Ideas are amazing. For one thing, they have infinite inventory: if I share an idea with you, that doesn’t take it away from me. For another, they are alive: your response to my idea grows both of our imaginations. And for a third, they are the source of everything in our world. Carl Sandburg said, “Nothing happens unless first a dream,” but what is a dream if not an idea?

These properties of ideas are why I get so excited when I see people whose ideas are in alignment with ours. The more of us in alignment, the bigger our dream becomes. And so I just about fell off my chair when I read Cracking the Green Code from John Marshall Roberts. Roberts assesses why people’s statements about the environment differ from their behaviors — and his assessment describes with exactitude how the Web Genome Project works and why purpose and values can be used to predict behavior. Here’s an excerpt:

Although inherently dynamic and non-linear in nature, a person’s daily behavioral choices are patterned by their core values—those fundamental beliefs, assumptions, and aspirations that they use to make sense of the world around them. A person’s core values act as a gravitational force of consciousness, literally shaping the way the world looks to them, and in turn how they look to the world vis-a-vis their day-to-day behaviors.

To illustrate by way of analogy, imagine spinning a marble around a bathroom sink. At any given point it would be difficult to predict the marble’s exact location, because its movements are somewhat chaotic and random, fluctuating wildly based upon even the most minute textural gradients in the sink surface. In fact, even the most learned physicist would have a terrible time devising an equation that would predict this marble’s exact path. Yet, anyone with an ounce of common sense can easily predict where the marble will end up eventually—right down the drain.

This metaphorical drain shapes our marble’s path in the same way that a person’s core values shape their thoughts and behaviors. Understand a person’s value systems and you will grasp the size, shape and contours of the mental sink around which the myriad “marbles” of their everyday thoughts are endlessly pulled as they strive make sense of the data their five senses send them.

Roberts’ analogy is a wonderful description of how the Web Genome Project works, and why we can personalize search results without knowing anything about your history. We don’t care about your history — what you’ve done or where you’ve been. We care about the sink — what shapes you?

So how do we get an understanding of the sink? We emulate physicists and doctors.

Physicists often work by inference: the only way we know about black holes, for example, is by observing the behavior of matter near them. Doctors do the same thing: we search for antibodies to tell us whether someone has a disease instead of searching for the disease itself.

So too with the Web Genome Project. We all have a numeric profile, and we’ve mapped a certain number of links with their own profiles. The numbers are sticky in both directions: as you click on a link, its number gets integrated into yours and vice versa. No retention of clickstream, no way to know where you’ve been, just the image of the sink that guides who you are.

Thank you, John Marshall Roberts! Thank you, Web Genome Project participants! Together, we are creating the topography of our online universe.

It’s a brave new world.

Alex Madison and Lisa Harmon from Email Insider have written two articles (one and two) on the shift from valuing left-brain attributes to valuing right-brain attributes. The pieces were inspired by the new Daniel H. Pink book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule The Future.

Say Madison and Harmon, ‘In his innovative book… Daniel H. Pink argues that our world has shifted from “left brain” dominance to the reign of right-brain thinkers: designers, inventors, teachers and storytellers. He deems this era “The Conceptual Age.”‘

Bravo. I’m delighted that empathy, play and meaning are coming into their own. Likewise, it’s about time businesses recognized the importance of design, story and symphony. Bring on the right brain!

At the same time, I find it interesting that the book is (probably intentionally) titled, ‘A Whole New Mind’. I haven’t read the book, so I’m not presuming to rebut its contents; instead, I’d like to explore a bit our human tendency to polarize.

When we polarize, we seek an extreme. We reduce the world to distinct categories, and then we elect from those categories: left or right, male or female, conventional or organic. We succumb to the ‘tyranny of the OR’ described by Collins and Porras in Built to Last.

The world we live in provides ample fuel for this tendency. It obligingly splits itself up into night and day, north and south, up and down. It practically begs us to choose sides.

If we pay close attention, though, we start to notice what philosophers and poets and gurus have observed throughout the millenia: that no thing exists without its opposite. Without night, day is meaningless; without north, south is meaningless; without up, down is meaningless. Yin contains yang and yang contains yin. Our world is the wholeness that contains all of our extremes.

The left brain — that logical, rational, emotionless creature — is what gives us the power to analyze, to reason, to plan, to calculate. It allows us to pay our bills, buy our houses, send our kids to college. None of these things are bad things.

The right brain — that creative, playful, feeling creature — is what gives us the power to explore, to dream, to invent, to transform. It allows us to find meaning, intuit connections, appreciate beauty. None of these things are bad things.

I prefer to live a life in which I can appreciate beauty AND pay the bills. I prefer to live a life in which I can plan ahead AND experience spontaneous joy. I don’t believe these things are mutually exclusive.

The research done by VortexDNA, whose technology powers the Web Genome Project, shows that companies that pay equal attention to all their stakeholders — customers, staff, shareholders, community and society — consistently outperformed companies that had a disproportionate focus on any subset. I would argue that the same need for equal attention exists for individuals, and that we use our brains to greatest effect when we use them whole-mindedly.

It’s wrong to say that the right brain is more important or the left brain is more important. The only ‘right’ brain is the whole brain.

Do you use your whole brain?

There’s a new Thai restaurant down the corner from my office. It’s truly lovely — beautiful handmade tables and fabulous oversized wicker chairs like giant thrones. It’s got yummy food. And it’s got personality. The first time I went there they weren’t fully up and running yet, and their furnishings were still en route from Thailand. The owner — who is just about the most earnest person I’ve ever met — used his iPhone to show me pictures of everything in the container.

I want them to succeed, I truly do. But based on my wholly unscientific analysis, Christchurch has the highest rate of Thai restaurants per capita of anywhere in the world, including Thailand itself. I think we’ve got three Thai restaurants for every man, woman and child. I simply cannot understand how someone would look at this market and say to himself, “What they need here is another Thai restaurant.”

This particular restaurant is three doors down (literally) from another Thai restaurant I’ve been frequenting, which also has great food and great service. So here’s my problem:

I want to see both restaurants succeed.

But my meager Thai food expenditure is unlikely to keep any restaurant in business, and will have even less impact if I divide it among two businesses, so I’m torn.

There are plenty of parallels between this scenario and, for example, the question of whether the U.S. auto industry should be bailed out or whether companies who send jobs offshore are evil. Basically, they boil down to a Darwinian question: what is our responsibility as consumers?

Should we give our local businesses our business to support our local community? What if we can get it faster, cheaper, better elsewhere?

What about newspapers? Yes, we all lament the decline of the newspaper industry, but how many of you subscribe to the paper version just to show your support? Why would you, when you can get it faster, cheaper, better online?

What about jobs? What is our responsibility as employers? Imagine you’re in a competitive market where everyone else is going offshore. Your choice is to contribute to your community by providing a few local jobs (and a lot of overseas ones), or to go out of business and offer no jobs at all, because you can’t compete otherwise. What do you do?

These are important questions, especially if we want to be conscious consumers in a flat world.

Like my Search Insider colleague Gord Hotchkiss, I am a bit of a Darwinist, but perhaps unlike him I believe Darwinism must be tempered.

Take, for example, the consumption of chicken. Any of you watch Jamie Oliver’s Fowl Dinners? He took the stance that everyone currently buys cheap chicken because they’re not aware of what has to happen in order for the chicken to be that cheap.

I believe that companies have to be outstanding in order to earn our business. At the same time, I believe we as consumers need to apply — to a reasonable extent — that ‘Jamie Oliver treatment’ to the stuff we consume. What has to happen in order for us to consume this stuff? What is our tradeoff? What kind of society are we creating?

In other words, we need to consider Darwinism at the societal level, not just at the individual level.

If I get all my news via Internet, I have to accept that I’m contributing to the demise of the newspaper industry. By the way, I do accept this — in this era of unrepentant environmentalism, I can’t stomach a dead tree wrapped in non-biodegradable plastic being delivered to my door every morning. But it’s a conscious decision.

If I buy all my books via Amazon, I have to accept that local bookshops may go out of business. Yes, I know I’m not keeping either the bookshops or the aforementioned Thai restaurants afloat singlehandedly, but that’s the nature of a community: we all do our bit. And this one’s a bit harder for me. I love Amazon, and I love local bookshops. So I spend money at both, which is great for Amazon but probably not so great for the locals, who need all of my book-purchasing budget if they want to have a prayer at surviving.

Is it your responsibility to buy American made cars, just so that millions of Americans can keep their jobs? What if the cars are rubbish? What if you work at an auto company and need to feed your family?

In an interconnected world, what is our consumer responsibility? I welcome your thoughts.

In the previous post, we discussed the fact that companies that grow out of alignment to the world around them will gradually lose their effectiveness — tobacco companies being a prime example. The choice those companies face is to transition what they do, so that they re-align themselves with society, or face extinction.

To recap, the boundaries that define a company as a complex system are as follows:

• staff
• shareholders
• customers
• community
• society

The changing nature of the world has changed the way that these boundaries work. In The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman makes the case that there is no longer any difference between Baltimore and Bangalore, between Seoul and Silicon Valley. Ever-increasing connectivity has dissolved distances and removed barriers.

So if barriers are gone, does that mean there are no more boundaries? Far from it. What it actually means is that our alignment across all focus areas is more important than ever — particularly our alignment with community and society.

In the old, non-flat, protectionist world, domestic manufacturers didn’t experience the friction of foreign products. Domestic unions were free from the friction of cheap overseas labor. Large publishing houses didn’t suffer from the friction of upstart bloggers.

In a flat world, all of these things are in contact with each other.

Imagine a ball rolling along a carpet. In the old model, the ball hovered above the carpet — the buffers of disconnectedness, isolation and protectionism meant that our actions didn’t provoke the friction with the outside world that they otherwise might.

Over the past few decades, all of those buffers have been ripped away. Thanks to the Internet, bandwidth, teleconferencing, and inexpensive travel, our behavior — which used to be compared only to our immediate neighbors — is now interacting with (or rubbing up against) the behavior of people halfway around the world.

So it’s more important than ever to have an inclusive focus across all stakeholders and boundary areas. The flat world means that we can’t ‘get away with it’ anymore. The highest global standard is the standard we are held accountable to. And, like the law, ignorance is no excuse for noncompliance.

How have the changing boundaries of the world affected your business?

Last week, I wrote about the boundaries of complex systems. Essentially, they work like gears with ratchet teeth: the more consistent the direction of travel, the more efficient the system itself. Here’s the picture:

The book Built to Last, by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, describes many fascinating characteristics of visionary companies, with the overall gist of the book being that companies that align themselves around a shared purpose and values outperform those that don’t. One of the more interesting of the authors’ observations is that it doesn’t seem to matter what that purpose and those values might be.

In particular, Built to Last uses as one of its reference companies Philip Morris. Regardless of your feelings about smoking, few people think the words ‘values-driven’ and ‘tobacco’ go hand in hand. But Collins and Porras describe a strongly adhered to and clearly articulated culture, passionate about freedom of choice.

While those values are consistent with the outside world, the company will flourish. While they are inconsistent, the company will suffer. Good/bad, healthy/unhealthy… these subjective concepts make no difference in this equation. What matters to company performance is what matters to the stakeholders, all of them: staff, shareholders, customers, community and society.

If the staff is passionate about their values, the shareholders are getting a good return on investment, the customers love the product, and community and society are supportive or not opposed, then the company will do well.

It is only in the past few decades that cigarettes began to be considered a vice—and the tobacco companies have paid for it. Increased PR expenses, litigation costs, decreased revenues… you can see the challenges that can be created in a company when it falls out of alignment with the society around it.

So this is the concept for today: self-alignment is not enough. Customer service is not enough. Taking care of relationships is not enough. Our companies—our lives—are governed by the totality of our focus.

Have you observed this in your own experience? I’d love to hear about it.

I am totally unique.

Nobody on this planet is exactly like me. Nobody thinks my thoughts, dreams my dreams, or lives my life. In so many ways, I am a snowflake: an utterly unique, totally individual, mold-breaking creature.

And yet, I am vastly predictable. For example, I am guaranteed to cry at any and all opportunities — and I mean ANY. An episode of The Simpsons where Homer feels bad about not being a good father. Lethal Weapon 4 where Joe Pesci talked about Froggy. This ad for New Zealand Post (I have to change the channel when it comes on, or risk breaking down into an incoherent sobbing mess).

I am guaranteed to cheer, loudly, at sporting and theatrical events. I am guaranteed to want to see the latest big-budget action flick. I am guaranteed, in short, to behave in certain ways, ways that can be tapped into and understood and used to identify me as a potential customer.

So am I unique or aren’t I? In Sunday’s Guardian, a variety of thinkers sounded off on the Pros and Cons of a Google World. Adam Curtis, the director of The Power of Nightmares (a TV documentary on terrorism), had this to say:

The millions of searches that engines like Google record and store reveal the shifting desires and fears of individuals. They’re leading to a new fragmented sensibility among millions of people in the way they see and experience the world. Machines like Google know something about us as human beings that we really don’t want to know - that we are not individuals: ‘If you like this then you will like that…’. So Google is a paradox. It gives us the feeling we are wild and free individuals, powerfully reinforcing an idea of us as heroic figures in the consumer age. Yet at the same time it is powerfully proving the opposite - that we are completely predictable. Out of that is going to come some very interesting political ideas of how to organise society and also new artistic ideas. The really interesting question is whether it is really a cult….

Here is the thing: if we were truly unique and truly unpredictable; if our actions were in no way interconnected and in no way integrated; if we didn’t have some means of anticipating, to some degree, the behavior of others — our lives would be ruined.

You wouldn’t have any idea whether your co-workers would show up or whether your spouse would be waiting at home. Events that require critical mass, like rock concerts and political movements, would be impossible. And none of the products that tap into the short head of the marketplace would exist.

In order to function, the complexity of our lives requires repetition, patterns, and short cuts. If we had to make a truly individualized decision for every action we take, we would become paralyzed. If we tried to assimilate all of the data available to us at any given moment, we would go insane.

And so we become hybrids. We are predictable to one degree and individual to another, and the combination of the two produces a unique result that nonetheless overlaps with millions of others.

Thank goodness. If we didn’t overlap, there would be no airlines, no iPhone, no Internet.

So are you happy to be one of the crowd? Or do you see yourself as a unique individual?

P.S. I haven’t forgotten the last post, and my promise of a post on Big Tobacco and complex systems… coming soon! Also hat tip to Brian Hayes for the link to the Guardian story.