metacool

Adios, WoW!

Like my fellow blogger John, I recently quit World of Warcraft.  It wasn't just about saving the $15/month I was blowing on a game I wasn't playing anymore; many issues played a role in my decision, to wit:

1. WoW just isn't as cool anymore.  Ah, you say, it was never cool!  Oh, but it was.  WoW is the most amazing piece of "flow design" -- the art of matching challenge to skill -- that I've ever had the pleasure to use.  Pair its ability to put one in a state of flow with some beautiful graphics and an easy to use platform for social networking, and you've got one sticky game.  Cool, even.  But what is hip today soon becomes passe, and I fear that WoW has become a victim of its own success, becoming too familiar and too big.  And, to paraphrase a statement I heard over the weekend, advertising is the penalty companies pay for being uninteresting: I knew I had to quit WoW when I saw the commercial featuring Mr. T.  In its heyday, WoW didn't need mass advertising.  (cash cow)*(milking it) = uninteresting
2. Per the wisdom of Bob Sutton, I decided I had enough power, fame, glory, and material wealth.  In WoW, that is.  When you're a level 70 Hunter and your equipment is good enough to not get killed every five minutes, and you've got a pet bear named Yogi who you love like a... dog, and your outfit couldn't be more Darth Vader, and you finally built that gyrocopter to validate all those hours spent getting your engineering up to 350, there just isn't much more left to life.  With all of this achieved, I quickly fell off the challenge/skill matching curve and the flow stopped flowing.
3. Opportunity costs.  I'm all about learning by doing, and I learned a lot from tooting around the world of WoW.  I learned about designing for flow, and got a glimpse of what the future of truly social software may hold.  Enough, even, to get a journal article out of it.  Now that the learning is under my belt, I'm ready for the next thing.  What should I do?  Let me know if you have any ideas.

But I'm more than a little bummed.  I miss Diegoman a bunch already.  Sniff sniff, sniff sniff.

metacool Thought of the Day

"Human progress depends on unreasonable people. Reasonable people accept the world as they meet it; unreasonable people persist in trying to change it."

- Bob Geldof

(via G.B. Shaw)

RIP, Paul Frère

Paul Frère, a singular driver, engineer, and journalist.  A big hero of mine.

metacool Thought of the Day

"I suddenly understood with great clarity that nothing in life—except death itself—was ever going to kill me. No meeting could ever go that badly. No client would ever be that angry. No business error would ever bring me as close to the brink as I had already been."

- David E. Davis, Jr., on the liberating effects of the automobile accident which almost claimed his life

An inconvenient truth about blogging

Sure, blogging is an integral part of what transparent leadership looks like cira 2008, and bloggers do great things, but blogging has its downside.

Hear Yossi Vardi speak eloquently about some downside of having a G5 humming away in one's lap.  If nothing else, this is a great example of how to use PowerPoint.  It's not the crate, but the person who pilots it, as was once said.

And check out this great profile of Vardi in The Economist.

A blogger done good

John Lilly, a long-time member of the metacool blog roll, was named CEO of Mozilla today.  I've been lucky enough to work with John at the Stanford d.school, spend many hours together swapping war stories about business and the nature of product development, and even toil for a few days as fellow Lobbyists. 

Not only am I happy for John, I'm really psyched for Mozilla, too.  Firefox is one of my favorite products.  It is incredibly reliable, very easy to use, and is the most personalized product in my possession.  I use it for play and for work; in any given day I spend four hours staring in to the Web as mediated by Firefox.  It's safe to say that Mozilla is one of my favorite brands, right up there with Apple, BMW, The Economist, Honda, The Cortiina, Subaru, McGuckin Hardware, and McMenamins Kennedy School.  I can't wait to see where the Mozilla goes with John, and vice versa.

That last vice versa is crucial.  As I wrote about in MIT's Innovation journal last year, John and the Mozilla community represent a new way of getting things done, one which requires a new paradigm of leadership and participation.  They live in a world that thrives on transparency and openness, a place where web thinking is freedom thinking.  We can all learn a lot about innovation and the art of getting stuff done from Mozilla.  One thing for sure: this is a story with many chapters left to go.

w00t!

(you didn't think I was going to write this without saying that, did you?)

Director's Commentary: Philippe Starck

My favorite talk from TED2007.  As one might expect, this is a meta level talk, a Director's Commentary about being a director dreaming big things.  A meditation on designing life. 

Here's a transcript of Starck's talk.  Let's just say that this is a very provocative and intriguing twenty minutes.

metacool Thought of the Day

"Most new ideas are bad; and the good ones are mostly not new."

- James G. March

Creativity, Entrepreneurship, and Organizations of the Future

Tomorrow I'll be part of a panel discussion at Creativity, Entrepreneurship, and Organizations of the Future, a conference presented by Harvard Business School.

Professor Jim Heskett will be moderating our panel.  He's written a provocative post on the HBS Working Knowledge website about tomorrow's discussion.  There's on open invitation there to leave your comments, ideas, and thoughts on the subject.  Please do so, as we'll be tackling at least some of them in the time we have tomorrow together, and the discussion will continue online through December 18.

The agenda of speakers at the conference is simply mind-blowing.  I expect to walk away with more than a few new ideas and insights, all of which will no doubt make their way in to metacool.  The entire conference is being held in honor of Professor Thomas K. McCraw, author of my favorite book of the year, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction.

My time at Harvard Business School changed my view of the world in many ways, and as a result fundamentally changed my life.  It is very meaningful to me to be back on campus exploring design, innovation, technology, business, and life.

Yet another reason why I venerate, respect, and love Alex Zanardi, part II

I wrote the other week about Alex Zanardi's amazing achievement at the New York Marathon.

I'm not a good enough writer to capture the charm of a live interview with Zanardi.  So to show yet again why he's my hero, here's a five minute segment from WindTunnel.  Enjoy.

metacool Thought of the Day

"There are those who do the real work of the world, and those who hound them."

- William F. Milliken

Yet another reason why I venerate, respect, and love Alex Zanardi

Today Alex Zanardi placed 4th out of 53 competitors in the hand cycle class of today's New York Marathon.  Not bad for a guy who not only didn't train for the marathon, but who died several times on the way to the hospital after losing his legs six years ago.

I love and respect Zanardi because he's such a racer.  Run a marathon?  No problem, let's do it.  Get back in the saddle and race the bejeezus out of touring cars (in a BMW, natch!)?  No problem, let's do it.  Write some inspiring books about your life and times?  No problem, let's do it.

In a world where negative whining often poses as concrete action, it's great to see someone who just gets on with it.  I have the distinct pleasure of hanging out with some people who make a living carving amazing things out of aluminum, wood, steel, and plastic.  Their job is really hard, because there is no bullshit factor due to the inherent tangibility of their medium; unlike a glossy PowerPoint deck, a milled piece of aluminum is either it, or is not.  They have a saying they roll out when someone is paralyzed by the prospect of  something new, something that might lead to failure, loss of status, or pain: Just F****** Do It.  JFDI.

Zanardi is a JFDI kind of guy.  In other words, a racer.  Racers are innovators.

Designing by influence

The current issue of Fast Company has a great article about the way HP's corporate design group influences the rest of the organization.  I found the article fascinating -- it's a great example of designing for business.

It's also a good example of why there's no silver bullet when it comes to getting an organization to integrate the design process in to the way it goes to market.  I love most of Apple's products, but I also realize that the way it goes about innovating -- a centralized, low-variance, top-down approach -- isn't the answer for every organization.  With HP, for example, you have a decentralized company where the leaders of individual business units are very powerful.  A centralized innovation model based on power wouldn't work well there.  As the article shows, what does seem to be working at HP is an approach based on influence, as well as on showing the distributed decision makers what could happen.  It's all about looking hard at the constituent parts that make up a culture -- people, resources, processes and values -- and then structuring a congruent approach.  Good stuff.

metacool Thought of the Day

”One thing that I learnt the hard way – well not the hard way, the easy way – when you’re designing a new car for production, never, never copy the opposition.”

- Sir Alec Issigonis

Colin McRae, RIP

Colin McRae, a racer's racer.  RIP

Power is the greatest...

... way to release your inner jerkdom.

A really chilling study: More Evidence that Getting a Little Power Turns You into a Self-Centered Jerk

A wonderful book about an amazing innovator

The past few weeks I've had the pleasure of making my way through a wonderful book about the amazing life and times of Bill Milliken.   The title is Equations of Motion: Adventure, Risk and Innovation.  An MIT engineer by training, Milliken's varied and exciting life makes Indiana Jones seem a wimp by comparison, and places Buckaroo Banzai in the category of simpleton.  Here's his bio from the publisher of the book:

William F. Milliken was born in Old Town, Maine in 1911. He graduated MIT in 1934. During World War II he was Chief Flight Test Engineer at Boeing Aircraft. From 1944, he was managing director at Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory (CAL/Calspan), retiring as the head of the Transportation Research Division, which he founded.

Bill joined the SCCA in 1946 (Competition License No. 6) and contested over 100 races as well as holding many responsible club positions. Milliken Research Associates was founded in 1976 and continues as a foundational research asset to the automotive and auto racing industries. Bill remains active in MRA, which is now run by his son, Douglas L. Milliken.

Bill is co-author of Race Car Vehicle Dynamics and Chassis Design. He is an SAE Fellow, member of the SCCA Hall of Fame, recipient of the SAE Edward N. Cole Award, the Laura Taber Barbour Air Safety Award and many other citations for innovation.

Today Bill lives in the Buffalo, New York area with his wife, Barbara. He continues to consult with racing and chassis engineers. He jogs around the half-mile track behind his home and spends several evenings at the gym.

This book works on many levels.  It's a fascinating look at the world of aviation pre- and post-WW II.  You get a ringside seat at the dawn of the sports car movement in the United States.  It is an honest glimpse at what life was like in America around the turn of the Twentieth Century, and what it feels like to enter early adulthood under the weight of a major economic depression.  Most of all, it's a tribute to what it means to be a racer, to be an entrepreneur and a generative person, to get up each morning and say "How am I going to change the world today?".

I believe "design" is a verb and "innovation" is best thought of as the outcome of relatively tight set of behaviors and life attitudes embodied to their fullest by people like Bill Milliken.  He designed his life, and continues to live a remarkable one today.   

I love this book.

PS:  if you don't have the time (or inclination) to read Equations of Motion, please take a look at this charming profile of Milliken written by Karl Ludvigsen: Mister Supernatural

Imagining innovative behavior, vividly

I don't believe creativity is about thinking outside of the box.  I think it's about making connections across otherwise unconnected boxes; it's about pattern recognition.

So, if you will, please indulge me as I communicate a creative link I just made across the writing of two of my colleagues/friends/fellow bloggers, Bob Sutton and John Maeda.  Lately I've been thinking a lot about what happens when human nature meets the need for organizations to be scalable and sustainable, and I think Professors Sutton and Maeda have -- quite independently -- hit upon a key point.  First, Maeda:

When I was younger, I often tended to think the worst of others when I felt sleighted in some seemingly unfortunate way. "I have been wronged because other person X has intentionally wronged me with motive Y." I punish the other person by publicly expressing person X's (alleged and) imagined motive Y.

Often you discover that your imagination has done its work the way it should -- it imagined something happened in elegant detail without ever actually happening. The net result is not only embarrassment, but even worse your own poor intentions or habits with respect to others are revealed. You imagine most vividly what you do yourself.

The best route is to avoid situations of thinking ill of others by enacting exemplar behaviors yourself. You are likely to be in a better position as you are in a better mood and more resilient to adopting negative behavior -- thus affecting your surrounds with the positive energy necessary to do amazing things in this world.

And then Sutton, as expressed in two points from his "15 Things I Believe" manifesto:

6. You get what you expect from people. This is especially true when it comes to selfish behavior; unvarnished self-interest is a learned social norm, not an unwavering feature of human behavior.

8. Avoid pompous jerks whenever possible. They not only can make you feel bad about yourself, chances are that you will eventually start acting like them.

I believe quite strongly that people are more likely to engage in innovative behavior when they are in a flow-like state of happiness.  It's hard to be innovative when you are unhappy yourself, because as Maeda says, "You imagine most vividly what you do yourself."  And it's hard to engage in innovative, value-creating behavior when you're only looking out for Number One -- all the innovative cultures I've had the pleasure to work in were notable for their relative lack of narcissistic behavior.  If, as Sutton says, "... unvarnished self-interest is a learned social norm...", then innovative behavior should be one, too.  People aren't innovative or not, but their behaviors, thoughts, and attitudes are.

Thank you for the connection, John and Bob.

metacool Thought of the Day

"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original."

- Sir Ken Robinson

A school for learning

I'm fascinated by Fuji Kindergarten, as profiled by Fiona Wilson in Monocle magazine.  Fuji Kindergarten is a school whose building was designed by Tezuka Architects.

I wish my kids could go to Fuji Kindergarten.  I wish I could have gone to Fuji Kindergarten.  I wish I could go now.  Fuji Kindergarten, I reckon, is what happens when "chutes and ladders" meets a thought experiment about education which goes back to first principles.  What  makes it so unusual an educational institution is that it places the most emphasis on learning, rather than on teaching.  And on students rather than teachers (and, I'd wager, on teachers rather than administrative staff...).  Think about that one for a while.

Next time I travel to Japan, I'm going to try and visit Fuji Kindergarten.  In the mean time, I'm going to try and apply some of its lessons to our own school project over here at Stanford, called the d.school.  Perhaps we can work harder to make the architecture really support the learning process behind design thinking.

By the way, I'm beginning to really dig Monocle magazine.

The Name of the Game is Work

The big thing about playing video games used to be that they were the new golf, a novel way to hang with friends and business associates in order to maybe bond, collude, or even get some productive work done.  But it's not just about golf anymore:  Aili McConnon from BusinessWeek just published an article about the intersection of work and gaming, and I'm here to tell you that video gaming is about work.  I even landed a quote in there referencing the lessons to be had from playing MMOG's: 

The lessons learned in these games become increasingly useful as companies become less command-and-control and more a series of distributed networks around the world.  The future of work is here; it's just disguised as a game.

The article also talks through some interesting game-related stories from McKinsey, J&J, and Philips, and also has a great insight from my Stanford d.school partner in crime Bob Sutton. 

I really do think that you can learn a lot about where this whole Web 2.0 thing is going by playing games online.  Learning by doing, serious play, and all that.

Director's Commentary: Cradle to Cradle

Here's a great Director's Commentary:  architect, designer, and author Bill McDonough speaks about cradle to cradle design.  If you've never heard him speak, I highly encourage you to give a listen.  And if you have, well, I learn something new each time I listen.

I first heard Bill speak on February 11, 2003 at a lecture given at Stanford's Graduate School of Business.  I remember being in that miserable state of having just recovered from a winter flu, and not really wanting to do anything more than go to sleep, but something told me to leave work early to grab a good seat. 

I'm glad I did.  His words changed my life, because for the first time I saw a potential path forward.  I took a class on environmental science in the Fall of 1988 as a freshman at Stanford, and had been aware of the science of global warming and of the importance of toxic concentrations of chemicals since that time.  But, as a design engineer, I never felt there was much I could do beyond specifying good materials and making sure they were labeled for recycling.  McDonough's Cradle to Cradle philosophy changed all of that for me, because it helped me see clearly the value of being able to combine, at a personal, corporate, societal, and global level, the lenses of business, human values, and technology.

On being remarkable

Seth Godin has a provocative post about what it takes to be remarkable: Is good enough enough?

Here's my favorite part, on what being remarkable entails at a personal level:

First, it would require significant risk-taking. Which would include the risk of failure and the risk of getting fired (omg!). Can you and your team handle that? If not, might as well admit it and settle for good enough. But if you're settling, don't sit around wishing for results beyond what you've been getting.

Second, it would mean that every single time you set out to be remarkable, you'd have to raise the bar and start over. It's exhausting.

Third, it means that the boss and the boss's boss are unlikely to give you much cover. Are you okay with that?

Are you willing to engage in innovative behavior?  A lot of the time it hurts.

metacool Thought of the Day

"Doing the right thing is important, which is where strategy comes in. But doing that thing well—execution—is what sets companies apart. After all, every football play is designed to go for a huge gain. The reason it doesn’t is because of execution—people drop balls, miss blocks, go to the wrong place, and so forth. So, success depends on execution—on the ability to get things done."
- Jeffrey Pfeffer

A thought on teams and leadership and stuff

Teams that win do so because they are winning teams first.  The emphasis should be on creating the winning team, not on the winning.

More Garage Majal...

My Garage Majal post touched a nerve.  Had a great discussion in comments, and received some strongly worded emails.  Thanks for those -- I learned a lot from the feedback.

Brendan Eich of Mozilla wrote a post back in April called Open Source and "Openness", and it sheds some good light on the argument I was trying to make about "brilliant networks".  Here's a quote:

Successful open source projects combine meritocratic leadership, "doing" more than "talking", and breadth through well-scoped extension mechanisms. It's not enough to do great work by oneself: each committer who has the stamina and remains engaged must spend time listening to users and developers, grooming helpers and successors, and refactoring or even redesigning to support what becomes, module by module, a platform.

I think we're entering a period where a new style of leadership -- let's call it web leadership -- is emerging.  Brilliant networks aren't bereft of great leadership.  Far from it.  It's just that the leadership style required in a network is something quite different from what we're used to.  Something to ponder over the next few weeks.

Innovation Lessons from Garage Majal

Here's an interesting article about Ron Dennis, the leader of McLaren.  That's him on the right in the photo above, accompanied by the author of the article, semiotician Stephen Bayley.  It's a fascinating walk through the McLaren Technology Centre, which is where wickedly beautiful and effective machines like McLaren F1 racers and the Mercedes SLR are wrought.

One can't read about Ron Dennis without thinking about Steve Jobs.  Both have created high-performance organizations which are able to innovate on a routine basis.  Both run organizations which are hierarchical and honest about it.  As Dennis remarks to Bayley, "Dust can be eliminated," and I think that's as much an organizational metaphor as a statement about the level of hygiene found at McLaren.

How does one organize for innovation?  I'm beginning to think there's a bimodal answer at work:  either build an organization around an exceptionally "right" individual like Jobs or Dennis, and have every aspect of it amplify their personal decision making abilities, or build a powerful network of individuals, a la Mozilla, which determines what is "right" based on the power of thousands of individuals -- some talented, some not so -- making deep bugs shallow.  In other words, brilliant dictator, or brilliant network.  Between those reigns the mediocrity of committees and task forces and focus groups.

What do you think?

metacool Thought of the Day

"A week or so ago or 10 days ago he was in Eldora in a dirt car. How many guys have been on the Eldora dirt and been on the streets of Monte Carlo?  That just tells you the guy has the disease. He has the fever. He likes the action and that’s what’s fun about working with him. It’s not about the money. It’s about the action and that’s what’s fun. It’s easy to work hard for a guy like that.”

- Chip Ganassi on why Juan Pablo Montoya is a racer.  And why it matters.

Encyclopedia of Life

Fantastic news involving E.O Wilson's TEDPrize Wish. Check out the Encyclopedia of Life, an exciting and hopefully impactful example of networked innovation.

His recent book The Creation is a powerful read.

metacool Thought of the Day

"After living in Silicon Valley so long, where there is so much greed, and just about everyone seems focused on squeezing every cent of everyone around them -- employees, customers, suppliers -- Zingerman's is a refreshing reminder that financial greed isn't always the first priority for every owner and manager.  It reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's poem Joe Heller.... Paul Saginaw and Ari Wienzweig seem to believe, like Joe Heller (the author of Catch 22) did, that they have enough, and that using their talents to create something beautiful and to give back along the way is a better thing than maximizing their personal wealth at every turn."
                                                      - Bob Sutton

Embracing Risk

I have a new article about design thinking and risk in the Spring 2007 issue of Rotman Magazine (PDF download).  It's on page 57 of what is a quite impressive collection of articles -- lots to chew on in there.  Low risk, I assure you.

This one, as with Getting to Where You Want to Go, is a result of my continuing professional collaboration with Ryan Jacoby, one of my colleagues at IDEO.

As always, please let me know what you think with an email or a comment below.

update 28may07:  I'm pleased to announce that this article can now be found over at BusinessWeek magazine

Creating Infectious Action through Social Enterprise

As part of the CIA-KGB class I'm teaching at Stanford this quarter, we're holding a "mini-conference" next week on May 3, and you're invited.  We have some really amazing speakers, and we'll be focused on how to created infectious action via social enterprise.

Here are event details.

It's free, but bring your brain.

Director's Commentary: James Nachtwey

 

Strictly speaking, 2007 TED Prize winner James Nachtwey isn't a designer, and his acceptance speech video above isn't a pure Director's Commentary.  But because it provides such a vivid and thoughtful perspective on his mode of leadership by storytelling, it's especially relevant to any discussion around design thinking.  Storytelling is one of the key pillars of design thinking, because it offers a way to communicate emotional content in a way that pure analytic thought and discourse cannot. 

Compare the impact of any of his images to any statistics you've heard about the costs of starvation, genocide, and war.  How might his approach change your own ways of communicating with others?

Introducing Creating Infectious Action, Kindling Gregarious Behavior (CIA-KGB), to be taught starting in April at the Stanford Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford

Wow, what a lot of fun that namestorm was!  The "KGB"  names are still rolling in, and I have to say there was some very creative thinking going on (see Reilly's comments on the previous post below).  The winner is Kindling Gregarious Behavior, because it sounds good, actually describes the content and aim of the course (not a bad thing at all when you think about it) and -- best of all for me -- it echoes the observation that Wikia CEO Gil Penchina made on a panel I hosted at last year's AlwaysOn conference.  Gil made the point that, instead of spending all your time, energy, money and luck building a big bonfire on your own and then hoping that a bunch of other people will choose to come and sit around it, why not identify all the myriad little campfires burning around you and pour a little gas on each one?  That's the way infectious action and gregarious behavior get fed.  It's not about some big top-down mission, though centralized thinking matters.  It's about embracing the power of the community.  It's about kindling.

Anyway, I'm really excited to be teaching CIA-KGB along with a truly fabulous -- FABULOUS! -- teaching team.  We learned a lot teaching CIA last year (and got lots of great coverage in BusinessWeek and other august journals), so this year we've made some tweaks to the class to try and make it an even better experience.  This year's class will again involve a creating infectious action project for the good folks at Mozilla, and will then focus on a project for Global Giving.  I'm very excited to be working with Global Giving, and it already feels good to be brainstorming project ideas with my Mozilla friends.

This will not be your usual classroom experience.  Everything is real, everything is open-ended, and the sky is the limit.  It'll be scary.  It'll be fun.  It'll be something, hopefully, which knocks your hat in the creek.  As if all that weren't enough, it looks like Global Giving will be supporting some summer internship positions for CIA-KGB students who A), kick butt in the class, and B) want to keep working on Global Giving-related issues.  How cool is that?

Are you a Stanford student with Master's standing?  Please consider applying for the course.  You can find an application here.  It's due March 9, and we'll be selecting 24 people to part of the CIA-KGB classroom community.  The journey is the reason we do all of this, and the fruit of the voyage will be more experience with the design thinking process as well as further developing methodologies for creating infectious action and kindling gregarious behavior.

Some good no asshole coverage

The San Francisco Chronicle published a nice interview with my colleague Bob Sutton about his new book The No Asshole Rule.  I have a little blurb in the article about why it's so important to filter out jerks when you're trying to encourage innovative behavior.

I love Bob's book and I think the coverage it's receiving is great -- I hope that it pushes the world a little closer to a state of affairs where the pursuit of happiness in the workplace is not only encouraged, but is the norm.  My only worry stems from the power of Google; will my descendants forever associate a web search on my name with the term "asshole"?  I hope not.  English is just so damn boring when it comes to swear words for the nether regions.  If that association is going to be a sticky one, I'd much rather it be with something like the Spanish gilipollas or -- even more mellifluous to these ears -- the Italian cafone.

On a side note not even tangentially tied to cafones, I must apologize for two trends on metacool as of late.  All of us on the staff of metacool are dedicated to writing thoughts about the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life.  But as of late we (I) haven't been posting that much, and what I have posted has usually been a pointer to something else rather than some (semi) original thinking.  Why?  Well, I'm not one to spend a lot of energy fabricating excuses, but I've been hella busy innovating.  Deep in structuring some prototypes and figuring out where to go with them.  Also, I'm busy getting the next version of Creating Infectious Action cranked up for the Spring Quarter at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.  I'm looking forward to teaching it with a rather awesome group of individuals.  More on that to come.  One change is that it'll probably be called "CIA-KGB" for short, instead of just "CIA".  So drop me a line and help me out with name brainstorming by letting me of any good verbs that start with a "K".

But creativity is endless. so expect a surge of posts (oh boy, has that word has been ruined forever, or what?) in the next few weeks as all this goo gels in my head.

RIP, Michael Brecker

When I was a teenager, jazz great Count Basie passed away, and I remember being shocked at how hard my music teacher took the news.  For him, Count Basie was The Man, the one who had inspired him to pursue a life in music, to become a teacher to kids like me.

Today, I'm so sad -- and shocked -- to hear that one of my heroes, saxophonist Michael Brecker passed away last month.  With his passing, the world lost a great innovator and a rare artistic genius.

For me, as a saxophone-crazy teenager, hearing Brecker's eponymous debut album blew my mind utterly and completely.  It was like getting a direct injection of musical innovation.   "Original Rays" showed his ability to control the remarkable EWI MIDI instrument.  His rendition of "My One and Only Love" introduced me to the iconic tune for the first time, got me interested in Coltrane, and stuck with me ever since -- it was the song my wife and I used as our first dance at our wedding reception.  And there's nothing quite his old albums where he's playing in a style called heavy metal bebop, like on the track "Skunk Funk".  If you're not into jazz, you know his sound, because he played just about everybody's album.  Michael Brecker is the person playing the saxophone on Dire Straight's tune "Your Latest Trick".  It's safe to say that I drove my parents, siblings, and neighbors crazy playing along to that album, figuring out how to play those amazing licks of his, how to get that amazingly fat yet supple sound.  Hearing him play a concert live later that year was a dream come true.

I never heard him play live again, unfortunately.  And though I'm upset over his death as if I actually had known him personally, I only knew him through his albums.  But music gives you that direct connection to people. 

Life is short.  Live it up, do what you want and can to enjoy it.

metacool Thought of the Day

"Intelligence and capability are not enough.  There must be the joy of doing something beautiful."
- Dr. G. Venkataswamy

Important Reading

"Being Mean is So Last Millennium"

Memorable Ads, Impossible Dreams, and Being Innovative

My colleague Paul Bennett of IDEO has written an insightful and delightful essay for BusinessWeek: Most Memorable Ads of 2006

Here's an excerpt from Paul:

We're clearly at an inflection point. I'm not even a traditional ad-guy and I've been asked to write this, so what does that say? We're all firmly in this together—marketers, designers, clients, agencies, researchers, ethnographers, art directors and writers, all being sniped at, out-thought, and remixed by consumers younger than our own kids. Hard as it is to say, in most cases, they're as good, if not better, at this stuff than we are. Now, together, we must figure out where to go from here. But before we get in to a whole spiral of circle drumming, chest-beating and problem-solving, let's take a quick tour of some of the highlights of the last year.

But first a warm-up of sorts: Honda's Impossible Dream spot—which aired in December, 2005, and therefore doesn't make the official 2006 list—deserves a mention for Not Being Afraid of the Joy of Great Storytelling, for expansive locations, great nostalgic music, excellent casting, and a fantastically simple premise. In it, a guy emerges from his trailer, mounts a scooter, and then seamlessly moves from product to product, stirring emotions, sweeping us along in his wake, and bringing a tear to many an eye.

I've written before about Honda's Impossible Dream ad in the context of what I like to call tangible brand mantras (you can see the ad by following that hyperlink).  It's an ad I can watch over and over (and I have - maybe 50 times; not as many viewings for me as the original Star Wars, but getting there).  And it's one which is authentic and true even though it's so outrageous and funny.  Honda is a company where the CEO knows whereof he speaks.  It's a company as capable of pulling off revolutionary innovation outcomes as it is innovating on a routine basis.  It's a group of people not afraid of thinking weird but right.  And, above all, it's a company which solves for happiness because, when one gets down to the bottom of it all, that's what drives innovation.

Each Spring Matters

John Maeda:  Each Spring Matters

A beautiful piece of writing.

2007 TEDPrize Winners

Be sure to watch it all the way through to the end...

Sir Ken Robinson on TEDTalks

Ideas Worth Spreading. 

That's a topic near and dear to my heart.  And one for which I'm more than happy to play a willing accomplice.

In this particular case, it's both a pleasure and a duty.

 

 

At the TED2006 conference earlier this year I had a peak life experience in the form of a talk by Sir Ken Robinson.  He stirred my soul and reminded me why I was here on the planet. 

I encourage you to take 20 minutes to listen to Sir Robinson.  If you're engaged in any kind of creative endeavors in your life (and we all are), you must see this.  And if you're responsible for the care, feeding, and education of another human being, you must see this.  See his video (and many more) on TEDTalks.

(plus, it's all sponsored by one of my favorite producers of cool products, BMW)

Let's Create Infectious Action

From the Worldchanging website:

"We have a choice to make. We can build a future of green products and industry, renewable energy and leapfrogging technologies, clean water and fresh air, livable cities and healthy children. Or we can have the kind of world Ed Burtynsky shows us."

See a quick video of Ed Burtynsky's powerful images

As of late, metacool is seen by about 3,000 4,000 people a day.  Can you help me create infectious action?  Could we double that number?  Tell a friend, and a friend of a friend, about the Ed Burtynsky video, and then ask them to do something about it.

2006: The Year of Total Design

If you're any kind of soccer fan, you know the meaning of Total Football.  Wikipedia defines it as "... a system where a player who moves out of his position is replaced by another from his team, thus retaining their intended organizational structure. In this fluid system no footballer is fixed in their intended outfield role... Total Football depends largely on the adaptability of each footballer within the team to succeed."

In the world of soccer, Total Football created an entirely new paradigm for how the game should be played.  The fluidity, adaptability, and ultimately, the creativity it engendered markedly raised the performance of teams who adopted it.  And while the system of Total Football is what enabled players to play better than they ever had before, for the system to work required a special type of player.  Soccer legend Rinus Michels put it this way:

Total Football... places great demands on individual and team tactical excellence... An absolute prerequisite, to master such a team tactical aspect, is that all the players possess a positive mentality...

Back to the world of metacool.  I believe there's something called Total Design.  Total Design is to normal design as Total Football is to normal soccer.  It's what happens when you combine wickedly good design thinkers with a human-centered, business-sensitive design process.  Design thinkers who know how to work across professional boundaries, who can play any position, who are flexible, adaptable, yet capable of driving toward a unified goal.  Total Design is about tangible results that change the world for the better, and those results can be, should be, will be, awesome.

You heard it here first:  2006 is the year of Total Design.

 

You won't make that flight

A few weeks back I posited that the key to being a successful innovator is having the mindset of a racer, which is some mix of foolish optimism, self-confidence, humility, and above all, persistence. 

Here's a fun story of persistence and why you shouldn't believe the naysayers who say it can't be done.

Innovators All: TED Prize Winners

The new TEDBLOG has a nice overview of each of the TED Prize winners.  They're as amazing as last year's group, and just as humbling, too:

Cameron Sinclair 

Larry Brilliant

Jehane Noujaim

On Zanardi and Innovation

Earlier this month, Alex Zanardi won the Italian Touring Car Championship at the wheel of a BMW.

Even if you don't "get" auto racing, give me a chance to tell you why Zanardi is one of my personal heroes, and why he's an important role model for innovators.  Simply put, Zanardi, has the kind of singular genius that makes something very difficult look oh so easy.  He is an incredible driver, very talented.  During the 1990's, from his come from behind win at Long Beach, to his audacious Corkscrew maneuver at Laguna Seca (in racing circles simple referred to as The Pass), Zanardi was the guy you knew would always go for it, would never ever - ever! - give up.  In other word, Zanardi is a racer, a person intrinsically motivated to win.

He almost died in 2001.  Zanardi's recent Touring car crown is all the more remarkable because it was achieved by a man whose legs were amputated above the knee, by a man whose died several times in a helicopter on the way to the ER room after his horrible accident.  Made all the more remarkable by the fact that, after regaining his health, his intrinsic motivation led him to figure out a control system for his racing BMW which uses his hands and his hip so effectively that he could not just be competitive, but be the most competitive in what is a very competitive racing series.

At the risk of trivializing Zanardi's accomplishments, let me say this:  innovation is a difficult pastime.  Most of the time it's not glamorous, fun videos about shopping carts not withstanding.  You're going to lose a lot of the time.  Ideas get beat up mercilessly.  Hard work gets flushed down the toilet.  People don't believe you can do it.  And the real world has a way of providing harsh feedback on things that work very well in theory but not in practice.  If you're serious about changing the world, innovation is ultimately about doing, and ultimately, winning.  Winning, as it turns out, is tough.

I think great innovators - winners - share a lot in common with great racers.  I just want to be a great racer.  That's why Zanardi is my hero. 

Shedding the tyranny of the wallet

To echo an infamous statement once made about the lowly shopping cart basket, the wallet is tyranny.  In this age of the mobile phone, the PDA, the RFID fob, the massive automobile locking/alarm/ignition system remote, and the iPod, who can get away with carrying a wallet alone?  Convergence isn't going to happen any time soon, my friends, and clipping that phone to your waist band just ain't gonna cut it.  Aesthetics matter.  The solution is quite clear, and yet... and yet the pressure to conform to societal norms is intense.  Hence the tyranny of the wallet.

You heard it here first: I'm freeing myself from the shackles of walletdom, and I'm going to start toting a man-purse. 

I've been contemplating this move for a while, a long while, in fact.  Back in 1991 my engineering boss at the Nissan Technical Center in Atsugi used a man purse, and it made a lot of sense from a utilitarian standpoint: having everything in one purse made it a lot less likely that he'd leave a stray pack of cigarettes in a chassis dynamometer, misplace the keys to his diesel Sentra, or drop a data log at the test track.  It made perfect functional -- or behavioral design -- sense.

It's the visceral and reflective levels of design which kept me from taking the plunge.  But two recent developments have tipped the balance in favor of the man-purse:

1. When a reputable venture capitalist  makes a very public endorsement of the man-purse, well, that means its societal meaning is changing.  A VC with a purse?  That's a compelling use case, a great story.  And it works well at the reflective level of design.
2. I'm no clotheshorse, but I do care about personal aesthetics. So I can't rationalize carrying a cordura camera bag turned purse.  Or worse, a fanny pack.  Enter the Freitag Mancipation line of man-purses.  They meet all my visceral design criteria, and because they're Freitag they'll work well and stroke my mojo, too.

So watch out for me and my man-purse.  Now I've just got to figure out how to buy one of these Freitag thingies without jetting over to Davos, because I can't find it on the internet. 

Honey, where's my wallet?

What's new at the d.school

BusinessWeek is running a great interview about what we're brewing at the Stanford d.school

We don't have an RSS feed on the d.school site yet, so in the meantime go ahead and sign up for our mailing list if you want to join the movement.

Viva viva!

The New Heroes

Be sure catch The New Heroes on PBS, a four-part series about social entrepreneurship.

Wait, shouldn't all ventures contribute to society?  Good Business can and should better the lives of employees, shareholders, and society.

Punch it in your TiVo or set the alarm and watch it in live time.