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She encourages us each to do one thing to affect change. Starting with my little family‚ we are eating organic. We already plan a weekly menu and cook at homemost nights. We enjoy Meatless Mondays. We are all (11 year old and 13 year old included) learning to read food labels. Thank you Robyn for inspiring a Mom like me. - @BBrosBridget

Adam’s wife Julie, Robyn, Marty’s wife Sue and Me!

We screened the COMMON film we produced. We talked about social ventures. Got them up to speed on this whole shared brand that helps save the world idea. I used my hands a lot while I was talking so they wouldn’t fall asleep.

We asked, what social issues are on their radar? They had some instant answers – the state of cafeteria food, racism, the inability for recording artists to earn a living, the concentration of corporate power. We settled on this issue:

I loved this. They are both teenagers who play video games, carry mobile phones, write code and want to be graphic designers. Yet they think the world is too hyper connected and too damn fast. Sort of a surprise to me. Ian even remarked that he was annoyed at the expectation that he should always be available. “Dude, I just texted you, where the hell were you?” We all agreed that this was eroding our ability to think and meditate on important issues. There’s a growing body of research that multitasking actually makes you less effective.

How could we solve for this idiotic acceleration? We only had an hour left and I decided it would be appropriate to heed our own advice. So we went for a walk in the community garden at our office to slow things down. We looked at some plants. We spoke with some neighbors. We got some insight. The subject of naps came up. We came back to our brainstorm refreshed, full of sunlight. We circled a few words we’d come up with earlier:

And there it was, our answer – hammocks. Hammocks get you outside where you can take a nap. COMMON Hammocks. We were all feeling it. They need to be portable so you can take them with you. Like these hammocks. Then we started talking about ideal places to hammock. We agreed that their needed to be an app and a site to companion with the hammocks so that people could find killer places to hang. From there we talked about encouraging people to share what they are meditating on while they hang. We wanted to prove that hanging in your hammock really is important world changing stuff. We drafted some posthumous supporters of this idea:

The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time. Antoine de Saint-Exupery

There is more to life than increasing its speed. Mohandas K. Gandhi

For fast-acting relief, try slowing down. Lily Tomlin

Then I had to go to a lunch meeting and they had to get back to high school. But you can beat your sweet hammock hanging ass we will be submitting our idea to the COMMON community. We feel like there is some potential…

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Stepping into the cottage the day before the COMMON launch was energizing. It had pitch energy. It’s a hell of a pitch when you think about, trying to convince people to share a brand in service of the greater good. Everyone was fried but inspired. The close proximity of the unveil provided the adrenaline to finish strong or, more accurately, to start strong. Because really that’s what the “launch” was, the start. But still, the baby was about to get a christening. And it was gonna be live streamed.

About a month prior to this day Alex and I discussed documenting the launch. He was totally game. Felt like an important moment to capture. At Butler Bros we are big fans of organizational documentary work. We call it Brand Films and more recently Advermentary. This content helps drive stakeholder conversation and create the feedback loop needed to make things better. Again this is only the beginning of COMMON and likely the first of many films. But this is a raw look at what happened on day one and what Alex, Rob, and John had to say hours before the launch.

Butler Bros pre-produced the film with the merry band of insurgents over at the Cottage. It was a fun collaboration. Art, Jeff, Isaac and Evan worked their butts off on this little production. I had the pleasure of talking to people and bringing the idea to film. Then I brought the footage back to Butler Bros and my bro and our editor Travis hammered it out. Special thanks to Moby and Monahans for the tracks.

Many of you have had Alex as a creative director or your agency guy. Let me assure you it was fun heaving him as a “client”, I mean an insurgent collaborator. Please continue to share your thoughts and ideas over at COMMON. The world’s first collaborative brand needs just that – collaboration.

This past weekend I attended the TEDxAustin conference. I want to share what the whole day collided to provide for me. The theme that emerged and united the best of what I heard: Vulnerability.

To be open to learning we must, in some ways, make ourselves “liable to succumb, as to persuasion”. In this way I began the day desirous more for a learning experience than wanting to have my own world view neatly reinforced. Is this not a vulnerable approach? But it is in the context of another denotation of the word vulnerability, one provided in relation to the game Bridge, that I find the true hope with which I approached the day ,”in a position to receive greater penalties or bonuses”. Who doesn’t want a bonus?

Here are the quotes that spooled up vulnerability for me in hopeful new ways: (includes some gentle paraphrasing)

• “Any one stakeholder with primacy can cause system failure.” Sunny Vanderbeck, Satori Capital, describing why old capitalism has broken fundamentals.
• “GDP…measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile.” David Cameron, via video archive, quoting RFK.
• “Sixteen percent of U.S. GDP goes to managing disease.” Robyn OBrien, illuminating the opportunity for America to clean up our food system and begin healing our nations economy simultaneously.
• “Run your life with JOY!” Gilbert Tuhabonye, recounting his sprint from tribal genocide in Burundi and invoking the power God gave him to forgive and run joyfully through his life.
• “We’ve only had three payment advances in the last 5,000 years: barter to coins, coins to paper, and paper to plastic.” Osama Bedier, eBay/PayPal, on mobile and e-payments and their power to restructure global commerce.
• “Language and culture are the software of the 21st century. While English may be the dominant language of business, service and sales happen in the local language.” Sylvia Acevado, CEO of communiCard on the ‘wave of opportunity’ Texas has in relation to its explosive population growth and the need to incorporate bilingual education for students in Texas.
• “What energy experts from a variety of backgrounds told us is – we are going to have to use all of the sources of energy we have now just to give us time to innovate to larger solutions we’ll need later.” Gregory Kallenberg, Director “Haynesville”, on the need to come to “rational middle” on energy policy and pursuit.
• “I got on the ground and photographed up at her, the light on her face, showing her strength, grace and beauty in spite of her circumstances.” Esther Havens, humanitarian photographer, on the process of humbling herself to her subjects in service of conveying their strength to draw philanthropists in without pity.
• “Don’t measure me by my tax bracket because I make poets, dammit!” Joaquin Zihuatenejo, Poet and high school teacher. Everything he said was profound to me. Wait until they post his talk on the TEDxAustin site. Could become legendary.
• “May your greatest longing be met by your greatest gift.” Flint Sparks, Zen Psychotherapist, breaking it down with Zen calm and circular brilliance.
• “Let ourselves be seen. Love without guarantees.” Brene Brown, Researcher Storyteller, via video archive but she brought it all together for me. As she says at the end of her talk she always wants to put a “bow” on things. She did. Her entire speech was really about, you guessed it – vulnerability.

We are all connected. And these days our greatest advances and greatest foibles only prove to us how connected we are. We are indeed more vulnerable than we would like to imagine. But there is opportunity in acknowledging our vulnerability, joining it in service of solutions that promote true prosperity for human and environmental stakeholders. And while that may seem like a pollyanna statement, I am feeling more confident that it’s the only basis for 21st century innovation. At worst it’s an honest starting place.

Thanks to the TEDxAustin team for serving this all up with grace.

For everyone reading the post, especially those who attended, please share your thoughts about what you took from the day by clicking the post title to submit a comment.

After spending this past Thursday at the FearLess Cottage in Boulder documenting the launch of COMMON I awoke Friday with one word in mind – decompartmentalize.

So many people I know feel like they must rob Peter to pay Paul if they are to make a difference in this world, that they must compromise their values now in order to be in a position to donate to their values later. I fit into this category as well. And despite working for many cause organizations over the years I feel like a net supporter not a net innovator on social issues, a service provider not a social entrepreneur. I believe in the causes my firm gets paid to amplify but I see problems that I want to address outside of those contracts. So does my business partner. Perhaps you do as well.

We’ve compartmentalized our values. Haven’t we? Our best intentions are often rendered after the fact. We only pay Peter after mugging Paul. And this is the dominant model for people who actually give a damn. Many people, read institutions, don’t really give a damn. Sometimes Paul never gets paid. The results are all around us. We are swimming in the externalized costs of the old economy. Our global economic system is in crisis. Our environment is in crisis. Etc. The game is up.

As Umair Haque points out in his zeitgeist corralling book “The New Capitalist Manifesto” we’ve settled for “thin” value. That is, value that is very tenuous because it largely ignores or abuses the stakeholders – human, environmental, et al. – that it banks on. Umair argues for the creation of “thick” value built on a new set of institutional cornerstones that acknowledge the complexities of our interconnected world and honors the true matrix of stakeholders. You could say we must decompartmentalize our best intentions and our business goals and combine them.

The COMMON Brand presented last Thursday offers a new way to approach this conundrum:

Benefiting people, communities, society, the environment and future generations is the new advantage in business. Our new capitalist brand is about transitioning from competitive advantage to collaborative advantage. COMMON is a brand that is community designed, community owned, and community directed. It is a single open source brand — a living network — for rapidly prototyping many progressive businesses that unleash creativity to solve social problems. COMMON is a shared brand, build on shared values that will enable shared or thick value to accure. COMMON will empower social entrepreneurship in a brand new way. Its designed to drive ideas that matter into fruition, rapidly.

What all of this means is that you get to be Paul. Peter is tapped out. Thanks to Alex Bogusky, Rob Schuham and John Bielenberg for fearlessly crafting this visionary brand and unleashing it on the world.

Butler Bros are creating a short brand film in the coming weeks that will share the COMMON launch and help it spread. Stay tuned.

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Now more than ever tobacco is a social justice issue. TReND’s research proves this. We know where MLK would come down on the issue of tobacco’s disproportionate grip on communities of color. Big tobacco is dug into the African American community in an especially deep way and is addicted to the dollars that flow from it.

But the great irony is that MLK likely found his true calling while picking tobacco. The story from NPR after the jump is an amazing one:

Martin Luther King Jr. could hardly believe his eyes when he left the segregated South as a teenage college student to work on a tobacco farm in Connecticut.

“On our way here we saw some things I had never anticipated to see,” he wrote his father in June 1944. “After we passed Washington there was no discrimination at all. The white people here are very nice. We go to any place we want to and sit any where we want to.”

The slain civil rights leader, whose birthday is observed Monday as a federal holiday, spent that summer working in a tobacco field in the Hartford suburb of Simsbury. That experience would influence his decision to become a minister and heighten his resentment of segregation.

“It’s clear that this little town, it made a huge impact on his life,” said John Conard-Malley, a Simsbury High School senior who did a documentary with other students on King’s experiences in Connecticut. “It’s possibly the biggest thing, one of the most important things, people don’t know about Martin Luther King’s life.”

Until then, King was thinking of other professions such as becoming a lawyer, Conard-Malley said. But after his fellow Morehouse College students at the tobacco farm elected him their religious leader, he decided to become a minister.

In his later application to Crozer Theological Seminary King wrote that he made the decision that summer “when I felt an inescapable urge to serve society. In short, I felt a sense of responsibility which I could not escape.”

“Perhaps if he hadn’t come to Connecticut, hadn’t picked tobacco up here, hadn’t felt like a free person, hadn’t felt what life was like without segregation and been elected the religious minister, he may not have become such a leader in the civil rights movement,” Conard-Malley said.

Austin is a pilot city for Daimler AG’s Car2Go car sharing program. They basically dropped a fleet of 200 Smart ForTwo cars on the city with a very smart reservation system powering the whole operation. I won’t go into details, but you can with help from this great little article by Kate X Messer.

Having recently sold a vehicle, I saw this Smart invasion as an opportunity to become a one car family again. My biking to work works on most days, the commute is only five miles one way. But what of early morning meetings where you need to show up dressed in more than lycra? The Car2Go program held out the promise of closing this gap. The buses in Austin simply don’t cut it. So this was my personal intermodal opportunity to seize. I signed up.

Now Car2Go isn’t cheap to use. But you have to hold it up against the real monthly cost of owning a vehicle. which is more than you think when you consider – your payment, annual registration, inspection, insurance, gas, maintenance, and time spent overseeing maintenance. This says nothing of environmental costs which vary depending on what you drive or how you get around. So when you do some accounting, the cost per minute model that Car2Go uses is put in it’s proper context.

And that’s really what this method of transport forces us to do – consider. Consider where we are going, when and why. Consider each trip. Consider the costs. I love this side effect. The forced consciousness. Riding a bike is much easier by comparison. But we do have to reconsider the whole matrix of how we get around and we all know it. So what are we willing to do as individuals, companies, and municipalities to drive efficiency up and environmental costs down? How grand will our vision be? The ideas can come from anywhere, and they need to.

A letter from our late fathers chief oncologist, Dr. Patrick Hwu. An example of excellence in humanity from a place with a reputation for excellence in medicine. A great lesson in grace and dignity for all businesses to behold.

The gusher in the Gulf only fuels the fire of innovation. What I am seeing here is a very Jedi like attempt to channel the rage / fear / confusion into kindling for a bonfire of solutions. Call it the fire under our collective ass. You get it, metaphor extended. Yesterday the entire conference sat in a room with Stephanie Owens from the EPA, Charles Hambleton producer from The Cove film (who is now working the Gulf region camera in hand), and Philippe Cousteau via Skype. The dialogue was very real but carried reason over reaction. It was heart wrenching to hear Philippe describe his dives into the spill site. “Looking up from under the plumes, the sun shines through, turning the sea a red color and outlining dead sea life.” He then spoke of visiting the Exxon Valdez spill site and spoke of the ongoing devastation to the ecosystem these many decades later. The takeaway – this isn’t going away in our lifetimes. The conversation then turned to action – Charles and Stephanie both made a great point about not punishing private owners of BP stations saying that it only hurts locals, not the company who trades fuel anyway. My take – retribution made in individual acts that curb personal consumption of petro products is the first order. Use this as a personal call to action. First look within, then look out. We finished this session with a moment of silence guided by Dr. Larry Dorsey. I prayed that I would have the perseverance to make personal change and the wisdom to teach my children a better way.

This takes me to the last thought on yesterday which spawned while listening to a man named Tom LaForge, whose company puts a drink on the lips of billion people everyday. Tom is Global Director of Human and Cultural Insights for Coca Cola. You can follow and inspire him on twitter at @otama Tom is smart and affable. He carries a massive corporate line on his shoulder when he comes to a conference like this. He tows it well. Coca Cola does some good. Does plenty of harm too. Not going to get granular here but I will share what I believe the most powerful thing Tom shared with us. It felt more like a poker tell then a direct call to action but still he said it though I am paraphrasing here – “the most important thing consumers can do is organize and speak to companies in a compelling collective voice.” The mandate for massive change will be an external force. Seems to me like he was asking for help, blinking morse code at the audience.