Rogue Bee Hive

[roguebeehive]

Polarize, Provoke, Stand-Out

Polarize, Provoke, Stand-Out: Be the Signal, not the Noise!

  Based on thoughts by Roger William (@Roger_William), provided as answer to my shout-out question: “Tell us your concept of a ‘litmus test’ in product design and how it might be applied to other areas in marketing and society?”

  Barney Worfolk-Smith (@mightybarnskey) recently wrote an interesting piece about the re-humanization of social media marketing, in which he cited Joe Kraus, the founder of Excite:

  The 20th Century was about dozens of markets of millions of people. The 21st Century is about millions of markets of dozens of people.

  This raises general doubts about the logic behind thoughts of social scalability and about the validity of overcome marketing concepts like target groups. Some colleagues within social media marketing are therefore suggesting to orient ourselves more towards contexts and group targets - rather than target groups.

While a stronger orientation towards the manifold of social contexts and the actually existing individual as well as group interests certainly holds true, the problem behind this advice is the generally pervasive cultural bias towards individualism and in-group orientation, at least in most Western contexts:

  Source: Eupedia, Eupedia image URL - thanks to Maciamo

In this regard, our individualist culture and especially our culture-dependant use of social media is responsible for keeping us in an individualism trap, where we have become our own entertainment - forever staying cognitively trapped in our personal filter bubbles and therefore suffering from our self-inflicted confirmation bias. This might be one of the reasons why the biggest digital information/marketing companies in the world - Google, Facebook & Co - are still able to lump us together in crude information clusters like the ones displayed in their ads settings:

   Google Ads Settings (Example)

  So, paradoxically, it is exactly because we are not fully acknowledging and reflecting the fact that we are “ζῷον πολιτικόν“ (social animals) that we are only able to see ourselves and our environment through the distorted lens of our inner narcissist - who only perceives what he has chosen to perceive through the skewed mirror of her/his superficial network of “friends” in the respective social channels. This is why we - although feeling like an individualist - end up being just a plain mediocre conformist, or in more modern/applied terms: why all hipsters do somehow look the same.    

 From a societal perspective, this behavioral pattern has interesting higher-order game theoretical consequences. One of these consequences is what we call median voter theorem, which basically states that “a majority rule voting system will select the outcome most preferred by the median voter".

  Median voter model, CC 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

  Translated to the world of marketing and consumption this means that brands will always put their main marketing focus on the most average (boring, mainstream, …) consumer, being right there in the “middle” (at the median) of the standard normal distribution of consumers. Game-theoretically, this can be easily explained based on the respective cost / efficiency of their marketing activities:

The consequences for the individual consumers become instantly apparent: all brands being positioned right besides each other - often also offering almost the same product - now become completely indistinguishable. Their compulsive hunt for short-term e$$iciency has effectively eliminated their last (subjective) differentiators, which in turn drives them into the open arms of marketing agencies, ready to provide them with some fresh, new emotional communication USPs.

But how can it be that - in times of personalization / individualization and person-specific (n=1) targeting possibilities - marketing communication is still talking to us as if we were one undifferentiated mass, ‘cattle’ without any individual differences? We all want to be seen and treated as individuals - so why the pluralistic ignorance of mass communication? Instead of searching for the responsibles only within the undoubtedly morally bankrupt marketing industry, we should rather look for responsibility in our own behavior as consumers. Because we are humans, we are inert, slow, and passive.

Why? Because mental change is demanding and energy-draining as it requires us to reflect our perception and make an independent, self-reliant and active choice rather than to just act upon existing habits or follow / imitate the behavior of others. The older and the more conservative we however get, the more likely we will stick with our existing and tested choices, ideas and behaviors - because our behavioral immune system wants us to save our energy and play safe.

The downside: we basically stop actively choosing and questioning our behavior and get stuck in routines, often based on nothing else than prejudiced habits. And the loss of (perceived) choice makes us feel bored and spiritless, because we act against our very own human nature of being curious animals - which is at least how we are born into this world before our educational system kills both our curiosity and creativity. The over-abundance of pseudo-choices available in the form of completely interchangeable product offerings cannot compensate for the inherent lack of real choice as these offerings are basically ‘empty choices’, containing no substance and therefore just leading to ego-depletion.

A possible solution to this passivity paradox in marketing could therefore be a form of communication that not only encourages but actually forces consumers to make an active choice. But how can this work? For example by using ambiguous signals that need to be actively interpreted by the recipient to be understood. One example for this from the field of visual perception are optical illusions like Rubin’s vase:

  "Rubin2", licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons  

  The ambiguity within optical illusions forces our visual perception system to make an active choice about how we want to interpret the perceived visual information. The same way, communication should also always be an active choice, a creative generation and interpretation of signals - because communication is not passive but in its core dialogical in nature and highly creative: 

Communication is the ongoing, mutual interpretation-agreement about signals being sent back and forth within a constantly changing context - each new signal changes the context so the next has to be interpreted on the assumption of (correct) understanding of the last one. And this is happening on various layers of communication, so a signal is able to change not only the meaning but the whole “code” of interpretation of all following signals! 

Against this background, Roger and I am arguing in favour of a litmus test-like style of marketing communication that allows consumers to 

stay active rather than passive (because the communicated signal is designed and sent in a way that requires the recipient to actively “decide” how he wants to interpret it,

make a personal / individual choice about how they want to understand the signal and how this interpretation allows them to position them within their social environment, and

discover previously not (consciously) perceived dilemmata within society or life itself that prompts them to reflect on how they want to deal with it (individually as well as collectively), so they can grow in the context of life’s challenges. 

Applying this approach to the lines you just read I therefore also want you to make an active choice and decide: is it a good and useful concept or just an old hat? Decide and make yourself heard!

"My Wife & My Mother-In-Law", public domain via Wikimedia

[roguebeehive]

High on Human Connection

By now, almost all big brands have not only adopted but seamlessly integrated social media into their standard repertoire of marketing ‘tools’. However, many brands still place condescending content over meaningful conversations, cheesy campaigns over authentic interaction, and paid platforms over inspired people. In short: they fail to understand what the social web is all about - confusing given that the answer is quite self-evidently part of the media concept itself: it’s social connections that are at the core of the ‘social’ web.

Maybe the reason many brands tend to miss this is their egocentric and rather anti-social character of being like little narcissists by mainly caring about themselves and how they want to be perceived - rather than really caring what their customers want and how they see them. Or maybe it is just our overly individualistic Western way of ignoring how much of our ‘own’ identity we actually owe to the influence and inspiration coming from our social environment. Anyhow, rather than identifying all the possible factors contributing to the problem, I prefer to come up with some ideas for improvement:

Just recently I have been involved in the generation of new ‘social’ ideas for a global transportation brand and developed in the process a phenomenological model of ‘social travel’ - holding at its core the potential for making new social connections while travelling. A whole cluster of ideas then emerged around the approach of connecting fellow travelers based on shared interests or contexts. We extensively discussed these ideas, also against the background that typical Western travelers might not feel comfortable to be put in touch with some random stranger they share only slightly more with than the itinerary.  

"NYC subway riders with their newspapers" by Travis Ruse, cropped by GallifreyanPostman - © Licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.

But just like in many other instances, the common doubts of the ‘branded brain’ are also here mistaken: recent research clearly shows that - even in the face of expecting otherwise - strangers do significantly benefit from connecting with each other, mutually increasing their well-being and the experienced positivity of their shared journey. The interesting aspect of this well-designed study by Nicholas Epley und Juliana Schroeder identifies “Pluralisic Ignorance” as one of the main reasons for the lack of actual connections being made by strangers.

Although this myopic (solely social-psychological) approach to explain a common public behavior is surely not able to provide a fully satisfying explanation, it still offers a good perspective on the power of human connections in the face of strong normative obstacles like the above described context of self-imposed socially isolated commuters. But how can we actually overcome these normative obstacles in order to be able to use the full power of social connections, for example in the realm of marketing?   

For that, we first have to fully understand why people do - and why they don’t connect in certain contexts. Our modern environment has become a predominantly urban one, with now 54% of the world’s population living in cities (up from 34% in 1960). With this urban context of living and upbringing comes along an increased neuronal vulnerability to pathological processing of social stress, potentially leading to heightened levels of anxiety, resulting in greater social isolation. Compared to the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness of humans, where we have lived in relatively close groups of hunters and gatherers, the large number of today’s city dwellers largely exceeds our social brain’s capacities to account for meaningful relationships.  

The reason for this is namely the concrete number of such relationships that our brain is still able to handle - Dunbar’s number - which has been calculated to converge around the count of 150 - by comparing several social animals’ group sizes and neocortex vs. medulla-ratios.

Exactly this kind of ‘social overload’ is holding us back from being able to tap into the social capacities of ourselves and use the full potential of our generally hyper-social character as humans. For our human brain with the social processing power of roughly 150 relationships, standing in a commuting train together with as many as 1,277 other commuters is simply too much to handle - a ‘social stack overflow’ - creating enough social stress in any average human to completely forget that ‘the fat bloke breathing in your neck’ might actually be a nice guy whom you could now also have an enjoyable and socially enriching conversation with. It simply won’t happen as such a person will not even be recognized as part of the ‘in-group’ while he is standing in midst of a crowd of anonymous commuters.

Instead, we are obsessively staring into our euphemistically called ‘smartphone’, trying to compensate for the depressingly factual loneliness that we are feeling right now, despite or actually because of being confined in a way too big ‘human livestock’. Several studies suggest, that it is actually this loneliness that only creates an - in many instances even addictive - need for a compensatory ‘friendships’ that we collect like tokens on the internet, specifically on social networking sites (SNS) like Facebook.   

The resulting problem is that Facebook, like other social networks, cannot provide a valid compensation for lacking face-to-face interactions (real and deep social connections), thus creating a vicious circle of a compensatory search for an inflationary number of empty ‘virtual friendships’ that are - by platform design - not aligned with the limited psychological capacity for relationships as described in Dunbar’s number. The current average number of Facebook friends (ranging between 338 and 375) therefore drastically exceeds our mental capacity to maintain meaningful relationships.

In effect, the use of social networking sites like Facebook seems to be only beneficial where it extends actually existing ‘real’ and deep (offline) social connections, as portrayed by the negative correlation found between measured loneliness and number of real confidants as well as the overall social network size - which seems to correlate with the general capacity of a person to process social complexity. Otherwise, the overall number of confidants seems to have decreased over the last two decades from three to only two, indicating a general increase in vulnerability due to social isolation. Together with alarming results about negative effects of Facebook use on the well-being of young adults, this reconfirms the fact that online social network sites alone can not make up for a lack of real social connections.  

It is only in the light of this context of increasing digital and real-world loneliness, that we can fully understand the underlying problem and successfully develop strategies to build sustainable social connections. An exceptionally positive example in this regard is the digital artist Ivan Cash, who is using digital means to foster ‘human connection’ between strangers. As part of his approach, he is a very keen observer of human behavior and is constantly looking for contexts which are calling for social enrichment due to a lack of human contact and real communication. One successful example is Ivan’s project “Snailmailmyemail’ in which volunteers are hand-writing incoming emails by strangers to be sent to the intended recipients as physical letters, to revive the art of slow communication by writing letters.  

In order to fully understand the creative effort that is needed, to overcome the existing obstacles for building new human connections, feel free to watch a talk about the malleability of reality Ivan gave earlier this year in London:

[roguebeehive]

Dancing with the Devil - by MJHB

Response of Marcus John Henry Brown to my shout-out: 

"Creative genius and marketing enfant terrible, tell us why marketing is generally doomed and how someone can at all be able to create something useful in a marketing context?"   

   Marketing isn’t doomed. What nonsense. Just because marketing and advertising are part of a commercial system that appears to be morally bankrupt, it doesn’t mean that marketing as a practice is about to pack its bags and shuffle off the mortal coil. As I’ve told you many times before, the usefulness of marketing focuses on selling products that noone really wants or needs which, within a capitalist system, is perfectly legitimate. You, dearest Thomas, have always had a romantic view of what marketing can do for the world: change it, make it better, improve the lives of others, save lives, etc, etc but you always forget marketing’s key dependency - the product. 

Young people in suits spend an awful lot of money on private marketing schools to learn stuff like “the three p’s” and other nonsense (like algebra, for fuck’s sake), and everything they learn (and pay huge amounts of money for the pleasure) revolves around marketing’s dependency on the product and being paid to sell stuff. “Putting a brand meaningfully into people’s lives” has, over the course of the last eight years, become a terribly en vogue thing to preach at marketing conferences, and it also looks grand on a LinkedIn account but it’s bullshit. People want to put a brand meaningfully into their mouths because they are hungry, or sit meaningfully in a brand because they need to travel to work. They do not ask their children to move over on the sofa so that a brand can sit in their place.

Your job isn’t to improve the lives of others and we are most certainly not enablers of conversations between brands, products and the consumers. The idea that people want to talk to brands is one of the biggest scams our industry has ever cooked up. It’s a lie. Talk about brands? Maybe. Talk to brands? No. As marketers and advertisers we dance with the devil every time we go to work, for heaven’s sake. We pour over data trying to find the emotional weak spot for something called “the target group”. The weak spot we call an insight. We then try and build various models of deceit by which we intend to trick these poor people into believing that they really need a yogurt that’s going to stop them from farting, or a shampoo that will dope their hair (and only their hair) or a car that will make their penis larger. This deceit we call “the creative”. Sometimes we’re really devious and create campaigns (we really do love our war terminology in this industry) that appear to be doing something helpful, useful and good, like Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign and for a brief moment in time it appeared that capitalism wasn’t that bad after all until we realised that Unilever (who produce Dove) also produce a skin whitening product in Asia. And even if you’re marketing something that is intended to do good, such as saving whales, the environment, people dying of AIDS, Ebola or hunger you would still employ the same thinking and tactics and you are still trying to sell something to people who don’t want to know about it. 

Does that make us bad people. Yes, yes I suppose it does. Is it fun, productive, creative and do people, real people, like the work we do? Yes, sometimes they do. And when we find the weak spot and push all of the right emotional buttons at exactly the right times then, yes, we can actually move people and change their perception about a specific thing.

We can make people cry.

It’s not magic - it’s science. It’s not art - it’s business.

We can, however, employ these skills to draw attention to matters of real importance and yes, it is also possible to include a brand or a product within this setting, but the context has to be bang on. I’m actually working on a project for a commercial client that isn’t trying to sell a product but is actually trying to make the world a safer and better place. Is it a campaign? Sure, but it’s still a remarkable route for a commercial client to take and I’m proud of them and proud to be involved.

Yes, we can change the world, but if you want to you’ll probably need marketing to let the world know you’re about to change it. 

[roguebeehive]

Management beyond Control

A reply to Steffen Roth’s essay “The single player mode of decision: Management as strategic unobservation of organization”.

Management has never been more abundant and at the same time more overvalued than today- at least if we understand it by its usual definition as:

“the function that coordinates the efforts of people to accomplish goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively ... comprising of planning, organizing, staffing, leading or directing, and controlling an organization to accomplish the goal.”

By DonkeyHotey [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

But who needs a management that reflects such an outdated, almost obsolete function in our digitised world of fast and efficient self-management?  Already in 2011, Gary Hamel stated in his much-noticed HBR article, that

“Management is the least efficient activity in your organization.”

That is one of the reasons why more and more influencers are calling for alternatives to the continuing decrease of power going along with an overly hierarchical and controlling style of (micro-)management.

If we start from Steffen’s understanding of the organizational context for management, defining organizations as “systems of decisions” and further accept that each of these decisions are “forms of mutual irritation of individual behavior and thus not subject to control if the involved parties anymore”, we are already at the core of the problem: complexity within systems.

  ”Complex systems organizational map" by Hiroki Sayama, D.Sc., Collective Dynamics of Complex Systems (CoCo) Research Group at Binghamton University, State University of New York. Licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

If we accept that our evolutionary younger brain-parts (mainly our cerebral cortex) are rather slow in rendering their higher-order information processing, then the classical ‘controlling’ part of management is doomed to lose importance with increasing informational complexity and rising intricacy of social interactions to process - trends that no one would reasonably negate in our post-industrial Information Age.

But what function can management still fulfill if control increasingly becomes a mere illusion in large organizations and success is just a matter of a lucky interplay of a plethora of elements against the background of an even more complex context, and as such the definition of emergence?

In the eyes of Steffen, if I understand him correctly, management is ultimately about nothing else but a certain (strategic) form of organizational observation: maybe making sure to adjust some statistical chances in favor of the respective organization in order to slightly optimize the odds to (the manager’s / the organizations / the department’s) favor. However, it is hard to accept the assumption, that this should be the only remaining role of management - and even harder to accept Steffen’s axiom that managers as well as all other individuals within any (complex) organization do not have any more influence on the outcome of their collective decisions on group level than ‘a rainmaker on rainfall’.

While the “rainmaker-function” of a manager is surely important, even if we understand it more socio-psychological in nature than colloquially, meaning as an internal team-leading and guiding function, there are still several other functions where a manager can become helpful beyond ineffective or even deteriorating micro-management: As a ‘complexity translator’. Having already outlined that modern organizations are operating in increasingly complex environments and are now socially complex constructs, the need for coordination of these complex elements gets more and more important.

This even more as innovation dynamics cause market environments to shift, change and even disrupt existing business models faster and faster. In such fast-changing and dynamic contexts, individuals are increasingly in need for orientation to perceive their own work as meaningful and attribute this meaning and purpose also to their organization. Exactly here is the role of modern management and the task of today’s managers: they have to make sure to align the skills and capabilities of their colleagues in a way not only with existing but also upcoming future market demands so that every individual in the organization feels valued and part of something greater and purposeful, so that all individuals in the organization together become ‘greater than the sum of their skills’ - an insight that is in no way new but has already been observed by Gestalt psychology, Konrad Lorenz or even the old greeks.  

In a nutshell: management has nothing to do with ‘controlling human resources’ but everything with a daily creative re-combination of fragile individuals so that they self-organize by way of intrinsic motivation to optimally align in an adaptive way against ever-changing market backgrounds. 

[roguebeehive]

Purpose of Management / by Steffen Roth

In my first shout-out I asked Steffen Roth the following question:

What is the function of management in an organization and is there any reason for its existence beyond mere self-management?

Today I have the distinct pleasure to be able to present his answer - which he presents in the form of a short essay by the following title:

“The single player mode of decision: Management as strategic unobservation of organization”

Answer to Thomas Hirschmann’s question: What is the function of management in an organization and is there any reason for its existence beyond mere self-management?

by Steffen Roth, ESC Rennes School of Business, http://steffen-roth.ch

Management appears whenever we aim to observe organization as guide for or outcome of individual behavior. Organizations are systems of decision. They “consist of decisions” (Nassehi, 2005, p. 186) and nothing but decisions, with the point being that decisions are not made by individuals, but by organizations. Hard to believe? Let’s imaging two persons playing Rock-Paper-Scissors. The game begins with contingent behaviors. Rock or paper or scissor, and it is only the co-occurrence of these behaviors that makes the decision. One player forming a rock is not a decision yet, right? It takes two to play the game, with the players needing to be aware of each other, too, for two isolated performances of rock, paper, or scissors would also not make a decision yet. Decision is hence not what happens in our minds or is formed by our bodies. Rather, they represent a form of communication. Decision are forms of the mutual irritation of individual behaviors and thus not subject to the control of the involved parties anymore.

Organizations appear if we observe chains of decision communications rather than chains of individual behaviors (Roth, 2014). Rock-Rock-Scissors-Paper-Scissors-Rock … The longer the chain, however, the harder it is to observe the entire chain of decisions, and the bigger the need to focus particular, e.g., particularly “typical” sequences of decisions. All observations of particular sequences decision, however, are confronted with the paradox that they represent contingent decisions themselves. “(A)ny communicative choice presupposes choice” (Andersen & Born, 2000, p. 320). There is hence no final cause for choosing either this or that sequence of decisions to guide or anticipate further decisions. Still, this form of guidance or anticipation is exactly what we expect from management. The mission of management is to guide or anticipate individual behavior in the context of organization.

Management approaches (and never completes) this mission by the observation of decision-making from the perspective and for the sake of (one of) the players involved, thus designing the roles of the players, which includes the design of management roles. In fact, players only emerge when decisions are very consequently reduced to individual behaviors. It is indeed only due to consequent forms of attention guidance that we are at all able to observe decisions, which are made by the game, as if the players had made them and as if the persons involved had chosen to play the role of the winner or the looser.

These strategies of the personalization (Roth, 2013) of decision making do not need to stop at the observation of individual behavior. Rock-Paper-Scissors can be played in both individual and collective versions. As the two players of the collective version are groups, the groups need to first agree on which of the three elements – here: Tiger-Samurai-Grandmother – to choose. Both groups then simultaneously unveil their choice to the other group and find out what decision it resulted in. The issue is that we are now tempted to observe a game within a game, or a decision making process within a decision making process, thus making our observation oscillate between two distinct levels of analysis. However, we can resolve this paradoxical observation if we mind that a form within a form is the same form within a different medium, which is a different form of observation. In our case, this means that in observing the “group decision” game “around” the initial game, we are observing a different game, thus asking a different question and getting a different answer. In fact, the answer to the question of how the group interaction on whether and by whom to perform Tiger, Samurai, or Grandmother is linked to the later decision not much more directly than a rain dance to rainfall [cf. Stefan Kühl (2000) on nonetheless persistent forms and functions of ancient and contemporary rainmaker phenomena]. The contingency of the relationship between the observation of organization and the observation of group interaction “around” the emerging chain of decisions essentially is the reason for the on-going need for management. However, if management is to instruct either individual or collective behavior, then the circumstance that decisions are not (subject to) behavior has to be disguised. In other words: As true as it is that the game would be over before even starting if decisions were subject to (group) behavior, so too would the game stop if players or teams felt that they could not influence the decisions. This is what calls for management as the illusive idea that different forms of the observation of organization can influence the outcome of organization. Such, management is the token for the idea that players actually can play their own game (e.g., by hiding a series of losses by changing the billing period).

This strategic form of observation has its advantages. The observation of players and their behavior is much easier than the observation of the game itself, the latter of which, after just a few repetitions, already calls for advanced skills in stochastic and eventually computer aid. Ontological heuristics, which focus on individual behavior in social context rather than on the social context of the individual behavior, of course have the advantage of reliably reducing complexity. This may be why the larger part of strategic advice for winning Rock-Paper-Scissors and other decision games is focused on observations of the players rather than on observations of the game. This advice mainly takes the role of the player and focuses on both the virtues that one needs and the traits of the other(s) that one needs to be aware of in order to outsmart the others. Cross-tables full of psychological and cultural observations draw attention to facts as important as the circumstances that rookie men have a bias towards playing the rock as compared to dominant women who of course tend to play the scissors when playing Rock-Paper-Scissors. That a group of Swiss students has a higher need for consensus than a group of US-American students if they interact on decision-making. That family businesses have less pronounced risk behavior as compared to venture capitalists. Findings of this kind may be as true as they can be. Still, the basic assumption behind them is that the respective factors impact decisions; that decisions are subject to individual or collective preferences and values; that decisions are made by anything else but the decision game itself. The cultivation of this – as illusive as indispensable – idea is the core function of management.

References

Andersen, N. Å., & Born, A. W. (2000). Complexity and Change: Two "Semantic Tricks" in the Triumphant Oscillating Organization. Systemic Practice and Action Research, 13(3), 297-328.

Kühl, S. (2000). Das Regenmacher-Phänomen: Widersprüche und Aberglaube im Konzept der lernenden Organisation. Frankfurt am Main: Campus-Verlag.

Nassehi, A. (2005). Organizations as decision machines: Niklas Luhmann's theory of organized social systems. The Sociological Review, 53(1), 178-191.

Roth, S. (2013). Dying is Only Human: The Case Death Makes for the Immortality of the Person. Tamara Journal for Critical Organization Inquiry, 11(2), 35-39.

Roth, S. (2014). The Multifunctional Organization: Two cases for a critical update for research programs in management and organization. TAMARA: Journal for Critical Organization Inquiry, 12(3), 37-54. 

[roguebeehive]

Shout-out to the Rogue Bees out there

What is this supposed to be, what is the ‘Rogue Bee Hive’? It is a place for all those who refuse to conform their behavior to the norm, to follow the ‘waggle dance’ of all other bees - or in short: for those - positively/creatively - deviant ‘rogue bees’ that are dancing to their own, different beat.

You guys rock, you are important - not only for your families and friends but for the survival of the whole hive: you are the ones that come up with new ideas although sometimes being called ‘crazy’. You do not stop experimenting, searching, trying out new things. When standard solutions do not work anymore, they come to you for help. Your ideas are both feared and wanted as basis for what they then call ‘innovation’. You make sure that the swarm of individuals we call society does not get trapped into a looming efficiency trap.

I am hoping that you guys still believe in yourself, in your abilities to actually make a difference with your thoughts and actions. And because I think we can do more together than alone I am sending this call out to you - at first only to a handful of people of whom I am sure that they are able to contribute with inspiring words that might help kickstart this idea, and make this site a place for exciting exchange and cooperation among the most independent and influential thinkers we have among us.

In order to make this ‘call for inspirations’ a bit more concrete, I am suggesting some ideas for a few lines that hopefully tap into each of your interests and that I think would make a great contribution to a vivid outline of what this place is aiming to be - for each of you great guys, in alphabetical order: 

Christian Hirsig (@christianhirsig): Founder of the Swiss crowdsourcing ideation platform ‘Atizo’: Can you tell us why someone might want to bet on open collaboration in a closed and highly competitive economy?

Gad Saad (@GadSaad): Author of ‘The Consuming Instinct’: Can you tell us why companies should look closer to evolution and biology than to classic business books to improve their marketing?

Jochen Büchel: (Author of a dissertation about ‘The Psychology of Things’): Can you tell us what business can learn from bio-psychology & bio-philosophy?

Marcus Brown (@MarcusJHBrown): Creative genius and marketing enfant terrible, tell us why marketing is generally doomed and how someone can at all be able to create something useful in a marketing context?   

Mario Reineking (designer & independent thinker): Why does great creativity sometimes require a great deal of social distance and solitude?

Roger William (@Roger_William): Tell us your concept of a ‘litmus test’ in product design and how it might be applied to other areas in marketing and society?

Rory Sutherland (@rorysutherland): Do you think marketing will be able to learn more from science than science from marketing - or can both only meet in nirvana?

Steffen Roth (Prof. at ESC Rennes School of Business): What is the function of management in an organization and is there any reason for its existence beyond mere self-management?

Stephen Marsh (Cornell graduate & highly skilled database developer): Are we facing a time where our social identities will be starting to have a digital life and evolution of themselves?

Looking forward to hearing from you if you like the idea of collecting some creative thoughts of unique minds - just get in touch. 

Special thanks to the authors of the lovely bee pictures in this post:

Photographer Fabian Lenk

Beekeeper Seb Wendlandt from "Die Honigpumpe"