We need impossibly bold ideas to transform our world.

We need to reset the bar of value considerably higher, based on cultural and global societal needs and tempered by the very possibility to impact meaningful changes in today’s world.

If we look at the most sweeping changes we benefit from every day—be they Uber, AirBnb, Bikeshare, Facebook, Slack or Twitter—I believe these will be seen over time as simply building blocks for a new set of changes we need to address.

From clean energy to a healthy food supply to cybersecurity to communications platforms to the impossible congestion on our roads.

We don’t need to disrupt these areas as much as we need to rethink them completely.

I’m honestly not in awe of how far we’ve come. I’m completely in awe of where we can get to now.

I think the scale of the needed changes will potentially reconfigure how we approach innovation itself.

For over a decade now we’ve evolved the concept of work and the structure of entrepreneurship from a bottoms up point of of view.  It’s changed our world and got us to where we are.

We have incubators, not unlike the old Hollywood studio system, that warehouse talent with a capital-first perspective, shuffling a broad array of people through a pitchfest for capital.

I’ve been part of this and it’s been an essential step.

But I wonder if this process needs to be rethought as well.

Whether in the upcoming years, this will still be spearheaded by team and founder as sacrosanct, and not one driven by the clarity and boldness of the ideas themselves as the organizing force?

Whether the idea of a startup will not change somewhat as more corporations with the reach, the resources and the data repositories will not become the capital sources tying innovation directly to infrastructure to leverage formative changes with less friction.

Whether this idea of change from the bottom up was a stage in itself?

Not about the aggregate of countless micro efforts but the need for big ideas that could capitalize on the massive potential we have today. Turning huge problems into a elegant, far-reaching solutions. Change built on the human capital and dynamics in our networks themselves.

I grew up in the tech industry as part of the revolution that a few people in a loft or garage could prototype something that could rewire our world.

It worked well and we are all the beneficiaries of this.

I wonder though if five years from today, the greatest changes we experience on the streets will come out of incubators and pitch fests. Or whether something else is brewing.

We are living the reality that the impossible is indeed possible. That unfathomable logistics are simply a step to take, not a show stopper when resourced.

I believe that we are entering an era where potentially, like in the entertainment industry, the creative idea is the starting point. The organizing principal.

The creative vision where possibility supersedes the mechanics of fundraising, team building, market penetration and the rest.

All are of course critical.

But I wonder whether we’ve turned a huge corner of both need and probability that the impossible can indeed happen in a new way.

Not that each and every piece is not critical of course. That iteration and execution aren’t essential, just that without the idea, without the vision, its just mechanics and skills.

Like walking into a factory or workspace  or an industrial kitchen. Simply desks and metal and technology.

With vision and creativity and an incubated idea, there can be magic that changes the world.

Try something.

Wake up early tomorrow and take a walk around your town or your city.

Think through how people move around. How transactions happen. How healthcare is instituted. How we live our lives. How we communicate cross time and space.

Never has a bigger ship with built in dynamics for larger and faster change been so verdant for rethinking. Where need and possibility intersect so easily.

Our world has so changed. Dramatically and for the better.

I have to wonder if the process of innovation itself, may not be next piece to re-imagine.

A requisite to even larger changes, rethought to suit the possibilities of the times themselves.

Community as a market strategy, as a channel and in some cases a business model, is the personal bias of my career.

It’s my way of understanding the world.

Truthfully, it’s always been somewhat ineffable and perplexingly inchoate. You can arrange the pieces in perfect order with invariably powerful results when it works, but it is as well, always unpredictable.

This is changing.

Community as an entity is becoming on one hand more critical for commerce, on the other, more deterministic, and more tangibly coupled to the networks they spring from.

And while the networks that wire our world become fewer, more powerful and data smart, community where human touch and collective engagement gather, becomes more critical as an after effect.

Networks today while some lament their impact on privacy and their monopolistic power, are the necessary counterpoints, in fact the subset of each community we participate in.

The dynamic between the networks we frequent and the communities we engage with define in many ways who we are as people and inevitably, whether the companies we work for and the causes we hold dear are successful.

It’s in this pairing of networks and communities where I start my work, with a handful of basic truths that regardless of the uniqueness of the community, invariably hold true.

The more I adhere to these ideas as starting points, invariably the better the results.

Networks are the strings that tie our world together, but communities are what gives them meaning.

Networks are a common factor, while horizontal communities are by definition unique and invariably-vertically focused. Maybe it’s a cause or a belief or a shared obsession, but communities are formed around common interest, not around friendships or place.

Saying that a network has an identity is a stretch; having a community without one is neigh impossible.

Network infrastructure is where technology shows itself at its best, but communities are where emotion and empathy, self organization, action and engagement happen.

Networks get continually smarter but this intelligence at its core is about driving the human connections to aggregate behaviors and beliefs than can form communities where the real work gets done.

The smarter the networks, the more extensive connections can surface. The more possibilities that in the end game communities can be formed.

Networks are the tangible things we can leverage, communities are the aspirational goals we set for them when they capture the imagination of a market.

The world’s population is already platformed on the social nets. The objective is discovering the hooks to surface and tie people together from this massive strata of humanity.

When we scratch this out on whiteboards and intersperse all these elements, leadership is something that surfaces as the key focus to channel enthusiasm into action, beliefs into organizations based on a collective drive. Discover the leaders and the language they use to tell their stories and you have a strong place to start.

Neither networks nor communities are tied to place as much as they are grounded in time.

Where people are matters of course and we need to understand the dynamics of speaking to people where they are, platform by platform.

But community, the aggregate of connection around a singular topic or belief, happens cross them all.

In time, not really in a place.

In some instances (though more rarely), communities exist at an address like your URl. On a bar stool at your neighborhood wine bar, but more and more, community is less and less like a club, more and more like an impromptu gathering regardless of location.

Platforming communities may indeed be a myth.

Community simply happens. Often in spite of the poverty of the infrastructure.

I want to believe in a platform that will enable every brand to manage its own community but I simply can’t discover it nor for all my attempts. Can’t seem to build it either. Trust me I’ve tried.

We certainly use vertical single-function solutions like Kickstarter to transact around a common community goal, but the community is not in one place, it is spread out across the web.

It lives everywhere but there.

This is a perfect wave.

Sometimes things just stack up and point to a new future.

Usually the pendulum swings in art, culture and technology, with emphasis on one extreme over another. One movement in reaction historically to what preceded it.

I believe that we are seeing a merging of opposites to a common goal.

It’s not data collection that matters, its interpretation. It’s not networks with increasing strong AI that matters, its where the smarts of the networks ends up coalescing around the human connections of the people in community groups.

A digital world driving an analog value.

There are few times where the science of data collection is at one with the needs of human expression.

It is happening right now.

The social nets feel fatigued to me.

Cacophonous. Unfulfilling. A shouting match.

I’m find myself pining for the dirt under the fingernails of life.

Wanting that nuance and exhausting pensiveness that comes from spending your Saturdays deep into a book that has nothing—and everything—to do with life.

Replacing music in my gym time with podcasts, though less the endless palaver of syndicated startup talk, more the long-form conversations on random topics like just recently, the early intaglio work of William Blake or behaviorism of open spaces in smart cities.

Forsaking time-sucking sitcoms for the story of ideas, novellas of surprise and the deep ambiguity that only comes from focus, from work of the mind, from abandonment to the process of laying out complex ideas.

And realizing—for me at least—that I only truly find the subtlety and assurance of thought in these stories and posts, infrequently in the short fuse of tweets.

It’s a reaction to a need for conversation and discussion. A hiatus from posturing. And exhaustion with speed pitching.

Embracing the truth that engagement is not a measurement, it’s a connection and we are mistaking as a culture—certainly as marketers–the measure for the truth of what we are seeking.

A firm rejection that life or work or friendship or the dynamics of startups can be captured in a phrase.

They can’t.

The collars of character counts in Twitter, the unfriendliness of words in Instagram, the enforced triviality and poses of Facebook, are like glances in the mirror.

Like Zoolander’s Blue Steel.

We are entering the most empowered, the most possible, the smartest data-driven time period that I can remember in my career.

But we need to truly redefine listening as an action with purpose to take advantage of this.

We need fuel for detailed imagining. We need stories that weave through the vagaries of inspiration and the foresight that only come from truly letting go.

We need articulate points of view that are owned by people not afraid to be dramatically wrong.

We need to surround ourselves with studied conjecture. With a thermal blanket of long-form thoughts.

There’s an ebb and flow of excitement and reflections, blogs and microblogs, phrases and expositions in thought.

We bob on top of these cycles, riding the wave in and out of cultural highs and lows.

I think today we are churning in the mire of trivialized socialization.

And it is calling out for for something with more depth. For something that takes digging in, with more touch and purpose.

That’s where the opportunity lies.

Technologists will see this as an evolution of platform types. Behaviorists will see it as the stair step of new platformed behaviors and collective drives for different types of communications.

I think it’s a combination of both, not a rejection of either.

The power of the nets as the origin of community is obvious.

But the more wired we become, the more connectivity is the given, the more data serendipity and UX clarity becomes the norm, the more the need for stories that bind. And thoughts that fight against simplicity and too easy understanding.

I see this as a nudge to step outside the metaphors that are stale and unfulfilling cross our social nets.

And in business, beyond the glorified, misguided tactics of growth hacking. Beyond the mania for simplification.

We need taglines, mission statements and clarity of course, but they are the tips of the iceberg, not the iceberg themselves.

The takeaway for me as I look into the new year, past the exhaustion and malaise of this political season and to the opportunities for work and culture, is in a commitment to understanding and listening.

And to me, this comes from immersive, multi-disciplinary thoughts and meditations. From allowing ourselves to discover the true story and forsaking the easy phrase.

I love a great tweet. They are simply not enough.

Who doesn’t love a pic that touches the imagination. We need more though.

We need thoughts that bind through our individualized understanding of them.

We need a process that understands that ambiguity and nuance are not a miss, but often the the only place where clarity can be found.

Marketing begins with assumptions.

Assumptions about the dynamics of the marketplace itself and how we can play to our own strengths. About core values and how to iconize them through positioning and branding. About how to craft a story and communicate it organically across customers, communities and partners.

In large companies, each uniquely different with their own siloed systems and innate group politics, there is one core assumption that crosses most of them as a starting point.

Be they Disney or the NBA, the City of New York or Whole Foods Markets, Dell. Or for that matter Google or Facebook.

Their brands are their single largest asset that each and every one of them is wired to control at every touch point that surrounds it.

Sometimes this means owning the entire ecosystem on both sides of the supply and delivery chains.

You really need to internalize that the enterprise is the polar opposite of a startup from this perspective.

In startups, we wake up every day to build our market and scratch our way to market fit any way we can. Our brands are the sharp edge of our aspirations.

The enterprise wakes up in a multitude of places, well resourced and carefully working to insure that they aren’t losing market share.

They live by trend lines–even innovation is as much a gateway to new customers and channels–as simply creative fodder for reconsolidating what they already have. To them their brands are nothing less than the aggregate of their market value.

That’s a place to start.

You need to step back to understand this strategically, discovering a selling and marketing point of view that can get you a seat at the table where decisions are made. And equally, a spot in the minds of their end customers all the while respecting the control that they demand.

Direct to customer sales are honestly so much simpler—in concept at least. You have to visualize only one behavior in one vernacular.

With the enterprise, you need to understand not simply them as your customer. But the behaviors of their customers. The dynamics of their developer community down on through distribution and support.

You need to think this through strategically from the very top down. Then tactically from the bottom up.

Large companies are really complex but they are understandable.

They are slow to move but once in motion, can create an endless waves that roll onwards indefinitely.

I know this to be true but we also need to be cognizant that the very markets around the enterprise are in flux and changing.

Less than a decade ago, marketing was simply an adjunct to sales. Not the case today.

As a rule, we still sell one-to-one vertically into big companies but we market one-to-many or often many-to-many horizontally across the various communities that comprise their supply and delivery chains.

My buddy Tom Critchlow, who knows this market as well as anyone, thinks that how we market to the b2b segment and the enterprise, is almost indistinguishable from how we market b2c direct to consumers. And the differences are blurring fast.

He’s right on.

But along with the consumerization of the broader marketplace, there are at least two other pieces that feed into this.

First is how we position ourselves.

I’m a believer in gathering the team in a room and tearing the different pieces of the market apart one by one, value add by value add. Thinking through every piece of the value chain through every permutation.

Then wiping the board clean and starting over to discover the one that fits them all.

It takes a diversity of understanding to graph out how your product or data type plays in the market. How it touches the wants of the consumer. The excitement of the developers and the brand loyalty of the enterprise customer.

But at the end, in many cases, when captured right, they are very much the same.

Brands are simply living and breathing beliefs, captured in time in an image or idea. Crafted with meticulous care but honestly beyond our control. Owned by the end user and as malleable as the personalities who embrace them.

Second is that community is becoming the marketplace.

In many ways this has already happened.

There are platforms and groupings cross the web for every affinity and enthusiast group. And any number of discrete developer communities but the communities themselves and the market are becoming more horizontal and atomic by their very nature.

They intersect.They cross pollinate on shared momentum and inspiration. They are platformed and interconnected.

While how you market to enthusiasts and developers appears at times different, honestly, the similarities are greater than the distinctions.

The intersection of where you find customers and developers is not as disparate as you may imagine. Unique perhaps at times but often adjacent.

There is no accurate GPS that shows us how to get from a great product to the hearts and minds of enterprise customers and their end users.

But there is a blueprint of sorts.

Directional and built on learned perspective and core assumptions.

Try on the ones I’ve shared as a general starting point.

Do the work to understand the dynamics of your unique situation and craft something built on your own understanding and interpretation.

Be flexible and aware of the changes happening right now in the market. In the rising of community as a core structure of communications.

And don’t underestimate the unstoppable power of a story well told that touches a collective imagination across all your customers and communities.

With that, a great product, potentially even better team and your fair share of luck, you have a good place to start.

I can’t tell whether it’s the season for introspection or simply that time of life for me.

But I’ve been preoccupied, thinking about my career as a marketer and free associating anecdotes about projects and product launches, surprising successes and some very painful duds.

Musing about the why of what I do and where it all started for me.

I’ve been thinking about how I grew up in a pre-web world, an English and philosophy major who ended up being the brand and community builder for such a broad array of tech companies.

How my natural comfort zone is at the intersection of technology and consumer behavior with new platforms for delivery and commerce but I was already a very young adult when I played my first video game on a trs-80.

I’ve wanted a big aha, like the successful salesperson who can point to themselves always hustling as a kid, or the CFO thanking their biz school professor.

It’s not that simple for me.

For years now when asked about how I came to define marketing as I practice it, I’ve used the story about my first job in tech, walking into the server room at Atari Corp, to manage their massive BBS enthusiast community.

How community as the core of how people act commercially just clicked for me.

It’s a true story but like most things of import, the backstory turns out to be a lot more nuanced and less poetic.

Very early on, I was a writer and freelance radio commentor for hire.

One of these gigs was ghostwriting early childhood education textbooks and grants for a prominent behavioral psychologist at U of W in Seattle.

I ended up managing a grant for the professor, whose funded mission was to aggregate groups of parents who were writing very early educational software programs for their special needs kids.

I created support groups for them, wrote documentation then published the software through Library of Congress.

I was a community manager of sorts, traveling around engaging with small groups of passionate parents, sharing early publishing tools, creating community platforms.

I fed organic growth for the project by marketing the very software products that I published back to their own local communities. Creating local heroes of the developers (the parents) and an interest group in schools to support the kids.

Most everything I do today was there in a very embryonic and analog state.

I was using community as both supply and demand.  Letting the innate dynamics and formlessness of these small groups gel into its own variant of a self sustaining market.

I was tapping into collective human behavior as the true essence of community.

And that marketing both internally and externally was the organizing and communications bridge between individual ideas and market connection.

This was a long time ago.

As I dug through old resumes tracking this down, I also realized that in most every brand and product I’ve built since, some nascent bit of tech was leveraged to coax out and platform developing behavior, community formation and market change.

For this instance, it was software tools but I can easily list out every data type from then to projects I’m considering right now.

It’s my definition of what ties the tech world together.

Constantly changing waves of tech but a dynamics of adoption that carries through them all.

That’s marketing as I practice it.

Professor Haring, all academic and convivial as I remember him, gave me a chance, and I fell into something about myself that still drives me today.

Not with a big bang.

Not with the buzz of first love or instantaneous attraction, but with some uncanny muscle memory when you find what you are good at.

When that tool or musical instrument or the organizing principle feels just perfect in your hand. When you stand up in front of a group and feel perfectly at ease and exactly where you should be.

To the professor a lifetime ago.

To every board I’ve ever worked with.

Every CEO and VC, every entrepreneur that’s put their faith in me to lead them to make it happen anew, in a unique way.

To the people and teams I am planning on working with in the new year.

All I can say is Thank You!

It’s going to be a great new year.