Author Archives: Diego Rodriguez
To the Hilt: Foodie
Seth Godin has a nice post about foodie, a perfect example of doing things to the hilt. Joe DeSalazar’s foodie is to a fancy dinner what Steve Moal’s Zausner Torpedo is to a standard luxury car: same fundamental offering, but implemented with a point of view obsessed with total quality and epicurean delight.
Granted, you’re not going to get to the mass market by doing stuff to the hilt, but there is an audience out there. And they’re hungry.
Why not do it to the hilt?
Using Option Value to Win the X Prize
Yesterday Burt Rutan and the entire cast and crew of Scaled Composites won the Ansari X Prize. Why them? Do they have better engineers than any other contender? Perhaps, but not likely. More funding? Nope. Better equipment? I doubt they have anything which couldn’t be bought by another contender. More wisdom and tacit knowledge, gained by years of knowing by doing? Check.
If you were to design a venture with sole purpose of winning the X Prize, you couldn’t do much better than Scaled Composites. Looking back on their history of bringing lightweight, high-performance, low-cost solutions to market, you might even think that Rutan had the X Prize in his head all along. He didn’t, of course, but on the other hand, he did.
Scaled Composites is a classic example of creating option value by using iteration to get into the flow of the opportunity stream. By option value, I don’t mean the value of a share of stock. Instead, I mean the value of future opportunities that open up by doing something today – creating options to do the things you want to do in the future. By creating the first VariEze, Scaled Composites opened up the possibility to someday create a round-the-world plane. Why? Because in meeting the challenges of building the VariEze, they forged a culture that values having a 50ft x 20ft x 8ft axis CNC mill on site (that’s it above), whose massive potentiality can’t help but spark the imagination of their staff! And by doing that round-the-world plane, they created the potential to build a space place, and so on and so forth… by actually doing things, you gain deep experience and the kind of tacit organizational knowledge which helps make you a prime contender for things like the X Prize.
Through conscious iteration, the people in a venture can position themselves to take advantage of any opportunity that may come their way, and the sky is the limit.
Will Sports Cars Die?: Venturi Fetish
What will the sports car of the future be like? There’s no reason why the sports car of the future couldn’t be electric. After all, Ferdinand Porsche’s first automotive design used electric, and not gas, motors. In fact, electric motors have an inherent advantage over internal combustion engines in that they provide maximum torque at zero RPM, which makes for absolutely smashing acceleration. The Venturi Fetish is all-electric and will do 0-60 in 4.3 seconds.
But how do we cradle-to-cradle the battery packs? And how do I get some extra juice when I’m stuck on I-80 in Nevada?
Some Cool Blogs on metacool
I added a couple entries to the metacool blogroll today. As always, this list is carefully edited for your viewing pleasure, and each blog in some way touches on metacool’s theme of creating cool stuff. Here they are:
Christian Lindholm: an eclectic blog from a Nokia designer. I particularly like his posts on The quest for Authenticity, The SUV of shoes, and Gourmet Junk.
Relevant History: The personal blog of Alex Pang, a Research Director at IFTF. Sounds like he and I made up the majority of the non-D&D crowd at Neal Stephenson’s recent reading at Kepler’s.
Bobby Cox on Leadership
Worthwhile has a nice post on the leadership style of Bobby Cox, manager of the Atlanta Braves:
1) Check your ego
2) Make your team shine in the field
3) Remember that things are supposed to be fun
If you’re in the business of making good stuff happen, I think these are great guidelines for getting the most out of your team, especially if that team is made up of knowledge workers.
Don’t go soft on deadlines, though.
metacool Thought of the Day
The Henry WorkCycles Conference Bike
Will Sports Cars Die?… continued
I recently spent three wonderful weeks driving 4,500 miles around the western United States. My faithful steed was a front wheel drive Honda Accord with a 2.2 liter, 4 cylinder engine making 130 horsepower (not a dissimilar configuration to the original car of the future, the Citroen DS), and I averaged 34 mpg for the entire trip. Mind you, my right foot is an exotic alloy of lead, tungsten, and depleted uranium, so those mpg’s were acquired at average cruising speeds well above 80 mph.
Funny thing was, I saw only a few other sedans on the road. Everyone else was driving RV’s, SUV’s, or monster pickup trucks with stonkin’ 10-cylinder diesel motors. These wavering hulks scared the bejeezus out of me on the highway, and the hum of their knobby tires on the highway kept me awake at night in my tent. I saw one mow down some deer without stopping. Three tons of steel to transport a few hundred pounds of human DNA? How stupid and silly: this trip convinced me in a fundamental way that our current automotive trajectory isn’t sustainable. We need to radically change our conception of what a car/truck/RV should be and do.
So, the interesting question isn’t “will there be sports cars?”, but rather “what will cars be, and what will a sports car be in that context?”. Along those lines, here’s a thought from an AutoWeek profile of Leonardo Fioravanti, father of tasty sports machines such as the Ferrari P6 (!!) and Ferrari Daytona (!!!!):
"My expectations for the future are that a large part of the cars cannot be polluting. In my mind, we will have to put beside this kind of vehicle a number of sporty and exciting ones."
Fioravanti designed many of the most exquisite expressions of internal combustion. He’s Mr. Red, Loud and Fast. But now he’s saying we need silent cars, cars that take care of us, cars that let us sleep well at night, literally and figuratively. Think about it – I certainly will.
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metacool Thought of the Day
“The central console is deeply irksome, too, with all of its small buttons and secondary control thingies. You never know if they’re not working because they’re Italian and you can’t understand them or because they’re Italian and they’re broken. They make the best argument yet for i Drive.”
— Jamie Kitman, on the Maserati Coupe