metacool

Cool Books of 2004

Another list.  Here are my favorite reads of 2004. No claims to comprehensiveness or consistency, and not all were published in the past year; just a list of books that made me think different in 2004:

On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins:  an elegant book on the nature of intelligence and how the brain works.  The good news for metacool readers is that "real intelligence" is the way that designers think.

The System of the World, by Neil Stephenson: third in the baroque triology, capable of stimulating latent nerdism, and a helluva of a long book, it continues Stephenson's fascinating journey through the origins of modern finance and computing.  I loved every page of it.  Not for everyone, which is refreshing.

The Innovator's Solution, by Clayton Christensen: forget the hype, the content is outstanding.  Clay tested the ideas in this book on my class at Harvard Business School, and yet I still find something fresh and interesting each time I go back to its pages.  The chapters on need-based market segmentation strategies are excellent.

Porsche: Excellence was Expected, by Karl Ludvigsen:  perhaps the best business book of 2004, unfortunately Excellence is marketed as a car book, which will keep it out of the mainstream.  In a world where marketing-led "brand building" is an oxymoron, Ludvigsen shows how Porsche built a brand with deep integrity piece by piece, slowly evolving it over time.  His discussion of the genesis of the Porsche Cayenne SUV also shows how quickly a brand can be diluted and maimed by managers out to make a quick buck.

Orbiting the Giant Hairball, by Gordon MacKenzie:  any book recommended by both Richard Tait and Bob Sutton (both proponents of humane business practices, and really good guys themselves) has to be good, and Hairball delivers.  Look, any organization will have its problems, and those problems can seem particularly nasty when seen from the inside.  The real question is: do you care enough about those problems do something about them?  Hairball is a guide to engaging with an organization to help solve its problems without losing your soul.  It also contains some great advice about dealing with nasty behaviors in the workplace, including teasing, which has run rampant in every org I've ever worked in.

Emotional Design, by Donald Norman:  if you haven't noticed, I'm quite taken by this wonderful piece of thinking.  His Visceral-Behavioral-Reflective model of human cognition is a powerful way to understand slippery concepts like brand and meaning, making this one of the most important books on marketing (where marketing is the process of understanding human needs and creating offerings to meet those needs) to come out in years.  His message about beautiful things working better is important, too.  Read this one.

That's like, soooo 20th Century...

John Moore of Brand Autopsy came up with this nifty comparison of old school / new school marketing philosophies:

Old School:
Reach  | Frequency

New School:
Remarkability | Fanaticism

metacool Thought of the Day

"In life there is nothing more foolish than inventing."

- James Watt

Collins on Drucker

"His generosity of spirit explains much of Drucker’s immense influence. I reflected back on his work, The Effective Executive, and his admonition to replace the quest for success with the quest for contribution. The critical question is not, “How can I achieve?” but “What can I contribute?”

Drucker’s primary contribution is not a single idea, but rather an entire body of work that has one gigantic advantage: nearly all of it is essentially right."

- Jim Collins

meta metacool 24 2004

Some business bloggers (including yours truly) are collecting their top 24 personal blog posts of 2004 over at A Penny For.  So without further ado, here's the metacool Top 24 for 2004:

Design

• Jolie-Laide
• How will it look in a month?
• Do it to the hilt!
• Getting Visceral in Wetsuits
• Laide, no Jolie
• The Bimota Tesi Millenium
• iBag
• When the Prototype Becomes the Product

Innovation

• Soichiro Honda on Enjoyment and Innovation
• Teamwork & Creativity
• Using Option Value to Win the X Prize
• You can prototype with anything
• Iridium, Steve McQueen, and Venture Design

Leadership

• A lesson in avoiding assholes, from Sir Richard Branson
• Cranium Wisdom from Richard Tait
• Vartan Gregorian on Liberty
• Vartan Gregorian on Organizational Leadership
• What if the CEO knew his products?

Marketing

• Sixten Sason, Brand Creator
• Tanks and Chunks
• It's Cool to be Keen
• How Does One Say "Poison Your Brand" in German?
• You'll Find Google's Brand in the Trash
• Subaru is the New Saab

Designing Adidas, Designing Zissou

Wes Anderson designs every element of his movies.  While most motion pictures are staged sets overlaid with a thin veneer of reality, Anderson's movies are true portraits of alternate realities where every detail is premeditated.  In The Royal Tenenbaums, for example, he needed to film the Tenenbaums in a home-like setting, so he went out and converted a grand old New York house into a functioning movie set.  The Real Deal.  Part of the pleasure watching an Anderson movie is picking out all the interesting stuff on screen -- he has an eye for interesting designs. 

That's why I'm so stoked to see The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.  It looks to be full of cool stuff from the golden age of Cousteau.

10jan04 Zissou Update:  for those of you trying to find Team Zissou Adidas shoes, they don't exist.  But they might soon if you bug Adidas enough.  Go to Josh Rubin's blog to send them an email, or sign Reuel Alvarez's online petition.  Customer evangelism, indeed!

What will it be like in motion?

A while back I argued that the temporal aspects of design often get ignored by designers.  Most designers, I'd wager, don't think about how their design will look in a year, let along five or ten.  Similarly, many don't think about what their design will look like during use -- what will it be like in motion?

There are exceptions.  Good software designers obsess over this question.  After all, the quality of a user interface is dictated in no small part by the way in which it helps a user move through a single task, and then from one task to another.  Spend any amount of time designing a software interface, such as a website, and you'll become very sensitized to how your solution works when it is in motion.

In my opinion, not many designers of physical products think about their product in motion, but they should.  Most products get designed on a piece of paper or on a screen, so it becomes easy and normal to think of them as Platonic forms existing on a still life of white or black.  But when designers do take into account motion, cool things can happen.  For example, some cars that seem ugly sitting in the driveway become objects of beauty when seen carving their way up a curvy, mountain road.  A knife can have a more or less appealing form, but its true beauty comes with use.

So what would happen if we thought of all designs in terms of movement?  Grant Petersen of Rivendell Bicycle Works (the most vibrant, real brand on the planet, in my opinion) took that idea and came up with a patented innovation, the SpeedBlend bike tire:

The colors on the SpeedBlend tire sidewall are interesting when seen standing still, but come alive when spun -- which takes Petersen's design from just another eccentric bike tire to something more about magic and fun:

Design for Free Culture

In early November I attended the pod casting discussion at BloggerCon.  Toward the end of the pod casting session, Larry Lessig pointed out that it would be great if technologists driving the design of podcasting software could do it in such a way as to make the entire domain of pod casting hard for would-be naysayers to grok.  Essentially, his point was that technology creators and facilitators should think about the larger societal context in which pod-casting operates in order to keep the copyright fun sponges out of the picture. 

Too often designers and technologists completely avoid asking the question "Who will expend energy actively blocking this innovation of mine?".  It would be a great thing if that question started getting asked with more frequency.  Even better would be to involve legal types in the early design phase of a new technology so as to design in barriers to prevent the naysayers from dictating how people should and can use a particular technology innovation.

More Firefox Customer Evangelism

Earlier this year I talked about the remarkable, user-driven Firefox ad campaign.

Well, I'm happy to say that today I joined over 10,000 other web browser geeks to run an ad in the New York Times with each of our names writ small -- very, very, very small:

 

Now, it's not an outstanding ad as far as ads go.  And since it ran in a newspaper, it has next to nil staying power (we would have done better to put a Firefox sticker on the dashboard of Dale Jr.'s NASCAR Monte Carlo).  But it certainly is a milestone in the history of customer evangelism.

Have you tried Firefox lately?  Over 11 million people have so far, because it's a great product worth talking about.

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

The 2005 Aston Martin DBR9

Playing with Brand Fire

Here’s the headline of an article I just read:

Ferrari Outsources F1 Engine Design Work

Shocking!  It got me all worked up.  My mind filled with visions of hell freezing over and Enzo Ferrari’s body spinning (at 19,000 RPM, mind you) in his grave.

I have nothing against the concept of engineers from India working on Ferrari motors.  Bear in mind that the day of tragic, cigarette-smoking Italian craftsmen hammering out Ferraris from stolen Cinzano signs is long gone; today Ferrari’s general manager is French, the chief of design is American, and its head mechanic is British.  No, what matters to the Ferrari brand is that the motors and cars continue to be designed and built in Italy.  So, no matter where they were born, the designers at Ferrari need to feel, act, and think Italian, imbibing lambrusco, eating pork products and parma cheese, and dreaming of screaming motors whenever they look out at the foggy expanses of Emilia right outside their drawing offices.

But.

Read the article carefully and you’ll see that Ferrari isn’t outsourcing anything.  They’re just buying design software created by the Indian company Tata, and some Indian engineers are going to live at the Ferrari factory (lucky bastards!) to support it.  No engine design work will occur outside of Italy. 

The lesson here isn’t that outsourcing is bad, it’s that the essential Ferrari brand idea that Italy is Ferrari is Italy should be guarded as if it were a life and death matter.  At the very least, Ferrari’s business development people should have put a gag order on Tata. 

Often times effective brand management is more about influencing what other people say about you, not what you say about yourself.

Choose Happiness

"Any person or nation can grow fatter and fatter, richer and richer, sleepwalking toward disaster. Or we can choose to remain lean and quick, wealthy in beauty and time  and, that word that inspired our forefathers, wealthy in happiness."
-- Yvon Chouinard & Nora Gallagher

Get Chouinard's complete ChangeThis manifesto here: Download 10.02.DontBuyThisShirt.pdf .

Hammers & Nails

If you ask a group of mechanical engineers to create a land mine detection system, they'll likely develop a system which prods the ground.  Electrical engineers might create a detector using magnetism.  In contrast, the biologists at Aresa Biodetection are using a color-shifting, genetically modified plant to signal the presence of land mines:

In the presence of chemical compounds released by explosives into the soil, the Aresa plant turns pink.  While there are certainly ecological and political barriers to implementing this solution, one has to admire its elegance.

If you're a hammer, the world looks like a nail.  Aresa's plant is a wonderful example of how innovative solutions often arise when technical domains and professional disciplines collide.  While you're probably not creating landmine detection systems, you could be doing this today.  For example, if your goal is to create an innovative, record-setting promotional campaign, why not add a nuclear engineer to your existing marcomm team?  Mix some screwdrivers in with the hammers and good stuff will happen.

metacool Thought of the Day

"I never knew I was going to get to the result until I got there." -- Pablo Pardo

The Dreaded Knowing/Doing Cat

Though I spent a couple of years getting my MBA (which was a great, fun thing to do), I'm a bit wary of the whole MBA thing in general.  The degree is getting a bit too rubber stamp-ish for my comfort level, as exemplified by this excerpt from a Slate article:

The Pennsylvania attorney general's office Monday sued an online university for allegedly selling bogus academic degrees -- including an MBA awarded to a cat.

Thing is, I bet the cat made some pretty good contributions to the class discussion.  At least enough to get a "2".  Takeaway?  Assess the person, not the degree.  Did they really learn anything?

Buying Word of Mouth

Great article in today's NYT Magazine on creating (and paying for) formal mechanisms to foster word of mouth communication around a market offering.

So long as they keep things real, agencies like BzzAgent and Tremor offer a fantastic addition to the traditional marketing mix.  Of course, as with all promotional activities, formal word of mouth campaigns should only be used in addition to, rather than in lieu of, having a remarkable, human-centric offering worth talking about in the first place.  Even better, that offering should be designed to foster word of mouth behavior on its own, so that most of your word of mouth can be earned, rather than bought.

Mr. Butt's Human Approach to Retail

There are blogs that focus on original (or somewhat original) content and thinking, and there are blogs that focus on cataloging and linking to interesting things.  metacool is mostly about the former, but once in a while I find something remarkable that I want to pass along, like this:

I've built my professional life around putting humans at the center of business activities.  To that end, I love this Cool News bit about a Mr. Butts of HEB, my favorite (really!) grocery store in Texas.  Want to create a better offering?  Create a culture of deep empathy for your users -- HEB gives employees $20 and tasks them to see what it really feels like to feed a family of four for a week on that bill.

Pagani, Successful Automotive Startup

I was fortunate enough to spend an afternoon hanging around the Pagani factory a couple of years ago.  Actually, to call Pagani's facility an automobile factory is quite misleading, as the term conjures up visions of dirty wrenches, flying sparks, and piles of sheetmetal.  If anything, the Pagani factory resembles an Intel chip fab -- clean, quiet, and orderly.  And the cars produced inside are exquisite.

Located a short drive outside of Bologna, Pagani sits but a stone's throw from the headquarters of Ferrari and Lamborghini -- part of the high performance internal combustion industry cluster that's existed in Emilia-Romagna since the 1920's.  The factory is very compact and sits, almost invisible, in a quiet suburban neighborhood.  It is divided into three main areas, each sitting side-by-side: a carbon fiber fabrication area with several autoclaves, an assembly area (big enough to fit three cars on jack stands) and an entrance lobby/museum.  The design offices sit above the museum, and the entire facility oozes quality and attention to detail, as do the fabulous cars that roll out the front door.  For example, most Pagani owners choose to have their car painted, but one car being assembled during my tour had been left in its natural carbon fiber finish.  Why?  Because the carbon fiber layup at Pagani is done with care and workmanship worthy of fine jewelry; every adjoining weave pattern met up with its neighbor with the unwavering precision of a Savile Row pinstripe.  Simply gorgeous, technically superb, utterly and completely to the hilt:

How to the hilt?  Well, when you order a Pagani Zonda, you also receive, at no additional cost, a pair of achingly beautiful leather shoes crafted in Bologna out of the same custom leather used to cover the interior of your car.

Amazingly, Horacio Pagani has been able to buck the odds (I reckon the last successful automotive startups were Honda and Ferrari, and those started in the unusual economic circumstances of the aftermath of WWII) to create a real, going automotive concern not unlike the famed atelier of Ettore Bugatti.  Conventional wisdom tells us that it's impossible to start a new car company.  Perhaps.  But Horacio Pagani built his venture in a smart, calculated way not unlike that of Burt Rutan at Scaled Composites: first, he paid his dues (learned the trade at Lamborghini) to pick up tacit knowledge, then started a composites fabrication business to get some cash flow and create option value.  Only once those steps were successful did he begin making cars with the passion of someone doing what he truly loves. 

Pagani is a great example of designing a venture and building it via an iterative process.