Enjoyment = Flow = Innovation

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Ferrarigaragemetacool
Next time your hear someone couching innovation in terms of
complex processes, jargon, and esoteric management theories, challenge them
with this simple question: how do you plan to enable people here to
enjoy their work?

The more I learn about innovation, the more I believe that the
organizations who innovate year over year over year are those who treat
people well, who build cultures where enjoying one’s work — routinely reaching a state of flow — is not the exception, but the rule.  If you want
to be sustainably innovative, these places teach us, then solve for
human happiness.  Think JetBlue.  Gore.  Honda.

Or even Ferrari.  Ferrari, the grandest brand in the world, red speed
incarnate.  Because it operates within the byzantine world of Formula 1
racing, where teams spend upwards of $200 million per season to design,
build and campaign two tiny cars around the globe, Ferrari could easily
be a nasty, brutish place to work.  But it isn’t, and therein lies the
secret to its formidable record of victory: helping its people get into flow.
Jean Todt, the scuderia’s leader, says this about his approach to culture:

People will give their best at work if they are happy.  If people respect their co-workers, both professionally and personally, they will want them to be happy too, and will help each other when there are problems.

Could enjoyment really equal innovation?  Yes.  It’s as simple (but
difficult) a proposition as this: to innovate well, treat your people well.

Beausage

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I’d like to tell you about a new aesthetic term called "beausage".  It sounds French but it’s not; instead it’s a synthetic combination of the words beauty and usage, and describes the beauty that comes with using something.

Metacool1914mercedes

Beausage is:

  • Roman amphitheater steps whose faces are worn away by the tread of thousands and thousands of shoes
  • Stone chips on the hood of a Ferrari 250 which has been run hard and put away wet
  • A bike seat whose adapted form reflects that of its owner’s posterior
  • The look and feel of the cockpit of the old Mercedes pictured above (a jumble of replacement gauges and parts, obviously used a lot) — that’s 91 years of beausage!

How, you may ask, is beausage any different than patina?  Well, it’s certainly related, but different.  Patina is really more about surface level changes happening at a chemical level: oxidation, chemical stripping, and so on.  Beausage describes changes that happen in 3D where atoms get torn and stripped away, as occurs with scratches, tears, chips, and wear marks.  I used to say "patina" when what I really meant was "beausage".  It’s nice to have both.

I wish I could say I coined it, but the term beausage is the brainchild of Grant Petersen, grand pooh-bah of Rivendell Bicycle Works and probably the single most brilliant, holistic, and intuitive brand creator out there.  I mention Grant not only for intellectual attribution, but because he’s going to help us bring this back into the world of creating cool stuff.  Grant states that "In general, real materials develop beausage, and synthetics look like old junk.  It’s like a cowpokes’s old denim jacket, versus an old polyester leisure suit…". 

Beausage is something for all products and their designers to aspire to.  When the chrome on the back of my iPod scratched away, the resulting exposed grey plastic made the thing feel cheap and ephemeral — the opposite of what a good chrome finish should have done.  Imagine an iPod that looked better (beausage) the more it got used.  When you start to conceive of finishes not as veneers but as reservoirs of meaning via beausage, then you’re giving your customers something that will continue to provide satisfaction through the ages.

Venture Design, part 8

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AutoWeek has a great "compare and contrast" profile of Jesse James (from Monster Garage) and Paul Moller (Mr. Skycar).  Their respective forays into the realm of flying cars represent two very different approaches to venture design.

In one corner, we have Moller, who has spent millions and millions and years and years developing Skycar.  He has a PhD, and his venture is very much a left-brain, Master Plan kind of effort: lots of costly (time + money) engineering and analysis, supported by a huge machine for consuming large of amounts of money with big, complex prototypes.  So far he’s gotten the Skycar to hover a few feet off the ground.  It looks cool, though.

In the opposite side of the ring, we have Mr. James, ace welder and intuitive designer, an entrepreneur who knows his way around an English Wheel.  If you’ve ever seen Monster Garage, you know that Jesse is all about building things now, and doing things to the hilt.  Talk is cheap in the land of Jesse, and its a place where you build to know.  In stark contrast to Moller, Jesse’s flying car venture was a two-week, multi-thousand dollar affair, and it resulted in a Panoz Esperante that flew 350 yards.

Who learned more?  Big budget, big schedule, or lean budget, scrappy schedule?  Ventures that seek to crack open new market spaces (like flying cars — not a good market, mind you, but a new market nonetheless) face a central challenge of closing critical information gaps.  If you have suitcases of cash, and a lot of extra time on your hand, try the Moller model.  Otherwise, as a proponent of appropriate venture design, metacool has no choice but to endorse Mr. James.

Wired Meaning, Glamour’s Grace

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Virginia Postrel has written a wonderful NYT piece about the meaning of wires.  She writes:

One of the best places to find wireless glamour isn’t in ads for
high-tech products. It’s in images of stylish lamps in catalogs for
companies like Crate & Barrel and Chiasso. Whether through careful
composition or a little digital magic, the lamps seem to have no cords.
Like bills piled on the kitchen counter or muddy footprints on the
floor, the utilitarian realism of electrical wires would break the
spell of domestic perfection. Glamour’s grace is the art that conceals
art… What is truly glamorous about wireless technology is the fantasy that it requires no wires.

Is it possible to tell an authentic story made up of little lies?  I’m not so sure… a good story, maybe, but authentic, no.  Perhaps I don’t need to be told an authentic story to get me to buy a lamp or a laptop, just a good one.  I wonder.

Apple = Fractal

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Alex Pang of IFTF tells this charming tale of brand fractalness:

"At Stanford Shopping Center yesterday, we walked by this fine retail establishment.


Apple Store, Stanford Shopping Center, via Flickr

As we passed, my son (who’s three) shouted, "HEY! THAT’S THE IPOD STORE!!!"

Update, 28 April 2005: This morning I asked him, "How did you know the iPod Store was an iPod store? Did you see the iPods in it?"

He said, "No! It looks like an iPod!"’

He’s right.  It does look like an iPod.  When you’re doing this fractal brand thing right, everyone knows it.  Especially three-year-old, precocious design critics.

Again, good marketing takes guts

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A few months ago we were talking about Scoble’s observation to the effect that any marketing website without a RSS feed should be flushed down the toilet. 

He’s right, and here’s why:  synthetic fables created by ad firms simply can’t compete with honest, soulful stories told direct to you and me from another human being.

Case in point:  if you’re a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers, do you feel more soulfully connected to the brand if you read this or this?  The answer is clearly the latter.  Why?  Because RSS combined with authentic, human content signals a new paradigm of marketing communications.  The brands and people who will succeed in this new paradigm are the ones with real stories and the guts to tell them without the mediocrity-inducing filter of marketing "professionals".  Good marketing takes guts.

metacool Thought of the Day

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"It’s the vehicle’s design that first forges that emotional bond between product and consumer… So often it simply boils down to this:

‘Do I like the way this car looks or not?’ 

And I think that’s part of the reason this industry is headed for a new golden age of design. That’s great news for all of us who dream about beautiful cars and trucks. It makes it a very exciting time to be in this business. Because we’re getting back to what it’s all about: Building the stuff that dreams are made of."

– Bob Lutz