ROUND EIGHT: Perturbed

An open and off-the-cuff letter to anyone who's "in the know" about the innermost workings of any of the following: 

• One Mind 4 Research 

• The New York Stem Cells Foundation 

• Institue for Community Inclusion 

• The Allen Institute for Brain Science 

• American Brain Coalition 

• Cerebral Palsy International Research Foundation 

•  American Association of People with Disabilities

• Weinberg Family Cerebral Palsy Center* 

*  *  *  *  *

Dear Sir or Madam:

Whenever I visit your organization online -- either at your site or on Facebook or Twitter -- a part of me gets perturbed. 

Irked. 

The reason being? 

I'm either a constituent or would-be constituent of yours. And you're not asking me to help. 

You're not: 

• gathering demographic info about me, having me take surveys, funneling me into focus groups, or designing your processes around me; 

• building online platforms that might enable me to help you address your key challenges and opportunities; 

• taking advantage of whatever professional skills I may be able to share (for little or no remuneration) in service to your cause. 

What you are doing, on the other hand, is asking for money. And telling me about your accomplishments. 

Me and at least 14 million others like me.**

What should I make of all this? My getting perturbed -- is this just a me thing or could it be that you:

• have a more inside-out than outside-in perspective, and "being digital" in, say, the Mark McDonald or John Seely Brown sense isn't your m.o.? 

• are already hitting your goals and accomplishing all you want or need to accomplish?

• want to hit home runs and the one- or two-base hits you believe could result from more fully engaging with constituents isn't worth it? 

• see us only as walking wallets? 

• are the expert and you intend to keep doing the same things that got you there? 

• don't possess the know-how you'd need to move your organization in these directions, or the time to learn? 

• are managing under a board of trustees that's asleep at the wheel? 

I hope to find the answers in 2014. The earlier the better. Until then, I'll "make of all this" an opportunity to: 

• keep learning 

• raise more questions like the ones above

• encourage the leaders of our neuro disorders /special needs organizations to think about delivering more value this coming year.  

I want things to go faster. 

I want all us to solve our problems -- pronto. But by the same token I'm with Dan Pallotta when he says:

Our problems are massive in scale. Our organizations are tiny up against them. And we have a belief system that keeps them tiny.

He has his own interesting ideas about how nonprofits might scale up and become less tiny. 

What's my answer-in-the-making?

I happen to believe that there's a lot of latent talent, creativity, and energy out there, i.e., brainpower, that our organizations could and should put to productive use to amplify their impact. Marketers of basketball shoes, online booksellers and reality TV shows do it. Shouldn't our community be able to do the same?

So, specifically to the leaders of the above mentioned orgs: 

I hope you'll be mindful of the fact that you /we need to do more, and be open to the possibility that you /we may actually be able to deliver it. I challenge you to look at your own management-belief systems. These are management challenges I'm talking about. These are management answers I'm alluding to.

*  *  *  *  *

*The list could go on and on.

**According to Children's Neurobiological Solutions Foundation, there are "more than 14 million children living in the US with one of more than 600 different neurological conditions."

PRE-FIGHT: Let's Glove Up

Here's how my pea brain's mind's eye sees things:

ON ONE HAND

We have various organizations and institutions, for and not for profit, that are committed to fighting the Cerebral Palsy fight and improving outcomes as they relate to CP. 

To me, they look to be doing bang-up jobs: pounding away at key challenges and opportunities; landing their share of punches. Becoming...thanks largely to advances in fields like genetics and robotics and brain science...encouraged and emboldened -- even to the point of believing that theirs-and-ours is a winnable battle. Even in the previously inconceivable sense that CP will someday be both preventable and curable. 

I'm excited along with them. 

I'd be a lot more excited if I knew that their various visions were about to be realized, say, this week. Even a year from now would be a more than acceptable time frame. 

Unrealistic? Could never happen? 

Maybe. 

Who's really to say? 

At a bare minimum, I don't think it's too overly whacky to suggest that big things could conceivably happen in the CP arena sooner rather than later and that, furthermore, we all ought to open our minds' eyes -- wider than they are now -- to what's possible. 

ON THE OTHER HAND

Over the past few years, I've immersed myself in enough management writing to have at least a feel for who the more influential thinkers are and what they're thinking about. What interests me most is their work on helping organizations get smarter and better, faster. (much of which is intimately tied to disruptive technologies like cloud computing, social media, mobile, and big data)

How're they doing? 

They're figuring things out. They're making discoveries. They're experiencing some wins. 

Many of them are fired up about what's possible, too. 

I'D LIKE TO RECOMMEND

We in the CP sphere should take greater advantage of what those management gurus -- those business brainiacs -- have to offer. 

Why's that?

Because CP has been kicking our butts. 

No offense to any one individual or CP organization, but -- we need help. All the help we can get. Why fight with one hand tied behind our back if we don't have to?

The good news is that the products of those folks' energies and efforts are more widely and readily available than ever before. They're there for the taking. So, too, are the opportunities for making personal connections. Accessing them, and attracting them to us and our "defeat CP" cause, should be straightforward.

We'll have to strive as a group, however, to become more:

1. OPEN

At the risk of exposing my own biases and nincompoopery, I am (via this post and this blog) putting myself out there in hopes that someone will come along and help me become a better / smarter CP fighter. Our orgs need to follow suit. To "get back," we need to give. We need to offer up our challenges and opportunities, our responses and results -- the whole of it -- to critical thought and commentary. 

May be worth taking under advisement:

• We should resist believing we're on the right track and therefore in no need of new and different ways of thinking or acting. The truth is, our mental models, e.g., our strategies and roadmaps and visions, are laughably small relative to the enormousness of our challenges. 

• Like CP itself, the problems we face are complex. In the words of David K. Hurst, "good questions are (often) better than good answers." Wisdom begins with an admission of ignorance. 

• A lack of funding doesn't have to slow us down. Money's just one of many resources we may acquire, mobilize, leverage, etc. 

• Keep this in mind: “There are always more smart people outside your company than within it.”* The staff at SUBWAY this month is wearing t-shirts that read "Make Us Better / Take Our Survey." If the biggest corporations are looking every which way for better ideas, we should probably be doing the same.

2. FINDABLE/ LOCATABLE 

I hope to be able to use this blogspace to make our leading CP organizations more visible to leading management thinkers -- and vice versa. My little mission is to facilitate connections. Very-best-case outcomes, to my way of thinking, would involve collaborative problem solving and co-creation activities between both sides. (both "hands") To that end, I invite participation. 

So, for example, to:

• Cynthia @ Reaching for the Stars: If you want to share your views here about what you believe it'll take to build "a foundation of hope for children with cerebral palsy"; if you want to name your pains; if you want to go public with your lengthy "things to do" list -- either directly or indirectly through me -- you're more than welcome to!! 

• John Seely Brown and John Hagel @ Deloitte Center for the Edge: You wrote in The Power of Pull (2008) about "Harnessing Pull to Change the World," and specifically about mastering pull "at the individual and institutional level to achieve much broader impact in economic and social arenas." I welcome either or both of you to use this forum to teach us how to beat CP. Feel free, in other words, to stop by and solve our problems for us!!

There's also a Twitter component to this. It'll be devoted to more of the same (as above) but revolve around a particular, pick-up-the-pace goal. 

I want things to move faster. Way, way faster than we're generally envisioning now. Using a (crude?) boxing analogy, I hope to be able to look at the next year as if it were a 12-round fight -- with an intention of knocking CP on its duff by the end. As Chief Inciter, I'll report on how the fight's progressing and do whatever I can to influence things in our favor. My tweets and interactions will be directed at the level of the organization, but anyone's more than welcome to follow along @KnockOutCP.

CLOSING

`A la Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Weinberger writes in Too Big To Know (2012): 

We thus do not yet have any good idea of what cannot be done by connected humans when working at the scale of the Net. 

We truly don't know what can or can't be accomplished. 

So...

Why not get ready to rumble?

Round one's set to start on June first.

*quote attributed to Silicon Valley icon Bill Joy (co-founder of Sun Microsystems)

A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 9.3.5.B

Got edges?

Conventional wisdom says an ailing organization should aggressively cut costs and /or develop new products and services to raise revenues. UCP's done both of these in recent years. To minimize operating costs, the former UPC of Central OH merged with another nonprofit (that also serves people with disabilities). On the revenue side, the national office has introduced at least three significant new service offerings...

Assuming for a minute it's done all the COST CUTTING it can do -- organizationwide, affiliate network included -- I want to focus this post on the GROWTH side of the UCP equation. 

"When organizations speak of pursuing growth, most are speaking of product- or service-level innovations produced in the core of their organization." 

The word "core" is key here. The authors of The Power of Pull contend that innovations derived from core operations are offering diminishing returns these days. Marginally improved, marginally differentiated products and services aren't moving the dial. As it relates to UCP, their concern would be that improvements of that ilk would likely not generate enough dough to make up for any losses the organization is experiencing due to reduced government support and /or increased competition.

(Do LIFE LABS, Mission Driven Consulting, and The World CP Challenge represent just marginally improved or differentiated services? If so, are they destined to provide  mediocre-at-best returns? If not, are there additional things UCP could do to ensure their sustained effectiveness? I hope to make those sorts of questions the subject matter of the next post.)

JSB et al. would counsel against pursuing marginal returns. It's not sensible, they write, "to keep pushing harder and harder on existing resources with minimal gains." 

If this is the organization's m.o., it should consider looking to the edge and learning to innovate at a more fundamental, institutional level -- for at least three reasons: (1) there's a good chance market opportunities are being missed (2) pursuing edge opportunities can be relatively less costly [because you're leveraging external resources] and (3) significantly, UCP would develop new institutional capabilities in the process.

If things are "difficult" for UCP, that's a sign that more changing and adapting need to be done. Changes in management mindsets are likely in order.* What the authors offer is a pragmatic pathway to making said changes and to improving, specifically, UCP's ability to learn.

In the next post I'll try to characterize and categorize some of UCP-National's innovations. Then, after that, I'll go into how UCP could inch itself closer to the edge.

*Question for UCP top managers to ponder: Do you consider it your purpose to be an orchestrator for your people to connect and learn from others, i.e., to improve their performance?

A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 9.3.5.A

Back to this JSB-JH3 approach, the one that hinges on the pursuit of edge opportunities: Should UCP have a closer look?

"Yes," if it:

• is interested in getting better faster 

• is turned on by the prospect of capturing "market opportunities that are appearing more rapidly than ever and that present large upside potential." (Note: Disruptive technologies -- social media, cloud computing, mobility, big data analytics, etc. -- figure prominently in the authors' formula but said opportunities aren't for technocentric industries alone; they're open to organizations of all kinds.) 

• has challenges to overcome. 

To the last point, this new approach is 's-much-as-anything an antidote to poor performance. It's for counteracting the effects of "The Big Shift," which is tied to globalization and rapid advancements in technology, and which has "dramatically intensified competitive pressures on firms over decades." More specifically, it's for organizations whose tried and true solutions ain't cuttin' it. It's for organizations whose core processes are in need of transformation.

Is UCP feeling performance pressures?

I don't have a lot to go by. My impression, however, is that UCP *is* being exposed to performance pressures. From UCP-National we have the President and CEO telling us the economics of providing services for disabled children are "difficult." At the affiliate level, I know (this is my lone example) that UCP of Central Ohio merged a few years ago with Goodwill Columbus  in order to lower operating costs -- which it had to do because it was unable "to raise the money it needed to thrive." 

These may be signs that performance improvement is imperative and not just something that'd be nice to achieve. I keep hearing about steady declines in government support. Are these actual, or threatened? At which levels of government? As for the effects of globalization and technology advances, I wonder: is UCP is seeing second order effects like service life-cycle compression and /or donors becoming more fickle in their giving patterns?

Obviously, I need to continue to learn about the nature of UCP's challenges. In the meantime, though, I'll proceed from the glass-half-full perspective that says new opportunities are springing up faster than ever. In my opinion, UCP should be open to any evidence that may exist to the effect that it could do better by making changes. It should be open to new opportunities and to looking, if need be, in new places for them.

Like edges. 

More about those, next.

A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 9.3.3

KNOWLEDGE FLOWS: Interactions that (1.) create knowledge or transfer it across individuals; (2.) occur in social, fluid environments that allow firms and individuals to get better faster by working with others

So, if I read a white paper and its author's "brainstuffs" are thus mingled with mine -- am I participating in a flow of new knowledge? Does the fact that I can get back to him or her via e-mail make that a social and fluid environment?

I'm not in love with JSB & Co.'s definition because it doesn't really help me understand why knowledge flows are becoming so all-important. ( Organizations must "accelerate a shift to a very different mindset and to practices that treat knowledge flows as the central opportunity.") And, don't most of us already participate in knowledge flows? Isn't that what people do? I'm sure everyone at UCP-National, for example, is learning on the job...

What's the big deal?

Before I try and answer, I want to take a stab at identifying how and where UCP may presently be participating in flows of new knowledge.

First, two particular "social, fluid environments" o' theirs beg my attention: 

• In its role as a news provider, PE&O is right where the action is -- processing information; moving it from the newsmakers to the rest of us -- on a daily basis. (Think SmartBrief.)

• Online communities like the one found at www.mychildwithoutlimits.org are HELPING MEMBERS HELP OTHER MEMBERS by enabling knowledge transfers that support, inspire, etc.

Surely UCP is participating in knowledge flows in these cases, no?

Well, on closer inspection...

No. I'd say that knowledge is flowing but that UCP isn't really participating -- at least in the sense of trying to better itself in the process. It's acting in both cases as a middleman, facilitating the transfer of knowledge. The actual contents (of the news and online-community-exchanges) may just as well be widgets. 

Where else could we look for evidence of UCP's participation in knowledge flows? Maybe this is a cop-out, but, the fact of the matter is that it's hard to get a glimpse of them from the outside. Knowledge flows are by definition dynamic and fluid. They're happening at the edge; they've yet to be made explicit. That said --

How about Twitter, Facebook, or the like as places to look?

COME TO THINK OF IT THERE WAS A LIFE LABS BLOG POST having to do with its practice of browsing for events to attend outside of the assistive technology arena. (in search of "different perspectives on solutions for people with disabilities") This may have been a clue that Life Labs is routinely participating in knowledge flows. 

And for actual evidence that it is?

Life Labs recently announced that it's formed a partnership with the AbleGamers Foundation to co-create mobile accessible gaming stations. (link to announcement) This may someday prove to be an example of how it pays to participate in knowledge flows. From its site: "Life Labs already has a major UCP affiliate interested in several of these mobile gaming stations and is excited to be able to offer the station to the general public once a prototype is completed."

*  *  *  *  *

There's still lots of fuzziness surrounding these notions of stocks and flows. I think it might be helpful, next, to reopen JSB's PLAYBOOK for PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT IN A POST BIG-SHIFT WORLD  (a.k.a. THE POWER OF PULL) and see exactly how they figure in.

A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 9.3.2.A

Looking for disability-related services and organizations near you? No need to fret or look any further. UCP has compiled a “comprehensive, one-stop shop of resources for every U.S. state and territory.” IT'S DONE ALL THE FILTERING FOR YOU. No need to worry about quality or quantity, either. UCP’s “knowledge of disability issues has been accruing for more than sixty years.” It's a source you can trust.

Accruing means adding. Accumulating. Stockpiling. Stockpiling knowledge in this case. Which leads us to KNOWLEDGE STOCKS.

John Seely Brown defines 'em as “what we know at any particular time.” Knowledge stocks are embedded in – maybe I should say they reveal themselves in the forms of – things like product or service offerings, proprietary technologies, and unique insights into how to organize production or marketing activities.*

The State Resource Guides I alluded to above are products of UCP’s Public Education and Outreach (PE&O) wing. As such, I think it’s fair to deduce that PE&O is organized – at least in  part – to “protect and capitalize on existing stocks of knowledge.” My questions, then: 

In what other ways is UCP organized to do this? (i.e., protect and capitalize...) What else does UCP know now that it's banking on being able to use to generate value going forward? 

I’m going to throw some things out in the next post that I think could reasonably be called UCP knowledge stocks. An exercise in classification it'll be.

To what end? 

Making what UCP knows more explicit may help to signal where to look for new opportunities, where to look to innovate, where new approaches may be in order...

A ways down the road.


*I think of Michael Porter’s value chain definition: a chain of activities that a firm operating in a specific industry performs in order to deliver something valuable (product or service)

A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 9.3.1

UCP has developed a comprehensive, one-stop shop of resources for every U.S. state and territory. Never scour the Web again for bits and pieces of disability information and resources from disparate sources!

That second sentence jumps out at me – it prompts me – every time I see it. Invariably it causes me to think of knowledge stocks and knowledge flows, and the central roles the two play in the meditations of John Seely Brown, et. al. 

One of that bunch's biggest ideas goes like this: 

It used to be that organizations could win by: (1) knowing valuable stuff, and (2) extracting value from -- while simultaneously restricting access to -- what they knew. Nowadays, however, that approach isn’t cutting it. Why not? Mostly because “in a world changing at an increasingly rapid pace, the half-life of these stocks of knowledge is depleting at an equally rapid pace.”

The new way to make it as an organization is to shift the primary focus to flows of new knowledge. 

“It’s no longer about what you know,” they say, “but rather, what relationships you have and what you can learn from these relationships.” 

UCP was founded in 1949, when the older ways had just begun to hold sway. Obviously, the organization has evolved over the years. (Witness its ongoing efforts to keep up with changes in information technologies.) Are its mindsets and practices, however, all the way up to today’s speed? That’s the sort of thing I want to delve into in this sub-section. 

Additionally, I’d like to know: 

• In what ways is UCP organized around the notion that value comes from protecting and capitalizing on existing stocks of knowledge? 

• How and where is it participating in flows of new knowledge? 

• How might it stand to gain by implementing JSB’s ideas? 

• Is there a systematic way to go about doing that?

You may have noticed that I haven’t been mentioning Red Treehouse. Reason being? At some point herein I want to zero in specifically on UCP’s Public Education & Outreach (PE&O) offerings. In my opinion, those are similar enough to (all of) Red Treehouse’s offerings that, if anything useful comes of the zeroing in, both organizations will be served.

*what we know at any particular time

A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 9.0

The Power of Pull, initially published in 2010, just now out in paperback, is one of my favorite books of the last few years. In this section, I'd first like to overview it broadly-shallowly-quickly and then relate two of its big ideas narrowly-deeply-deliberately to Red Treehouse and UCP. 

Here’s how I see things unfolding:

9.1: OVERVIEW /KEY CONCEPTS

Thesis. “To get better faster at whatever it is you do, you’ve got to be supported by a broad array of complementary people and resources from which you can pull what you need to raise your rate of performance improvement.” 

Three levels of pull. Pulling is about accessing (searching), attracting (making serendipitous connections), and achieving (collaborating). The last set of practices entails participating in what the authors call creation spaces -- which are akin to Gartner’s collaborative communities. 

Success formula. Use pull techniques to: (1) define compelling trajectories for change, (2) provide leverage to the passionate individuals who are attracted to these trajectories, and (3) amplify the impact of these individuals. 

9.2: SHAPING STRATEGIES

"By grasping how pull works we can build institutions that can act as platforms to catapult change, and maybe even transform the world in necessary and far-reaching ways." 

Should UCP pursue a shaping strategy, i.e., should it attempt to reshape the CP arena on a global scale? Based on the BIG SKY PROJECT vision of the future for people with disabilitiles, is UCP already moving in this direction?  

Inquiring minds want to know. 

9.3: KNOWLEDGE STOCKS AND FLOWS

The authors contend that the sources of economic value are moving from "stocks" of knowledge to "flows" of new knowledge, and that we must "accelerate a shift to a very different mindset and to practices that treat knowledge flows as the central opportunity and knowledge stocks as a useful by-product and key enabler." 

What are the implications for UCP and Red Treehouse?

I can say already that the implications are huge. Our new ways of knowing impact everything these organizations do. In posts 9.3+, I'd like to look closely at UCP's Public Education & Outreach (PEO) efforts -- and then use that as a springboard for exploring David Weinberger's new book about "networked knowledge" (Too Big To Know) in section ten.

A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 8.5

Practically speaking, will it matter much if UCP and Red Treehouse don’t get a handle on social media? If they never master community collaboration? If they decide not to take all the steps Gartner would have ‘em take to reach the FUSING – or even the FORGING – stage? That takes a lot of work…

Why not just take a pass? 

To Ronald McDonald House of Cleveland: Red Treehouse is just one of your several initiatives and you only have a small staff to support it. Even still, I'd venture to guess you’ve had success growing your network of families, professionals, and organizations this calendar year. Social media's played no role. Why bother even dipping a toe in at this point ? 

UCP: You’re one of the larger health nonprofits, but you’re not some Fortune 500 giant in some crazy-competitive industry. Your reputation's secure. I’m sure donations are steady. Besides, your top priority is your network of affiliates: their work is mostly hands-on, face-to-face, and local. 

   

Either or both of you could opt out gracefully. You could “blame the tools, conclude that social media lacks business value, or assume your organizations simply aren’t ready.” In UCP's case it’d be simple as pie to say that it’s given Twitter (and the like) the old college try but decided to pull back the reins.

Maybe the wizzes at Gartner don’t know what they’re talking about. 
Maybe social media isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. 

In fact... 

*  *  *  *  *

JOHN KOTTER -- Professor of Leadership, Emeritus at Harvard Business School, author of 18 books, co-founder of Kotter International – THE GREAT JOHN KOTTER DOESN'T SAY A SINGLE WORD ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA in his piece about staying competitive “amid constant turbulence and disruption” in last month's Harvard Business Review. 

What he does say, instead, is that the organizational structures we’ve used in the past “are no longer up to the task of identifying hazards and opportunities soon enough, formulating creative strategic initiatives nimbly enough, and implementing them fast enough.” And, organizations need to come up with better ways of continually assessing their operating environments and reacting “with greater agility, speed, and creativity.”

His general solution, or antidote? Involve “more people than ever before in the strategic change game.” Do it in a way that’s economically realistic, i.e., that gives you the biggest bang for your buck. 

Specifically, Mr. Kotter introduces in the article his concept of the DUAL OPERATING SYSTEM: two separate operating systems running in concert, with the second one – a.k.a. the network – employing an agile structure "and a very different set of processes to design and implement strategy.” The job of the network...is to use volunteers (employees and others) to “liberate information from its silos and hierarchical layers and enable it to flow with far greater freedom and accelerated speed.”

Although he doesn't explicitly say it, I take it as a given that he’d be OK with using social media as a means to those ends. Social-media-enabled collaboration is inferred.

*  *  *  *  *

I find the similarities between Kotter’s dual operating system and Gartner’s COLLABORATIVE COMMUNITIES (“a communal structure within the enterprise”) to be remarkable. Both start with the proposition that organizations are being forced to “evolve toward a fundamentally new form.” Both stress the importance of getting smarter faster…

Even their pitches and promises are alike. Namely: Those organizations that get their acts together now (i.e., the ones that take the consultants' advice) will see immediate and long-term success. They’ll be more profitable. They’ll produce better goods and services. They’ll be more competitive. 

They'll win. 

Hmm. 

I wonder how those sorts of messages /promises would be received by the respective management teams at UCP and Red Treehouse. Would they resonate? Inspire? Excite? Would they compel either or both org. to keep exploring social media? To keep learning through trial and error?

I could see where they might miss the mark. Where they might be too removed, too abstract, and too much in the P&L language of business as we've known it --

It's partly because of that that I now want to move away from Gartner (and Kotter) and head in the direction of a trio of thought leaders who make similar and complementary recommendations, who offer their own unique twists, and who in many ways, IMHO, do a better job of getting to the simple essence of things.
 

The guys I have in mind -- John Seely Brown, John Hagel III, and Lang Davison -- are big-time business consultants in their own rights. Surprisingly, though, they talk less in terms of "beating back threats" and "outracing the competition" and more in terms of using social media to: DO more. HELP more. ACCOMPLISH more. Success, to them, boils down to the choices and passions of each and every individual with a stake in a given organization.

*  *  *  *  *

It's a personal thing.

Our "new digital infrastructure," as they say, gives us unprecedented opportunities to live up to our potential. Individually and institutionally. If we passionately want to improve and get better faster at what we’re doing, i.e., if we care, we’ll explore and master the new tools and techniques. We’ll move outside our comfort zones. We’ll connect and join forces with talented others who have similar interests.

What advice would they give UCP and Red Treehouse? Being all you can be does depend on your getting a handle on social media. It does matter. Lip service isn’t enough. Dipping one toe in isn’t the answer. Real human commitment is. 

To me it's even more personal. MY DAUGHTER AND OTHER KIDS LIKE HER ARE COUNTING ON YOU to make the smartest possible uses of the resources (you're privileged to have) at your disposal. That's what this social media thrust is about. 

I'd like for you both -- I think it'd behoove management at UCP and Red Treehouse -- to hang in there and learn what the authors of The Power of Pull have to teach: how small moves, smartly made, can set really big things in motion.

*  *  *  *  *

Go fail. And then fail again. Non-profit failure is too rare, which means that non-profit innovation is too rare as well. Innovators understand that their job is to fail, repeatedly, until they don't.*

*from seth godin's BLOG, dateline November 30, 2012: "Non-profits have a charter to be innovators"