Episode Notes [03:47] Seth's Early Understanding of Questions [04:33] The Power of Questions [05:25] Building Relationships Through Questions [06:41] This is Strategy: Focus on Questions [10:21] Gamifying Questions [11:34] Conversations as Infinite Games [15:32] Creating Tension with Questions [20:46] Effective Questioning Techniques [23:21] Empathy and Engagement [34:33] Strategy and Culture [35:22] Microsoft's Transformation [36:00] Global Perspectives on Questions [39:39] Caring in a Challenging World Resources Mentioned The Dip by Seth Godin Linchpin by Seth Godin Purple Cow by Seth Godin Tribes by Seth Godin This Is Marketing by Seth Godin The Carbon Almanac This is Strategy by Seth Godin Seth's Blog What Does it Sound Like When You Change Your Mind? by Seth Godin Value Creation Masterclass by Seth Godin on Udemy The Strategy Deck by Seth Godin Taylor Swift Jimmy Smith Jimmy Smith Curated Questions Episode Supercuts Priya Parker Techstars Satya Nadella Microsoft Steve Ballmer Acumen Jerry Colonna Unleashing the Idea Virus by Seth Godin Tim Ferriss podcast with Seth Godin Seth Godin website Beauty Pill Producer Ben Ford Questions Asked When did you first understand the power of questions? What do you do to get under the layer to really get down to those lower levels? Is it just follow-up questions, mindset, worldview, and how that works for you? How'd you get this job anyway? What are things like around here? What did your boss do before they were your boss? Wow did you end up with this job? Why are questions such a big part of This is Strategy? If you had to charge ten times as much as you charge now, what would you do differently? If it had to be free, what would you do differently? Who's it for, and what's it for? What is the change we seek to make? How did you choose the questions for The Strategy Deck? How big is our circle of us? How many people do I care about? Is the change we're making contagious? Are there other ways to gamify the use of questions? Any other thoughts on how questions might be gamified? How do we play games with other people where we're aware of what it would be for them to win and for us to win? What is it that you're challenged by? What is it that you want to share? What is it that you're afraid of? If there isn't a change, then why are we wasting our time? Can you define tension? What kind of haircut do you want? How long has it been since your last haircut? How might one think about intentionally creating that question? What factors should someone think about as they use questions to create tension? How was school today? What is the kind of interaction I'm hoping for over time? How do I ask a different sort of question that over time will be answered with how was school today? Were there any easy questions on your math homework? Did anything good happen at school today? What tension am I here to create? What wrong questions continue to be asked? What temperature is it outside? When the person you could have been meets the person you are becoming, is it going to be a cause for celebration or heartbreak? What are the questions we're going to ask each other? What was life like at the dinner table when you were growing up? What are we really trying to accomplish? How do you have this cogent two sentence explanation of what you do? How many clicks can we get per visit? What would happen if there was a webpage that was designed to get you to leave? What were the questions that were being asked by people in authority at Yahoo in 1999? How did the stock do today? Is anything broken? What can you do today that will make the stock go up tomorrow? What are risks worth taking? What are we doing that might not work but that supports our mission? What was the last thing you did that didn't work, and what did we learn from it? What have we done to so delight our core customers that they're telling other people? How has your international circle informed your life of questions? What do I believe that other people don't believe? What do I see that other people don't see? What do I take for granted that other people don't take for granted? What would blank do? What would Bob do? What would Jill do? What would Susan do? What happened to them? What system are they in that made them decide that that was the right thing to do? And then how do we change the system? How given the state of the world, do you manage to continue to care as much as you do? Do you walk to school or take your lunch? If you all can only care if things are going well, then what does that mean about caring? Should I have spent the last 50 years curled up in a ball? How do we go to the foundation and create community action?…
Wednesday Reading Series: Youmna Chlala & Jennifer Firestone— January 29th, 2020 Hosted by Kyle Dacuyan. Youmna Chlala is an artist and a writer born in Beirut based in New York. She is the author of the poetry collection, The Paper Camera (Litmus Press, 2019). She is the recipient of a 2018 O. Henry Award, a Joseph Henry Jackson Award and the Founding Editor of Eleven Eleven {1111} Journal of Literature and Art. Her writing appears in BOMB, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Bespoke, Aster(ix), CURA and MIT Journal for Middle Eastern Studies. She has exhibited at the Hayward Gallery, The Drawing Center, Art In General, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Dubai Art Projects, Hessel Museum of Art, and MAK Center for Art and Architecture. She participated in the 33rd Bienal de Sao Paulo, 2017 LIAF Biennial in Norway and the 11th Performa Biennial. She is co-editing a new series for Coffee House Press entitled Spatial Species (2021). She is a Professor in Humanities and Media Studies and Writing at the Pratt Institute. Jennifer Firestone is the author of five books of poetry and four chapbooks including Story (Ugly Duckling Presse), Ten, (BlazeVOX [books]), Gates & Fields (Belladonna Collaborative), Swimming Pool (DoubleCross Press), Flashes (Shearsman Books), Holiday (Shearsman Books), Waves (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), from Flashes and snapshot (Sona Books) and Fanimaly (Dusie Kollektiv). She co-edited (with Dana Teen Lomax) Letters To Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics and Community (Saturnalia Books) and is collaborating with Marcella Durand on a book entitled Other Influences about feminist avant-garde poetics. Firestone has work anthologized in Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, Songs, & Stories for Children and Building is a Process / Light is an Element: essays and excursions for Myung Mi Kim. She won the 2014 Marsh Hawk Press' Robert Creeley Memorial Prize. Firestone is an Associate Professor of Literary Studies at the New School's Eugene Lang College and is also the Director of their Academic Fellows pedagogy program.…
Friday Reading Series: Harmony Holiday & Lily Jue Sheng with Nyle Genevieve— January 10th, 2020 Hosted by Nicole Wallace. Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, archivist, director, and the author of four collections of poetry, Negro League Baseball, Go Find Your Father / A Famous Blues, Hollywood Forever, and A Jazz Funeral for Uncle Tom. She founded and runs Afrosonics, an archive of jazz and everyday diaspora poetics, and Mythscience, a publishing imprint that reissues and reprints works from the archive. She worked on the SOS, the selected poems of Amiri Baraka, transcribing all of his poetry recorded with jazz that has yet to be released in print and exists primarily on out-of-print records. Harmony studied Rhetoric at UC Berkeley and taught for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. She received her MFA from Columbia University and has received the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a NYFA Fellowship. She is currently completing a book of poems called M a à f a and an accompanying collection of essays and memoir, Love is War for Miles, both to be released this fall, as well as a biography of jazz singer Abbey Lincoln. Lily Jue Sheng works between moving image, collage, text, performance, and installation. Nyle Genevieve makes video art, comics, zines, music, and handmade apparel. They met in college at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and are both based in New York City. Nyle's series 'Winds of Change' and 'Never Sit' merge anthropomorphic existential crisis and female desire with doing everything yourself. She also plays drums for Nandas. Lily's video work 'Five Movements (五種流行之氣)' has expanded into select performances at The Knockdown Center (with Anjuli Rathod) and Roulette Intermedium (with Anjuli Rathod and Nyle Genevieve). 'Five Movements' uses cinema to describe feelings of melancholia -- the sensations of dreaming, and disrupting, myths surrounding the home. The third performance at The Poetry Project will include an expanded spoken word and unique subtitles in Shanghai dialect and English by Lily and a performed music score by Nyle.…
Monday Reading Series: A Steve Abbott Reader— February 24th, 2020 Hosted by Kyle Dacuyan. Join us in celebration of Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader (Nightboat Books, 2019) edited by Jamie Townsend, with an afterword by Alysia Abbott. In this long awaited, first ever retrospective of Steve Abbott's work you'll find writing, illustrations, and comics by this Gay Liberation hero and foundational Bay Area underground writer. Throughout the night we'll hear from the book's editor Jamie Townsend; Steve Abbott's daughter, Alysia Abbott; as well as friends, correspondents, and admirers of Abbott including Nayland Blake, Alexander Chee, Todd Colby, Ariel Goldberg, Hugh Ryan, Rakesh Satyal and Sarah Schulman. About Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader— The first retrospective collection of writing, illustrations, and comics by a hero of the Gay Liberation movement and Bay Area underground writing. Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader (Nightboat Books, 2019) is a landmark collection representing the visionary life's work of beloved Bay Area luminary Steve Abbott. It brings together a broad cross-section of literary and artistic work spanning three decades of poetry, fiction, collage, comics, essays, and autobiography, including underground classics like, Lives of the Poets and Holy Terror, rare pieces of treasured ephemera, and previously unpublished material, representing a survey of Abbott's multivalent practice, as well as reinforcing his essential role within the contemporary canon of queer arts. Steve Abbott (1943—1992) was a poet, critic, editor, novelist, and artist based in San Francisco. Jamie Townsend is a genderqueer poet and editor living in Oakland. They are half-responsible for Elderly, an ongoing publishing experiment and hub of ebullience and disgust. They are the author of Pyramid Song (above/ground press, 2018), and Sex Machines (blush, 2019) as well as the full-length collection Shade (Elis Press, 2015). An essay on the history and influence of the literary magazine Soup was published in The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture (Wolfman Books, 2017). They are the editor of Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader (Nightboat, 2019) and Libertines in the Ante-Room of Love: Poets on Punk (Jet Tone, 2019).…
Friday Reading Series: Elaine Kahn With Coco Gordon Moore & Bridget Talone— February 21st, 2020 Hosted by Laura Henriksen. Join us for the New York City launch of Elaine Kahn's latest book Romance or The End (Softskull Press, 2020). In this highly anticipated collection of chaotic and gutting love, Kahn frays the literary membrane between narrative and self to give us this magnetic work of seduction, contortion, and repulsion. Elaine Kahn will be joined by Coco Gordon Moore and Bridget Talone. Elaine Kahn is the author of Romance or The End (Soft Skull, 2020) and Women in Public (City Lights Publishers, 2015). Her writing has appeared in Frieze, The Brooklyn Rail, jubilat, Poetry Foundation, Art Papers, and elsewhere. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and teaches at the Poetry Field School. She lives in Los Angeles, California. Coco Gordon Moore is a visual artist and poet. She is the author of "A Sketch of Romance" and "Today I Hate The Sun". The proceeds from her latest chapbook went to The Brooklyn Community Bail Fund and her upcoming book will help aid Red Dot Campaign; a non profit working to destigmatize the period as well as collecting tampons and pads for shelters and underfunded schools. Last year Gordon Moore put together a group show at Reena Spauings gallery in efforts of creating a space of affordable art and working to raise money and awareness for the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund. She continues to try and find ways to use art as a tool for reparations. Bridget Talone is the author of The Soft Life and lives in Philadelphia. Recent work has appeared in A Perfect Vacuum, Pouch Mag, and Elderly.…
House Party is a digital performance and publication series out of The Poetry Project with readings, songs, dances, writings and prompts from the past, present, and future. Within each issue, we'll also be sharing a living list of resources, emergency grants, and other recommendations. TMO is a natural storyteller, her rhythm with words propelled her into telling her stories through poetry, she's been slamming out powerful messages laced with alliteration and metaphor since speaking. Her art is a form of both; testimony to her survival as a Black Queer and indigenous human living amongst the dangers of colonialism, And love letters to like sufferers of societies many destructive dysfunctions. Born in Juneau Alaska she is deeply tied to her Tlingit roots, and as a daughter of a Black Panther she was raised between Juneau and San Francisco her whole life and has been an Oakland resident for 8 years.…