John Seely Brown: The Business School of Extreme Aerial Surfing

It's extreme surfing. It turns out that I spend, for lucky reasons, three months a year in Maui. And this kid, who is, by the way, a world champion, now lives next door to me. And I've had a chance to observe how basically five kids have come together to create a cohort, to engage in incredible fast learning, to reinvent aerial surfing, to at the extreme edge and now all become world champions. And Maui up to now has never, ever produced a champion in its history. So interesting question. What happened if just one kid had done it? And this kid is pretty talented, that would be interesting, but not worth studying. The question is, how did they all become. What's going on here? Why do I bring it up? How did this become possible? So I've had a chance to live with these guys, have dinner with these guys, because they're, as I say, 200ft from my house. They find me kind of weird. I find them kind of interesting. Now, the obvious thing is they came together and they said, somehow we're going to learn as much as we can from each other. And they formed this amazing ability to critique each other on the fly almost all the time and compete like mad with each other the rest of the time. It's not surprising. These guys have extreme passion. In order to be able to push themselves to the edge. They fail continuously, by the way, when you fail sometimes out there, it's really bad. You get really messed up. This is not an easy fail, but it doesn't stop them one iota, kind of. Another thing they do is kind of, again, obvious is they get all the DVDs of all the champion surfers around the world. They bring them into their living room next door and they sit there with imovie and a few other things and they go through this thing frame by frame by frame, studying each move, seeing how what they can do about this. They dash down the hill to the surf, try it out, back up, so on and so forth. Another thing they do, and you actually saw it in the water. There is very near, the very end, you saw Dusty almost land on somebody. Well, that was a cameraman trying to grab a picture of Dusty performing. In fact, all Dusty has to know, let it be known he's about to go surfing. And videographers flock from all over the place. But what they really do is they kind of now, of course, with their own video cameras and now others, they go out and they practice and capture their own moves. Come back almost like a design studio, by the way, and they critique each other's moves, try to Kind of parse them and look at how they can do something better. One of the most interesting things to me, and an idea that I think comes through, a lot of stuff that you guys must be thinking about is how do you get the best ideas from adjacencies? How do you start studying things like it? Well, obvious things like it are skateboarding. In fact, Dusty's a champion. Not a champion, but a damn good skateboarder, too. So you go out and you study these skateboard moves, and then you see, how do I appropriate a skateboard move over here into what I'm doing over here? It's not just skateboarding. It's actually mountain biking. It's actually motocross. One of the most recent moves that happened is actually Dusty will let the board get way out in front of him. That actually was picked up. It's called the. I forgot the exact name of it, but I call it the motocross move. It came from Motocross Extreme Performance. And where you can actually see these guys with their motorcycles out in front of them flying over an edge. He said, I bet I can kind of appropriate that. Okay, those are kind of obvious in some ways. Two more things is it basically, Dusty and his gang understand local ecosystems. They understand spikes. What they do is they're constantly flying all over the world, circulating around the world, going to every kind of local, talented place, competing with those surfers, looking for new moves and so on and so forth. In fact, when I have to talk to Dusty, it has to be, of course, by Skype. I have no idea what country he's going to be in. He circulates the globe. But it's interesting how they have kind of figured out, as we all would expect, that there are seats of incredible talent. I gotta go and visit those things. And then how do I appropriate new ideas? How do I build relationships in those spikes of incredible capability? And what can I learn from them? And then how do you kind of productively interact with folks so that now people come to them to show them things they don't have to go out? Now, you might say all this is pretty clear if you actually think about entrepreneurialism. I think any of you would say these aren't necessarily bad strategies to think about yourself. But I think the key to me is somehow, first of all, it's not that they're just passionate about surfing. They're passionate about extreme performance, and that's what pushes them to the edge and to try all kinds of things. But secondly, they have a deep, questing disposition. This means anywhere they go, they look for new ideas.