Author Archives: Diego Rodriguez

New York Times, meet Alltop. Your disruptor.

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Featured in Alltop

Personally, I haven’t had much luck with RSS readers.  I suffer from the "weekend barrier" — I’d rather not spend the time to curate my own collection of RSS feeds, and I often wonder what I’m missing out there that I simply don’t know about.

Enter Alltop, a new experiment from Guy Kawasaki and friends.  I like it as brain food: it feels like the New York Times in terms of breadth, but deeper in passion due to the laser focus of each of the "contributors".  It’s curated RSS, or perhaps even an edited newspaper, but with a radically streamlined business model, with each of the "contributors" having an individual revenue stream of their own design.  As such, Alltop represents a disruptive business model relative to the New York Times.  Let’s see where it goes.

And yes, metacool is part of Alltop!  Definitely take a few minutes to wander through the various sections — lots of cool stuff!

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metacool Thought of the Day

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"When I am no longer controversial I will no longer be important.’
– Gustave Courbet

Are people upset with you?  It is because what you’ve done is so bad it is shameful, or because it is so polarizing, so rooted in a strong point of view that all but the most progressive or forward-thinking people don’t understand and "get it"?  Do you want to design for the mass market of today or tomorrow?  Are you designing under the old paradigm or for a new one?

Having a strong point of view, informed by real human needs, is at the core of how design thinkerdoers behave.  They make choices, and thus end up with strategies grounded in the needs of real human beings, real organisms, and the planet, and end up with something whose value proposition is intelligible, which creates real value for a real soul somewhere in the world, and is designed to spread and reach the right people, whether that be a bushel or a billion.

Making choices, taking the route which may be controversial or even painful, is about being willing to live with innovative outcomes. 

Quattro!

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I’m happy to say that metacool turns four today.  Huzzah!

Four years ago my wife vacationed attended a yoga camp or something in Hawaii and I stayed behind in California because of work commitments.  Me, at home by my lonesome and wondering how I might learn a bit about how ideas diffuse across the web, decided to indulge my 3rd-grade ambition to be a writer, and cranked up this blog by writing a one-liner about the merits of ugly cars.  Thus was born metacool.*

Some 838 posts later, I’m still at it, and I thank you for your patronage and for the great conversations.  The great thing about taking risks in life and just doing something is that unexpected things emerge, stuff you never anticipated would happen.  I can honestly say that this little blog landed me two great new jobs, a new hobby that routinely transports me to a state of flow, and an incredible group of new friends.  Via metacool I’ve been able to befriend people everywhere from the Middle East to Japan, and just about everywhere in-between.  I’ve quite literally met some of my heroes, too.  I am very grateful for all of these human experiences.

My wife has been my biggest supporter.  I can be a bit obsessive about my passion for the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life.  For example, she came with me the day I visited the Ducati factory, the Pagani atelier, Fiorano raceway, and the Ferrari museum, all without even a pitstop for a coffee, let alone lunch.  That’s  love.  Please join me in thanking my wife for her patience and support over the past four years as I’ve dribbled out these posts.  I’d likely be a little fitter, our household a bit more together, and more rested than I am now if it weren’t for the time I spend writing stuff here.  But it is so fun, and I’ve learned so much.  My wife is just great, and words fail me.

Thanks for quattro, let’s go for otto.  And flow.

* actually, I already had a mailing list going on Yahoo Groups called metacool.  Blogging on TypePad, as it turned out, is much cooler than spamming your friends.

Introducing a new blog: Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

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Never leave well enough alone.

Spring is in the air, and the team here at metacool world headquarters just returned from a week-long management retreat where, among other things, we decided to revamp the way we go to market.  It’s time for some market segmentation.  Instead of delivering metacool goodness through just one tube called metacool, we’ll now be delivering metacool goodness through two of these tube structures which we’re told make up this internet thing.  More than double the fun, and a new way for me, I mean us, to investigate some passion areas without boring the majority of you all to tears.

If you dig my coverage of the more visceral aspects of our designed environment, please tune your radios to my new blog called Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness.  Where metacool is all about the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness is focused on the visceral side of things.  If I were to imagine a Venn diagram of sorts, then this new one would overlap 90% of its area with the older one.  One can’t understand the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life without understand the visceral sides of things, but many folks interested in the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life bore easily when fed gearhead gnarlyness more than once a month.  Hence the segmentation. 

If it helps, allow me to sketch out a prototypical target audience member for each blog:

  • metacool:  early forties, with 2.3 years of graduate school; enjoys a fine red wine and dines on gourmet Vietnamese cuisine at least 2x per week; can name the drummer on every Coltrane album; also reads the NYT, Winding Road, the Economist, and Monocle (but is unsure where the last publication is going); recently augmented the 1964 Aston Martin with a Breezer Uptown 8 bike.
  • Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness:  mental age of 14 regardless of true physical age; likes music a whole lot but suffers from hearing loss from standing too near to too many aluminum-block Can-Am V8’s;  likes any number of fine cuisines but is equally comfortable with cheese doodles and a fine light beer from Golden, Colorado;  used to read Road & Track, Automobile, Car & Driver, Autoweek, Autosport, Racer, Motor Trend, Car, Air & Space, and Bicycling, but dumped all of those subscriptions for Winding Road alone; recently modified the 1964 Aston Martin with a supercharged Chevy small-block conversion, and added a Boeing Stearman to the internal combustion corral because of the sound it makes.  Secretly prays each night to receive a Ford rocket Galaxie from the Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy.  Or both.

Does that help?  In other words, I am both of these blogs, and they are both me.  I want to have a way to explore visceral stuff more deeply without turning off the rest of you.  I am mildly dismayed when metacool is called a "car blog" (it isn’t — I merely use cars as a lingua franca to talk about innovation), but I would love it if Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness were labled as such.  One of my favorite public intellectuals is Russell Davies, and all I’m really doing here is aping him or Kevin Kelly, each of whom maintain a nice collection of inter-related blogs.  Looking at what Russell does, hopefully Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness is to metacool as eggsbaconchipsandbeans is to we’re as disappointed as you are.

This new blog is a working prototype.  The graphic design is rough, and some of you loyal readers will recognize some older content.  Thank you for patience and feedback as it moves forward.

Let me know what you think by dropping me a line or leaving me a comment.

AFAQS*:

  • Why are you wasting your life blogging about cars?  Well, I don’t really blog about cars that much.  But I believe it is vitally important to understand the visceral side of things if we’re going to make much progress on planet Earth.  Why doesn’t everyone drive a fuel-efficient car?  Why doesn’t everyone ride a bike instead of driving a fuel-efficient car?  Why don’t we ride public transportation?  All of these have to do with what I call the challenge of making green red, and unless you dive deep in to our reptilian psyches as I plan to do here, I think you lose the big picture.
  • Will there be less Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness on metacool?  No.  But there will be more at Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness.
  • Will the character of metacool change?  I think so, but only gradually.  When I started writing metacool, I was but a lad in my early thirties without a care in the world and a hot 240-horsepower car in the garage.  Now I’m an old man with two kids, a mortgage, and a real job, and my hot car now gets out-dragged by a Camry from Hertz.  As I move through the world, I’m actually less interested overall in aesthetics and product-related stuff, and more interested by macro economics, psychology, and organizational dynamics.  I hope metacool continues to be interesting across those domains.

Oh my goodness, this has to be the most boring post I’ve ever written.  Let’s get back to business!

Ship it!  JFCI!

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

* Anticipated to be Frequently Asked Questions

 

Presenting the Lutzinator

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Pontiac

A while back I wrote about the crazies at Ducati tapping in to the power of co-creation.  By promising to use a  name submitted over the web for its new G8-based car/pickup, Pontiac is pushing that idea harder.  If you go to Tame the Name, you too can submit a name for this new product.  How cool is that?  Go ahead, submit a few. 

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: when it comes to using the web to push the frontiers of marketing, the people at GM know what they are doing.  I love this initiative: good marketing takes guts, and Pontiac is about to enjoy a true brand renaissance.  They finally have fantastic product (but perhaps poorly timed, given $4 gas…) and it appears as though their marketing folks are working hard to shed any remnant of their screaming-chicken past.  Another decade of this kind of execution and Pontiac will be the new BMW.  I kid you not.

Messing around with virality in Facebook

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I’m a big believer in knowing by doing.  So in preparation for my upcoming Stanford class on Creating Infectious Engagement, which will involve a viral marketing project for Facebook, I’ve been messing about a bit over in their part of the world.

This past weekend I set up a "I’m a fan of" page on Facebook for the Stanford d.school.  Using some tools built in to Facebook, I sent notice of this fan page to four key connected mavens, and have been tracking the membership stats over the subsequent days.  Here’s what the curve looks like, tracking the total number of fans at the end of each day (or at my 10pm bedtime, to be more precise):

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I’m not sure what to think about these results.  Any comments or ideas from Facebook and/or marketing gurus would be great. 

Jill Bolte Taylor at TED2008

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This is the first of my three favorite talks from TED2008.  Not only does Jill Bolte Taylor use the best stage prop I’ve ever witnessed in a live speech, but she manages to talk about left brain and right brain in a way that helps us understand the power of living with a truly whole mind. 

Her presentation blew me away the first time I heard it, and my second and third viewings have been just as powerful.  I’ve already made some changes in my life as a result of her words.

Want an innovative culture? Status differences blow

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When it comes to bringing cool stuff in to the world, I’m a big fan of Honda.  If you’ve been around metacool for any period of time, then you know that I admire Honda a great deal.  I’ve written about Honda’s ability to innovate on a routine basis, about the fact that it is led by someone who really — really! — knows the business, about its ability to advertise truth rather than myth, about the pickup they make which I dearly want and am only waiting for the diesel model to arrive to purchase, and about kick-ass minivan race cars made by Honda’s own employees on their own time because, well, kick-ass minivans are a kick in the ass if you’re a racer.  Just about everyone at Honda, it would seem, is a racer, as explained in this great article in Fortune:

Unlike Toyota (TM),
which is stodgy and bureaucratic, Honda’s culture is more
entrepreneurial, even quirky. Employees are paid less than at the
competition, and advancement is limited, given Honda’s flat
organization. Their satisfaction and fierce loyalty to the company come
from being around people like themselves – tinkerers who are obsessed
with making things work.

At the risk of making a broad generalization, I would say that innovative startups and more mature organizations capable of innovating on a routine basis (like Honda) share two key elements in common:  first, a remarkable lack of status differences among employees, and second, a low-friction environment when it comes to the meritocracy of ideas.  I actually believe the latter is a function of the former.  Why? 

We all have 24 hours a day to live our lives.  We have finite time and energy at our disposal.  If we all start with the same account balance, some of us choose to spend it worrying about what our boss’s boss thinks about us, or on over-preparing for that internal review meeting, or on wondering what our growth path is.  Others say "this is this" and get on with being generative, pushing ideas as far as they can go, and helping others see what works by gathering real evidence from the world and letting opinions fall by the wayside.  Status differences are energy sinks.  Do you want to spend your life worrying or producing?  Dramatic status differences lead to dramatic wastes of energy. 

Show me a group of people who worry less about where others think they stand, and more about how things are really going and how they might do things better and cooler, and mark my word, that’s the group of innovators.

A wonderful example of a disruptive business model

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Here’s a great example of a low-end disruptive business model: Psychotherapy for All

The more I work on the creation of disruptive business models, the more I’m convinced that there’s almost always room for a disruptive model.  One just needs to start with human needs and look hard, work hard for it.  The design process needs constraints.  A lack of viable solution spaces is more a reflection of poor innovation process than a statement of fact; it is a lack of generative contraints which leads to dead ends. 

I can think of no better design constraint for the genesis of disruptive business models than trying to serve the needs of people living on a few dollars a day.  What, for example, might happen to pace of innovation in our US healthcare system if we were to take notes on disruptions such as this one, or from the Aravind Eye Care System?