"There was a time not so long ago when egomaniacs made media to their own personal standards, and when you make something for yourself, it will always be far better and more honest than something you make the please the marketplace. With computers, individuals can be egomaniacs and make the media they think is good."
– Tibor Kalman, as quoted in Wired magazine, December 1996
Quite a lot, as it turns out.
Until the TEDTalk video comes out, Tom Guarriello’s great blog post about Philippe Starck’s incredible speech at TED last week will have to do. It’s a good brain rattler.
photo credit: PMO
I’m double blog-stinting this week. Along with my fellow guest bloggers David Hornik and Bruno Giussani, I’ll be over at TEDBlog for the week writing posts on a daily basis.
Actually, I’m always double stinting in that I’ve been a guest blogger for TED over the past year. One of my recent posts talks about whooping it up with Toyota in NASCAR, and another one is a march through my daily life in search of my Starck Factor.
In case you are wondering, no, I didn’t receive any hate mail for daring to talk about NASCAR in the same sentence as TED. Honestly, I think NASCAR is a great example of what happens when technology meets entertainment meets design in a premeditated fashion. It may not be your cup of tea – or it might be your can of Bud – but it is obviously working, so why not learn from it? One of my goals for 2007 is to make it to a NASCAR race.
But do please check out the TEDBlog this week.
Wow, what a lot of fun that namestorm was! The "KGB" names are still rolling in, and I have to say there was some very creative thinking going on (see Reilly’s comments on the previous post below). The winner is Kindling Gregarious Behavior, because it sounds good, actually describes the content and aim of the course (not a bad thing at all when you think about it) and — best of all for me — it echoes the observation that Wikia CEO Gil Penchina made on a panel I hosted at last year’s AlwaysOn conference. Gil made the point that, instead of spending all your time, energy, money and luck building a big bonfire on your own and then hoping that a bunch of other people will choose to come and sit around it, why not identify all the myriad little campfires burning around you and pour a little gas on each one? That’s the way infectious action and gregarious behavior get fed. It’s not about some big top-down mission, though centralized thinking matters. It’s about embracing the power of the community. It’s about kindling.
Anyway, I’m really excited to be teaching CIA-KGB along with a truly fabulous — FABULOUS! — teaching team. We learned a lot teaching CIA last year (and got lots of great coverage in BusinessWeek and other august journals), so this year we’ve made some tweaks to the class to try and make it an even better experience. This year’s class will again involve a creating infectious action project for the good folks at Mozilla, and will then focus on a project for Global Giving. I’m very excited to be working with Global Giving, and it already feels good to be brainstorming project ideas with my Mozilla friends.
This will not be your usual classroom experience. Everything is real, everything is open-ended, and the sky is the limit. It’ll be scary. It’ll be fun. It’ll be something, hopefully, which knocks your hat in the creek. As if all that weren’t enough, it looks like Global Giving will be supporting some summer internship positions for CIA-KGB students who A), kick butt in the class, and B) want to keep working on Global Giving-related issues. How cool is that?
Are you a Stanford student with Master’s standing? Please consider applying for the course. You can find an application here. It’s due March 9, and we’ll be selecting 24 people to part of the CIA-KGB classroom community. The journey is the reason we do all of this, and the fruit of the voyage will be more experience with the design thinking process as well as further developing methodologies for creating infectious action and kindling gregarious behavior.
Hi. Lots of great name ideas streaming in for the "KGB" part of CIA-KGB. Here’s a sample:
I like ’em all. What I’ve learned is that the name needs to be of parallel structure to CIA, which stands for "Creating Infectious Action". If you have any more ideas, let me know. We’ll decide the name soon.
The San Francisco Chronicle published a nice interview with my colleague Bob Sutton about his new book The No Asshole Rule. I have a little blurb in the article about why it’s so important to filter out jerks when you’re trying to encourage innovative behavior.
I love Bob’s book and I think the coverage it’s receiving is great — I hope that it pushes the world a little closer to a state of affairs where the pursuit of happiness in the workplace is not only encouraged, but is the norm. My only worry stems from the power of Google; will my descendants forever associate a web search on my name with the term "asshole"? I hope not. English is just so damn boring when it comes to swear words for the nether regions. If that association is going to be a sticky one, I’d much rather it be with something like the Spanish gilipollas or — even more mellifluous to these ears — the Italian cafone.
On a side note not even tangentially tied to cafones, I must apologize for two trends on metacool as of late. All of us on the staff of metacool are dedicated to writing thoughts about the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life. But as of late we (I) haven’t been posting that much, and what I have posted has usually been a pointer to something else rather than some (semi) original thinking. Why? Well, I’m not one to spend a lot of energy fabricating excuses, but I’ve been hella busy innovating. Deep in structuring some prototypes and figuring out where to go with them. Also, I’m busy getting the next version of Creating Infectious Action cranked up for the Spring Quarter at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. I’m looking forward to teaching it with a rather awesome group of individuals. More on that to come. One change is that it’ll probably be called "CIA-KGB" for short, instead of just "CIA". So drop me a line and help me out with name brainstorming by letting me of any good verbs that start with a "K".
But creativity is endless. so expect a surge of posts (oh boy, has that word has been ruined forever, or what?) in the next few weeks as all this goo gels in my head.
A must-read about Toyota: From 0 to 60 to World Domination
How does Toyota win? By coming an evidence-based culture with an eye to the long view. By investing in incremental innovations to build long-term brand equity, and investing the payback in revolutionary innovations like the Prius. By paying attention to technical details and to the humans who design and build the cars and those who service and drive them.
It seems simple, right? Realization and implementation are so tough.
I’ve always wanted one. Growing up in Boulder as a lad in the Ford + Carter years, I saw them everywhere. An ubiquitous presence on the aesthetic landscape. I just assumed that a third of America drove a Saab 96 or 95. Along with bobbing Citroen DS21’s, snorty BMW 2002tii’s, prim and proper Volvo Amazons, and some wickedly Mothra-like ur-Subaru’s, the Saab 96 was the car of choice for all the forward thinking 1970’s pseudo intellectual and non-pseudo intellectual hippies who inhabited (and still inhabit) my hometown. Each day on my trudge to and from elementary school I’d stop and goggle an off-white 95 wagon, marveling at its bulldog proportions and vestigial tailfins. "Why?," I wondered. "Why not?" I now realize, was the answer.
It’s a design classic. Penned by Sixten Sason, it built the Saab brand by winning rallies the world over, its little two-stroke heart beating away pop-pop-poppoppopopop-pop in freewheeling gravel drifts through dark forests. Of course the brand lost its way, as most great brands do when they become exercises in linear, rational corporate thinking. Too bad Subaru is the new Saab, but thank goodness Subaru is the new Saab, too.
Long live the 96!
When I was a teenager, jazz great Count Basie passed away, and I remember being shocked at how hard my music teacher took the news. For him, Count Basie was The Man, the one who had inspired him to pursue a life in music, to become a teacher to kids like me.
Today, I’m so sad — and shocked — to hear that one of my heroes, saxophonist Michael Brecker passed away last month. With his passing, the world lost a great innovator and a rare artistic genius.
For me, as a saxophone-crazy teenager, hearing Brecker’s eponymous debut album blew my mind utterly and completely. It was like getting a direct injection of musical innovation. "Original Rays" showed his ability to control the remarkable EWI MIDI instrument. His rendition of "My One and Only Love" introduced me to the iconic tune for the first time, got me interested in Coltrane, and stuck with me ever since — it was the song my wife and I used as our first dance at our wedding reception. And there’s nothing quite his old albums where he’s playing in a style called heavy metal bebop, like on the track "Skunk Funk". If you’re not into jazz, you know his sound, because he played just about everybody’s album. Michael Brecker is the person playing the saxophone on Dire Straight’s tune "Your Latest Trick". It’s safe to say that I drove my parents, siblings, and neighbors crazy playing along to that album, figuring out how to play those amazing licks of his, how to get that amazingly fat yet supple sound. Hearing him play a concert live later that year was a dream come true.
I never heard him play live again, unfortunately. And though I’m upset over his death as if I actually had known him personally, I only knew him through his albums. But music gives you that direct connection to people.
Life is short. Live it up, do what you want and can to enjoy it.