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TED Talk: How Beauty Can Save the World

I’m delighted that my new TED talk, 4 Ways to Build a Human Company in the Age of Machines, was released on TED.com as a featured talk.

Watch it here

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The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.

Erwin Schrödinger

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Ohnmacht

This term is all over German newspapers these days, and it comes closest to describing what I feel in light of the recent events in Nice and Turkey (and in fact, this whole year). It doesn’t quite translate into English because it means both powerlessness and being without consciousness, and the Germans say, ever so precisely, that one “falls” into Ohnmacht. It makes me think of Kevin Kelly’s prediction that uncertainty will only increase the more we seek to know. I’m certain we are falling. Where we will land, I don’t know. “It remains an irrefragable law of history that contemporaries are denied a recognition of the early beginnings of the great movements which determine their times.” ― Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

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Stendhal looking over and after me.

Photo credit: Karsten Eichhorn for M-Love

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Accelerating what? Conventional HP campaign gives answers. Smarter EY campaign asks "better questions."

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License to kill also means the license not to kill.

C, in Spectre

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I spoke at OuiShare Fest yesterday in Paris, the conference for the collaborative economy (and yet much more than that). Great fun to riff with Esko Kilpi, Nilofer Merchant, and Arthur De Grave about the future of work, all the way from robots to romance, automation to Universal Basic Income. Congrats to the organizers - truly unique conference and community! Love what Esko Kilpi said on our panel: "Work is a relationship. Great work means meaningful relationships with meaningful people."

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“Among philosophical theories, It is a general rule that those that can be loved can not be believed, and those that can be believed can not be loved. I know truth, and yet I love absurd yet great metaphysics, sublime ethics, and pure aesthetics. These are what I love most. Yet in searching for what is believable, I am inclined to believe in the positivistic theory of truth, the hedonistic theory of ethics, and the empiricist theory of aesthetics. I know these are believable, but I can not love them.

Guowei WANG

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So delighted to see The Business Romantic released in Brazil!

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The audience...remains a mystery.

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La vie en Chateau Marmont... someday everybody will appreciate "Somewhere" - one of the most underrated movies of all time.

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An aerial view of Rush drummer Neil Peart's set. 

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On Tenderness and Seduction

Last week I was asked by a marketing executive in a Q&A about the difference between romance and seduction, and I answered that while both followed the same principles (to hold something back; to not show or know EVERYthing), romance was a sublime sentiment (with the goal of protecting ambiguity and aura), whereas seduction was a transactional technique (with the goal of ultimately destroying ambiguity and aura). Kind of like the difference between marketing and sales. 

And then I came across this quote by French writer Michel Houellebecq today:

“Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so hard to give up hope,"

and it suddenly appeared so timely, so relevant in light of Trump's and other current demagoguery that I wanted to give it a big hug.

On brand and in (provocative) character, Houellebecq of course meant it in a slightly more cynical way, but the beauty of his writing is that you can always rescue it from its own disingenuity and disillusion.

So here's to tenderness and hope!

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"Light is not so much something that reveals as it is itself the revelation." - James Turrell

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"After the trapeze act was over at a show in Newark, a 10-year-old girl next to me began to sob. When her parents asked her why she was crying, she looked up and shook her head hopelessly and said she couldn’t say.

“Running Away With The Circus,” New York Times Magazine, November 21, 2015