Great artists ship

Now HERE's a playground. Google, our cheerful fetch-dog of a search engine, has an R&D space called Google Labs where they think up all kinds of new searches, and let you try them. You don't appreciate a Ferrari until you see it accelerate.

Venture capitalist Martin Tobias says,

"In the end with every new data type, the guy who does search makes the most money. The publishing tools get driven to zero. Hosting gets commoditized. It costs too much to build a brand or to deliver premium content. Consumers want free and easy access."

I believe in live prototyping. Ship early, ship often, and tweak along the way.

I have created four performances a year for almost 7 years. All the books helped. The teachers helped more. But nothing helped as much as the crucible of knowing we HAD to perform, an audience was coming. Eugenio Barba says, "Don't just train. Train AND develop a performance. Do both, from the start."

Jim McCarthy and Michele McCarthy -- developers of Software Development Bootcamp (McCarthy Technologies), and authors of Software For Your Head: Protocols for Creating and Maintaining Shared Vision -- would call this "Versioning your way toward the Vision," the straightest route to greatness. Picasso would paint until his studio was full, then move into an empty studio and begin again, letting people sell what was left behind. Stanislavski would train a group of actors, develop a methodology, then leave to found a new studio when the current actors resisted innovation.

Like Jim McCarthy says, "Great artists ship."

Eugenio Barba, head of Odin Teatret in Denmark, believes in "We." He and the Odin reflexively begin with, "What would be best for me... AND you... AND us... AND our community... AND the world?" They are only interested in solutions which work on all levels. You would not believe how much this simple filter improves the quality of solution. Thinking of this, walking through autumn fields in Paris toward Theatre du Soleil, I came up with a slogan for my theatre work:

"Say We. C'est oui."

When you get past all the bad language puns (those two phrases rhyme), it means, "Say "we." It is yes."

Andrew McMasters' theatre, Jet City Improv, which has performed every Friday and Saturday night for 14 years, is probably the closest I know to a theatre doing live prototyping. Their theatre innovation/iteration rate is unconscious, but growing with the slow steadiness of time; their business iteration rate is conscious and swift. Andrew, a pragmatic idealist like Eugenio, has integrity, a "yes" attitude, a "we" outlook, and an incredible network. "The answer is always Yes," says Andrew. "It's just a question of How."

Integrity makes us points of light.

Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike
As if we had them not.
-- William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, 1:1