What in the world moves you? How do you move the world?
Yesterday I met with a principal at his East Detroit school. Few things ground human relationships like concern for the safety of people who have been harmed or terrified, and you could see it in his face as he spoke about the number one thing his students ask for help with: safety from violence in and outside of school.
You can read about that in the news or a policy report. Hearing it directly from Detroit youth, tasting gunpowder in the air from a recent shooting, or seeing it momentarily tug at a grown man’s composure takes the experience to a different level of reality.
The issue moves him and his staff, he’s doing remarkable things to cultivate a culture of empathy and appreciation to help the most “at risk” youth in the school move forward from within and beyond the city. We’re focused on de-escalation, conflict resolution, and challenge based learning initiatives to help youth embrace and resolve challenges in creative non-violent ways. There’s a bigger vision too: we believe creating a culture that feelingly sees the world bolsters solution-focused entrepreneurial thinking in and beyond the communities we’re part of.
I call that emotive mechanics. We aim to change the way people look at and feel about the world with tangible actions, but we’re guided by a judicious mix of our own emotions and tools for making sense of the world through education. In that sense, we’re emotive mechanics too.
…
For those interested, the school is part of the Blanche Kelso Bruce Academy. Some may have heard about the Catherine Ferguson Academy in the news in previous years, these schools are part of the same organization.
Panel in “Riddle” by Kyla Vanderklugt p. 49 of Flight Vol. 8
New life-challenge for me: turn curiosity into courageous questionsquickly.
Not so new but still challenging for me to do: elicit passion and wisdom from other people as soon as appropriate.
“Art ain’t about paint. It ain’t about canvas. It’s about ideas. Too many people died without ever getting their mind out to the world.” — Thornton Dial, SR.
Art, as I’ve come to understand, exists as a special form of communication. It’s communication that inspires a sense of wonder—a deep curiosity that has us ponder the encounter and ideas behind what we engage. It compels us to activate our curiosity as we wonder about the possible implications an encounter can have on our lives or the that of others.
I saw Thornton Dial SR.’s quote in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s folk artist exhibit. It was liberating as much as it was validating: To make art, one requires no rigorous history of training, art degree, special materials or extraordinary circumstances to start. To me, Thornton Dial’s quote was an invitation to make whatever was on my mind if I so wished to do so. Better yet, it comforted me to know there’s boundless opportunity to share any idea, including those that can’t be experienced in writing. Perhaps what we have to share comes forth as good and beautiful. Whatever we choose to do, the act of honestly communicating our ideas certainly brings us closer to truth for our minds and hearts. Whenever that happens, it’s an invitation to live life artfully.
Looking at Mr. Dial’s quote again, it also applies to how I look at living life when speaking with and listening to people. There’s an art to good conversation and dialogue. If we consider Seth Godin’s distinction between the characteristics of work and art, artful conversation becomes a palpable ideal. Godin believes that work can be recognized as something people want to do less of, while art is something people want to make more. In that sense, we can all strive to make artful conversations. Both are important, good work can be necessary for creating better art.
I believe everyone benefits being in and moving from a place of passionate curiosity. Being as Rachel Carson describes, in a “sense of wonder”. When activated, it entices profound intrigue straight from the spirit. Whether mentally or physically, that place could be our own, among others, or perhaps better yet: shared. What matters most is that we speak with the flames of inspiration, those burning deeply from within our being to create that place.
If there’s dead space or if confusion nags at your attention in a way that prevents peace for everyone in the conversation, call it out and help shake things up. Time and life in the presence of another person are too precious an opportunity to squander. For anyone who grants me the privilege of sharing a conversation, this applies to us too. Call me out if I don’t do so first. Just because I’m familiar with the recesses of awkward pause doesn’t mean I necessarily need or want us to stay there.
Perhaps the cost of very good conversation comes from committing yourself wholly to the people you speak with by thoroughly listening and keeping the courage to share what really matters to you. But do so in the greater interest of co-creating an enriching dialogue for everyone involved. Live boldly. Don’t be cautious, but be considerate with presence, intelligence, and equal heart. With this in mind, we can strive to create heartful conversations.
I’m still learning how to do so with excellence. But I like the idea that it’s an endeavor to live and share.
Stuck in your writing with writer’s block or inhuman reports? Start verbing over nouns for how-filled stories instead of statements.
What? Happened?
Sometimes we already know what we want to say, but we don’t say it in a way that people want or need to hear. Guess what I learned last week from a startup’s strategy-to-proposal session and botching public speaking points for a TEDX event? To start, it’s a phenomenon in what vs. how to move from nouns to verbs.
My coworker and I ran into the same problem: we’d start writing in “strategic whats”—true and well researched statements that were core to what we do—and then get stuck because we realized there was no way we could engage an every day person with plain English to carry our vivid story in pitches and proposals.
Later in the week as I refined and practiced my talking points for TEDX UM-Dearborn with friends, I found myself in the same trap: my outline, full of nouns, had plenty of descriptive content. Yet most of it was not what I could read and quickly translate to a person on the street or a public audience.
Verbing to Escape Writer’s Block
From getting stuck with writing or realizing I’m about to “bomb” the lines of a speech, I realized it was the same kind of sensation I occasionally got from writer’s block in my college career. I vividly recall feeling disheartened in my composition classes. I’d stare at pages of my own writing without knowing what to do next short of starting over to move the reader forward.
At the same time, I knew I had something important to say even if I didn’t know how. As I started working as a writing consultant, I realized everyone has something they can say when prompted with good questions or another set of eyes.
Engaging stories are an obvious and desirable outcome. But it’s rare to recognize when mental blocks get in the way of creating a good story and why the mental block happens until it already appears. So here’s my answer to the question “how can you intervene with writer’s block?” Use verbs right away.
Turn the focus of a sentence from nouns to verbs. If you will, start “verbing”. Take the reader’s attention from seeing “what it is” to moving them with “what we’re doing”.
I’m not the only person who’d recommend verbing your stuff either. Simon Simek thinks along similar lines too. He advocates that we use verbs to craft strategy too.
While I’m not new to making sure powerful verbs have presence when writing strategy, it’s the first time I’ve made the connection to my life’s other writing/speaking endeavors. Punctuation aside, our habits of grammar speak deeply to the way we think. Grammar rules govern the way we organize ideas, and we have our own tendencies. I suspect it’s more likely that grammatical devices are among the last thing we pay attention to as we write. Hopefully, paying attention to verbs is a tactic for the someone searching for another way to examine what they write.
That’s all I wanted to say about verbing. For what specifically brought me to the above conclusions, I’ll point to the startup and my talk on privilege/environmental justice.
Backstories
The startup’s services I’m working with essentially does two things.
1) Create marketable media around supply chains
2) Facilitate sustainability challenges to classrooms to ignite youth initiatives and deliver diverse insights
In writing something akin to the sales pitch though, it felt like I wrote a research paper. I pointed to visionary statistics that prove diversity for decision making and that youth are great for making fantastic changes in the world. For my co-worker, she sought to make an inspiring case-study about previous work with a vibrant school before she thought it turned into a flat statement about what happened.
In both our cases we had plenty of good information about what we use and do to provide value to our prospective client and the world. But without stepping into the how or why, we realized there was little to stir a reader past the facts to engage our services.
The “speech” at TEDX UMDearborn:
I was actually there for a performance, but prepared both a presentation to introduce the performance.
Literally, physically, this involved coordinating inspiration: I paced the audience’s breathing with my own (admittedly sometimes erratic!) breathing, which set the pace for the music.
Intellectually, there were three ideas I wanted to convey, so imagine telling a story based on the the following concepts:
Privilege of presence for inspired recreational learning and “entertainment”
Air quality as privilege and right exercised in the literal act of inspiration & respiration
Responsibilities coupled with inspired privilege
What brings the above points together? Inspiration. Breathing. Where we were, what we were privileged to do, and what I think all attendees should recognize we share: the privilege and opportunity to inspire as individuals and a community. But that’s for another post…
Now, dear reader, tell a compelling story about those three points to the nearest person! Okay, you don’t have to but if you attempted, kudos. Did you feel like you were caught off guard with insufficient context? Didn’t know where to start or why?
That’s how I felt too, though I already internalized a lot more information related to those items. It’s a moment of writer’s block for speech. I’ll share the actual and ideal narratives another time (I did prepare more than three bullet points).
Fortunately I (first) discovered it that moment as I practiced it in front of an informal audience and substantiated two of the three items above in advance. However, under duress, making an explicit connection about air quality and breathing fell by the wayside as yet to translate the statement from bullet point to story by the day of the event.
Speak your truth with courage, and all your heart.
Inspire, then move us–with each word you expel, and each breath you spend. We’ll catch our breaths, and then we’ll respire.
We’ll breathe as we move closer toward something worth every spirited breath of speech, story, and song before our lives expire.
But it ends not with neither your life nor ours. Greatness flows over and through endeavors of legacy everlasting.
Free it with your voice and contribution to the world.
Let it ebb and flow from heart to heart: yours to mine, theirs to yours.
Call again!
Through sacred passage of wisdom in your call and listening–let your curiosity open the greatness of others, share your reliable truths, and always ask for the greatest of truth even when the only answer may be silence from your fellows.
The echoes of utterance will be great, and the world may quaver and shake in new movement as it awakens with the warmth of your voice for the reasons we share with you.
This month, I aspire to make professional jargon and buzzword*-filled language more human. Yes, that’s an oxymoron in action.
[*as I noted before, there’s a difference between buzzwords and fuzzy concepts; professional jargon falls under that distinction too. They can be one in the same if you, like I now and then, might be unfamiliar with them.]
I’ll say this: Few things freshen up professional jargon like superlatives and exclamation points make any upcoming meeting that much more exciting.
I recently finished the following:
“Ian Tran brings strategic planning, research, insight, and implementation experience for sustainable viability, brand, operational outreach and marketing in addition to a breadth of educational background to the team with a splash of spirit from the Great Lakes Bioregion!” (yes, I really wrote that for part of my professional bio: http://worldbycycle.com/team/ )
That bio was challenge for me to write–it almost spurred an existential crisis. I had to present myself to both corporate professionals and educators/community based groups while embodying the spirit of adventure that we explore in presenting our work.
Try it at your own workplace! Here are a few examples with exclamation points to get you started!
Coming soon as event invitations:
“Excellent ITS Customer Service Form Meeting!!!”
and
“Adventuresome ITS Potluck Meeting!”
What we communicate remains important, but sometimes the only thing gets through is the passion or character that that brings what we say together. Until I’m comfortable with articulating information to all relevant audiences, I’ll lean on passion.
A brief note about Frito Lays’ participatory flavor contest: The curiosity about bizarre flavors like Chicken and Waffles is enough to substantially surge profits in a short-term (w/in about a year). Good if your company:
1) has standard reliable service record and customer base
2) has good customer engagement
3) might need time to figure out bigger strategic goals in the future
I also noted that a package designer must have granted their inner geography wonk a moment to put the origins of various flavor suggestions on the back of the package.
They’ve got something remarkable going on: participation. I’ll be keeping an eye on their contest (and reading their press release about it)–I bet it’ll have some useful implications for citizen and educational initiatives as well.
[Yes, I recently encountered a bag-the buyer said it was terrible but he was curious enough to get some. I agreed with him after trying to finish the rest his bag–the salty/sweet balance wouldn’t be an issue had the flavor not tasted like budget deep-fry breading scraped off a buffet tray. I’ll add it to the list of things to attempt when you’re still young, but nevermore unless dire circumstance arise!]
About a year ago, I contemplated a lot about existentialism in marketing:
If a product engages an audience (especially the consumer) with an actual experience, the product–and in turn, the brand–becomes priceless, the added value becomes invaluable. I also made an ethical distinction between outreach and marketing. You can read that post here. Now, I’m finding a continuum between community-based ethical enterprises and stories:
Stories humanize our relationship with whatever good or service we engage.
In the case of two companies we’ll read about soon, one is a fair example of a story functioning as added value for its product distinction and marketing. The other is a case of what I’d call “integrated value”.
Authentic sustainability creates value for all parts of an organization, its community, and operations by cohering them into its initiative and ethos (AKA, the culture of the project/program/and company).
Ironically, my revelations are heightened by the fact that I’m starting to work closely with an Australian company (ISMOTION) to examine the “story of stuff” for sustainability in global supply chains–while many people whom I know are focused on very exciting sustainability and community building on a local level.
Playing music as Ole smokes the salmon gives a story that differentiates his product from others, and adds value to the smoked salmon altogether. It’s clever marketing that makes consumerism a bit more humane thanks to the touch of a story and a product procured with passion. But how integral is the music to enriching a customer’s experience? Looking for the value of the story, I’d say it could be additive, but it’s not crucial to the success of the product.
Interface is a carpet company. For those who might not be familiar with building materials and sustainability in industry, carpet companies pack a surprising punch when it comes to re-imagining how our economy can function [1].
Judging from the video, Interface’s net-works program might be considered a “social enterprise”. However, they’re throwing in a fine new phrase that’s worth noting in the lexicon of commerce, “restorative enterprise” which asks: How can a company improve a place or process for the human and ecosystemic community?
While they might not explicitly say so in their marketing, it’s focused on using their supply chain to cultivate sustainability through a coherent thread of actions and their concurrent or subsequent stories. Interface improves the world by sourcing their materials from waste. But they move people in showing how they source material and why the initiative exists in the first place: by removing discarded fishing net from coastal coral reefs, and by creating visible benefit to people from impacted island communities. That’s quite a story.
The value they provide comes from everything they do in the supply chain–it’s integrated value, and every step of the way you’ll probably find something or someone who’s willing to tell a story about what they do. That’s a stronger qualitative indicator for ideal creative actions toward sustainability–everything and person benefits because it’s integral to the enterprise’s core operations.
The product becomes an engagement piece for the entire production process. You’ve probably seen this in commercials–for car companies, we see footage of engineers and assembly line workers who take pride in their most recent design and labors as an example. It’s good, but the system they work within has yet to figure out persuasive alternatives that make a good coherent story for their products throughout the supply chain and communities they touch. At least on face, Interface’s Net-Works program looks at improving others throughout its supply chain and makes another distinction in its product: it’s “community-based”.
The places that its nylon supplier gets material makes a difference: people take fishing nets from the coast and ocean around their homes. Also, the end of the product’s life matters too: the company takes back old used carpet to create something new.
Their community impact is integral to the product and brand’s story–just as thoughtfully crafted art for humane purposes can become a priceless treasure for a person or community, the product, program, and brand convey a priceless value: it contributes to the dignity and integrity of our existence and those we live with–including the land.
* * *
I recently got back from a summit (check out the highlights from ReRoute) in New York which poses the same kind of question for business and economics in general: “How can we make business and economics more enriching and non-degrading to the people, and other co-habitants we live with?”
There’s a movement/field of study called solidarity economics, which looks at this, and from discussing with conference luminaries, it’s clear that the “new economics” movement is well underway.
Telling the story of our stuff looks like an excellent start in a global economy. Yet at the end of the day, I think we beam the most when people we know, see, and embrace directly do well.
I’m really excited at the prospect of consulting Interface’s Australian company with the team at Ismotion to show the global story of their sustainability initiative, and will look forward to the time when I do the same here in the Great Lakes bioregion as well.
[1] The Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s “Circular Economy” video gives a good big-picture overview of how the carpet industry’s business of “cradle to cradle” material reuse happens.
#11 VIII 2013
Edited 14 August 2013 to distinguish added value from integrated value.
I’m integrating many facets of what I do into one place. In my quest for examples of interesting people who do a disparate array of things and had personal websites that brought them all together, I wound up finding the following phrase: “sell an experience, not a product.”
The concept was probably coined by someone famous or at least famous within marketing circles–I’ll let others point to the source for now. The idea however is interesting–even marketers (presumably good marketers), some of the greatest product pushers of all-time, look for truth and meaning in what they purvey. I don’t think I’m off-mark to say “selling an experience” plugs into the essence of existentialism. Experience is irreplaceable and particular to one’s perception and circumstances (which are subjective enough to present real challenges to anyone attempting to replicate them). Yet the bigger question for me is this: how much can one intrinsically and extrinsically integrate into what they do?
Here’s where outreach and marketing overlap in my opinion (and why I believe outreach is the superior concept to marketing, though with all due respect to marketers) I believe both are still important and useful. Both operate on transdisciplinary principles of design–particularly through communication.{continued after the jump}
An organization or individual (the entity initiating the marketing/outreach) conceives a desire and/or need among audiences/consumers. The conceiver(s) communicate the existence of their product(s) and/or services to the audience/consumers–this is the most visible part of the marketing and outreach–and ideally deliver or facilitate some connection between the desired good/service (plus a new sub-category: experience) and audience/consumer.
-> Conceiver <–> Communicator <–> Audience/Consumer <- [I wish I could draw triangles and circles with text]
In most capitalistic arenas, marketing strives to stimulate and serve desires for some kind of product (material stuff–frequently stuff you don’t need, I’ll let the great Annie Lennox walk you through its impacts through “the story of stuff“) or service (again, not necessarily something you need but may want). In the buzz I’m reading from this admittedly narrow cross section of the marketing community, the best tangible way to justify product hustling is to give something that’s well beyond the value of the product–by emphasizing how the context of your life fits around the product. It’s the experience and story for the product’s discovery and procurement (or potential experience and stories) which potentially shapes the identity of its consumer that makes it worthwhile. Apple is a commonly cited “experience” brand. Indeed, I’ve friends who are downright upset about the hardware, software, and interface about the actual products, but there are plenty who can affirm their enamory (I’ll fiat the existence of this word and make it so via urban dictionary someday). When word of this magical realization spreads exponentially, the mystery of hype becomes manifest!
Outreach in non-profit circles, which normally focus on meeting needs (though sometimes takes on the guise of marketing to simply promote awareness about an organization’s existence), ought to be driven to communicate the availability, accessibility, relevance, and/or significance of a good, service, and/or experience.
In most capitalistic organizations I can imagine, marketing a service means that a company may provide the things you need for the experience (think skydiving), but I’m drawing a blank about how they’d market an experience–perhaps movies? Experiences are used to market goods all the time though.
Outreach marketing (think AdCouncil PSA marketing) is a bit different. The experience benefits people in ways that are not monetizable. It’s about good lifestyle choices, spending time with the kids, etc.
Where does propaganda fall into this spectrum? …
Interestingly, fostering identity is intrinsic to good leadership too (for scholarly backing to this claim, see The New Psychology of Leadership borrow it from a University Library network, it’s priced like a textbook around $90, there are other things I could point to also, but I’m not essaying with my strict scholar’s hat at this time). In this writing, we’re now entering the bigger picture of collective social behavior. Sources: “Sell an experience, not a product”.
“Marketing needs more polymaths”http://www.thedrum.co.uk/opinion/2012/05/16/marketing-needs-more-polymaths-more-magic-please-underpinned-logic[Note: I keep starting things that make me think I’m supposed to cover all of my thoughts about whatever I write. Since I stopped using wordpress when I wrote this (I won’t force you, but please visit me on my primary blog instead!, I have no idea how long these posts run and have yet to check the word count. Yet since there’s a glimmer of hope that some wordpress users might be interested in reading, I figure I’ll re-post it here. I might expand this post later as it ties into essays and research I’ve worked on before, apologies in advance if it ends abruptly.]
As much as I appreciated the clean presentation and worry-free formatting of wordpress, I strongly dislike how wordpress forces users to pay for simple features that affect layout, fonts, and so forth.
I actually did so months ago but forgot to let anyone know. Maybe I’ll figure out a way to reintegrate this website eventually. See you elsewhere in the meantime!
Among things I never imagined doing, making jewelry in college ranks high on the list.
The course was actually a natural science class that’s open to the community as a workshop too. We learned about the chemistry and physics that go into near-alchemy glass phenomena. In addition to the physics and chemical reactions behind glass working, I learned fundamental techniques for crafting glass beads last semester. By the end of the endeavor, I realized I was working with serious materials that could place me alongside competent and professional jewelers (indeed, at least one of the people in the lab, Katherine*[spelling?], is a full-time artist and jeweler).
Many of our glass rods came from exotic and esteemed places like the Murano district of Italy and China (perhaps exotic for those not numbed by globalization). Our instructor taught workshops at the University of Toledo’s glass museum, and I worked with 22 karat gold leaf, sterling silver, and stainless steel.
The glass gets its color based on its chemical contents, and sold as glass rods. Heavy metals (things you don’t want to ingest a lot of like lead, etc.) are frequently used as opacifiers (to make the glass less transparent). History holds that some antique yellow glass vases would glow in the dark because of the uranium in them (I hear from other classes and conferences that uranium ore is yellow too). When we work with a “cobalt blue” rod, it appears cobalt blue especially because the rod of glass contains a fair amount of cobalt silicate or cobalt (II) aluminate. I’m guessing that it’s a radioactively stable isotope of cobalt. For beads with lead content, I now tend to seal beads with clear glass in case any potential health concerns do manifest.
The blue striping on the beads/pendant
is “cobalt blue” (contains cobalt). The
pendant is suspended with sterling
silver, the crimps for the clasps
are sterling silver as well, and
the beads are threaded with
stainless steel cable.
Enough back story: At the end of the semester, I came to enjoy working with glass, made some nice things (turtles!), was required to make a necklace for the final project, was left with a bundle of glass rods, and invited to join the summer workshop and Southeast Michigan Glass Bead Maker’s Guild.
As much as I enjoy glasswork, a few concerns arise.
1) As a class, we use about 5 tanks of acetylene (a natural gas) in one semester for our torches.
2) Globally, gold contributes to over 90% of mine production, and I suspect the precious metals and steel we used were not from recycled.
(Here’s the No Dirty Gold report I sourced that statistic from)
3) I definitely won’t use a lot of the glass for myself, but if it’s worth it for someone I’m very glad to make it. However, I refuse to craft kitsch.
Disclaimer: In some ways, I dislike getting into classical conservation issues like recycling and the accelerated anthropocentric climate crisis. They tend to boil down to basic education and responsibility, and people get pigeonholed as a very different kind of person known as an “environmentalist”. Recycling and climate change tend to miss a bigger picture in the scheme of life: we all have responsibilities that cannot be delegated to specialists. You don’t delegate your day-to-day responsibilities to a professional ethicist. Likewise, there are basic things that everyone can/should do that are not to be left for someone else to clean up after. Responsible environmental actions are a necessity in everyone’s life, the difference comes from the degree of insight, scale, and influence we knowingly interact with. You can go to an environmental scientist for insight, but don’t forget about the learned perspectives of everyone else in society.
1) Back to point 1 about natural gas consumption:
The first point probably has a stereotypical and common set of reasons for an environmental science major to be worried. Anthropocentric greenhouse gas combustion, natural gas consumption, which ties back to extraction (increased demand for fuel can add to impetus for fracking in the Great Lakes region [I’ll acknowledge natural gas as an enticing transition fuel, but when we get to the science of risk, impacts, and industry response, it’s very challenging to justify considering the proximity of these operations to our local drinking water supply]).
2) The second point really makes it meaningful for me–I’ve met people face to face, shook hands and embraced people who underwent (some continue to undergo) environmental injustices in Appalachia due to mountain top removal coal mining. Contrary to what most people would assume, they were still potentially willing to mine coal in other ways even at the risk of black lung disease. They weren’t willing to see their fruits and neighbors die from toxic water or silicosis.
3) Furthermore, people can only wear so much jewelry at a time, assuming that they’d even want to (I for one, barely wear a watch, and do so for practical purposes). Again, I refuse to craft kitsch–it’s frequently devoid of substance and rarely authentically communicates one’s intentional assertions of self-agency.
I find beauty through intrinsic and extrinsic circumstance of an event or entity–when both are there, it’s magic. Simple, complex, mysterious all at once. Glass as a medium captures this. The art is visual and for the creator, kinesthetic as well. I recall a [paraphrased] quote from a master Murano glass maker (sorry, I don’t recall his name, he’s in an early video about the history of glass making in 1960s):
“glass is the only medium I know that can be hard, yet fragile and malleable all at the same time”.
I’d take it further and apply it as a fair symbol of the human spirit too. It’s origins are inorganic (in a chemistry sense) yet natural and artificial (in that it is frequently created with human intention) too.
A process such as glass work on a small scale is intricate, introspective, and takes more time and effort than the finished outcome may suggest (realizing a cat’s eye marble is probably made by hand still surprises me). But as a process, it is fleeting and enrichment is particular only to the individual engaged in its creation. If I’m dissatisfied with the intrinsic nature of what I’ve made, I’m presented with a few challenges. Can I imbue substantial extrinsic meaning into what I’ve done? This then becomes a tenuous endeavor akin to marketing what we don’t really need. At the same time, I’m looking to pay off tuition and attain more stable living conditions.
Curious to know the context of glass bead making among fine jewelers, I started looking around. I found several jewelers pricing two-bead earrings around $60-$80 a pair, and that necklaces can easily reach $800 or more. Considering the potential time, effort, energy and materials it takes to make glass, this actually makes sense.
That’s right, we (you the reader and I) now enter the domain of “what’s it really worth” we now ponder if a balance can ever exist between the priceless value of experiences and stories, the worth of the intrinsic materials, and whether the experience modifies the value of a material item. Indeed, there exist companies which drive so much into developing a “culture” and identity around their products, that their value is appreciated for the story. Surely the existence of an active customer fan-forum can be considered a milestone of success in enterprise. In the bead industry, see trollbeads. For parallels in consumer technology, I’ll merely mention “apple”; video games: “halo”.
Perhaps the greater creation behind these individual trinkets comes from the creation of a dynamic, living entity: the “community” which sustains meaning through the extrinsic discussion, exhibition, criticism, and occasional exaltation for particular items, artifacts, and ideas. The strength of any community belongs to the domain of invaluable relationships.
While capitalism and money may be myriad topics fraught with issue for deeply contemplative and compassionate comprehension, I’m convinced that the lifeblood of these systems amounts to a beguilingly simple notion: trust. I suspect most economists consider the value of our currencies, even an individual or institution’s faith in a good, service, or market resilience rely upon trust for arbitrary interest rates and belief in economic dogma. Yet the injustices inherent to both of these systems tend to violate the very basis of my conjecture for money and capitalism!
We must be looking at a wicked problem in its most worthy sense… [A wicked problem is a special kind of problem for complex systems thinkers. The link goes to previous posts that discuss or at least tangentially mention wicked problems with useful external links for more specific characterizations of wicked problems.]
Light Telecommunication 