Daniel Lubetzky

While many of the choices on TIME Magazine’s Top 10 lists for 2009 were lame or uninspired, here are a few worthwhile picks:

MOST HILARIOUS VIDEO:

Bonnie Tyler spoof of 80s (Other viral videos: I had already noted great videos including of Susan Boyle, and there are other good ones like this wedding procession, the post-it film "deadline", the mock ad for Flutter that underlines the silliness of the world we live in, and the baby dancing that even my grandmother had forwarded me)

FUNNIEST AD:

Hulu

COOL AND DEEP:

The Longest Way 1.0 – one year walk/beard grow time lapse from Christoph Rehage on Vimeo.

Also Cool Scientific Discoveries:

• The Human Epigenome, Decoded
• Gene Therapy Cures Color Blindness
• A Robot Performs Science
• Breeding Tuna on Land
• Teleportation!
• Top 10 New Species
• A 3D Digital Camera

I was surfing through TIME Magazine’s Top 10 Everything of 2009 list. While many of their choices seem random and uninspired at best, some gems hidden among their finds included their choice of Adam Lambert’s "Mad World" among their top songs. I read the lyrics several times, pasted below, and listened also to the original Tears for Fears performance (also below). 

When I was a kid in San Antonio, Texas, newly arrived from a sheltered upbringing in Mexico City, I enjoyed the song but didn’t relate to it – or understand why it resonated so much among American kids who "had it all." 

In Mexico City, in every corner on popular streets there was an indigent kid begging for alms and struggling to survive, so kids that had a home and a family didn’t generally question their lot.  Why then, would kids who could eat American cereals for breakfast and go to Malibu Grand Prix feel deprived? 

In retrospect, this song hits such a chord with the alienation and loss of meaning that many feel in modern society, primarily in the developed world.  Serious challenges of course are faced every day by struggling kids. But much of it also has to do with the framing of those challenges.  "How bad do I have it relative to the 30,000 children who literally starve to death every day?" 

The search for depth and meaning, and reaffirmation of our special fortune amidst so much wealth and excess, and of our role and duty to find our own way to make this a better world for others, are critical to the health and happiness of future generations.

In very real ways, thinking of others and kinding others (ie, doing conscious acts of kindness for others) gives us meaning and fulfillment.

Mad World lyrics
Songwriters: Orzabal, Roland;

All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, worn out faces
Bright and early for their daily races
Goin’ nowhere, goin’ nowhere
Their tears are fillin’ up their glasses
No expression, no expression
Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow
No tomorrow, no tomorrow
And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dyin’
Are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you
‘Cause I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It’s a very, very
Mad world, mad world
Mad world, mad world
Children waitin’ for the day they feel good
Happy birthday, happy birthday
Made to feel the way that every child should
Sits and listen, sits and listen
Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me, no one knew me
Hello teacher tell me what’s my lesson?
Look right through me, look right through me
And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dyin’
Are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you
‘Cause I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It’s a very, very
Mad world, mad world
Mad world, mad world
And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dyin’
Are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you
‘Cause I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It’s a very, very
Mad world, mad world
Mad world, mad world
A raunchy young world
Mad world
© ROLAND ORZABAL LIMITED;

Jason Alexander often shares with prospective OneVoice supporters that the first thing that drew him to OneVoice was not the creativity, courage or logic of our plans, but the parental empathy he felt when my friend Mohammad Darawshe. 

Mohammad spoke about his efforts to steer his then 9 year-old son Fares away from the commitment to become a Shahid. Back in 2001, Fares had told his Dad that, just like he had met his commitment to make the soccer team, and just like he had met his pledge to score the highest grades in class, he now was committing to achieve martyrdom.  These were heady times, when Israelis and Palestinians were engaged in one of the deepest cycles of violence in their history. Mohammad  took the warning signs seriously.  He more than succeeded in steering Fares towards positive ways to lead his people, and today Fares attends Kings Academy in Jordan and is – like his Dad – one of the brightest hopes that Israelis, Palestinians and internationals have for peace and reconciliation.

This powerful article by Ethan Bronner made me think of Jason’s emotional connection with Mohammad’s plight.  Back then I had no children.  Now I do.  And this piece made me shed more than one tears of hope.

December 31, 2009

A Mideast Bond, Stitched of Pain and Healing

By ETHAN BRONNER, New York Times

JERUSALEM — He can be impulsive. She has a touch of bossiness. Next-door neighbors for nearly a year, they talk, watch television and explore the world together, wandering into each other’s homes without a second thought. She likes his mother’s eggplant dish. He likes her father’s rice and lamb.

Friendship often starts with proximity, but Orel and Marya, both 8, have been thrust together in a way few elsewhere have. Their playground is a hospital corridor. He is an Israeli Jew severely wounded by a Hamas rocket. She is a Palestinian Muslim from Gaza paralyzed by an Israeli missile. Someone forgot to tell them that they are enemies.

[Read more →]

Very much in OneVoice, and very much with a sentiment like that of the KIND Movement, Starbucks bested all videos I got this season with this awesome compilation (which I received from Jason Alexander): musicians and ordinary citizens across the world joined on the same day at the same time to sing the same song:

Among all of KIND’s retail partners, Starbucks certainly ranks among the classiest, most professional and most sincerely committed to truly make this a better world.  In this case the above is part of a partnership with Project RED to fight AIDS.

The Jerusalem Post TV bureau covered Keith’s visit with Israeli and Palestinian youth leaders of OneVoice.

Michael Malone from ABC News wrote an interesting article on Apple’s iPhone and its overall new product development strategy, with interesting strategic lessons for new product development and business in general.

[Read more →]

Leadership is the process of bringing a new and generally unwelcome reality to an individual, organization or setting, and helping them successfully adapt to it.

-Rony Heifetz (as quoted in a Harvard Kennedy School study (by Dutch Leonard) on Leadership in High Uncertainty Environments, as part of Young Global Leaders executive program.

Other interesting insights from that course with important applications for movements like OneVoice as well as to fast-growing companies like KIND:

• On the danger (and opportunity) of Vantage Bias:

     When you are holding a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

Cognitive Biases to watch against: giving too much weight to personal experience/illusion of experience; overconfidence of influence/power, or ability to predict future, and of ability to control future; ignoring disconfirming evidence; inability to perceive radical change; escalation of commitment in the face of "evidence"; tendency to turn issues into personal convictions;

• Affirm Values at Difficult Moments
• Never let bad news be a surprise; prepare people to enable them to adapt
• Eye contact in some African countries is disrespectful.
• Build deep team cohesion during times of stability to enable you to deal with uncertainty in the future
• To manage well in a crisis, prepare AHEAD by thinking of, and hiring, the right people with the right values – resilience, team spirit, loyalty, courage
• Create structured discipline in the mundane, so the unanticipated is compensated by expectable outcomes
• Grounded Confidence is important; false optimism is not sustainable;
• Learning most effective when: Positive, Immediate, Certain, and Reinforced.
• Ensure issue (rather than person putting it forward) is what is evaluated and ranked.
• Listen to warning systems – forms of dissent, dissonance; encourage feedback;
• Don’t dismiss disconfirming evidence; question if you are not too narrowly focused – lighthouse/boat scenario; must remain open to possibility that you are wrong;
• A leader can change the conditions in which the team operates, out of which new models for leadership will emerge.
• Ecologist: when you reach in and try to take out anything out of the universe, you find out that it is interconnected to everything else.

Yesterday I tried Softsoap’s Pure Cashmere Hand soap.  I was struck by the proposition that a soap could contain "cashmere extract" because a while back I had wondered what "cashmere" really was.  Most consumers just know Cashmere sweaters as exceptionally soft but don’t know where "cashmere" comes from, so I guess the marketing team at Softsoap’s parent company, Colgate, figured that they would make things romantic with the cashmere association. 

The trouble is, cashmere is the fur of a type of goat – the cashmere goat.  Colgate tries to connect to this silly gimmick by using "hydrolyzed keratin" – a protein extract from the goat’s hair.  This ingredient, besides being the least present in the formula (see label), has no discernible impact on the purported features of the product.  It is just used for smoke and mirrors.  Too bad that most consumers have not yet caught up with this deception – though I did find one colorful site that brought them to task on it.

You’d think Colgate would be a bit more responsible with its claims and advertising.

Then again, liquid soap is a modern invention that pollutes water at such greater levels than regular soap, for the sheer fact that it is used in much ampler and less efficient form than regular bars of soap.  The same reason why companies created shower gels and liquid soaps  – because they can command a higher price and accomplish more turns than using regular soap bars – is also the reason why consumers should avoid using such products, which harm the environment and are just wasteful.

This is another in a series  (see prior examples here and here) of magical uses of art in real life situations – which accentuates all that is good about art and about life – and can be a phenomenal marketing tool:

This season many millions of pine trees are being chopped off to decorate Christmas living rooms.  With growing awareness about the harm of reducing the footprint of trees in our globe, this tradition (which I assume does not have any grounding in biblical or canonical precepts of Christian religion) must be getting questions more and more. 

One answer for environmentally-conscious Christians may be to just pass up the tree altogether – or to use an artificial Xmas tree.

But what if a company were to offer to go further: that for a fraction of the cost of buying such a tree, it would actually plant a new tree in the honor of the family foregoing the actual tree.

Or a company in business of making the artificial trees could sell a version that included this environmentally-conscious commitment – not only would buyers forego killing trees, but the company would actually pay to plant X number of new trees…

Leave it to a Mexican Jew to think this up…