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.

On August 20th, PSFK and The Guardian presented a Good Ideas Salon at the Soho House in NYC, which focused on the past events, present issues and future possibilities of advertising. Moderated by George Parker of AdScam, the salon was split into two different panels.

The second part of the discussion features Dominico Vitale (Founder, PI&C), Gill Linton (Founder, The Joneses), and Alain Sylvain (Managing Director, RedScout), discussing the importance of creative strategy, the industry’s lack of connection with consumers, the use and over-use of terms such as “the big idea” and “branding”, and accountability. Watch the discussion below.

See part 1 here.

On August 20th, PSFK and The Guardian presented a Good Ideas Salon at the Soho House in NYC, which focused on the past events, present issues and future possibilities of advertising. Moderated by George Parker of AdScam, the salon was split into two different panels.

Part one featured industry veterans Curvin O’ Reilly, Tom Messner (Bonaccolta Messner), and John Garland (Garland/Berjis Consulting), discussing the advent of holding companies, Saatchi & Saatchi, and the fact of the advertising profession remaining the same despite seismic changes to the media landscape. Watch the video of the presentation below- the second part will be posted tomorrow.

Our roving photographer Dave Pinter caught a lot of the action at our recent Good Ideas Salon as we mixed entrepreneurs and freelance creative professionals in a room together.

The gallery is on Flickr.

Thanks to everyone who attended. And if you’d like yo host your own Good Ideas Salon, drop Hedyeh Parsia a line at hedyeh@psfk.com for more details.

Good Ideas Salons

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]

In November, PSFK hosted Good Ideas in Design. Led by Dave Pinter (PSFK/GRID2 International), along with design experts including Craig Dubitsky (The Kind Group), Jill Fehrenbacher (Inhabitat), John Fiorelli (Cut and Paste), and Peter Semmelhack (Bug Labs), the panel discussed innovations they anticipate on seeing more of in the field of modular design.

Filmed in December 2008, we took our Good Idea Salon to Naked’s office space, where a packed audience sat in on our panel discussion about collaboration. Moderated by Colin Nagy (Attention/PSFK), the panel discussed innovations in how businesses, organizations and ordinary people are working together in new ways. The panel included Amit Gupta (Jelly/Photojojo), Andrew Hoppin (NASA), John Geraci (Outside.In/DIYCity), and Matthew Stinchcomb (Etsy).

Filmed in December 2008, this Good Ideas Salon focused on Digital, exploring new ways in which individuals and brands are storing, sharing, and archiving their online narratives online. The panel, moderated by Piers Fawkes (PSFK), included Claire Hyland (Electric Artists), Johanna Beyenbach (Naked), Mike Arauz (Undercurrent), and Noah Brier (Barbarian Group) and touched upon a range of topics spanning from the evolution of virtual identities and collaboration to mobile technologies and the relivening of analog through digital.

Held in December 2008, this Good Ideas Salon provided an interesting discussion around social media and the struggle between transparency and professionalism. Moderated by Colin Nagy (PSFK/Attention), the panel included Darren Paul (Night Agency), Faris Yakob (McCann), Caroline McCarthy (CNET), and David Art Wales (Ministry of Culture/Prudent Boozers).

Going forward, we want to ask our friends if they want to run salons in their local cities on or around the same date. The main aim is to get people to share their Good Ideas first with their local audiences and secondly with a global audience via video on this site.

Hopefully, we’ll get to a stage where different folks from around the globe discuss the same subject – and then users of this site can see what people from all over think on certain broad subjects.

If you’d like to host a Good Ideas Salon in your city – please read the About & FAQ pages on the Good Ideas Salons site and connect with the community manager via the contact information there.

Thanks,

Piers Fawkes
Founder of PSFK