The arts appear to involve what Abelson (1963) termed ‘hot cognition’. Hot cognition is learning that involves personal goals, motivation and emotion—cognition steeped in feeling. Cold cognition refers to flow‐chart thinking, or rule bound problem solving and decision‐making.
If you are interested, check out Catterall, J.S. and K.A. Peppler (2007), “Learning in the visual arts and the worldviews of young children”, Cambridge Journal of Education, Vol. 37/4, pp. 543-560
A friend of mine contacted me today, saying she wanted to do 'the Bailey matrix' to help her decide whether to start her own business.
The matrix is something that, back when we were graduates in Canberra almost 20 years ago, I would draw up for friends in the hope of it helping them decide what they wanted to do next with their lives. Using a spreadsheet.
Another friend, Andrew Dempster, used a similar matrix which we all called the Dempster matrix (Hi Andrew!). I can't remember now if it was Andrew or I who innovated the weighting approach - where you weight different options according to their fulfilment of various important goals. It doesn't really matter who did it - but it was a turning point for the utility of the matrix, allowing you to give a higher score to things which mattered the most to you. Effectively, it introduced the variable of subjective value into a spreadsheet.
All jokes aside, the matrix is actually a very useful tool for making decisions. Not so much that you use the scores religiously to determine what job you might take, but that the process itself helps you to clarify whats important to you, and how various options will help you to achieve those things.
I actually use a variant of the matrix these days with clients when trying to establish if their program budgets are going towards the right areas, based on their overall goals or mission. It is slightly more complex - it includes things like duration of engagement, level of subsidy, and stakeholder target groups - but the principle is the same. It is a way of measuring your actions (real or proposed) against your values. Yes, using a spreadsheet.
So here it is in all of its glory - the Matrix of Making Decisions. Use it as a guide only :-).
I am happy to share the Matrix under a Creative Commons License - Share Alike/ Non-Commercial. This just means, please don't go out and use it to make your millions (or if you do, please tell me how you managed it. I've only ever gotten the occasional beer or block of Dairy Milk from it ;-).
Jackie Bailey
Principal, BYP Group
The PDF version of this transcript can be downloaded here:
Rough transcript of Tesla Model 3 Launch
Acknowledgements: These notes have been taken from the recording posted by Mobilegeeks.de at the following link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8_e3DwKUiM
Time code estimates are drawn from that video.
Disclaimer: These are rough notes only. They are not meant to be relied upon for the purposes of commercial profit and using them is acknowledgement that this is the case. No responsibility will be accepted for their use or misuse.
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Material includes views and recommendations of third parties which do not necessarily reflect the views of BYP Group or its clients.
Please also note, this video does not start at the very beginning of the launch. We commence our rough transcription when Elon Musk is talking about the Tesla Roadster and the rationale for their approach, increasing in volume/accessibility each time.
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[Elon Musk speaks to an enthusiastic live audience made up mainly of media and Tesla Motor car owners:] People said, 'Well the Roadster’s nice, but it’s sort of a toy and really expensive, and sort of a car that you could use everyday, or a car that could compete against the great combustion sedans of the world', so we said, ‘OK, we’re going to make the Model S.
So the Model S – any of you drive the model S? Ha ha thank you – so but you know it’s a great sedan. It can seat up to 7 people 5 adults and 2 kids. It’s tested by Road & Track, MotorTrend and others, as the fastest four-door car in history – ever.
And it’s got great handling, it’s got great technology, it’s got things like Autopilot, and it was rated by almost every group as the best car in its year and by Consumer Reports as ‘The best car ever’! [1:25]
The reason for that is not just to achieve a superlative in cars, but to show what an electric car can do, because people didn’t believe an electric car could do this. So what was important … the reason it was important was not to achieve awards, but it was to show the car industry, to show the World, that an electric car really can be the best car. That’s what really mattered. [1:55]
For cars, about half the market wants a sedan, and half the market wants an SUV. So [2:06] we thought, ‘Oh well, we’ll extend the Model S platform into the Model X’. [2:13]
Both of these are very important because the revenue from the Model S and the Model X is what’s needed to develop the Model 3. So the Model 3 with all the engineering and the cost reductions to achieve the capabilities too billions of dollars, so the S and the X paid for that Model 3 development.
So I just wanted to say to all of you who bought the Model S or an X, ‘Thank you for helping build the Model 3!’
[Cheers]
So the Model 3 is happening because of you.
And we actually have an S and an X on the side there. It has, of course, falcon wing doors - it did cause us some challenges … it’s working [He remotely opens the Model X doors at 3:12]
So, now then going from the S and the X, we finally come to step 3 or the final step in the master plan – a mass market, affordable car.
It was only possible to do that doing the prior steps. But we’re here, so that’s what we’re going to be showing you tonight. OK .. (Comment from crowd) So I’m going to describe some of the aspects of the Model 3, and then, and then, yeah, …
So let’s show the Master plan again. OK, so, that’s the Master plan with steps 2 and 2.5.
Then we go to the Model 3.
First of all I wanted to start by saying the Model 3 is going to be an incredibly safe car. [4:15s]
Here at Tesla we believe that safety comes first. We care about you, we want you, we want your friends and family to be safe. This is paramount.
The Model 3, will not just be 5 star on average, it will be 5 star in every category. And even the base Model 3 will do 0-60mph or 0-100kph in less than 6 seconds. [4:41]
At Tesla we don’t make slow cars. [Laughter from the crowd and Musk]
And of course, there will be versions of the Model 3 that go much faster.
In terms of range it will be an EPA rating of at least 215 miles. I want to emphasize these are minimum numbers. We hope to exceed them.
It will also …all model 3’s will come standard with Autopilot software and Autopilot will come in with every option, you won’t need to pay extra, the Autopilot features will always be there.
The Model 3 also fits 5 adults comfortably. Comfortably is the important part here. Haha. The challenge with building a smaller car, obviously, is ‘How do you make it comfortable with so many people inside?’
So there are 2 important design steps we did with the Model 3 to do that. We moved the instrument panel and firewall – there really isn’t a firewall - we don’t have a big internal combustion engine at the front. Well we moved the front seats forward and compressed the instrument panel.
When you do your rides tonight, you’ll see what we mean. You’re sitting a little further front. It feels great. That’s what gives you the legroom so that you have 5 adults, so the first and second rows have plenty of legroom. [6:24]
Then on the rear roof area is one continuous pane of glass. The reason that’s great is it gives you plenty of headroom and a feeling of ‘openness’.
So it has by far the best roominess of any car in its size. Then in addition, it has, just like the Model S it has a front and rear trunks. It has more cargo capacity than any gasoline car of the same external dimensions.
And, yeah., and uh, you can actually- someone asked me this recently – ‘Can you fit a 7 foot long surfboard on the inside?’
The answer is ‘Yes’. You can.
Then with respect to Supercharging, all Model 3’s will come with Supercharging, standard.
So the reason Supercharging is very important, as many of you know, is that it gives you freedom of travel. Ok? It means you can conveniently go, where you want, how you want, and a lot of having a car is about freedom, and going where you want to go, … and so the Superchargers are critical to that.
So … [shows Supercharger network graphics] … we are now at the point where we have built out 3600 Superchargers worldwide. And about the same number of ‘Destination chargers.’ And that’s present day. By the end of next year, we will have doubled the number of Superchargers. [Cheers] And quadrupled the number of Destination chargers.
So you will be able to go virtually anywhere, and in fact, because the onboard charger of the Model S (sic) is able to adapt to any country’s voltage and amperage, wherever you go in the World, if there’s electricity, you can charge.
So then what about buying and servicing?
So where we are today with Tesla is we have over 215 locations in Asia, North America and Europe, and by the end of next year we expect more than double that to 441 locations.
The key point being, almost no matter where you are in Europe, North America or Asia, if you are in any mid-sized metro area, you will be able to get your car serviced.
Now how are we going to make these cars? Good question. [Nervous laugh from Musk at 9:25]
We need to achieve high volume production. So this is in two parts. First there is the vehicle factory.
[9:37] Our Fremont factory in the past has reached almost 500,000 per year, so we’re confident that Tesla can achieve that number in terms of vehicle production. I think that’s going to be … I wouldn’t say straightforward, but very doable.
And what about batteries? We would basically need to absorb the world’s entire lithium battery production. That’s why we are building the Gigafactory. This is a vital element. To give you a sense of scale, the Gigafactory will have the largest footprint of any building of any kind, OK? Volumetrically it will only be second to the Boeing factory in Washington, so this is really quite an enormous facility.
In fact, it will produce more lithium batteries than all other lithium factories combined. That’s one location. So we’re talking about 50GWhr/yr of production. And it won’t be just about volume, it will also be producing the most advanced cell and battery in the world. So it’s the combination of high volume and advanced technology is what enables us to make the model 3. It’s already operational today. [End 11:12]
So when are deliveries? They’re next year. So I do feel fairly confident it will be next year. [Nervous laughter from Musk and the crowd 11:37] Ha ha.
And then in terms of price, it will be $35,000. And I want to emphasise that even if you buy no options at all, this will still be an amazing car. You will not be able to buy a better car at $35,000 or even close even if you get no options. So it’s a really good car even nwith no options.
So do you wanna see the car?
[Cheers]
Well we don’t have it for you tonight. Well … I’m just kidding of course! It’s April Fool’s somewhere.
Bring it out!
[Trailer video commences at 12:29. Ends 13:03]
[Unveiling of 3 Model 3’s, one red, two silver one of which is silver/gray. Ends 14:55]
14:55 So what do you think? Do you like the car? Looking good?
All right, and umm, I just learned, this is crazy, but the total number of orders [15:15] for the past four hours has passed 115,000. So … thank you. That’s a lot yeah. Thank you to everyone that ordered the car. We love you! And for those of you that are here please enjoy your rides in the Model 3, and for those online, you can order at Tesla.com. Thank you! [Presentation ands 16:13.]
[Camera work revealing the Tesla Model 3’s on the stage.]
I was putting together a table of various validated instruments which have been or could be used in arts impact research, and thought it might be useful for others working in this area.
The table is a list of instruments which can be used to measure empathy, self-esteem and self-efficacy, wellbeing and so on. I have also included links to the instruments if they are available for free or purchase online.
You can access the table in html or pdf.
Please feel free to comment - the list is not exhaustive and doubtless there are some in there which have more or less efficacy than others!
Happy measuring :-)
Jackie Bailey, Principal, BYP Group
I was just reading some of Dr Ann Markusen's work (Dr Markusen is the Director of the Arts Economy Initiative at the University of Minnesota), as you do. A few things cropped up which I wanted to flag here as interesting which I would love to hear others' thoughts about.
In her recent work on the Californian creative economy, Markusen uses the same terminology that arts policy types in Australia have also been using for the last few years - 'ecology' rather than 'economy.' Since at least 2009 (and probably before), people working in arts policy and strategy in Australia have called the arts an 'ecology' or 'ecosystem', as a way to try to capture the the nature of the arts as a system of fluctuating relationships, and the primacy of authentic connection - between artists, organisations, audiences - the list goes on.
This is kind of like my Artistic Vibrancy Onion, so named because I think of the arts as a web of relationships across different layers of society and culture (perhaps Artistic Vibrancy Spiderweb might be more apposite?)
Here is how I tried to conceptualise the arts ecosystem for the Australia Council for the Arts when they asked me to, last year.
I drew it like this because a) I am a pretty crap drawer and b) it seemed a better way to describe the slightly miasmic soup in which artists operate, as opposed to the more traditional supply or value chain diagram of arts production.
The ecology concept allows us to think of arts happening in non-linear ways - as innovation does too. Arts happens in relationships and conversations, as does most human interaction and the fruits of human creativity. Rather than talking about it as an economy, or an industry, the arts is this space, a field (if we are going to get Bourdieuian, and why not?) in which people commune with each other and what's going on inside and outside their heads, hearts and bodies.
Naturally artists also operate as economic actors. And some parts of the arts are industrial and could be described as an industry, which implies the making of stuff and selling it and creating economic value and employment. These terms are used interchangeably, but really depend on the political goal of the conversation. For example, we talk about creative economies when we want to make the point that arts make money and contribute to GDP. We talk about the arts industry for a similar reason - to be able to talk about it in the same breath as the car manufacturing industry, or the pharmaceutical industry.
And so we talk about creative and cultural ecologies and ecosystems when we want to make a different point. When I use the term arts ecology, I am trying to convey quite a lot in that one word:
This article has been summarised at Urban Cinefile. I am uploading it here, importing from our old website, because it has some still-useful insights from still-expert experts.
The clue was on the flyer: a picture of the hairless Sphynx, one of the world’s jarringly un-fluffiest of cats. At the 2012 AFTRS seminar, “Not Fluffy: Reimagining the Creative Enterprise,” six of Australia’s leading researchers in screen business each tried to answer the question: are screen practitioners fluffy-minded artists? Or are they like the Sphinx – tough-minded creatures, with little more than their keen nose for a business opportunity to protect them from the ravages of a competitive industry?
David Court: The King’s Men – Five great lessons from William Shakespeare’s theatre company
David Court, the Head of the Centre for Screen Business at the AFTRS, explained to the gathering of 30 screen producers and practitioners that even the great artists like Shakespeare are not as fluffy as everyone might think.
According to David, William Shakespeare’s theatre company, 10% owned by the Bard himself, was run in a most pragmatic fashion. The Bard’s first company, “The Lord Chamberlain’s Men,” faced a steep rent increase. At that point, pragmatic Shakespeare brought in a gang of “strong men” who pulled the theatre apart, from pillar to post, then re-assembled the theatre across the river. The newly assembled theatre was renamed “The Globe.”
Shakespeare then tapped into what we would now call “market segmentation.” He established a new theatre within the exclusive, and expensive, precinct of The City of London. The Globe charged only 1 penny for admission, whilst the newly built Blackfriar’s Theatre, with its smaller capacity, charged a steeper entry price of sixpence. By setting up in a more expensive location and charging a higher entrance price, Shakespeare and his theatre company, now called “The King’s Men”, took what was then an art form for the masses into “high art”, for an elite and wealthy audience. Think Woolworths, selling apples for $2.98 a kg, and its high-end store, 50 metres away, selling them for $5.98 per shiny punnet.
David dispels the myth of the artist as “a lonely man (and then, it was typically a man), sweating away at his art in a dusty garret.” He blames this common, but misguided belief, on Romantic era thinkers such as Lord Byron, and later repeated by non-artists such as John Maynard Keynes in his acceptance speech for the position of Director of the British Arts Council.
David suggests that at least Shakespeare clearly did not conform to this stereotype. Shakespeare worked closely with his troupe of actors, borrowing liberally from other creative sources, and repurposing old material. This was a great artist, and one actively engaged with realizing his art in a practical, and responsive business-like fashion.
David draws out five business lessons for screen practitioners from Shakespeare’s story:
Box Office Prophecy, presented by Dr Jordi MacKenzie
Dr Jordi MacKenzie of Sydney University is trying to bring some predictability and measurability to estimates of likely box office takings of a yet-to-be-released feature film. The boldness of this experiment flies in the face of conventional wisdom that says box office earnings of a film are too unpredictable to allow meaningful forecasts.
The study, now in its 5th year has managed to strip back the information required to make accurate predictions about box office to nothing more than the key cast and crew list. Good results have also been obtained with only a small number of screen industry participants, sometimes as few as 10 in each “game”.
The researchers have found a correlation of r = 0.95 between actual box office results and their predictions. In statistics-land, this is very, very robust. A correlation of ‘1’ is a perfect correlation, with ‘0’ being no correlation – and a correlation like what Jordi and his co-researchers obtained is virtually unheard of in natural phenomena.
The question researchers asked participants was not “What do you think [film X] will make at the box office?”, but “What do you think others will think this film makes at the box office?” This was a conscious attempt to divine the “Wisdom of the Crowd” phenomenon. In academic-speak they call it a “pari-mutuel” technique.
Another benefit of the study in using this technique is that they were able to have the predictions naturally render themselves into probability distributions, rather than a single point prediction. This enabled the researchers to then quantify the uncertainty surrounding each prediction.
Whilst his statistical figures were too small for me to scrutinize from my vantage point, Jordi is confident that the research team has found a methodology that could be extremely useful in guiding early investment and financing decisions of individual film projects.
For those who are curious, the research paper is available online for free and entitled: “Nobody knows anything? Applying pari-mutuel information aggregation mechanisms to the motion picture industry.”
Copyrighting the Future, presented by Professor Michael Fraser
Professor Michael Fraser of the University of Technology Sydney next took the lectern and argued quietly but forcefully for a copyright registration database, which he dubbed the “National Content Network” (NCN).
The professor is realistic about the environment that faces IP enforcement, acknowledging that enforcement causes alienation within society. This is because digital film piracy is practiced by 1 in 3 of the population. Consequently, in his words, “enforcement alone won’t fix this market failure.”
Michael proposes a solution, simply stated: “Creators have to offer a better service.” His National Content Network would give both consumers and creators what they want. Creators want to be paid for their IP. But what do consumers want? According to Michael, they will pay for:
- Instant access
- Freedom to repurpose the material (“mash-up”)
- All of this in one transaction
Of copyright’s importance, Michael says that a fair and enforceable copyright law was the essential ingredient to the Industrial Revolution. He noted Imperial China had copyright law well before Europeans, however, it gave all copyright to the Emperor. British law dating from the late 17th century on the other hand specifically protected a citizen’s intellectual property (IP). It was this difference, he feels, that allowed the West to surpass China in technological terms, and how it came to dominate the World.
To further support his argument, he referred to Article 27 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the effect that “If you can’t make a living from your work, you are silenced.”
Creative Futures – presented by Tony Shannon
Tony Shannon, Acting Director of the Creative Industries Innovation Centre (CIIC) described some of the work they are doing for the Creative Industries (CI’s). According to Tony, all of the creative industries seem to struggle with a basic level of business-mindedness.
Tony urges creative businesses to make use of resources on the CIIC website (www.creativeinnovation.net.au) such as the Revenue Master. As simple – and he himself admits, simplistic - as the tool is, he says it is too often that he comes across creative businesses that have not done a basic revenue forecast of this nature.
Tony mentioned an analysis which I am currently working on with CIIC. We are looking at Centre’s findings across the hundreds of creative industry business reviews which the Centre has done over the last three years. The picture which is emerging is that creative businesses’ key challenges arise because of weaknesses in business fundamentals, such as strategic planning, sales, finance and systems and processes.
Whilst the study does not yet include the screen sectors, Tony and the audience speculated as to how much these attributes of the broader creative industries might apply to the screen industry.
For Love and Money – presented by Simon Molloy
Simon Molloy spoke on the topic of “Psychic Income”. Psychic income is the difference between what a producer does earn through their films, and what they could earn in an alternative profession.
In 2007, AFTRS surveyed 4,500 Australian producers. The survey found that Australian producers work for love and not money, sacrificing professional careers and tens of thousands of dollars in incomes in other fields to become screen producers. Drawing from and building upon results from the 2007 survey, Simon is investigating and attempting to be more precise about the reasons why Australian producers forego such large amounts of money.
Whilst Simon was reluctant to testify to the rigour of this research by conventional academic economic journal standards, he takes heart from the achievements of Daniel Kahneman, who was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2002. A psychologist by training, Kahneman is recognized for his work in disproving the economic rationalist assumption that all people work in an economically rational self-interested manner.
For more information, see Urban Cinefile’s previous article on psychic income at http://www.urbancinefile.com.au/home/view.asp?a=18807&s=Features.
Insights into the changing roles of producers in the new Australian screen culture, presented by Professor Deb Verhoeven
To avoid what Deb, Chair of Media and Communication at Deakin University, self-deprecatingly described as “an incredibly boring talk about data”, she refocused her question to “How do you survive as a screen producer in a hostile IP environment?”
In a vein strikingly resonant with that of Professor Fraser earlier in the day, Deb argued that what matters in this new environment is the “interoperability of content with data.” This ‘interoperability’ has 3 layers:
Deb foresees the second layer as the most difficult. She says it will involve standardizing meanings, which will require an army of what is known in academic circles as ‘ontologists.’ The layperson would probably identify them as the humble librarian or “information manager”.
The upshot of the above she says, is that we should be thinking more about production workflows (e.g. AGILE production techniques, Just-in-time (JIT) film production etc) instead of just production or distribution.
Deb’s notion of “interoperability” predicts that the difficulty in Michael’s National Content Network (NCN) will likely be setting up definitions and standards. I asked Prof Fraser if he knew Deb’s talk was going to align with his work so neatly. He confessed he didn’t, but added wryly, “We nearly embraced after her talk.”
Panel Discussion: How can Australian screen businesses become more sustainable, profitable and long-lived?
The panel consisted of Sandra Levy, CEO, AFTRS, Brian Rosen, President, Screen Producers Association Australia (SPAA), Neil Peplow, Producer and Director of Screen Content at the AFTRS, Dr Chris Burton, UTS Business School, David Court, AFTRS Centre for Screen Business.
The usual questions populated this discussion, such as “What is the correct business model for screen content creators?”, “What will happen to the independent film?” (left unanswered), and “How do we lift the Australian screen industry out of being a cottage industry and what is the role of Government in this?”
On the correct business model for screen content creators, Brian Rosen ventured that television has it pretty much right, with pay TV operators like HBO branding high quality content, and broadcast television producing “event” television.
One upshot of this for the feature film industry, is that he suspects there is a gap emerging in the film market at the $20-25 million budget level. This is because Hollywood’s response to the paradigm shift occurring in media has been to make big “event” movies, with lots of CGI. It was not mentioned in the discussion, but there was a pre-World Wide Web precedent for this gap in the Working Title films (e.g. Four Weddings and a Funeral) and Merchant Ivory films of the 80’s and 90’s (e.g. A Room with a View). The success of these films probably prompted the studios to create spin-off specialty studios such as Rogue Pictures, Miramax (created by the Weinstein brothers, but later purchased and remodeled by one of the big studios), and Fox Searchlight.
With regards to the last question, on “How do we lift the Australian screen industry out of being a cottage industry, and what role does Government play in this?”, it was Brian Rosen again that ventured an answer. He argued that to create a viable screen industry like Hollywood, you have to look to what Hollywood has that attracts the best ideas from all over the world. His answer to that is i) capital and ii) infrastructure. Consequently, he says it would be better to invest the $42 billion being invested in the National Broadband Network (NBN) instead into film production in Australia. This would attract film productions from all over the world, and the rest would follow.
The main disagreement (and there were many) between the panellists and some audience members appeared to revolve around the “business-mindedness” or otherwise of screen practitioners. Leading the “for” camp was Sandra Levy, who claims that the producers she has seen in her career, both in television networks and as CEO of the AFTRS have always “been market savvy, known their audience and are highly entrepreneurial in getting their films to market.” This was a claim supported by David Court’s own view of his AFTRS students.
On the “against” camp, i.e. screen practitioners do not appear to be business-minded, was Tony Shannon and other members of the audience. Clearly, Tony Shannon’s experience of creative industry practitioners, as well as Simon Molloy’s presentation would appear to suggest there is some evidence for this position too.
One attendee commented after the event that one of the statements by the panelist Neil Peplow was telling of a non-commercial mentality typical amongst even successful film producers such as Neil. Neil was describing the ravaging effects of piracy on his film income. He said that his film, Waking Ned Devine, had been illegally downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. “If”, he speculated, “every one of those illegal downloads were to be charged 50 cents, I would nearly have made a profit on my film!” The suggestion was made by the attendee that if Neil were truly “business-minded”, he would have been seeking to make millions rather than just breaking even. If this assertion is correct (and let’s give Neil the benefit of the doubt here – he was speaking off the cuff and his statement could equally be interpreted as a keen desire to redeem money from an irredeemable situation), then it is a mentality that runs against the lessons from David Court’s paper that a good creative business should be prepared to “negotiate its terms of trade”.
Perhaps though, the two opposing opinions can be reconciled. My own penny’s worth (or sixpence, if I was feeling especially wealthy in Shakespeare’s time): most Australian screen practitioners make films for love and not money. It’s such hard work that your heart has to be in it. However, once they have made a film, they can and do work in entrepreneurial and business-savvy ways to bring their film to a paying audience.
Yen Yang - Principal, Creative Industries, BYP Group
I keep coming back to the artistic vibrancy framework in my work for arts organisations, and hearing of how it has been adopted across Australia and overseas. I thought it might be time to unleash my Onion of Artistic Vibrancy on to the unsuspecting arts world. When I was at the Australia Council for the Arts, I worked with the performing arts sector to develop an artistic vibrancy framework. For a long time, the arts organisations and funders had struggled to articulate artistic merit. We needed a shared language to talk about, and to some extent, evaluate, measure or at least record, artistic vibrancy.
We identified five core elements of artistic vibrancy:
Great Art
Great Artists
Engaged Audiences
Engaged Communities
Vibrant Society and Culture
Great Art
This is about how well you do your art - eg your technical proficiency as an orchestra or the production values of your play. Your peers are probably the best people to ask, eg through peer review, benchmarking against organisations you are like or which you aspire to be like, or less formal conversations.
It also refers to how well you contribute to your artform. Again, your artistic peers would be the ones to comment on this, as well as the community of the artform you are in and the artists you work with. You could do this via interviews, conversations, a peer committee, and opportunistic conversations eg with visiting experts or well-respected guest artists.
Great Artists
This refers to your organisation's contribution to the development of artists. Your artistic peers, sector experts and the artists themselves would be the best placed people to talk to about how well you are doing in this area - eg through conversations, a peer review panel, and artist surveys.
Engaged Audiences
This is a question for the audience of your work - either for live performances, readers of your books, or online viewers or listeners to your music. We want to find out how emotionally moved, intellectually stimulated, challenged and captivated they were by your artwork, coining Alan Brown's language or artistic impact. The best people to ask about this are the audience members, via interviews or a survey.
Engaged Communities
This is about your organisation's connection to its community beyond the audience. For example, an orchestra can be relevant to its wider community through education programs, or perhaps through programming decisions to engage target groups. "Community" can be your organisation's target communities, eg disadvantaged youth or particular ethnic groups, or it could refer to your local community or your entire nation. The key question is to ask how relevant you are to these people. And the best people to ask are naturally the community members you are interested in connecting with. You can do this via open days, community surveys and community consultations, or perhaps conversations with community representatives.
The above is a quick summary. There are a bunch of resources and 2 e-books which I worked on with the Australia Council, designed to help organisations reflect on their own artistic vibrancy and engage with communities.
The onion of artistic vibrancy
AV-Onion
Now we come to the onion.
My underlying idea when developing the artistic vibrancy framework, is that arts organisations are all about relationships.
We can think about these relationships as a series of concentric circles, like an "onion."
At the core of the onion is the organisation's relationship with the artform itself. For example, 'excellence of craft' is really about a strong relationship with the artform, as is the 'development or preservation of the artform'.
At the next ring out is the organisation's relationship with itself. This includes the organisation as an idea, a brand and an institution, as well as the organisation's more tangible connection with its own staff, both artistic and non-artistic.
Then we move to the organisation's relationship with artists who may be external to the organisation, and the wider artistic community. The organisation always sits in relation to its "field," to be Bourdieu-ian about it.
At the next level is the organisation's connection with its audience - those who watch, listen and experience the art.
Then we have the 'community relevance' layer, which is the skin, the interface between the 'inner onion' and the wide world. This is about the relationship of the organisation and its work with its identified community and specific communities of interest.
Next is the general public - those who might see or hear some of the 'art' created, or might walk past the gallery or exhibition and imbibe, by osmosis, some benefit or challenge from the existence of the art (ambient participation, according to Alan Brown, or institutional value, according to John Holden).
And then there is the air, the wide wide world in which the onion sits - the relationship with society and culture.
Why the onion is a useful tool
By conceptualising it this way, arts organisations can start to map their own efforts and energy when it comes to each dimension of vibrancy. If you wanted to, you could actually draw an onion and map your resources and programs on to it, to see where you might be strongest or where you might want to concentrate more energy.
The layers don't have to represent waning connection the further out you go. Your aim is to have strong weaves between all layers.
This could be a useful way of communicating your organisation's foci to others. Importantly, it is a good way to understand yourself, keeping the art at the heart of the onion but strongly weaving its connection to all layers.
The Verge article, entitled 'This tiny electric car could be the future of urban transportation' echoes my own articles here and here from a couple of weeks ago. (You heard it here first. ;-). )
With the recent passing of former Intel CEO, Andy Grove, there have been many tributes to his remarkable abilities and achievements,[1] not least of all, his ability to admit that he was wrong.[2]
This article is not going to say anything to attempt to detract from the great man he was, and his incredible achievements. But in the harsh glare of history, there was one key mistake he made that is oft overlooked. This article will examine that mistake with the benefit of ‘20/20 hindsight’.
A Great Legacy: Avoiding Disruption Pt 1
Firstly though, we should put into context Grove’s achievements which were truly World transforming. Grove is credited with being the man to execute upon his predecessor, Gordon Moore’s, famous ‘Moore’s Law’[3] . It was under Grove’s reign that much of this was achieved.
Tributes extend even further, to Grove’s epitomizing and propagating Silicon Valley’s culture of continual, relentless improvement. Also, when faced in the 1970’s with the existential threat of Japanese competitors ‘dumping’ dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips - Intel’s core market at the time - it was Grove who suggested leaving the DRAM market to refocus upon the fledgling microprocessor business. One disruption event avoided!
The Celeron Chip
And again in 1997, Grove famously invited Clayton Christensen, the author of a now seminal book, ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’ and the man attributed with coining the term ‘disruption’ in the sense we know it today, to speak to his employees. As this story from the New Yorker recounts:
‘Grove had sensed that something was moving around at the bottom of his industry, and he knew that this something was threatening to him, but he didn’t have the language to explain it precisely to himself, or to communicate to his people why they should worry about it. He asked Christensen to come out to Intel, and Christensen told him about the integrated mills and the mini mills, and right away Grove knew this was the story he’d been looking for.’[4]
From this meeting, it is said Grove famously decided to produce the Celeron chip – a cheaper, lower-powered chip than Intel’s core offering at the time.
The Orthodox View: Grove’s successor, Paul Otellini made the big miss for Intel
Consequently, Intel’s big ‘miss’, of not picking the mobile chip market, is seen as the fault of Grove’s successor, Paul Otellini. A typical account is that portrayed by one of my favourite analysts, Ben Thompson on his Stratechery website, in this case relating a story told by Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic:[5]
‘There is a sense, though, that the company’s strategic position is much less secure than its financials indicate, thanks to Intel’s having missed mobile.
The critical decision came in 2005; Apple had just switched its Mac lineup to Intel x86 processors, but Steve Jobs was interested in another Intel product: the XScale ARM-based processor.
The device it would be used for would be the iPhone. Then-CEO Paul Otellini told Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic what happened:
“We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it. And the world would have been a lot different if we’d done it,” Otellini told me in a two-hour conversation during his last month at Intel. “The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do…At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought.”’
Since that time, ARM Holdings have gone on to become ‘market dominant in the field of processors for mobile phones (smartphones or otherwise) and tablet computers.’ [6]
My dissenting view: Grove made the big miss for Intel
In contrast to this mainstream view, I argue that it was actually upon Grove’s watch that the mistake was made. In my opinion, it was at that fateful meeting between Christensen and the people at Intel in 1997, that a proper understanding of disruption theory as we now come to know it[7] would have pointed to the likely disruptor of Intel’s core business.
It appears that all Grove and his people took away was that the disruption was going to ‘come from below’ i.e. a cheaper competitor. Intel responded with the cheaper Celeron offering.
However, this was not the paradigmatic shift in thinking that Disruption Theory truly requires. Disruption Theory[8] goes further to suggest that the competitor was likely to be so ‘asymmetric’ that the incumbent would not even think of the disrupting force as a threat.
Disruption: Personal Digital Assistants (PDA’s) morph into Smartphones
In 1997 the eventual disruptor was already beginning to take shape in the form of personal digital assistants (PDA) handheld computers such as the ‘PalmPilot’[9].
With their puny processing power, limited functionality and gray-scale LCD screens, they were clearly no threat to the mighty Pentium processors for which Intel is still famous.[10] But in time, these PDA’s would become the basis for the first smartphones such as the Handspring Treo 180[11] which used the PalmOS operating system.
Disruption: About the business model, not just the technology
What is more, ‘disruption’ in the Christensen sense also tends to come with a new business model. In other words, it is not just the technology that disrupts, but the business models that the technology enables that do the disrupting. Think Dell’s business model (selling personal computers online sales) to the conventional retail model adopted prior to that point.
ARM Holding’s business model is a classic case of this. Rather than investing hundreds of millions in a chip fabrication plant, instead they focused upon licensing the designs of the chips for others to fabricate.
To be fair to Grove, it is impossible to be omniscient – especially after he managed to avoid one major disruption. Instead, I look at the contribution (or failure?) by Christensen, who in his account[12] of the meeting professed to his clients at Intel that he didn’t know anything about the chip industry. But even a rudimentary understanding of the chip industry would have suggested the Achilles Heel of the chip industry was in the expense of the chip fabrication process. This barrier to market entry, or ‘moat’ would be flipped on its head by a business model such as ARM Holdings’.
These two clues – the easily dismissed processors in the meager hand-held devices, and the inversion of the business model of processors – should be apparent to anybody studying disruption theory today. However, we cannot blame Andy Grove for not being able to better articulate the ‘gut feeling’ he had in the late 90’s that disruption was about to befall Intel, when the father of Disruption Theory himself was still decades away from being disrupted on this point. Grove and Christensen, both great men, but not infallible.
[1] http://venturebeat.com/2016/03/21/silicon-valley-legend-and-former-intel-ceo-andy-grove-passes-away-at-79/
[2] http://www.linkedin.com/pulse/time-andy-grove-came-fortune-refused-meet-editors-rik-kirkland
[3] "Moore's law" is the observation that, over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
[4] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/05/14/when-giants-fail
[5] https://stratechery.com/2016/andy-grove-and-the-iphone-se/
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Holdings
[7] Arguable one more sophisticated than even Christensen himself understands – See my earlier post citing the Techcrunch article that points this out.
[8] http://www.claytonchristensen.com/key-concepts/
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PalmPilot
[10] Grove is also credited with the ‘Intel Inside’ and Pentium promotion that made ordinary consumers stop and consider the CPU in their machines.
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handspring_(company). Nerd that I am, I owned one of these when they first came out.
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
What burgeoning team sport phenomenon awarded over AU$20 million in prize money[1] this past August to a team of 5 players where the youngest broke onto the international competitive scene last year at the tender age of 15, and the oldest is nicknamed ‘Old Man’[2] at a mere 27 years of age? Here are some clues: Its players, bear nicknames like ‘Piglet’, ‘Faker’ and ‘Amazing’, its 119 pound (54kg) stars can mysteriously burn-out[3] at the age of 21[4], and its audience is already measured at 137 million people around the World. [5] Team names include ‘Evil Geniuses’, Cloud9 and fNatic.
I’ll give you just one more clue: The team is made up of what would typically be considered the least athletic people alive – geeks.
By now, most male readers under 30 will know what I’m talking about. The rest of you are probably scratching your head at this perversely inverted world where pimply nerds are sports heroes and worshipped by legions of female fans. [6]
The phenomenon in question is eSports in which computer gamers play against each other, frequently online, and at the elite level, in the flesh at stadiums including the Wembley Arena.[7] The game that awarded over $20 million in prize money is DOTA 2[8], a computer game that allows multiple players to compete online in a virtual battle arena, or a MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) for short. DOTA itself is an acronym for ‘Defence of the Ancients’, which is in turn, a spin-off of the extraordinarily popular ‘real-time strategy’ game[9], World of Warcraft 3 published by Blizzard Entertainment. The ‘2’ in Dota 2 refers to the fact that it is the second official version by Valve Corporation which produces and distributes games.[10]
But DOTA 2 is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ‘eSports’. Other games commanding multi-million dollar prize pools include League of Legends, Call of Duty and Smite.[11] These are just a few of the video games played competitively, described as ‘massively online battle arena’s’ or MOBA for short.
People from all corners of the ‘connected’ Earth play eSports against each other making it, in some ways, even more international than soccer/football where players are restrained by travel and passports to play against each other. Of course, in the interest of fairness, and to make their competitions a compelling live event, most competitions at the elite level require players to compete at the same venue on the same equipment live before an audience of screaming fans. Nevertheless, the purely online competitive component has its sophisticated leader boards, through which some child star players have emerged like ‘overnight’ sensations.[12]
Its nerdy star players look so much like you would expect a professional video gamer to look, it makes any parent wonder about the future health of their boy– or their girl.[13] Hailing from all the ‘nerd’ classes; pimply, deathly pale, skinny or overweight (but never physically well-developed), bespectacled, greasy-haired, Asian (even 2 of the Canadian DOTA 2 world champions ‘Evil Geniuses’ are of Asian descent) it is perhaps not surprising considering professional teams have coaches and rigorous training regimes,[14] big brand name sponsors,[15] as well as billionaire owners and backers,[16] just like ‘real’ sports teams.
What has this all got to do with the title of this article?
Here’s a hint. The ‘Super Nation’ of eSports is South Korea[17] where the micro-momentary expression of a pro-gamer losing to the upstart wunderkind, Faker, has its own meme page.[18]
In an impressive display of government intervention triumphing over the free market, the Korean government made a conscious decision nearly 20 years ago to promote its ‘soft power’.[19] Frequently the historical whipping boy of its near-Asian neighbours, China and Japan, and with a mere fraction of the people of those populous giants, Korea’s government felt it needed to somehow compete with its historical ‘big brothers’. During this time, not only did it provide universal superfast broadband, but it sponsored the development of its key cultural industries, including film, television, popular music, and of course, gaming. The rest, as they say, is history.
[1]Source: http://www.esportsearnings.com/tournaments/12894-the-international-2015
[2] http://evilgeniuses.gg/Profile/13,Fear/
[3] http://www.kotaku.com.au/2015/02/one-of-league-of-legends-best-players-gets-benched/
[4] http://lol.gamepedia.com/Piglet
[5] https://www.superdataresearch.com/blog/esports-brief/
[6] http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/13035450/league-legends-prodigy-faker-carries-country-shoulders
[7] https://www.google.com.au/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=sse+arena+wembley+wikipedia&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&gfe_rd=cr&ei=GBgnVozSJdDu8wfqg7gQ
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_strategy
[10] The history of how DOTA 2 came to be it itself an interesting illustration of the power of the crowd-sourcing phenomenon, where a fan of the game, known only under the ‘handle’ (alias) of Eul, kicked off a chain of successive iterations by even more fans adept at programming. Ultimately, Valve commissioned the last in this line of fans, ‘Ice Frog’ to help build their official version of DOTA 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_the_Ancients#Development ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_the_Ancients#Sequel
[11] http://www.esportsearnings.com/tournaments
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_%22Faker%22_Sang-hyeok
[13] All-female eSports teams exist e.g. Girls HK, Team Siren, and presently, a select few, earn respectable prize money: http://www.kotaku.com.au/2015/08/hong-kong-gets-its-first-all-female-league-of-legends-team/ ; http://team-dignitas.net/articles/blogs/No%20Category/3465/Call-Your-Shot-What-Do-You-Think-Introducing-Team-Siren ; http://www.esportsearnings.com/players/female_players . However, they are still a minority in eSports: http://www.polygon.com/2014/5/27/5723446/women-in-esports-professional-gaming-riot-games-blizzard-starcraft-lol
[14] http://www.liquiddota.com/forum/dota-2-general/462152-coaching-in-esports-a-comprehensive-look
[15] http://fortune.com/2014/07/24/esports-sponsors/
[16] http://dota2.gamepedia.com/Invictus_Gaming
[17]http://www.pcworld.com/article/2036844/why-gamers-in-asia-are-the-worlds-best-esport-athletes.html ;
[18] https://www.facebook.com/H2K-Ryus-face-memes-480179422135007/ . The original expression can be seen at around 13 seconds in at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPCfoCVCx3U
[19] http://www.creativetransformations.asia/2014/05/the-k-pop-factory-phenomenon/
In my post detailing my thinking on the Apple Car I touched upon how Clayton Christensen - the person who is attributed as having coined the term 'disruption' in the post-Internet age - himself does not believe Apple is 'disruptive' according to his own definition. The following article from TechCrunch details issues with Christensen's definition, suggesting the definition itself, has been 'disrupted'.
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