure, what do you do with it? Ignore it? Own up to it privately? Acknowledge it publicly? Attempt to hide it? Show it off?

Although we might be tempted to ignore failure, the fact is that the seeds of success are often in the ashes of failure.

Contained deep within each way to fail are practical, valuable, tangible lessons that can help us all move on, evolve, grow, adapt, and succeed. Less important than failure itself is the direction we take from it.

Or at least that’s what I think. But I’m interested in your thoughts, opinions, lessons, stories and links. Valeria and Elli have prepared some key questions, links and ideas to guide us along this week’s #kaizenblog; follow along and join in.

Join us for this conversation on Friday, April 23rd at 12pm ET/5 pm GMT on Twitter by using the hashtag kaizenblog. It might be easier to sign into the conversation by using Tweetchat or Tweetgrid. Add your thoughts to the conversation!

In today’s NOLAlicious newsletter:

It seemed like the cap would never happen. 87 days into the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, it seems BP has finally stopped oil from spewing into the Gulf. But we know the end is nowhere close. So we encourage everyone to push forward and find ways to help this region that we all hold so close to our hearts.

It seems like a long time ago I first thought about how we’ll respond to the Gulf Oil Spill. And as saddened as I’ve been by the realities of the long-term impact of the disaster, the uncertain economic impact, and the sad stories of the individuals and families impacted by the spill, I’ve been lifted by the continued response by organizations and individuals nationwide.

The latest: Geoff Livingston, August 25 – CitizenGulf’s National Day of Action:

Citizen Effect’s CitizenGulf project will become a National Day of Action on August 25th, in alignment with the week of the fifth anniversary of Katrina. The benefit — to be promoted by Gulf Coast Benefit — seeks to help fishing families find a new, more sustainable future by providing education resources for their children.

Three ways you can help:

• Attend or host your local event. Email gulf@citizeneffect.org to host.
• Donate Now.
• Support Gulf Coast Benefit’s Pepsi Refresh project (more on August 2nd).



Read Geoff’s announcement to learn more about how to get involved, host an event, donate, and vote for Gulf Coast Benefit’s Pepsi Refresh Project (more on that August 2nd).

I’m stoked to be joining Andy Sternberg, el-studio.com, Live Your Talk, Sloane Berrent and Zoetica as promotional partners for the events, but the real “thank you” will go to each one of you, giving back in your own way, the best you can.

Thank you.

The right time and place, Washington, DC

Taken from an adventure at The Newseum.

Inside and Outside, Luray, Virginia

Aligning the outside and the inside. Loving the Mimslyn Inn in Luray, Virginia. Reflecting from CrisisCommon’s International CrisisCongress last Friday at the World Bank. Reading Skip to Market Manifesto. Announcing CitizenGulf’s National Day of Action. Living.

Open, New Orleans, Louisiana

The doors are open. Go for it.

San Fermin in Nueva Orleans with the @NOLAbulls, New Orleans, LA. Reblogged from NOLAlicious.

Love: Site helps businesses reward consumers for positive acations:

… Bolder works with businesses to sponsor a different challenge each week.

California-based Bolder teams up with businesses to challenge consumers to complete a certain action every week. This week’s challenge, for example, is to “make a car trip a bike trip,” and it’s sponsored by Timbuk2. Consumers who complete the challenge must then log it in along with a tweet-length story about their action; in return, they get the promised reward. In Timbuk2′s case, that’s USD 20 off a custom-made bag. Such stories also go to the site’s action feed, meanwhile, where the Bolder community can see them, comment on them and vote for them. Those voted “boldest” will be featured on the Bolder blog and may receive extra special rewards.

I first heard about Bolder via Umair Haque:

Here’s what I like about Bolder: it turns the relationship between companies and people inside out and upside down. Instead of activists pressuring companies to do something responsible, companies ask people to take small steps with them. So it asks us to recognize, in other words, that real change begins with sets of interdependent decisions. From an economic perspective, Bolder asks companies to subsidize second-order decisions (those one step down the demand chain) that are the most socially beneficial. By doing so, it lets companies and people work together to create more meaningful, authentic benefits.

Bolder, in fact, is a tiny but vivid example of many of the principles of next-gen marketing, Instead of “consumers,” there are people; instead of “consumption,” there’s positive impact; instead of “loyalty,” there’s reciprocity; and instead of zero-sum “responsibility,” there is generosity.

One sign. More to come.

Nobody doubts the impact of the Gulf Oil Spill on the people, wildlife and wetlands of the Gulf. Devastating. Life-shattering to thousands of people right now, for years, and for some, forever.

That we know. But we’re a little uncertain of exactly how much, for how long. Estimates of the economic impact of the oil spill vary widely. Imagine the complications: we don’t know exactly when the spigot is going to be turned off. We don’t know how (if? when?) the spill can be cleaned up. We don’t know how the industries directly impacted will fare, and we don’t know how the effects will trickle down through the rest of the economic and societal ecosystem. We don’t know if people will buy less seafood, or change which beaches they visit, or change what industries they monitor and care about. We don’t even know if the laws and rules will stay the same.

What’s happened so far? Unemployment? No impact, not even in the coastal Louisiana parishes, according to government figures. But we know that hides the disruption, because the rise of one industry (cleanup) is not equivalent to the decline of the impacted industries.

Lost income? The national media reports that BP’s compensation checks have largely offset lost wages and income. But the distribution has been highly uneven, and the numbers are skewed since many of the the impacted are unable to file a claim and verify a significant portion of their past income in the cash-based, relationship, off-the-books form of economic exchange common in this industry and region.

Lost business? Look for a wave of profit warnings and claims of “gulf oil spill impact” from private and public companies in the next wave of quarterly earnings reports. Look for the trickle down effect that happens when money is redistributed through the economy. GNO is collecting key economic information about the oil spill and recently released an initial economic impact assessment of the deepwater drilling moratorium (PDF), but it’s early days in estimating the full impact.

But beyond that, here’s the thing:

“You don’t hear one fisherman complain about BP around here, not one,” [Mike Berthelot] said.

“They’re making better money for BP,” Berthelot added. “But it ain’t the same. This is the end of our way of making a living. BP will pay people for a year or two, and then they’ll go away. Then what?”

Exactly. Then what?

Katrina dislodged New Orleans’s entire societal and economic system, fracturing the delicate system of relationships that made New Orleans the city it was. Some is still here, some is lost, forever. What’s left? A laboratory. New Orleans (and perhaps to a greater extent, Detroit) represents a laboratory for urban change, for testing educational reform, medicine, community organization, urban planning, disaster response, to start. Take any big issue impacting how cities and societies are organized, built and shaped, and New Orleans is a test bed for change, big or small. Some might say New Orleans is too unique for the tests and learnings to applied to other urban areas, but I disagree: New Orleans is too much of a part of America to forget, neglect, or ignore.

So, how are we responding to the oil spill? We’re all responding in the ways we know. We’re exploring and telling the stories of the impacted. We’re creating platforms to stay current and up to date. We’re creating and organizing conferences, concerts (Gulf Aid, Gulf Coast Benefits, to start) and meetups to keep people engaged, aware, and give people easy ways to give back. We’re creating contests to solicit and fund great ideas to aid the impacted communities (of note, Pepsi Refresh Project: Do Good for The Gulf). We’re holding raffles, creating exhibitions, donating our time and money to people and organizations leading the charge. We’re using and creating tech tools emerge to track and help organize responses to the oil spill. Just the tip of the iceberg.

What’s next? My hope: less talk about how many thousands of gallons of oil are pouring into the Gulf (not because we’ve stopped talking, but because the spigot’s turned off). More platforms for people to get involved. More economic analysis around the direct and indirect impacts of the oil spill. More tools and applications to bring government data and interactions to the individual. And more tools to get people aware, involved and interested in shining the light of public inquiry into the decisions of businesses and our governments before disasters, not after. Conscious capitalism, and societal change.

That’s my hope. What’s yours?

—

Leave it to me to write a post about economic analysis without a single number. I could tell you how many millions and billions of dollars that are being lost, redistrbuted and paid, but the fact is that is that the individual stories are more powerful. The total numbers are simply too large to really comprehend.

More:

• NOLA.com, Economic impact of Gulf of Mexico oil spill varies by industry
• McClatchy, Gulf oil spill’s economic impact will be long term
• Huffington Post, The Economic Impact Of The Gulf Oil Spill

Alone in Public, Charlottesville, Virginia, June 2010

So, a couple weeks ago I posted a quick riff about why it’s hard to get paid for what we do for free. Based on the response, it appears there are a more than a couple people out there thinking along the same lines.

For many of us, simply indulging our passions, creating and publishing for ourselves is enough. But for the rest of us, we harbour the belief that creating and publishing is an investment in ourselves, developing intellectual rigor, learning new skills and mediums, developing relationships, leveraging the communicative margin. We put in the time and effort to make the transition from passion to paid.

That’s a different mindset. We do “fake work” and “make work” because for us, it’s real work. We get serious about getting paid, even though it may not look obvious to the outside world. We do the seemingly ridonkulous, because we know the routes we take matter.

We invest in purpose, even as we fund the gap between purpose and profits with our blood, sweat and tears.

We know that every project, every action, every emotion, has an opportunity cost. And we know that the opportunity cost of not following your passions and interests is tremendously expensive, and usually much higher when viewed in retrospect than the here and the now.

We do. We build. We learn how to listen to the market rather than just ourselves. We learn to decern the difference between being stubborn and being determined. And if we’re good (and we tell people about it) and the market is functioning, then what we build will scale, we’ll bring others with shared purposes together, and we’ll have the impact we’re meant to have.

But still, sometimes we don’t know how to proceed.

Cue Julien, and his post How to get paid for what you do for free, a more tactical response to my more vague “link, build, recycle, shift” advice, focusing on “gaining credibility, changing context and applying leverage”.

Three methods:

• Method #1 focuses on building testimonials and word of mouth, or at the very least facilitating word of mouth.
• Method #2 is all about profiting from asymmetries: your easy = their difficult, or your knowledge = their lack of knowledge:
  

  What you do isn’t magic in your circle, so you have to go somewhere where it is.

  Meaning: translate one realm to another. It may seem easy to you, but that’s because you’ve built the knowledge, credibility and support to translate between realms.

• Method #3 is about creating and leveraging social proof:
  

  This final method is a third form of social proof, one that completes the equation with the other two: proof from others, proof from the environment, and proof from yourself. When you put together all three, you have evidence on all sides telling everyone that you’re worth a premium. Apply enough pressure on each of these, and you’re golden. But don’t apply enough, and there will be a lack of congruence when people look around, so they won’t believe it.

• But of course, it’s not just about doing the right things, but doing it the right way.
  

  Here’s the thing though: You actually have to be good at this thing you’re doing for free. You can be average and apply all of these methods I mention and still get paid, but people only feel good about it once they’ve gotten great value from your work. So you might be able to convince a few people, but then you’ll quickly go back down the ladder again. When you start to get paid, realize that you need to up your game very seriously and it’ll keep you up there. That’s when it’s even more important to work your face off.

Three keys on how to be better than free. Points for consideration of your current and future path. And hopefully, a rejuvenated conviction that the you can actually see the future you want. The inner and outer selves will align, just around the bend.

You just have to fund that gap between purpose and profit with a little more blood, sweat and tears. Trust: purpose pays. Doing good is good business. It just takes the marketplace some time to realize it sometimes. And sadly, we can’t pay the rent with tears in the meantime.

But you have it. Pick your spots, build, and keep pressing go.

Thank you, Brian, for the spark. Maybe this is why I blog.

Apart, New Orleans, Louisiana

Photo reblogged from NOLAlicious.