do
thank you um
i'm currently a professor at the
university of colorado boulder
i've also
worked as a writer in advertising and
film
and as a professional
musician and cyclist i usually don't
disclose this much because it's followed
with questions of
what
and or um the comment which is usually
polite which is my you've done a number
of things you've had a varied and
interesting career i think it's really
important to communicate that i've not
had a career i've had a series of
projects that connect
in ways that are too complex to explain
right now
what has happened is that um
i am now also executive director of
what was previously boulder digital
works and is now simply bdw we just
changed the name because we thought it
was really weird to be talking about
digital in 2012 when digital was pretty
much thoroughly integrated by around
2009.
the way that we started
is that i was at that time head of the
advertising department university of
colorado boulder
and we won a lot of awards so we were
approached by a number of different
entities that want to know when we're
going to develop a graduate program
after i did some research into this i
decided that never would have a graduate
program in advertising the world really
didn't need another graduate program in
advertising we were however excelling
and interactive and so that was when i
created bdw at that time really the
interest in bdw was very much
from the advertising industry
and the problem they wanted us to solve
was
the talent problem because an industry
which previously had been organized
pretty strictly around four entities
which is basically you know account
service account planning
and creative and media found itself
suddenly with like 10
other types of people at the table at
the beginning of a project and so what
we looked at was how to solve the talent
problem
uh one getting the right talent and two
keeping the right talent so it's
basically
an acquisition and retention problem
here was the agency response as we
started to explore solutions and some of
the questions around
what digital had done to the industry
the first response was
that generation y is a bunch of
privileged self-entitled
all right we do not like those kids and
they they think they know everything and
of course we do the second response was
well since they love play and they you
know really like
whole life integration of work and play
we'll have beer and foosball in our
offices and that will keep them there
that will attract them and retain them
the third response was simply this
internet has ruined everything
for our business all right and
none of those responses i think are very
very wise or thoughtful
what we did was we created bdw and um
bdw is fundamentally about integration
and it's the integration of technology
design
and entrepreneurism
and the students who come to bdw and
pedro sorrentino who was here earlier
today it was our first international
student he was in our
third class we've actually just
celebrated our third anniversary as of
october
and um the students who come to bdw are
people who want to change their lives
and we talk about pretty well because
our anthem then and now is still being
start here change everything and these
are people who have seen the
possibilities of you know full-on you
know integration of digital environments
and physical environments be tremendous
and then
be received with a pretty resounding
thud from a lot of the worlds where they
had been working as pedro talked this
morning he had a good job but he did not
see a future that he desired in that job
he did he thought he has much greater
potential and he actually actually does
and has already shown that uh where do
they come from everywhere we've had
students from
currently have students from india we
have students from switzerland we've had
students from sweden
um
china and so on and what we're curious
about is how they find out about us
because we don't really publicize
ourselves that well and it's basically
tells me there's a tremendous need for
this type of type of place where do they
go this is the irony of the entire
program um if they go to agencies they
don't stay
and uh you know they typically do not go
to agencies and um we have for example
one one student who began at a google
startup
was there for about six months
complained to me that it was rather slow
compared to what we do uh then he went
to an agency
and then he went to adobe as
an experienced designer and he is now
lead experience designer at adobe and
he's 25 years old so this is what we're
seeing with these people we are an
accelerator we rapidly accelerate their
careers
um what i'd like you to do right now is
to
close your eyes for just a minute and
we're going to do a brief exercise and
here's the exercise because we've had a
number of talks earlier today about
about school okay and about
what school was like what school has
been like i'd like you to close your
eyes keep it close for a second and
picture a classroom
picture a classroom and what you'll
probably have is a classroom that could
be from any grade it'll stand out to you
in some way and here's what the
classroom will look like
it will have rows of desks sometimes
fixed to the floor with chairs fixed to
the desk
it will also have windows on one side of
the room typically the left side of the
room
there will be a desk at the front
and there will be a teacher at that desk
often times the desk is raised off the
ground
and what does this say to you you can
open your eyes now all right what does
it say to you is that the message that
this space that this learning space is
communicating is one of order
and authority
order and authority that's what you
learn primarily from the space and that
is really repeated you know throughout
the grades that you have
through especially through elementary
second secondary school
the classroom that i picture
is
a very old classroom extremely tall
ceilings the school that i went to in
elementary school had an old building
and a new building and by the time you
each sixth grade you got to be in the
old building
so it was the sixth grade and um
i was this type of student that
everybody wanted to have my mother
actually talked the school board into
starting me in school at age four and i
was ready and so
my this one day
i was particularly um
engaged in a project i was drawing the
solar system with colored chalk on a
blackboard that covered an entire wall
so i stayed while everyone else went out
to the playground for lunch and
something happened i noticed at one
point that
in our aquarium there was a dead fish
all right and so i don't know why i did
this exactly it wasn't planned out but i
picked up the dead fish
and i tossed the dead fish up
into our lights that were suspended like
inverted like bowls
okay
and
you know i was nine years old i quickly
forgot about it
and i went off to do something else well
it was winter
our windows were to the east that
afternoon it was dark the lights came on
and it wasn't very long until the room
wreaked the fish okay baked fish
and the teacher didn't even ask she just
immediately called me up to the front of
the room
and said why did you do this
and my response was simply i don't know
and i still don't know why did i do it i
don't know because it was there all
right and so then she went to this
response which certainly reinforces the
idea of order and authority and she said
what if everybody did this
and my response was but they don't
and then she said but what if everybody
did this
and my response was they don't and then
in my little brain i immediately started
quantifying and i'm like we have eight
fish now in an aquarium we have 12
lights we have 25 students it's
mathematically impossible for everybody
to do this okay
uh
my life transformed my grade school
career at that moment transformed from
being outstanding student amazing
everybody loved me etc to being
classified as
difficult and disruptive all right
difficult and disruptive and uh
privileges were taken away and so on so
why do i bring this up because since
that date right and i'm not i'm now much
older than i'm going to confess to you
um since that day from that
nine-year-old day
i have been sort of possessed by the
what if everybody problem
all right what if everybody okay
is that really an argument what if
everybody problem it's like our recent
election
of obama thank you uh and everybody's
saying well the washington redskins
whenever the washington redskins lose
the democratic candidate does not win
all right something like that and total
ridiculous thinking and so i was like
what the what if everybody problem but
you have always heard this all right so
what's the problem with internet getting
back to the agency's problem with the
internet and actually all creative
industries especially have suffered from
this because it challenges ownership
what is the problem of digital
technologies digital technologies are
disruptive all right they change
business models that have been
long-standing and the way that money can
flow and how you make money and where
the profit can be it's really a state of
permanent beta and i also found find
this term now permanent beta to be sort
of strange because you know buddhists
have been telling us for centuries eons
that
everything's changing all the time
anyway it's just that i think it's more
obvious now and it's also
more pressing to deal with permanent
beta so the problem really is when we
look at you know the agency problem the
talent problem and so on it really
generates from
from change constant change and rapid
change so
the solution however
is also change
and this is what people do not like to
hear that they will have to change that
institutions will have to change and
it's interesting to me that having
worked in industry but also now working
in education
that education is also a victim of this
type of thinking and i call it
supply-side thinking all right when we
look at consumers uh you know doc
searles who was one of the original
authors of the clue train manifesto
wrote a really interesting piece in the
wall street journal about a month ago
about you know consumer it used to be
supply side to the consumer we gave them
what we had and what was profitable for
us to do
and now they have the power and the
tools to get what they want have the
power to demand what they want it's the
same thing with students it's absolutely
the same things with students in college
they can now get what they need and know
what they need without really doing that
much in a college colleges are really
rigged especially um a research one
institute like university of colorado
and other research one institutes and
please understand i have utmost respect
for research and study and colleges and
what they have done but what we're
seeing is business as usual rather than
addressing the real need of students
students children all of us in fact are
learning machines the challenge is not
to get people to be creative the
challenge is to allow people to remain
creative all right when they're they're
doing work and school
so when i go when i went to the agencies
and i said what you're really looking at
guys is not a recipe do these three
things or these five things and you'll
have it there certainly tactics are
important and you need to you know
implement those tactics but overall what
your challenge here is is it's this
simple and that means it's actually this
difficult is that a creative culture is
a learning culture all right the
creative culture is a learning culture
and what that means and the reason
creatives don't want to go to certain
places it's because they're boring
they're doing boring work the second
reason
that creative people
lead places is they're getting bored
creatives are always about what's new
what's next can i keep learning can i
keep growing
and that really is you know the problem
that we're looking at is yeah i'm sorry
you just have to be more interesting and
and more stimulating and create a
culture that rewards
not
necessarily in terms of bonuses and so
on but rather rewards in terms of doing
work that feels good to you and you yeah
this is mine i'm happy about it and i
want to do more so that's really what
we're looking at um
so what i'm thinking of is that
the the real
conclusion here all right is that
you know how do you do this
how do you do this and of course because
it's finally
all about me um it's finally basically
that the what if we flip this what if we
go the what if everybody's solution a
problem whether the what if everybody's
solution did this take it to the
what if everybody solution okay what if
we took it to a what if everybody's
solution one if we said you know it's
not creative's not just something you do
over here
all right learning is not something you
do and then you're done with it and you
move on to your careers and your lives
and so on what if we say lifelong
learning all right because lifelong
learning will be synonymous with
creative all right and there's nothing i
have a number of friends who they're
like i'm going to make a bunch of money
and i'm going to do what i really want
it never ever works okay it doesn't work
i'm going to make money and then i'm
going to do something i'm sorry you've
you're way out of practice at this point
you're way out of practice so
it's the what if everybody's solution
what if everybody insisted on doing work
that was personally rewarding for them
okay
and it solved problems all right the
solid problems and this is the other
really
screwed up thing about people thinking
about the way they think about creative
creative is not going off you know and
sitting in the pair trees and talking to
angels it's not going off to some
isolated place and discovering yourself
creative is problem solving all right
that's what we're really looking at is
we've got this thing here and it's
there is an issue uh how can we fix it
or how can we change it or you know what
is a workable solution and one of the
things we do at bdw is we're very agile
we look at something but that's not
working let's change it all right rather
than sitting there and steadfastly
defending our practice even though it's
been done for a long time well now it
doesn't work and that's kind of the
proof
of
what we do so what i'd like you now to
do for a moment is
close your eyes again
and
approach change and all the problems
we're seeing around these sorts of
disrupted technologies
and imagine that disruption as a
solution
and see what starts to pop to mind okay
because
truly imagine your own learning culture
imagine you know your own creative
culture but especially imagine you're
learning spaces and what i'm going to
point out to you is that the most
profound powerful and practical learning
space that you'll ever confront is your
own mind all right
keep it open keep it flexible keep it
hungry keep it curious
thank you
you