Just last week Google and some of the world’s leading musician’s performed what could be the first global symphony orchestra concert at the Mecca of music, Carnegie Hall in NYC.  For the most part, critics were amazed at how this all came together last Wednesday night, April 15, 2009.  But some dinosaur-like music pundits of the “eastern seaboard” didn’t get it, don’t get it and applied their antiquated views upon this new form of innovative musical programming. This behavior is reminiscent of many forms of life on earth today, they are extinct but they don’t know it yet. Quotes included: “If there is something about this concert that I should like can someone tell me?” here. 

The world is flat, but apparently old media holdovers don’t know it yet, and Google, undoubtedly the most innovative company of the last decade, put up significant resources to again ‘let the world decide’ how they’d like to engage and participate. In the realm of music and art, I always love what Andy Warhol once said, “Art is what you can get away with.” That of course does not mean that I like to listen to bad music, however, music is a form of art.

This whole scenario is a saga of east and west coast and why Silicon Valley ended up geographically where it is. After living in California now twenty years since moving from Boston, I can tell you exactly why. Cultures of tolerance and diversity have been present here a lot longer and they stimulate innovation by fostering trust and tolerance of other cultures and backgrounds. The startup culture of California also respects those who try and fail; this means that you learned - and you acquired experience by failing. That - in my mind - is the secret of Silicon Valley, in addition to its presence on the Pacific Rim and the abundance of sunlight.

You might be thinking: why is this important for businesses? Rewind back to the top ten characteristics of startup employees and the importance of culture on business and innovation. You can’t make huskies run like greyhounds; I have said this many times before. There is no question that ten years ago you were more likely to find the startup talent in the valley, now it can be anywhere and/or virtual. The YouTube [World] Symphony is an excellent example of this.

Companies and their HR departments are challenged worldwide to build collaborative innovative cultures, in an effort to make this happen they still set up offices in Silicon Valley. As I mentioned in an earlier post, in the late 1990’s I began consulting with the world’s largest software company and the question that came up continuously was what Google’s culture was like? How did they architect it and why was it so innovative? This is still the subject of many articles in the management press and for the most part what I see is today is “rear view mirror thought leader analysis.” My answer to that company was always simple.  Google established a unique, altruistic, open and transparent culture of the brightest people and did not assign a profit and loss to KPI to each and every unit and/or member. This drove their innovation from within, but today Google realizes that it needs to drive innovation from outside in and it is well on its way. Check out GoogleOcean and the YouTube Symphony.

The Personality of Fish:  

Portuguese Man O War & Alturism  
When I think of the ocean, I see a river of rivers intertwining, intermixing and interacting together to form the most vibrant ecosystem in this solar system. We are dependant on the ocean for the air that we breathe and the interaction of ocean-atmospheric interface creates our weather. Disruptive forces such as warm core rings equal to the size of all the New England states sometimes spin off of river-like currents such as the Gulf Stream. Discovered by Dr. Peter Weibe in the 1980’s, warm core rings are unpredictable and can devastate year classes of fish during their planktonic stages. No one knew the rivers of the oceans better than the early explorers who followed their currents and winds to the new world.

Dr. Weibe leveraged the latest and greatest advances in infrared satellite imagery to discover the warm core rings and his research was perhaps some of the most innovative in modern oceanography. As with many of my posts we venture again into the alien world of biological oceanography and why warm core rings are important to our cod and haddock populations. It turns out that these warm core rings interact with the closed gyre ecosystem that contains larval cod and haddock populations. With each new river or current come new temperature and salinity levels and a whole new host of potential predators such as our jelly fish and siphonophore friends. The Portuguese Man O War is one of the world’s greatest examples of symbiotic altruism. Every cell is designed for a specific purpose, whether its bouncy, sailing, and/or eating they are all focused on the survival the best interest of the whole organism. When the currents in the Gulf Stream slow the Man O War can increase the CO2 level inside its sail to catch the wind.

Millions of Man O Wars glide with the Gulf Stream originating somewhere off the North African coast and follow it up the Eastern US seaboard where they collide with the cold waters of the Labrador Current. When they encounter larval fish and plankton populations they can wreak havoc by leveraging their conveyor like tails of nematocyst laden tentacles into an eating machine. At the University I had the great opportunity to study with Dr. E. O Wilson, who spent his life studying the sociobiology of ants, which like termites are perhaps the most altruistic of all terrestrial animals. The altruistic assemblage of cells in the Man O War makes it one of the ocean’s greatest innovators and most advanced of our gelatinous friends. Perhaps altruism was central to Google’s thinking as it assembled an innovative culture that is changing the way we see the world. Until next time I wish you great marketing and selling in the millennium.