I really like technohumanism and Our RISD, John Maeda’s latest new blogs.  For such as busy guy, Professor Maeda sure has a lot of blogs — I count four on the metacool roster of cool destinations.  And maybe that’s the point: if you’re using a blog as a place to fool around with ideas, it helps open your eyes to the world, which then makes it easier to see the world, which then makes it easy to have things you’d like to blog about, and so forth.  Of course, it helps a lot if you start out with John Maeda’s curiosity and energy!

If you have access to Monocle magazine, check out their recent profile of Professor Maeda’s new role as the President of RISD.  Here’s a quote where he is talking about where students of the future may come from:

"I want all these under-served areas that are massively creative and
unique. How do you get to where the missing talent is? How
do you find raw talent? Maybe it’s ageless, maybe it’s people who are
60-plus. I think all these stigmas can maybe go away."

If you’re a reader of metacool, you know that greatly admire John’s philosophy of doing both.  If I were 17 again and looking at places to pursue an undergraduate education, I would look quite seriously at RISD, for it is a place  all about exploration across boundaries.  When I was 19, after a harrowing freshman and sophomore years that felt like I was leaving my soul at the entrance to campus, I figured out a way to do both, and ever sense I’ve been happiest in life when I’m trying to do both.  Now, it’s tough to do both at times (and I’ve been caught doing too much of both in the last six months), but life gets better and richer this way.  Why choose?  Do both.  One blog?  Why not two blogs?  One job?  Why not two?  How about three?  The only sell out is selling yourself short with false tradeoffs. 

This is the second of my three favorite talks from TED2008 (Jill Bolte Taylor’s being the first).

Here Benjamin Zander delivers a nice insight in to what makes well-performed classical music a sublime aesthetic experience.  But what impressed me so much about Zander’s talk was his message of leadership being about making eyes bright.  This is a truly moving TED talk, and an informative one as well.

"If we have a strong sense of purpose, good friends, loving
relationships, meaningful work, and good health it’s very likely that
we will also quite frequently experience happiness in our lives. Yet,
happiness is a by-product of pursuing those other goals and I think
that analogy applies to business as well. In my business experience,
profits are best achieved by not making them the primary goal of the
business. Rather, long-term profits are the result of having a deeper
business purpose, great products, customer satisfaction, employee
happiness, excellent suppliers, community and environmental
responsibility—these are the keys to maximizing long-term profits. The
paradox of profits is that, like happiness, they are best achieved by
not aiming directly for them."

– John Mackey

Look at an organization which is doing great stuff in the world, and you’ll very likely see leadership which knows whereof it speaks.  Not leadership who got there by doing something unrelated.  I’ve written recently about leaders who know what they are doing because they’ve done it before they were leaders.  Let’s call them "do it – know it – do it" leaders.  These are folks such as Takeo Fukui (Honda) and John Heinricy (GM) as exemplars of this.  My friend John Lilly of Mozilla is another good example, and the list goes on and on: Steve Jobs, Wendelin Wiedeking, A.G. Lafley — you get the picture. 

Roger Penske is another exemplar of this ethos, as illustrated by this New York Times article from a few years ago.  Here is a telling example of "do it- know it – do it" leadership at work, describing the scene around the Penske garages as Team Penske prepares to race at the Indy 500:

Early Friday, as crews prepared for the final practice before the
race, a Penske employee, wearing a crisp white shirt, black pants and
black shoes, stood outside the garage, using a paper towel to wipe down
barricades printed with Penske’s logo.

Most teams do not have
such barricades. Penske’s employees wear uniforms with embroidered
logos, not stitched-on patches. They share one big toolbox, but each
crew member has a drawer. Parts that can be polished are polished —
every day.

"The real success is in the details," Penske said as
he sat behind the desk in his motor home Friday. "I’ve tried to be a
leader by getting my own hands dirty."

Then he washes them.
Penske cannot say for sure that being fastidious off the racetrack
results in being fast on it. What he can say, though, is that he has
created a culture that has fostered loyalty. And loyal employees
produce results.

Executional excellence is one part of the story.  Knowing which details to focus on is something that comes from experience in working in operational settings.  Dirty trucks don’t show up on a P&L statement, at least not directly, but as a statement of brand integrity, they most certainly do over time.  To have a sense for this, you’d have to get out of the boardroom and take a look around.  But just looking isn’t enough.  When you look, you need pattern recognition to see what is important, and that ability to see deeply can only be informed by relevant personal experience.

Morale and motivation and alignment are the other big wins of "do it – know it – do it" leadership environments.   Al Unser Jr. is quoted in the article as saying ""He is the one car owner of all the car owners I drove for who truly understands what a driver is going through out there."  Racing drivers put their existence on the line when they go out on the track, so it’s easy to understand the importance to them of having someone who understand what they’re going through, who will demand perfection in mechanical preparation as Penske does.  But why shouldn’t that be the standard for any organization?  If I’m going to ask you to do something, especially something really tough and hard such as creating something meaningful from a blank sheet of paper, shouldn’t I understand your task deeply enough to be able to do things that increase the odds that you will come out of it victorious and healthy and happy?  Otherwise why would you take the plunge with me instead of with an organization with better odds of success. 

If not for that, why are we all here?

If you haven’t yet made Presentation Zen a part of your blog diet, I encourage you to do so.  PowerPoint presentations trying to do what should be better done with prose are destined to fail.  Getting an audience to believe in what you’re saying, to go somewhere with you, is better done with spoken words over images.

For example, what better way to sum up the state of the Yahoo!/Microsoft transaction than this wonderful image, brought to us by Brad Feld? 

Touché, my friend.  Touché.