These are the people. The ones who fell out of the old machine and needed to find homes in a new one. We haven’t arranged them fully just yet, but I can feel it forming around me. I couldn’t be happier. I am after all, a recovering English major myself.

These outstanding minds are finding their way into new situations all over the place, not just in my business. They’re too smart not to. And the business “leaders” with their upside-down financial models are losing these intellectual capitalists in droves. And losing their shirts in the process. I’m told Tribune and others are all but done, short of full liquidation, which’ll be a fall-out that washes across us all in what will seem to be fear and upset, but more accurately a rebirth.

One brilliant “recovering reporter” asked me the other day, “What happens when the AP goes under?” I said I didn’t know and didn’t understand why it would. Better understanding his point, that in the not-too-distant-future there wouldn’t be anyone ready and able to buy legitimate content (newspapers and other bankrupt patrons), it began to become clear. So i rejoined his question. “The internet shrinks, that’s what happens,” he finished.

No fodder for bloggers to riff on. Pundits without fuel for their complaints. And, as I heard recently in a conference for media publishers, a halcyon time for corruption in government. Bloggers and Twitterers and Facebookers are pundits in an ever-expanding economy of opinion, which O would have to predict is the largest bubble we haven’t seen yet. And no one’s really addressing it because we so love to hear ourselves talk. It’s freedom for the “common man,” right, Ashton?

The last papers are trying to organize with each other in order to begin charging for their content online, unraveling one of the most ridiculous business models ever rushed into online: free content for everyone! Yay! And 40% margins demanded by shareholders. That didn’t work, but maybe it was just them. Well, except for the music industry’s attempt to stop the free flow of music earlier on. Oh, and TV trying to control channel distribution… and, well, radio and movies and magazines and books… oh my.

The Internet, the Great Leveler, continues to pull business models down. Fighting it, we generate fad-based businesses instead (Facebook and Twitter) and we continue to commit the same sins we did in 1999/2000, minus the foosball tables and in-house baristas. Only ten years later, here we are still running at falsely contrived models like YouTube (losing money by the bucket-load), Facebook (continuing to eat VC cash, most recently contributed by a Russian contingent), Twitter (still “figuring out its business model” while turning away buckets of cash from its false-economy cousin), and the list goes on.

Meanwhile, those who actually produce wander the planet in search of a safe place to ply their trade.

Get ready for a return to news guilds, bands of not-for-profit investigative reporting organizations, a total fragmentation of what we once knew as the newspaper/publishing/media industries. And keep an eye out for the smartest new models rising, like Monocle (www.monocle.com). There is hope. We’ll just have to be a little patient. Or write our way to our own new destiny.

We need to get past our view of the designer as a shaper of objects. The dictionary defines a designer as someone who plans an artifact or system of artifacts—in other words, the “posters and toasters” of the 20th century. This is too narrow. I prefer Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon’s definition: “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” In this definition, design is a way of thinking, and anyone in the company can be a designer, including the CEO.

Design thinking is about refusing to accept the easy answer. It’s about imagining new possibilities that weren’t on the table before, and prototyping those possibilities so they can be tested. It’s the difference between “deciding” the way forward and “designing” the way forward. Deciding only works in a stable market where innovation is a low priority.

Imagine the new company culture, no matter the company, defined around design thinking like this. It’s probably this country’s number one advantage (if our only real advantage) culturally going forward. We should be celebrating this concept in every concept and company.

And we should debate vigorously how we create cultures within companies that allow for this. Equal parts tension and inspiration, freedom and process, democracy and dictatorship. Can they live in harmony? I think so. You just have to have designers who are articulate enough and business savvy enough to have the hard conversations along the way. At the same time, you have to have a management team who understands that design is a process that takes time and space. All families should live together and learn from each other every minute of every day.

The result is a company that evolves in harmony with its market, not the lumbering Frankensteins that so many of us still are today.

Thanks to jeff leitner for pointing this article out.

the field is open for someone, anyone, to make a ‘deck’ that is useful to the common man and allows broadcast through blog, email, twitter, or ‘insert next thing here’ so that the next big thing isn’t another technology or trick. it’s the meaningful experience. it’s connecting with people in a meanginful way. the final frontier, as always, is defining and designing the best human experience. eager to see what starts flying back. and, hoping twitter is already hard at work building a business on top of its engine because even they know they’ve already become commoditized. and the last thing we need is to fall back to the debate about which 140 character message-slinger is the right one to standardize on…

As reported in AdAge today, Time-Warner’s Jeff Bewke’s has laid out a vision that should work… and should have enough momentum behind it to shove it through. it’s simple, really. let’s all admit that subscription tv is something we’ve acclimated to… WAY back in the 80′s for goodness sake. now, let’s also admit that the web is just another vehicle for the same channels. and, in break-through thinking, the same subscriptions should hold true. people will pay. and whatever misses might leak through (just like jumping cable subscriptions from your neighbor’s box back in the day) will be a small hitch amidst a far more engaged and willing audience. and eventually even those gaps will be filled. give us what we want WHERE we want it AND when we want it. imagine that. an old media conglomerate coming through with business-minded new media thinking.

thanks, jeff. i’m here to cheer you on and anyone else willing to apply a new model to an old industry in the interest of making future sense of our confused current world. yet another little piece of the economy that can now calm down :o)…

having had some fairly lengthy discussions on the topic with a good friend, Jeff Leitner, we’re finding common threads to follow in a purposeful way. we’ll be publishing on our efforts in the near future. one of our early discussions spawned the thought of a split in social groups and what could be two archetypes: messy versus clean. our labels are admittedly self-serving as they reflect our bias/perspective. we don’t like the ‘messy’ groups and we do like the ‘clean.’ hence the implied judgment in the labels. that said, take a look at group definition from the perspective of a cause strategist.

recommendations on better defining these social aggregates and what it could mean for online strategies is likely a rich field to mine.

we are amazing beings, capable of reinventing ourselves and the structures that guide us when all else appears lost. we are in a moment now where things appear scary and lost. they aren’t. instead, we are in a moment of tremendous change and we need to take the reigns and make that change happen purposefully, artfully, elegantly… so that the world we create on the other side is one of transparency, authenticity, and amazing opportunity going forward.

i’ll continue refining and redesigning this particular speach, but hope you enjoy its current incarnation as delivered at the interaction’09 conference.

best,
–jim

Jim Jacoby, manifest Founder and CXO, Presents “UX Designers as Business Leaders” from manifest on Vimeo.

at any rate, check it out. it’s worth a hard look (and the hard work) if you’re going to begin employing these techniques on your own behalf or on behalf of a client. give yourself some honest accountability against which your efforts can be judged. makes down-stream decisions a lot easier, whether you like the outcome or not…

Brad says…

Media is giving us an enormous ability, and more and more channels, to reach consumers. The irony is that in an environment where there are more and more channels to reach the consumer, it’s never been harder than it is right now to engage the consumer. The step before consumer action, which we all hope to get, is consumer engagement. And consumer engagement is driven by innovative, fantastic content that stands out from the rest, captures the consumer imagination and differentiates the brand.

We are living in an age of content, and if advertisers and marketers start thinking of themselves as content producers that are tasked with engaging consumers around their brand, that is a much more enlightened view than people who think of themselves as disseminators of the information that the company wants consumers to learn about their brand. If you’re creating amazing content, consumers will find you and they will engage with you. The “Bike Hero” viral video (spoof on “Guitar Hero” last year) got over 2 million hits and had people spend like four minutes watching it. That’s the new model — it’s creating compelling content that draws consumers to you as opposed to crappy content that you push out and impose on broad-scale media.

the result, you have to be as broad as you need to be. immediately after you take your shot, every communication you’ve sent needs to be laser-guided so it reaches its mark in a meaningful way. the further away you are, the broader your blast, but the less likely you can pull you individual pellets on-course.  a matter of relevance and understanding the customer. perhaps there’s another dimension worth considering in addition to how compelling your content is (which i’d certainly be selling if i were in the video game business and had that strong advantage). the other consideration is proximity to the customer, the closer you are (the better you understand each other) the more likely you are to serve up the right content at the right time.

mixing cultures (and arguably metaphors here for a minute)… it’s been brought to my attention that a lot of what i’m talking about in terms of driving our marketing, communications, and technology efforts toward a higher ground is found in a full-blown philosophy developed years ago by Thich Nhat Hanh. his book, The Miracle of Mindfulness is a treatise on better getting into the moment. while driving toward self-awareness and bhudist concepts, it can be applied to business and internet-enable communications. probably not a coincidence that we’re stumbling into this realization.

as for the posting title here, a mixture of eastern and western can be a holy vs. hell balance in itself, given either one or the other getting off-kilter. ironic that the US is sizing up to counter-balance China in the long run? i think not… how we go about business is going to be a fascinating meeting of minds in the coming years.

for my own part, i believe the world is filled with trees like twitter, facebook, myspace, youtube… you name it. the issue here is that each of them believes they are the one. further, marketers/agencies who figure one or the other out believe they should be used incessantly. the problem is, you start shaking this tree and someone comes along and says, well, if you shake it harder, you’ll get more out of it. so you shake harder. then a crowd of others come around and start shaking it with you… ostensibly to get more value out of it. eventually you’ve shaken all the leaves off of it and you have nothing left but leaves that will blow off in the wind. anyone for an island in secondlife?…

my point is simply this. don’t lose the forest for the trees. create an ecology of smart communication outlets and work them together. treat them like the living, evolving ecology that they are and use them responsibly. treat them like an ecologist would, with an eye for sustainability (to coin another over-abused phrase).

and leave poor guys like seth from trying to answer the question you’re really asking between the lines: how do i have a big idea? he can’t tell you! get inside yourself and find it there. the problem is, that’s a scary thing to do and only the brave live comfortably inside their own minds.

(thanks to john patterson from the Chicago Convergence for sharing. check out the convergence site for more local innovation on topics just like this…)