Are you a Live player or Dead Player?

What makes a framework useful? 

Perhaps, when it doesn't create much fuss and quietly gets into your bones to let you make few distinctions carefully! 

Ever since I first read Samo Burja's distinction of Live Players Vs Dead Players in his blog, I've been seeing Live and Dead Players in orgs, in startups, and in people I meet in my work and travels.
Who is a Live Player? 

In Samo's words, a live player is a person or a tightly coordinated group of people that is able to do things they have not done before. A live player usually does things outside their domain, is tightly coordinated with the group, possess a living tradition of knowledge and knows to play in stealth mode to avoid opposition. 

Who is a Dead Player? 

In Samo's words, Dead player is a person or a group of people that is working off a script, incapable of doing new things. And what causes them to die? When tight coordination is replaced by bureaucracy, when an intellectual tradition dies. They may compete in old tested domains, but they can never do anything new. 

Few days back Matt Stoller published a fascinating argument to break up The Walt Disney Company. Reading his argument, it was obvious: Disney is no longer alive. They are a dead player. But remember this. Never write one dead though. You never know if they are playing dead.

P.S. I used to be a dead player. I talked about my transformation here