Are You Indispensable?

On the morning of February 4, PSFK will host a Good Ideas Salon at Soho House with special guest Seth Godin. Good Ideas Salons are designed to bring likeminds together to share ideas and positivity around certain subjects.

For this intimate event, Seth will present ideas from his latest book Linchpin, and will openly discuss with the audience their experiences as linchpins at work. PSFK will also orchestrate some (opt-in) match making where attendees will have the opportunity to meet peers who can share knowledge with them and in turn become indispensable at work.

Who Should Attend?

Linchpins invent, lead (regardless of title), connect others, make things happen, and create order out of chaos. They figure out what to do when there’s no rule book. They make their customers and peers happy. They love their work, pour their best selves into it, and turn it into a kind of art.

Purchase tickets here.

Get Seth’s new book Linchpin here.

With Collaboration as its motto, the Good Ideas Salon São Paulo was the first to happen in South America. About 60 people attended the event, which brought together speakers with radically different backgrounds to discuss the theme.

Marta Schonhorst, a former Brazilian Olympic rhythmic gymnast, exposed her experience on how collaboration is fundamental to the development of sports, particularly given the synchronized dynamic so particular to her sport. Ricardo Freire, a travel blogger, spoke of how his readers have became co-authors of the content he publishes, limiting his role to curator within a highly collaborative information network. Augusto de Franco, a self-denominated “Netweaver”, explained some of his research and experiments with horizontal social networks and how their configuration represents an antithesis to a hierarchic, command and control, centralized structure. Ari Raynsford, a PhD in Nuclear Physics with a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering, both from MIT, is a specialist in Integral Vision due to his extensive studies of Ken Wilber’s work. He stated that social networks are potentially an evolutionary experience with a greater human conscience, arguing that nobody detains all the truth and only through an integral model that accepts collaboration between individuals can we continue to evolve.

At one point Ari said the evolutionary process is inherently hierarchic, because as you transcend from one level of consciousness to the next, new elements become part of your rationale, rendering the “system” increasingly more complex. Augusto offers a contrasting view, making clear that he does not believe in esoteric explanations nor does he believe human beings exist in different evolutionary stages. If this were the case, society would legitimatize the power of one individual over another, and that is not what collaboration and horizontal social networks are all about. Ari then said that while this vision may be partially true, it certainly does not constitute the whole truth. Hierarchy and human evolutionary stages in the negative form that Augusto sees them, Ari says, originate from a misconception caused by our present level of consciousness, which is insufficient, and we are thus unable to judge nor properly understand subjective matters through an objective prism. Quite deep and complex, to say the least.

Wikis, crowdsourcing, democracy, spirituality, blogs and grassroots movements: the discussion became deeper and broader with new methods and tools for collaborative models mentioned. If there’s one key takeaway to remember, it’s that there are a number of ways to structure, manage and sustain collaborative models, and that no one model is necessarily the best for everyone.

The event took place at The Hub, a collaborative and collective workspace. In their own words:

We’ve been working across four continents, and 12 cities to create places for people who want to change things. This is the ambition. We set out to create places that borrow from the best of a member’s club, an innovation agency, a serviced office and a think-tank to create a very different kind of innovation environment. Places with all the tools and trimmings needed to grow and develop new ventures. Places to access experience, knowledge, finance and markets. And above all, places for experience and encounter, full of diverse people doing amazing things. We call these places Hubs. In many ways we’re just getting started. And we’d like you to be part of it.

The next Good Ideas Salon, São Paulo will take place 1Q 2010 on ETHICS.

Good Ideas Salons

In partnership with Nissan, PSFK held an event on October 20 2009 to discuss the future of Pure Living in Tokyo. Piers Fawkes, founder of PSFK, moderated a conversation with an international panel of experts and covered topics that included sustainability, design, urban planning, technology and zero-emission mobility.

Before the event, PSFK spoke with Hiromi Matsubara about her views on pure living.

To catch all the images, video and discussion around this event – visit www.psfk.com/pureliving

In partnership with Nissan, PSFK held an event on October 20 2009 to discuss the future of Pure Living in Tokyo. Piers Fawkes, founder of PSFK, moderated a conversation with an international panel of experts and covered topics that included sustainability, design, urban planning, technology and zero-emission mobility.

Before the event, PSFK spoke with Rie Azuma about her views on pure living.

To catch all the images, video and discussion around this event – visit www.psfk.com/pureliving

In partnership with Nissan, PSFK held an event on October 20 2009 to discuss the future of Pure Living in Tokyo. Piers Fawkes, founder of PSFK, moderated a conversation with an international panel of experts and covered topics that included sustainability, design, urban planning, technology and zero-emission mobility.

Before the event, PSFK spoke with Danny Choo about his views on pure living.

To catch all the images, video and discussion around this event – visit www.psfk.com/pureliving

In partnership with Nissan, PSFK held an event on October 20 2009 to discuss the future of Pure Living in Tokyo. Piers Fawkes, founder of PSFK, moderated a conversation with an international panel of experts and covered topics that included sustainability, design, urban planning, technology and zero-emission mobility.

Just before the event, we spoke to Marc Alt (Green Visionary, Founder at Marc Alt + Partners) about his thoughts on ‘Pure Living’ and how he saw it manifesting itself in the world today.

To catch all the images, video and discussion around this event – visit www.psfk.com/pureliving

In partnership with Nissan, PSFK held an event on October 20 2009 to discuss the future of Pure Living in Tokyo. Piers Fawkes, founder of PSFK, moderated a conversation with an international panel of experts and covered topics that included sustainability, design, urban planning, technology and zero-emission mobility.

Just before the event, we spoke to Mark Dytham (Creative Catalyst, Partner at Klein Dytham architecture, and Founder of Pecha Kucha) about his thoughts on ‘Pure Living’ and how he saw it manifesting itself in the world today.

To catch all the images, video and discussion around this event – visit www.psfk.com/pureliving

In partnership with Nissan, PSFK held an event on October 20 2009 to discuss the future of Pure Living in Tokyo. Piers Fawkes, founder of PSFK, moderated a conversation with an international panel of experts and covered topics that included sustainability, design, urban planning, technology and zero-emission mobility.

Video of the talk can be found (and shared) below. Left to right, the experts on the panel were Mark Dytham (Creative Catalyst, Partner at Klein Dytham architecture and Founder of Pecha Kucha), Peter Rojas (Technology Guru, Founder at gdgt), and Marc Alt (Green Visionary, Founder at Marc Alt + Partners).

The panel discussed a variety of ideas from resource sharing to product life cycles, as well as different feedback mechanisms that can guide sustainable everyday behavior. They also fleshed out a new vision of electric cars as a kind of gadget and mobile battery, exploring how our relationship to cars is changing as they become a mobile infrastructure and more of a service rather than a product.

To catch all the images, video and discussion around this event – visit www.psfk.com/pureliving

Last Friday at the Art Directors Club in New York, PSFK sat down for a panel discussion on contemporary collaboration with Mike Brown of Virgin Group, Ben Lerer, founder of Thrillist, Sam Lessin, CEO of drop.io, and Nate Westheimer, VP Product, anyClip.com & Organizer, NY Tech Meetup. The afternoon’s talk centered around creative collaboration in the realm of business and entrepreneurship, and how both creative individuals and business-oriented entities can profit from working around shared interests.

From the discussion emerged a common sentiment, introduced by Lerer, that smaller creative groups need to take advantage of and leverage what they have over larger companies via a bartering process of sorts. Westheimer conceived of this bartering as a sort of exchange between small and large, whereby smaller firms trade technological and intellectual innovation in exchange for the resources and legitimacy that only a large company can bestow.

Indeed, Lessin described the entire entrepreneurial process as one of leveraging—most succinctly, as taking nothing and leveraging it into something meaningful, more often than not employing technology to do so. It is this something-from-nothing endeavor that can be used to establish a fruitful collaborative relationship with a larger group. Finally, Lerer cautioned that throughout this bartering process, smaller groups ought not be so capricious as to devalue their work through their enthusiasm for collaboration. Small innovators would be better served letting their work go unsold than to sell it for free or at too great a discount—above all, creative independents ought to value their work fairly, both to themselves and collaborators.

Below is footage of the entire panel discussion.

Good Ideas Salons

[images via Dave Pinter]

This past January PSFK held Good Ideas Salon in London, bringing together the most forward-thinking tastemakers, innovators, and experts from around the world to discuss key areas steering innovation and opportunity. The last panel of the day focused on Good Ideas Through Collaboration, where Colin Nagy (PSFK / Attention) moderated a talk between Pat Connor (BBC), Jeremy Ettinghausen (Penguin), Sophie Howarth (The School of Life), and Simon Waldman (The Guardian).

While the idea of collaboration is nothing new, the way we use it are still being developed and reinterpreted. Jeremy Ettinghausen noted that collaboration is relatively new in relation to corporations, who are currently struggling with the concept and may be afraid of outsiders. While people are already comfortable collaborating and working together on things they’re passionate about, the concept of collaboration is dawning on corporations and the media.

Collaborators drive innovation through their ability and willingness to share and cultivate ideas, and through third party tools, anyone can find a way to do what they want to do. But, Simon Waldman argued, successful collaboration is really about the ideas, not the technology.

While the collaborative process has its obvious merits, there is always the possibility of exploitation. The panel shared its advice for best practices, such as distinguishing between users creating for the benefit of other users and users creating to benefit a corporation.