Executing Ideas

Seth Godin spoke today at the Willow Creek Association’s Global Leadership Summit. I love his books, Lynchpin and Tribes. Here’s the goods:

Average, average, average. Mass everything is built into our culture.

But right now—on our watch—is a revolution.

Books, newspapers, music–traditional pillars are crumbling.

Now, there are new modes of media. This results in a proliferation of choice. You just need to reach a tiny sliver of the seven billion people in the world.

We’ve branded ourselves to death, guys.

And what we’re seeing today is the death of the industrial age.

We are entering the age of tribes–a group of people who share a culture.

We’re used to a spiritual tribe, a work tribe, and and a community tribe. But now we can have a hundred tribes. People still meet up, connect up, and want to be in sync.

New paradigm: Connect Challenge Culture Communicate Clear Commit. It matters not if you make iPhones or work for spiritual advancement.

Those who control the means of production, and you control the world.

The new means of production is the laptop. Now the worker owns it.

We are facing the the end of the job, the death of the job. And I can see beyond the job. After the job is the artist.  It’s the delivering of a human expression.

Following rules has infected the Church because it’s inherited the culture of the factory–it makes people interchangeable. That’s what makes the factory work. The reason why they want you to fit in so that they (the industrialists) can ignore you.

Now you have a chance. You say, “Tell me the map, the steps! I’ll even take a fictional map.” (Cue the Narnia slide…)

You must be different and unique. (Read Lynchpin if you haven’t!) Because if your boss can write down what you do, you are expendable.

Local is like cheap. If local is all you’ve got, you’re sunk. (I wonder what this says to or means for the “local” church.)

Bowling trying for perfect. Who cares?

Bottled water is a commodity: nobody cares, there’s no way to differentiate yourself. Nobody is going to talk about you. Everyone has seen brown cows. Nobody talks about brown cows. Nobody talks about any cows–except for the purple cow. You can’t get there from a Dummies manual. You’re not going to get there because your boss told you to. Because if your boss knew, she’d have done it already!

If failure is not an option, you’ve just made sure that success isn’t either. Art makes us uncomfortable.

Note: I’m working out some of my own thinking on this. Stay tuned!

No one doubts the prevalence and therefore the importance of social media generally and also particularly in college culture. A few of my notes, observations, and questions from the World Assembly of the IFES:

1. Data Dangers. Some people are deeply concerned about the security of our data, especially how it’s used by governments and corporations. While most nod a bit, we mostly scoff. In a generation, we may herald their prophetic attempts to get us to see what’s happening.

2. That’s a problem. Social media (@jamesdoc on Twitter called it “immersive media”) can be problematic for some people. It may be that someone has an addictive personality, as one person I chatted with mentioned. Or it may be that such a medium can release internal and social sin in a way that is unique in human history. Or maybe there’s nothing new under the sun.

3. Some students are well ahead of older leaders in their media savvy, management of different relationships and spheres (or acceptance of the impossibility of doing so), and theology of socially mediated relationships. One student pointed out how many more relationships one can begin and even maintain well with Facebook.

4. Social media permit us to put out soft and intriguing invitations to dialog, through quotes, observations, links, and the like. The “weak links” of social media are wide (and yes, often shallow), but they can lead to significant conversations both online and face-to-face.

5. With Skype, Apple FaceTime, and Google+ Hangouts, what does “face-to-face” mean anymore? There’s general agreement that there is great value in actually being in the same physical space, but why exactly? People have flown in from 130 countries for this conference. What is it about being together that makes it worth such a significant investment? Further, we have commented dozens of times how amazing it is to sit with biblical texts in the middle of ten people from ten countries here at the World Assembly, hearing different perspectives brought to bear on it (and being born by it). We can do this every week online if we so choose. That didn’t exist at the last World Assembly in 2007.

6. “We have lost control. And that is good.” @Andy_Shudall said this during his presentation, explaining that it is no longer possible to moderate—let alone manage—any large, long discussion online. The question was raised, with concern, of starting students in discussion online and then not being able to be there, with the result being wrong answers given, hurtful things said, and (in this case) the Bible being misquoted. I found myself explaining the two options in this scenario. First, you don’t facilitate it and make it happen. It either occurs elsewhere and you may not even know about it, or it doesn’t happen at all and you can’t ever deal with whatever would have surfaced. Second, you facilitate it and deal with all the wonkiness that arises. The latter is preferable for the student ministry that IFES does.

7. It’s not so different. Several times in the social media sessions, we found ourselves talking about new scenarios and saying, “But hold on—how is that different than this analog situation?” For example, the conversations and the lack of control is no different than those had after an event by students as they walk back to their dorms and apartments. Technology gives us an illusion and expectation of control, and it scares some people to release that.

8. We value being together more. Andy Moore, acting head of communications for IFES (@lovingmercy on Twitter), opened the plenary session on new media by having us turn to our neighbors and acknowledge how good it is to really be together. By having socially-mediated relationships, the contrast of our incarnate friendships makes us cherish the latter, perhaps.

9. Nothing is private anymore. And maybe that’s a good thing. Someone raised a question about online deception and false identity. I suggested that it’s actually harder to deceive others on Facebook than real life, given the interconnection evident through that medium. (Andy Moore recommended the movie Catfish.)

10. The potential needs our attention. While concerns and questions arose in abundance, I really wanted more careful thought and discussion of the potential of social media in the work of the IFES. Who are our best thinkers on relating well to people on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the rest? What are the bleeding edge students trying and is it working? How do we share insights between Brasil (Portuguese), Hong Kong (Cantonese), and the South Pacific (several languages)?

It’s here and we’re going to be surfing for a while, just barely staying up on an unstable but exciting platform.

Technorati: A69Q8K63BMJA

Here’s a fun presentation I did for 80 InterVarsity staff members at our recent staff conference.  Caution: it’s not your normal corporate PowerPoint.