"It’s a bridge with great character.  It tells a story."

— Santiago Calatrava, on his new Sundial Bridge in Redding, California

“You see this? This is this. This ain’t somethin’ else. This is this!”

— Robert De Niro in The Deer Hunter

Just read an interesting article, Artisan Bakers Prosper in Low-Carb World.  As people figure out that Bimbo white bread makes them go blimpo, they’re also learning that real bread made from real ingredients by real bakers like Red Hen Baking can be something else altogether.  Something really good, in fact.  Says Gina Piccolino of the Bread Bakers Guild of America:

[Artisan Bakers have] taken the time to educate customers on what it is they are actually buying when they’re buying artisan products… Multigrain, whole-grain, whole-wheat kinds of products are good for you.

There’s a lesson here for all of us trying to create winning products in the 21st century.  Gone is the day where brilliant packaging and glossy advertising wrapped around a mediocre product create winning offerings.  No, now people want Acme Walnut Levain instead of WonderBread.  They want a soulful Mazda 3 instead of a Ford Focus.  They want a burrito from Andales, not Taco Bell. 

The market winners of today are those products which stand on their intrinsic merit alone, not on what their creators say we should think about them.  We the consuming populace are the final arbiters of quality and we want great stuff created by product crazies who couldn’t – and wouldn’t – be doing anything else.

Probably because they are by definition uniquely personal works, hot rods are hotbeds of “doing it to the hilt”.  A few weeks ago we examined the Zausner Torpedo.  Jay Leno has something well, a bit bigger to show you.

Jay Leno knows what it means to take something and really do it to the hilt.  His latest hot rod is powered by the motor from an old M-47 Patton tank.  For those of you out there who aren’t exactly into tanks, you’re not really supposed to put tank motors into a car.  It’s just not right.  But it is to the hilt.  Here’s what Jay has to say about it:

The car weighs 9500 pounds–nearly 5 tons, but only one-twentieth of what the tank weighed. This thing is faaasssttt. Best of all, it’s hilarious to drive. The size is what’s the funniest. The engine alone is 6 ft. long. The car looks like a roadster on steroids.

Man, it’s great to see someone doing things to the hilt.

"When I was at Audi, it took us 15 years to change the company… By the time the Ford brand is really where I want it, I will be ready to retire. I have 10 to 12 years. You scratch away at it one car at a time."
— J Mays, Ford

(Your products drive the brand and ultimately the value you create in the marketplace; brands on their own don’t create value)

John Maeda of MIT is leading an effort called the Simplicity Design Workshop. As quoted by Jessie Scanlon in the New York Times, Maeda says that “simplicity is an endangered quality in the digital world, and it is time to break free from technology’s intimidating complexity.”

Along with several other designers, Maeda has formulated a list of the fundamental tenets of using simplicity as a way to design technological solutions:

1) Heed cultural patterns

2) Be transparent

3) Edit

4) Prototype

What I find stunning about these design principles is that they apply equally well to the domain of designing business models and venture structures appropriate to the realities of the 21st century. We need ventures that are willing to live in symbiosis with the cultures that surround them. We need ventures that are willing to be honest and transparent in the financial dealings — more of the old HP Way and less Enron kniving. We need ventures that edit what the scope of what they do, so that what they do end up taking on is rich with meaning; we’ve got too much generic, me-too crap in the world today. Finally, we need ventures that are willing to prototype their way to a better and ever-evolving state of being.

“The reign of the poetical has started.”
– Philippe Starck

“We became a $6.6 billion brand because of design. To compete, we knew 10 years ago with the original founding team that we had to have a design group, because that would be our competitive advantage over value players such as Kmart or Target. We create our lines and the whole experience around design. If we were just another value player, where would we be today?”
– Jenny Ming, President, Old Navy Gap Inc.

“I see us as being in the art business. Art, entertainment and mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also happens to provide transportation.”
— Bob Lutz (aka The Man)