Creative Faculty member's film at the Berlinale

Congratulations to Joao Daniel Tikhomiroff for the Berlinale film festival screening of his new film, Besouro ("Beetle"), the biography of Brazil's most famous Capoeirista, Besouro Manganga.

Here's the Besouro trailer.

Joao Daniel directed the film, one of the largest productions in Brazilian history, which tells the story of Besouro's life and struggle to help free Brazil's ethnic African population from economic slavery in the 1920s. Besouro became a legendary master of the African-inspired fighting dance, which grew out of Afro-Brazilians' being unallowed to own weapons. With action director Huan-Chiu Ku (Kill Bill, Matrix) the film has spectacular stunt sequences and a soundtrack featuring Gilberto Gil, Rica Amabis, Tejo and other Brazilian stars.

Photo: Joao Daniel (left) at the Besouro premiere last night in Berlin with the film's stars Jessica Barbosa and Aílton Carmo

Last September Joao Daniel delivered a joint master class and President's Lecture at the Berlin School on the subject of Mixing -- the model he has developed for his company that spans advertising, TV and film production.

You can also watch Joao's Tent Talk on the subject with fellow Berlin School Creative Faculty member Tony Segarra.

Jeff Jarvis and Peter Guber - unexpectedly aligned

Two of the highlights of the recent USA module for the EMBA program were speaking appearances by Jeff Jarvis and Peter Guber.
One is a thought leader on the digital transformation and its affect on traditional media, especially print journalism. The other is a legendary Hollywood production company head, former studio boss and record label founder.

Our Faculty Director David Slocum listened closely to them and found some suprising similarities in their messages.

"For me, the crucial thread running through these shared ideas is a committed openness to change – in industries and institutions, in teams and in individuals, and perhaps most in the romantic ideas we tend to harbor about the individual leader or writer."

Read the whole post and David's list of parallels here.

Seamless Mind

We got an update from Sergio Mugnaini, a 2009 graduate and Interactive Creative Director of Almap/BBDO Brazil, which was runner-up for Agency of the Year at Cannes last year.

Sergio has just launched a new, open-source magazine, Seamless Mind, which is looking at issues of branding and communication from a borderless perspective. The magazine's format is open source, allowing you to view it online, download a pdf, order a printed version and share as you would like. It's well worth a look - www.seamlessmind.is

And Sergio reunited with two fellow classmates, Matthias Spaetgens and Sergio Alcocer for a Brazilian new year's celebration at the beach.

Filip Nilsson Lecture -- Small but Excellent

When we have President's Lectures at the school, the speakers from big global companies often pack the house. They are usually grappling with the challenge of running large, or sometimes even global organizations. That's interesting, but often strikes me as trying to steer a supertanker. Not something many of us do.

I often prefer it when speakers from smaller companies give a lecture. It seems closer to the daily experience most of us have -- working in small teams and small organizations.

Filip Nilsson was one of my recent personal favorites among our lecturers for this very reason. In November he gave a look behind the scenes at how a 120-person agency in Sweden's No. 2 city has managed to win Agency of the Year in Sweden for an astounding 15 consecutive years. And not just in Sweden alone: Forsman & Bodenfors consistently wins some of the top awards at global advertising festivals like Cannes Lions, meaning they are doing work that sets new global standards.

Filip's lecture title was "because we're different," and he laid out some key structural reasons why his agency has developed a company culture that achieves excellence.

The main points I took away were:
1. They have a radically democratic corporate structure, with 27 equal partners each holding just under 4% of the company. That's not a typo.
2. Since no one is going to get stinking rich atop this structure, they also try to focus on having real lives too (although in the early days they were workaholics anyway)
3. They have no clear company heirarchy; decisions are made as a group the way Indian tribes used to decide-- by the power of interpersonal persuasion.
4.  They are small by choice, having resisted the constant temptation and offers to either grow bigger or sell themselves to a large holding company.
5. Despite being small, they hold themselves to high standards of creative excellence.
6. The creative work-in-progress is always placed in the middle of the room so that everyone in the company is exposed to it and can offer feedback. It generates crowdsourced creativity.

This structure leads to problems too. It can take a couple of years for new employees to learn the unwritten organigram that everyone has in their heads (who is respected, whose word carries weight, etc.)

But it has obviously worked very well for Forsman & Bodenfors.

The complete lecture is now online, as is Michael Conrad's Tent Talk with Filip. Thanks again to Filip for his visit and inspiration.

November EMBA module comes to a close in London

Coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, our recent EMBA module featured perhaps the most fireworks of any module yet. The John Hunt Presidents' Lecture is already online, and we'll soon post the equally fascinating lecture from Filip Nilsson.

There was a day spent at the Falling Falls conference that included Chancellor Angela Merkel and Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, and some of the participants scored tickets to see U2s historic show in front of the Brandenburg Gate. There were visits to Freemantle and the BBC in London, plus a fun PechaKucha night in Berlin where we all learned from Saadi that the white donkey is a symbol of Damascus.

Godfathers Seymour Stein and John Gough shared time with the group, and thanks to Professors Osman, Greenwald, Seebacher and Tabatoni for their hard work in the classroom.

The next module comes at the end of January in the USA, and we're already excited about what's in store.

Stefan Sagmeister collects Lucky Strike Design Award

It's not every day that music artist Lou Reed delivers a laudatio, but that's what Creative Faculty Member Stefan Sagmeister received this week in Berlin. Stefan, who will be meeting our EMBA participants in New York during the upcoming USA module, collected the prestigious Lucky Strike Design Award for his work and was introduced by Reed, for whom Stefan designed album covers.

Image: Stefan speaks at the awards presentation.

The award is given by the Raymond Loewry Foundation, named in honor of the father of American industrial design.

Mark Tutssel to lead Cannes Jury

Congratulations to Creative Faculty member Mark Tutssel, the Chief Creative Officer of Leo Burnett Wordwide, for being named President of the 2010 Cannes Lions Film and Press Juries.

Mark has led Leo Burnett to creative excellence again in 2009, being the third-most awarded agency network at Cannes. We're especially proud of Mark's accolade for Agency of the Year at the Golden Drum Festival, which was earned partly by recent Berlin School graduate Bechara's big sweep.

Jeff Jarvis to deliver President's Lecture in New York

It's now official that we have landed Jeff Jarvis to deliver a President's Lecture during the USA module next January in New York. We're really excited about this, especially given Jeff's current (and quite public for the blogosphere) battle against cancer. The fact that confirmation came now during Jeff's convalescence from surgery is testimony to Jeff's love of his work or unflappability, or both.

Our Class 2 cohort had a great session with Jeff in New York in May 2008, and for that we have class valedictorian and web guru Shaun Abrahamson to thank for the tip. Since then we've begun working together with Jeff on his New Business Models for News initiative and will even unveil some current group projects related to that when we're in the U.S.

Jeff joined our Board of Governors last year and has now become even more influential in media circles due to his terriffic book synthesizing web economy business principles, What Would Google Do?

The lecture will be open to the public (with invitations going out in January), and the date is set for January 22. Mark those calendars, New Yorkers. The rest of you can catch the video of it on the website afterwards.

Jeff's blog Buzzmachine is also worth a bookmark...

Sergio Alcocer wins Hispanic Creative Advertising Award

Congrats to our recent graduate Sergio Alcocer for winning yet another award with his Austin. Texas company LatinWorks. This time he nabbed an Hispanic Creative Advertising Award for a low-budget but high-imagination campaign for the Cine Las Americas film festival.

Sergio has built a great reputation as an expert in marketing to Latin Americans in el Norte, and in this case he manages to poke some fun at Argentinia's former President Menem along the way. He's an easy target when you see the footage.

You can check out the full Ad Age article here.

Courtesy of Advertising Age, here's the ad.

Thanks, David!

Our quiet Website relaunch

It has taken a long time (as website projects always seem to do), but we're proud to unveil our (permanent-) beta version of the new website. We've had a redesign deployed since late June, but now the final back-end features have come online. In the coming days and weeks the scaffolding will take on more and more decoration in the form of content, especially as we backfill the site with months and even years of legacy material from both the former website and our brimming archives.

Aside from the blog, we're most jazzed about the new possibilities for video. It's mashed up with our YouTube channel, and the photo archive is mashed up with our Flickr account. So we're looking forward to having a flexible, nimble way to showcase the people and ideas of the school. In our Absolut world, watching a video can lead you to a person, which leads you to an event, which leads you to a blog post, which leads you to a piece of wisdom, and so on. We hope you'll immerse yourself in the great people, ideas and activities associated with the school.

We once had a blog on our old website, but it died on the vine before I arrived on the team. I never really understood why, and it's been one of my main goals to kiss the blog back to life and make it a key piece of our existence. We have an amazing community of thinkers and creative people associated with the school, and my goal is that we can reflect the passion and impact that this young organization is generating.

Thanks to our design firm, Novamondo, for a clean, elegant and functional design plus a tireless eye for details in the execution. Thanks to our programming and application partners at TD Solutions for delivering (after some bumps in the road that we made it through together) a remarkably versatile and workable back-end. Thanks to one member of the TDS team in particular; David, from now we have dubbed you Sir David. And thanks to the Berlin School team, especially Will Taylar, who has shown resourcefulness, patience and good cheer throughout this open heart surgery.

If you notice bugs or problems, spartan text passages, anything labelled "test" or "text", or other head-scratchers, especially in these first days, please bear with us. We are learning to taxi this complex Airbus before we can fly it, but we're glad you're on board in any case.