On a recent trip to LA, I stayed at the Georgian Hotel, a great 1930s Art Deco hotel in Santa Monica. It got me thinking about architecture in LA, and specifically one of my favorite buildings in the States: The Bradbury Building. Designed by architect George Wyman in the late 19th century it has an interior bathed in glorious light from a massive skylight and amazing wrought iron detail on numerous staircases. Even though it was built in the 1890s it was featured as a futuristic set in Blade Runner. 

What interests me most about the building is the story behind the architect. George Wyman was a junior draftsman when he was plucked from obscurity by the mining millionaire Lewis Bradbury to create the landmark building. Even though he lacked experience, The Bradbury is a masterpiece - unquestionably Wyman’s finest hour. After that, he designed nothing further of note in his entire career. That was his one shot at creating something memorable and he nailed it. 

I recently also saw Factory Girl on DVD and even though it was a bit of a shocker, I was filled with Warholian thoughts, and wondered about the nature of 15 minutes of fame. If we’re to become famous for great innovation,  do we all get one shot at it? And if so, have you had yours yet?

In developing new products for food and beverage clients, we often get inspired by bringing two or more seemingly disparate ideas together to create a something new and groundbreaking. We call this exercise “creative smashing” or “monster trucking”. This kind of idea generation is often really fun because we enter into it with the mindset of exploding myths and destroying sacred cows. One of my favorite real world examples of this is a hot dog stand in Vancouver, Canada called JapaDog. In short, a fusion of sushi flavors and hotdogs. 

Situated at a busy downtown street corner, JapaDog is the inspiration of Noriki Tamura, a former Tokyo advertising salesman who emigrated to Canada 2 years ago with a change of career in mind. Competing with 100 other city hot dog carts, he realized he needed an edge.  JapaDog was born.  

The best sellers at JapaDog are the Oroshi - a feisty bratwurst, layered with daikon radish, green onion, wasabi and soy sauce and the Terimayo - a turkey dog with a shaved black nori and wasabi mayonnaise. Purists may turn up their noses, but local Vancouverites, known for their hunger for fusion food are lining up around the block. 

It reminds me that innovation can be found in the most unlikely of combinations and that even something as glorious as the hotdog, can be spun in a completely new way.  What other examples have you got?

This is rapidly becoming my favorite subject - I’m fascinated by the way our brains are being changed by technology.

David Weinberger writes in his thought provoking book Everything is Miscellaneous about the ways that virtuality is changing how we organize information. We’re moving from physical heuristics to systems of self-organization - this is how Ithink about the world, so therefore, that is how it is organized for me.

Whereas physical layouts (think retail stores) limit the number of connections products can have (e.g., a product should be shelved in one or two places in the store tops, in order to maximize return on limited square footage), in the virtual world, anything and everything can be linked. As the brilliant Kati Sciortino says, it’s all about the meta.

And information is now accessible, easily and cheaply. Look ups are at our finger tips. Perhaps we can finally move from educational systems of rote learning - memorization - to schools that teach us how to think.

The implications on us - as marketers, parents, educators, thinkers, citizens - are monumental. And we’re just beginning to think about what they will be.

Everything is Miscellaneous is a really intriguing read. I highly recommend it. (And thank you to J. Duncan Berry of Applied Iconology for recommending it to me!)

I just got back from a week in Napa, touring a number of wineries (and tasting a number of wines!!!). I loved learning about the very different philosophies and approaches to creating a great wine. To me, Sam Baxter, the young winemaker and general manager of cult winery Terra Valentine expressed it best - he spoke about the raw materials he works with - rich soil, great vines, the right clones, and a fabulous microenvironment in the Alexander Valley.

From there, it’s about his knowledge, expertise, and intuition… He marries the tools and technology of winemaking with his art - he can measure pH and acidity, etc, every hour, but they don’t pick until he *feels* the grapes are ready. The aging process is also art and science - which coopers to use, what percentage old vs new oak, in what quantities to blend. It’s amazing. An age old art, made somewhat new through technology, but never abandoning its human roots (pun intended).

Each year, Sam experiments with a few variables in limited quantities, to understand where he can improve the wine. He’s worked at Terra for 9 years and he says he’s still learning about its land. It made me think about the way I approach development and innovation - am I finding the right balance of rigor and intuition? Am I continuing to adjust variables that seem perfectly well-tuned? To me, the week presented a challenge - to take everything I do to an even higher level, to find the balance between the known and unknown, and to all push on for a greater depth of understanding and knowledge. There is no final destination. It’s all a magnificent journey of exquisite beauty.

Mini is readying the launch of its new wagon, the Clubman, but more recent news from BMW reveals a Mini SUV is also in the works (artist’s rendering pictured).

Mini’s huge success in North America has been based on its unique personality - an impish rebel in a world of bland sedans and lumbering SUVs.  Celebrating its smallness has been integral to its brand - launch advertising even poked fun squarely at SUVs.  

So surely someone at Mini can see that an SUV is an inherent contradiction to the brand’s core values - pandering to the desires of American drivers - rather than following its own road as it has always done.   

Or maybe it’s such an unexpected twist, that it fits perfectly with a brand that has always zigged?  What do you think?

We all know that some of the most successful brands create a sense of belonging - a sense of values and purpose that people can relate to, identify and share. Here’s a great example.

Recently a friend of mine in the UK sent me a catalogue for a brand called howies. Based in a small village in Wales, howies designs and manufactures hip skate/surf/outdoorwear. The clothes are pretty cool, but what made that brand immediately impactful to me was its philosophy which came across in the story of how its summer catalogue was produced. Rather than spend money on flying off to a sunny country and shooting the catalogue on a real beach, the howies team spent the money on building their own eco-t.shirt print shop and used photographs from that project as the backdrop for their catalogue. A completely different and unexpected approach and totally in keeping with their environmental philosophy.

Rather than pay lip service to these ideals, they are truly living them, infusing them at every level of their business and reinforcing the beliefs that represent the core of their brand. Innovative design thoughts like the “car project” where they bought an old aluminum car, stamped 40,000 holes in it and used the metal for fastners on their jeans, speaks to a creative and uncompromising approach to business. Now that’s a brand that I want to be a part of.

In Orbiting The Giant Hairball, Gordon MacKenzie’s 1998 classic take on maintaining creativity in the workplace, the author discusses how creativity is being suppressed as early as grade 2 in schools. As an amateur metalwork sculptor, he is asked by a friend to talk to a class of grade 1 kids about art. He starts his lesson by posing the question “how many artists are in the room?”. All the grade 1 kids jump up with their hands raised. As he continues to give this same lesson to older kids, he finds to his dismay that there are fewer and fewer of them who consider themselves artists. By the time he gets to grade 6 only 1 or 2 kids are brave enough to raise their hands.

Jason Gingold at DDB in Seattle pointed me to a similar theme raised by Sir Ken Robinson at last year’s TED conference, where among all the amazing displays of new technology, he gave a simple, poignant speech about the wonder of creativity and how it is being taught out of our children. In his speech, Sir Ken suggests that kids start off life more creative because they are not afraid of being wrong - “kids will take a chance,” he says. He goes on to utter one of the most important truisms of innovation. “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original”.

I have the privilege of working with some of the most innovative people in business, who create new products at the world’s biggest companies. Yet, the one thing that I consistenly see is an absolute fear of being wrong. Being wrong is not the same as being innovative, but being prepared to be wrong is the only path to breakthrough.

What happens when 100 bloggers get together and write a book for charity? You get the latest thinking on marketing in the age of conversation from the disparate voices with something to say.

I’m proud to have been a part of the conversation. Check it out - and order the book next week!

LAUNCH DAY

Monday, July 16th

FORMATS & PRICES

Hardbacks $29.99
Paperbacks $16.95
E-book $9.99

Background
Dedication

AUTHORS
Anderson Roger

…a new twist on a familiar combination.  I fed this to 10 different people.  Each of them declared it their new favorite flavor.  ‘Nuff said.

How many times have you talked about educating the consumer?  When the consumer fails to use your product correctly, how do you respond?  With more instructions or with fundamental changes?

I worked once with a client whose cleaning product had a terrible reputation - consumers complained that “it never works” and “it just makes the problem worse”.  But in fact, the entire category was like that, so one brand was as good or bad as the other.  When we conducted ethnographic research, we learned that the prodct wasn’t the problem - consumer usage was!  Consumers used the product incorrectly.  They used too much, they used it the wrong way.  They ignored the instructions and allowed their natural inclinations to scrub kick in, but in fact, the best results came from lightly dabbing.  Scrubbing just made the problem worse, grinding in the dirt.  And when consumers were confronted with failure, they just went back, used more product and scrubbed harder.  It was a recipe for disaster.

The solution, of course, was to redesign the product in a way that overrode their natural behaviors and caused them to use the product effectively.  The answer didn’t come in adding more instructions or shouting at the target to LEARN, DAMMIT…the answer came from the company learning itself.

Next time you are working double-hard to make the consumer learn how to use the product…or learn why they need it in the first place…or learn why it’s better than the competition…ask yourself what your company has to learn from the situation and how you can create solutions that don’t require the consumer to do the hard work of learning. 

It’s our job to solve problems, not theirs.  It’s our job to make life easier.  It’s our job to learn.

A great quote from Thomas Friedman in “The World Is Flat”:

 “It is essential that we stay as open and flexible as possible.  America’s cultural willingness to tear things down and rebuild them anew gives us an enormous advantage in the age of flatness, when you are required to tear down and build up more often to achieve innovation and growth.”

I do believe that we are a predisposed to be country of progress - one that is congenitally dissatisfied with what is and always pushing for what could be.  At the same time, though, our educational system is in many ways broken and our collective interests tend to skew to the world of want vs. need.  Will we still have what it takes in the future to disrupt and transform with the same sense of urgency?

 What do you think?  Is the United States uniquely positioned to innovate?  Will we have an advantage is this area ongoing?  And what are the things we need to do to push this predisposition forward?  Would love your thoughts.  (And if you haven’t yet read The World is Flat, go out and buy it today!)

It’s Cicada season in Chicago. For those who don’t know, according to Wikipedia, Cicadas are large locust-type insects that have odd lifecycles - ours are on a 17 year cycle. Every 17 years, they come out from underground, mate, then slit into the bark of a twig and deposits eggs - up to several hundred. When the eggs hatch, the newborn nymphs drop to the ground, where they burrow and start another cycle.

The 17 year long life cycle is an adaptation to predators such as the cicada killer wasp and praying mantis, which could not regularly fall into synchrony with the cicadas. Both 13 and 17 are prime numbers, so while a cicada with a 15-year life cycle could be preyed upon by a predator with a 3- or 5-year life cycle, the 13- and 17-year cycles allow them to stop the predators falling into step.

Fascinating, no? And occasionally gross. Cicadas swarm (loudly) and they are quite blind and dumb, so despite the fact they can apparently do the math to understand prime numbers, they cannot necessarily tell the difference between a human leg and a tree, and therefore have a tendency to climb both.

So our cicadas have been asleep since 1990. In Czechoslovakia over the weekend, a man awoke from a 19 year coma. Imagine, he fell into a coma in 1988, when the country was still under Communist rule, and has woken up to an entirely new world.

Which leads me to a question - 17 years from now, what sorts of change would you like to see? If you were to awake in 2024 after a long hibernation, what progress would you expect?

Me, I’m looking for process innovations to have wiped out hunger and poverty. I want to see innovation in alternative, clean energies turn back the clock on the negative impacts we’ve made on our planet. I want to increase the speed of to reduce the amount of time we all spend in limbo. And I want all the fat and calories removed from my favorite foods.

Let me know what you’d like to see in 2024.