Brand Autopsy

Tom Peters kickstarts our go-get'em engine that may be sputtering in today's tough economy with this excellent rant. It's a MUST-READ.

Below is a tease...

SOURCE: Dealing with Recessionary Times | TomPeters.com

File this under “Small Ideas with Big Impact” ...

PROBLEM:
Too much spillage in the men’s room urinals at Schiphol Airport (Amsterdam).

SOLUTION:
Etch an image of a common housefly near the drain holes of the porcelain urinals.

RESULTS:
Spillage has been reduced by 80%. According to someone close to the project, “The fly improves aim. If a man sees a fly, he aims at it.”

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Further Learning:
This is an example of what professors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein call a NUDGE. These professors classify any act that attempts to “alter [people’s] behavior in a positive way, without actually requiring anyone to do anything at all” as a NUDGE.

Fascinating stuff. Learn more by reading the NUDGE book, NUDGE blog, and this NY Times article.

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Electronically reprinting Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto for Change has become a New Year's tradition on Brand Autopsy. Enjoy all over again ...

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Originally posted on December 31, 2004

Bruce Mau, a designer, thinker, articulator, and massive change provocateur, has a lot of ideas on a lot of things. His Incomplete Manifesto for Change is a list, an incomplete one at that, of 43 ideas to get you beyond thinking differently but doing differently. As 2008 turns to 2009, the message of doing differently is one we should all heed. Enjoy.

An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth Author: Bruce Mau (1998)

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth.

3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.

8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.

11. Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.

12. Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.

13. Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.

14. Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.

16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.

17. ——————————. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.

18. Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you’re separated from the rest of the world.

19. Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.

20. Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.

21. Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.

22. Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.

23. Stand on someone’s shoulders. You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.

24. Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it.

25. Don’t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.

26. Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you.

27. Read only left-hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our “noodle.”

28. Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.

29. Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.

30. Organization = Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between “creatives” and “suits” is what Leonard Cohen calls a 'charming artifact of the past.'

31. Don’t borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.

32. Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.

33. Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.

34. Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea — I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.

35. Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You’ll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.

36. Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else … but not words.

37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.

38. Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.

39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces — what Dr. Seuss calls “the waiting place.” Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference — the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.

40. Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.

41. Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I’ve become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.

42. Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.

43. Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can’t be free agents if we’re not free.

When you give people something to believe, they will come together. And when people come together ... communities will form, love will spread, and movements will happen.

Watch and listen as Greg Cordell, from Brains on Fire, tells the story of The Red Ribbon…

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RSS READERS ... click here to watch the video.

SOURCE: The Cocktail Party Rule (Hugh MacLeod)

I just read one of the more compelling definitions of what a “Good Idea” is. This definition is remarkable in its brevity and clarity. You might also agree …

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“A really good idea is simple, unexpected and relevant. And it unites extremes: it should risk a lot but nevertheless be easy to implement. Everyone should talk about it, but existing customers should not be irritated by it.”

Nadja Schnetzler
co-founder, BrainStore
source: THE IDEA MACHINE (Wiley, 2005, pg. 56)

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[I'm on a visual kick these days.]

Let your marketing mind wrestle with David Armano's nifty depiction of the ladder up to Brand Heaven and the ladder down to Brand Hell. Good Stuff!

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Bookstores merchandise most books with the spine facing out. Only new releases and best-sellers get the front-face treatment. Merchandising books with the spine facing out allows the retailer to stock more books. However, front-facing books gives a book greater visibility and results in higher sales.

Borders recently tested a front-facing display strategy where more books were stocked with their covers, not spines, facing customers. Sales increased by 9.0%. The strategy was so successful, all Borders bookstores will be switching to the front-facing strategy in the next couple of weeks.

The drawback to a front-facing strategy is Borders will have to reduce its inventory by 5%-10%. This means the typical Borders store will reduce its inventory anywhere from 4,700 books to 9,300 books. Execs at Borders aren’t too concerned about the loss of inventory since many of the books they stock only sell one copy per year.

On the other hand, Barnes & Noble has no intentions of reducing its inventory of books. (The typical Barnes & Noble stocks 125,000 to 150,000 at its stores.)

Borders did some customer research at its front-facing prototype store and learned customers perceived Borders as having more books, not fewer, with this new display strategy. (Interesting.)

Bold move by Borders. We’ll have to see if this works in the short-term AND the long-term.

FOR MORE: Read this Wall Street Journal article.

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FOR EVEN MORE: Seth Godin riffs on how Borders strategy is counter to the Long Tail. Joe Wikert, an executive at book publisher Wiley, fears customers will leave empty-handed because of the reduced inventory.

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Electronically reprinting Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto for Change has become a New Year's tradition on Brand Autopsy. Enjoy all over again ...

---

Originally posted on December 31, 2004

Bruce Mau, a designer, thinker, articulator, and massive change provocateur, has a lot of ideas on a lot of things. His Incomplete Manifesto for Change is a list, an incomplete one at that, of 43 ideas to get you beyond thinking differently but doing differently. As 2007 turns to 2008, the message of doing differently is one we should all heed. Enjoy.

An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth Author: Bruce Mau (1998)

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth.

3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.

8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.

11. Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.

12. Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.

13. Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.

14. Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.

16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.

17. ——————————. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.

18. Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you’re separated from the rest of the world.

19. Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.

20. Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.

21. Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.

22. Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.

23. Stand on someone’s shoulders. You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.

24. Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it.

25. Don’t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.

26. Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you.

27. Read only left-hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our “noodle.”

28. Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.

29. Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.

30. Organization = Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between “creatives” and “suits” is what Leonard Cohen calls a 'charming artifact of the past.'

31. Don’t borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.

32. Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.

33. Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.

34. Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea — I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.

35. Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You’ll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.

36. Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else … but not words.

37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.

38. Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.

39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces — what Dr. Seuss calls “the waiting place.” Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference — the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.

40. Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.

41. Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I’ve become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.

42. Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.

43. Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can’t be free agents if we’re not free.

While rummaging through some marketing books for a research project, I dug up this tasty quote for us marketers...

Some might consider the product category of fire extinguishers as being boring. Sure, the fire extinguisher category is HIGHLY important, but it ain’t a sexy product category. Or is it?

The Home Hero Fire Extinguisher looks anything but dull. It’s sleek and dare we say … sexy.

The Arnell Group has redesigned the fire extinguisher to no longer be “so damn obtrusive, ugly, and not conducive to a pleasant experience of the rest of the aesthetic of your kitchen.” The Home Hero Fire Extinguisher is currently being sold exclusively at Home Depot for the alluring price of $25.00.

Learn more from Rob Walker’s CONSUMED column in the NY Times.

Brandon Fritz, of Kolbrener, has compiled a list of major branding terms in a super-creative "Periodic Table." Click below ...

The marketing world is learning to become more comfortable with CGM (consumer generated media) and with Citizen Marketers. Now we also must learn to become more comfortable with EGM -- Employee Generated Media.

The Wall Street Journal reports the Big Four accounting firms are using "Employee Generated Media" to help gain an edge in the ever-competitive campus recruiting scene. Josee Rose writes ...

"To lure candidates steeped in Facebook and YouTube, the Big Four are turning to the Web. Deloitte & Touche asked employees to make short videos about their experiences at the company. The videos were a way 'of taking the aspects of social networking and experimenting on how you can use the new tools of today to move forward into a workplace of the future,' said Cathy Benko, chief talent officer. About 400 videos were made, and the 14 best will be posted on YouTube and used on campuses.[source]

Is it a scary for you to consider having employees make short videos about the experiences at your company? Are you afraid of what they will say? Are you afraid they will be off-message and off-brand? If so, sounds like you have some work that must be done to improve the employee experience at your company.

At the Building Better Restaurants blog, Jeffrey Summers gives 10 reasons why restaurants must take a sledgehammer to their host stands. (It's a good list.) I love reason #10 ... "Because you don’t have one at your house when you host people there!" >> READ MORE

While I love the contrarian thinking behind this idea, is it realistic for a restaurant not to have a hosting stand? Will restaurant guests know where to go and what to do if they don't see a hosting stand?

As restaurant guests, we've been conditioned to walk up to the hosting stand in order to get seated. Hosting stations are common, expected, and essentially sacred cows in the restaurant world. Which, of course, makes them ripe for reinvention.

So ... what ideas do you have for reinventing the restaurant hosting stand? How can a restaurant create an environment where the Host can host without the barrier of a clunky hosting station? Maybe you've seen a restaurant solve for this. If so, please share what you've seen.

Sprint recently sent 1,000 subscribers a termination notice. These were not dead-beat customers who hadn’t paid their cellphone bills. These were customers who paid their bills on-time but called the Sprint Customer Service department all-the-time.

The terminated customers called the Sprint Customer Service department an average of 25 times a month complaining about billing charges and/or technical issues. In the letter to these disposed customers, Sprint said, “The number of inquiries you have made to us … has led us to determine that we are unable to meet your current wireless needs.”

While the idea of firing customers is counter-intuitive, it’s not new. In the book ANGEL CUSTOMERS AND DEMOM CUSTOMERS (2003), authors Larry Selden & Geoffrey Colvin advocated businesses fire their least profitable customers ("demons") so the business could better focus on satisfying their most profitable customers ("angels").

In an online article, Geoffrey Colvin explains the rationale behind his thinking…

”In our experience across a wide range of industries, companies typically find that the best 20 percent of their customers account for 150 percent of total profits! The worst 20 percent typically lose money equal to 75 percent of profits, while the remaining 60 percent of customers account for the rest. Knowing which customers are angels and which are demons presents an enormous opportunity.

Once you know the true profitability of your customers, you can figure out the reasons behind the numbers. For your unprofitable customers, you'll have to face the reality that you're not offering them a compelling value proposition - a way of meeting their needs so well that they'll reward you with handsome profitability. You'll have to devise new, better, value propositions for them, which our experience shows you can probably do. As a result, you'll start to turn those unprofitable customers into profitable ones, which typically creates a substantial swing in the business's overall profitability.

In the end, you may find that a small percentage of customers just cannot be made profitable. By the time you've figured out who they are, you'll understand very well why they probably aren't worth keeping.”

With over 53,000,000 subscribers, Sprint will feel no pain over losing 1,000 "demon" customers.

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UPDATE ...
Via Seth, by way of gadgettell, we get a look at the letter Sprint sent its "demon" customers:

Twitter is still new on the scene and it has us marketers scrambling to find ways to effectively use it as a marketing medium.

(For those unaware, Twitter is being defined as “micro-blogging service” where users can quickly update people as to what they are doing. Brevity, connectivity, and immediacy are key to Twitter as users can post text-based messages up to 140 characters long yet reach a wide swath of people using the service with their laptops, PDAs, cell phones, etc.)

The best use of Twitter I’ve seen as a marketing medium comes from Panaros, a Buffalo, NY restaurant. Panaros twitters its daily specials. Brilliant.

*** Kudos to the Brand Flakes for Breakfast blog for the hook-up.

As we know, an elevator pitch is a super-short explanation of an idea, a business, or a person which is designed to create further interest. Over at the Idea Sandbox blog, Paul Williams shares how the intros to television shows have mastered the elevator pitch. (Brilliant. Just bloody brilliant! A must-read post!!!)

Paul cites numerous examples from Star Trek to My Name is Earl to Bosom Buddies which all support his TV Intro as Elevator Pitch idea. Paul also highlights how the intro to every A-Team episode is a well-crafted elevator pitch. Notice how this intro quickly explains the premise of the show and compels us to watch further to see what happens.

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A-Team intro:
"In 1972 a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem. If no one else can help. And if you can find them. Maybe you can hire... The A-Team."

RSS Readers ... click here to view the video.

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Come to think of it, the TV intros Paul highlights fall into the MADE TO STICK sweet spot of being Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Stories.

I hope Chip & Dan Heath, the authors of MADE TO STICK, pick up on Paul’s bloody brilliant insight of how TV show intros are made to stick elevator pitches. Good stuff.

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“The thing about Social Media that frustrates marketers to no end is that you can't buy attention and that if you have no choice, but to think and act small, then you'll try to say well here is a 100,000 person community, how can we buy it? What you'll do instead if you're just four people, how can we amaze them? That change in posture, that change in attitude is the single biggest shift, that's going on the Internet right now.” -- SETH GODIN

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PodTech’s Jennifer Jones recently chatted with Seth Godin about all things big, small, and social media-related. It’s a 15-minute conversation that’s worth your listening attention. Or, you can read the full transcript to dig up some money quotes. Be sure to listen/read Seth's line on the smartest thing JetBlue did ... it's straight-up Evolutionist WOM thinking.

Oh yeah, I can’t let this post go without highlighting another smart Godin quip from the interview …

“… most of the times you need to ignore your customers because the goal is to get your customers to talk to each other. And you need to listen to what they [customers] are saying to each other." -- SETH GODIN

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Electronically reprinting Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto for Change has become a new year tradition on Brand Autopsy. Enjoy all over again ...

---

Originally posted on December 31, 2004

Bruce Mau, a designer, thinker, articulator, and massive change provocateur, has a lot of ideas on a lot of things. His Incomplete Manifesto for Change is a list, an incomplete one at that, of 43 ideas to get you beyond thinking differently but doing differently. As 2006 turns to 2007, the message of doing differently is one we should all heed. Enjoy.

An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth Author: Bruce Mau (1998)

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth.

3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.

8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.

11. Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.

12. Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.

13. Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.

14. Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.

16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.

17. ——————————. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.

18. Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you’re separated from the rest of the world.

19. Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.

20. Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.

21. Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.

22. Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.

23. Stand on someone’s shoulders. You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.

24. Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it.

25. Don’t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.

26. Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you.

27. Read only left-hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our “noodle.”

28. Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.

29. Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.

30. Organization = Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between “creatives” and “suits” is what Leonard Cohen calls a 'charming artifact of the past.'

31. Don’t borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.

32. Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.

33. Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.

34. Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea — I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.

35. Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You’ll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.

36. Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else … but not words.

37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.

38. Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.

39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces — what Dr. Seuss calls “the waiting place.” Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference — the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.

40. Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.

41. Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I’ve become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.

42. Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.

43. Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can’t be free agents if we’re not free.

From Thursday's edition of the Wall Street Journal [sub. req'd]:

"Car makers are coming out with a host of high-tech holders that can help drinks stay hot or cool and better prevent tipping and spilling by fitting more container sizes.

The 2007 Chrysler Sebring, which goes on sale this fall, comes with a front cup holder that can help keep beverages hot and cold. It can heat to 140 degrees Fahrenheit and cool to near freezing at 35 degrees Fahrenheit. The cup holder cavity contains a heating element made of ceramic, the same material used in hair dryers. When the cup holder's heat or cool feature is switched on, an electric current will either heat or cool the material and help maintain the temperature of the liquid."

Directly applying Seth Godin’s Free Prize-ology has me thinking this high-tech cup holder isn’t the first reason why you’d buy a 2007 Chrysler Sebring. However, it is probably the first reason why you’d talk to others about your new 2007 Chrysler Sebring.

In Monday’s Wall Street Journal TECHNOLOGY Report, movie director Barry Sonnenfeld shared an interesting idea to address a movie’s week-after-week decline in box office sales. [SOURCE LINK (sub. req’d)]

These days a movie’s first week is its biggest sales week. Box office sales in the second week of a movie’s opening are about half of what the movie did in its first week. And sales in its third week are about half of a movie’s second week sales take. For example, CARS opened last week with box office sales of $60.1 million. In its second sales week, CARS took in $33.7 million which is about half of its opening week sales. So next week … CARS will probably take in about $17.0 million.

To arrest the week-after-week sales decline movies experience, Barry Sonnenfeld offers the idea of releasing a special edit of a film with extra scenes to goose sales during week four of a movie’s release. Digital editing and digital distribution of movie prints makes this idea financially feasible from a cost standpoint. Sonnenfeld is realistic though and rightly tempers his expectations, “No one's going to come back to see RV again, with 10 minutes of new stuff, but you would if it was STAR WARS or KING KONG.”

Ya know … this marketer thinks Barry Sonnenfeld might be onto something here. We’re already buying DVDs of our favorite movies with additional scenes and alternative endings. Why wouldn’t we also be apt to buying tickets to see a movie that has extra scenes and other cinematic doo-dads a few weeks after a film’s initial release. Interesting idea, eh?

[UPDATED on May 9 to fix a broken link]

Earlier today, Stefan Engeseth conducted a lecture at 30,000 feet in the air sharing ideas from his book (ONE: A Consumer Revolution for Business) on FlyNordic’s Stockholm to Olso flight. I wonder if Stefan began his presentation by asking travelers to … “Adjust their business mindset and marketing mentality to a full upright and unlocked position?”

quote from Presentation Zen (Garr Renoylds)

quote from Presentation Zen (Garr Renoylds)

quote from Presentation Zen (Garr Renoylds)

quote from Presentation Zen (Garr Renoylds)

Garr Reynolds over at the Presentation Zen blog has more tasty quotes from jazz greats which apply to the life of business and the business of life. Great stuff Garr!

The other week I blogged about a NY Times article on how Rite-Solutions harvests the collective wisdom of its employees. This week Chris Flanagan, from the Business Innovation Factory, clued me in on a video presentation Jim Lavoie (Rite-Solutions CEO) gave last October at the Collaborative Innovation Summit #1. In this video vignette, Jim tells the story of how and why Rite-Solutions developed the internal idea stock exchange. (Hint ... you can skip to the half-way point and listen only to the idea stock exchange story.) Great stuff … well worth watching.

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>> VIDEO LINK<<

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You can also watch other storytelling video vignettes ... including this one from Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company magazine and the author of the NY Times article on Rite-Solutions internal idea stock exchange program. Chris also said this presentation from Dennis Littky on creating a new model for education blew everyone away at the Collaborative Innovation Summit.

Sunday’s NY Times has a way tasty article from Bill Taylor (co-founder of Fast Company) about how Rite-Solutions is insourcing ideas from all its employees rather than outsourcing ideas or relying solely on the ideation generation from a few big-brained internal executives to move the business.

Rite-Solutions has created an internal idea stock exchange where employees can suggest the company invest in new technology, enter into a new business channel, implement a cost-efficiency initiative ... etcetera. Submitted ideas become mock stocks and employees read an “expect-us” (not a prospectus) detailing how the idea can benefit the company. These ideas-turned-stocks are then listed in the Rite-Solutions “Mutual Fun” board where every employee is given $10K in stock market fantasy funds to buy, sell, and trade in the ideas they believe Rite-Solutions should focus on.

Pretty cool, huh?

Now, check out the congregation is smarter than the preacher sentiment from James Lavoie, one of Rite-Solutions co-founders:

"We're the founders, but we're far from the smartest people here. At most companies, especially technology companies, the most brilliant insights tend to come from people other than senior management. So we created a marketplace to harvest collective genius."

In another article, Lavoie explains the reasoning behind Rite-Solutions “Mutual Fun” idea this way …

“We believe the next brilliant idea is going to come from somebody other than senior management, and unless you’re trying to harvest those ideas, you’re not going to get them. That’s why we give everybody an equal voice, and a game to provoke their intellectual curiosity.”

The “Harvesting Collective Genius” reminds me of the Idea Revolution which Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder wrote about in the way worthy IDEAS ARE FREE book. In this book, Robinson and Schroeder make the business case for the internal insourcing of employee-generated ideas. Worthwhile snippets from this book include:

“Every employee idea, no matter how small, improves an organization in some way. It is when managers are able to get large numbers of such ideas that the fill power of the idea revolution is unleashed.”

”Ideas are free. Employees become allies in solving problems, spotting opportunities, and moving the company forward, to the benefit of all. And when managers decide to let their employees think alongside them – and no longer seek to go it alone – they will have joined the Idea Revolution.

”This empowerment starts a virtuous cycle. As employees see their ideas being used, they begin to feel valued as part of the team and become more involved.

”Small ideas are the best source of big ideas. A big problem or opportunity frequently manifests itself through a host of smaller signs or symptoms, each of which might be seen individually by different people in different places at different times. What might seem to be a small idea could in fact be addressing a facet of this larger issue. This bigger issue can often be discovered by probing with the right questions.”

Small ideas tend to stay proprietary, since there are no mechanisms for competitors to find out about them, and even if they do, the ideas are often situation-specific and so cannot be copied. Because of their proprietary nature, they accumulate into a considerable cushion of sustainable competitive advantage.”