Ricardo Zonta pulls some doughnuts at the Monterey Historic Races in his 2006 Toyota F1 car.
And, be sure to watch this in-car video of Zonta breaking the Laguna Seca lap record between racing sessions of the Historic races. The first lap is just a warmup. The second is the record breaker.
So fast it’s scary.
The world lost a great innovator earlier this week in Maynard Ferguson. In my past when playing the saxophone was at the center of my existence, nothing got me more excited than the chance to play a Maynard Ferguson tune with all my friends in our jazz-rock band. We had lots of fun using his music to blow our audiences away (and in the process removing a good deal of my hearing. That’s life).
Ferguson was a great role model as an innovator, always open to new ideas, new technologies, new ways of seeing himself and being in the world. And he wasn’t afraid to be way out there with some hair-raising, totally crazy, high-altitude trumpet lick.
If you’re interested in hearing a cool discussion about creating contagious behavior, pouring gas on fires, releasing control and the future of marketing, check out this video of the panel discussion I moderated earlier this year with Bob Sutton at the 2006 AlwaysOn conference. Joining us on the panel were:
What an awesome group! The video image is kind of small, the open Internet comment box can be a bit distracting, but the sound quality is good, and that’s what matters. This insights and thoughts brought up by Mitchell, Perry, and Gil knocked my hat into the creek. I love marketing innovation.
For a nice written summary of the panel discussion, see this post on Bob’s blog.
I’ve added two cool blogs to my COOL STUFF section. They’re a yin yang combo for innovators. They’re both of a legal bent, but from totally different points of view. Yes, I know, legal stuff. Bear with me here:
Patent Pending Blog: about patents. Obviously. This blog is a great reminder of how there’s really very little new under the sun. It’s good, clean fun, too — who wouldn’t want to read about Harry Houdini’s Diving Suit? And look at those gents in the illustration above. They’re cruising around in a rolling iron yurt, discussing the state of their stock portfolios. Think of it as a collection of Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness, Antique Edition.
Business Bankruptcy Blog: no, I don’t enjoy looking at traffic accidents. But this is important stuff for innovators know about, because business viability and sustainability are key to getting stuff done in the world.
I think if you make the Bankruptcy blog, VentureBlog, Feld Thoughts, and The Economist a part of your regular reading schedule, you’ll be way ahead of the new venture business curve.
The cool business-and-design offering at the Stanford d.school this fall will be a class called Clicks-n-Bricks: Creating Mass Market Experiences. While I won’t be part of the core teaching team for this one, I do plan to drop in for a class session or two (or three!). This class is a logical evolution of where we went with Creating Infectious Action last quarter, where we found that the most compelling student projects all involved the design of experiences. So why not teach an entire class focused on that topic?
We’re thinking big about the future of business and design at the d.school.
Check out Bob Sutton’s blog for more details about Clicks-n-Bricks and how to apply to be a part of the action (it’ s open to Stanford graduate students only).
I believe that a strong emphasis on personal happiness is the hallmark of an innovative culture.
Tal Ben-Shahar teaches a class at Harvard on positive psychology, and out of this class has created a nice list of principles for enabling happiness.
Here are his flow-inducing tips:
1. Give yourself permission to be human
2. Happiness lies at the intersection between pleasure and meaning
3. Keep in mind that happiness is mostly dependent on our state of mind, not on our status or the state of our bank account
4. Simplify!
5. Remember the mind-body connection.
6. Express gratitude, whenever possible.
While his list is couched in the language of personal happiness, I
think it’s a wonderful one to keep in mind when you’re navigating your
way through the workplace. After all, organizations are made up of
individuals, so why not apply the same principles for happiness to life at work? It’s not as if work is really a different mode of existence from everyday life. Or at least, it shouldn’t be. How can we make individuals, teams, groups, and entire organizations happy in their work? That’s when innovation starts.
It used to be that having a blog was a remarkable thing for a Fortune 500 company. I know because I had to "hurdle" to get one started when I was part of the team at Intuit, and it was a big deal when General Motors came out with their Fastlane blog. As marketing organizations have become more comfortable with easing their span of control over outbound messaging and content, blogs are now more or less part of the marketing mix. RSS feeds are de rigueur. Corporate blogging is about trusting the judgment and intuition of individual contributors instead of relying upon a rule-based central authority. It’s about releasing control and rules, but embracing judgment and character. In general I think that’s a better way to market, because it comes across as more real and authentic because it is more real and authentic, and a more open, trusting stance is a wonderful way to engage the outside world in creating contagious action around your offerings — which is the fundamental (if often forgotten) goal of marketers in the first place.
So that’s the state of world for relatively unscripted marketing words coming out of organizations, but what about the visual expression of their brands? Photos and the like. Now we’re talking about thousands of words. But, as most bloggers can tell you, companies are loath to share their visual content. If you want access to a photo from a website, you’d better be ready to contact their press department and kiss the ring.
But not General Motors. Their marketing team is pushing lots of great photos to a public Flickr gallery. And pulling in photos from the gearhead community. This is good marketing. Yes, it would be better if everything were published under a Creative Commons license to really free up usage, but this is a great start.
Why not share some of your corporate visual content with the outside world? The reality is that people are going to take your online content anyway. Why not do it in a way which engages your fan base, encourages participation, and rewards good judgment and creativity? What’s the worst that could happen?
I’m always one to endeavor to only toot my horn if I can do so without blowing it. So this is meant as a quiet toot: In case you haven’t read the August 21 issue of BusinessWeek, check out this tasty blurb on metacool from the front of the magazine.
Design geek, indeed!
Bruce Nussbaum and Seth Godin have got me thinking about some ways to "fix" air travel. As a boy reading about medieval history, I used to wonder what it was like to have bandits on the roads. Now we know. The ultimate solution would be to "fix" the root causes of the hatred which drive people to blow each other up, but short of that, how might we improve the current situation?
I agree with Seth that we can do — and will have to do — a lot without getting on airplanes. The state of world affairs is going to sell a lot of Halo systems and iSight cameras alike. My friend Anthony Pigliacampo runs his cool startup company on Skype. The tools are already there, and they’re going to get pushed hard. Expect lots of innovation in this space.
But what about the airplanes? What happens when we have to move atoms and not bits? I just brainstormed with my buddies Ryan and Omar for three (3!) minutes and it’s clear that opportunities abound (just to be clear, and to preserve the reputations of the two gentlemen, some of these ideas (the stupid ones) are mine and mine alone) :
And so on and so forth. The current situation is unacceptable, some good thinking and some guts could make it better.
Mr. Jalopy of Hooptyrides showed me this beautiful design detail he shot of Burt Munro’s famous Indian motorcycle record breaker. The same motorcycle featured in Roger Donaldson’s wonderful movie The World’s Fastest Indian. I quite liked that flick, especially the opening sequence, which is a perfect balance of deep technical unabashed gearhead gnarlyness and man-on-the-street, just-tell-me-a-simple-story plot exposition.
Just look at it. Those two "seahorse" details in the metal plate are there to provide mechanical clearance for the furiously revolving rocker arms on the little terror of a motor found beneath. You can just see the intake trumpet in the background, poking its snout out like a shy little elephant. Burt Munro was an incredible innovator. This is stunning design work. I can’t help but agree with Mr. Jalopy when he says that "…I am not even particularly interested in motorcycles, but I spent half
an hour looking at this amazing machine and kept finding trick shit
like this. I don’t know that I have seen a greater accomplisment by a
single person."
The more I look at it, the more I feel there’s a wealth of insight to be found in this photo about the process, philosophy, and value of design thinking. I’m going to keep writing about Burt Munro’s rocker divots for a while, just to see what’s there. I’d like to hear what you see, too.
