TheWayoftheWeb

I’ve just been reading a great post on the Creative Review blog which covers a growing issue in advertising at the moment.

Namely, the increasing crossover between videos on Youtube, and mainstream advertising which may or may not have been inspired by the original.

Honda’s Let It Shine commercial led to similar thoughts from Carl and Dave.

And then there’s T-Mobile commercials, or Silent Discos?

Now, I’m not going to suggest that there’s a right or wrong answer for every instance. After all, ‘Bad artists copy, Great artists steal’, to quote Picasso. But it is important to keep in mind that the wrong decision is going to be increasingly messy – after all the sharing networked world feeds as much on negativity (perhaps moreso!) than positivity.

And the flipside is a mainstream adoption of the remix and mash-up which mainstream media is often fighting against. But the generally accepted online culture tends towards attribution in the majority of cases, whereas the professionals seem more reluctant in general to acknowledge the sources of inspiration.

Maybe it’s the tradition of seeing creativity as moments of divine inspiration, as eloquently discussed by Elizabeth Gilbert in a TED talk.

If you’re involved or interested in charity, social good, business, management or leadership, then I highly recommend The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World having found it important enough to read it twice in the space of the few days I’ve had it!

And it’s not even about social media, web 2.0, or marketing. It’s far more important than that.

In all honesty, I wasn’t aware of Jacqueline Novogratz (here’s a Charlie Rose interview with Jacqueline) and her work, which includes founding the Acumen Fund, but I happened to see a post by Seth Godin which described it as important and essential – and then said Seth would buy a number of copies for bloggers to read and then pass on to their friends.

Which is how I ended up with an unexpected airmail package last week.

The book is a partly a personal account of how Novogratz was motivated to apply the knowledge and processes of business, learned during her time Chase Manhattan Bank and the  Stanford Graduate School of Business, to begin micro-financing projects, having heard of the success of Professor Muhammed Yunus and the Grameem Bank, and starting by founding Duterimbere, a microfinance organisation in Rwanda.

Her account of her time in Africa, and the thought process behind the philosophy of combining charitable investment and entrepreneurship is enlightening, moving, at times harrowing, and importantly inspirational to produce actual results. The fact that Duterimbere spans both sides of the Rwandan Genocide, means that you’re presented with the humananity of women who worked to better the cause of poor women in the country, but were also caaught up in various ways in the genocide, whether as victim or as perpetrator.

It’s this honesty and moral ambiguity that had the greatest effect on me as I read the book – Jacqueline is brutally honest about her efforts to improve the situation of the poor, and especially where her well-intended efforts failed, particularly in her early attempts at building relationships with the women she needed to work with, or was trying to help – indeed she’s very honest about a number of mistakes made in her work with Duterimbere, and that’s probably why the organisation was able to celebrate it’s 20th anniversary in 2007, and survive the troubles which ripped Rwanda apart.

Suffice to say that the lessons of leadership and management contained in the book are applicable to any situation in which you’d like or need to be able to build successful working relationships with individuals or groups of people, regardless of their financial situation.

And it’s also the first book I’ve bought/received which my partner has voluntarily started reading – in this case before I’d even finished reading it!

And once I’ve done my duty in passing it on, I’ll be buying my own copy to refresh my memory on a regular basis:- The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World

I recently watched an interesting TED presentation by Elizabeth Gilbert on ‘a new way to think about creativity’ (found via Lateral Action where there’s a good post about the content of the talk):

The presentation looks at how creativity was often assigned to divine assistance in historical times, and the benefits that approach had – and could still have.

And examples include dancers in Spain, who for one night might be seen as channelling that divine creativity, or an American poet who felt like she had to catch poems as they passed her by.

But the insight that people, including Gilbert, can work for a long time before having that moment of celebrated divine creativity struck a chord, and reminded me of another interesting TED talk:

It also ties into the idea of practice, and of 10,000 hours being about right for expertise in any field, as written about recently in Outliers: The Story of Success. (My own thoughts on Outliers)

As a writer/journalist/blogger/marketer/geek,  I’m always fascinated by insights into creativity and expertise – Lateral Action has proved a constant source of great insight, along with Springwise and many more sites (Many of them appear in my Google Reader Shared Items). All accompanied by music – usually Last.fm.

It did bring up one question on a marketing theme – with so many new social networks arriving, and so many new social media marketing experts appearing – how many people can honestly claim to be approaching 10,000 hours working in social media marketing or especially on a single social network?

Rather than trying to force a post on some topics which need more thought and research, or pretending I’ve spotted something where I can add value in my RSS feeds, I’m going to get back to some presentation work I need to finish, and leave you with some great inspiration for presentations:

1. Logic + Emotion blog by David Armano: Everything he does seems to combine between clarity and looking good.

2. Presentation Zen: Hardly a secret, but full of useful information and insight.

And lastly a great presentation by Neil Perkin which I thought I’d already shared but couldn’t find on the site just now.

It’s a pretty short starter list – so where do you find inspiration, advice, or useful tool for presentations?