"Shaped like a Blogg! or a Garden hose!"

image of Molly Crabapples self portrait

I found these great rules for creative success from Molly Crabapple via Richard Kadrey’s tumbler. I think a lot of these apply to most industries… I’ve a few favourites #6 and #8 are most relevant

1. The number one thing that would let more independent artists exists in America is a universal basic income. The number one thing that has a possibility of happening is single payer healthcare. This is because artists are humans who need to eat and live and get medical care, and our country punishes anyone who wants to go freelance and pursue their dream by telling them they might get cancer while uninsured, and then not be able to afford to treat it.

2. Companies are not loyal to you. Please never believe a company has your back. They are amoral by design and will discard you at a moment’s notice. Negotiate aggressively, ask other freelancers what they’re getting paid, and don’t buy into the financial negging of some suit.

3. I’ve cobbled together many different streams of income, so that if the bottom falls out of one industry, I’m not ruined. My mom worked in packaging design. When computers fundamentally changed the field, she lost all her work. I learned from this.

4. Very often people who blow up and become famous fast already have some other sort of income, either parental money, spousal money, money saved from another job, or corporate backing behind the scenes. Other times they’ve actually been working for 10 years and no one noticed until suddenly they passed some threshold. Either way, its good to take a hard look- you’ll learn from studying both types of people, and it will keep you from delusional myth-making.

5. I’ve never had a big break. I’ve just had tiny cracks in this wall of indifference until finally the wall wasn’t there any more

6. Don’t be a dick. Be nice to everyone who is also not a dick, help people who don’t have the advantages you do, and never succumb to crabs in the barrel infighting.

7. Remember that most people who try to be artists are kind of lazy. Just by busting your ass, you’re probably good enough to put yourself forward, so why not try?

8. Rejection is inevitable. Let it hit you hard for a moment, feel the hurt, and then move on.

9. Never trust some Silicon Valley douchebag who’s flush with investors’ money, but telling creators to post on their platform for free or for potential crumbs of cash. They’re just using you to build their own thing, and they’ll discard you when they sell the company a few years later.

10. Be a mercenary towards people with money. Be generous and giving to good people without it.

11. Working for free is only worth it if its with fellow artists or grassroots organizations you believe in, and only if they treat your respectfully and you get creative control.

12. Don’t ever submit to contests where you have to do new work. They’ll just waste your time, and again, only build the profile of the judges and the sponsoring company. Do not believe their lies about “exposure”. There is so much content online that just having your work posted in some massive image gallery is not exposure at all.

13. Don’t work for free for rich people. Seriously. Don’t don’t don’t. Even if you can afford to, you’re fucking over the labor market for other creators. Haggling hard for money is actually a beneficial act for other freelancers, because it is a fight against the race to the bottom that’s happening online.

14. If people love your work, treat them nice as long as they’re nice to you.

15. Be massively idealistic about your art, dream big, open your heart and let the blood pour forth. Be utterly cynical about the business around your art.

Finally…

The Internet will not save creators.

Social media will not save us. Companies will not save us. Crowd-funding will not save us. Grants will not save us. Patrons will not save us.

Nothing will save us but ourselves and each other.

Now make some beautiful things.

-Molly Crabapple

I had an interesting conversation the other evening with Markus Andrezak (@markusandrezak). It was using music co-creation and collaboration as an analogy of how to interact with your customers in the business world.

I like the analogy of music and music creation having once, in a previous life, been one (or a joke goes been the guy who hangs around with musicians). when you create music with fellow musicians it really is both collaboration and co-creation, everyone feeding off each other’s ideas essentially starting from one persons base concept. Extending that analogy into business you can look at a start-up where they originally set out to solve their own problems as the basis of the initial product being created. That same problem solving “thing” is discovered to work for others and a new business is formed.

As the start-up grows it starts listening to its initial customers for changes and enhancements, directly adding in features and capabilities. Again this works with the music analogy; the musicians listen directly to the friends and fans, those that attend the performances, and adjust accordingly; changing tempo, changing key, even playing in a different style. In both instances again this is Co-creation because it is a small group able to communicate their needs wants and expectations. As both the music analogy grows into wider distribution of the music, be it online or via physical distribution,separating musicians from direct interaction with their fans, as an organisation grows to include many more clients, it is very hard for almost impossible to maintain or even regain that level of initial intimacy and Co-creation.

What happens when you do reach such scale is that there is a lot of noise that need to be picked through.

There was a lot of debate as to what was collaboration and what was co-creation. Both are the process of working together for a common end. I’m hard pressed to really distinguish between the two and could easily argue that try differentiate is degenerating into an argument about semantics.

Trying to find other people’s views on this was interesting. over at this site I found a reference to this paper: A Typology of Customer Co-Creation in the Innovation Process, where they define co-creation as –

“Customer co-creation is an active, creative and social process, based on collaboration between producers (retailers) and users, that is initiated by the firm to generate value for customers” (Piller, Ihl & Vossen – 2010)

Where as over here  they assert that collaboration is co-creation.

Where I think the difference could be is, collaboration is a structured coming together to address a specific issue or problem and co-creation is a broader, ongoing engagement. Either way, I think the point is that it’s a good thing and should be embraced, unless of course you just meme copy and take your strategies from others

Today is a based off several things colliding at the same time for me – discussions with friends, colleagues and some twitter banter.

Everywhere I’ve been, risk management is broken into discreet units and managed individually ostensibly due to it’s complexity, working on the assumption that what they have is enough. Even Enterprise Architecture Frameworks skip over how Risk Management is to be engaged and offer little to no support in understanding the holistic picture.

Despite the argument of organisations that they don’t believe enterprise risk management (ERM) is necessary or that the existing static, compliance based tools or technique employed are sufficient, there is a place for ERM. By assuming that the nature of the business will stay the same, as-good-as-it-gets is an arrogant disregard for the fact that environments change. There will always be a requirement to navigate risk in business, as to avoid risk is to avoid success.

• How do you navigate risk in your business?
• Do you use a spreadsheet compiled from compliance questions?
• How about a pre-canned register provided by a consulting company?
• Is risk management handled at a project or programme level without higher level visibility within the organisation?
• Is there a single, unified view of risk management?

To disregard risks that may destroy value, you risk destroying the business; this is what static, disaggregated risk management techniques can cause. ERM, that is looking holistically at the organisation, provides a structured and disciplined process that aligns strategy, process, people and technology in order to maximise the desired outcomes and minimise the undesirable.

A holistic ERM approach allows the identification of various types of risks, providing the necessary visibility to the business. This visibility can provide the business with the ability to apply a measured and complete approach to the remediation or mitigation of risks, through tools and techniques, as well as identifying emergent risks to the organisation. As an example, a change in one area of the business’ policy due to legislative change, may have further implications though if handled in isolation, wouldn’t allow the business to be proactive.

Focusing on a single component of risk, such as looking to insure as a loss reduction technique for operational and financial risk, neglects the other risk types (of Technical, operational, financial, commercial or project-based/time based) and has the same affect as a business silo risk management model.

Read more…

Warning: this is a half thought – I saw this YouTube clip recently by Steven Johnson , titled – Where good ideas come from.

http://youtu.be/NugRZGDbPFU

The short of it is:

• Ideas need time to incubate
• The best ideas and breakthroughs come from a collision of multiple ideas or hunches
• You need to provide a way to allow contemplative thinking and mingling of people to allow the discussion to happen.

Every day customers, managers, investors are telling us to innovate more. The biggest issues I see is that in the corporate world we don’t make time to think about things. If we do it is generally in some form of work-shop environment where no one has had 5 minutes to spare before getting there to think about it.

Whilst the internet has made it a lot easier to collaborate, borrow, use or bounce-off other’s ideas, having time to get out there and participate in discussions as well as making time to reflect and absorb is becoming increasingly harder.

Silicon Valley’s latest acquisition has the twitter sphere in a tizz. For those living under a rock, Facebook acquired messaging company WhatsApp for $19B dollars

What I like about the whole situation is that WhatsApp exploited a perceived gap in market. Sure there are messaging apps that work across multiple platforms, but their focus is all about the social platform. WhatsApp’s was more simplistic, universal messaging across platforms. Given the platform and style of service, users feel far less threatened and take up in various geographies show this.

They are also a “cloud service platform” that allows them to mine the information on relationships and interconnectivity that a lot of players in the social service space would kill for. The fact that Google offered USD$10B previously is a clear sign of their value. This can be attributed to a lot of things, least of which is their growth rate and repeat customer rate.

Whilst this might highlight some some trends in market, like the purchase of startups focused on social services, it is a blinkered view of the market as a whole. These MEGA players (Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc) have a weird and wonderful product and marketing model that most of the world is still trying to get their heads around. Like most marketing machines, new product are critical to the survival of a company (be it new to market, improvements or repositioning). WhatsApp shows a link between Google and Facebook’s understanding of their customers (BTW that’s not you) and what they want, but most importantly, what it is worth.

Apart from the incredulity that is coming out by the average Joe, there are severalitems and articles out there that attempt to show why the $19B.

The best article I read was from Danny Crichton (@DannyCrichton)  who points out that the growing trend in social application business acquisition is going to change the nature of business, certainly in Silicon Valley. I’m leaning toward agreeing with most of his observations though I’m wiling to bet that some of the other cities around the world will get a look in as the Valley is rapidly becoming expensive!