I found this very interesting because I have been researching what it takes to create a successful office-community.  The article lists three rules that they live by: 

1. Everyone has the ability to talk to whomever they need to from any department or level.  
2. Everyone has the ability to offer up an idea.  
3. Everyone must be familiar with the goings on of the academic community.  

At the same time, they setup a brain trust, consisting of their smartest and most creative people. The trust is used to ask questions of and to get feedback from on a daily basis and more frequently if necessary.  

I read this and thought, wow Pixar has a great management team.  They respect their staff, give them the authority they need to get their jobs done and supply the feedback they need keep things on track.  Until now, those were the ingredients I thought were necessary to get the job done well.  But according to Ed, my missing ingredient is Talent.  

Ed writes that “if you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they’ll screw it up.  But if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they’ll make it work.”  He defines a great team as a talented group of smart people.  What happens if I don’t have a smart group?  What if each individual in my team never finished high school?  Can’t their collective intelligence make the team work?  or are they limited in what they can do?  Is there anything they can do to move passed their mediocrity?  

I don’t have an answer, but hope there is one or that Ed is wrong.  Otherwise many companies are doomed to fail by their unsurpassable mediocrity and that is just sad.

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I think Al Gore’s work to make people aware of global warming has been a fantastic marketing campaign.  His movie, ‘An Inconvenient Truth‘, started to raise awareness and the public conversation about global warming and climate change.  In the last few months, he helped launch an organization called We Can Solve It, whose motto is “we can solve the climate crisis”.  This organization is marketing heavily and has not only made people aware of the issues, but is also instructing people how to help.  This means, they are trying to rally a grass roots following to solve the problem.  I think they have the right idea.

Imagine marketing AI as a problem that we haven’t solved yet, but can be solved!  Imagine a marketing effort that not only educated the people, but also wanted to activate the masses.  I think that in this day and age, one where web 2.0 and collaborative spaces have proven successful and extremely useful, we should be able to do it!  Now all I need are a few people to help me get the ball rolling.

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