Author: Richard

I’ve been meaning to point people to Erika Andersen’s ChangeThis manifesto, “Growing Great New Managers”, since I first read it at the beginning of this month. She uses a gardening metaphor to provide some of the the most sensible and practical advice for new managers and those responsible for them that I’ve come across in a while. Here’s a little taster, but don’t take my word for it, download it and see for yourself:
“I believe that listening is the management analog of soil preparation, the foundation for all future success. This flies in the face of common wisdom: most of us assume that once we become managers, we’re supposed to stop listening. We think manager = answer person. I suggest that the single most useful thing you can learn to do as a manager is stop talking and start listening.”

After reading a couple of recentish pieces on Tom Peters’ site about “Brand You” (here and here) and the original column by Lucy Kellaway , which he linked to, I decide to write a follow up to my piece, “Unbranded You”.
Instead I found I had plunged into a long meditation on identity, the market, authenticity and our changing world, which took me to some interesting places, but a long way from writing anything.
So, instead, I am going to focus on a couple of extracts from two entries from the blog of that master cartographer of the human landscape, Grant McCracken. They, I suspect, might point forward to a more useful strategy for the future than the Brand You formula, which, while in one set of terms, worked quite successfully in the Eighties and Nineties, but, as much of Tom Peters’ other work suggests,may be less appropriate in the emerging world that faces us now.
The first extract is from a piece entitled “Cate Blanchett: Brand Exemplar”:
“Contradiction is one of the sources from which fluidity and openness come.  Blanchett is “candid and private, gregarious and solitary, self-doubting and daring, witty and melancholy.”  The idea that a brand could be any of these things is a little dizzying.  The idea that it could all of these things at once, is completely removed from the realm of possibility.  Still, that’s doesn’t mean that brands won’t someday master contradiction.  After all, if a real world of perfect dynamism is truly upon us, it won’t have any choice.”
The second is simply called, “Noise”: 
“I found myself thinking that some of the most interesting people these days are hybrids.  In fact, it’s relatively easy to be one thing.  In fact, we got pretty good at being one thing.  These days, the trick is to be several things.  This is more difficult, but I think Rosenwald is right to say that it gives us access to new creative powers.  Selves used to be declaried unfit for habitation when  filled with diversity, accident, and noise.  But these are now the signatures of someone well defined.  Hybrid selves are good to live.  Good and noisy.”
Read both the posts in full to get what I am groping for, but my sense is that rather than developing a public persona that can be expressed in two or three words, like a conventional brand, a good and noisy identity, “filled with diversity, accident, and noise”, is the way to the future.

I am linking to this just because I like it – particularly the magazine tearing percussion in the elevator scene.
(Thanks to Jason Kottke for the link)

What follows is an extract from a speech by the late David Lochhead. I wonder, and this is a genuine wonder, I don’t know the answer, how much has changed in the ten years since he gave it.
“Let me say at the outset that I like the World Wide Web. I enjoy browsing. I appreciate the avenue to information of all types that the Web opens to me. But while the Web is not totally devoid of community building, those places where community happens are hidden away in dark corners. The culture that we were beginning to construct in the formation of services like Ecunet has become something different, something distorted, something of a caricature of culture.
Let me try to characterize the world as I experience it on the Web. It is first, a culture of isolated individuals, wandering in what seems like random paths through Cyberspace. When I journey on the Web, I journey by myself. On the way, I encounter people, but we are as ships passing in the night. Occasionally, I discover a fellow traveller, someone whose Web page reflects some of my interests. For a few days, we might exchange e-mail. We might cross link our pages. But very soon we pass on, left only as traces in the form of entries in our respective e-mail address lists.
To what shall we compare the culture of the Web? I imagine that if we were to conduct a kind of free association brain storming, the list of our comparisons might well go on for ever. The image that has impressed itself on me lately, however, is that of the Carnival midway. A glitzy veneer hides a content of questionable quality. The entertaining competes with the sleazy and the grotesque. And behind it all seems to lurk an endless array of gigantic egos – carnival performers, if you like – each with their own “home page.” One stall competes with the other to be today’s “hot spot.” Technique abolishes substance. And the web surfer wanders up the midway, pausing at some attractions and ignoring others, quite indifferent to the faces of the crowd who wander the midway with him and not usually interested in the faces of those who work the carnival stalls, either. That is not to say that there is no community on the Web. But what the Web constructs is a community and a culture of perpetual strangers.”

“Thomas Jefferson (2004; Hartmann 2002: 69-73) saw three main threats to democracy — governing elites, organized religion and commercial monopolists (whom he referred to as a “pseudo-aristocracy”). So he was keen to include freedom from monopoly in the Bill of Rights. But, thanks mainly to his Federalist opponents, that clause slipped through the cracks of the constitution.”
Keith Hart
Hartmann, T. 2002. Unequal Protection: the rise of corporate dominance and the theft of human rights. New York: St. Martin’s.

A few days ago I wrote about how Ben Copsey and I were working on an idea for a web-based business. At that time we weren’t sure whether this was “just a good idea” or whether it was something that would have wider appeal.
Well, we’ve just had our first reality check. My good friends, Gill and Nick at Plot, have just started playing with a prototype and so far have been very enthusiastic. Of course, being Gill and Nick, they have come up with a barrage of ideas we need to think about. But the general thrust of their experience so far is that our potential market has expanded to a niche market of four.

My friend Michael Renouf has, at last, gone on-line. I love Michael’s work and have felt sad that much of the best of it has never been seen by a wider public. Some of the birthday cards he has drawn for me, Mimi and Ben have been so funny, pointed and unexpected, that they are a sheer delight. Take a trip to his site, visitor numbers will encourage him to keep going. At the moment he is following Patricia Ryan Madson’s advice, “Be average”, but take a daily visit and pretty soon I expect you will see something that blows you away. Remember, Non-Stick Plans, go there. You won’t be disappointed

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a challenging manifesto up at ChangeThis, “Few and Far Between: Black Swans and the Impossibility of Prediction”. In it he argues that our world is shaped by rare, unpredicatble shocks and that we might as well accept this rather than maintaining the fiction that we live in a predictable, ordered world.
You ought to read the wholoe thing, but a passge I particularly like is this one:
“Go through the following exercise. Look into your own existence. Count the significant events, the technological changes, and the inventions that have taken place in our environment since you were born and compare them to what was expected before their advent. How many of them came on a schedule? Look into your own personal life, to your choice of profession, say, or meeting your mate, your exile from your country of origin, the betrayals you faced, your sudden enrichment or impoverishment. How often did these things occur according to plan?”
Had it been published a few months earlier I might well have quoted it in my manifesto, “Purposive Drift: making it up as we go along”, which has a different, but complementary, take on prediction and planning.

This snippet from a long article by Bob Garfield on the coming end of advertising as we know it, is worth at least a short ponder:
“… listen carefully to Jan Leth, executive creative director of OgilvyInteractive North America, as he tells a funny little story about an agency assignment for Six Flags.
‘They had a promotion for their 45th anniversary. They wanted to give away 45,000 tickets for opening day to drive traffic. So we got a brief to do whatever: ads, microsite, whatever. But our interactive creative director just went off and posted it on Craigslist. Five hours later, 45,000 tickets were spoken for.’
‘No photo shoot. No after-shoot drinks at Shutters,’ he adds, with faux regret. Then, with somewhat less irony: ‘Now, the trick is, how do you get paid?'”

I was looking through some of my entries on this site and noticed how often I use the word “curious” and its variants. Some of the people who know me well may say that I am simply nosey. This may be true. But, in my defence, I would say that the world is an interesting place and that there is much to be curious about.
Doing a quick search for “curiosity” on my machine, I rediscovered the results of an on-line test I had totally forgotten about. (Apologies: I can’t remember where I did this, only that it was something I looked at in January 2003). It seemed pretty accurate to me:
Richard’s Key Strengths
1 Creativity, ingenuity, and originality
Thinking of new ways to do things is a crucial part of who you are. You are never content with doing something the conventional way if a better way is possible.
2 Curiosity and interest in the world
You are curious about everything. You are always asking questions, and you find all subjects and topics fascinating. You like exploration and discovery.
3 Capacity to love and be loved
You value close relations with others, in particular those in which sharing and caring are reciprocated. The people to whom you feel most close are the same people who feel most close to you.
4 Love of learning
You love learning new things, whether in a class or on your own. You have always loved school, reading, and museums-anywhere and everywhere there is an opportunity to learn.
5 Appreciation of beauty and excellence
You notice and appreciate beauty, excellence, and/or skilled performance in all domains of life, from nature to art to mathematics to science to everyday experience.
The only tiny disagreement I have with this analysis is that I have never been so keen in learning in formal contexts like school or class. Apart from that it seemed spot on.
The other thing I found in my search was a “think” piece I wrote back in 2002, “Managing Creativity”, which could equally well have been called “The Six Cs of Creativity”. The section on curiosity read:
4 Curiosity
The implied questions ‘why?’ and ‘why not?’ underlie all creative activity.
The ‘why?’ is a questioning of how things are. The ‘why not?’ is a questioning of how things might be. Both carry the idea of the world as a dynamic field of possibilities rather than something fixed or static.
Cultivating curiosity, by encouraging the hunger for new experiences and new ideas and by provoking deep questions and different frames of reference is at the heart of successfully managing the creative process.
“Powerful and effective ideas are unlikely to emerge from isolating creativity on a pedestal. Instead, managers must learn to immerse themselves in their companies’ actual circumstances…. Creative thinking will arise naturally from a visceral sense of the state of things and from early intimations of new openings and opportunities – awareness acquired by an unbounded and active engagement with the environment.”
RegisMcKenna, “Real Time: Preparing for the Age of the Never Satisfied Customer”, Harvard Business School Press, 1997, pp147

“What do you consider to be the major reason for your early and continuing success? Answer, without hesitation: an immense curiosity to know what is going on elsewhere.”
Raymond Loewy, “Industrial Design”, “Royal Designers on design: a selection of the annual addresses given by Royal Designers for Industry at the Royal Society for Arts,1954-84” The Design Council,1986, pp174
“An emeritus professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cyril Stanley Smith, points out that historically, necessity has not been the mother of invention; rather, necessity opportunistically picks up invention and improvises improvements on it and new use for it, but the roots of invention are to be found else where in motives like curiosity and especially, Smith noted, ‘esthetic curiosity”
Jane Jacobs, “Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life”, 1986, pp222