• Hi, I’m Brad Abare

  I'm a make-it-happen guy working with big idea people. I design teams and orchestrate strategy so that great ideas I believe in get done.
  
  I am Jamaica's husband, Foursquare's comm director, Personality's founder, and a catalyst for CFCC.
  
  
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Roger L. Martin and Jennifer Riel wrote an excellent article for BusinessWeek, “Innovation’s Accidental Enemies.” They suggest an alternate path to the two defaults we typically choose when it comes to filtering new ideas.

When faced with a new idea, the boardroom impulse is to ask for proof in one of two flavors: deductive and inductive. With deduction, we apply a widely held rule. With induction, we develop a new rule from a wide range of data. In both cases, we use existing information to understand the issue in play. But for breakthroughs, there is no rule or pool of past data to provide certainty.

Instead of using deductive and inductive logic to reason with a new idea, the authors suggest a third form: abductive logic.

Instead, when facing an anomalous situation, we can turn to a third form of logic: abductive logic, the logic of what could be. To use abduction, we need to creatively assemble the disparate experiences and bits of data that seem relevant in order to make an inference—a logical leap—to the best possible conclusion.

In other words, abductive logic suggests we focus less on what we know and more on what we don’t. “Asking what could be true—and jumping into the unknown—is critical to innovation. Nurturing the ideas that result, rather than killing them, can be the tricky part.”

As content becomes more and more populous, the gap between what exists and what exists that I’m interested in will continue to grow larger. Google search has been a convenient distraction because it has taught us to believe that a robust search engine is all we need to deliver all we need. Unfortunately, search is only good for me if I take the initiative to search. It doesn’t come looking for me. At least not yet.

Content creators are everywhere. From writers, photographers, designers and musicians to YouTube maestros and Twitter provocateurs, content is being generated everywhere and it seems by everyone (I’m adding to the noise by writing this blog post). The beauty of more content is that it encourages more creators to take part in the joy of creation. It’s a natural part of the way we were… created.

The future, I believe, will be seized by those who figure out the best way to curate content, not just create content. I call them Content Curators (apparently Rohit does too). Content Curators are the people who sort and sift through the glut of content and organize it in a way that is relevant to a desired filter.

Amazon gets this. Every time I purchase something from Amazon, my habits are recorded and compared to give recommendations that I might also appreciate, based on others who enjoy similar combinations and/or content that is related. A similar logic exists behind iTunes’ Genius Mixes. Magazines are good at this too. They provide a specific frame (sports, marketing, sales, cooking, design, news, etc.) that all of their content filters through.

Content Curators will also become “branded” because people will be hungry to have someone else do their sorting and sifting.

Our dependency on content creators will become less and less as our dependancy on curators becomes more and more.

Maybe it’s time to brush up on those mixtape skills and start curating!

I’m of the persuasion that all of us are born with a raison d’être. Outside of the collective vision or values we may aspire to as a country or community, or even the ‘higher calling’ we may sense from religion, I think each of us is uniquely positioned and poised to pursue a specific purpose. For me, I think this reason for being is found at the intersection of God’s will, my strengths and weaknesses and the resound of current community.

Unfortunately, I know of too many people who would use their vocation to describe their calling. It’s an easy mistake, especially for people who have jobs that are NGO or church-related, in the social service sector or even cause-related companies. When you’re working for an organization that has a strong sense of do-gooder-ness, it’s easy to slip into the mindset that this is also your reason for being.

However, if your reason for being is too interconnected to your vocation, how could you ever stop working there? What if you’re not supposed to be working there anymore? I know of many who fear they would have nowhere else to go if they were without their current job. Instead of searching deep within their soul to define or rediscover their reason for being, they use their vocation to define their calling. Their competency has defined their call.

Forgive me, but if I defined my reason for being solely by my competencies, my purpose in life would be pretty drab.

I’m not suggesting we remove the crossover nature of our vocations and our calling. I love it with they intersect. I’m only suggesting that we be cautious in how we define our own sense of purpose.

History is full of people who have risked their lives for something greater than themselves. From revolutionary starters to missionary martyrs, risk doesn’t exist unless there is an upside and a downside. And the greater the risk, the wider the gap is between the two.

If I give you five dollars with the promise that you’ll turn it into ten, the most I’m out is five bucks if you squander it. But the most I gain is five bucks if you managed it properly.

When it comes to putting your life on the line for something, the stakes must be pretty high. If the potential for loss is your life, the potential for gain has to be that much greater.

It’s difficult to compete with someone who is willing to give their life for someone or something.

The only way to really compete with someone who is willing to risk their life would be to risk your life. This is why war is such a powerful tool.

People who are unwilling to sacrifice their lives must accept that the upside of their minimized risk will never be what it could be if they were willing to sacrifice life.

Perhaps this is what Jesus was getting at when he said “If you try to hold on to your life, it will slip through your fingers; if you let go of your life, you’ll keep it” (The Voice).

I wish we spent a lot less time and money trying to avoid death’s greeting, and instead found something actually worth dying for.

They did.
And so did they.

I know a few friends on sabbatical right now. Having never been on one myself, I’ve always kind of frowned at the idea. Seems like a luxury for rich people, or a last-resort for someone on the verge of a meltdown. Either way, I used to think that sabbaticals were for people who didn’t know how to pace themselves appropriately.

I’ve since grown up a little.

I’d really like a sabbatical.

Daniel Pink tells of Stefan Sagmeister and the one-year sabbatical that Sagmeister takes every seven years. He makes a lot of sense.

I’ve been in my current “state” for seven years this November. Seems about right. Perhaps if and when I transition from my current role/responsibilities/season?

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”
—Attributed to Mark Twain

The April 6 Time cover story by Kurt Andersen is yet another addition to my growing collection of essays on excess.

Andersen’s opening line is as bold as it is incriminating: “Don’t pretend we didn’t see this coming for a long, long time. He continues…

In the early 1980s, around the time Ronald Reagan became President and Wall Street’s great modern bull market began, we started gambling (and winning!) and thinking magically. From 1980 to 2007, the median price of a new American home quadrupled. The Dow Jones industrial average climbed from 803 in the summer of 1982 to 14,165 in the fall of 2007. From the beginning of the ’80s through 2007, the share of disposable income that each household spent servicing its mortgage and consumer debt increased 35%. Back in 1982, the average household saved 11% of its disposable income. By 2007 that number was less than 1%.

The same zeitgeist made gambling ubiquitous: until the late ’80s, only Nevada and New Jersey had casinos, but now 12 states do, and 48 have some form of legalized betting. It’s as if we decided that Mardi Gras and Christmas are so much fun, we ought to make them a year-round way of life. And we started living large literally as well as figuratively. From the beginning to the end of the long boom, the size of the average new house increased by about half. Meanwhile, the average American gained about a pound a year, so that an adult of a given age is now at least 20 lb. heavier than someone the same age back then. In the late ’70s, 15% of Americans were obese; now a third are.

The rest of the article is a great re-cap of how we’ve gotten to where we are, and what “The Great Reset” means to the way we live.

I’ve been thinking about the idea of ownership. I own a lot of things:

• My house and its contents
• My stocks and mutual funds
• My car
• My computer and cell phone
• My land/property
• My business

But what does it mean to own this stuff? Do we really ever own anything?

Technically, the bank owns my home until it’s paid off. I can’t take anything I own with me when I die. And the value of anything I own is only as good as the value others ascribe to it.

What would happen if I started looking at things, not as stuff to own, but stuff to steward?

Humor me for a moment and think about the implications of this. If we stopped thinking “ownership” and instead thought “stewardship,” would I…

• Cling less tightly to things?
• Begin to think about who else can benefit from this stuff?
• Think more about people?
• Consider future generations and their benefit?

Vaclav Havel, in a New York Times op-ed suggests a similar posture:

“Maybe we should start considering our sojourn on earth as a loan. There can be no doubt that for the past hundred years as least, Europe and the United States have been running up a debt, and now other parts of the world are following their example. Nature is issuing warnings [in the form of climate changes] that we must not only stop the debt from growing but start to pay it back.”

I’ve been a little giddy lately about the barrage of articles coming from mainstream press about living on less. I’ve excerpted several of my favorites below. The article titles alone are enough to weave a tapestry of titillating tales toward a generation in need of being tipped. Consider Scarcity Culture, Squeeze Play and Luxury Shame to name a few.

The De Beers ad to the right is one example of an advertiser’s attempt to ride this wave of conspicuous consumption and guilty pleasure. I’m not convinced it will work.

Jamaica and I have been on this life of less journey for a while now, and we’re convinced more than ever it’s a commitment, not a fad.

Excerpt from Newsweek’s Luxury Shame by Johnnie L. Roberts

Across America’s upper strata, rich folk like Hirtenstein are experiencing an unfamiliar emotion: luxury shame. The late Coco Chanel, doyenne of 20th century fashion, long ago said that luxury is “the opposite of vulgarity,” not of poverty. But in these recessionary times, it seems vulgar to flaunt one’s luxurious lifestyle. And so the wealthy are going blingless and eschewing the spending sprees of the recent Gilded Age, giving new meaning to the phrase “embarrassment of riches.” The trend is horrible news for the $175-billion global luxury market, which is already absorbing the blows of plummeting personal wealth. (Read full article)

Excerpt from Adweek’s Squeeze Play by Noreen O’Leary

American consumers have no recollection of life in the Great Depression. Not only are most simply too young to remember it, but for the last quarter century they’ve lived without extended economic hardship, becoming ever more acquisitive in a world of instant gratification and easy credit… This is not a normal recession. This is a tectonic, structural shift, a global realignment,” says Umair Haque, director of Havas Media Lab. “The post-war industrial era was the era of production. Now we’re seeing the birth of the real 21st-century economy and marketing has to adapt. We’ll see a world where consumption [will] slow — especially in developed countries where there will be a shift from consuming to saving — and production will slow.” (Read full article)

Excerpt from LA Times’s Scarcity Culture by Reed Johnson

We shopped. Then we dropped. Then we started making culture again — dancing on the rubble of our own excesses, stitching together art from the ragbag of our desires. Every generation or so, throughout modern American history, the culture of hardship has followed hard on the heels of the culture of consumption and prosperity. The financial shifts and shafts of the late 1800s spurred Mark Twain’s skeptical wit (“He is now fast rising from affluence to poverty”) and Thomas Nast’s savage caricatures. In the 1930s, the banks panicked, the Champagne bubbles burst and our ancestors went from black tie to bib overalls, dance crazes to down-home hootenannies, “Blue Skies” to “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and “decadent” modern art to the reassuring pictorial homilies of Grant Wood and Norman Rockwell. (Read full article)

Reed Johnson goes on to say that “In yearning for a ‘culture of restraint’ and a spirit of shared sacrifice, Americans really are yearning for national unity, i.e. community.” University of Texas professor Richard Pells points out that “the mass culture of the 1930s and ’40s (when 75% of all Americans went to the movies at least once a week) has been balkanized and splintered into a thousand niche markets. “We don’t have the sense of a shared common culture that we did in the ’30s or after World War II,” says Pells, author of Radical Visions & American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years.

Here’s to Less.

“Mine honour is my life, both grow in one. Take honour from me, and my life is done. Then, dear my liege, mine honour let me try; In that I live, and for that I will die.” —William Shakespeare

I’ve been thinking a lot about honor. It seems to be in short supply these days. And by honor I mean the authentic sacrificial preference manifested in the esteem and distinction of someone other than you. The kind of honor that costs something, not the obligatory recognition that often accompanies shiny medallions or trophies. Not the stuffy ceremonies where you lose track of whose turn it is to back-pat who.

A little over a month ago I had to let three people go from my Foursquare team. Three people out of a team of 17. There were 20+ people let go across the organization, and all were due to company-wide budget cuts. Although necessary and fiscally responsible, the loss was painful. I realize Foursquare is not alone and by no means unique. Reductions in workforce appear to be a daily headline in this tough economy.

Which brings me back to honor.

The ancient Greek concepts of honor (honour) were not just about the exaltation of the one receiving honor, but also the shaming of the one overcome by the act of hubris. In ancient Greece, hubris referred to actions which, intentionally or not, shamed and humiliated the victim. This concept of honor is like a zero-sum game. In other words, according to these ancient Greece concepts, honor can’t be manufactured, manipulated, or made. Honor must come from sacrifice.

I want to be the kind of guy that thinks twice before honoring people. Because if I am going to truly honor someone, it means I must truly sacrifice something.

Our three teammates were let go with little honor. From auditor demands and HR policies, we let protocol get in the way of people. And when protocol and policies precede people, honor can become a commodity.

It’s not too late to honor our former comrades, but it’s going to cost us something. Because if it didn’t cost something, it wouldn’t be honor.

What would my life look like if every single thought or action I had was filtered through the lens of “other people”?

• Education would be less about me acquiring knowledge and more about who I can share this with.

• Personal budgeting would be less about what I need and more about what I can give away.
• Marriage would be less about my needs and more about her needs.
• Business decisions would be less about the bottom line and more about the impact on my employees and clients (and their families, friends, etc.).
• Entertainment would be less about my thrills and more about inviting others to share in the joy.
• Praying would be less about what I want and more about what God wants.
• Church would be less about what it does for me and more about what it does for others.
• Sports would be less about competition and more about winning together.
• Government would be less about preserving and more about serving.

I know it sounds sort of utopian.
But a homeless Guy from Nazareth seemed to get it right.
I’d like to do the same.

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