New Commons Blog

We have been running the Academy since December 2007 as a University Without Walls…open to all and engaging conversation…so to speak. We piloted a few programs ranging from Web 2.0, Cash Flow Management, to Resilience Planning & Process. This diverse selection only represents a small portion of what we have been researching and can share with you about what the 21st century is demanding from people who lead and work in businesses, non-profits, government, and communities.

Many folks are finding that the way to lead in organizations with the talent and skills to bring involve more organic, change agentry, facilitation skills and less of the mechanistic, expert, directive oriented skills we had in the 20th century.

We want to hear from you: What other better thinking and doing do you want to learn and apply to prepare you for our current and emerging challenges? Let us know today! Comment below.

There is a great quote from Charles Landry regarding planners. He states:

“Finally, I argue that those in planning from land use to urban marketing are not creative enough, because they limit what they see as resources and underestimate the diverse ways of improving or solving problems. In part their mindscape is at fault and in part the uncreative bureaucratic process they are bound into. Yet if they get it right they can and do create physical spaces and opportunities that act as a stimulus for imaginative action so that the city works well as a creative system. This might require new leaders and certainly new training.”

(FYI: New Commons Academy will be hosting a Resilience Planning course for Planners (and others) on June 11th with Resilient Partnership founder Larry Quick and myself presenting. Please spread the word. But,I digress:)

I believe this is THE critical point that we’ve been missing. Everything from our zoning ordinances to our environmental regulations (though all created with good intentions) have mostly served to stifle creativity. The planning done in most communities today fails to see the community as a system at all, let alone a creative complex system. This has got to end now!We live in a time major transitions. At the global scale, we are witnessing conditions that are now and will continue to impact every nation, community and individual on the planet.

Rising sea level, global warming, Peak Oil are some of the broader issues that directly relate to drastic increases in the prices of fuel, food, and insurance that have the potential to completely alter our current economic systems. These conditions bring with them major environmental and health impacts. They also provide new opportunities that we haven’t even thought about yet (i.e. alternative energy sources/technology, new economies). But in order to deal with these and many other immediate and emergent conditions, communities and organizations must possess an understanding of those conditions, capabilities and the networks at play, not only at their scale of operation but at multiple scales above and below them. This level of understanding can only come from a process that meaningfully engages key stakeholders in a whole systems dialogue that embraces the complexity and diversity of the community or organization. It is through this engagement that stakeholders become not just participants but champions and custodians of the projects and initiatives identified during the process.

Just like a ‘good’ engineer must fully understand the conditions within which she is designing, planners must likewise understand the conditions, resources and capabilities of the place for which they are planning, at multiple scales. Planners are the designers/engineers of places. Like the good site engineer goes through a thorough analysis of the conditions of a given site, the planner must do an even more in depth analysis before ever even considering development of a plan. Unfortunately, most planning today is very reactionary based upon past events and compartmentalized data. The thinking being used to solve the major problems of the day is the very same thinking that created most of them.

Resilience means the ability to withstand or recover readily from difficult conditions. We use the term because we believe it best describes what we are aspiring to create: places and organizations that are resilient. Most of the planners today are trying to achieve this goal of resilience but they lack the processes required to fully understand (or at least more fully understand) the conditions and capabilities at multiple scales that affect the complex adaptive system that they call their community. Traditional visioning exercises and community charrettes are tools that, as currently utilized, fall drastically short of reaching the level of understanding required to plan for resilience.

As already stated, this is a critical point in our history. Communities and organizations that best understand the complexities inherent in the conditions that are unfolding before them will be the ones most likely to survive and thrive in the years ahead. Those that do not can’t possibly react fast enough or with the informed decisions necessary to avoid massive disruptions. A new way of thinking is required. A new process of planning is needed. Planners of the 21st century must strive to be the conveners and facilitators of change. They must work to break down the barriers to creativity that they and their predecessors created.

I’m excited by the work we are doing as part of the Resilience Partnership. Our new website www.ResilientFutures.org will be launched later this week. This is an international network of practitioners that embrace whole systems thinking and help facilitate this thinking in cities, towns, companies and organizations recognizing that a multiple-bottom line, multi scale approach is imperative.

Did I mention that New Commons Academy will be hosting a Resilience Planning course for Planners (and others) on June 11th with Resilient Partnership founder Larry Quick and myself presenting. Please spread the word.

Robert reference: The Spaces of Democracy by Richard Sennet

— Amartya Sen and Nussbaum worked on UN definition of Quality of Life

1 - Basic health and hygeine

2 - Basic numeracy and literacy

3 - Ability to secure employment that matches with talent and provides sufficient income to appear in public without shame

3rd element defines the economic development imperative.

Distributive Justice vs Corrective Justice

Departmental thinking/ Departments have divisions. Nomenclature shift to ‘agency’ so that agencies have missions and agent who work toward them. Why build roads? Econ dev. Lack of roads prevents growth, hence build roads.

Key shift among agencies’ missions - horizontal connections. Example: economic development and education are interlinked, but cultures are different.

Key shift - stop creating job descriptions and start attracting and managing talent

Overall, get away from mechanistic thinking and replace it with systems thinking.

Q: How does this talent management work?

KP: Effective workers are always working beyond their job description. Personnel systems need to be flexible, less oriented to longevity/seniority.

Obs - RI gov HR is doing exactly what it’s designed to do. It’s the wrong thing to do, but the system is working very effectively.

Q: If structure follows strategy, then strategy follows vision. Who coordinates the vision?

KP: Governance is key - NGOs and communities need to bring their vocabularies to bear.

Reference: Kwame Appiah

Q: You can’t have the re-visioning until you can a crisis. Now we have a looming crisis. How do we take advantage? What are the downsides? Corruption.

KP: Planning is key. You can’t have autocratic visioning. Or republican (representatives). Community planning groups must participate. Messy and less used, but much more evolved sense of participation.

Q: Systemic problem in city/state structure. System breeds inefficiency. Correctable?

KP: Local government is profoundly atrophied. Doing the same things as 50 yrs ago. Hasn’t added anything but has shed health. What does it do? Public schools, police, fire = 85% of budget. Public works, parks and recreation, vital records, planning are all tiny parts.

Q: Do you see a state in the US that we can use as a model?

KP: No. Most states are so much bigger. We should look for an urban county government that has state-like powers. Also, the US doesn’t match us well. We’re more like Holland than Texas.

Reference: False Flat - Dutch community development.

Obs - Stop thinking about US as 50 states, but rather 300+ metros. A new federalism. Is there something in this?

KP: Yes. US is a commonwealth of metropolitan economies. State economies are a function of metro economies. RI is essentially a metro area of about 1,000,000 people. Governments tend to think within their own boundaries, not outside. RI’s great hope is to participate in the greater Northeastern economy.

NYC planning - realizes position in global game, but also needs to adapt to maintain position. NYC leading transit thinking. They need to link the region via high speed rail to reach the talent base to stay a leader. We need to think this way too.

Obs - The cesspool law. A missing opportunity to improve enviro/water/coastal issues.

Obs - Maritime cluster is strong, but under supported/disorganized. Lots of expert talent.

KP: Both good points. Maritime talent is excellent. Best underwater workers in the world: Electric Boat. Oceanography from eastern CT to Woods Hole. Even MIT.

Obs - Globalization reveals regionalization. Example: Cascadia=BC, WA, OR. Also, Boston-DC metro axis.

Obs - How about New Zealand as an example? Transit department now 3 from 2,000. Gov doesn’t provide services but ensures that services are provided. Privatization done in conjunction with existing union structures. Agencies can’t assess the quality of the services they provide, but CAN assess the quality of services provided by others.

Obs - Metropolitanization: Jim Capraro approach creates lots of energy, but it’s messy. Overall, very successful approach yields good results. Also, non-linear appoaches: working on reforming City of Prov gov. Five and Ten.

Q: Can we really combine our 39 fire departments?

KP: Small jurisdictions are inefficient, as are very large jurisdictions. There’s a sweet spot around 25k per unit. RI doesn’t have lots of very small towns. MA worse off than us. Key question: how doe you get efficiency and productivity out of what’s already there.

Boundaries are antiquated, but there’s no structure for communication/coordination.

Q: Could RI create a fulltime “Senate” that focuses on vision. Then Assembly stays in tactics.

KP: No limits as long as you have proportional representation. I would fear a winner-take-all mentality.

Q: Very few people can run for office. How can we get more ‘regular’ people involved in government?

KP: Key question. We have a ‘citizen’ legislature, but they come from a narrow slice of society. They’re ‘people people’ but not that good with technology and maths. Need the ability for quantitative assessment.

Q: Do you have an insider’s view of how the state is using technology?

KP: It’s used in the mechanistic context. It replaces job descriptions. More vibrant use is not highly developed. Email replaces telephone. State doesn’t appreciate how much it is a knowledge employer. How do you build a road? It’s a knowledge decision.

Q: State has so much information, but they never push out realistic information.

KP: They have data, and some gets made into information. Then some of that is made into knowledge. Did a police analysis on Driving While Black. They had the data, but the agencies resisted. “Our job is to do things, not to think about what we’re doing.” Not enough people in state government are paid to think. They’re only paid to do.

Q: How do we get government to think creatively?

KP: We have to take over government. As economics emerged as a science, they started to look at voter behavior in terms of economics. Candidates  marketed themselves and the citizens participation was to vote.  Democracy is then transactional. Another approach: involvement in governance is part of the healthy community life.

8:15 - A few early arrivals are having coffee and chatting. My computer is on the projector. I will be live blogging the event and, perhaps, serving as a rapid-response information resource. In previous workshops, I have searched the web for resources germane to the topic of discussion and displayed them in real time using a projector. If I’m good, I can keep up with the conversation.

8:30 - Speaker Ken Payne arrives and looks quizzically at the projection. Here’s Robert Leaver to explain. Need to ‘work the room’ so I’ll post and add more later.

8:55 - Well, we’re only about 5 minutes behind schedule so far, but there’s precious little evidence that we’ll get going any time soon. Around 25 people so far, more filing in.

9:10 - Just demo’d the Providence & Beyond social network we made with Joomla. @funkepunkemonke did a great job. Now Fred Presley is introducing the speaker.

9:15 - Speaker “Sometimes my mind works so hard that it stops. I call it “therapeutic depression.”" Takes a break with 19th century translations of Stoic philosophy.

Reference: Martha Nussbaum

Greeks believed in healthy body, healthy mind, healthy life in the community. Can we be personally healthy in an unhealthy community? The level of thought that goes into social health needs to meet the level of thought that goes into medical training.

What’s Coming: Obersvations on “the predicament we’re in.” Then some notions about taking a next step.

Our system doesn’t work the way we want it to, so we don’t feel we’ve been as productive as we could have been. In organizations, great talent that goes unused and other who have “checked out.” So agencies suffer from a debilitating chronic, low-grade depression. Dept. of Admin building is the ultimate RI example. There’s no space for casual conversations. ((ED. “Make the hallways wider.)) Many for-profit companies understand the value of these interactions and facilitate them.

Obs. 1 - We live in structures and name the components. We use those names in the syntax of the structure, creating a grammar of creation. When the structure is non-functional, the grammar become non-functional. Approach: deconstruct the grammar in historical context. The grammar was created for another time, another society. We don’t need to be bound by that structure. Our conditions are different.

Pledged to self to explain the RI situation in historical context. Couldn’t be done from the inside, so he stepped out and wrote articles for Projo.  (or Essays_By_Ken_Payne_08in PDF)

Every generation creates their own structures, physical and intellectual. Historically, RI legislature met on Benefit St. and in Newport. New State House built, but also the building now housing DOT. That was the first state government office building.

Question: How do we recreate government space in RI? All government space is oppressive and depressing.

Obs. 2 - Who believes the RI government is optimally functional? (Laughter.) DEM legislation - don’t think about the vertical regulations, but the horizontal connections. Vertical relationships are easier to talk about, so that’s our grammar. But value comes from horizontal connections. During cutbacks, that with the strongest statutory support will survive the best. Hence we are eliminating our best value.

RI ranks at the bottom of government effectiveness. And it’s always because of HOW we use the people in government. High-performing organizations are all about how you use your talent.

SO: We have non-functioning space, non-functioning structures and an antiquated grammar. How do we move forward.

– Discussion

Q: What is the role of legislation in this process?

KP: Laws create space in three ways: you must, you must not, you may. Last option allows for space that can be used creatively. Non-rules based thinking. 19th C thought of law as a way to release energy. Each corporation required separate charters, then general enabling law that release energy.

Q: Easy to see what’s not working, but we want to focus on what IS working. What do you see that’s working in RI or elsewhere?

KP: See great examples all the time. RI Keepspace, and now DEM is dedicating resources against that effort. So that’s RIH and DEM in horizontal connection.

Q: Laws could create space, but now laws seem to limit space. Your thoughts re: current fiscal crisis. Is there an opportunity for transformation?

KP: Our basic cultural metaphor has been mechanization, creating rules-based structures. Tayloristic thinking. In RI, the approach is always: When in doubt, create a new rule.

TG: Now with the draw down, there’s an opportunity to use the space more creatively.

KP: Quality of meeting space in state government is dismal. DOA conference room B is symbolic of the culture.

Q: Greeks concern w/growth of individual. Capitalism is precondition of democracy and wealth creation. How do we get back to that approach?

KP: Working on the paper on the importance of keeping economic top-of-mind in legislation.

Q: Perception - private can select talent, deselect non-talent. Government can’t do that very well. Or can it?

KP: Much more talent in government than is being used. Difference is that government is bad at respecting the talent people bring, and then improve on that. People with talent and energy get plugged into job descriptions, and pretty soon the light goes dim. Give them an opportunity to shine, and the light comes back on. System doesn’t promote churn or innovation.

Obs - Loyalty and longevity prevent innovation.

Obs - RI too broken to find many success models. We’ll have to look outside.

Obs - Premise of mechanics: get it right and then replicate. No need for adaptation. New Deal created structure of interests. Now we’re locked into an institutional structure that doesn’t let us compete or adapt. Structure so rigid it won’t even listen anymore. Mechanics requires that government “has the answers.” Private sector is now growing by asking questions. Accurate?
KP: Read John KG’s New Industrial State as an historical work. Mortality rate of governments is about zero, so churn is about zero. Agencies persist. So 1930’s structures persist, embedded mistakes have a very long lifespan.

Q: Disconnect - private state moving one direction, government standing still. As developer, you need to hire private 3rd parties to guide you through the system. What are the elements we can take forward, success models?

— How Do We Design a Future System?

KP Fear - RI government will become more corrupt, worse than it has been. Sources of corruption - misuse of position to create advantage - [Robert Burke? Sociologist — bosses and machines arise when formal systems fail] by that definition, RI faces potential problems.

CVS - is the local ball team, they want to win in their home stadium (RI). So they work the system to get that win.

RI now cutting gov workers, so more work for those remaining. System slows down. How will people react to this slow down? Will they be tempted to do something inappropriate/illegal.

Constituent services - citizen mad because of ‘the system’ and they are told ‘go scream at the gov or legislator. They in turn lean on the agency to bring that problem to top of the pile. As we hollow out government, we are at great risk.

Q: Private sector uses visionary planning to achieve objectives over time. RI gov does not have this ability. Concept: Dual budgeting system — 1) authorize (governor/vision/strategy) and 2) appropriate (assembly/tactical) — based on objectives. A good idea?

KP: RI budget system is 82 years old, born 1926. Why do we have to live with this forever?

Q: What type of personality traits/characteristics are required to shift the current system?

KP: Multiple sets of talent required. Example of talent, but bad to work with: mindset is controlling and precise, does great at managing risk and keeping numbers. But, innovation and responsiveness were disaster. The issue is recognizing talent and then using it effectively.

Q: Follow up — what about leaders? What do they look like?

KP: Need leaders that are genuinely interested in the talent they have , not the systems.

Obs - Fundamental flaw - government works best when run by people who understand governance. Our system is about politics. Simile - politics: governance as lust: true love. System rewards politics over governance. Collapse is positive in that it could create groundswell.

KP: People change. As vocabularies change, people can learn the new language.

RL - Two references

Garreth Morgan - Images of Organizations: Metaphor rules

James Hillman - Kinds of Power

I set up the intro to my Web 2 class with a story about how I stumbled over Web 2 one day in 1999. And it wasn’t the most interesting thing I found that day. But I gotta back up. It starts with this question:

Why does the next big thing always come out of nowhere?

It’s really quite simple: people cluster around success, and the next thing — innovation — isn’t successful. So nobody clusters. So nobody knows.

Until innovation succeeds. And then - WHAM! - everybody finds out. And usually not in a good way. Web 2 is that next big thing, and it is bearing down on your business right now.

So, one day in 1999 I was on an journey from nowhere to nowhere, and I stumbled across Web 2. And I kept right on going, because the next thing I found changed by whole career and, in fact, my life.

It all started with this guy Jakob Nielsen and his site useit.com. It’s a site about usability, the study of how humans interact with computers via the interface - graphical user interface (GUI) or whatever. And don’t let anybody give you their ‘opinion’ on usability. It’s a laboratory science. I had been reading Nielsen’s columns for a while because they were making the website I was working on at the time spectacularly successful. This column was pretty esoteric, but it dealt with a real problem — not being able to edit web pages through a browser.

Toward the end of the column, there’s a link to this post on one of the earliest of what we now call blogs, Dave Winer’s UserLand. Today, it’s called scripting.com. This guy Winer had a kind of software called Manila that let people click a special link on a page, and then edit the page. (That, in a nutshell, is Web 2.)

I pushed the IT guys at my company to check it out, at least experiment. They just laughed at me. “You can’t just have anybody making web pages.”

Anyway, at the very bottom of this second article, there was a link to what some of Dave Winer’s friends were up to, a website and a book called Cluetrain. The people who wrote this book, that whole side of the world called “dot commies” - they saw the big picture clearly, accurately. They saw way so few people controlled so much information. And how that was about to change.

A few of their 95 Theses:

1 - Markets are conversations.

3 - Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

39 - The community of discourse is the market.

40 - Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.

74 - We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.

It was this last one that got me. I grew up on advertising, literally. My father was a Mad Man at J. Walter Thompson working on Ford and Pan Am. I knew the inside story on advertising, yet there I was making more than I ever had before writing ad after ad after ad.

Cluetrain opened my mind to the possibilities for my career. Within six months, I had left a job I hated to join a start-up dot com, and I haven’t looked back since. But that’s another story.

Here’s the bottom line: Cluetrain is right.

The proof is Google. They break all the rules except one, yet they make all the money. The one they don’t break: give the people what they want.

What the heck does any of this have to do with Web 2 (and you’ll definitely be asking yourself that question if you take the class)?

Everything.

So we took about 45 minutes to break into groups of 3 or 4 and share our projects and capabilities. Now we’re sharing our take-aways with the group.

• Growing traction around sustainable businesses
• We need to train people to solve problems that haven’t occured yet
• Need for efficient use of resources, housing planning needs to include this thinking — same as regulations around various businesses
• Our roads haven’t kept up with our desire to be on them
• New paradigm for business building - don’t build biz around functionality, but passion - needs institutional support (if I care about YOU, then I’ll care about your BIZ) focus on benefit, not output — not the profit, but what the profit can do
• Community - unity needs to come first - is everybody you need to talk to in the room, are they aligned
• Need incentives for green development
• Assets not fully understood or leveraged
• Now is a really great time for the future
• We need to align and connect the ~10,000 non profits in RI to eliminated duplication, leverage their capabilities and compensate them appropriately
• Stay engaged with the community after planning, but into and through execution to be sure projects stay on course, strategies applied in proper conditions
• Non profits need to put “place” in their mission for auto-alignment
• Put non-profits back into neighborhoods
• Some RFPs are requiring multiple non profits to collaborate
• Businesses also have untapped passion and energy for improving place
• Frame desire not in terms of what you want to eliminate/avoid, but in terms of what you want to achieve
• Self-created econ dev project to bring innovation at scale to housing/planning/greening/regenerative-restorative communities

We’ve already gone over our time limit, but the group conversation continues. Your humble (not) scribe needs to ‘itty off on his oddy-nocky and make some pennies for himself.

Next Providence & Beyond event in April 11. Keep an eye out for it.

I talked.

Jeff Deckman is leading the first participatory session: Passions. We’ll go around the room and voice our passions. Please, no names here…

0: taking business experience to help other

1: orchestra conductor analogy for aligning the facets of resiliency-social, environ, econ, built environ, etc.

2 connecting with communities coming from an architectural POV. “Making sure we had all the stakeholders involved.” Less design, more community work.

3: passionate about ideas, as pediatrician/pub health know health comes from social context. existed 150 years ago.

4: passionate about people, assisting people who have gone through adversity. providing with process to become self-sustaining - community organizing - helping people make change in their lives

5: fixing what humans have done to the planet — sustainability, nobody knows what it means. figuring out my connection to the planet

6: leaving footprint in the sand of time - remembered for making a mistake or making a difference - passionate about business development for human empowerment - two paradigms: significance and security

7: combining biz dev and environmental planning - connecting business success with personal success

8: rivers - balance within ourselves - connecting people with their locations/rivers

9: lifelong Prov resident - realness, beyond preservation to sense of place that’s real - not reinvented, not the same soul that it used to have - real places need people to be more real

10: fighting the corporate predators of tobacco control - work with others to leverage the power of beliefs - if unexamined, they can lead to troubles - combining health with people and place, de-medicalizing health, [describes resilience planning without knowing it]

11: connecting soul to work

12: from real estate POV, planning is wasteful - we need to be stewards, not abusers - not just develop housing, but develop communities

13: don’t believe that for-profit puts profits before people - supports the ability of private sector to make change for the better - seeks to take Prov to “next level”

14: passionate about the future - taking responsibility for the future - family is important, reminds us of our responsibilities to the future

15: passionate about improving quality of life - transitioning housing stock to healthy, affordable

16: 2 questions - what constitutes home for a person? what constitutes home for a community

17: passionate about people and how they interact as a community, business career ultimately didn’t satisfy - sold biz and went into community development

18: passion = adventure - prefers the dark, exciting path other avoid, finds excitement through education, history, business…

19: living the love demonstrated by Christ

20: passionate about being passionate, web 2 and helping Davey beat Goliath

21: people and place - most focused on 5 themes — the greek Agora/Spynx dicotomy — resurgence of debate in public school — a regenerative economy — systems where waste becomes food — the next generation

8:30 — Intake: We got photos and profiles from (almost) everybody for use in the social network we will build.

The focus of P&B this year is”Better Linking, Better Doing” around the concept of resiliency. So, instead of a speaker at every workshop, half of the workshops are just the members. The goal is for us to get to know each other better — Better Linking — and familiarize ourselves with all the ‘aligned projects’ underway or in planning — Better Doing.

9:00 — Intro: Robert Leaver reads a poem by Rumi, tells a brief history of this project from “A Year in Providence and the Region” 2006 to “Providence & Beyond” 2007 and 2008.

Fred Presley gives an update on our colleague Larry Quick who is in Australia recovering from treatment for leukemia. Before his diagnosis, Larry said, “2008 will be the year of resilience.” How true? Fred and Larry work in the field of ‘resilience planning’ which seeks to take planning out of the reactive mode and into the pro-active mode — to see issues as they forming, not when they become real problems and position ourselves and our communities not just to survive, but to thrive in these changing conditions. Analogy: surfer.

Michelle Gonzalez brings people up to date with New Commons, our upgraded website. Then I’m supposed to talk about the new blog and our soon-to-be social network.

End segment one. I gotta go talk.

Providence & Beyond is a sustained inquiry into the future of this region. Our entry points this year are two questions: Resilient Cities? Resilient Suburbs? We choose these ways into the conversation because we believe our places - cities, towns, villages - given adverse conditions like climate change and post peak oil, will have to learn how to do a lot of springing back after a lot of bending, stretching and compressing.

We enter this conversation not with answers or solutions, but with perspective, capabilities and passions. And by getting to know each other better, we can bundle our passions and capabilities and pursue some projects than can make a difference and help our places become more resilient.

Providence & Beyond is organized around three interrelated aims: better thinking, better linking and better doing. Last year, members said: “we did good thinking and some linking. This year let’s dig deeply into linking and doing”…and that is the focus for the year. So we will engage in conversation to get to know each other better so we can partner to get things done for making places more whole. Our questions:

I wasn’t exactly the first person to start up a blog. But I’ve been at it a few years now, long enough to recognize something remarkable in the blogosphere when it happens.? Not for nothin’, but this marketing-oriented blog about social media gained literally instant traction.

Three posts, 60+ comments. That’s just a preposterous ratio. Completely unsustainable. A fourth post yielded a paltry 9 comments so far. On average it’s still 17.5 comments per post.

For reference, on my little Bucket Blog, I recently set a new record for comments at 13, but several were me chatting up my readers.? On this social media blog, it’s all reader comments.

This blog does have some things going for it that I don’t. The author, Catharine P. Taylor, is a legend in the advertising trade press. A key player in AdWeek’s 00’s resurgence and founder of their AdFreak blog, she was pushed aside last year, leading to the title’s decline many say.

Her name alone is not enough to generate this kind of interest. Indeed, her own blog that covers the general NYC/USA advertising industry enjoys good engagement, but not like the social media blog.

My take-away is that this is a critically important area of the marketplace. Companies are asking their ad agencies to guide them into these market-converations, but it’s really a case of the blind leading the blind.

Hence the explosion of comments on this blog. Also, the quality of the discussion on the social media blog is similarly exceptional. Very smart, very experienced marketers are realizing that their entire way of doing business — their unique value equation — is changing in front of their eyes.

This new world is a much more difficult place to “create interest” where there is none, to “build a brand position” that doesn’t fit the facts. At best, you can fool some of the people some of the time. At best.

So agencies are being asked by their clients to lead those clients to the place where the agency is no longer relevant.? Now that’s entertainment.