Get on a Southwest flight to anywhere, buy shoes from Zappos.com, pants from Nordstrom, groceries from Whole Foods, anything from Costco, a Starbucks espresso, or a Double-Double from In N' Out, and you'll get a taste of these brands’ vibrant cultures. 

Culture is a balanced blend of human psychology, attitudes, actions, and beliefs that combined create either pleasure or pain, serious momentum or miserable stagnation. A strong culture flourishes with a clear set of values and norms that actively guide the way a company operates. Employees are actively and passionately engaged in the business, operating from a sense of confidence and empowerment rather than navigating their days through miserably extensive procedures and mind-numbing bureaucracy. Performance-oriented cultures possess statistically better financial growth, with high employee involvement, strong internal communication, and an acceptance of a healthy level of risk-taking in order to achieve new levels of innovation. 

Misunderstood and mismanaged

Culture, like brand, is misunderstood and often discounted as a touchy-feely component of business that belongs to HR. It's not intangible or fluffy, it's not a vibe or the office décor. It's one of the most important drivers that has to be set or adjusted to push long-term, sustainable success. It's not good enough just to have an amazing product and a healthy bank balance. Long-term success is dependent on a culture that is nurtured and alive. Culture is the environment in which your strategy and your brand thrives or dies a slow death. 

Think about it like a nurturing habitat for success. Culture cannot be manufactured. It has to be genuinely nurtured by everyone from the CEO down. Ignoring the health of your culture is like letting aquarium water get dirty. 

If there's any doubt about the value of investing time in culture, there are significant benefits that come from a vibrant and alive culture: 

• Focus: Aligns the entire company towards achieving its vision, mission, and goals. 
• Motivation: Builds higher employee motivation and loyalty. 
• Connection: Builds team cohesiveness among the company’s various departments and divisions. 
• Cohesion: Builds consistency and encourages coordination and control within the company. 
• Spirit: Shapes employee behavior at work, enabling the organization to be more efficient and alive.

Mission accomplished

Think about the Marines: the few, the proud. They have a connected community that is second to none, and it comes from the early indoctrination of every member of the Corps and the clear communication of their purpose and value system. It is completely clear that they are privileged to be joining an elite community that is committed to improvising, adapting, and overcoming in the face of any adversity. The culture is so strong that it glues the community together and engenders a sense of pride that makes them unparalleled. The culture is what each Marine relies on in battle and in preparation. It is an amazing example of a living culture that drives pride and performance. It is important to step back and ask whether the purpose of your organization is clear and whether you have a compelling value system that is easy to understand. Mobilizing and energizing a culture is predicated on the organization clearly understanding the vision, mission, values, and goals. It's leadership’s responsibility to involve the entire organization, informing and inspiring them to live out the purpose the organization in the construct of the values.

Vibrant and healthy

Do you run into your culture every day? Does it inspire you, or smack you in the face and get in your way, slowing and wearing you down? Is it overpowering or does it inspire you to overcome challenges? It's important to understand what is driving your culture. Is it power and ego that people react to, and try to gain power, or a culture of encouragement and empowerment? Is it driven from top-down directives, or cross-department collaboration? To get a taste of your culture, all you have to do is sit in an executive meeting, the cafe or the lunch room, listen to the conversations, look at the way decisions are made and the way departments cooperate. Take time out and get a good read on the health of your culture.

Culture fuels brand

A vibrant culture provides a cooperative and collaborative environment for a brand to thrive in. Your brand is the single most important asset to differentiate you consistently over time, and it needs to be nurtured, evolved, and invigorated by the people entrusted to keep it true and alive. Without a functional and relevant culture, the money invested in research and development, product differentiation, marketing, and human resources is never maximized and often wasted because it's not fueled by a sustaining and functional culture. 

Look at Zappos, one of the fastest companies to reach $1 billion in recent years, fueled by an electric and eclectic culture, one that's inclusionary, encouraging, and empowering. It's well-documented, celebrated, and shared willingly with anyone who wants to learn from it. Compare that to American Apparel, the controversial and prolific fashion retailer with a well-documented and highly dysfunctional culture. Zappos is thriving and on its way to $2 billion, while American Apparel is mired in bankruptcy and controversy. Both companies are living out their missions--one is to create happiness, and the other is based on self-centered perversity. Authenticity and values always win.

Uncommon sense for a courageous and vibrant culture

It's easy to look at companies like Stonyfield Farms, Zappos, Google, Virgin, Whole Foods, or Southwest Airlines and admire them for their passionate, engaged, and active cultures that are on display for the world to see. Building a strong culture takes hard work and true commitment and, while not something you can tick off in boxes, here are some very basic building blocks to consider:

1. Dynamic and engaged leadership
   A vibrant culture is organic and evolving. It is fueled and inspired by leadership that is actively involved and informed about the realities of the business. They genuinely care about the company's role in the world and are passionately engaged. They are great communicators and motivators who set out a clearly communicated vision, mission, values, and goals and create an environment for them to come alive.

2. Living values
   It's one thing to have beliefs and values spelled out in a frame in the conference room. It's another thing to have genuine and memorable beliefs that are directional, alive and modeled throughout the organization daily. It's important that departments and individuals are motivated and measured against the way they model the values. And, if you want a values-driven culture, hire people using the values as a filter. If you want your company to embody the culture, empower people and ensure every department understands what's expected. Don't just list your company’s values in PowerPoints; bring them to life in people, products, spaces, at events, and in communication.

3. Responsibility and accountability
   Strong cultures empower their people, they recognize their talents, and give them a very clear role with responsibilities they're accountable for. It's amazing how basic this is, but how absent the principle is in many businesses.

4. Celebrate success and failure
   Most companies that run at speed often forget to celebrate their victories both big and small, and they rarely have time or the humility to acknowledge and learn from their failures. Celebrate both your victories and failures in your own unique way, but share them and share them often.

Microsoft’s revenue from the once-unstoppable Windows franchise is declining. Research In Motion is struggling to hold onto market share despite inventing the “Crackberry.” Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy. Many companies, including producers of revolutionary tech products, are faltering because they don’t understand and aren’t built to respond to consumer behavior in the digital age. In short, these companies failed to prioritize their users.

What’s a user? You’re a user. So are your co-workers, employees, family, and friends. Users are job hunters, social-media commenters, brand fans, potential customers, and existing customers. Everyone who interacts with a business through its website, intranet, mobile app, Facebook page, or any element of its digital footprint is a user—and all together, users are more influential than those relative few who have bought a company’s products and services. Bloggers, “friends,” and user reviewers create a swarm of public opinion that shapes brands and drives sales. Employees, business partners, and job candidates all influence operational performance, and, by extension, brand and sales. 

Users come in many different forms, but they all want the same thing: for it to be easy. We all go online to accomplish a finite task, like check sport scores or buy new shoes—in fact, in 2012, 50% of consumer spending is going to be influenced by or transacted through the Internet, according to Forrester Research—and none of us want to spend a second wondering what to click on next. We just want it to be effortless. This expectation—and digital’s influence on consumer spending—will only grow. By the time young people who grew up with the Internet gain mainstream purchasing power, they’ll be even more reliant on digital and will have developed sky-high expectations of usability. If you’re not catering to their needs when they find you, they’ll move on to someone who does.

Microsoft Windows has been a victim of this type of scenario. Once Apple began championing breakthrough user experiences such as a more intuitive operating system, not to mention the iPod and iPhone, Windows became perceived as difficult and unpleasant to use. Members of IT and procurement departments, those who make the PC or Mac decision for thousands, they’re users too. Eventually they brought their preferences into their purchasing decisions, which is what helped Apple surpass Microsoft in market capitalization last year.

A more foundational aspect of being user first is letting users lead you to the next big thing, and then being nimble enough to follow. If the Windows team had put users first in all decision making, it surely would be playing a larger role in the mobile market. If RIM had put users first, it would have produced a phone that users loved, not had, to use. If Blockbuster did it, it wouldn’t have focused on the traditional rental model, but rather on making it easy for users to see the movies they want.

One decidedly user-centric company is Mint, the online personal-finance service. It was literally founded on the notion of being user-friendly. Aaron Patzer, the founder, had long relied on Intuit’s Quicken and Microsoft Money to manage his money. But he found the programs incredibly tedious. One day instead of spending hours filing gaps in entries, he started to conceptualize personal finance software that would be “so easy to use, people will actually use it,” he’s said. Today Mint.com is free to use, can accurately and reliably match up 85% of all transactions with their appropriate spending categories (a huge improvement over its competitors), and uses advertising in a way that benefits its users. Rather than sell space to flashy banner ads, Mint’s advertising messages are tailored to each user and provide information that saves them money. The startup has been so successful that two years after launch Intuit purchased Mint for $170 million, closed its Quicken Online service, and hired Patzer as vice president and general manager of the company’s personal-finance group.

The businesses, like Mint, that do digital right, enable a user-first strategy to penetrate all levels of strategy and operation. Leadership, at every crossroads, must ask, “Am I making user lives easier?” Admittedly, this is a large undertaking, but it boils down to this: Learn what would improve your users’ lives, then figure out how to give it to them in a way that complements your business goals, budget, and timeline. Then don’t ask for anything in return. When a company’s digital products and services satisfy real user needs, users fall in love, and they will often evangelize it to all of their friends. Become indispensible to your users and customers will follow.

Social innovation is what the world needs now - and, as I have learned over the years, design is at the center of social innovation.

Whatever we don't like about the world we live in, whatever doesn't work the way we think it should, has, believe it or not, been designed to work pretty much exactly that way. Unproductive meetings, products that break, pollution, inequity, even war and poverty are the symptoms of poor design, design that is also usually devoid of social innovation.

We used to think that politicians, business executives, NGOs or even religious figures would save the world. The truth is that we have entered a new age, an age in which it will be designers that solve our toughest problems.

We are all, or can learn to be designers. If you organize a meeting, your design for the meeting affects the outcome. Designers create products, businesses, processes that attempt to bring peace to the Middle East and figure out how to get corn to grow with little or no water.

By building in positive social (and environmental) outcomes to the design process we learn to do everything we do in a way that helps make the world a better place. Seventh Generation, the company I co-founded two decades ago, was a pioneer in this process, designing products that attempted to solve or mitigate environmental problems. We practiced this in a hands-on, learn-as- you-go way but today, just as one can get an MBA, or an MD, one can now learn to become a social innovation designer.

The newest program out there is the Master's of Fine Arts in Design for Social Innovation, which will launch next fall at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

It was developed by Cheryl Heller, who helped Seventh Generation with some of its toughest design challenges and convinced me that this new discipline at SVA was one I should lend a hand to as an advisor. In its inaugural class, a carefully select a group of 25 individuals will master this discipline in real life settings.

I can't wait to see what they dream up.

Having spent many days over the past two months with the newest generation of social entrepreneurs at Pop Tech, the Kauffman Foundation and the Social Innovation Boot Camp at NYU and Columbia, the excitement of hope and new possibilities provided a stark contrast to the news about Europe's impending disintegration, poverty statistics in America that are worse that we had previously calculated and worse that expected contamination from the Fukushima nuclear reactor in Japan.

From INC.com by Eric Schurenberg November 18, 2011

The entrepreneur turned VC warns that there is too much money chasing too few marketable ideas. The crash, he says, is coming next year.

Outspoken entrepreneur-turned-VC Mark Suster last night put a date on a prediction he has been making for some time in his blog about a coming crash for angel investors: The end will come next year. “And if not 2012,” he said. “Then 2013.”

Suster’s  prediction, made at the VentureShift conference at Le Poisson Rouge in New York’s Greenwich Village, adds to a chorus of warnings that the current surge in angel money into the startup market is going to end badly. Sean Parker made a similar prediction, reported here on Inc.com, earlier this week.

There are a couple key market forces creating the froth in the market, Suster said. Chief among them is what he identifies as a 90% drop in the cost of starting a company over the past 10 years, thanks to the adoption of open source programming and cloud-based business services, among other things. A startup ante that was $5 million in 2000 is now down to $5 thousand.

With the barriers to entry lowered, new players have rushed in.  Founders have grown younger and more tech-focused. Mentorship-led investors, like Y-Combinator and Tech Stars have stepped in to serve their needs and get access to the next Zuckerberg. For fear of missing out—the emotion Suster abbreviates as “FOMO”—VCs that ordinarily would have focused on larger deals have joined the move to early stage investing. The result merits yet another acronym: ENIFA. Or, Everyone Now is an F—g Angel.

The effect on valuations has been predictable. “There is too much money chasing too few great ideas,” says Suster. “People are paying too much for early stage funding.” At some point, angels will realize that there is no way to get their money out at anything like what they paid, and the flow of money will shut down.

If you’re in the market for funding now, Suster says, grab what you can while the money is still flowing. He is making sure that all his portfolio companies at GRP partners have the funding to see themselves through a coming dry spell, and he advises startups to do the same.

Don’t wait until your product is fully featured before seeking funding. “Most startups over-optimize,” he warns. Instead, take the money while it’s available. “When the hors d’oeurve tray goes by, take two,” he says, “and stick one in your pocket. Don’t spend everything right away.”

And then brace yourself. No one will ring a bell when the angel investing is ready to collapse. “Have you ever read Nassim Taleb, author of Black Swan? We’re aren’t going to know until it happens.” But Suster has no doubt that we are near the end of the great angel investing surge.  “Are we in a bubble? Of course we are.”

From Brian Solis.com by Brian Solis October 26, 2011

Part 8 in a series introducing my new book, The End of Business as Usual…this is not content from the book, but instead, this series serves as its prequel.

Social media says so much and so very little at the same time. First, social media implies that media is just that, social. But when you study many of the best practices or test the advice dispensed through popular “top 10″ posts, you find that at the heart of notable social media successes is simply brilliant creativity and desirable incentives, not necessary authentic or genuine value or engagement.  With every Tweet or Like to win campaign, hilarious viral video, and user-generated promotional series, businesses make social media more of an oxymoron than a movement to transform two-way conversations into improved customer relationships.

According to an annual IBM study, getting closer to customers is the overwhelming top priority for CEOs. And, social media is lauded as the great facilitator for engagement and renewed business relevance. What we tend to forget however, is that social networks are merely platforms for people to connect with friends, family and peers. Businesses are not the primary beneficiary of connections, but they can certainly benefit once they realize that a Like or follow does not equate to an opt-in for marketing communiqué.

If CEOs are placing increasing importance on customer relationships, why is it that we are less aligned with the “R” in social CRM and closer in alignment to the “M,” where M stands for marketing and not management. That’s because of where social media lives within the organization today.

In IBM’s recent “From Social Media to Social CRM” report, it was revealed that social media is already siloed within marketing, marketing communication, or public relations, accounting for 52%, 45%, and 42% ownership respectively. When we think about the primary function of each of those functions, it’s clear to see why the premise of many of today’s top social media best practices are marketing driven rather than market driven.

The difference between a social brand and a social business is internal connectedness, preparedness, and collaborative approach to customer and employee engagement.

A Social Media and Social CRM Strategy are Different

As good friend Paul Greenberg noted in his book CRM at the Speed of Light, “The underlying principle for Social CRM’s success is very different from its predecessor….traditional CRM is based on an internal operational approach to manage customer relationships effectively. But Social CRM is based on the ability of a company to meet the personal agendas of [its] customers while, at the same time, meeting the objectives of [its] own business plan. It is aimed at customer engagement rather than customer management.”

At stake here is relevance among the growing base of a more connected consumer landscape. Engaging consumers from a marketing-driven approach may work for the short term, but engagement requires a holistic approach. Consumers see one brand, one company, one experience and not a series of disconnected silos experimenting in social media without a common vision, mission, or process. While businesses are building an infrastructure to support social media, governance, policies, and strategies are only as strong as the experiences they’re designed to create, the problems they’re intended to solve, and the ability to adapt to and lead consumer experiences because you can see what others don’t.

IBM studied how businesses view their foundation for social media and found that many times, the prevailing corporate culture impeded innovation and collaboration, not just with consumers, but also within. And for any change agent, that will come as no surprise. Whether they know it or not, change agents are becoming hybrid cultural anthropologists and politicians learning how to adapt the culture while rallying internal champions to bring about real change.

Here you can see the number of businesses that have defined KPIs, flexible business models, established policies, adaptive approaches to incorporating social media into business strategies, and defined governance. The blue shades on the left equates to those that strongly agree while toward the right, companies start to show that they’re not where they would like to be. According to the IBM report, only 38% are confident in the support of their company in innovation and creativity. Just 30% can comfortably say that they have strong executive sponsorship for social media. And, a measly 27% say they share insights across functions.

Once you see these numbers, it’s clear that businesses are on the right path, but we’re really just at the beginning. More importantly, one could argue that the direction of the path is questionable. Even though the businesses on the far left are established and confident, they might be operating without a holistic strategy that spans across lines of business, products, functions or across the globe.

And what of a centralized or holistic approach, defined by a common goal and reinforced through not only governance, but compliance?The effects of connected consumerism require nothing less than internal transformation and in many ways, a new outlook.

The challenges that businesses face are still relatively immature as IBM discovered. ROI, employee use of social media, and negative brand exposure lead the top three challenges companies face today. In the number four and seven spots however, we see the true threat to progress, lack of strategy and lack of support. We can not march into new territory without a unified vision. We can not lead consumer experiences if those experiences are either undefined or unsupported by the leadership organization we’re to stand behind.

When’s the last time you looked at your mission and vision statement? Can you Tweet it? Does it speak to you? The truth is that in addition to processes, businesses must rethink who or what it is to a different breed of consumer. This consumer is not just social, they’re connected across networks, devices, and they influence and are influenced differently than traditional consumers.

Mo Data, Mo Problems

What we need to do, where we need to be, how, why and to what extent is available to us today. We won’t discover these answers in the form of brand or competitive monitoring using social tools. We must capture data, interpret it, and also act upon it, now and over time, to learn and pursue relevance without forgetting our core markets and competencies.

Companies are clearly capturing data as IBM found. But as you can see, how data is analyzed, interpreted, and in turn shared across the organization is scattered. And, what happens to information (or insights) once its distributed is unclear in this study, but we can assume that it isn’t embraced and acted upon across the board.

Businesses are experimenting. Businesses are learning and adapting. But this can’t just be about social media. This must be about using disruptive technology to improve customer experiences and relationships. We can’t find comfort until we’re clearly operating outside of our comfort zones. And even then, we can’t rest until we are meeting the needs of connected consumers, where they are, how they connect, and reinforce the values, products, and services that are important to them.

Times are a changing and as a result, the foundation of business must also change. It’s a new era of business and consumerism and you play a role in defining it.

Part 1 – Digital Darwinism, Who’s Next
Part 2 – Social Media’s Impending Flood of Customer Unlikes and Unfollows
Part 3 – Social Media Customer Service is a Failure!
Part 4 – I think we need some time apart, it’s not me, it’s you
Part 5 – We are the 5th P: People
Part 6 – The State of Social Media 2011: Social is the new normal
Part 7 – I like you, but not in that way

Steve Jobs' impact on your life cannot be underestimated. His innovations have likely touched nearly every aspect -- computers, movies, music and mobile. As a communications coach, I learned from Jobs that a presentation can, indeed, inspire. For entrepreneurs, Jobs' greatest legacy is the set of principles that drove his success.

Over the years, I've become a student of sorts of Jobs' career and life. Here's my take on the rules and values underpinning his success. Any of us can adopt them to unleash our "inner Steve Jobs."

1. Do what you love. Jobs once said, "People with passion can change the world for the better." Asked about the advice he would offer would-be entrepreneurs, he said, "I'd get a job as a busboy or something until I figured out what I was really passionate about." That's how much it meant to him. Passion is everything.

2. Put a dent in the universe. Jobs believed in the power of vision. He once asked then-Pepsi President, John Sculley, "Do you want to spend your life selling sugar water or do you want to change the world?" Don't lose sight of the big vision.

3. Make connections. Jobs once said creativity is connecting things. He meant that people with a broad set of life experiences can often see things that others miss. He took calligraphy classes that didn't have any practical use in his life -- until he built the Macintosh. Jobs traveled to India and Asia. He studied design and hospitality. Don't live in a bubble. Connect ideas from different fields.

4. Say no to 1,000 things. Jobs was as proud of what Apple chose not to do as he was of what Apple did. When he returned in Apple in 1997, he took a company with 350 products and reduced them to 10 products in a two-year period. Why? So he could put the "A-Team" on each product. What are you saying "no" to?   

5. Create insanely different experiences. Jobs also sought innovation in the customer-service experience. When he first came up with the concept for the Apple Stores, he said they would be different because instead of just moving boxes, the stores would enrich lives. Everything about the experience you have when you walk into an Apple store is intended to enrich your life and to create an emotional connection between you and the Apple brand. What are you doing to enrich the lives of your customers?

6. Master the message. You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you can't communicate your ideas, it doesn't matter. Jobs was the world's greatest corporate storyteller. Instead of simply delivering a presentation like most people do, he informed, he educated, he inspired and he entertained, all in one presentation.

7. Sell dreams, not products. Jobs captured our imagination because he really understood his customer. He knew that tablets would not capture our imaginations if they were too complicated. The result? One button on the front of an iPad. It's so simple, a 2-year-old can use it. Your customers don't care about your product. They care about themselves, their hopes, their ambitions. Jobs taught us that if you help your customers reach their dreams, you'll win them over.

There's one story that I think sums up Jobs' career at Apple. An executive who had the job of reinventing the Disney Store once called up Jobs and asked for advice. His counsel? Dream bigger. I think that's the best advice he could leave us with. See genius in your craziness, believe in yourself, believe in your vision, and be constantly prepared to defend those ideas.

Yang Lan, a journalist and entrepreneur who's been called "the Oprah of China," offers insight into the next generation of young Chinese citizens -- urban, connected (via microblogs) and alert to injustice.

I recently walked into a packed hall of 200 Parsons students for an event called “Start Something--Why Creatives Need to Become Entrepreneurs,” organized by the NYCreative Interns group. Four women entrepreneurs, including Laurel Toby, the founder of Mediabistro, were up front, talking about their experiences of launching their respective businesses. The incredible energy in the room highlighted an emerging trend--the headlong crash of creativity into capitalism to forge a startup model for the future. In this new model, designers drive the force of American entrepreneurialism.

This business model is a cause for true optimism. It’s not the big business capitalism that no longer generates jobs or income or tax revenues. Nor is it the old, slow attempts by design and design thinking to reform big corporations to make their culture more innovative, with limited success. Rather, it’s the capitalism of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic--the original, early form of entrepreneurial capitalism. It’s the promise of design fusing with startup culture to increase innovation by raising the success rate of venture capital from 10% to as high as 80%. This growing desire among designers to bring their user focus, strategic vision, iterative methodologies, and propositional thinking to the still-geeky, tech/engineering-centric world of startups promises to be transformative and explosive.

The pattern can be broken down into a series of dots. There’s the dot of students at Parsons, RISD, RCA, the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship, and Aalto University, in Helsinki, beginning to embrace the world of startups. (Stanford has been there for a while, thanks to David Kelley.)

The emerging trend represents a headlong crash of creativity into capitalism.

There’s a dot of small design/innovation consultancies, such as Ammunition, Fuse, and Smart Design, which are developing and selling more of their own products, independently and through corporate partnerships. (Yves Béhar has been an entrepreneur for a decade; his latest product, a great new urban bike called Local, is now in production.) In addition, we have IDEO now supporting incubators such as General Assembly, Excelerate, and TechStars, and helping to launch products such as the Yoomi self-warming baby bottle.

Perhaps the most important dot of all is the one of innovative startups started by entrepreneurs with design degrees or backgrounds--YouTube, Flickr, Slideshare, Tumblr, Airbnb, Slideshare, Vimeo, and Feedburner, and YCombinator. These successful examples have inspired countless design students who want to start their own companies. They see that it can be done.

Another dot is Idiom, India’s answer to IDEO. The cutting-edge design/innovation consultancy has successfully launched 80 companies, out of 100 attempts, over the past six years, with the average launch taking about nine months from concept to profitability. (Idiom calls its process Mind to Market.) By applying the approaches and tools of design to the traditional startup process, Idiom increased the success rate of VC from 10% to 80%.

Led by its cofounder Sonia Manchando, whom I consider to be the intellectual heir to the great C.K. Prahalad, Idiom is pioneering an entirely new VC model called Dream:In. I was lucky enough to participate in it last year. It goes like this: Hundreds of students were trained to interview and tape thousands of people about their dreams--their aspirations, not their needs. The dreams were collected, categorized, and presented to business people, consultants, and folks like me to help draw up business plans to enable those dreams. Those plans are now in a portfolio, from which venture capitalists can choose by category, by individual concept, or by investing in the fund itself. Each year, students go out, dreams come in, business plans replenish the portfolio. When was the last time we even thought about a radical change in the VC model? This made-in-India idea does.

What does this new direction of design toward entrepreneurship and away from big business mean? For me, two things. The less important is epistemological. The Parsons event by NYCreative Interns says it all--“Why Creatives Need to Become Entrepreneurs.” Creativity is a more inclusive term than design. Creativity is more easily accepted by venture capitalists, engineers, business people (and maybe even design students) than design. In addition, as design goes social, it moves toward industries such as advertising, with a long tradition of having “creatives” as part of its culture. In the past, I’ve said we should forget nomenclature--design, design thinking, innovation--it’s all a banana. Now that banana for me is creativity. But if anyone is uncomfortable with the term, just use the D-word.

The more important change from big business to new business is conceptual. We need new conceptual categories to deal with the new turn toward entrepreneurship. Zuckerberg, Hurley, Fake, Chase, Stone, Jobs--why and how and where they innovate require entirely different categories of design thinking, if you will, than we’ve used before. We need to learn much more about leadership and the roles of charisma and calling, and the transformation of inspiration into execution. Entrepreneurs are a lot like religious prophets--they embody their following, they “know” their tacit dreams and longings, and they express them. It’s no accident that The Economist put Jobs on its cover with a halo around his head while he held the newly launched iPad as a “tablet.”

Another critical concept is framing. One key to entrepreneurs’ success is that they frame things differently, they connect existing dots in unique ways. The two guys who started Method, for example, frame-changed the market for sustainable cleaning products from a “suffering-is-good-for-you” space to a “cool-design-that’s-good-for-the-planet” space.

We also need to know a lot more about “meaning,” not just the data gathered by ethnography but knowledge that takes us much deeper into understanding culture. We need to know more about shared spectacle and why we crave it, and how honing craft and skill to near perfection can enable you to make and do the unique--which is what entrepreneurs do.

The encouraging news is that we are seeing a dynamic expansion of the scale, range, and power of traditional design. It promises to revive a broken VC model, capture the imagination and energy of a new generation of young designer/creators, and perhaps even regenerate Western capitalism (yes, no small thing). But perhaps most important of all, the creative turn to the entrepreneurial is hopeful. Optimism has always been at the heart of design. This takes it to a new level.

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Bruce Nussbaum blogs, tweets and writes on innovation, design thinking and creativity. The former assistant managing editor for Business Week is a Professor of Innovation and Design at Parsons The New School of Design. He is founder of the Innovation & Design online channel; founder of IN: Inside Innovation, a quarterly innovation supplement. Twitter- @brucenussbaum