Better Business Through Improv

John Moore at Brand Autopsy is sharpening his improv skills - and his business skills, too, it seems. Recently he struck up an e-mail conversation with Patricia Ryan Madsen, author of IMPROV WISDOM, his current textbook. (While the book is geared more to encourage us to take chances and do more of the things that are important to us in our personal lives, the Improv Maxims Patricia shares are highly applicable to business.)

A transcript of their e-mail exchange can be found here. (And you have to love any book that has a subtitle of Don't Prepare, Just Show Up. Even Woody Allen says that's 95 percent of success anyways.)

Part of the beauty of adapting improv into business practices is what Seth Godin in his latest book, All Marketers Are Liars, dubbed The Curse of the Red Queen - the evolutionary paradox that what worked yesterday is unlikely to work today. (This must be a Seth original because I did a search and could not find anything besides references to the slasher movie myth of the queen that kills seven every 100 years. And I would quote you the exact passage but Red Queen or Curse was not in his index and I have no recollection where it was in the book.)

Whether we like it or not, none of us are as prepared for tomorrow as we need to be. (Mostly because we don't yet know what tomorrow will throw at us until it gets here.) But this book looks like it might be a good resource to learn how to be more open to the chaos.