Daniel Lubetzky

Also been meaning to upload this picture of the YGL delegation that came with us on a visit of Jerusalem this last spring…

I’ve been meaning to upload this picture of a bus stop ad – from a very creative ad campaign for the movie District 9.

Devin Leonard wrote an excellent article [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/business/media/30ad.html?_r=1&sq=hey%20pc&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print] about the epic advertising rivalry between Apple and Microsoft. It includes nice lessons & insights for students of advertising.

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Alina Tugend wrote a piece last week in the New York Times that I think contains some valuable insights about how to give and receive criticism.

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Very few people in my life have struck me as much as Van Jones for being as exceptionally inspiring, as extraordinarily sincere in their commitment to help improve the lot of others, and as leaders with such well rounded qualifications as Van’s.

Van is a fellow "Young Global Leader" from the World Economic Forum and the subject of a Skoll/Sundance "Stories of Change" documentary.  I have known him for many years in very intimate settings, including in international settings where someone else could have been negative about the US or extreme in some sense, but this was never the case with Van Jones.

Van is all about positively inspiring others – and he does that like few others.  There is not one bone in Van that is not authentic.

His resignation from the US Administration today – apparently provoked by dirty partisan politics – is a sad step for all Americans.  He had been appointed as the "Green Czar" with a brilliant concept of tackling two problems at once with an entrepreneurial solution: overcome disenfranchisement and unemployment of inner-city youth, and address climate change challenges and lack of US competitiveness in the green industry by building programs that train young people with green manufacturing and green industry skills.

Whoever engineered these silly attacks may have won a battle but will lose the war: Van will not be stopped from doing great work for America and the world, and this forced attention at least puts a spotlight on an extraordinary public leader that deserves our support.

People ask me why I hate partisan politics – this is Exhibit #1.

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Ben Cohen, one of my mentors and founding Board members of PeaceWorks, is truly one of the great social marketing geniuses of all time. Much of the reason for it is that he BELIEVES in what he does.

And now they did it again, with, as my team member Phil shared, "a gutsy (and arguably brilliant) branding move" – to rename "Chubby Hubby" to "Hubby Hubby" in support of marriage equality. 

The Chinese symbol for Danger is composed of crisis plus opportunity.

Westerners love this beautiful insight.

Yet when you ask a Chinese person if they know it, they all know how
to write danger, and when asked, they all know what each of the
components mean, but most have never stopped to think of the wisdom
and inherent lesson contained therein.

Some times we are too close to things to notice.

Sent from my iPhone – pardon typos
.

Here is a project that seems quite powerful:

…a mesmerizing dialogue between teh children of the perpetrators of the Holocaust and the children of the surivors.  Both live out the Holocaust daily, unable to move forward.  Both finally face the past and are empowered to move on.

The trailer video contained here is worth watching.

I’ve always felt the weight on my shoulders from my Dad’s survival of the Dachau concentration camp.  I cannot escape those shadows. It had never crossed my mind that the children of the perpetrators must have similarly been marked and shaped by that experience.  Very poignant, and the trailer seems to confront the issue with depth and introspection.  It includes the story of a marriage between the son of a survivor and the descendant of a major Nazi criminal.

My friend Andrew McLaughlin had pointed me to this very cool video and this post a while back – re Technology and the White House transition – and I only now got to see it.  The way the new techies in the White House are thinking about government and governance is really innovative – they are literally finding ways to increase transparency, efficiency and value-creation by combining the power of government with technology and entrepreneurial thinking.  Take a look at the idea in minute 1:55:

Nice idea for a social enterprise to build a guerrilla marketing campaign on: