metacool

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

1964 Ferrari 250LM

Intrinsic Motivation

Seth Godin has an interesting post today concerning six, lobsters and videotape:

Today, in anticipation of a dinner party, I stopped at a lobster seller in Chelsea Market in NYC. I asked for a six pound lobster. The pricing at the store is $9.95 a pound for small lobsters and $8.95 a pound for lobsters six pounds and up.

The lobster weighed (I'm not making this up), 5.97 pounds. For reference, that's just less than a pound by the weight of a penny. Feed the lobster a plankton and it would be six pounds.

He started to ring me up at $9.95 a pound. I pointed out the price breakdown and the guy shrugged and said, "It doesn't weight six pounds."

Two co-workers came over and with precisely the same uncomprehending grin, repeated his point. I added a penny to the scale but they weren't swayed.

So, the two questions are, "Do you think the owner wanted them to act this way?" and "Would they have acted differently if they were on camera?"

I believe that the best motivation is self-motivation. That teaching people the right thing to do is far more effective than intimidating them into acting out of fear.

Seth brings up the critical difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation: if you can create a culture that encourages people to act on the basis of self-motivation, you're likely to have good relations between workers, good customer service, and best of all, a place that churns out innovation. Why? Because intrinsic motivation leads to enjoyment, flow and meaning. Ask Honda or Cox.

It's Cool to be Keen

Keen shoes have tipped. In a repeat of the Doc Martens phenomenon of the late 80's, we're going to start seeing them everywhere, on everyone. The thing about a pair of Keen shoes is that you can't help but notice them when they stroll by -- their designers took a risk and added a big old ugly toe-protecting bumper to the front of the tried-and-true Teva, and came up with something which screams "Look! I'm different and kind of cool." That toe bumper may be ugly, but it represents Keen's entire "brand", and no amount of money thrown away on awareness building could come even close to the word of mouth (message of foot?) buzz generated by this aesthetic oddity. Now, I'm a TiVo guy, so I don't watch many commercials, but to the best of my knowledge Keen doesn't spend anything on advertising. I saw my first pair at REI, then I saw another set on the toes of a friend... and... and I had to have a pair.

The lesson here is to build your marketing into your offering. Make something great, something interesting, and make sure that you design that offering such that private usage is made unavoidably public.

Keen. All the cool kids are wearing them.

Enabling Customer Evangelism

The folks at Firefox are helping their passionate user base take out an ad in the New York Times so that the world can hear about the Firefox experience.

It's a cool marketing idea; not quite open source, but something close. No doubt the imitators will dive in, but Firefox has filled the idea vacuum with this one. Brilliant.

Bringing cool stuff to life: 2004 TED Prize

I'm obsessed with the process of bringing cool things to life. I admire the TED Prize, because it isn't about being a genius or a superhero -- it's about doing great stuff. The 2004 winners are Bono, photo-artist Edward Burtynsky, and medical device pioneer Robert Fischell.

Some say that rockers are but court jesters, but some use their fame as a bully pulpit. Bono has done this; the TED site leaves us with one of his remarkable thoughts: "What are the blind spots of our age? It might be something as simple as our deep down refusal to believe that every human life has equal worth."

To my mind, the environmental issues facing us today are beyond comprehension. What do a billion people look like? What does it feel like to lose an organism forever? Photos by Burtynsky can help deliver the message in a way that breaks through the fuzz.

Many people create products which claim to change people's lives, but which really only affect lifestyle. For example, an iPod is way cool, but it differs from my 80's Walkman only by degree. Robert Fischell creates things that fundamentally change lives.  His work is the standard by which that statement must be judged.

Visceral, Behavioral, Reflective: Understanding Cool

In this brief essay on the 1939 Mercury, Donald Norman shows how powerful his Visceral, Behavioral, Reflective model is as a tool to understand designed objects (especially cool ones). 

Dante or Beowulf?

Neal Stephenson answered some questions on Slashdot recently, and made a point about "Dante" writers versus "Beowulf" writers. Dante writers are beholden to patrons such as universities and fellowship grants, are more likely to be part of the establishment, and have to adhere to external expectations. Beowulf writers, on the other hand, write whatever the hell they want and might find a mass market along the way, critics be damned. In business terms, they're high beta folks, high variance. As Stephenson puts it:

... people on the Beowulf side may never have taken a writing class in their life. They just tend to lunge at whatever looks interesting to them, write whatever they please, and let the chips fall where they may. So we may seem not merely arrogant, but completely unhinged.

I think there's a parallel to entrepreneurial finance here: do you take Dante money for your company from an establishment source (VC, Angels, etc...) and allow them to dictate your behavior somewhat, or do you Beowulf bootstrap and follow your own destiny? Food for thought.

If you're not interested in efinance, read the Slashdot stuff anyway, as there's a particularly cool bit about a LNG tanker. Excuse me while I perform some Red Lotus incantations.

CYA Notice No. 660 from the metacool legal team: This post exeeds the dorkiness exposure limit set by management.

metacool Thought of the Day

“Research should be defined as doing something where half of the people think it’s impossible – impossible!  And half of them think hmmmmm, maybe that will work, right?  When there’s ever a breakthrough, a true breakthrough, you can go back and find a time period when the consensus was, ‘Well, that’s nonsense.’  So what that means is that a true, creative researcher has to have confidence in nonsense.”

– Burt Rutan

Steve Jobs on Innovation

"You need a very product-oriented culture. Apple had a monopoly on the graphical user interface for almost 10 years. How are monopolies lost? Some very good product people invent some very good products, and the company achieves a monopoly. [But] what's the point of focusing on making the product even better when the only company you can take business from is yourself? So a different group of people starts to move up. And who usually ends up running the show? The sales guy. Then one day the monopoly expires, for whatever reason...but by then, the best product people have left or they are no longer listened to." - Steve Jobs

Things which I believe drive this dynamic in organizations:

1) As Clay Christensen has noted, succcessful organizations drive for ever-increasing margins over time.  This dynamic forces changes in the organization's internal mission and raises the profile and validity of sales and financial people.

2) People who do the creative work of product development are different from the people who do the routine (but very important) work of managing call centers, tracking accounts receivable, talking to shareholders, and keeping the lights on.  Thing is, routine people are more likely to get satisfaction from being managers, rather than from focusing on content, which is what creative people like to do.  So the routine people rise in the organization, mismanage the creative people, and nothing gets good gets created -- witness Apple without Jobs.

3)  Tibor Kalman once said "success = boredom".  If a product line is becoming mature, and if the company is unwilling or unable to roll out new lines of products, the good product people will leave in search of more interesting challenges.  Who wants to be the guy trying to take another $0.01 of cost out of an already optimized mechanism? 

4) Product success drives financial success, which leads to going public, which leads to short-term financial pressures and the generation of a gigantic bureaucratic hairball.  That hairball tangles the creative product people and binds them, limits them.  As the rather creative fellow Richard Branson says, "If it's a private company, you can get away with more. If it's my money, then if I lose my money, no one else has been hurt by it."

Mis Zapatos de Batman

© Valentin Sama  (taken with a 1936 Leica)

Photographer, teacher, writer, and raconteur extraordinaire Valentin Sama has a cool new blog.  It’s concerned with all aspects of photography, from tools to techniques to philosophy.

It’s also full of beautiful photos like the one above (“My Batman Shoes”).

CYA Notice No. 658 from the metacool legal team:  Sama is my uncle
CYA Notice No. 659 from the metacool legal team: Your experience may vary, but Sama’s blog works best if you read it in Spanish.

Cranium Wisdom from Richard Tait

Attended Stanford’s EDAY over the weekend, and had my hat knocked in the creek by the event’s final speaker, the Grand Poo-Bah of Cranium, Richard Tait.  The theme of EDAY was “the power of play,” so who better than a gaming company Grand Poo-Bah to tie a bow around things? 

Tait’s spiel focused on his own version of the 4 P’s: Passion, Productivity, Profitability, and Play.  Some particularly chewy nuggets:

Passion:

• Lighten & Enlighten: that’s Cranium’s passion, and as a mission it infuses all their daily activities.
• Invest time and energy in your culture: Cranium holds periodic “rodeos” where the group gets together to discuss cultural issues.  What’s going wrong and how can we improve things?
• Encourage each member of your org to come to work each day with a point of view about what they bring to the party: Tait’s daily POV centers on passion, speed & urgency, and discovery.

Productivity:

• Focus on innovation and marketing (metacool editorial: if you do them right, they’re one and the same): Everything else can and should be outsourced.  Drucker agrees, by the way.
• When hiring for jobs that create value in the marketplace, hire for how people think and not for what they know:  Hiring for smarts, and renting experience when needed, is a great way to find (and retain) those knowledge workers capable of creating remarkable products.  To his credit, Tait acknowledged that for routine work (a concept I borrow from Bob Sutton, another EDAY speaker) like day-to day accounting, finance, and operations, you should go for experience.  Just make sure those folks are a cultural fit.  Actively shun the fun sponges who take delight in the creation of bureaucratic hairballs.

Profitability:

• Operational rigor can empower, rather than distract, a creative organization:  Encouraging your entire workforce to actually understand EBITDA (as Cranium does) is impressive.  Setting that EBITDA reporting to a Bee Gees soundtrack takes things to setting eleven.  Creative people are adults, too, and they’re usually pretty smart.  They can understand EBITDA.
• Never forget that customers are your best (and FREE) sales force:  Cranium made its limited marketing dollars work as hard as they could.  In fact, it sold its first million units without a dime of outbound marketing spend.  And people at Cranium do seemingly crazy things to win and retain passionate customers.  For example, Tait once delivered Cranium games on Christmas Day to customers on a shipping waitlist. 

Play:

• Use the spirit of play to guide your product development process:  Cranium went from concept to reality in just six months using a philosophy of rapid prototyping (print out game boards drawn in PowerPoint) and fluid iteration (hold four user playtests a night, and modify the prototype between each one).
• See the world with the mind of a child:  What is interesting?  What works particularly well?  What tastes and feels good?  Case in point, the Cranium color palette – which now informs the entire Cranium brand – was lifted from a roll of Lifesavers.  Classic.  Tasty.  Effective.
• Enjoy yourself in the workplace, and enjoy what you do:  Tait clearly does, and his enthusiasm is infectious.  And he digs old 911’s, which is worth 50 bonus points.

Speaking of bonus items, here’s a charming PDF by Tait which nicely summarizes his thoughts on culture, meaning and innovation.  I’m still looking for my hat…

Download CraniumSecretSauce.pdf

metacool Thought of the Day

"We try to evolve and evolve a product until the inevitability of it almost appears undesigned."
- Jonathan Ive

Soichiro Honda on Enjoyment and Innovation

"Each individual should work for himself. People will not sacrifice themselves for the company. They come to work at the company to enjoy themselves."  - Soichiro Honda

That Honda the company is a champion innovator is due in no small part to the culture created by Honda the founder.   

What I find so interesting about this quote from Mr. Honda is his focus on the concept of enjoyment.  When was the last time you heard any industry magnate, let alone a Japanese one, say it's all about individual enjoyment, not about the greater good of the company?

Many business thinkers write about managing innovation, as if innovation were a thing.  But innovation is ultimately the expression of a set of behaviors originating in the individual.  So rather than focusing our energy on understanding the output of those individuals (innovation), we should think instead about how to lead those individuals so that they can be as innovative as possible.  Could creating a culture of innovation be as simple as cultivating a culture of enjoyment?  Mr. Honda says "yes": If you're at Honda, then, the central task of leadership is about creating work that leads to enjoyment, and innovation will follow.  It's not unlike the leadership philosophy of Bobby Cox.

But what does enjoyment mean?  Is the implication that work needs to be "fun", as in dot com fun?  Is it about air hockey tables and free M&M's?  Should employees be walking around with inane smiles on their faces?  I don't think so.  My guess is that Mr. Honda believed in the kind of enjoyment which leads to a state of flow.  Csikszentmihalyi (the originator of the concept of flow) wrote this illuminating discussion of enjoyment in his book Good Business:

The experience of happiness in action is enjoyment -- the exhilarating sensation of being fully alive... Enjoyment, on the other hand, is not always pleasant, and it can be very stressful at times.  A mountain climber, for example, may be close to freezing, utterly exhausted, and in danger of falling into a bottomless crevasse, yet he wouldn't want to be anywhere else...  At the moment it is experienced, enjoyment can be both physcially painful and mentally taxing; but because it involves a triumph over the forces of entropy and decay, it nourishes the spirit.

Nourishing the spirit.  Experiencing the thrill of triumphing over adversity.  Happiness in action. When was the last time you heard those words associated with managing innovation?  Next time someone in your workplace couches innovation in terms of by-the-numbers processes, jargon, and esoteric management theories, just ask them this simple question: how do you plan to enable people to enjoy their work? 

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

Vanilla Bicycles

To the Hilt: Foodie

Seth Godin has a nice post about foodie, a perfect example of doing things to the hilt.  Joe DeSalazar’s foodie is to a fancy dinner what Steve Moal’s Zausner Torpedo is to a standard luxury car: same fundamental offering, but implemented with a point of view obsessed with total quality and epicurean delight. 

Granted, you’re not going to get to the mass market by doing stuff to the hilt, but there is an audience out there.  And they’re hungry. 
Why not do it to the hilt?

Using Option Value to Win the X Prize

Yesterday Burt Rutan and the entire cast and crew of Scaled Composites won the Ansari X Prize. Why them? Do they have better engineers than any other contender? Perhaps, but not likely. More funding? Nope. Better equipment? I doubt they have anything which couldn’t be bought by another contender. More wisdom and tacit knowledge, gained by years of knowing by doing? Check.

If you were to design a venture with sole purpose of winning the X Prize, you couldn’t do much better than Scaled Composites. Looking back on their history of bringing lightweight, high-performance, low-cost solutions to market, you might even think that Rutan had the X Prize in his head all along. He didn’t, of course, but on the other hand, he did.

Scaled Composites is a classic example of creating option value by using iteration to get into the flow of the opportunity stream. By option value, I don’t mean the value of a share of stock. Instead, I mean the value of future opportunities that open up by doing something today – creating options to do the things you want to do in the future. By creating the first VariEze, Scaled Composites opened up the possibility to someday create a round-the-world plane. Why? Because in meeting the challenges of building the VariEze, they forged a culture that values having a 50ft x 20ft x 8ft axis CNC mill on site (that’s it above), whose massive potentiality can’t help but spark the imagination of their staff! And by doing that round-the-world plane, they created the potential to build a space place, and so on and so forth… by actually doing things, you gain deep experience and the kind of tacit organizational knowledge which helps make you a prime contender for things like the X Prize.

Through conscious iteration, the people in a venture can position themselves to take advantage of any opportunity that may come their way, and the sky is the limit.

Will Sports Cars Die?: Venturi Fetish

What will the sports car of the future be like?  There's no reason why the sports car of the future couldn't be electric.  After all, Ferdinand Porsche's first automotive design used electric, and not gas, motors.  In fact, electric motors have an inherent advantage over internal combustion engines in that they provide maximum torque at zero RPM, which makes for absolutely smashing acceleration.  The Venturi Fetish is all-electric and will do 0-60 in 4.3 seconds. 

But how do we cradle-to-cradle the battery packs?  And how do I get some extra juice when I'm stuck on I-80 in Nevada? 

Some Cool Blogs on metacool

I added a couple entries to the metacool blogroll today. As always, this list is carefully edited for your viewing pleasure, and each blog in some way touches on metacool's theme of creating cool stuff. Here they are:

Christian Lindholm: an eclectic blog from a Nokia designer. I particularly like his posts on The quest for Authenticity, The SUV of shoes, and Gourmet Junk.

Relevant History: The personal blog of Alex Pang, a Research Director at IFTF. Sounds like he and I made up the majority of the non-D&D crowd at Neal Stephenson's recent reading at Kepler's.

Bobby Cox on Leadership

Worthwhile has a nice post on the leadership style of Bobby Cox, manager of the Atlanta Braves:

1) Check your ego
2) Make your team shine in the field
3) Remember that things are supposed to be fun

If you're in the business of making good stuff happen, I think these are great guidelines for getting the most out of your team, especially if that team is made up of knowledge workers.
Don't go soft on deadlines, though.

metacool Thought of the Day

The Henry WorkCycles Conference Bike

Will Sports Cars Die?... continued

I recently spent three wonderful weeks driving 4,500 miles around the western United States.  My faithful steed was a front wheel drive Honda Accord with a 2.2 liter, 4 cylinder engine making 130 horsepower (not a dissimilar configuration to the original car of the future, the Citroen DS), and I averaged 34 mpg for the entire trip.  Mind you, my right foot is an exotic alloy of lead, tungsten, and depleted uranium, so those mpg’s were acquired at average cruising speeds well above 80 mph.

Funny thing was, I saw only a few other sedans on the road.  Everyone else was driving RV’s, SUV’s, or monster pickup trucks with stonkin’ 10-cylinder diesel motors.  These wavering hulks scared the bejeezus out of me on the highway, and the hum of their knobby tires on the highway kept me awake at night in my tent.  I saw one mow down some deer without stopping. Three tons of steel to transport a few hundred pounds of human DNA?  How stupid and silly: this trip convinced me in a fundamental way that our current automotive trajectory isn’t sustainable.  We need to radically change our conception of what a car/truck/RV should be and do.

So, the interesting question isn’t “will there be sports cars?”, but rather “what will cars be, and what will a sports car be in that context?”.  Along those lines, here’s a thought from an AutoWeek profile of Leonardo Fioravanti, father of tasty sports machines such as the Ferrari P6 (!!) and Ferrari Daytona (!!!!):

"My expectations for the future are that a large part of the cars cannot be polluting. In my mind, we will have to put beside this kind of vehicle a number of sporty and exciting ones."

Fioravanti designed many of the most exquisite expressions of internal combustion.  He’s Mr. Red, Loud and Fast.  But now he’s saying we need silent cars, cars that take care of us, cars that let us sleep well at night, literally and figuratively.  Think about it – I certainly will.

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metacool Thought of the Day

"The central console is deeply irksome, too, with all of its small buttons and secondary control thingies. You never know if they're not working because they're Italian and you can't understand them or because they're Italian and they're broken. They make the best argument yet for i Drive."

-- Jamie Kitman, on the Maserati Coupe

Proto Bowling

Rob Glaser's approach to restructuring the Professional Bowler's Association (PBA) is proof positive that you can prototype anything, and that we should design ventures to have the let's-learn-as-we-go flexibility of a good prototype.  In this Wired article, Glaser's business partner Chris Peters describes how they restructured the league to take advantage of the iterative product development process they knew so well from working in the software industry:

"You launch version 1, put it out there, see what you did wrong, and you come out with version 2. It's a process I understood well. You don't spend 10 years on a grand plan and then finally put something out there; that's just stupid. You've got to have a constant product cycle."

Among the lessons learned by getting out there and doing something: emotion rules, and there are players willing to take on the challenge of adding NASCAR-type theatrics to formerly staid bowling lanes.  There's no way a group of smart people talking to a whiteboard could have come up with that nugget. 
If you set up your venture as a prototype, you can focus your energy on discovering a golden framework so that the right implementation recipe emerges organically.

More on Ugly Ferraris

"...Ferraris have to be beautiful.  If I look at the overall car market, I don' t like too many designs at the moment.  The romance of design is being lost.  The language is too aggressive, too confrontational.  The '50s and '60s on the other hand was an era of artistry and beauty and I want to bring some of that feeling back.

If cars are beautiful, people want them, now.  I've never bought a product hoping I'd like the look of it in six months."

-- Frank Stephenson, Design Director for Ferrari & Maserati 

[I think this means we'll begin seeing beautiful Ferrari automobiles again soon]

Will Sports Cars Die?

 

"In just a very few years in the mid '50s the most beautiful sports cars ever made appeared: the Lancia B24, the MGA, the Lotus Elite.  Why?  Any design reflects the psychological reality of those responsible.  Designers in the '50s could entertain the prospect of driving fast and free.  Their response was to doodle and then shepherd into manufacture sports cars.  Our psychological reality is rather grimmer.  This is why designers today doodle utilitarian vehicles.  This is why the sports car will soon be dead."     - Stephen Bayley

While I agree with Bayley’s assessment of the influence of culture on design – the culture of a designers is inescapably embedded in the designed object –  I differ as to the outcome.  Yes, our society is more militant and afraid than it was during the romantic era of automotive design, but I don’t believe the sports car will die out completely as a result.  Instead, it will become a low-volume, niche product for a small and dedicated group of gearheads whose primary interest is in the visceral and behavioral elements of the automobile – they want know what it feels like to be connected to steering, the gearshift, and the throttle.  All those people who bought sports cars merely for their reflective, I-want-to-get-laid value (i.e. Corvette owners) are now buying Hummers and will buy whatever is au courant.

Critics have been moaning about the impending death of the sports car for quite some time.  Professor Ferdinand Porsche expressed this counter argument over 25 years ago:

“Even in the unlikely event of the car disappearing one day from the road, we will still have the sports car.  If we take the horse as an example: as a working animal it is practically non-existent, but in the field of leisure and sport there are many more horses today than ever before.”

It’s common today to hear about “horse people”, individuals who structure their lives so that they can slake their passions for the animals.  Perhaps the same will happen with sports cars.

metacool Thought of the Day

"When it's a battle between form and function, function comes first, then you squeeze that form right up next to it so that it looks good, too."

-- Matt Zabas, 13 Choppers (creators of Ducati-powered custom motorcycles)

Show High Interest, Then Stall

SOL. AFU. WTF. WFO. POS. All valuable and versatile acronyms guaranteed to add value to any business conversation. Amaze your colleagues with this new (to me, at least) addition to your business phrasebook!:

Show High Interest, Then Stall = SHITS

Defined in Kawasaki’s Art of the Start as a tactic commonly employed by the people holding the purse strings. A precursor to the Mushroom Treatment, where caca of another kind functions as an information substitute.

Wynton Marsalis on What's Important

“You can reach a situation where things of intelligence and refinement and culture can be considered elite, and things that are crass and ignorant can be considered to be real and of the people; when you begin to have the mass of the populace believing that they should strive for something that’s not worth striving for, then tremendous amounts of energy goes into the worthless and the maintenance of that which is worthless.

That’s a battle we all fight, even within ourselves. You have to actively pursue knowledge. It’s out here for you. But you gotta go out and get it. You gotta want it. And you’ve gotta keep wanting it.”

-- Wynton Marsalis

iBag

Schlepped down to the local Apple store the other day and picked up a minty new iPod. Needless to say, I’m a very happy new iPod owner.  But this post isn’t another ode to Ive’s tiny white brick – I’ve already written that one.  Instead, let’s talk about the bag it came in.

The bag.  Dangling from my hand, it made me feel so good walking down the street after issuing grievous wounds to my Visa.  The relatively dense iPod package felt secure within the plastic bag material, whose silver finish positively glinted in the late summer sun, and the two carrying cords were positively intriguing: do I sling it from my hand or shoulder like a sack, or do I go for the metrosexual thing and wear it as a mini backpack.? I went the sack route.

So it’s a beautiful, wonderful thing of a bag. Again, Norman’s tripartite model of cognition helps analyze what’s going on here at a more intellectual level:

Visceral (feel):  silver, smooth, shiny, whole and integral – all pure Apple aesthetics.
Behavioral (function): a bag’s bag, with a wide, closable mouth, strong material, stout metal eyelets to increase load capacity, resilient plastic material, convenient carrying cord which allows multiple bearing modes.
Reflective (meaning): I rarely feel good about carrying a branded shopping bag, but I felt proud to have this thing – “Hey, he just bought something at the Apple store – cool!”

Not surprising that Apple would do a bag so well.  From the standpoint of building and enhancing the brand, this bag is worth ten times any incremental cost over a more mundane solution.  It’s about a seamless brand experience.

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

The Confederate Motorcycles F124 Hellcat

What if the CEO knew his products?

I have a good friend who is an officer in the US Army.  He’s the Real Deal: immensely educated (engineering undergrad, Harvard MBA, plus multiple other graduate degrees), an elite athlete (each morning he outruns all the junior soldiers he works out with), and, as you can well imagine, highly motivated and disciplined.  But before you begin to think he’d be the last person you’d want to go to a ballgame with, realize that he’s also one of the most creative and original thinkers I’ve ever met, not to mention a very capable consumer of cool Corona beverages.  For example, I’ll never forget his story of manning a highway checkpoint as part of a peacekeeping mission in Kosovo: the afternoon was dragging on, the line of stopped cars growing ever longer, tempers flaring.  What would you do to diffuse the situation?  My friend had a portable field kitchen brought in ASAP and proceeded to serve up thousands of hot doughnuts, calming nerves and making friends via an awesomely creative use of soft power.

He’s also a tanker, meaning that he leads an organization of over a thousand individuals whose mission is to go to battle, if necessary, in tanks.  I remember comparing notes on what a typical workday looked like.  As you can imagine, ours were quite different.  His started with an intense physical workout, and then transitioned to a full 12 hours of harsh decision making and do-it-now leadership, after which he would be free to go home.  Except he wouldn’t.  No, as a hardcore tanker, he would stroll over to the maintenance garage for a few more hours of wrenching on tanks along with rank and file soldiers.  Why?  Partly because, as an engineer, he loves mechanical stuff.  And maybe there’s some stress relief in there.  But mostly because he recognizes that he is a much stronger leader of men when his way of knowing – understanding what it takes to keep of group of tanks and tankers running day after day – comes by doing.  For him, when to do is to know, there’s never a knowing-doing gap, and his leadership rings true and effective.

Think of my tanker buddy and ask yourself this: how would your own organization look, feel, and behave if its leadership really – really – understood what things were about?  What if they could demo any product as well as a frontline salesperson?  What if they could man the tech support helplines?  Screw that, let’s lower the bar limbo limbo to the floor and just ask: what if the CEO knew how to start up the product we make?

I’m an engineer by training, so I’m biased, but I’ve long believed that product companies are best run by engineers/people who grok stuff at a deep level.  Like Apple.  Toyota.  Porsche.  Amazon.  Or Honda… Honda makes arguably the best damn motors on the planet (eat your heart out Ferrari and BMW!) and they have a conspicuous habit of picking CEO’s from an elite pool of engineers who spent their formative 20’s wrenching on Formula 1 cars.  You better believe these guys know cars inside and out, and it shows in the very real value difference between even the most pedestrian Accord (wow!) and an average rental-crapwagon Ford Taurus. 

Consider this: last week Takeo Fukui, the CEO of Honda, shoehorned his derriere into a BAR-Honda Formula 1 car and proceeded to carve a few hot laps of Tochigi, the corporate R&D track, hitting 181 miles per hour. Few auto makers boast a CEO who can shift a manual gearbox, let alone demonstrate his company's racing vehicles at speed.  For dessert Fukui straddled a RC211V Honda racing motorcycle and burned off a few more laps.  Any wonder why Honda makes such great stuff?

I have a feeling Takeo and my tanker friend would see eye-to-eye on all the important aspects of leading by knowing by doing.

Venture Design: The Art of the Start

Download 1.01.ArtOfTheStart.pdf

I’m happy to be hosting Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start manifesto on behalf of my friends at ChangeThis. It’s a great essay on the process of creating cool stuff, and is a snappy piece of thinking and writing. I particularly like Kawasaki’s emphasis on building a successful venture via iterative problem solving – right NOW:

What you should is (a) rein in your anal tendency to craft a document and (b) implement. This means building a prototype, writing software, launching your Web site, or offering your services. The hardest thing about getting started is getting started. Remember: No one ever achieved success by planning for gold.

I’m looking forward to reading the complete book. I think it will be like a tasty mix of The Knowing-Doing Gap, Innovator’s Solution, and Free Prize Inside.

metacool Thought of the Day: Laide, No Jolie

Design critic Stephen Bayley, on the current crop of just plain hard ugly (not even jolie-laide) cars coming out of Maranello:

"Even Ferrari has its problems... if you want to know what God thinks about the Enzo, just look at the people he gives them to."

Cranking up a new corporate blog

Tenacious D may be able to rock 24x7x365, but I can't. I found this out last week with the public launch of a weblog for the product I market. All my creative energy was consumed in a tremendous endothermic blogging reaction, hence the content drought at metacool.

The blog is getting good reviews from highly connected blogging mavens like Anil Dash and Robert Scoble, but most importantly, customers love it. And I love doing innovative marketing.

metacool Thought of the Day

“Life is once. Forever.”

– Henri Cartier-Bresson

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

The Bimota Tesi Millenium

Getting Visceral in Wetsuits

This week’s New York Times talks about how wet suit makers are moving beyond addressing only the Behavioral elements of their products to embrace the Visceral and Reflective aspects as well.  Instead of cranking out old-style suits that make a surfer's bottom look like a tube of dried chorizo, manufacturers like O’Neill are making sexy new products out of new materials and shapes designed to flatter the body.

John Hunter, designer at O’Neill, says it best in this quote from the article:

You're inside a super-hip, state-of-the-art, rubber human-body girdle, looking cooler and stronger and slimmer and better and feeling it, too.  If, as a result of that, you get some extra love, we're fine with that.

When offerings in your industry start to deliver more functionality than users need, it’s time to take a deliberate approach to differentiating your product by paying attention to its Visceral and Reflective components.  You need to design the whole burrito and put some love into it.

 

Where (and when) to Iterate

I thought it would be worthwhile to talk a bit more about the Donald Norman thought I provided on Friday. Taken out of context, this quote would seem to imply that an iterative design methodology is a sure prescription for mediocrity. That would be an incorrect, and unfortunate, takeaway.

In order to understand Norman’s quote, we need a quick outline of his model of human cognition. First, we take in our external environment using two channels, one Visceral, which is the realm of things like looks, feel and smell; the other Behavioral, which is what allows us to create movement and take action. Operating on top of those channels is our Reflective processor, which Norman describes as the “… level that conscious and the highest levels of feeling, emotions, and cognition reside.” Most of what we call “branding” happens at the Reflective level.

Take the iPod. Viscerally, you love the shape, the heft, its intense whiteness, the chromed back, the feel of the controls – even the look of the advertising and packaging delights you. Behaviorally, the Click Wheel functions so intuitively that you can get to any of your 20,000 tunes in three clicks or less. Finally, at the Reflective level, you can’t imagine life without all that music on your hip, and the iPod fits your self image in a deep way. Norman’s Visceral-Behavioral-Reflective model of cognition explains nicely why Apple’s products just plain rock and we love the brand: great products fire at all levels of cognition.

What Norman is saying is that to create a product that works from a Behavioral standpoint, you must engage in iterative process of testing and revision. But if you apply that same iterative process to the Visceral and Behavioral components of the design, you’re mucking about with art and mystery, and at that point you’re well on the road to mediocrity.

If you want to create remarkable stuff, test test test to make sure it works, but leave the Visceral and Reflective elements up to your artists from Design and Marketing.

How to Be Creative, from gapingvoid

Hugh Macleod at gapingvoid has assembled a nice How to Be Creative tip list. I've pulled his headers into a list below, but it's definitely worth clicking through to his site for the full commentary. I especially like his "Keep Your Day Job" dictum, which is great advice for all those investment bankers out there who plan to quit and become painters. Not that they shouldn't, but if you've got a good job you can afford to buy paint. And healthcare. But I digress:

1. Ignore everybody.
2. Creativity is its own reward.
3. Put the hours in.
4. If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being "discovered" by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.
5. You are responsible for your own experience.
6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.
7. Keep your day job.
8. Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.
9. Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.
10. The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props.
11. Don't try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.
12. If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.

via Joi Ito

metacool Thought of the Day

"If you want a successful product, test and revise. If you want a great product, one that can change the world, let it be driven by someone with a clear vision. The latter represents more financial risk, but it is the only path to greatness."

-- Donald Norman, Emotional Design

Why so many cars on this blog?

Yes, it's true: I'm guilty of a heavy reliance upon automobilia to illustrate my thinking in this blog.  But, lest you dismiss me as a dumb motorhead (which is a false stereotype, by the way), let me explain why cars happen to provide so much fodder for my musings:

1)  Cars are the Third Space in Our Lives:  Home.  Work.  In our society, when you're not in one of those two spaces, you're probably in your car.  Automobiles are a huge part of our built environment.

2)  Cars are Computers:  With a LAN, multiple processors, and complex human interface points, a modern car is the other computer in your life.  It may be the only computer you ever love.  Or lust after.  Granted, I haven't touched on this subject area at all in this blog, but I will.

3)  Car Forms are Difficult to Design Well:  Ever wonder why not every car comes out looking as gorgeous as a Ferrari Daytona?  Or as honest as a Toyota Sienna?  It's because shaping sheetmetal to trigger positive visceral reactions is about heuristics, the realm of mystery and art.  As such, cars make for compelling discussions about aesthetics.

4)  Getting Cars to Function Well is Hard:  Why does a BMW M3 steer so well while the steering on a Ford Taurus lacks the sophistication of my 1974 Big Wheel?  It's really hard to get the functional aspects of automotive design right, and it's fun to talk about things when they go right.

5)  Automotive Marketing = Cubic $$$$: Creating meaning around the most visible and expensive machines we ever own is a big, competitive business.  And it's one where product goodness drives brand image drives product goodness.  As such, cars represent a reflective design challenge of the highest level of difficulty.

6)  They're Familiar and Fun:  You want I should gossip about urine analysis machines?

How Does One Say "Poison Your Brand" in German?

Porsche’s management is planning to add a four-door, front-engine sedan to their lineup.  I find this rather painful, as Porsche is all about – and only about – two doors and rear engines.  To be clear, it’s not about having just two seats, as the 911, and the 356 before it, proved that four-seat cars can be real sports cars.

So why roll out a four-door sedan?  Well, automakers like multiples of ten, and some MBA-type at Porsche wants to be able to grow sales to the 100k mark, something not likely with only a lineup of pure sports cars.   Porsche Chief Executive Wendelin recently stated in BusinessWeek that the key to creating shareholder value “… is to avoid a quarterly [earnings] orientation,” but it seems to me that by floating this four-door concept, Dr. Wendelin isn’t practicing what he preaches.  Shareholder value is defined as the present value of all future cash flows; if you believe, as I do, that creating a four-door Porsche will erode the brand’s hard-won equity, then it’s bound to erode long-term cash flow as well, for in an automotive landscape where a $30,000 Subaru can run with any Porsche 911, what else is there besides brand image?  No, a four-door Porsche is just a play for short-term earnings.

If they were really serious about long-term growth, Porsche the company would keep the Porsche the brand focused on making tasty sports cars, and then find another brand whose name could be used to rollout sedans without dilluting Porsche's heritage, much as Ferrari is doing with Maserati.

Next thing you know they’ll be talking about introducing a SUV. 

Oh.

More Bonafide Book Reviewing: Emotional Design

I just finished reading Donald Norman's new book Emotional Design, and it knocked my socks off.

Read my review at 800CEOREADblog

metacool Thought of the Day

"The perfect state of creative bliss is having power (you are 50) and knowing nothing (you are 9).  This assures an interesting and successful outcome."

-- Tibor Kalman

More on the Stanford d.school

The d.school now has a website up!  Here's the credo:

Stanford University is creating a bold new center for design.  The center is intended to advance interdisciplinary research and teaching, place Stanford at the epicenter of the design field, and strengthen the connection between the university and industry.

As I wrote about earlier, it's a remarkable mission, this d.school.  Design is a discipline, not just a profession.  As such, the design process can be taught to people from all walks of life, and applied to their respective domains to help bring about positive change in the world.

Attack of the Brandroids

The stock is down 45%, the financial clock is ticking faster... it's time for practicing the brand management of desperation!  How about a 20 oz, 740 calorie frozen blended "beverage" that packs a 114 gram carbo wallop and tastes vaguely like a stale floor scrap off our signature donut line?  Sure, it'll ruin our laser focus on making great donuts and great donuts alone, and turns us into something more like a Starbucks with better pastries and worse coffee, or a Dunkin' Donuts with better donuts and just-as-mediocre coffee, but we'll keep our jobs for at least a few more months, and besides, as brandroids we're all about line extensions and "tremendous" growth opporunities and what was De Niro talking about anyway with all that "this is this" mumbo jumbo?... I think he was babbling about something like "fundamental goo", which is what this drink is all about and pretty much sums up what Krispy Kreme will be with just, oh, three more years of this kind of inane marketing behavior. 

Jerry Garcia on Strategy

Brian Camelio, President of ArtistShare, came up with a radical new business model for musicians by asking himself the fundamental question of any strategy generation exercise: what will make me unique and desirable? As he told the New York Times:

I got to thinking: what's the one thing you can't download, the one thing that the artist can hold onto? The answer: the creative process. That's the product I'm offering: the creative process.

What he come up with is ArtistShare, a collection of tools to help artists move from a product-centric business model to one built around continuous, interactive relationships with their audience. In his new approach, recorded music is allowed to do what it does best – be an idea virus that sells the artist – and value is claimed for the artist instead by charging for access to the rest of the creative process. Kaplan says it well:

The creative process is a timeline. It is a living, breathing thing. An artistic product… is just a quick snapshot of that timeline. The moments of brilliance an audience hopes to experience when purchasing that artistic product exist throughout the entire process.

I applaud ArtistShare’s determination to build a thriving venture off of a business model innovation (check out their patent here – respek!). It is a wonderful answer to the strategic question posed at the top of this post. As that notable musician/business guy Jerry Garcia once said (thanks to Tom Peters for the quote):

We do not merely want to be the best of the best, we want to be the only ones who do what we do.

metacool Thought of the Day

"I truly believe in beautiful cars.  The cost is the same.  And they're better."
-- Peter Horbury, Executive Director of Design, North America, Ford

(things that look and feel good work better)

Sound Matters, part 2

A few days ago I touched on the importance of paying attention to all aspects of your product’s use experience, even to the point of considering the sounds it makes.

Sound character can be a vital element of your entire brand.  Consider the lengths Porsche went to make the new 911’s exhaust note evoke the same intense, visceral reaction in listeners as did 911’s of yesteryear.

To understand why sound is so important to Porsche’s brand, understand that the original 911 was powered by an air-cooled, boxer motor which sounded like nothing else.  Most cars used liquid-cooled motors in a vee or inline configuration, combinations which sound radically different than the raspy banshee wail of an air-cooled 911.  The new 911 uses a liquid-cooled motor, and the cooling fluid muffles the sound of all those whirring chain-driven camshafts, pistons and valves, much as wrapping a violin in muslin would deaden its voice.  As a result, the motor didn’t meet people’s expectation of what a Porsche should sound like when it debuted six years ago.

Porsche carefully engineered the old 911 sound back into the new car.  First, they recorded a sound signature of the 911 using 32 microphones in an anechoic chamber.  The design team used the resulting acoustic fingerprint to help shape the sonic character of the new 911 as heard from the driver’s seat.  They even placed a computer-controlled Helmholtz resonance chamber in the air intake manifold plenum.  The engine control computer automatically adjusts this resonance chamber to tune the sound of the motor in real time, much as trombone player adjusts his airstream to create music.  The result of all this is a car which sounds remarkably like an old Carrera RS even though it share very little mechanical DNA with that car.

The visceral element of a brand can (and should) be a source of intense emotions.  Porsche gets it.