Tiny Gigantic

We’ve had some posts here before calling for a re-imagining of education (here & here), but after reading this post on School 2.0, I’m certain that education will change whether we plan it or not. Hopefully it’ll change in a good way.

And on a related note, the NYT asks if the 4-year degree is worth anything anymore.

My good friend Rob Simons wrote a book called Things Kept Burning. It’s a collection of 23 short to super-short stories, all of which kinda make you feel funny. He’s got a way of making you see his characters naked, and then, seeing yourself in them. After which, you think about yourself naked, in awkward places and situations, and all mental hell breaks loose. You get my point. Buy the book.

Often we run across astoundingly bad communications that somehow made it past the editors (if there were any) and out into the world. Some are confusing, some are too obvious, and some are just plain bad. From here on out, we’ll be intermittently posting photos of the offending communications and making suggestions for what they should have been. We’re calling it You shoulda hired us. This one seems to be the name of a band. Sorta clunky, if you ask me. Hell, even Underdog Uprising has better rhythm. Our suggestion:

Underdog Rising

Got any other good ideas?

So we were eating our pancakes and sausage this morning, and when the coffee kicked in, we kinda got on a talking jag. We were talking about whether BurningMan is a business or what? Because if you’ve been there you know that the whole thing is a huge work of art, and also that that it makes tons of revenue. This is really fucking cool. Because it shows that life’s rewards don’t only go to the mercenaries, and that it’s possible to become extremely prosperous by focusing on creativity and generosity—two things that usually don’t play a huge role in a business plan.

Previously, you’d never hear a businessperson described as an artist, and vice-versa. But now, the idea of business seems to fit more comfortably with the idea of art. We think it’s got something to do with a change in businesses and the people who start them. More and more, we see companies adopting multiple bottom lines that factor culture, community, and wellbeing (which are traditional domains of art) into their accounting, right alongside money. Entrepreneurs are now looking to build companies that don’t just make money, but actually create a positive change in the world. They want their work to mean something, and that’s pretty well aligned with the spirit of art.

Here’s a bunch of encouraging evidence:

Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class & his blog
Dan Pink
Good Magazine
Cambrian House
Your Name on Toast
Pixelotto
False Profit

Anyone wanna add to this list?

Pretty smart stuff from Bong Spirit Import company. I really, really, hope that you can repurpose the bong, er, bottle, when it’s empty.

Over at This Blog Sits at the, there’s a good post on building reputation and identity in a way that defies traditional branding logic.

Here’s how it starts:

When theatre people say why Cate Blanchett is a good actress, they say she is:

* transformational and fluid
* open
* filled with contradiction
* uncontrolled at the core
* elusive
* ambiguous

Hah! Traditionally, this is the “no fly zone” of the branding world. It may do for actresses to work the more difficult and meaning rich tropes. Not for brands. No, brands preferred a rhetoric that emphasized emphasis, repetition, clarity and, um, emphasis.

But why can’t the brand be more like Cate?

It’s an important question to ask. See where it leads here.

This viral art campaign invites you to download templates for printing your own cold sores. What an awesome idea.

Via Wooster Collective

There’s an interesting post on Seth Godin’s blog about name tags and large groups of people. Apparently, homeboy loves name tags:

…doing name tags properly transforms a meeting. Here’s why:
a. people don’t really know everyone, even if they think they do.
b. if you don’t know someone’s name, you are hesitant to talk to them.
c. if you don’t talk to them, you never get to know them and you both lose.
d. if you are wearing a name tag, it’s an invitation to start a conversation.

At first read, I thought he was advocating sticking your name on your breast-pocket like the rest of the herd and hoping someone will talk to you simply because they can read your name—and maybe he is—but I think there’s more to it than that. What he’s really advocating is doing something, anything really, that will invite conversation between strangers. And in that regard, he’s right on.

But to my mind, name tags alone don’t cut it anymore. Nor do the 2-sided lanyards they often hang from. These things reek of a meeting or presentation where power point rules, and every one’s got their elevator-pitch nailed to their foreheads. These are the kinds of gathering that make me want to kill myself.

But if you can do something to start a real conversation—and if that conversation’s about the people you’d like to talk to, rather than about what you’d like them to know about you—you’re gonna go far.

This doesn’t happen by accident or by chance. You gotta want it. You gotta work at it. And you gotta prepare for it. The world’s best pick-up artists are constantly honing their game and developing ways to engage other people. So come bearing gifts or conversation pieces that anyone can engage with. Create a game whose success depends on people working together. Learn as much as you can about the people who will be in attendance so you can draw the interesting ones into conversation. You’ll wind up getting a lot more out of it than just a name.

Do you have any other good suggestions for creating conversation with strangers?

The Digital Horizon is a tech column in Fast Company, and this month’s piece is too dopey to leave alone.

The article makes just a few points, which I’ll summarize here:

1. What do people want from a website? No one knows for sure.

2. “Your site is your virtual corporate headquarters” and so you should expect that no one will want to hang out there, just like your real corporate headquarters.

3. Instead of asking your audience to come to your site, you should bring your web content to where they are, and you do this by letting your content be embedded in blogs and MySpace pages and the like.

I think this is a strange line of thinking.

First, it’s pretty obvious what people want from a website. They want community (forums, social networks, etc.), useful tools (search, maps, payment tools, tax calculators, etc.), shopping (duh), or content (writings, videos, music, games, data, etc.).

Second, your site is not your virtual corporate headquarters. Your intranet is your virtual corporate headquarters, and your site is the hub of your company’s virtual relationships. It’s not a good idea to just give up on it and let it be boring. (And as an aside, notice that the author knows that typical bricks-and-mortar corporate spaces are inhospitable, and yet doesn’t question whether that’s a good thing, or a good model for a site. Strange.)

Third, most companies don’t produce content, so they don’t have anything they can make available to embed in on MySpace or whatnot. Most companies only do messaging, and they make no attempt to reward people’s attention. In my opinion, this is the main reason why most company websites suck. And if they fixed that, they wouldn’t have to depend on other companies to distribute whatever content they might have.

I used to listen to Brian Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy all the time. I had no idea he didn’t make that title up.

Turns out, he got it from a Mao-era Peking Opera. The image above is the book of postcards from the show. Here’s the description:

The modern revolutionary Peking opera “Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy”, carefully revised, perfected and polished to the last detail with our great leader Chairman Mao’s loving care, now glitters with surpassing splendour… [It] is a splendid victory for Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line on literature and art.

See the postcards and read the plot summary here.

So we’ve written a play. It’s one-act play, and kind of a meta-thing.

It’s called I’ll Know It When I See It.

Here’s the script:

CLIENT: We need to do a brand refresh. Do you do that? Do you do brand refreshes?

DESIGNER, COPYWRITER, OR OTHERWISE CREATIVE TYPE (henceforth to be referred to as DCOOCT): Oh, yeah. We’re pros. Just fill out our proprietary Creative Brief worksheet, so we can get a better idea of what exactly you’re looking for.

CLIENT: Stellar. What we really need is a logo that pops. And we want it to be really edgy, which is why we came to you.

Weeks, months, and sometimes years pass.

DCOOCT: We think we’ve really nailed it on this round. Really edgy in just the right way”can somebody get this projector to work?

Weeks, months, and sometimes years pass.

CLIENT: Logos 2, 7, and 32 are getting there. But they don’t really say “integrity, trust, or innovation,and they’re a little too trendy-feeling. We want less “in your face” and more “edge.” Do you know what I mean?

Weeks, months, and sometimes years pass. The show goes on forever. Seriously. For. Fucking. Ever.

. . .

The other name for this play is Deja-Vu, and it’s a meta-play because it’s being performed right now at creative agencies all over the world by people who aren’t even acting. In fact, it’s the longest running show on Madison Avenue, even though we wrote it just now.

The problem with “edgy” is that it doesn’t mean anything. Which is not to say that people don’t mean anything when they say it. Of course they do. It’s just that “edgy” means different things to different people, so as a piece of creative direction it’s useless. Or worse, it’s an epic wild-goose chase, which ends with you getting your ass kicked by a goose that doesn’t even exist.

When someone asks you for “edgy”, what they really mean is, “I’ll know it when I see it.” Which is no way to start a project.

It’s worth noting that “edgy” comes in many disguises. Sometimes it’s called “trendy” or “in your face” or “fresh” or any number of subjective things.

No matter the words they use, the client’s gonna need some help turning all those abstractions into things you can work with. And if you do that, you’ll help close the curtain on our tired little play. Take a bow.

Business Week has an interesting article about Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson’s latest so-crazy-it-just-might-work endeavor. And while the audacity of the project itself is quite amazing, what inspired me was London design firm Seymourpowell‘s conceptual thinking about the interior of the world’s first commercial spaceship.

The firm was charged with designing conceptual interiors for the spaceship, and wasn’t at all fazed by the prospect of designing something for which there was no precedent. As principal Dick Powell explains, they simply saw it as a human problem…

It’s a rare and beautiful thing for an organization to make this claim and actually mean it. Beautiful.

These images were made by tossing a camera into the air. Turns out there’s a whole community built around this technique. And here’s a how-to.

Here’s the last set of simple ways to use creativity to make your work better. (check out previous posts 1 & 2) To be clear, we didn’t make this up, and we don’t know who did. But we’re still surprised at how much talk there is around these small ways of working, and how little action. We’d like to change that.

Learn every day
If your professional development happens only when there isn’t any other work to do, you’re not going to get any better at your work. So make the time to teach yourself something new. No doubt it’s a tough thing to do when there’s a deadline approaching, but new perspectives are the key to great work. And great work should matter more than any deadline.

Invest in failure
Some lessons can only be learned the hard way, and failure is often the best teacher. You are in the business of creativity, which means it’s your job to experiment and try things that you’ve never tried before. If an idea or an approach fails, it’s a good lesson and a step toward the right answer. And if the idea works, it will most likely do more than anyone could have expected. So make failure a regular part of your day.

Take action
If you think something needs to be done to make your work, your culture, or your job better, do it. Don’t wait to be told. It’s pretty likely that lots of people in your company would be psyched that somebody’s finally doing something. In fact, your bosses probably would be too. So go ahead and do the thing that needs to be done. It’s your company, and it will be what you make it.

So how does it feel to be your own boss?

(Oh, and you can download the full pdf of all three parts from the middle column. It’s called How to clean out your desk. Enjoy)

In following the Z-list as it transformed into Z-list 2.0—a more usable version of the original Z—I was reminded how highly incestuous the blogosphere really is: Everybody’s got a blogroll, with their favorite blogs on it. And presumably, they read these blogs. And the bloggers who write the blogs that have been blogrolled, presumably add the blogrolling blogs to their own blogroll. And so there’s all this content (some of it quite good, and some of it quite not) on these blogs that’s been linked to and excerpted and reworded and attributed and praised and debated and recirculated by the bloggers who claim to read said blogs.

So here’s where I’m having trouble: if blogs like those on the Z-lists aim primarily to expand the community, it seems like it might make sense to target an audience unlike the Z-lists. Doesn’t it?

That said, preaching to the choir is way easier than converting the savages who, arguably, are more in need of our help. This is not to say that we bloggers can’t and don’t help each other. We can and do. But I think the people we’re really trying to help maybe aren’t necessarily blogosphere savvy, and don’t know how or where to access all the information we’re trying to give them. So to help them, we should be posting our blogs in places where the internet intersects with another medium: tv-station websites, newspaper websites, print magazine websites, and even radio-station websites. Bloggers might not go here for information. But regular people might.

Anyone know any other ways?

Photo by Tony Northrup.

Link.
via Neatorama

Here’s our second set of simple ways to keep creativity alive in your work. This shit isn’t rocket science. Actually, it’s ridiculous how obvious it is. And it’s even more ridiculous how rarely we do the bare minimum to keep from turning into zombies at work. (Part 1 here)

Go outside
It’s no secret that we need new experience to generate new ideas. You can’t continue to be brilliant if you stare at the same walls every day. To get new perspective, get your ass out of that chair, and invest an hour in a change of scenery—it will save you countless hours scanning those old walls for ideas that aren’t there.

Expand your toolbox
The more you depend on a tool, the less it does for you. So let go of the mouse and pick up a pencil. And when the pencil loses its point, stop drawing and make a collage. Or even better, abandon your toolbox completely, and invent a new tool. Because sometimes a new tool is what it takes to do the job right.

Include everybody
It’s easy to do decent work with an agreeable group. The problem is that you are not in the business of doing merely decent work. You do kick-ass work, and kicking ass requires you to include the people who make doing the work harder. Because they will also make it better. So find them, and make sure they have a say.

There probably is. I’m sure of it. Because it’s been feeling a little stale as of late. I use del.icio.us as a way to surf the web that none of the search engines (no, not even google) can come close to. That’s right. Finally, after more than a decade since someone floated the phrase “surf the web,” here’s a way to do it that actually fits my interests and feels useful. I once found sources of inspiration, information, and opportunity almost daily on this thing. It’s called subscriptions. And if you know about del.icio.us, and you’re not using subscriptions, you’re missing a whole world of stuff out there that’s made just for you. But now, I’m beginning to feel like all the same links get cycled and recycled in my subscriptions box, under the same tags, so that it becomes a bit like scrolling through a lame-ass google search to find the goods. And pretty soon, that’s not gonna be worth it. So I can’t help thinking: what’s the future of social bookmarking? What’s better than del.icio.us?

(picture from surreal coconut)

See, babe, I told you we’d make it up to you. We felt really bad that our How to be a better lover series finished a little too quick, so we’ve come up with some games to keep you turned on.

Use role-playing to explore your boundaries
What if your brand stood for something completely different?
What if you changed your audience?
What if you got into a whole new category?

Never use the same come-on twice
Briefly describe what you do. Now do it again, using totally different words. Now do it again, with a whole new set of words. Keep it up, and don’t stop until you’ve surprised yourself.

The old in-out
Take a look at your business from different levels. Ask yourself why you do what you do. Now ask yourself, “So what?” Seeing yourself from all angles will help you clarify what it is you’re trying to do and what you mean to others. And that clarity is the beginning of a plan.

Tell your mother
Whenever you’ve got something important to say to anybody, make sure it’s as clear and as human as possible. You do this by imagining how you’d say it to mom. If she can understand it enough to be proud, you can be sure you’ve got it nailed.

Do what feels good
Pay attention to those times when your work is the most fun. You’ll probably notice that the things you like most are also the things you do best. So focus on them and figure out how to make them a bigger part of your business. Then you can feel free to have as much fun as you like. After all, it’s a strategic advantage.

And if you want your very own copy of How to be a better lover, grab the pdf here (or from the middle column). But don’t keep it all for yourself. You gotta share the love.