ANTIGENcy

Okay, I have been chit chatting with a few poeple who’ve really helped me to round out this concept.

It comes down to this.

The work we are doing to isolate corporate antigens (these are largely threats to a company’s culture) and design antibodies for them to protect themselves is typically called scenario planning. That is designing/creating events that pose threats to a company’s human infrastructure and then helping them create adequate defenses.

It turns out this is done in many larger companies but under a much more conventional approach.

Our aim is to continue building these antigens and focus on companies who care about the following:

1. building toward a more innovative workplace
2. fostering creative energy within all points along the org chart hierarchy
3. adopting design thinking as a means to complement management of the business
4. building customer-centric teams trying to be more agile and strategic

In the coming weeks, we are going to begin using this site to introduce these antigens. Shortly thereafter, using an open source approach, we’d like to get ideas of more insights, ideas about both antigens and antibodies that are out there.

If you are a company that is already practicing this, we would like to hear from you. If you are a company that would like to begin prototyping a program, drop us a line.

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This was forwarded to me today. This is a realty outfit large enough to sponsor a NASCAR driver.  Huh.

Awesome.

Reminds me of the butter maker in Wisconsin called Merdes.

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You know, for as preposterous as it sounds to do what I am doing, I haven’t run into anyone yet that has called me out or told me that I am a complete fool. Most the folks that I share this idea with are intrigued, cock their head a little to the side and then again intrigued. Perhaps their just holding it in.

In the simplest terms, I am focused on isolating destructive “strains” affecting companies. I am starting on the interior and will work my way out to the exterior in the next few months. Once I have begun a map of the these strains in isolation, I will begin to craft specific antigens and then antibodies that address these strains.

The bottom line is that I really feel like this is an approach that has legs. I believe that we need to begin looking at evolutionary biology as a metaphor to help us manage change. As things become more networked and socialized, it will be through these biological metaphors that we understand how to manage the lightening-speed growth of business evolution.

In the coming weeks I will be fleshing it out more and talking to folks in both the traditional management consulting space and the bio-sciences space to firm the concept up more. I feel like an idiot as I dive deeper into this as I am neither a management consultant or a biologist. I’m just a guy with an idea.

This is the most fun I have had at work in years. I am absolutely flabbergasted.

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Last week I stopped working as the Executive Vice President of Strategy at a well-respected and good-sized independent communications firm in Raleigh. At that post, I was a consultant working on big project strategy, organizational development, design thinking, design strategy and culture change.

I am now taking that experience and trying something new based on what many of my clients wanted throughout my engagements. Something different, more transparent, more accessible and without all the budgetary inflexibility.

I am creating ANTIGENcy. Both an anti-agency and a corporate antigen.

I think it can be different by virtue of not doing what conventional consulting practices do. Not charging the fees they charge and being a little more open and accessible. And it can be successful by virtue of protecting a company’s defenses. That is what we plan to accomplish.

Let’s see if it works.

Filed under: General