WEBVTT

00:00:00.248 --> 00:00:02.651
I have to say that I'm very glad to be here.

00:00:02.651 --> 00:00:05.852
I understand we have over 80 countries here,

00:00:05.852 --> 00:00:08.066
so that's a whole new paradigm for me to speak

00:00:08.066 --> 00:00:09.445
to all of these countries.

NOTE Paragraph

00:00:09.445 --> 00:00:11.430
In each country, I'm sure you have this thing called

00:00:11.430 --> 00:00:13.551
the parent-teacher conference.

00:00:13.551 --> 00:00:15.665
Do you know about the parent-teacher conference?

00:00:15.665 --> 00:00:18.065
Not the ones for your kids, but the one you had as a child,

00:00:18.065 --> 00:00:20.883
where your parents come to school and your teacher

00:00:20.883 --> 00:00:23.381
talks to your parents, and it's a little bit awkward.

00:00:23.381 --> 00:00:26.722
Well, I remember in third grade, I had this moment

00:00:26.722 --> 00:00:29.578
where my father, who never takes off from work,

00:00:29.578 --> 00:00:33.508
he's a classical blue collar, a working-class immigrant person,

00:00:33.508 --> 00:00:36.668
going to school to see his son, how he's doing,

00:00:36.668 --> 00:00:39.175
and the teacher said to him, he said, "You know,

00:00:39.175 --> 00:00:41.450
John is good at math and art."

00:00:41.450 --> 00:00:43.512
And he kind of nodded, you know?

00:00:43.512 --> 00:00:45.882
The next day I saw him talking to a customer at our

00:00:45.882 --> 00:00:49.677
tofu store, and he said, "You know, John's good at math."

00:00:49.677 --> 00:00:52.968
(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

00:00:52.968 --> 00:00:55.399
And that always stuck with me all my life.

00:00:55.399 --> 00:00:58.256
Why didn't Dad say art? Why wasn't it okay?

00:00:58.256 --> 00:01:01.662
Why? It became a question my entire life, and

00:01:01.662 --> 00:01:04.579
that's all right, because being good at math meant

00:01:04.579 --> 00:01:08.111
he bought me a computer, and some of you remember

00:01:08.111 --> 00:01:09.960
this computer, this was my first computer.

00:01:09.960 --> 00:01:13.813
Who had an Apple II? Apple II users, very cool. (Applause)

00:01:13.813 --> 00:01:17.067
As you remember, the Apple II did nothing at all. (Laughter)

00:01:17.067 --> 00:01:19.328
You'd plug it in, you'd type in it and green text would come out.

00:01:19.328 --> 00:01:20.885
It would say you're wrong most of the time.

00:01:20.885 --> 00:01:22.719
That was the computer we knew.

00:01:22.719 --> 00:01:25.360
That computer is a computer that I learned about

00:01:25.360 --> 00:01:29.937
going to MIT, my father's dream. And at MIT, however,

00:01:29.937 --> 00:01:33.183
I learned about the computer at all levels,

00:01:33.183 --> 00:01:36.863
and after, I went to art school to get away from computers,

00:01:36.863 --> 00:01:39.101
and I began to think about the computer as more of

00:01:39.101 --> 00:01:41.282
a spiritual space of thinking.

00:01:41.282 --> 00:01:44.136
And I was influenced by performance art --

00:01:44.136 --> 00:01:48.371
so this is 20 years ago. I made a computer out of people.

00:01:48.371 --> 00:01:51.409
It was called the Human Powered Computer Experiment.

00:01:51.409 --> 00:01:55.088
I have a power manager, mouse driver, memory, etc.,

00:01:55.088 --> 00:01:58.875
and I built this in Kyoto, the old capital of Japan.

00:01:58.875 --> 00:02:00.840
It's a room broken in two halves.

00:02:00.840 --> 00:02:02.940
I've turned the computer on,

00:02:02.940 --> 00:02:06.493
and these assistants are placing a giant floppy disk

00:02:06.493 --> 00:02:09.339
built out of cardboard, and it's put into the computer.

00:02:09.339 --> 00:02:13.648
And the floppy disk drive person wears it. (Laughter)

00:02:13.648 --> 00:02:16.165
She finds the first sector on the disk, and

00:02:16.165 --> 00:02:21.496
takes data off the disk and passes it off to, of course, the bus.

00:02:21.496 --> 00:02:25.052
So the bus diligently carries the data into the computer

00:02:25.052 --> 00:02:28.496
to the memory, to the CPU, the VRAM, etc.,

00:02:28.496 --> 00:02:33.277
and it's an actual working computer. That's a bus, really. (Laughter)

00:02:33.277 --> 00:02:35.754
And it looks kind of fast. That's a mouse driver,

00:02:35.754 --> 00:02:37.753
where it's XY. (Laughter)

00:02:37.753 --> 00:02:39.462
It looks like it's happening kind of quickly, but it's actually

00:02:39.462 --> 00:02:42.658
a very slow computer, and when I realized how slow

00:02:42.658 --> 00:02:46.781
this computer was compared to how fast a computer is,

00:02:46.781 --> 00:02:51.418
it made me wonder about computers and technology in general.

NOTE Paragraph

00:02:51.418 --> 00:02:53.543
And so I'm going to talk today about four things, really.

00:02:53.543 --> 00:02:57.235
The first three things are about how I've been curious

00:02:57.235 --> 00:03:00.769
about technology, design and art, and how they intersect,

00:03:00.769 --> 00:03:03.726
how they overlap, and also a topic that I've taken on

00:03:03.726 --> 00:03:05.987
since four years ago I became the President

00:03:05.987 --> 00:03:09.560
of Rhode Island School of Design: leadership.

00:03:09.560 --> 00:03:12.277
And I'll talk about how I've looked to combine

00:03:12.277 --> 00:03:16.912
these four areas into a kind of a synthesis, a kind of experiment.

NOTE Paragraph

00:03:16.912 --> 00:03:19.547
So starting from technology,

00:03:19.547 --> 00:03:21.882
technology is a wonderful thing.

00:03:21.882 --> 00:03:25.406
When that Apple II came out, it really could do nothing.

00:03:25.406 --> 00:03:27.876
It could show text and

00:03:27.876 --> 00:03:31.474
after we waited a bit, we had these things called images.

00:03:31.474 --> 00:03:33.956
Remember when images were first possible with a computer,

00:03:33.956 --> 00:03:36.352
those gorgeous, full-color images?

00:03:36.352 --> 00:03:39.570
And then after a few years, we got CD-quality sound.

00:03:39.570 --> 00:03:41.922
It was incredible. You could listen to sound on the computer.

00:03:41.922 --> 00:03:45.859
And then movies, via CD-ROM. It was amazing.

00:03:45.859 --> 00:03:48.002
Remember that excitement?

00:03:48.002 --> 00:03:51.699
And then the browser appeared. The browser was great,

00:03:51.699 --> 00:03:54.556
but the browser was very primitive, very narrow bandwidth.

00:03:54.556 --> 00:03:57.813
Text first, then images, we waited,

00:03:57.813 --> 00:03:59.609
CD-quality sound over the Net,

00:03:59.609 --> 00:04:04.253
then movies over the Internet. Kind of incredible.

00:04:04.253 --> 00:04:07.123
And then the mobile phone occurred,

00:04:07.123 --> 00:04:12.658
text, images, audio, video. And now we have iPhone,

00:04:12.658 --> 00:04:16.782
iPad, Android, with text, video, audio, etc.

00:04:16.782 --> 00:04:18.809
You see this little pattern here?

00:04:18.809 --> 00:04:22.142
We're kind of stuck in a loop, perhaps, and this sense

00:04:22.142 --> 00:04:24.748
of possibility from computing is something I've been

00:04:24.748 --> 00:04:27.565
questioning for the last 10 or so years,

00:04:27.565 --> 00:04:31.779
and have looked to design, as we understand most things,

00:04:31.779 --> 00:04:35.667
and to understand design with our technology has been a passion of mine.

00:04:35.667 --> 00:04:40.423
And I have a small experiment to give you a quick design lesson.

NOTE Paragraph

00:04:40.423 --> 00:04:42.921
Designers talk about the relationship between form

00:04:42.921 --> 00:04:46.262
and content, content and form. Now what does that mean?

00:04:46.262 --> 00:04:48.829
Well, content is the word up there: fear.

00:04:48.829 --> 00:04:53.900
It's a four-letter word. It's a kind of a bad feeling word, fear.

00:04:53.900 --> 00:04:58.557
Fear is set in Light Helvetica, so it's not too stressful,

00:04:58.557 --> 00:05:01.258
and if you set it in Ultra Light Helvetica,

00:05:01.258 --> 00:05:05.196
it's like, "Oh, fear, who cares?" Right? (Laughter)

00:05:05.196 --> 00:05:07.794
You take the same Ultra Light Helvetica and make it big,

00:05:07.794 --> 00:05:10.336
and like, whoa, that hurts. Fear.

00:05:10.336 --> 00:05:12.251
So you can see how you change the scale, you change

00:05:12.251 --> 00:05:16.559
the form. Content is the same, but you feel differently.

00:05:16.559 --> 00:05:18.626
You change the typeface to, like, this typeface,

00:05:18.626 --> 00:05:21.409
and it's kind of funny. It's like pirate typeface,

00:05:21.409 --> 00:05:24.333
like Captain Jack Sparrow typeface. Arr! Fear!

00:05:24.333 --> 00:05:27.224
Like, aww, that's not fearful. That's actually funny.

00:05:27.224 --> 00:05:31.093
Or fear like this, kind of a nightclub typeface. (Laughter)

00:05:31.093 --> 00:05:33.513
Like, we gotta go to Fear. (Laughter)

00:05:33.513 --> 00:05:36.526
It's, like, amazing, right? (Laughter) (Applause)

00:05:36.526 --> 00:05:38.978
It just changes the same content.

00:05:38.978 --> 00:05:41.232
Or you make it -- The letters are separated apart,

00:05:41.232 --> 00:05:43.420
they're huddled together like on the deck of the Titanic,

00:05:43.420 --> 00:05:46.419
and you feel sorry for the letters, like, I feel the fear.

00:05:46.419 --> 00:05:48.604
You feel for them.

00:05:48.604 --> 00:05:50.738
Or you change the typeface to something like this.

00:05:50.738 --> 00:05:54.270
It's very classy. It's like that expensive restaurant, Fear.

00:05:54.270 --> 00:05:56.556
I can never get in there. (Laughter)

00:05:56.556 --> 00:06:01.842
It's just amazing, Fear. But that's form, content.

NOTE Paragraph

00:06:01.842 --> 00:06:04.891
If you just change one letter in that content,

00:06:04.891 --> 00:06:08.871
you get a much better word, much better content: free.

00:06:08.871 --> 00:06:13.239
"Free" is a great word. You can serve it almost any way.

00:06:13.239 --> 00:06:15.834
Free bold feels like Mandela free.

00:06:15.834 --> 00:06:18.515
It's like, yes, I can be free.

00:06:18.515 --> 00:06:21.787
Free even light feels kind of like, ah, I can breathe in free.

00:06:21.787 --> 00:06:24.517
It feels great. Or even free spread out,

00:06:24.517 --> 00:06:28.089
it's like, ah, I can breathe in free, so easily.

00:06:28.089 --> 00:06:31.296
And I can add in a blue gradient and a dove,

00:06:31.296 --> 00:06:33.647
and I have, like, Don Draper free. (Laughter)

00:06:33.647 --> 00:06:37.009
So you see that -- form, content, design, it works that way.

00:06:37.009 --> 00:06:39.442
It's a powerful thing. It's like magic, almost,

00:06:39.442 --> 00:06:43.728
like the magicians we've seen at TED. It's magic.

00:06:43.728 --> 00:06:46.015
Design does that.

NOTE Paragraph

00:06:46.015 --> 00:06:49.163
And I've been curious about how design and technology intersect,

00:06:49.163 --> 00:06:50.632
and I'm going to show you some old work I never really

00:06:50.632 --> 00:06:53.920
show anymore, to give you a sense of what I used to do.

00:06:53.920 --> 00:06:56.546
So -- yeah.

00:06:56.546 --> 00:06:59.737
So I made a lot of work in the '90s.

00:06:59.737 --> 00:07:03.033
This was a square that responds to sound.

00:07:03.033 --> 00:07:06.459
People ask me why I made that. It's not clear. (Laughter)

00:07:06.459 --> 00:07:12.175
But I thought it'd be neat for the square

00:07:12.175 --> 00:07:17.231
to respond to me, and my kids were small then,

00:07:17.231 --> 00:07:19.807
and my kids would play with these things, like, "Aaah,"

00:07:19.807 --> 00:07:22.733
you know, they would say, "Daddy, aaah, aaah." You know, like that.

00:07:22.733 --> 00:07:25.118
We'd go to a computer store, and they'd do the same thing.

00:07:25.118 --> 00:07:28.290
And they'd say, "Daddy, why doesn't the computer respond to sound?"

00:07:28.290 --> 00:07:31.833
And it was really at the time I was wondering why doesn't the computer respond to sound?

00:07:31.833 --> 00:07:35.052
So I made this as a kind of an experiment at the time.

NOTE Paragraph

00:07:35.052 --> 00:07:38.236
And then I spent a lot of time in the space of

00:07:38.236 --> 00:07:41.205
interactive graphics and things like this, and I stopped doing it because

00:07:41.205 --> 00:07:43.917
my students at MIT got so much better than myself,

00:07:43.917 --> 00:07:45.727
so I had to hang up my mouse.

00:07:45.727 --> 00:07:49.295
But in '96, I made my last piece. It was in black and white,

00:07:49.295 --> 00:07:52.522
monochrome, fully monochrome, all in integer mathematics.

00:07:52.522 --> 00:07:54.188
It's called "Tap, Type, Write."

00:07:54.188 --> 00:07:57.674
It's paying a tribute to the wonderful typewriter

00:07:57.674 --> 00:08:01.759
that my mother used to type on all the time as a legal secretary.

00:08:01.759 --> 00:08:04.280
It has 10 variations. (Typing noise)

00:08:04.280 --> 00:08:06.409
(Typing noise)

00:08:06.409 --> 00:08:09.782
There's a shift.

00:08:09.782 --> 00:08:14.047
Ten variations. This is, like, spin the letter around.

00:08:14.047 --> 00:08:17.651
(Typing noises)

00:08:17.651 --> 00:08:24.636
This is, like, a ring of letters. (Typing noises)

00:08:24.636 --> 00:08:27.547
This is 20 years old, so it's kind of a --

00:08:27.547 --> 00:08:29.361
Let's see, this is —

00:08:29.361 --> 00:08:31.477
I love the French film "The Red Balloon."

00:08:31.477 --> 00:08:33.735
Great movie, right? I love that movie. So,

00:08:33.735 --> 00:08:37.343
this is sort of like a play on that. (Typing noises) (Typewriter bell)

00:08:37.343 --> 00:08:41.473
It's peaceful, like that. (Laughter)

00:08:41.473 --> 00:08:45.640
I'll show this last one. This is about balance, you know.

00:08:45.640 --> 00:08:47.591
It's kind of stressful typing out, so if you

00:08:47.591 --> 00:08:50.952
type on this keyboard, you can, like, balance it out.

00:08:50.952 --> 00:08:53.022
(Laughter)

00:08:53.022 --> 00:08:55.570
If you hit G, life's okay, so I always say,

00:08:55.570 --> 00:08:58.927
"Hit G, and it's going to be all right.

00:08:58.927 --> 00:09:01.438
Thank you. (Applause)

00:09:01.438 --> 00:09:04.085
Thank you.

NOTE Paragraph

00:09:04.085 --> 00:09:07.417
So that was 20 years ago, and

00:09:07.417 --> 00:09:12.059
I was always on the periphery of art.

00:09:12.059 --> 00:09:14.409
By being President of RISD I've gone deep into art,

00:09:14.409 --> 00:09:18.068
and art is a wonderful thing, fine art, pure art.

00:09:18.068 --> 00:09:20.872
You know, when people say, "I don't get art.

00:09:20.872 --> 00:09:25.260
I don't get it at all." That means art is working, you know?

00:09:25.260 --> 00:09:27.336
It's like, art is supposed to be enigmatic, so when you say,

00:09:27.336 --> 00:09:30.300
like, "I don't get it," like, oh, that's great. (Laughter)

00:09:30.300 --> 00:09:32.932
Art does that, because art is about asking questions,

00:09:32.932 --> 00:09:35.644
questions that may not be answerable.

NOTE Paragraph

00:09:35.644 --> 00:09:37.572
At RISD, we have this amazing facility called

00:09:37.572 --> 00:09:41.242
the Edna Lawrence Nature Lab. It has 80,000 samples

00:09:41.242 --> 00:09:44.823
of animal, bone, mineral, plants.

00:09:44.823 --> 00:09:47.533
You know, in Rhode Island, if an animal gets hit on the road,

00:09:47.533 --> 00:09:50.707
they call us up and we pick it up and stuff it.

NOTE Paragraph

00:09:50.707 --> 00:09:53.248
And why do we have this facility?

00:09:53.248 --> 00:09:56.691
Because at RISD, you have to look at the actual animal,

00:09:56.691 --> 00:09:59.571
the object, to understand its volume, to perceive it.

00:09:59.571 --> 00:10:02.283
At RISD, you're not allowed to draw from an image.

00:10:02.283 --> 00:10:03.948
And many people ask me, John, couldn't you just

00:10:03.948 --> 00:10:08.076
digitize all this? Make it all digital? Wouldn't it be better?

00:10:08.076 --> 00:10:11.018
And I often say, well, there's something good to how things

00:10:11.018 --> 00:10:14.683
used to be done. There's something very different about it,

00:10:14.683 --> 00:10:17.009
something we should figure out what is good about

00:10:17.009 --> 00:10:20.086
how we did it, even in this new era.

00:10:20.086 --> 00:10:22.977
And I have a good friend, he's a new media artist named

00:10:22.977 --> 00:10:26.515
Tota Hasegawa. He's based in London, no, actually it's in Tokyo,

00:10:26.515 --> 00:10:28.617
but when he was based in London, he had a game

00:10:28.617 --> 00:10:31.908
with his wife. He would go to antique shops,

00:10:31.908 --> 00:10:34.055
and the game was as such:

00:10:34.055 --> 00:10:36.736
When we look at an antique we want,

00:10:36.736 --> 00:10:39.583
we'll ask the shopkeeper for the story behind the antique,

00:10:39.583 --> 00:10:41.213
and if it's a good story, we'll buy it.

00:10:41.213 --> 00:10:43.454
So they'd go to an antique shop, and they'd look at this cup,

00:10:43.454 --> 00:10:44.783
and they'd say, "Tell us about this cup."

00:10:44.783 --> 00:10:48.887
And the shopkeeper would say, "It's old." (Laughter)

00:10:48.887 --> 00:10:52.611
"Tell us more."
"Oh, it's really old." (Laughter)

00:10:52.611 --> 00:10:55.157
And he saw, over and over, the antique's value

00:10:55.157 --> 00:10:57.820
was all about it being old.

00:10:57.820 --> 00:11:00.329
And as a new media artist, he reflected, and said,

00:11:00.329 --> 00:11:02.973
you know, I've spent my whole career making new media art.

00:11:02.973 --> 00:11:07.675
People say, "Wow, your art, what is it?"
It's new media.

00:11:07.675 --> 00:11:10.713
And he realized, it isn't about old or new.

00:11:10.713 --> 00:11:12.227
It's about something in between.

00:11:12.227 --> 00:11:17.688
It isn't about "old," the dirt, "new," the cloud. It's about what is good.

00:11:17.688 --> 00:11:23.122
A combination of the cloud and the dirt is where the action is at.

00:11:23.122 --> 00:11:25.106
You see it in all interesting art today, in all

00:11:25.106 --> 00:11:27.125
interesting businesses today. How we combine

00:11:27.125 --> 00:11:31.414
those two together to make good is very interesting.

NOTE Paragraph

00:11:31.414 --> 00:11:34.185
So art makes questions, and

00:11:34.185 --> 00:11:39.008
leadership is something that is asking a lot of questions.

00:11:39.008 --> 00:11:41.010
We aren't functioning so easily anymore.

00:11:41.010 --> 00:11:44.138
We aren't a simple authoritarian regime anymore.

00:11:44.138 --> 00:11:47.544
As an example of authoritarianism, I was in Russia one time

00:11:47.544 --> 00:11:49.720
traveling in St. Petersburg, at a national monument,

00:11:49.720 --> 00:11:52.882
and I saw this sign that says, "Do Not Walk On The Grass,"

00:11:52.882 --> 00:11:54.525
and I thought, oh, I mean, I speak English,

00:11:54.525 --> 00:11:57.262
and you're trying to single me out. That's not fair.

00:11:57.262 --> 00:12:00.136
But I found a sign for Russian-speaking people,

00:12:00.136 --> 00:12:03.309
and it was the best sign ever to say no.

00:12:03.309 --> 00:12:06.033
It was like, "No swimming, no hiking, no anything."

00:12:06.033 --> 00:12:11.632
My favorite ones are "no plants." Why would you bring a plant to a national monument? I'm not sure.

00:12:11.632 --> 00:12:13.905
And also "no love." (Laughter)

00:12:13.905 --> 00:12:17.458
So that is authoritarianism.

00:12:17.458 --> 00:12:19.623
And what is that, structurally?

00:12:19.623 --> 00:12:22.373
It's a hierarchy. We all know that a hierarchy is how we run

00:12:22.373 --> 00:12:25.398
many systems today, but as we know, it's been disrupted.

00:12:25.398 --> 00:12:28.916
It is now a network instead of a perfect tree.

00:12:28.916 --> 00:12:32.136
It's a heterarchy instead of a hierarchy. And that's kind of awkward.

NOTE Paragraph

00:12:32.136 --> 00:12:35.536
And so today, leaders are faced

00:12:35.536 --> 00:12:37.450
with how to lead differently, I believe.

00:12:37.450 --> 00:12:39.680
This is work I did with my colleague Becky Bermont

00:12:39.680 --> 00:12:41.920
on creative leadership. What can we learn

00:12:41.920 --> 00:12:44.345
from artists and designers for how to lead?

00:12:44.345 --> 00:12:48.350
Because in many senses, a regular leader loves to avoid mistakes.

00:12:48.350 --> 00:12:52.423
Someone who's creative actually loves to learn from mistakes.

00:12:52.423 --> 00:12:55.601
A traditional leader is always wanting to be right,

00:12:55.601 --> 00:13:00.062
whereas a creative leader hopes to be right.

00:13:00.062 --> 00:13:02.560
And this frame is important today, in this complex,

00:13:02.560 --> 00:13:07.330
ambiguous space, and artists and designers have a lot to teach us, I believe.

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:07.330 --> 00:13:11.040
And I had a show in London recently where my friends

00:13:11.040 --> 00:13:12.917
invited me to come to London for four days

00:13:12.917 --> 00:13:15.379
to sit in a sandbox, and I said great.

00:13:15.379 --> 00:13:18.727
And so I sat in a sandbox for four days straight,

00:13:18.727 --> 00:13:21.888
six hours every day, six-minute appointments with anyone in London,

00:13:21.888 --> 00:13:24.075
and that was really bad.

00:13:24.075 --> 00:13:27.707
But I would listen to people, hear their issues,

00:13:27.707 --> 00:13:29.601
draw in the sand, try to figure things out,

00:13:29.601 --> 00:13:32.144
and it was kind of hard to figure out what I was doing.

00:13:32.144 --> 00:13:34.852
You know? It's all these one-on-one meetings for like four days.

00:13:34.852 --> 00:13:36.758
And it felt kind of like being president, actually.

00:13:36.758 --> 00:13:39.755
I was like, "Oh, this my job. President. I do a lot of meetings, you know?"

00:13:39.755 --> 00:13:41.663
And by the end of the experience,

00:13:41.663 --> 00:13:44.502
I realized why I was doing this.

00:13:44.502 --> 00:13:48.631
It's because leaders, what we do is we connect

00:13:48.631 --> 00:13:52.788
improbable connections and hope something will happen,

00:13:52.788 --> 00:13:54.543
and in that room I found so many connections

00:13:54.543 --> 00:13:58.863
between people across all of London, and so leadership,

00:13:58.863 --> 00:14:01.500
connecting people, is the great question today.

00:14:01.500 --> 00:14:03.757
Whether you're in the hierarchy or the heterarchy,

00:14:03.757 --> 00:14:06.152
it's a wonderful design challenge.

NOTE Paragraph

00:14:06.152 --> 00:14:09.877
And one thing I've been doing is doing some research

00:14:09.877 --> 00:14:13.525
on systems that can combine technology and leadership

00:14:13.525 --> 00:14:14.519
with an art and design perspective.

00:14:14.519 --> 00:14:18.792
Let me show you something I haven't shown anywhere, actually.

00:14:18.792 --> 00:14:21.234
So what this is, is a kind of a sketch, an application sketch

00:14:21.234 --> 00:14:23.792
I wrote in Python. You know how there's Photoshop?

00:14:23.792 --> 00:14:28.051
This is called Powershop, and the way it works is

00:14:28.051 --> 00:14:31.078
imagine an organization. You know, the CEO isn't ever

00:14:31.078 --> 00:14:33.360
at the top. The CEO's at the center of the organization.

00:14:33.360 --> 00:14:35.579
There may be different subdivisions in the organization,

00:14:35.579 --> 00:14:38.264
and you might want to look into different areas. For instance,

00:14:38.264 --> 00:14:41.766
green are areas doing well, red are areas doing poorly.

00:14:41.766 --> 00:14:44.016
You know, how do you, as the leader, scan, connect,

00:14:44.016 --> 00:14:47.020
make things happen? So for instance, you might open up

00:14:47.020 --> 00:14:50.170
a distribution here and find the different subdivisions in there,

00:14:50.170 --> 00:14:53.881
and know that you know someone in Eco, over here,

00:14:53.881 --> 00:14:55.862
and

00:14:55.862 --> 00:14:57.870
these people here are in Eco, the people you might

00:14:57.870 --> 00:15:01.938
engage with as CEO, people going across the hierarchy.

00:15:01.938 --> 00:15:05.023
And part of the challenge of the CEO is to find

00:15:05.023 --> 00:15:08.482
connections across areas, and so you might look in R&D,

00:15:08.482 --> 00:15:11.682
and here you see one person who crosses the two areas

00:15:11.682 --> 00:15:15.239
of interest, and it's a person important to engage.

00:15:15.239 --> 00:15:19.275
So you might want to, for instance, get a heads-up display

00:15:19.275 --> 00:15:21.874
on how you're interacting with them.

00:15:21.874 --> 00:15:23.453
How many coffees do you have?

00:15:23.453 --> 00:15:26.847
How often are you calling them, emailing them?

00:15:26.847 --> 00:15:29.637
What is the tenor of their email? How is it working out?

00:15:29.637 --> 00:15:31.999
Leaders might be able to use these systems to

00:15:31.999 --> 00:15:34.981
better regulate how they work inside the heterarchy.

00:15:34.981 --> 00:15:38.408
You can also imagine using technology like from Luminoso,

00:15:38.408 --> 00:15:40.933
the guys from Cambridge who were looking at deep

00:15:40.933 --> 00:15:44.162
text analysis. What is the tenor of your communications?

NOTE Paragraph

00:15:44.162 --> 00:15:47.615
So these kind of systems, I believe, are important.

00:15:47.615 --> 00:15:50.473
They're targeted social media systems around leaders.

00:15:50.473 --> 00:15:53.782
And I believe that this kind of perspective will only begin

00:15:53.782 --> 00:15:59.089
to grow as more leaders enter the space of art and design,

00:15:59.089 --> 00:16:02.514
because art and design lets you think like this,

00:16:02.514 --> 00:16:04.289
find different systems like this,

00:16:04.289 --> 00:16:06.162
and I've just begun thinking like this,

00:16:06.162 --> 00:16:08.095
so I'm glad to share that with you.

00:16:08.095 --> 00:16:11.277
So in closing, I want to thank all of you

00:16:11.277 --> 00:16:15.359
for your attention. Thanks very much. (Applause)

00:16:15.359 --> 00:16:20.043
(Applause)