Discovery and Planning: The Essential Tension of Innovation

In my previous two posts I wrote about an intersection between the arts and an emergent form of business innovation that is not yet fully defined. In this space a kind of venture model is possible that draws on the strengths of both paradigms, maximizing creative possibilities while minimizing uncertainty and risk. I affectionately and irreverently call it the Cake Machine. Cake being profit, of course.

The process is abstract, combining the best of several powerful frameworks--Stanford d.school's design thinking, emergent strategy and Rita McGrath and Ian MacMillan's discovery driven growth.

First some definitions. 

Discovery: what you practice when you don't have the data to do anything else. The process of going where there isn't a lot of information to guide the way. It is often led by hunches, intuition and incremental discoveries.The process is uncertain or leads to uncertain outcomes.

Planning: the process of making decisions and strategies that yield desired results over time. The process is predictable.

There is an essential tension between these two. Discovery wants to be an open ended process to maximize its ability to explore and make amazing things. Planning wants to reduce uncertainty to measurable risk, producing desired results next month, next quarter, next year.

The process of creating innovative companies and brands is structured as a cycle that utilizes this tension between discovery and planning. To give this rigor and structure, design thinking is formally articulated as a problem solving tool while discovery driven planning is used to model the business and define the design parameters.

This process throws off creative energy by considering design as a critical component of the entire business ecosystem and by defining design parameters using sustainable business models. It is more of an engine than an incubator. The design, discovery and planning processes are in play simultaneously.

Design thinking, emergent strategy and discovery driven growth are generally formulated as linear processes. By reconstructing them into an iterative loop, I create a cycle which holds at its center a fully formed venture whose final form is, at the start, something of a mystery. As we circle the center, considering it from all angles, we continually refine the entire business and design ecosystems using what we find there to define our design parameters.

Design thinking engages in a process that has been organized by the d.school as follows:

1. Empathy

2. Define (focus): create a clearly defined problem statement

3. Ideate (flare): generate as many solutions as possible to the problem as defined above

4. Prototype

5. Test

In this engine, design thinking is used as an essential framework for problem solving once the problems are defined more clearly by the financials. Reverse financials bring problems to light early in the process, generating clear problem statements and then flaring to generate previously unrecognized solutions. This process of focus and flare, using the business financials as a way of setting design focus early in the process, maximizes innovation within the entire business ecosystem, from the design of the user experience through the supply chain to the overall finances of the organization.

Here is a rough step by step pass through the first cycle.

1. Start with any basic concept for a product or service offering.
2. Define the basic unit of business and any alternative units. The unit of business must differentiate.
3. Build a set of reverse financials--an income statement and balance sheet--that makes the venture worthwhile. 
4. Back out of the financials as many of the assumptions that you can that have to hold true for this venture to succeed.
5. Rank assumptions by order of importance, with the most critical assumptions, the ones where everything falls apart if you get it wrong, at the top. 
6. Design tests to discover the accuracy of your assumptions.

By now you have made a circular pass around the loop with basic definitions of everything that has to hold true for your venture to succeed. You have a sketch of your variable and fixed costs in place, a required income, a sense of return on assets which gives you an allowable amount of fixed assets, and a basic model of how your entire supply chain and marketing efforts have to behave for this to work.

With these inputs you go back to your design concept and refine it based on the cost and price information that your financials have modeled. You calculate your break-even point and evaluate your offering in terms of its potential market. Using design thinking you maximize your creative input into the design within the parameters defined by the financials.

How does this work? The process can be adapted to any venture. Here is one example.

Imagine a designer who believes she can build a disruptive product to fill a perceived hole in the market at a price point of $800. The product is disruptive and differentiated because it will bring a level of quality to that price point that currently only exists in products offered by competitors at a much higher price. How will she go forward?

Her business unit is defined as a product purchased by the consumer for $800. We start with the assumptions that to make this worth the effort, the company should generate $1,000,000 in net income with a contribution margin ratio of 45% and a return on assets of 25%. To start, she believes manufacturing can be achieved with fixed costs of $600,000 per year. Now we work the income statement backwards.

Net Income	$1,000,000.00
Taxes (40%)	$666,666.67
Income	$1,666,666.67
Fixed Costs	$600,000.00
Contribution Margin	$2,266,666.67
Variable Costs (55%)	$2,770,370.37
Sales	$5,037,037.04

At an $800 price point with $600,000 in fixed costs and a contribution margin ratio of 45%, the venture must sell just over $5 million in sales or 6,250 units to make the desired net income. For this to happen, each unit must have $440 or less in direct labor and materials.

Now that we have used the basic financials (backwards) to define our design parameters, we come back to the design to ask the question, what amazing things can be done in this product space for $440 per unit? How can we disrupt and capitalize in this space? Is there an innovation in manufacturing or distribution that would allow us to disrupt the competition? What does our potential market look like? How could we sell 6,250 units a year? We have nothing so far invested in fixed assets, but our basic balance sheet will allow us up to $4,000,000 in property, plant and equipment. Can we come in under this? What is possible for that amount? How much can be outsourced? How can those investments be delayed while we refine the design?

If the initial pass around the loop is successful, then the project enters the next level in the cycle, making more detailed financial documents, more specific designs and prototypes, while testing assumptions and doing everything possible to delay major investments and keep real options open so that you can refine and discover along the way.

So why are discovery based processes and design so critical to this next wave of profitable ventures in the United States? It has to do with an understanding of how money is created by firms. So much press has been focused on the amount of money made by banking and investment firms of late. What is missed in that is just how narrow the margins are in those transactions. Contribution margins for banking firms can run as low as 3%, which means that to make $3 million they have to move $100 million. That is an amount of capital that is unavailable and those are returns that are unreasonable for most business ventures. 

A well designed venture can produce contribution margins of 50% or more. With lean business plans this can be hugely profitable. It outperforms the financial markets by orders of magnitude. In our above example, the company is represented by $4,000,000 in fixed assets and let's give it another $1,000,000 in net working capital. With $5,000,000 tied up in capital, the company spends $440 to receive $800 in income for a contribution of $360 per sale. That is a return of 80% on money invested in direct materials and labor. If this were successfully implemented it would produce $1,000,000 in net income with $5,000,000 in total assets. Of course you can't just wave a magic wand and make that happen. But you can make it happen if you structure it by design. Or at least you can work through potential projects, avoiding the ones that don't make the cake until you find the ones that do.

What cake machine does is structure the modeling of innovative ventures in ways that focus and maximize the creative input to the process while minimizing uncertainty and risk. You want to quickly discover your major problems and hurdles so you can focus your problem solving and design energy on them first, either solving them to overcome barriers to entry or stopping the process before you spend in other areas.

Giving the process rigor and structure provides discipline for the transfer back and forth between discovery and planning. If we imagine it the way the brain works, this activates both sides, giving equal weight to analysis and innovation throughout. This system is like the corpus callosum, connecting both sides of the brain at the center, with directed and disciplined discovery on the creative side and open ended financials and planning on the other.

By iterating in this way an organization can cycle through any number of ideas at a time, learning from each and focusing on the projects that have the most likelihood for success. Most importantly, the design parameters are set up in sync with the operating and financial goals of the enterprise which focuses creative activity in ways that increase the likelihood of success. To succeed, the process needs leaders who can design the entire business models and drive superb design within the financial parameters. It is a rare breed who can do both, but that is where the cake gets made.

The Avant Garde and Finance

These two disciplines seemingly couldn't be farther apart both in methods and in orientation to the world. But consider what they both seek to achieve. Finance attempts to look ahead into the future to determine the likely outcomes of investments that are dependent on the future performance of a host of variables including entire markets. Art makers attempt to make culture, which is a similar process of working towards a future encounter with a wider audience, attempting to interpret the impact of works that are also dependent on a host of variables, also attempting to create something of value. Each navigates exceedingly complex terrain using dramatically different tools.

The essential functions of finance are to determine what are, and what are not, worthwhile investments of money over time. The essential functions of design are to produce a superior user experience that also extends itself out over time, past the point of purchase and into the life of the product, process or service. The essential functions of art, or at least a major current problem being explored, is how to produce better culture and possibly better outcomes for everyone involved.

Over the past months I worked to build an iterative model that would give structure to innovation while maximizing realizable options. It is possible, with the right conditions and tolerances for innovation, to create teams that combine the strengths of all three disciplines. Bringing discovery driven planning in at the early focus stage of the design thinking process will apply profitable parameters early on. This focuses the idea generation by ruling out as many unprofitable avenues as you can, before you invest in exploring them. 

Let me try and explain how this works in plain English. First you assemble a design team to address a problem or need.  At the earliest stages in the design process, you create a set of financial statements that build on your ideas, only you build them in reverse. And this is the key. You in effect take your idea and create a ghost company or business unit entirely on paper, working backwards through all the calculations to arrive at a sense of what that idea would have to look like in order to be profitable. Within these reverse calculations will be a host of assumptions that must prove to be true in order for your idea to work profitably. With them laid out on paper, you can begin to test these assumptions upfront, working from the most consequential to the least consequential.

Testing concepts in this way has two significant benefits over implementing first and testing as you go. First it minimizes the cost of exploring a concept or idea by increasing the speed and accuracy of initially evaluating its viability. And second, by minimizing the cost and reducing the risk, it increases the number of ideas that can be explored without the expectation that every idea will be a success. By providing something of a safety net for your innovation efforts, this encourages your design teams to be more innovative, to push out to the edges of their own abilities and beyond.

This already happens in some combination in every successful venture, but it tends to happen latently and over time. There is a kind of Darwinian weening out of the weaker concepts as they are implemented. In this other model we are able to create a kind of three dimensional virtual model of an idea and back out it the assumptions that have to hold true in order for it to be a success. We are looking for the problems before they become problems.

Here we get finance and design working together at the very beginning. What happens is a very quick cycling of ideas that allows for the generation of the most possible solutions you can come up with the least possible cost in exploring how viable they are. What is absolutely critical for maximum success is to have someone in the middle who speaks both finance and design and can translate the concepts across disciplines. 

Design thinking is an extremely powerful tool for innovating. Its weakness though is that every step is very dependent on the outcomes of the previous steps. The end result is very dependent on the questions asked or problems raised at the start. Discovery driven finance adds the capability of focusing the early stages of the design thinking process to produce a greater likelihood of a profitable outcome. 

All innovators push the boundaries of their fields. By focusing design activity we actually encourage MORE innovation. When you have those kinds of people at work on your project, they are going to push the limits. Steering them in that activity increases the likelihood of smash hits and radical disruptive moves forward. 

Next week I will post one more time with a more concise how step by step description of how this works.

Where I've Been, New Avenues, and a Major Discovery

In 2009 I read a paper at a conference at Northwestern University's Department of Communication Studies. In it I sought to build a global model that would describe everything I knew about how images operate in the world, from conception and creation, through editing and distribution, to their impact on far flung audiences throughout the world.

In the end I succeeded in sketching out my understanding of how mass media, business, psychoanalytic theory, aesthetics, and so on interact in ways that define a process. It is a sort of model of how change can be made through media. This model was informed by a broad range of professional experiences from my work at Time Inc in a critical production role at a billion dollar magazine to independent and freelance image making for a wide range of clients, to my own personal work that answers to more personally defined terms of making and audience engagement.

As I was working through this paper, I intuitively sensed that something was happening along the intersection between art making and business. I was hearing about it in a broad range of terms, from evolutions in social media, to user interface design, to changes in audience engagement strategies, to instability in the global economy, to predictions that the US economy itself needs to and is transforming itself into an innovation based economy that will be able to generate profitable innovations in a turbulent world market.

As we passed through the recession and continue to transition into the new economies made possible by computers and the internet, it was becoming increasingly clear that the possibilities for cultural innovation were almost entirely dependent on the funding sources and business models that quite literally define and shape their outcomes.

You cannot innovate outside of the business models and ecosystems in which you operate. They are designed to protect their own success and survival. Your efforts to disrupt them will be defeated unless you can address the business on its own formal terms.

On a deep ontological level this is reminiscent of the problems that painting encountered as it transitioned into abstraction in the early parts of the last century. It, along with all the arts, to evolve out of the avant garde, first faced itself on its own formal terms. Something similar is happening in business.

My conclusion in my paper at Northwestern was that one cannot innovate on a large scale in ways that significantly escape the business models that you are dependent on. I had not yet read Clayton Christensen's book, the Innovator's Dilemma, in which he explores this problem for large corporations that succeed wildly, growing to dominate their industry only to find themselves irrelevant or losing to competitors that are more innovative and nimble. But I had already lived inside or around that cycle of innovation through my decade in publishing in New York City. My intuitive understanding of the problem led me to confront it on stage at Northwestern.

Plain and simple. You cannot innovate beyond the restrictions of your business model. Therefore, you must design new business models if you want to innovate. A simple, logical conclusion.

I chewed on that conclusion for almost a year, looking for ways to work around it. There wasn't any way around it. If you can't work with the finance and the accounting, you can't build innovative organizations.

At this point I quietly enrolled in a Master's of Business Administration program at Western Washington University with the intention of studying accounting and finance. The first year I just put my head down and worked hard on the quantitative skills. As an artist with an MFA, I was an unusual addition to the mix, but I brought significant personal experience and was able to quickly translate concepts into my own real world experiences.

About nine months ago I began an independent study on innovation and the arts. At that point there were 20 or so Master's of Arts Administration programs throughout the United States. I pulled all their curricula and worked through what it was that they were teaching. Almost without exception, they were extremely light on the hard quantitative business skills like accounting, operations and finance.

By now I had worked through substantial portions of all three and could recognize what a loss this was to the entire field. The weakness of the whole field was summed up in the introduction to one of the leading textbooks on arts administration. It a field that is an amalgamation of ideas where no one key differentiating point or strength has emerged. The potential weakness was that you could get light versions of an MFA and an MBA without getting the full strengths of either.

I asked myself the following question--was there something happening at the nexus of art making and business that was uniquely powerful and strong, in which the best of both worlds would come forward and new and valuable models would emerge that would contribute to both fields?

From there began nine months of research that yielded the following answer; Yes, and the possibilities are incredibly exciting. They also are not restricted to non-profit or for-profit equations. And as more and more states in the US start to adopt the formation of social purpose corporations, the possibilities only continue to grow.

I wasn't the only person asking these questions. The entire field of arts education had been shifting towards audience engagement and the recognition that art making is a conversation with the public, with broader implications and consequences. The field of social entrepreneurship emerges out the interactions between art making and current evolutions in development and social innovation. This fall the School of Visual Arts is offering the first MFA in Social Entrepreneurship. There is a clear recognition that art making is not restricted to a material or image making event.

Concurrently the business world is experiencing escalating levels of uncertainty and a need to innovate disruptively as an almost normal condition in the markets.

By combining models of design thinking, emergent strategy and discover driven planning that have been developed at Stanford, Harvard, Wharton and Columbia, and tested at places like IBM, Apple, IDEO, and Ashoka, it is possible to integrate art, accounting, finance and design in powerful ways.

Tomorrow I will post on what this space is starting to look like from my perspective, how it works, and why you need someone who speaks art, design, accounting and finance on your team, no matter what it is you are trying to do in the world.

The Coming Wave of Change for US Non-Profits

In the next five years US based non-profits are going to be faced with a wave of leadership transitions as baby-boomer executive directors retire. For the smaller and more innovative organizations, this is going to be an absolutely critical set of transitions. At the same time as the mantles are being passed, organizations are going to be faced with an increased need to increase efficiencies and run leaner. This will require the use of partnerships and contract relationships as organizations downsize and operations go online and into the cloud. There are many risks ahead, but the single largest risk for visionary and innovative organizations is that the core visions and values that the executive teams have nurtured over their tenure will be lost or diluted in the upcoming turmoil.

To increase the challenges, there are fewer qualified people to inherit these positions than there are people who are going to be retiring. The good news is that universities have recognized this deficit and are launching extremely innovative programs in social entrepreneurship, human driven design and social change that are graduating people with the raw skills and the creative methods to start to fill the void. Their entry into the work place will increase innovation, with all the problems that disruptive change brings.

The next wave of innovative non-profits will need to run extremely lean, be highly creative, work in partnerships as well as independently, and contract out critical portions of their operations. At the same time, they will have to be rapidly scalable as large influxes of money come their way in pulses.
As executive teams head into retirement, they need to set up their successors with a core set of strategies that are designed to embrace this more turbulent environment and still carry the core visions and values forward.

These next wave non-profits will be able to receive highly evolved strategic input and move it forward. A critical problem is communicating to those partners in ways that carry the vision to them. The best thing that an executive team can do to prepare for this is to engage in a strategic distillation of their expertise into a set of core documents that can communicate their vision in terms of internal accounting, internal and external communications strategies, and scalable growth plans. Without that strategic distillation, those core components discovered through years of work will at the very least be transformed if not lost altogether.

Further Thoughts on the Times' Paywall

There is an inescapable and very simple formula that describes the financial activity of all organizations that do business. It is the income statement for a given period of time:

Revenue - Expenses = Net Income

Most income generated in a given period fits under revenue, and most of the money spent for that same period fits under expenses. Complete the formula and you have a sense of the general capacity for an organization to create income. If net income is negative, then the organization obviously can't sustain that business model. If it is positive, then possibilities exist for growth.

Much has been made about notions of 'free' in the new internet economy, and it is certainly an important marketing component that plays to the strengths of digital distribution, but it cannot and should not in the long run be taken out of its context in a process that ultimately has to deliver a reliable revenue stream--a business model in which revenue ultimately exceeds expenses.

Anything given away for free costs money to create and distribute. Those costs go directly to the expense side of the formula. But they don't merely offset an equal amount of revenue. The cost of free comes directly out of the net profit of the company on a one to one basis. Here is how that works.

Let's say hypothetically that the New York Times has a net profit margin of 10% (for 2010 it's actually about 4.5%). That means that for every $100 it spends, it takes in $110 to make a profit of $10. Or we can say that every $110 worth of news sold by the New York Times cost it $100 to make. 

Now let's say that the New York Times decides to give away $100 in product. So they make $100 worth of news and give it away for free. Conventional logic says that the Times now has to make $100 in sales to make back that $100 loss. But because zero revenue comes in to offset that $100 expense, the New York Times is actually in the hole for $1000. Here's why. To get the money to make the $100 unit it gave away for free, the Times had to make and sell $1000 worth of news, bringing in with the 10% profit margin $100 in profit. So the $1000 dollars in operating expense brings in $1100 in revenue, and the profit, the $100 balance left over goes to pay for the $100 gift.

Now, the above theoretical example is based on the idea that the Times has a relatively stable operating business model. In this climate that is not the case, and technological advances in digital distribution have destabilized the model to the extent that there is little precedent to demonstrate the actual market value of the content recently being distributed for free.

What does all this have to do with the rollout of the New York Times paywall? 

Here is where it starts to get interesting.

Net income for the New York Times Company for the past five years is as follows:

2010: $108 million
2009: $20 million
2008: ($58 million)
2007: $209 million
2006: ($543 million)

Despite the recession that started in 2008, the Times' worst year was in 2006. If the recession bottomed out in mid 2008, then the Times has been making slow gains in its overall operating profitability, with a net income of $108 million in 2010.

What this is telling us is that its operations without the paywall are narrowly in the black, returning a modest net income in 2010 of $108 million on revenues of $2.4 billion, or a net profit margin of 4.5%. That is for the entire New York Times Company. The New York Times Media Group, publishers of the New York Times newspaper and NYTimes.com, makes up about 65% of that revenue.

According to the Times this improvement in profitability results from increasing online ad sales and cost cutting and increased efficiency in the print division.

Here's where I think the explanation for the current paywall system may reside. The Times is in the black, but barely. The industry is in flux. Change is already happening. Growth will happen online. The print division is cost cutting, but there are limits to how fast and how far that can go. The opportunity for an increase in net income comes mostly from NYTimes.com. But, whatever happens with NYTimes.com, online advertising needs to be sustained. Loss can come too. Make the paywall too tight and online advertising will drop off as readers fall away. Surges of readership through social media sharing will be constrained.

The middle spot? Make a paywall that is more of a nuisance than a real deterrent. This will keep advertising rates as high as possible through free readership and will begin to migrate concerned and conscientious readers over to a paying online model. Gradually the tightness of the paywall can be adjusted as its financial impacts become more known. 

If print revenues can be kept stable, the move to a loose paywall produces a powerful effect. Once the approximately $40 million invested in the paywall's implementation, plus the paywall operational costs are recovered, and any loss in online advertising is offset, online subscription revenues go nearly straight to net profit. Remember, NYTimes.com is already giving the news away for free. Their operations don't have to change for the paywall to take effect. They already produce and distribute the news. All things being equal, production costs don't rise.

It is one of the most unusual rollouts in business history. A company that is in full operational flow suddenly and somewhat loosely begins to charge for a product that it has been giving away for free.

A Little Bit of Free

In 2009 I made a series of predictions for the year, starting with the prediction that the New York Times would start to charge for it's online access. I was a little short on my time frame, but anyone who understands even the basics of the business of publishing could see the day coming. On March 28, the Times will initiate a pay for use system where users can access 20 pages per four week period for free and then have to pay, starting at $15.00/month.

The outcry against it indicates that the Times online is indeed worth paying for. People are upset because they recognize the value of the content and recognize the cost of being cut off from it. That right there says this will succeed at some level. If the announcement had been met with a collective yawn, it would have been a terrifying signal to the Times' executive team.

To demonstrate the value of the New York Times you can engage in a very simple experiment. Try life without the New York Times online. If it is worth the price, pay for it. If it isn't worth the price, don't.

Journalists and Photojournalists should be applauding this move. It signals an effort by the New York Times to uncouple content creation from direct dependence on online advertising. Without online subscription prices or online newsstand sales, there simply is no other way of generating a predictable online revenue stream. For online pieces there has been a direct one to one expense to advertising income ratio. That means that for every dollar spent on creating and distributing content one dollar has to come in from advertising to break even.

The publishing business model has always depended on three main sources of revenue; subscriptions, newsstand sales, and advertising. This created a more balanced and diverse method of allowing the readership to pay for content. Subscribers built a steady stream of predictable revenue, newsstand sales were driven by the content of individual issues, with sales surging for more popular--or valuable--content, and advertisers paying to pair advertising with the content. Subscription and newsstand sales provide a way for content creation to be recognized as both valuable and sustainable. It is a thing worth paying for, and requiring the audience to pay for it demonstrates its value.

If advertising is the only reliable mechanism for generating revenue, then the real value of content falls through the floor. The inevitable business conclusion in an online advertising only model is that content that is more conducive to advertising gets more lubricant in the system. A truly free model could only sustain itself over time if the content shaped itself around the advertising. In that case the reader is her or himself a product delivered by the publication to the advertisers. By paying for the content, the reader becomes the client again, shifting the scales back towards a balance between serving both the readers and the advertisers.

For that, just a little bit of free sounds about right.

Update: With early reports from the Times subscription rollout in Canada coming in, it seems that there are some very large holes in the paywall. Whether they are intentional or not, this certainly is not shaping up to be a black and white pay-or-don't-access situation. There's a good piece on Nieman Journalism Lab about how four lines of code are all that are needed to disable the content blocking system. 

Warscape

Reporting on armed conflicts invariably relies on one or more basic storylines that impart sense to the unfolding of events and the roles of actors. Such a narrative usually casts some in the role of victims and others as perpetrators. The most prevalent storyline of violence in the reporting on the warscape of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been rape. Indeed, the DRC has become infamous globally through the reports on the massive scale of sexual violence. While other forms of violence and abuse have also been committed on a massive scale, it is sexual violence that has attracted the lion's share of attention, especially among "outside" observers... Arguably "SGBV (Sexual and Gender Based Violence) tourism" has been added to what has come to be known as "war zone tourism." 

From the opening paragraph of The Complexity of Violence: A critical analysis of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)

Nestled in the middle of that dense and important paragraph is a word of real significance to any efforts in communicating the reality of distant conflicts--warscape.

The word itself does not appear frequently enough to yet merit a definition in wikipedia or any other major online source that I could find, but I think it deserves a significant amount of examination before it does. When used in a social or political context, the authors here and in one other study I could find seem to think of it as denoting the realities of a war, of describing the existence of things beyond the scope of communication. But within word itself lies a key to its own interpretation.

-scape |skeɪp|
combining form
denoting a specified type of scene : moonscape.

Critical to understanding depiction and its effects we need to have a clear sense of how removed the authors and the audience might be from the war. To experience a war as a warscape we must approach it from a distance. There can be little warscape for the war fought over and around us. That is too traumatic and chaotic to be combined into form, or any specified type of scene. With enough distance in place, all kinds of influences determine what final form the war might take, and what those media depictions might achieve in the world. As I have said time and again, those influences almost always align themselves along the interests and perspectives of the media makers.

We know from the history of the genre of landscape painting and photography in the west that the media are formed as much by the needs and wants of the audience as they are by any intrinsic truth of the land itself. Ansel Adams' work achieves iconic status in the branding of the western landscape because there is an audience that is highly receptive to his particular vision.

Does it not hold true as well then that the stories of distant wars are not then shaped as much by the needs, desires, and fantasies of the audience as they are the complex realities of distant conflicts? Are we not able to pick and choose the telling of the war that best suits the marketing and dissemination of the news itself? In this way, the warscape becomes the companion to the landscape. It is a vision rooted in distant events and places, but prepared, shaped, packaged, and distributed with the specific intent to meet local needs.

And if warscapes have been formed to respond to market needs, could they not also be formed to achieve results other than popular reception and market share? Could they not be formed to exert influence on political outcomes, on public figures, on groups with power to direct aid and partnerships, negotiate settlements, support solutions? Absolutely they can.