Author Archives: Diego Rodriguez

Our brand can’t go there…

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BMW Koons art car top metacool

Your brand can't go there?  Really?  Or is it that you can't imagine a way to get there yourself?

Brands with a fixed identity are not only boring, but are likely to lose relevance over time.  While a brand needs to stand for something, to have a firm point of view, it also needs to be able to evolve, to learn, to grow.  Brands need not be static entities. Imagine a person who achieved greatness and then decided to remain fixed in place… yes, I don't want to party with them, either.

I admire the marketers at BMW because they seem to be able to conceive of their hallowed brand as a dynamic, living thing.  Instead of saying "our brand can't go there", they think "our brand is designed to go places", which I'd wager is why the brand is still so strong after so many year in the market.  The dynamic totality of their vision, which encompasses everything from manufacturing to sculpture to R&D to messaging, is centered on the principles of movement and getting to new places, with the risks that come with leaving the safe harbor called What We Know That Works Today. 

As a result, they're able to ask an artist like Jeff Koons to mix a little 2010-flavor joy with their current ultimate driving machine to come up with the brand vision above.  This beauty, an M3 GT2, will be gracing the streets of Le Mans, France in just a few weeks, taking the brand to new places.

You can go there, it just takes guts.  It's a bigger risk not to try.

BMW Koons Art Car 

P90061227

Yeah, like he said…

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Yesterday I wrote about serendipity, purpose, and some words of wisdom from Joi Ito.  It just came to my attention that my friend John Lilly wrote a great blog post a while back dealing with many of the same themes, plus he ties them to the importance of living within a strong network.  Or in a less techie way of putting it, by surrounding yourself with great people and opportunities.

Here's an excerpt — I just love this stuff:

..for most of the important
turning points in my life, I treated them with a little less seriousness
than, you know, buying my next iPod. Now, I’m not saying that I didn’t
recognize that sometimes decisions would have effects, or that I didn’t
take them seriously. What I’m saying is that a bunch of decisions that I
thought were really important turned out to be not important at all,
and some things I decided to do just for fun changed everything (like
when I went to visit an old high school friend in Jamaica who would
eventually become my wife.)

Here’s a quick story to illustrate a turning point that I didn’t
realize until much later. When I was a junior in college, I had decided
to major in computer science, and was starting to get interested in
something called Human Computer Interaction — designing systems for
people to be able to use them effectively. I went to a lunchtime seminar
by a guy named Robert Cailliau — a physicist from Switzerland of all
places — and he brought with him a giant black computer called a NeXT —
Steve Jobs’ creation that would eventually turn into the Macintosh that
we know today. He started giving a demo of a program where you could
bring up a page full of text and pictures, and click on blue underlined
text to get to other pages full of text and pictures. And I remember
saying to myself, “Huh, I guess that’s sort of neat — text &
pictures, click click click.” And the next thing I remember was waking
up when everyone was gathering up all their stuff to leave — I had
fallen asleep — and missed, of course, the first demonstration I’d ever
seen (or most people had ever seen) of the World Wide Web. So there you
go — one of those powerful inflection points in my life — and I slept
through it.

…you
never know when a decision you make is going to have a profound effect
in your life. At least, I’ve never been able to tell. So my coping
strategy — what I do to make everything work for me — is try to put
myself into situations where there are tons of great choices, tons of
great people, tons of great outcomes possible — so that it makes the
odds that I make some really important & good choices that much
better.

Of course, it also helps to be smart, well-educated (formally and informally), and willing to work hard.  But obviously context and what you make of it really matters.

Focus on everything!

photo credit: Joi Ito

Do both, and focus on everything

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Joi Ito has taught me so much since I started reading his writing around seven years ago.  More recently I've been able to collaborate with Joi on some stuff, and I can now safely say that the only thing better than Joi on the web is Joi in real life!

Recently at IDEO we've been talking about the difference between having a vision and having a purpose.  A vision is something you shoot for, a point in the future, while a purpose is a point of origin, something that guides you.  We're of a belief that visions are tough to go after when you desire innovative outcomes because they tend to reduce emergent behavior and serendipity.  A single, defined point in the future may be better suited to a top-down, variance-eliminating organization trying to reach a single goal, rather than for one trying to exist in certain way, believing that a guiding purpose will ensure that the outcomes that do arise will be not only appropriate, but likely extraordinary.

Against that context, I just read Joi's latest blog post, Focusing on Everything, which is just wonderful.  Here's an excerpt:

One of the great thoughts in the book is the idea that you should set a
general trajectory of where you want to go, but that you must embrace
serendipity and allow your network to provide the resources necessary to
turn random events into a highly valuable one and
that developing that network comes from sharing and connecting by
helping others solve their problems and build things.

I heartily recommend reading the rest of Joi's post — it is powerful stuff.  As someone who took John Maeda's advice to "do both" to heart a few years ago, I find Joi's philosophy of life very reassuring. 

Focus on everything.  Yes, I think I will.

photo credit: Mizuka

metacool Thought of the Day

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"When you come out of college, you’re raw. You have energy. You want
to experiment. You want to learn. You have hopes. You have aspirations.
You want be Oprah Winfrey.
You want to be Steve Jobs. You want to be Bill Gates. You want to be
all that. Slowly, over time, you lose it. And by looking in the mirror
every day as you get older, you fool yourself that you’re O.K. There
has to be another way of looking in the mirror and revisiting what you
really want to do.

So I would say, maybe at the end of college,
write it down honestly, in 100 words or whatever it is, and put it in a
box. I call it the magic box. Revisit it once a year or once every two
years and say, how honest are you to that? Don’t let anybody run your
life. That, in my mind, is very, very important. You should be in
control of your life"

– Vineet Nayar

Bill Moggridge, blogger

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Bill Moggridge, Director of the Cooper-Hewlitt, is blogging about his experiences there, and it's fascinating stuff.

Bill combines an effortless writing style with a keen eye for details and a warm sense of humor.  I particularly like his post A Car in the House (but then, I would, eh?).  Here's a charming video vignette about what it takes to put a Nano in the Cooper:

What a wonderful opportunity to see the world through the eyes of a truly great designer!

When in doubt, just do good stuff

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Metacool Just Do Good Stuff

I found truth in a cup of yogurt today.

I was fortunate to have breakfast with my friend and collaborator Ryan Jacoby today, and he reminded me that, at the end of the day, it's all about making good stuff.  Yes, everything else in your business ecosystem has to be in place, but you need to sell good stuff.  An Apple Store without Apple products would be… not so good.

Back to the cup.  Having intended to purchase a cheap(er) lunch, I just walked out of Whole Foods with a more expensive lunch, natch.  Actually, at around six bucks for a frozen burrito and a couple of yogurts, it is not bank-breaker meal, but I am a semi-Mid Westerner and have a kids to send to college and I'm living in the land of massive taxation… but I digress.  Back to the cup: while wandering the isles, I fell prey to a pricing promotion, and though I can never justify a container of Siggi's yogurt at $2.49 per unit, I certainly was up for two of them being promoted at $2.00 a lid.  Yes, it would seem that I need to turn in my MBA, but I am not a perfect person nor do I want to go through life making rational purchase decisions.

And how very happy I am right now with spoon in mouth and a wallet $4.00 lighter.  Siggi's, for those of you who have not had the pleasure of sampling yet, has exquisite mouth feel.  It is thick without being clompy, smooth without feeling excessively processed.  It comes in some of the standard yogurt flavors — vanilla, blueberry, etc — but also in some unexpected ones, like grapefruit.  Love that grapefruit.  And none of the flavors feel like they feel off the back of a truck destined for IHOP; they are light and complex, not syrupy and bright.  There's a wonderful backstory to Siggi's, too:  the company is led by a passionate, entrepreneurial Icelander named Siggi who is crazy about his native skyr yogurt and so found a bunch of wholesome cows in New York and started cranking out skyr.  The packaging is eco-friendly and the graphic design meets my psychographic needs.  With all of this, $2.49 starts to feel reasonable.

There's no big punchline to this post.  Just do good stuff.  Just do good stuff.  When in doubt, repeat that under your breath:  Just do good stuff.

11 blogs I dig

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Hi.  I was recently asked by the nice folks over at blogs.com to come up with a Top 10 list. 

I have lots of favorite blogs.  You can see a few of them here to the right of this page, and many more gnarly ones over at Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness.  It was actually difficult to come up with a Top 10 list because I like so many different blogs, but after some serious procrastination I whittled it down to ten… or eleven.

Top 10 Metacool Blogs

Enjoy!

photo credit: Russell Davies

The Farm Aquatic with Dan Barber

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Because it works on so many levels, this talk by Dan Barber was by far my favorite of TED 2010.  

Without spoiling the talk for you, I love the way Barber takes us on a walk through his life, and has a conversation with us all along the way.  And it's a funny one at that.  His insights changed the way I think about the relationship between oceans and food; prior to this I did not recognize that one could create an aquatic version of Polyface Farm.  Amazing.

This talk is also a master class in public speaking.  No, in public story telling.  This talk defines the bar by which we should measure pitches for a cause.  This is how to start a movement, how to get people to sit up and take notice, take action.

Awesome.  And now I'd like to try some of that Spanish fish…

Execution really matters

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Yes, anyone can say that they value a nicely pressed shirt, that their employees are 100% aligned behind delivering a world-class pressed shirt experience, that their shirts are the mostly likely to be properly ironed, etc…

But can you actually do it?  Over and over and over?  Until it feels as natural as breathing, when it becomes the thing you just do?

Thus are reputations made.  And reputation is the stuff really great brands and careers are made of.