Sitting here in my hotel room in Nashville I am happy to finally have some time to post this interview with Ruth Blatt. There are many of these yet to come! 

I first found out about Ruth when reading one of her articles in Forbes. She
writes about popular music using research on management and entrepreneurship. She shows a different side of musicians and music industry professionals by writing about them as navigators of their own careers, as leaders of small businesses, and as part of self-managed creative teams.

Since becoming a father I have thought many times about all the great things music can do to help a person develop their communication skills, relationship skills, leadership skills, how it helps to build confidence and it’s many other positive results. I would love and encourage for my children to experiment with music so as to experience the benefits that it has to offer. Most of all to have fun and be creative. Ruth’s articles include these same thoughts and present them as business insights to companies, entrepreneurs and the general public. I wanted to ask her some questions of my own so as to gather more insights this time geared towards musicians.

Ruth has a Ph.D. in Management and Organizations from the University of Michigan and taught Entrepreneurship to MBAs at the University of Illinois in Chicago. She has written for TheAtlantic.com, Psychology Today and Wired.com.She currently writing a book about the history and production of rock concerts. If you want to learn more about her you can visit: www.therockbandproject.com

This episode was edited by Andy Warren of www.applesandchocolate.com

Aaron Bethune.

Music Specialist. Creative Collaborator. Author. Musicpreneur.

Take a lisen to the interview here.

In this 30-min interview, part of the “Be Your Own Boss” Summit with Lisa Rooney and a panel of dozens of experts and entrepreneurs from all over the world, you’ll learn how to make the journey to succeed in business much easier right from the start. Click on the image below…

By Alice Korngold, Co-Editor, Giving Thoughts, and author of A Better World, Inc.: How Companies Profit by Solving Global Problems…Where Governments Cannot and Alex Parkinson, Senior Researcher and Associate Director, Corporate Leadership, The Conference Board In his essay on pressing issues facing U.S. foundation leaders and boards, Phil Buchanan, president of the Center for Effective […]

As Dr Gary Smith, lead author of a new study published in Pediatrics, explains: “Children at this age will explore their environment by putting things in their mouth. and if they simply bite down on one of these things, they’ll burst and the contents will shoot to the back of their mouths.”

Rather than risk a worst case scenario of respiratory or cardiac arrest, pulmonary edema, coma or even death as a result of being exposed to the contents of these packets, Smith says emphatically: “There is no reason why children should be rushed to hospitals in a coma or and with swelling down their lungs and we have to intubate them. There is no reason that children should have to die when we have effective safer alternatives for detergent.”

If a child becomes nausious, is vomiting, coughing or begins to choke, these could be signs of poisoning. Keep this number for the Poison Help Line handy: 800.222.1222

CBS News, 4/25/16

The post Laundry detergent packets pose increasing risk to children appeared first on The Good For You Network.

Memory’s main purpose is not to help us keep track of the past, but to help us navigate the future. This is a critical understanding for business, because decisions happen in the future…and influencing them is how you drive profits and build brands.

From this angle, marketers can use a prospective memory model when creating content, whether it be a presentation, blog, marketing campaign, training program, finance document, or IT specs. Unlike retrospective memory, which means recollecting the past, prospective memory triggers us to remember to act on a future intention.

The concept of prospective memory is gaining momentum because scientists are observing that 60–80% of the memory problems we have are not about forgetting the past—they are about forgetting the future.

Think about this in terms of your own situation. What memory problems did you experience last week? They were probably things you intended to do and forgot to do, such as picking up the dry cleaning or sending a file to your client or brand consultant. Personally, I always intend to bring a reusable bag to the supermarket, yet constantly find myself bag-less at the checkout counter.

Imagine this for a moment. You create content at Point A, hoping your audience remembers and acts on it at Point B. The skilled, modern communicator knows how to communicate information at Point A so that it sticks and motivates behavior at Point B.

Take for instance this recent IBM campaign, which advertises the concept of smart cities. The premise is that if cities were smarter, people would not have to drag their suitcases or bikes up the stairs—there would be ramps; people would not play with their phones or have lunch on the sidewalk—there would be places to sit; people would not have to stand in the rain—there would be shelter.

The ads invited people to share their own ideas for smart cities. This example showcases Point B communication. IBM could have easily set up a campaign with nice text and visuals, inviting people to share ideas for smart cities via a website or Twitter. This would have been just Point A communication. Instead, they imagined what might happen at Point B. They asked: What would people be able to see or do at Point B? When we ask that question, it is easier and—as you can see from the example below—more fun and useful to create communication at Point B.

When creating content, always ask: What will people see at Point B if your message were put into action?

Cues are one way in which we can communicate at Point A so that we influence long-term memory and convince others to act on intentions at Point B. Cues are important because they are signals for action. In the IBM campaign, with repeated messages, bikes, suitcases, shoes or rain can become cues to trigger the memory of what you saw and remind you that if you have an idea, you can share it. The mistake that too many marketers /communicators make is not thinking of environmental or internal cues that may trigger a memory and intent at Point B.

To understand the importance of cues, consider a situation in which people are asked two rapid-fire questions and to blurt out an answer to a final statement. It goes like this:

1. What continent is Kenya in?
2. What are the two opposing colors in the game of chess?
3. Name any animal.

In studies like these, roughly 20% of people answer zebra to the last sentence and about 50% respond with an animal from Africa.

If you remove the first two questions and ask anyone you know to simply name any animal, less than 1% will volunteer a zebra. By directing people’s attention to specific stimuli (Africa, black and white), it is possible to influence what they will say or do next. This is because our memories are stored in an associative way: related concepts are linked and the reminder of one spreads through a network of related concepts, making recall of a particular one more likely. This is a subconscious and automatic process called priming.

Ironically, while waiting for a client earlier today at their offices, I noticed the book below on the coffee table. The cover reinforces the connections we may already have in our minds.

Memory works on the basis of associations: one thing can trigger another. What cues exist in your customers’ world that can trigger memories of your brand?

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Carmen Simon, PhD, co-founder of Rexi Media and the author of Impossible to Ignore: Creating Memorable Content to Influence Decisions

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Storytelling Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

In his TED Talk, Dave Meslin wondered: What would happen if Nike advertised sneakers in the same way local governments announced important information — with long, bland, black-and-white newspaper ads filled with jargon?

“Apathy as we think we know it doesn’t actually exist,” said Meslin, a local organizer in Toronto. “People do care, but we live in a world that actively discourages engagement by constantly putting obstacles and barriers in the way.”

Across Canada, Natasha Letchford — a Deputy Municipal Clerk in North Vancouver — stumbled on Meslin’s talk on Facebook. She found herself highly inspired, in part because she wanted to prove it wrong.

“One of reasons I went into local government was because I truly believe that I make a difference. So when Dave Meslin said that government is in some ways trying to deny people an opportunity to involved, I disagreed with him on that,” she says. “I took it as a bit of a challenge.”

“We in local government get so focused on making sure that the water’s turned on and making sure that the garbage gets taken away that when it comes to something like statutory notices … it becomes ‘that’s just the way we’ve always done it.’”

As she puts it, “We’re not going out of our way to deny people the opportunity to understand what’s going on. We just weren’t making the time to re-think our standard statutory notices.”

Just before Letchford watched this talk, the senior executive team in North Vancouver’s city hall had asked employees to think about year-long projects. So Letchford decided to update North Vancouver’s notices and signage.

In an email to the team, she wrote: “I wanted to share something I’ve been struggling with: how do we meet our legislative requirements for notice, yet not put people to sleep with overly legal black-and-white newspaper ads, or, simply have them ignored? This TED talk does a great job of explaining what local governments do wrong in regards to notice and how we might fix it.”

It wasn’t hard to get the go-ahead to redesign North Vancouver’s newspaper notices and “posted property” signs, Letchford says. In general, she aimed for far fewer words, going back to legislation in order to figure out the minimum that were required. She combed out “legalese” and redundant information, and upped point sizes, so that signs would actually be readable from a car. And she began including images of what the proposed property would look like.

North Vancouver has gotten great feedback on the redesigned notices and signs so far — including one very sincere form of flattery: Letchford has noticed that greater Vancouver has started rethinking its public notices too.

A before newspaper notice in North Vancouver. And a sample after.

A before posted notice in North Vancouver. And a sample after.

Mikko Hypponen speaks just last week at TEDxBrussels, expressing outrage at the NSA.

“We already knew this.” “It’s necessary for the War on Terror.” “Other countries are doing it too.” “But I have nothing to hide.” These are the most common reasons people express for not feeling outrage over the revelations this year that the United States’ National Security Agency has been involved in widespread surveillance.

Mikko Hypponen: How the NSA betrayed the world’s trust — time to act

In today’s blistering talk, security expert Mikko Hypponen shares why he is hopping mad about the NSA’s actions, and why every user of the internet should be equally enraged. Because at the end of the day, he says, these rationalizations obscure a shocking fact: because the world relies on American companies for its information needs, virtually every user of the internet is being watched.

Digital privacy is, obviously, something on many of our minds. Below, a collection of articles, think pieces, op-eds and TED Talks on the state of digital privacy, some that echo Hypponen’s vigor and some that offer differing opinions.

1. The story that started it all. In June, when journalist Glenn Greenwald first broke the story in The Guardian that the NSA was collecting Verizon phone records for millions daily, and that the Prism program was tapping into the data of major tech companies, some were riveted and outraged while some tuned out because the news at first glance didn’t sound shocking. So, in case you missed them, read the initial stories that would eventually make Edward Snowden a household name. While Greenwald just announced that he is leaving The Guardian after 14 months of reporting this story, for now, his column “On Security and liberty” is a great resource for the latest revelations in just how far this surveillance goes. The most recent articles: “NSA and GCHQ target Tor network that protects anonymity of web users” and “NSA shares raw intelligence including Americans’ data with Israel.”

2. The deep look at the data. The New York Times and The Guardian have just completed a pair of in-depth analyses of the documents they received from Snowden in June. Both concluded that no information, no matter how small or seemingly irrelevant, escaped the NSA’s purview. The New York Times described the NSA’s strategic plan as that of an “electronic omnivore… eavesdropping and hacking its way around the world to strip governments and other targets of their secrets.” According to the leaked documents, only 35% of the NSA’s efforts are focused on collecting information on terrorist activities. The NSA is spying on both friends and foes, using information to gain “diplomatic advantage” over US allies like France and Germany, and “economic advantage” over growing economies like Japan and Brazil.

3. A new revelation this week: evidence that the NSA and (its British counterpart) GCHQ hacked Google and Yahoo. In his talk, Hypponen points out how strange it is that, while leaked documents show the exact dates that the NSA began monitoring major American providers, many of these providers had also stated publically that they hadn’t given backdoor access. Just days after Hypponen’s talk was delivered, new evidence emerged that Google and Yahoo had indeed been hacked — not by tapping into the software, but by tapping into their private networks via leased fiber. This Washington Post article gives a nice explanation of how we know that the NSA had access to internal cloud data from these companies. And read Google’s hopping mad response to this news, which they call “industrial scale subversion.” A member of the TED tech team points out that this doesn’t necessarily support the solution Hypponen shares in his talk — to create alternatives to American providers. “This was not happening just within the US, but on international soil as well,” he explains.

4. A valid question: who is watching the watchers? In late October, another new wrinkle in this story emerged, which Hypponen mentions in his talk — that the NSA was monitoring the telephones and emails of 35 world leaders, including Angela Merkel of Germany, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil and Felipe Calderón of Mexico. And apparently, President Barack Obama did not sign off on this … or even know about it until an internal review in the wake of the NSA revelations this summer. Here, the Washington Post breaks that story, while John Cassidy of the New Yorker thinks more deeply about what it means, writing, “From the very beginning of this, the biggest question has been about the supervision—or lack of supervision—of the spying agencies: Who watches the watchers?”

5. Another interpretation of NSA outrage: a battle for power on the internet. In this talk from TEDxCambridge, security expert Bruce Schneier (the man who pointed out “The security mirage”) gives a fascinating analysis of why revelations of NSA, GCHQ and other government surveillance programs are so shocking — because they represent a shift. For the first part of the internet’s history, the medium gave power to those traditionally without it — to individuals and grassroots organizers. But now, the internet is increasingly becoming a tool for traditional powers like governments and international corporations. So where does this leave the majority of citizens? Stuck in the middle, says Schneier. (Bonus: Read both Schneier and Hypponen’s initial take on the revelations of NSA surveillance, given to the TED Blog this summer.)

6. An alternative cloud service. In his talk, Hypponen ends with a call for people outside of the United States to band together to create Open Source, secure alternatives to American internet companies. And Hypponen’s company, F-Secure, has just launched one such alternative: Younited, a personal cloud service hosted in Finland, which has strict privacy laws. Hypponen writes of the service, “It’s high time for a fresh European alternative to enter the market, taking the existing Internet behemoths head on. What the world needs now is a cloud storage service that is not subject to uncontrolled access by intelligence agencies.”

7. But is Open Source the answer? TED’s tech team is not convinced. “I’d rather trust an open source project than a closed one any day of the week. But Open Source is not a silver bullet,” says one team member. “You can see even back in 2003 people tried to back door the Linux kernel. This patch was submitted in a strange way so it was caught but the code looks so innocent that if it was part of a normal merge it might not have been caught. Those three lines of code would give anyone root access — god access on linux systems. As of 2012, there are over 15 million lines of code.” Just for fun, he suggests watching this YouTube clip of what happened recently when the creator of the Linux kernel was asked if he has been approached by the NSA about giving backdoor access, as it will definitely scare you. And another team member agrees: “The solution is not so much Open Source and governments, but probably strengthening the whitehat community around Open Source.”

8. Another rebuttal to Hypponen: why we can’t cut off the data flow between the U.S. and the world. Cameron Kerry, the General Counsel of the US Department of Commerce, recently gave a speech warning against a solution like the one Hypponen forwards. According to the blog The Hill, Kerry argues that cutting off the flow of data between Europe and the United States would be a mistake. “It would cause significant and immediate economic damage,” he says. “Moreover, it would lead to loss of competitiveness on both sides, as other economies around the world that embrace open Internet architectures and freedom to experiment with data analytics offer havens for innovators … Our economic future is at stake in our international engagement.” (Note: Kerry will speak soon at TEDxBeaconStreet.)

9. The end of the internet? Security experts are echoing Kerry’s concerns: according to The Guardian, they are now warning that this data collection policy might lead to the dissolution of the Internet as we know it. Countries like Brazil, Germany and India have begun encouraging regional online users to route their data locally rather than over the monitored US and UK servers. Indian government employees, for example, have been advised not to use the US-based Gmail, and to type up sensitive documents on typewriters, rather than on a computer. For a system that is based on interconnectivity, the implications of a fractured and localized Internet pose a threat to the network, global economies, and our access to information.

9. In defense of the program. Meanwhile, U.S. officials are standing firmly in support of the NSA surveillance program, insisting that it is effective and necessary. General Keith B. Alexander, director of the NSA, said last month that he saw no effective alternative to the government’s program of collecting electronic metadata in the fight to prevent terrorism. Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, published an op-ed in USA Today strongly defending the program, arguing that the program has been effective in helping to prevent terrorist plots against the U.S. and its allies. And, for the first time, information collected by the NSA is being used to build a criminal case around a suspected terrorist. Jamshid Muhtorov, who is accused of supporting the Islamic Jihad Union, was informed that data collected in his private communications was used to arrest him. This case is expected to precipitate further legal action and possibly head to the Supreme Court.

11. Other major threats to privacy: facial recognition, social media, and cell phone GPS. In his recent TED Talk, “Why privacy matters,” behavioral economist Alessandro Acquisti sounded a warning bell on the fact that facial recognition abilities are exponentially improving while, meanwhile, the line between personal and public is blurring via social networking sites. In his talk, he warns that we are about to have an Adam and Eve moment — where all of a sudden, we realize we aren’t wearing any clothes. “Any personal information can become sensitive information,” he says. (Read the TED Blog story: The future of facial recognition.) In another chilling TED Talk, “Your cell phone company is watching,” German politician Malte Spitz shares what happened when he asked his cell phone company to share the data they were collecting on him. The result: 35,830 lines of code that added up to a nearly minute-by-minute account of half a year of his life.

Liz Jacobs contributed heavily to this article.

Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and best-selling author of The Tipping Point and Blink. In this talk, filmed at TED2004, he explains what every business can learn from spaghetti sauce. (Recorded February 2004 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 18:15)

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I think I was supposed to talk about my new book, which is called Blink, and it’s about snap judgments and first impressions. And it comes out in January, and I hope you all buy it in triplicate. (laughter) But I was thinking about this, and I realized that although my new book makes me happy, and I think would make my mother happy, it’s not really about happiness- so I decided instead I would talk about someone who I think has done as much to make Americans happy as perhaps anyone over the last 20 years. A man who is a great personal hero of mine, someone by the name of Howard Moskowitz, who is most famous for re-inventing spaghetti sauce.

Howard is- (holds hand slightly below shoulder level)- Howard’s about this high, and he’s round, and he’s in his sixties, and he has big huge glasses and thinning grey hair, and he has a kind of wonderful exuberance and vitality, and he keeps a- has a parrot, and he loves the opera, and he’s a great aficionado of medieval history. And he, by profession, he’s a psychophysicist. Now, I should tell you that I have no idea what psychophysics is, although at some point in my life, I dated a girl for two years who was getting her doctorate in psychophysics. Which should tell you something about that relationship.

But- (laughter) Howard- As far as I know, psychophysics is about measuring things. And Howard is very interested in measuring things. And he graduated with his doctorate from Harvard, and he set up a little consulting shop in White Plains, New York. And one of his first clients was- this is many years ago, back in the early 70s- one of his first clients was Pepsi. And Pepsi came to Howard and they said, you know, we- there’s this new thing called aspartame, and we would like to make Diet Pepsi. We’d like you to figure out how much aspartame we should put in each can of Diet Pepsi, in order to have the perfect drink. Right?

Now that sounds like an incredibly straightforward question to answer, and that’s what Howard thought. ‘Cause Pepsi told him, look, we’re working with a band between 8 and 12%. Anything below 8% sweetness is not sweet enough, anything above 12% sweetness is too sweet. We wanna know, what’s the sweet spot between 8 and 12. Now, if I gave you this problem to do, you would all say, it’s very simple. What we do is you make up a big experimental batch of Pepsi, at every degree of sweetness- 8%, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, all the way up to 12- and we try this out with thousands of people, and we plot the results on a curve, and we take the most popular concentration. Right? Really simple.

Howard does the experiment, and he gets the data back, and he plots it on a curve, and all the sudden he realizes- it’s not a nice bell curve. In fact, the data doesn’t make any sense. It’s a mess. It’s all over the place. Now, most people in that business, in the world of testing food and such, are not dismayed when the data comes back a mess. They think, well, you know, figuring out what people think about cola’s not that easy, you know, maybe we made an error somewhere along the way, you know, let’s just make an educated guess, and they simply point and they go for 10%, right in the middle. Howard is not so easily placated. Howard is a man of a certain degree of intellectual standards. And this was not good enough for him, and this question bedeviled him for years. And he would think it through and say, what was wrong? Why could we not make sense of this experiment with Diet Pepsi?

And one day, he was sitting in a diner in White Plains, about to go- trying to dream up some work for Nescafe. And suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, the answer came to him. And that is that when they analyzed the Diet Pepsi data, they were asking the wrong question. They were looking for the perfect Pepsi, and they should have been looking for the perfect Pepsis. Trust me. This was an enormous revelation. This was one of the most brilliant breakthroughs in all of food science. And Howard immediately went on the road, and he would go to conferences around the country, and he would stand up and he would say- You had been looking for the perfect Pepsi- you’re wrong. You should be looking for the perfect Pepsis. And people would look at him with a blank look, and they would say, what are you talking about? This is craziness. And they would say, you know, move! Next! Tried to get business, nobody would hire him- he was obsessed, though, and he talked about it and talked about it and talked about it. Howard loves the Yiddish expression “to a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.” This was his horseradish. (laughter) He was obsessed with it!

And finally, he had a breakthrough. Vlasic Pickles came to him, and they said, Mr. Moskowitz- Doctor Moskowitz- we wanna make the perfect pickle. And he said, there is no perfect pickle, there are only perfect pickles. And he came back to them and he said, you don’t just need to improve your regular, you need to create zesty. And that’s where we got zesty pickles. Then the next person came to him, and that was Campbell’s Soup. And this was even more important- in fact, Campbell’s Soup is where Howard made his reputation. Campbell’s made Prego, and Prego, in the early 80s, was struggling next to Ragu, which was the dominant spaghetti sauce of the 70s and 80s.

Now in the industry, I don’t know whether you care about this, or how much time I have to go into this, but it was, technically speaking- this is an aside- Prego is a better tomato sauce than Ragu. The quality of the tomato paste is much better, the spice mix is far superior, it adheres to the pasta in a much more pleasing way, in fact, they would do the famous bowl test back in the 70s with Ragu and Prego- you’d have a plate of spaghetti, and you would pour it on, right? And the Ragu would all go to the bottom, and the Prego would sit on top. That’s called adherence. And, anyway, despite the fact that they were far superior in adherence, and the quality of their tomato paste, Prego was struggling.

So they came to Howard, and they said, fix us. And Howard looked at their product line, and he said, what you have is a dead tomato society. So he said, this is what I want to do. And he got together with the Campbell’s soup kitchen, and he made 45 varieties of spaghetti sauce. And he varied them according to every conceivable way that you can vary tomato sauce. By sweetness, by level of garlic, by tartness, by sourness, by tomatoey-ness, by visible solids- my favorite term in the spaghetti sauce business (laughter)- every conceivable way you can vary spaghetti sauce, he varied spaghetti sauce. And then he took this whole raft of 45 spaghetti sauces, and he went on the road. He went to New York, he went to Chicago, he went to Jacksonville, he went to Los Angeles. And he brought in people by the truckload. Into big halls. And he sat them down for two hours, and he gave them, over the course of that two hours, 10 bowls. 10 small bowls of pasta, with a different spaghetti sauce on each one. And after they ate each bowl, they had to rate, from 0 to 100, how good they thought the spaghetti sauce was.

At the end of that process, after doing it for months and months, he had a mountain of data about how the American people feel about spaghetti sauce. And then he analyzed the data. Now, did he look for the most popular brand variety of spaghetti sauce? No! Howard doesn’t believe that there is such a thing. Instead, he looked at the data, and he said, let’s see if we can group these different- all these different data points- into clusters. Let’s see if they congregate around certain ideas. And sure enough, if you sit down, and you analyze all this data on spaghetti sauce, you realize that all Americans fall into one of three groups. There are people who like their spaghetti sauce plain, there are people who like their spaghetti sauce spicy, and there are people who like it extra chunky.

And of those three facts, the third one was the most significant. Because at the time, in the early 1980s, if you went to a supermarket, you would not find extra chunky spaghetti sauce. And Prego turned to Howard, and they said “You telling me that one third of Americans crave extra chunky spaghetti sauce and yet no one is servicing their needs?” And he said yes! (laughter) And Prego then went back, and completely reformulated their spaghetti sauce, and came out with a line of extra chunky that immediately and completely took over the spaghetti sauce business in this country. And over the next 10 years, they made 600 million dollars off their line of extra chunky sauces.

And everyone else in the industry looked at what Howard had done, and they said, oh my god! We’ve been thinking all wrong! And that’s when you started getting 7 different kinds of vinegar, and 14 different kinds of mustard, and 71 different kinds of olive oil, and- and then eventually even Ragu hired Howard, and Howard did the exact same thing for Ragu that he did for Prego, and today, if you go to the supermarket, a really good one, and you look at how many Ragus there are- Do you know how many they are? 36! In six varieties. Cheese, Light, Robusto, Rich & Hearty, Old World Traditional (pause)- Extra Chunky Garden. (laughter) That’s Howard’s doing. That is Howard’s gift to the American people.

Now why is that important? It is, in fact, enormously important. I’ll explain to you why.

(picture of a bowl of spaghetti with sauce)

Because what Howard did, is he fundamentally changed the way the food industry thinks about making you happy. Assumption number one in the food industry used to be that the way to find out what people wanna eat- what will make people happy- is to ask them. And for years and years and years and years, Ragu and Prego would have focus groups, and they would sit all you people down, and they would say “what do you want in a spaghetti sauce? Tell us what you want in a spaghetti sauce.” And for all those years- 20, 30 years- through all those focus group sessions, no one ever said they wanted extra chunky. Even though at least a third of them, deep in their hearts, actually did. (laughter)

People don’t know what they want! Right? As Howard loves to say, “the mind knows not what the tongue wants.” It’s a mystery! And a critically important step in understanding our own desires and tastes is to realize that we can not always explain what we want deep down. If I asked all of you, for example, in this room, what you want in a coffee- You know what you’d say? Every one of you would say “I want a dark, rich, hearty roast.” It’s what people always say when you ask them what they want in a coffee. What do you like? Dark, rich, hearty roast! What percentage of you actually like a dark rich hearty roast? According to Howard, somewhere between 25 and 27% of you. Most of you like milky, weak coffee. Which you will never, ever say to someone who asks you what you want- that I want a milky, weak coffee. (laughter)

So that’s number one thing that Howard did. Number two thing that Howard did is he made us realize- it’s another very critical point- he made us realize in the importance of what he likes to call horizontal segmentation. Why is this critical? It’s critical because this is the way the food industry thought before Howard. Right? What were they obsessed with in the early 80s? They were obsessed with mustard. In particular, they were obsessed with the story of Grey Poupon. Right? Used to be, there were two mustards. French’s and Gulden’s. What were they? Yellow mustard. What’s in yellow mustard? Yellow mustard seeds, turmeric, and paprika. That was mustard. Grey Poupon came along, with a Dijon. Right? Much more volatile brown mustard seed, some white wine, a nose hit, much more delicate aromatics, and what do they do? They put it in a little tiny glass jar, with a wonderful enameled label on it, made it look French, even though it’s made in Oxnard, California, and instead of charging $1.50 for the 8 ounce bottle, the way the French’s and Gulden’s did, they decided to charge 4 dollars. And then they had those ads, right? With the guy in the Rolls Royce, and he’s eating the Grey Poupon, the other Rolls Royce pulls up, and he says, do you have any Grey Poupon? And the whole thing, after they did that, Grey Poupon takes off! Takes over the mustard business!

And everyone’s take home lesson from that was that the way to get to make people happy is to give them something that is more expensive, something to aspire to. Right? It’s to make them turn their back on what they think they like now, and reach out for something higher up the mustard hierarchy. A better mustard! A more expensive mustard! A mustard of more sophistication, and culture, and meaning. And Howard looked to that and said, that’s wrong! Mustard does not exist on a hierarchy. Mustard exists, just like tomato sauce, on a horizontal plane. There is no good mustard, or bad mustard. There is no perfect mustard, or imperfect mustard. There are only different kinds of mustards that suit different kinds of people. He fundamentally democratized the way we think about taste. And for that, as well, we owe Howard Moskowitz a huge vote of thanks.

Third thing that Howard did, and perhaps the most important, is Howard confronted the notion of the Platonic dish. (laughter) What do I mean by that? For the longest time in the food industry, there was a sense that there was one way- a perfect way- to make a dish. You go to Chez Panisse, they give you the red tail sashimi with roasted pumpkin seeds in a something something reduction- they don’t give you five options on the reduction. Right? They don’t say, do you want the extra chunky reduction, or do you want the… No! You just get the reduction. Why? Because the chef at Chez Panisse has a Platonic notion about red tail sashimi. This is the way it ought to be. And she serves it that way time and time again, and if you quarrel with her, she will say- you know what? You’re wrong! This is the best way it ought to be in this restaurant.

Now that same idea fueled the commercial food industry as well. They had a notion- a Platonic notion- of what tomato sauce was. And where did that come from? It came from Italy. Italian tomato sauce is what? It’s blended, it’s thin. The culture of tomato sauce was thin. When we talked about authentic tomato sauce in the 1970s, we talked about Italian tomato sauce. We talked about the earliest Ragus. Which had no visible solids, right? Which were thin, and you just put a little bit over it and it sunk down to the bottom of the pasta. That’s what it was. And why were we attached to that? Because we thought that what it took to make people happy was to provide them with the most culturally authentic tomato sauce-A; and B, we thought that if we gave them the culturally authentic tomato sauce, then they would embrace it. And that’s what would please the maximum number of people.

And Howard- and the reason we thought that, other words- people in the cooking world were looking for cooking universals. They were looking for one way to treat all of us. And it’s good reason for them to be obsessed with the idea of universals, because all of science- through the 19th century and much of the 20th- was obsessed with universals. Psychologists, medical scientists, economists- were all interested in finding out the rules that govern the way all of us behave. But that changed, right? What is the great revolution in science of the last 10, 15 years? It is the movement from the search for universals to the understanding of variability. Now in medical science, we don’t wanna know how necessarily- just how cancer works, we wanna know how your cancer is different from my cancer. Genetics has opened the door to the study of human variability.

What Howard Moskowitz was doing was saying this same revolution needs to happen in the world of tomato sauce. And for that, we owe him a great vote of thanks. I’ll give you one last illustration of variability, and that is- oh, I’m sorry. Howard not only believed that, but he took it a second step, which was to say that when we pursue universal principles in food, we aren’t just making an error, we are actually doing ourselves a massive disservice. And the example he used was coffee. And coffee is something he did a lot of work with, with Nescafe. If I were to ask all of you to try and come up with a brand of coffee- a type of coffee- a brew- that made all of you happy, and then I asked you to rate that coffee, the average score in this room for coffee would be about 60 on a scale of 0 to 100. If, however, you allowed me to break you into coffee clusters, maybe 3 or 4 coffee clusters, and I could make coffee just- one of those for each of those individual clusters- your scores would go from 60, to 75 or 78. The difference between coffee at 60 and coffee at 78 is a difference between coffee that makes you wince, and coffee that makes you deliriously happy.

That is the final, and I think most beautiful lesson, of Howard Moskowitz. That in embracing the diversity of human beings, we will find a surer way to true happiness. Thank you.

Toni Griffin speaks at TEDCity2.0. Photo: Ryan Lash

Everyone knows Detroit is in trouble. The list of problems assaulting the once-mighty Motor City is long and, from a look at national newspapers, incessantly documented. Most recently, the city filed for bankruptcy; its former mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, was sentenced to 28 years in prison for public corruption. Since the booming 1950s, the city of Detroit has lost more than a million residents; the vacant lots that now speckle the city form a space about the size of Manhattan.

Toni Griffin: A new vision for rebuilding Detroit

Of course, Detroit’s economic collapse was not solely brought about by bad management, but is the result of larger global economic shifts. In a post-industrial economy, as manufacturing has evolved and established itself overseas, Detroit needs to figure out its new place in the new world.

Many people are optimistic it can be done. In today’s talk, architect and city planner Toni Griffin talks about how she and her team plan to rebuild the city from the ground up through an initiative they’re calling the Detroit Works Project.

“There is a future for the next generation of Detroiters, both those there now, and those that want to come,” she says in her talk. “Let’s not focus on what Detroit is, but what it can be.”

As part of this week’s “Invented Here” series, the TED Blog interviewed Griffin about the challenges that Detroit faces as it transitions to a post-industrial economy. The real key, she says: support local entrepreneurship and the burgeoning creative economy. An edited version of our conversation follows:

What’s your involvement with Detroit Works?

I worked on the whole planning piece, which is Detroit Future City, published in December 2012. It’s a series of strategies around six planning elements: economic growth, land use, neighborhoods, city systems, public land and civic engagement.

And where is that project now?

We have a series of strategies for each of these six elements, and now, Detroit Future City’s mission is to partner with the different agencies, nonprofit groups and businesses to implement those strategies. Every sector — from media organizations to corporate business to education — is developing a plan and implementing it.

Obviously there’s a lot going on right now related to the city’s bankruptcy and restructuring. Coming out of the bankruptcy, as difficult as that will be, there is hopefully an opportunity to reconfigure our operations and systems to better support the initiatives of Detroit Future City.

How can you do that?

As an example, we might reconfigure infrastructure such as transportation, water systems, and so on, so it’s better aligned with a more sustainable land-use pattern that promotes density. The goal is to enable neighborhoods in the areas where they’re most viable. What we need to do is realign service delivery, utility systems, transportation systems. For instance, let’s identify the neighborhoods that are dense and active, and make sure they get great bus service.

Detroit has become the poster child for urban decay. How can it build an economy that will survive and thrive in a post-industrial world?

For decades, Detroit has been a mono-economy city, focused on the automobile industry. The region is still very automotive-centered. Both domestic and international automakers have a presence in the Detroit metro region, including two automakers still within the city itself.

There is an opportunity to build on that — for example, by focusing on R&D as it relates to the auto industry and supporting existing small businesses and suppliers. But at the same time, we need to support creating new small businesses and suppliers as part of the larger regional economy.

One of the tenets of Detroit Future City is that it’s not so much about the land use as it is about the city’s larger strategy for economic growth. The key is to build that economic growth within the city limits, so that there’s more revenue generated in the city and for the city — and more opportunities for Detroiters to be employed within the city.

Remember, while Detroit has lost more than 60% of its population since its peak in 1950, it’s experienced an even higher percentage of employment losses. We still have many more residents than we have jobs for them. We need to rebalance the ratio of jobs to residents of the city.

As a great step forward. Goldman Sachs just identified Detroit for its 10,000 Small Businesses program. That will link local Detroit businesses to supportive services and access to capital and capacity for growth.

How can Detroit become a meaningful player in the new global economy?

Well, Detroit has always been a member of the global economy as a real driver of the automobile industry. And that industry has never left the region. Parts of it have left the city, but not the region.

So Detroit is still an important international hub for the automotive industry, with international and domestic businesses located in the region.

What we want to remind people is that we need to re-root some of this industry back into the city itself. Detroit has some of the largest educational institutions in the region, as well as companies, including GM’s headquarters. That keeps Detroit as a viable place for continuing to attract business to the region and the city.

And how does your plan try to bring jobs back to Detroit?

One way is through supporting local entrepreneurship, because we believe that entrepreneurship creates a substantial amount of jobs. We’re also focusing on education. When we visited our sister city of Torino, Italy, another auto-industry town, we found it impressive that the educational sector of R&D there related to the innovation and technologies that create new advancements in the automotive sector. We can do the same with Detroit’s education system; it’s a great opportunity to link back to that larger auto industry.

A third sector is to develop the creative class. There’s a great project now called the Tech Town, which is an incubator of creative R&D firms that have the potential to support all kinds of sectors, including automotive and healthcare. This incubator model is also something we learned from Torino, and it gives us an opportunity to expand and support other kinds of sectors.

What have you learned from rethinking Detroit?

What we realized is that Detroit is richer than one economy. In fact, it’s a network of economies. There’s been a lot of attention in the last year on how the downtown and midtown areas are starting to take on an exciting new life. We’re also seeing efforts to create more housing for new tenants to foster more residential living downtown and to bring more employees back into the city by renovating our classic office buildings.

There’s often a tension between encouraging local development and entrepreneurship and also trying to attract new residents to the city. How do you see these dynamics playing out in Detroit?

That’s always a tension in any city. That’s why we want to really highlight local entrepreneurship development, and I think that takes on a very broad scale. Entrepreneurs can be very small firms producing for the automobile industry — but they could also be a sole proprietor doing advertising and marketing or website development. Or they can be young and creative entrepreneurs who are thinking about new ways to be productive in the city.

Given that the city is 82% African-American, there was also an equity issue on the table about how we intentionally tried to reach out and into the local community to find ways to support those local businesses, from the established business in an office building or shopping strip to the sole proprietor working from home.

There’s always a tension between downtown and the neighborhoods, but it helps to have local business owners invest in their own downtown. What we hope to see is a model with opportunities for local neighborhood businesses and local homegrown entrepreneurs to have locations and visibility within the new downtown space.

When can Detroiters expect to start seeing these changes in action?

You’ll already see that if you walk through Woodward Avenue downtown. There are a lot of very local firms there, and we’re beginning to see some local retail stores. There’s an intentional move to bridge the gap between the downtown neighborhood tension and the outsider/insider tension of new local entrepreneurs.

And I think there really are opportunities to overcome that challenge. Shinola, the watch and bike company that I discussed in the talk, is one of those really great examples. The firm decided to move to Detroit, and in doing so, was committed to creating a staff predominantly made up of local Detroiters. That hopefully extends to how they think about their supply chain and how they’ll partner with other local entrepreneurs.

In the face of global crises like climate change and refugee migration, it seems sometimes that nation-states are hopelessly gridlocked and unable to act. At TEDGlobal 2013, political theorist Benjamin Barber laid out a counter-proposal: Go local. Big cities are demonstrating a remarkable capacity to govern themselves democratically and efficiently in networks, both locally and globally. They share certain unique qualities that can elude bigger entities: pragmatism, civic trust, participation, creativity and cooperation. Mayors implement practical change every day. So, Barber suggests, we should give mayors more power — including with big global issues.

In Barber’s 2014 book If Mayors Ruled the World. Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities he proposes the Global Parliament of Mayors, a global governance platform that brings together collective urban political power. Now, it’s become a reality. From September 10–12, some 100 mayors of major cities and representatives of urban networks will meet in The Hague.

In this Q&A, Barber shares details on the need for a Global Parliament of Mayors, the upcoming gathering, and what it took to turn this dream into a reality.

Professor Barber, give us the cheat sheet on the Global Parliament of Mayors: Why is it needed?

Traditional nation-states and international organizations have become less able to discharge their sovereign responsibility to secure the lives, liberties and property of their citizens, especially in the face of existential threats like climate change. It’s a sort of sovereign default, and it has left cities to carry the responsibility for sustainability and other global goods. For that, they need a global urban governance network that is both democratic and efficient — something that goes further than the urban networks we already have. Namely, a Global Parliament of Mayors that can offer cities a megaphone for their collective urban voice and a platform for common urban policy-making.

You are basically making a counterintuitive claim that, in a globalizing world, democracy’s best hope is not found in a global government, but locally in cities.

It is only counterintuitive if you assume local and global are antonyms. But in the new world of interdependence, local problems are global problems, and municipal goods are global goods. Think about refugees, pandemic disease, inequality, crime, markets, terrorism and of course, climate change; These are all global challenges that manifest themselves locally in cities. Problems and solutions today are “glocal”: at once both local and global. Indeed, the irony is that states tend to be bordered, insulated and parochial, while cities have become open, transactional, urbane and cosmopolitan — the carrier of universal values. That is why urban networks have been more successful in addressing global challenges than nation-states.

Who will participate in the Hague gathering?

Because it is the inaugural convening of a new democratic governance body with a global compass, we are gathering representatives of more than 100 cities from around the world, North and South, developed and developing, wealthy and poor, large and small — as few as 200,000 residents. We also seek representation by mayors, rather than their deputies, so that the crucial decisions have the full legitimacy of mayoral participation.

What was the journey from the idea of the GPM to actually convening it?

I proposed the governance body in the final chapter of my book If Mayors Ruled the World. Almost immediately following its publication and my TED Talk in 2013, I began to hear from sitting mayors, including those in Seoul, Los Angeles, London, Hamburg, Boston and elsewhere, inquiring about the idea with interest and enthusiasm. This interest resulted in planning meetings in Seoul with Mayor Park Won-soon, in New York City with the publication CityLab and in Amsterdam with several mayors in The Netherlands, including Mayor Eberhard van der Laan, Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb and Mayor Jozias van Aartsen. In the summer of 2015, Mayor van Aartsen proposed that The Hague be the site for the inaugural convening in September 2016. The process, led by visionary mayors, was laborious but unwavering, animated by our small GPM team in New York and facilitated by our advisory committee and the City of The Hague.

How is the event structured? What kind of discussions will take place?

Over a three-day weekend, we will hold four parliamentary sessions, starting with three plenaries, on climate change (“The City and Nature”), refugees (“Arrival Cities”) and governance (“The City and Democracy”). Each plenary will aim to put a few key practical proposals for common action on the table. Proposals will call for opt-in by individual cities, rather than top-down imperatives, and will be prepared in advance by our Advisory Committee, with mayors debating and amending them with the assistance of experts from relevant urban networks, such as the C40 Climate Cities and EFUS (the European Forum for Urban Security). A final plenary session will offer the opportunity for formal ratification of agreed-upon proposals.

What do you hope happens during this inaugural gathering?

The two principal aims of the GPM are to establish the legitimacy and continuity of the new global organization of mayors as a governance body — including future meetings and a digital platform where mayors can meet online — and to demonstrate the capacity of cities to establish common policies in critical domains, such as climate change and refugees, that can serve their citizens when nation-states are gridlocked and unable to act. Cities have both a responsibility and a right to act on behalf of their citizens in critical areas of sustainability and liberty when states do not or cannot act. Some mayors are willing to act autonomously while others prefer a model of full cooperation with states. Yet in the end, citizens have a right to life and liberty and sustainability too, which means that cities have a right to govern on their behalf when that is the only road to sustainability. The argument is laid out in our document “Declaration of the Rights of Cities and Citizens.”

You have a new book coming out early next year. Can you give us a preview?

It will be titled Cool Cities: Urban Sustainability in a Warming World, from Yale Press. It is a kind of sequel to the previous book and looks at the role cities have played in combating climate change through existing urban networks like the C40 Climate and ICLEI and in the new Global Parliament of Mayors. It makes the case for mayors governing collaboratively to curb greenhouse gases and promote decarbonization. And it shows that they can go well beyond the COP21 agreement reached in Paris last December in getting real results.

Watch Benjamin Barber’s TEDGlobal talk proposing the Global Parliament of Mayors >>