metacool Thought of the Day

"There have been several times in my life when I owned something so
special that I worried I would lose it or it would be stolen or be
abused by the kids. A pen knife collection that my Dad gave me was one such treasure. So I hid it. I didn’t want anyone to use it or steal it so I found a hiding place for it. The problem was I forgot where I hid it. It took years of searching and I finally found it again hidden in the garage. There
have been other times where I have hidden something from the world and
the one who couldn’t find it was me, the one who couldn’t enjoy it was
me and the one who was in misery because something so nice was lost was
me.

Forget football, forget my pen knife collection – think of what you might be hiding at work. No
not, those gummy bears behind your printer, I am talking about your
skills, your ideas, your special qualities that you hold back thinking
you will wait until the better job comes along or until you get paid
what you are worth or until they get real cream for the coffee or until…

The only one that suffers from holding back is you and your career. Imagine Steve Jobs or John Chambers or the Google Guys holding back. Those
innovation ideas or process flow improvements or your creativity and
sense of humor should be brought forward now, not next time. Next time may be too late. The more you add the more you will see. Too often, people hold back and stuff the value they can add in the lower right desk drawer waiting for a better time. That time is now. Get the recognition now, get the satisfaction that you made the place better now."

Richard Moran

Innovating is…

I really enjoyed the recent conversation here on metacool about the meaning of designing.  A bunch of us took at a stab at completing the sentence "Designing is…".  Check out the comments here to see some of the thinking.  I'm still mulling this stuff over; there's some good provocations there.

Now, what does innovating mean to you? 

Innovating is…

More Glass House simplicity

Besides metacool shipping another release to market, one of my peak life moments in 2008 was getting to hang out with an amazing group of people at the Philip Johnson Glass House. There we held a salon of sorts, and talked about simplicity, among other things.  You see more about this awesome day here and here.

I just discovered this awesome video of John Maeda talking about our day on the day.  Looking back on that moment in time, I really appreciate his ability to take me back to what I heard, thought, and felt.

If, as I learned that day, knowledge is the beginning of practice, and doing is the completion of knowing, then surely YouTube is the resolution of being. Many thanks to the people who put this video together for enabling us to remember and share and learn.

I'd love to participate in more salons like this. And even host and curate them. Not necessarily at the Glass House, but anywhere a good conversation is to be had.  I think I'll do that.

The four ways of creative cultivators

My New Year's Resolution for metacool is to publish more original stuff, more often.  Here's a step in that direction, and perhaps a step too far:  I didn't have time to craft a brief post, so I pounded out a long one.  I'm sorry. 

As of late I've been thinking a lot about the difference between managing and leading, whether creativity can be led or managed, and what might happen if you pushed those two questions together.  Here's an in-progress answer:

Hang around long enough in around the coffee stations of any Fortune 100 company, and you're bound to hear the question "how can we better manage creativity around here?".  While it may taken different forms, this is not just a tough question, it's also the wrong question. We can't manage creativity.  Period.  We can't implement a process that will create creative outcomes with a high degree of reliability.  If you look around, the killer innovations of our time are coming from organizations like Google, Mozilla, and the X Prize Foundation, who've each stopped trying to manage innovation in traditional, top-down ways in favor of leading it.  And they lead it in a very specific way: they see the leadership of creativity, in all its facets and complexity, as something akin to the act of cultivating a garden. Particularly when it comes to harnessing the power of emergent behavior, where creativity morphs in to world-changing innovations, leaders must all — in fact, can only — tend to their gardens.  They must learn to become cultivators of creativity. 

Some essential thoughts on creativity.   We at metacool hold these truths to be self evident, that everyone is potentially creative, that creativity is endless, that each individual is capable of being an agent of change in the world when properly supported by their surrounding ecology and society.  We do not subscribe to the myth that there two types of people: "creatives" and everyone else is not an idea that will sustain modern organizations. To be certain, differences in life experience enable some folks to be more creative, but a critical task of leadership is to enable every individual to be as creative as need be, rather than to choose the seductive path of tapping a select few to do the dreaming for the rest of the pack.

With the challenges we face in the world, it is incumbent upon leaders to unleash the creativity of the many, not the few.  Modern organizations tasked with delivering ever more holistic customer experiences must be able to tap in to the creativity, intelligence, and initiative of everyone affiliated with the brand, not just the talent of a select creative few. If the success of an open sourced Firefox over "closed" competitors such as Microsoft's Explorer can show us anything, it is that charging the generation of new sources of value and wealth to a limited few results in suboptimal outcomes in the form of disgruntled users and unhappy shareholders. Firefox is created largely by a community thousands of volunteers who work for ego satisfaction alone, organized by a small group of people — creative cultivators — wholly responsible to that community. Cultivating creative behavior within this type of community has much more in common with behaviors and attitudes associated with the successful cultivation of gardens than it does with traditional, top-down, centralized, command-and-control notions of what effective management looks like.

To realize a community, organization, or even an entire society capable of reaching its creative potential, we need a wholesale shift in our conception of what effective organizational leadership looks like. That leadership model can be found in the following four defining behaviors of creative cultivators:

1) Being at the bottom of things

Flourishing gardens come from being at the bottom of things. Instead of pursuing the traditional management goal of being on top of things — with the lucrative by-product of being at the top of things — the leader-as-cultivator makes it their job to live simultaneously at the bottom and in the middle and on the edges, dealing with things that might seem like plain manure to outsiders.  Unfortunately for those caught in old models of leadership, it's not lonely at the bottom. The bottom can be a messy place, but it is the wellspring of success when it comes to fostering creativity. With plants, as with people trying to act in creative ways, you can't tell them what to do, but you can try to support what they need to do, matching essential resources to tasks at hand. This is not traditional, I'm-the-heroic-boss leadership. Instead, the creative cultivator takes satisfaction from tending to the health of the overall garden, and wisely leaves the kudos for smelling great and looking good to the roses.

2) Trusting what is there

Creative cultivators trust what is there. A wise cultivator resists the temptation to "dig up the seed", as it were, to check if people are being creative enough. Many breakthrough innovation initiatives are stifled by linear project timetables more appropriate to incremental efforts. The paradox of cultivating creativity is that confidence in outcomes is the fundamental enabler of creativity itself; a wise gardener knows that roses are the best authorities on the creation of rosiness, and until they bloom, only checks in to see if they need more food and water. Furthermore, creative cultivators trust that the right answers — though not the ones they would have thought up themselves — will emerge from their gardens. Cultivators at Wal-Mart chose to move the needle on sustainability by engaging thousands of their store associates in a Personal Sustainability Project, with each individual choosing to reshape a life behavior. Trusting what was there, Wal-Mart rewarded "crazy but good" ideas emerging from the PSP program by promoting them across the company network. Likewise, ideas bubbling up within the PSP system which were negatively deviant — like a strange tomato that received too much fertilizer — were treated as a positive learning opportunity for the originator.  So much about what makes a creative organization tick is tacit.  It's about what's there and what it creates, rather than what a few brains wish to have happen via explicit processes and goals.

3) Seeing the ecosystem

By their nature, gardens are part of larger ecosystems. As shown by the recent success of P&G in bringing in outside sources of innovation in to the company, healthy gardens readily accept inputs from the outside world.  Rain, water, seeds, nutrients — we don't care where they came from, we just care about their integrity and how they help us grow good stuff.  Encouraging variance — the creation of weird or unexpected ideas — is a key goal for someone cultivating a creative culture. Anything that encourages variance through the cross-pollination of ideas from outside sources (very much the function of bees) should be reinforced. And as we're sadly seeing out in the world, gardens without the benefit of bees soon stop producing. Thinking about the long-term health of all stakeholders in an ecosystem is also a signature act of the leader as cultivator. Innovating is a long-term endeavor and requires a great deal of patience, investment, and fortitude. Actions that value short-term productivity over the long-term health of the garden and its larger ecosystem are ultimately anti-creative.

4) Taking a bird's eye view

Finally, creative cultivators do all of the above while simultaneously curating the garden from a bird's eye view. Managing a portfolio of creative endeavors requires knowing how many plants a certain piece of land can support and then pruning or as culling appropriate. Steve Jobs has stated that the iPod's development would have been impossible to support had the company also invested in other attractive opportunities, such as a PDA. This notion of garden as portfolio extends to strategy and brand: creative cultivators recognize that terroir matters, that some things (think wine grapes) just grow better, taste better, in certain places. Doing the most with the resources at hand, listening to what works and what doesn't, and guiding growth to be something unique and wonderful – that is the essence of strategy, and of gardening as well. Most importantly, a creative cultivator creates the context for plants to grow in accordance with a strong vision of how the garden should evolve. In organizations, this means having points of origin that can inspire individuals to be creative in certain ways, and not others, and to innovate in certain directions. For example, Whole Foods has created tremendous value based on the proactive decision-making skills of thousands of employees, each guided by a carefully crafted set of Core Values.  BMW, Virgin, Prana, and a host of other strong brands do this well, too.

Taken together, these four ways of leading should help creativity and its children grow and flourish.  Instead of trying to manage creativity, we must move to a model of leadership that's all about cultivating it.

Imperfect eagles, and other thoughts

One of my resolutions for 2009 is to do more original thinking (via my writing here) and less pointing to other stuff.  2008 was a very busy year for me on many levels, which led to less writing and more pointing.  And to be honest I lost some interest in this blog in favor of thinking about gnarlyness on one of my other blogs, but after some reflection over the past couple of weeks — as well as the inspiration of meeting (!) some life heroes and observing how they've found ways to live their lives to the fullest (hint: cancel your cable TV subscription, fly to England when you want to, don't be afraid to let it all hang out, communicate with integrity and passion), I now have a crisper point of view about where to go with things here, and I hope you'll like it.  I hope most of it means back to the future.  Without promising too much, hopefully the quality and frequency will both go up.  As a wise man once said, do both! 

So, less pointing, more thinking.

Of course, since I'm an imperfect man living an imperfect life as best I can, allow me the liberty of pointing to something right now:  Walking Eagles

Let's hope 2008 was the year where walking eagles did their stuff, and that in 2009 we can all soar.

Where are we going to sell it?

Where are you going to sell it?

I always try to treat a mundane food-shopping trip as an expedition to an exotic marketing laboratory.  Viewed through that filter, there's usually something interesting going on.

Case in point is this yogurt case at Whole Foods. Hanging out on the top shelf are some granola-type bars.  These particular bars are sold by a firm called Attune and are infused with probiotics.  So selling them in the yogurt section makes perfect sense: it's about being placed in a way that embraces the shopping experience and needs of the human at the end of the supply chain, rather than efficiencies of layout and inventory stocking.  For example, before I arrived at this display, I had no idea that you could get the outcome of yogurt consumption in a solid food experience.  Had these Attune products been located in the activity bars section, I would have missed them amongst all the brand shouting.

When it comes to innovation, there's as much or more that can be done with all of the layers of product experience around the core offering as with the core offering itself.  And in this day and age, running some experiments with three of the four P's — place, promotion, price — is likely to yield some quick and productive results.  Always ask, "So where are we going to sell this?"

More everything matters

In his latest column, Tyler Brûlé explains his simple, "everything matters" test to assess a hotel's capabilities: order a club sandwich.

He explains:

Focusing on the very basics, it starts by sampling the quality of 10
everyday ingredients (bread, lettuce, tomato, egg, bacon, chicken,
mayonnaise, butter, potatoes and cooking oil) and how well (or not) all
of these can be worked up into a club sandwich.

As with many
things in life, if you can nail the simpler, smaller things, then the
rest tends to fall into place. This is particularly true of hotels and
how they deal with toasting bread, frying eggs, arranging lettuce,
crisping bacon and cooking French fries.

Everything matters.

Director’s Commentary: Making Monocle

Videopage_3

Here's a Director's Commentary by Dan Hill, who played a key role in the design of Monocle, which is not just one of my favorite magazines, but also a brand being successful at the seemingly impossible task of building something new and different in a down economy.  In reading his detailed account of how the design of Monocle came to be, I was struck by two big things:

First, the all-important commitment to a strong, focused point of view.  In this case, the brains at Monocle chose to be ever calm and centered:

In terms of rhythm of updates, we deliberately decided less is more,
and flying in the face of conventional wisdom (if you can have wisdom
in a medium only a decade old) we produced editorial at a steady rate –
essentially a well-made film or two per week – rather than bombarding
the user with content. Deciding to filter, reflect and craft rather
than immerse the user in a constant flow of data in lieu of
information… this sense of quiet calm exuding
from Monocle was another important statement: that you don’t have to
clutter websites with every possible bit of information you can. And
that – particularly for the busy people that enjoy Monocle –
information overload is not something we wished to contribute to.

The second notable aspect of their approach is a strong dedication to smoothing friction in every aspect of the user experience.  They took a human-centered approach to almost every detail of Monocle, including the structure of each URL used on the Monocle website:

In terms of user generated content, or user discussion of Monocle
pieces, my view was that we didn't need comments on the site as people
increasingly have their own spaces to talk, discuss, comment – whether
that's blogs and discussion fora, or the social software of Facebook
et al. So a more progressive approach would be to ensure that
everything is linkable and kept online – with clean, permanent URL
structures – thus encouraging people to point to articles from the
comfort of their own sites… The web is intrinsically designed for linking
and archiving, so I ensured that Monocle.com would do that. A simple
point, and one the industry discovered long ago – in my case, after much work at the BBC
– but fundamental nonetheless. It’s still surprising how often it’s
forgotten by new entrants, given this basic premise of pointability has
underpinned almost every mature online success, from Amazon to YouTube.

As such, it's worth pausing to note that the URL structure was
considered as part of the design job. See later on multidisciplinary
teams, but the architecture of the site, and further, the environment
it sits within, are as key to me as the visual layer pinned on top. I
always reference the Eliel Saarinen
quote: "Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger
context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an
environment, an environment in a city plan." The larger context for
this site is that portion of the web that cares about Monocle, or the
topics covered, and designing for that environment includes making
elegant URLs – as the tokens by which Monocle.com is referenced. Thus,
the pointablity, linkability, permanance and appearance of those URLs
and site structures become fundamentally important.

Thus, the URls might not be as clean as they could be – it took a bit of negotiation to get EPIServer, a .net based CMS, to output them – but they're fairly understandable e.g.:

http://www.monocle.com/sections/affairs/Web-Articles/Christine-Loh/
http://www.monocle.com/sections/design/Web-Articles/Beijing-Olympic-gold-rush/
http://www.monocle.com/sections/business/Magazine-Articles/Spot-the-shopper—Beijing/

i.e. type of section / type of content / title of content

It's no accident that Monocle is such an engrossing experience.  This kind of total experience rarely happens by accident.