January 13, 2011
January 11, 2011
What stories really are...
For extra credit, watch Dr. Brown's TEDxHouston talk.
For extra extra credit, read her book, The Gifts of Imperfection.
July 01, 2010
Tasty Quote from G.K. Chesterton
I riffled though CONSUMED: Rethinking Business in the Era of Mindful Spending today. Would have read it, but couldn’t get into enough so I riffled through it. As the title/sub-title suggest, this book identifies issues and the consumer/business sentiment with overconsumption.
Even though I riffled through the book, this tasty quote from British philosopher G.K. Chesterton made a lasting impression with me. Perhaps it’ll linger with you too...
[NOTE: I received a free copy of CONSUMED to review from the publisher.]
April 15, 2010
Emulate Drug Dealers (part 2)
The other day we looked at the advice from the founders of 37signals who write in their book, REWORK, “Emulate drug dealers. Make your product so good, so addictive, so 'can't miss’ that giving customers a small, free taste makes them come back with cash in hand.”
We also shared some more business wisdom from drug dealers on surpassing customer expectations, wholesale buying strategies, and selecting profitable customers.
If this idea of emulating drug dealers has you intrigued, reacquaint yourself with a vintage Brand Autopsy post sharing business lessons learned from the movie about a Harlem drug lord from the early 1970s, AMERICAN GANGTSER.
American Gangster synopsis:
Following the death of his employer and mentor, Bumpy Johnson, Frank Lucas establishes himself as the number one importer of heroin in the Harlem district of Manhattan. He does so by buying heroin directly from the source in South East Asia and he comes up with a unique way of importing the drugs into the United States. As a result, his product is superior to what is currently available on the street and his prices are lower. His alliance with the New York Mafia ensures his position. It is also the story of a dedicated and honest policeman, Richie Roberts, who heads up a joint narcotics task force with the Federal government. Based on a true story. [SOURCE]
AMERICAN GANGSTER | BUSINESS LESSONS
LESSON ONE
Mentors Matter
LESSON TWO
Launching New Products
LESSON THREE
Brand Dilution
LESSON FOUR
Leadership Qualities
LESSON FIVE
The Loudest is the Weakest
LESSON SIX
Winners Can Quit
April 13, 2010
Emulate Drug Dealers
In the book REWORK, the authors, Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson (co-founders of 37signals) recommend emulating drug dealers by offering free samples to customers. Drug dealers, as Jason and David point out, know by giving away free samples of a “product so good” and “so addictive,” customers will “come back with cash in hand.”
Businesses, according to the authors, shouldn’t “be afraid to give a little away for free” so long as they are confident in the products/services they sell. As cited in the book, ice cream shops confidently give away free samples knowing it will most likely result in a sale. Car dealers do the same by allowing potential buyers to test drive a car before buying it.
Why stop at emulating drug dealers by only giving away free samples?
Businesses have a lot more to learn from the business practices of drug dealers. From procurement of product to acquiring customers to satisfying customers, the parallels between a well-run drug dealing operation and a successful business run thick.
This is territory we’ve covered on the Brand Autopsy blog. In early 2004, we ran a 7-part series on “Street Corner Selling” which shared drug dealing business lessons from Bruce Jacobs' book, DEALING CRACK.
The lessons have held up well. Read for yourself...
Street Corner Selling Curriculum:
Lesson #1: Customer Acquisition
Don’t Act Desperate
Lesson #2: Ten Minute Rule
Surpassing Customer Expectations
Lesson #3: Procurement
Wholesale Buying Strategies
Lesson #4: Merchandising
Maximizing Sales Through Bundling
Lesson #5: Angel Customers and Demon Customers
Selecting Profitable Customers
Lesson #6: Developing Enthusiastically Satisfied Customers (pt. 1)
Generating Customer Referrals
Lesson #7: Developing Enthusiastically Satisfied Customers (pt. 2)
Making it Easier for Customers to Buy
April 05, 2010
GreenBox is Marketing Done Right
In Purple Cow, Seth Godin wrote about the virtue of baking remarkability into how a business does business. According to Seth, “marketing done right” is when “the marketer changes the product, not the ads.”
The Purple Cow concept states it’s ultimately more meaningful (and less expensive) to bring a remarkably innovative product to market than it is to spend the advertising money necessary to successfully market a boring product.
GreenBox understands the Purple Cow concept. They developed an innovative pizza box that sells itself. This pizza box is not just reusable and recyclable ... it’s also remarkable. The GreenBox breaks down into four serving plates and into a nifty container for leftovers.
Have a look at marketing done right...
March 24, 2010
Thought Starters from Tom Fishburne
By day, Tom Fishburne is a managing director with Method. By night, Tom is a cartoonist appealing to the “improbable audience of brand managers.” By way of SXSWi, I attended Tom’s session on Innovation Lessons from Cartooning. Excellent session with lots of chewy takeaways, including:
Deliberate Exclusivity
“It’s more meaningful to be provocative to a few than to be broadly boring to many.”
Innovation as Instigators
“Innovation when done right can spark conversations.”
“Truly innovative ideas require innovative business models.”
“How you share your innovative ideas is more important than the ideas themselves.”
New Ideas
“Unfortunately, most businesses are equipped with more ‘cutting tools’ than ‘growing tools’ and too many meaningful ideas never see the light of day.”
Recessionary Times
“Recessions are litmus tests for worthwhile brands. If your brand isn’t worthwhile, it won’t last.”
All quotes from TOM FISHBURNE.
March 13, 2010
February 15, 2010
THE BUSINESS TREE | in less than 300 words
I love business analogies. Connecting familiar, yet very different, concepts helps to bring about greater understanding to complicated topics. For example, I compare my marketing services of “Second Opinions” to that of a doctor. I’ve also compared the growth problems Starbucks is having to that of a garden needing weeding and pruning before it can achieve healthy growth again.
A credit union I know uses an interesting analogy to describe how they prep for future growth of opening new branches by saying, “Before we put up branches, we put down roots.” In other words, they lay down a foundation of community involvement long before they build a new branch of their credit union.
Interestingly, at the time I heard that branches/roots line, I was reading THE BUSINESS TREE written by Hank Moore. In this book, Hank makes the analogy of growing a business to growing a tree.
It’s a smart perspective and perfect for inclusion in my on-going series of business book summaries in less than 300 words.
A business is like a tree. The roots of a “business tree” symbolize the strategic focus and future direction the organization is designed to grow. The trunk stands for the entire body of knowledge a business possesses. Branches stand for each department within a business. Twigs represent outside suppliers. And leaves on each branch symbolize employees.
With proper nourishment, the “business tree” will achieve healthy growth by growing steadily, optimally, and profitably. With neglect, the “business tree” will never reach its potential and eventually die.
To “weather the forces of change” that naturally occur in the marketplace, the healthiest “business trees” have a management culture that takes the time “to understand how the company has grown” and analyzes “the relationship of each branch, twig, and leaf to the others.”
Healthy, nourished, and growing business trees always:
1. Give customers products/services they cannot get elsewhere
2. Offer products/services at reasonable prices
3. Have leaders whose can-do spirit seeps throughout the total organization
4. Create an employee culture based upon trust and empowerment
5. Respond to the always-shifting winds in the marketplace
6. Foster collaboration and knowledge-sharing between all departments
7. Realize success is not an entitlement, but rather the by-product of smart and ethical growth strategies
Just like all healthy trees grow, all healthy businesses will grow. Proper nourishment is the key and companies that “plan to grow and grow by the plan” will build strong roots with a dense trunk, creating a regenerative and expanding system of branches, twigs, and leaves.
WORD COUNT: 250
[NOTE: I often receive free copies of biz books from publishers and publicists. However, I spent my money for my copy of THE BUSINESS TREE.]
February 08, 2010
December 31, 2009
Beyond Thinking Different to Doing Different
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 2009 turns to 2010, the message of doing differently is one we should all heed. Enjoy.
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.
December 14, 2009
THIS MATTERS NOW (and tomorrow)
Seth Godin asked 70 people to choose a provocative word and riff. Seth compiled the short essays into an ebook titled, WHAT MATTERS NOW. You’ll recognize many of the contributors. Hopefully, you’ll be inspired by their contributions to make your best contribution in 2010.
*** DOWNLOAD THE PDF here ***
Digitally riffle through the pages using Scribd.
Enjoy and share with others.
My contribution is titled, SACRIFCICE. It's on page 62. It's also below...
September 13, 2009
September 04, 2009
March 26, 2009
Good Stuff from Tom Peters
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...
February 11, 2009
Small Idea. Big Impact. (Less Mess.)
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.”
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.
December 31, 2008
Beyond Thinking Different to Doing Different
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 2008 turns to 2009, the message of doing differently is one we should all heed. Enjoy.
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.
December 27, 2008
November 06, 2008
Great Advice for All of Us
October 07, 2008
June 03, 2008
Up the Ladder OR Down the Ladder?
[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!
March 12, 2008
Borders Reducing its Borders
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.
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.
December 29, 2007
Beyond Thinking Different to Doing Different
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.
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.
December 18, 2007
Marty Neumeier on Creativity
While rummaging through some marketing books for a research project, I dug up this tasty quote for us marketers...
December 09, 2007
Fire Extinguishers can be Sexy
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.
September 25, 2007
Branding Definition Table
Brandon Fritz, of Kolbrener, has compiled a list of major branding terms in a super-creative "Periodic Table." Click below ...
September 19, 2007
September 18, 2007
Sledeghammer Your Hosting Stand
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.
July 08, 2007
Sprint Drops “Demon” Customers
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.
UPDATE ...
Via Seth, by way of gadgettell, we get a look at the letter Sprint sent its "demon" customers:
May 22, 2007
January 30, 2007
January 12, 2007
December 30, 2006
Beyond Thinking Different to Doing Different
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.
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.
August 10, 2006
Free Prize Personified
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.
June 20, 2006
May 08, 2006
High-Flying Business Book Promotion Idea
[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?”
April 28, 2006
Jazzy Business Quotes | 5
quote from Presentation Zen (Garr Renoylds)
April 27, 2006
Jazzy Business Quotes | 4
quote from Presentation Zen (Garr Renoylds)
Jazzy Business Quotes | 3
quote from Presentation Zen (Garr Renoylds)
April 25, 2006
Jazzy Business Quotes | 2
quote from Presentation Zen (Garr Renoylds)
April 24, 2006
Jazzy Business Quotes
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!
April 11, 2006
Part 2 | Harvesting Collective Genius
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.
>> VIDEO LINK<<
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.
March 27, 2006
March 24, 2006
March 09, 2006
Pop Art Stores
We’ve seen Pop-Up Retail stores from Target, JC Penny, and Song (to name just three). And now we have POP-ART Retail storefronts. Last fall, Prada, bastions of high-end Italian couture, installed a retail storefront in Marfa, the epicenter of the West Texas badlands. It's not a store as you can't buy stuff. It's a Pop-Art store. Now that’s decidedly Godin-ish purple.
from the El Paso Times …
"Prada Marfa" looks incredibly out of place, a permanent public art sculpture in the middle of nowhere.Almost everyone in far West Texas is either scratching their heads and wondering what it's all about or talking about this strange art object in the desert that resembles a high-fashion boutique in Paris or Milan.
The artwork, a 15 1/2- by 25-foot stucco and adobe rectangular building filled with expensive hand-crafted Prada shoes and handbags, went up a couple of weeks ago on desolate ranch land on the outskirts of Valentine: population 217 and roughly a 2 1/2-hour drive southeast of El Paso.
from an ARTFORUM article …
”Behind its shatterproof, plate-glass windows were posh-looking high heels and handbags. There amidst the tumbleweeds, in the very landscape where Giant was shot, was a boutique displaying accessories from Miuccia Prada's fall 2005 collection.Was this the inevitable apotheosis of Judd-effect gentrification?
Not exactly—it was Prada Marfa, Elmgreen & Dragset's new, permanent sculpture, produced by local nonprofit Ballroom Marfa and New York-based Art Production Fund (co-founded by Doreen Remen and art maven/fashion enthusiast Yvonne Force Villareal). It's more or less a perfect, if small, replica of a typical Prada emporium—except it will always be closed.”
More:
++ Associated Press article
++ pradamarfa.com
++ google search
Laws of Lifetime Growth
Over at the Dig Tank blog, Howard Mann recommended the recently published LAWS OF LIFETIME GROWTH (Dan Sullivan & Catherine Nomura). Since Howard’s Brickyard thinking jibes with much of my thinking, I took him up on reading THE LAWS OF LIFETIME GROWTH.
Good book … lots of chewy statements to gnaw on which will help challenge/motivate anyone and any business to seek meaningful and continual growth. However, at times, the book gets a little too righteous in dispensing pious platitudes. Look beyond the triteness and delve into the “rightness” of each lifetime growth law.
Go ahead and gnaw on the following snippets from the book ...
”The ten laws in this book are like mirrors you can use to reflect your behavior, to see if it’s supporting or undermining your continued growth. Use them as you would a hallway mirror on your way out the door – do a quick check to make sure everything looks good, adjust if necessary, and then carry on. (pg. 2)
LAW ONE:
Always make your future bigger than your past.
”Approach your past with this attitude, and you will have an insatiable desire for even better, more enjoyable experiences.” MORE
LAW TWO:
Always make your learning greater than your experience.
”Experience alone is no guarantee of lifetime growth. But continually transform you experiences into new lessons, and you will make each day of your life a source of growth.” MORE
LAW THREE:
Always make your contribution bigger than your reward.
”The one sure guarantee that rewards will continually increase is not to think too much about them. Instead, continue making an even greater contribution – by helping others eliminate their dangers, capture their opportunities, and maximize their strengths.” MORE
LAW FOUR:
Always make your performance greater than your applause.
”If you become more skillful and useful, you will receive greater applause from an expanding audience. This can be intoxicating, and the temptation will be to start organizing your life around other people’s recognition and praise. You’ll keep repeating what got you the applause in the first place – rather than moving on to something new, better, and different. The applause will become more important to you than your improved performance.” MORE
LAW FIVE:
Always make your gratitude greater than your success.
”Continually acknowledge others’ contributions, and you will automatically create room in your mind and in the world for much greater success.” MORE
LAW SIX:
Always make your enjoyment greater than your effort.
”Finding ways to get more and more enjoyment from your activities is one way to ensure continued growth.” MORE
LAW SEVEN:
Always make your cooperation greater than your status.
”Working with others and creating opportunities for increased cooperation makes greater things possible in our lives and in the world.” MORE
LAW EIGHT:
Always make your confidence greater than your comfort.
”Many successful people start off life as dreamers and risk-takers, but the moment they become successful, they start seeking greater security and comfort as their main goal. This attitude puts them to sleep motivationally, and they lose the confidence that made them so successful.” MORE
LAW NINE:
Always make your purpose greater than your money.
”Money as an end, become as growth stopper. Having a purpose that is greater than yourself will give you a constant impetus to strive. Purpose gives life meaning and helps us direct and focus our talents and efforts.” MORE
LAW TEN:
Always make your questions bigger than your answers.
“ … all growth lies in the territory of the unknown. What we already know is in the past. What we have yet to discover is the future. Always make your questions bigger than your answers and you’ll keep drawing yourself into a bigger future with new possibilities.” MORE
February 22, 2006
BimActive is now Active
Last year I spent a little time working with Bones in Motion (BiM), an Austin-based technology start-up helping them fine-tune the marketing strategy of their first product, BiMActive.
Simply put, BiMActive turns your cell phone into a GPS-enabled high-tech pedometer. But BimActive is more than just a pimped-out pedometer. By syncing one’s cell phone with a satellite, BiMActive records distance, speed, pace, location, elevation, and calories burned while you run, cycle, hike, or whatever. All this information is accessible on one’s cell phone or online in one’s personal training journal. Cool stuff, eh?
Andy Graham and Jon Werner of BiM have spent the better part of the past three years to bring this remarkable product to market. Congratulations fellas … your idea is now reality.
For more on BiMActive, stream their demo from the recently held DEMOconference.
February 09, 2006
Something to Gnaw On …
I’ll be off the blog for a few days while I’m in Boise, ID attending the wedding of a great friend (.jpg), former college roommate at Baylor, and current Idaho deputy attorney general. While I’m away, here’s something to gnaw on …
I’ll be posting some of my thoughts next week. Until then … the blog is yours -- jump in with your comments.
UPDATED: Two other friends of mine would like their photo on Brand Autopsy as well. You asked for it Jeff and Matt. Hope you enjoy this vintage image from 1989.
January 29, 2006
MINI’s Uncommon Practices
Seems as though making the common uncommon is baked inside the company culture of MINI USA. MINI made the common car uncommon. Through its ad agency, Crispin, Porter + Bogusky (CP+B), MINI made the common advertising campaign uncommon. And now since CP+B resigned the MINI ad account in favor of a much larger Volkswagon assignment, MINI USA has made the common ad agency selection process uncommon.
The normal way companies select ad agencies is to use an outside selection firm to manage the RFP process and then a select number of agencies are invited to make their pitch to the company in a series of boardroom meetings. Afterwards, the company selects their ad agency of record.
MINI began its search for a new ad agency using the normal process of hiring an outside firm to ferret through proposals. However, once MINI narrowed the list of ad agency candidates down to four, things got uncommon … very uncommon.
MINI CEO Jim McDowell organized a weekend-long “boot camp” immersion where all four remaining candidates performed in front of each other. The first assignment McDowell gave the ad agencies was to introduce themselves to each other by creating interesting name tags on the spot. Next, McDowell tested the quick-thinking improv skills of the agencies by asking them offbeat questions like, “If Arnold Schwarzenegger runs for President, who should be his running mate?”
During the boot camp, the agencies were sent out on a scavenger hunt in rainy weather to drive MINI Coopers and collect items to be used in a scrapbook which were later presented in front of MINI marketers and the other ad agencies.
After the boot camp, one agency dropped out citing chemistry differences. The three remaining agencies had open access to the MINI team but McDowell again did something uncommon – he gave each agency open access to every nugget of information requested by one agency. If one agency requested something, McDowell shared that something with every agency.
McDowell put these agencies through this uncommon pitch process “… to get closer to how each agency thought, behaved, and went about their business when unexpected situations were thrown at them.”
MINI ultimately selected Butler Shine as their new ad agency.
SOURCE: BusinessWeek | Getting Creative With Mad Ave (sub. req’d) | Feb. 6, 2006
December 30, 2005
Beyond Thinking Different to Doing Different
I was all set to compose a thought-provoking, idea-inspiring, and forward-thinking post to close out 2005 and kick-start 2006. However, the following vintage BRAND AUTOPSY post is far more thoughtful and inspirational than anything I could come up with today. Consider the following electronic reprint a BRAND AUTOPSY new year tradition...
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 2005 turns to 2006, the message of doing differently is one we should all heed. Enjoy.
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.
For more on Bruce Mau:
* Radio Interview | The Connection (WBUR-FM) | November 23, 2004
* Design Principal | Fast Company | October 2000
* Massive Change | website
* Massive Change | book
* Massive Change | radio show
* Bruce Mau Designs | website
* A collection of articles on Bruce Mau Designs | website link
johnmoore (from Brand Autopsy)
As a marketingologist with the Brand Autopsy Marketing Practice, I give companies “Second Opinions” about the business and marketing activities they are currently doing or considering doing.
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