I never thought I’d see the day:
Yes, I am a card-carrying member of the Fabricland Sewing Club. The shame, the shame!
Here’s the deal: I’m building some prototypes for a new product. For inspiration, and for product design, I needed fabric. Lots of it. Apparently, you get a 40%-off discount when you’re a member.
The rest is history.
Eleanor Roosevelt said that the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Do you dream?
Do you believe?
I think that dreaming is an essential survival skill in business, in work, in life.
I’ve just come through a month without dreams. A month of projects, tasks, requests, work. Basically, stuff.
The problem with stuff is that stuff happens. Stuff accumulates. And then stuff obliterates.
Passion dies. Enthusiasm fades. Curiosity subsides. Joy flees: stuff has conquered. We have seen the enemy, and the enemy is us.
In case the problem for business, for work, is not perfectly clear, here it is: creativity depends on all those good things I’ve just mentioned. Just try to be creative without passion, enthusisasm, curiosity, joy.
Good luck.
Without creativity, nothing new and exciting happens. Without creativity, you are just one more drone in the faceless masses. Without creativity, your business is just one more me-too nothing-new ho-hum big stinking deal.
You need dreams.
You need big beautiful dreams.
And then you need to believe.
When a company has no dreams, there is no belief. Without belief – in something, anything – the company has no soul. Without a soul, it’s a dead man walking, an empty automaton … a skeleton that’s still, somehow, stubbornly, moving.
But don’t expect anyone get excited about it. Not the people who work there – to them the company is a payment on a car, on a mortgage. And if not the people who work there, why the wider world?
You must have a dream. They must be beautiful dreams. And then you must believe. Otherwise, what’s the point? Go flip burgers, and ask would you like fries with that.
This morning, at 6:07, I found a dream. It is beautiful.
And I believe.
Up at 6:20 this morning (late), skipped breakfast. Left house at 7:20.
At work at 8:10 – working in Bellingham today. Juggled projects and priorities until noon, then had lunch with my boss, Kevin. Worked until 4:45.
Home at 5:45 (border lineup was huge). Eating until 6:00. 15 minutes of hockey – Buffalo Sabres beating the Carolina Hurricanes 1-0, then out with Gabrielle, Aidan, and Ethan to Ethan’s baseball practice.
While Ethan was practicing with his team, I threw the ball with Gabrielle and Aidan – they’re both getting better at catching and Gabrielle is really starting to throw well. Some hitting practice too – Gabrielle straightens her arms a little too early on some of her swings, but she’s working to avoid that and had 3 or 4 big, big hits.
Home at 8:00. Kids have to get ready for bed. Aidan needs to be changed; the older kids have their ‘reading time.’ (The choice is: go to bet at 8:00, or read and stay up until 9:00.)
8:30. Aidan’s in bed, Ethan and Gabrielle are reading. I can start to relax. Teresa reminds me of some work that I need to do in the gutters. I promise my Saturday away.
Tired.
(But, it is a good tired!)
Is your business beautiful?
That sounds like a strange question – mostly because it is. But it’s a good question. It’s a question more people should ask of their business, processes, strategies, marketing, and products.
Why?
Well, think about it: what is beauty?
Beauty is the marriage of structure and function. It’s elements in careful but dynamic balance. It’s symmetry and simplicity. And above all, beauty is memorable.
Structure and function
Structure is only present where it is functional. All that is not functional is not structural. It has been abstracted out. All that is functional grows out of the structure. There are no missing pieces, and nothing is glued on as an afterthought.
Functions that are structural are solid; they are embedded in physical reality or organization. Structures that are functional are needed; they are not waste or empires or holdovers from a previous age. Are all the structures in your business functional? Are all the functions in your processes structural?
Balance
Is your business in balance? Example: your product portfolio. Do you have a mix of products at varying stages in their life cycles? Some that are new and still incurring product development costs. Some that are in young and still growing, finding their feet. Some that are in middle age: cash cows that will must be milked to the fullest before they dry up. Some that are tottering around on crutches that need to be put out to pasture.
Symmetry
Symmetry is an attribute of processes. If you mapped your workflow, would you find dangling loops? Winding paths? Dead ends?
The more symmetry, the better flow. The more loops, the more cost you’re building into your model.
Simplicity
Simplicity is as much as needed and no more than what is required. Simplicity is as simple as possible and complex as necessary. Are all your moving parts radically simple? If your company is more than two years old, and if you are not married to continuous process improvement, the answer is no: stuff happens.
Stuff accumulates. Over time, stuff overwhelms. Stuff is money, because stuff burns time. Which means that stuff is also lost opportunity. Getting rid of stuff is giving yourself the gift of focus.
Memorability
Is your business, marketing plan, product, division, whatever, memorable? Memorable things make an impression on people. Things that make an impression on people have a chance to matter. Things that do not make an impression on people do not, by definition, matter.
You want to matter. You want your business to matter. The only way to matter is to do something remarkable. What do you do that is remarkable?
. . .
. . .
Making your business beautiful is making your business lean. And focused. And proportioned.
Is your business beautiful?
If not, surgery is the only option.
[tags] business, process, improvement, beautiful, simplicity, john koetsier [/tags]
I’ve been following Seth Godin’s blog lately.
He’s the extremely clueful author of Ideavirus, among other books.
So in a recent post on cargo-cult marketing I found it pleasantly surprising that he states “we have no idea why some ideas spread and others don’t.”
The post is about copying things you see successful companies doing, just like Pacific Islander cargo cults blindly copied US Army procedures like making an airstrip, creating a air traffic control hut, etc. The problem?
… just because you copy the elements that apparently made something work before doesn’t mean that you’re going to be guaranteed that it will work again.
Good point.
More interesting, though, is his admission that we just don’t know why some ideas spread and others don’t. I mean, he’s the expert.
We know something about how ideas spread, through Godin’s work, as well as Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.
But why?
Some things catch. Some things don’t. Perhaps the best explanation is a Biblical one:
The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.
Which is not to say, as Damon Runyon observed, that you shouldn’t bet that way.
Just don’t expect to win every hand.
[tags] seth godin, ideavirus, marketing, innovation, ideas, malcolm gladwell, john koetsier [/tags]
A company with a conference table this cool:
And one that is still bold enough to put a Flash movie as the first thing you see on their site (remember skipintro?):
… must be a pretty cool company. And indeed, if you check out their guiding principles (aka ‘frogism’), they are:
1. StrawberryFrog means working SmarterFaster.
2. We are humans – everyone is entitled to fun in their lives.
3. No one is big enough to be independent of others; none of us are as wise as all of us.
4. Ideas can come from anywhere.
5. Ideas need time and space to grow.
6. We spend other people’s money as if it were our own.
7. The best research is subjective, creative, informs and inspires.
8. Be honest.
9. Don’t mistake comfort for good work.
10. When we develop work we ask ourselves: is it wonderful? Does it move you? Does it make you curious? Is it a simple idea? Is it culturally authentic?
11. Keep it simple, not simplistic.
12. Trust your instincts.
13. Take chances.
14. We don’t have to be big; we have to be good and profitable.
15. No excuses.
16. Smile.
I think I would like to work at a company like that. Wouldn’t you?
[tags] strawberry frog, advertising, business 2.0, netherlands, john koetsier [/tags]
I sometimes shop at Chapters Indigo. But only when I have too … like when I get a gift certificate from IDC Canada for participating in one of their research studies.
I hate shopping there, because the site is always, without exception, slow. I have never had it respond quickly. Double plus annoying. Plus, the selection is never what you get at Amazon. And you can never find as much information about what you’re buying as at Amazon.
But 25 bucks is 25 bucks, so every month or so after dutifully filling out my survey, I head on over to Chapters to find something to blow it on.
And here are two things I particularly hate:
Please, please, IDC: move to Amazon gift certificates.
. . .
. . .
You know, I guess if you actually count all the reasons above, there’s actually 5 reasons why Chapters Indigo sucks. What can I say – bonus day at Sparkplug 9.
… you’ve left the boilerplate text in your website after launching.
[tags] fortuitous, beta, launch, web 2.0, funny, john koetsier [/tags]
OK, the title is accurate. But that’s not really why I’m making this post.
Actually, what’s going on here is that I’m testing Apple’s iWeb.
Teresa mentioned that she’d like to have something from time to time that would help her create a digital scrapbook, and so I said I’d look for something for her. It needs to be simple, needs to tie into all our digital stuff (which mostly means iPhoto), and needs to be fast.
So I gave iWeb a shot. Here’s the result: some of the pictures we took in La Jolla this spring.
Total time: about 15 minutes, most of which was picture selection.
Drag and drop, baby!
The rumors had been around for some time: PowerSchool was on the auction block. Now it’s official.
But why? Why did Apple sell PowerSchool? It appears that the division was not profitable enough for Apple, and there were always rumors of issues around the development of new versions of PowerSchool.
But I think there are two key reasons.
One: Not selling more Macs
One is that PowerSchool did not actually help Apple sell more Macs.
When Apple bought the company, PowerSchool had about 10,000 school clients, if memory serves. (I did a research project on student information systems (SIS) for my company about 5-6 years ago.)
The theory was that with PowerSchool as the foot in the door, Apple would be able to sell more Macs to education. And the magic of bundling would also make selling PowerSchool easier in schools that already had a significant Mac prescence.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, unfortunately, there is.
Apple’s penetration in education has at best held even over the past 5-6 years. More likely, it’s trended down. In fact, PowerSchool didn’t help Apple sell more Macs.
In retrospect, it’s not too hard to see why.
First of all, schools make buying decisions on SIS systems maybe every 10 years. It’s like buying Oracle. You don’t switch to DB2 next year just because somebody gives you a 10% off coupon.
Secondly, they are purchases made with two significantly different audiences. The people making buying decisions on SIS systems are principals, districts, and states. On the other hand, classroom teachers often have significant input into instruction computer buying practices.
And third, it’s not a works-better-together scenario. Because it’s web-based, PowerSchool will work for anyone with any modern computers: Windows, Mac, Linux, you name it. Have web browser, will travel. Same thing for most of the other modern SIS systems on the market. That’s as it should be: back-office and front-office applications are de-coupled and independently upgradable.
Two: Educational content on iPods
But the piece of the deal that’s most intriguing to me is the committment on the part of Pearson to bring their educational content to iPod.
There is no bigger company in educational technology than Pearson. They already have the leading SIS software in the market, SASI xp. But that’s not all they do.
Pearson is a quintessential international megacorp, with businesses all over the world. However, they’re biggest in publishing. In educational publishing, they make textbooks, they publish novels for age-targeted audiences, and more – particularly, curriculum-related products. As they so modestly state:
We are the leading pre K-12 curriculum, testing, and software company in the US, reaching every student and teacher in that country with one or more of our products and services. We offer a wide range of solutions that integrate our instructional, assessment, and reporting capabilities. These instructional offerings include basal and supplemental programmes, and technology-delivered adaptive learning solutions.
Well.
What if you were a company that had a strong historical presence in education with slightly declining market share, but also had an incredibly hot product in the general consumer market that can display text, play audio, and show movies?
You might try to make that incredibly hot product the basis for an educational trojan horse. If so, you’d probably be a well-known fruit-flavored company.
In fact, that’s just what I predicted three weeks ago. After, just for the heck of it, I put one of my company’s courses on my iPod, the lightbulb went on and it became clear to me that the iPod is a perfect vehicle for mobile, personalized course content delivery.
Not so good for interaction, necessarily. And not something that will take the place of discussion, teachers, and all the other needed accoutrements of school. But certainly an excellent way to distributed course text, images, audio, and video.
Education has been looking for e-books for some time now. Maybe the iPod … particularly a next-generation model with a larger screen … is precisely that, but we never realized it until now.
Hmmm. Starts some bells ringing, doesn’t it?
If you were Apple, wouldn’t that be something you wanted? You bet. And how would you get it? You might start by partnering with one of the largest education curriculum and supplemental materials producers out there.
You might start, in other words, with Pearson Education.
I take a ton of screenshots.
See something cool on the web: screenshot. See something I want to blog about: screenshot. Funky error condition: screenshot.
But it leaves a mess on my desktop: Picture 1, Picture 2, Picture 3, Picture 4 … you get the picture. (Ha. Ha.)
So it was very cool to see the secret-screen-capture tip on Apple’s new Pro website. This combination of keys takes a screenshot … and saves it immediately to your clipboard.
Meaning that you can take that screenshot, jump into Photoshop, and paste it right into a document. That’s cool – and that’s fast. So fast I thought I’d take a screenshot of the tip:
There’s only one problem: you need 13 fingers. (Well almost.) Here’s the key sequence:
Sorta like this:
[tags] apple, mac, keyboard, screenshots, screen captures, john koetsier, photoshop [/tags]
Better is boring. Better sucks. Better is evolutionary, incremental. Better is moving the sticks a few more yards down the football field. Big deal.
Different is in. Different is sexy. Different is new. Different is exciting. Different is brandable. Different is attention-grabbing. Different is a pattern interrupter that breaks through the attention clutter and gets noticed.
From Seth Godin:
Every day, in almost every office of almost every organization, people are going to get together to make something better.
Making things better is a natural impulse, especially if you want to grow.
Unfortunately, better is not always the right strategy. Better is not always superior to different.
And from Mike Wagner:
We’re bombarded with over 3,000 marketing messages a day – and we remember next to nothing …
and
… as Kathy Sierra has so carefully articulated, the human mind comes with a crap filter. The mind filters out sameness and responds to different.
Different is revolutionary. Different is unexpected. Different is surprising.
In the neverending mashed-up undifferentiated stream of data we experience every day, unexpectedness and surprise are welcome, even craved.
As Chaucer said six hundred years ago: “Men evere seeke newfangle.”
You got it, baby.
[tags] differentiation, branding, innovation, novelty, chaucer, purple cow, seth godin, john koetsier [/tags]
Wired has an important article in their June issue on what they’ve dubbed crowdsourcing. What is crowdsourcing?
Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D.
Jeff Howe, the author of Crowdsourcing, gives plenty of examples: it’s people uploading photos to iStockphoto where companies and people who need photos can buy them on the cheap. It’s VH1 sourcing videos that “ordinary” people have uploaded to the internet and building a show around them. It’s Proctor & Gamble finding underemployed brainiacs who solve thorny science and engineering problems at InnoCentive. And it’s Amazon’s Mechanical Turk … outsourcing fundamentally simple and repetitive problems that humans still do better than machines.
Other examples that Howe did not give but could have include the recent development of services that enable bloggers to sell their stories to mainstream media companies … newspapers, magazines, etc. … for a fraction of what a staff writer would cost. (For the life of me I cannot find that link back – help!) Or imagine excellent podcasts being paid for retransmission on satellite or terrestrial radio. I could see this happening with Venture Voice easily.
To me, this is incredibly relevant to the discussion on my recent We Are Not Consumers post. I wrote it in quasi-response to Pete Blackshaw’s Consumer-generated media blog … and Pete responded with a lengthy comment explaining why he still prefers the term “consumer.”
However, as the Wired article lists, 57% of 12- to 17-year-olds online are contributing to the web in one way or another:
Late last year the Pew Internet & American Life Project released a study revealing that 57 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds online – 12 million individuals – are creating content of some sort and posting it to the Web.
This is literally changing the world. However, if you’re a company that wants to take advantage of these new opportunities to get more work done cheaper, or to get work done that you’ve always wanted to do but could never do affordably, everything that is presented here relies on 4 things:
Friends of our who recently moved to Alberta just had twins: Kathryn and Larissa.
They were born a month early – preemies – and have been in hospital for 20 days … all their young lives. Congrats Wayne and Adriana!
They emailed this photo:
That’s the number of kilometres Teresa and I drove on our recent road trip to California.
(I thought I’d finally post it just to remove it from my list of to-blog articles!)
Note: 1500 of those kilometres were done on the first killer day: Abbotsford BC to San Francisco, CA.
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
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