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metacool Thought of the Day
"Most people don’t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.
…when you read a biography of someone you admire, it’s rarely the things that made them happy that compel your admiration. It’s the things they did to court unhappiness — the things they did that were arduous and miserable, which sometimes cost them friends and aroused hatred. It’s excellence, not happiness, that we admire most.
…Fulfillment is a byproduct of how people engage their tasks, and can’t be pursued directly. Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself."
What’s a sleestak?
Where do great songs come from? A great question, to which I must ask: what's a sleestak?
Every once in a while, I become obsessive about a special tune. Case in point, I've probably listened to Tower of Power's Knock Yourself Out several thousand times. When I encounter a piece I like, I need to listen to it over and over and over to unlock its secrets. It drives my wife nuts.
Here's my latest obsession, a tune called Cloisonné:
Readers of metacool will know that I deeply admire They Might Be Giants. Not only is their cover of Tubthumping the official anthem of all of us trying to make a dent in the universe, but over and over they create some amazing pieces of music which are highly creative, playful, and original. Art. They are also a case study in group creativity, having produced a stream of consistent innovation over a period of 30 years. How many individuals — let alone groups or organization or companies — can lay claim to a track record like that?
Back to Cloisonné. In the following passage, John Flansburgh talks about the creative process that lead to tales of second-story sleestaks breathing on his dice:
The story behind the song Cloisonne is pretty discombobulated. In an experimental period of putting Join Us together we created a series of electronic beats entirely without song ideas behind them. The idea was to make the tiniest drum machine-based beats that were still exciting. I probably spent twelve hours just editing and tweaking these sounds with no particular song in mind. The lyric is kind of from a Rat Pack point of view–like the guy singing is really into his own swagger, but he's also kind of out of date and out of it. The idea of not knowing what a sleestak is does come from my real life–I am actually exactly a year too old to have watched that show. Having to have Land of the Lost explained to you is slightly undignified, but thus is the fate of those who get old.
This version of the song is essentially our live band arrangement of the song. John L. is playing a bass clarinet, and we took Stan Harrison's inspired, highly chromatic sax intro and outro and mangled it in our fashion. Our apologies to Stan!
Personally, I like the Stan Harrison version on the album more than this one, but that's because the saxophone arrangement reminds me of The Borneo Horns, whose leader is arguably the greatest saxophonist in the world, Lenny Pickett, who played that incredibly gnarly solo on Knock Yourself Out, and who collaborated with Stan Harrison to create the Borneo Horns. And yes, I've listed to my precious Boreno Horns CD thousands of times… but enough of this beeswax, let's get back to our conversation about innovation and creativity.
Perhaps the astounding fecundity of imagination presented to us by They Might Be Giants can be attributed to several of my innovation principles. To wit:
- Principle 2, Hear and see with the mind of a child: clearly They Might Be Giants are able to think differently about the kinds of things which other adults take for granted in day to day life. Othewise, how do you go from Quonset huts to law enforcement to sleestaks? Free association, creative association, and wordplay are all common behaviors in kids, but they get squeezed out of us as we jump through the hoops of scoring 90% on spelling tests, hitting 740 on the GMAT, and getting through that interview with the company we always wanted to work for. You can see see and hear the way you did as a kid, but it takes practice. Clearly the guys at TMBG are still in practice.
- Principle 11, Everyone needs time to innovate: I love the story Flansburgh tells above, because Cloisonné happened even though they weren't even trying to write a song. They were screwing around with electronic beats for the sake of screwing around with electronic beats. This is intrinsic motivation at its best, and it's the kind of time that's rarely accounted for in mainstream business. Forget 10% time or 20% time or that funky offsite, how much time do people have for seemingly unproductive, totally unaccountable time to simply play with stuff? Messing around is a surprisingly effective way to get to unique and novel outcome.
- Principle 19, Have a point of view: Yes, they have one. It's about telling interesting stories in unusual ways, and never telling the same one twice. They aren't working from script vetted by 100 layers of focus group-approved marketing criteria. This is them, and they are this stuff.
By the way, the generation of this blog post required nine spins of Cloisonné and another ten of Tubthumping.
What's a sleestak? Yeah, I had to ask, too.
Innovation principles by Markkula
The genesis of these thoughts on marketing from Mike Markkula are detailed on page 78 of Walter Isaacson's intriguing biography of Steve Jobs. In their clarity, simplicity, and actionability, they are stunning. As a marketer, I take three lessons from them.
First, they are about people. Markets are made up of individuals. When striving to bring something new and cool to life, we're much better off imagining the life of a single customer than we are trying to disaggregate and disambiguate mountains of anonymized market data. A holistic understanding of the customer experience you wish to enable is a great way to start creating mind-blowing products. As a way of being, empathy is to product developers what The Force is to Jedi Knights.
Second, they are focused on the market. Surely great marketing is always about the market? Not always, and not so often: in my experience, many marketers worry more about communicating with each other internally than they do with real people in the marketplace. They spend more time reading reports created by others than they do learning from the market directly. They don't use products created by competitors, nor do they try to experience their channels in the way that an end user would. They may or may not love their product segment — I mean, can you imagine Steve Jobs hawking anything other than stuff he believed in? Significantly, none of Markkula's dictums explicitly mention the internal functions or structure of the enterprise. Granted, it could be argued that "Focus" is about both the internal choices an organization makes about what not to do, as well as on all the market-facing features, line extensions, and complementary offerings it chooses not to invest in.
Third, they focus on the big picture and on the smallest details. Yes, you need to understand where the market is going and how culture, politics, and macro economic trends may influence your future state in three to five years. But you also must appreciate the nuances of texture, smell, form, sound, proportions, and color. The realm of the visceral is always there, our minds and hearts want things to feel good and true. Everything matters, and marketers (or designers, or businesspeople, or engineers — it's all the same to me) ignore this truth at their peril.
Back on planet metacool, I believe the following innovation principles are at work in Markkula's document:
Principle 1: Experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world
Principle 3: Always ask: "How do we want people to feel after they experience this?"
Principle 9: Killing good ideas is a good idea
Principle 20: Be remarkable
metacool Thought of the Day
"Between the unknowns of birth and death it is our love and courage, the banishment of fear, that decides if we really lived."
Innovation principles in practice: 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 17, 19
Principle 1: Experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world
Principle 2: See and hear with the mind of a child
Principle 5: Anything can be prototyped. You can prototype with anything
Principle 6: Live life at the intersection
Principle 8: Most new ideas aren't
Principle 17: It's not the years, it's the mileage
Principle 19: Have a point of view
I love this video by Ice Cube. It got me thinking about my approach to principles 6 and 8.
Ice Cube is a remarkable person. When I learn in this video that he studied architectural drafting, his compositional approach to the structure of his music makes total sense. And you can feel the authenticity of his knowledge of the architecture and built environment of LA. Every great innovator I know makes for a great dinner partner, in the sense that they invariable have a wide array of life interests, for which many they are a bonafide expert. Being interested in many areas, knowing a lot about a few but being willing and curious to learn about the rest, is the stuff that great innovators are made of. Given all of this, I need to expand Principle 6, Live life at the intersection, to embrace the idea of being able to pull from, and make connections across, many buckets.
He ends the video by talking about Ray and Charles Eames engaging in mashup activity before mashups were cool. There's a saying that if you're not stealing (from your predecessors), you're not designing, and that's been the thrust of Principle 8 for me: you should proceed with the humility to believe that someone, somewhere, created something you can learn from. But I like the idea of sampling more. Just as Ice Cube and other musicians sample each other's work to create new, perhaps we should substitute the notion of "sampling" for "stealing". Take a sample of something already in the world, learn from it, extract the essence of it, and mash it up with your current threads to get to something wonderful, remarkable, and new.
Innovation principles in practice: 1, 6, 19, 20
Principle 1: Experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world
Principle 6: Live at the intersection
Principle 19: Have a point of view
Principle 20: Be remarkable
Innovation principles in practice: 14, 15, 20
Principle 14: Failure sucks, but instructs
Principle 15: Celebrate errors of commission
Principle 20: Be remarkable
RIP, Sergio Scaglietti
The great entrepreneur, marker, artist, and businessman Sergio Scaglietti passed away on Sunday.
Via his intuition-driven design process, Scaglietti created some of the most visual stunning cars of all time, such as the Ferrari 250 GTO pictured above. In the humble opinion of this writer, he also brought to life the most gorgeous and lust-worthy designs ever marketed by Ferrari, which is really saying something. His creations took a Modenese vernacular sculptural aesthetic and made it the international standard for all things red, loud, curvy, and fast.
metacool Thought of the Day
I really like these thoughts from Scott Cook, Intuit's founder.
His expression "the boss is no longer the Caesar" gives me some new ways to think about Innovation Principle 12, Instead of Managing, Start Cultivating.