It was cool and mildly breezy around 8 PM today. So I went for a walk, and I noticed something. Though I passed a couple of hundred people, nobody else was taking a walk. There were people returning from work, people going places with purpose-laden bags, people running, people going to the store, people sipping slurpies. But nobody taking a walk. Young women working their phones, but not taking a walk. People walking their dogs, or pushing a stroller, with the virtuous air of one performing a chore for the benefit of another, but not themselves taking a walk. I was the only one taking a walk. The closest activity to “taking a walk” that I encountered was two people walking together and forgetting, for a moment, to talk to each other. The moment passed. One of them said something and they slipped back into talking rather than taking a walk.
Down with Innovation, Up with Imitation!
Perhaps it is professional burnout, but lately I’ve been getting extremely tired of all the stupid things people say about innovation. Especially stupid positive things. A great deal of the stupidity in the conversation about innovation is driven by the desperate urge to be original for the sake of being original. There is a pervasive, unexamined assumption that originality is always a good thing. Copycats, by Oded Shenkar is a delightful little book that takes on a project that I strongly support: taking down the holy cow of innovation and extolling the virtues of imitation. Ironically, it is one of the most original business books I’ve read in the last few years. It even manages to say something new about the business case everybody loves to hate: Southwest Airlines.
Wanted: A Book Cover Designer for “Tempo”
Update: the book is published, cover and all. Adam Hogan did the cover.
I am at that dangerous stage with my first book project, Tempo, where I am going around telling people the manuscript is “95% done,” but with the last 5% threatening to take 50% of the time by the time the it is actually done. But still, with cautious optimism, I can report that I really do think I’ll get the book out by November, as I’ve promised. Which brings me to the reason for this post: I need a cover design. If you are a book cover designer and want to take a shot at it, read on. If you are not, but happen to know good book cover designers, please help me out by emailing along a link to this post, reblogging it, and so forth. Designers with no book-cover experience, you can still bid, but I’ll probably favor people with experience unless they ALL price themselves out of my budget. All bids due by August 10, 2010
9 Simple Rules
- My maximum budget is $1000. And I’d rather spend MUCH less upfront. I intend this book to recover my cash investment and start making money as soon as possible.
- You can bid for the job by emailing me your bid with links to samples of your work. Do mention how you found out about this job. Read the rest of this list first though.
- MY WEIRD OFFER: You can choose to bid for some mix of a dollar amount under $1000, and a per-copy profit share up to $1 per copy, on copies sold in the first year, up to a maximum of 3000 copies. So if I sell 500 copies in Year 1, and you bid $500+$1/copy, you’ll make $1000. If it becomes a runaway hit, you make a maximum of $3500.
- Calibration: I have approximately 500 people signed up for the book release announcement/beta lists already. And this blog has 2000+ RSS subscribers, growing steadily. You decide what that means.
- I would prefer bids from the United States to keep the logistics and communication simple, but will consider bids from other countries.
- If you have never done book design before, send links to samples of your most relevant work. Adjust your bid downwards accordingly
- This is just an informal, non-binding, request for quotes (RFQ). If I pick your bid, we’ll try to figure out a deal and a mutually acceptable creative brief. If we can’t, I’ll move on to my second choice. And so on.
- I know many readers of this blog are designers. If you choose to bid, please don’t be offended if I don’t end up picking you. I appreciate your loyalty to this site as a reader, but my priority is to get a great design.
- Even if you are a big fan of ribbonfarm, please don’t offer to do it for free (I’ve received such offers before, but I can’t accept free work when I make money myself)
So if you’re interested, please email me your bid (dollar amount plus profit-share proposal) and samples to your work. Mention how you found out about the job.
All bids due by August 10, 2010.
If I don’t get enough good bids through this post, I’ll end up looking at the normal channels.
A Big Little Idea Called Legibility
James C. Scott’s fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, examines how, across dozens of domains, ranging from agriculture and forestry, to urban planning and census-taking, a very predictable failure pattern keeps recurring. The pictures below, from the book (used with permission from the author) graphically and literally illustrate the central concept in this failure pattern, an idea called “legibility.”
States and large organizations exhibit this pattern of behavior most dramatically, but individuals frequently exhibit it in their private lives as well.
Along with books like Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization, Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors we Live By, William Whyte’s The Organization Man and Keith Johnstone’s Impro, this book is one of the anchor texts for this blog. If I ever teach a course on ‘Ribbonfarmesque Thinking,’ all these books would be required reading. Continuing my series on complex and dense books that I cite often, but are too difficult to review or summarize, here is a quick introduction to the main idea.
The Right Question, Review of Shallows, Insight vs. Mind-Candy
I have three off-ribbonfarm posts this week that should interest you guys.
Is the Internet Making us Smart or Stupid?
A guest post on VentureBeat, my review of Nick Carr’s The Shallows (a book-length build on his Atlantic piece, “Is Google Making us Stupid.”
The Dangerous Art of the Right Question
On the Trailmeme blog. This post seems to have gone somewhat viral via Hacker News, Lifehacker and a couple of other significant mentions. Slightly lighter fare than you guys are used to here, but should still be of interest.
Also on the Trailmeme blog, this one is a sort of follow-up to the previous one, examining the emerging world of infographics, using 3 of my own ribbonfarm graphics to examine the difference between mind-candy and true insight graphics.
Head on over, comment etc.
The Happy Company
I rarely read biographies or autobiographies of individuals or groups. This is because I rarely find accounts of success or failure by the people involved, or hired hagiographers, very believable. I usually wait for somebody to tell the story more critically, within a broader context, such as the history of a sector. But I made an exception for Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness for three reasons. First, I wanted to steal concrete ideas from the Zappos playbook about customer-centeredness. Second, I was puzzled by the apparent cultural mismatch in Amazon’s acquisition of Zappos. And finally, I was curious about what a genuinely happiness-centric approach to business looks like. Deconstructing the Zappos story seemed like a good idea. This post is mainly about the last question, as well as some general thoughts about “corporate culture.”
The Eight Metaphors of Organization
Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization is a must-read for those who want to develop a deeper understanding of a lot of the stuff I talk about here. Though I’ve cited the book lots of times, it is one of those dense, complex books that I am never going to attempt to review or summarize. You’ll just have to read it. But I figured since I refer to it so much, I need at least a simple anchor post about it. So I thought I’d summarize the main idea with a picture, and point out some quick connections to things I have written/plan to write.
(For once, the picture was complex enough that I chose to draw it and scan it in, instead of doing one of my ugly MS-Paint sketches). Here’s the main idea of the book — [Read more…]
Becalmed in the Summer Doldrums
In the early eighties, after lunch, around 1 PM on hot — and I mean Indian hot — summer days, I’d step out onto the verandah, push two straight-backed chairs together to create a sort of bench, and take a nap. There were ceiling fans inside, and even one room with an air-conditioner, but I preferred the verandah with its still, hot air. It was a natural sauna and sensory deprivation chamber. It induced a sort of death-sleep and occasionally, mild hallucinations. Reflecting on these memories and the 100 degree days we’ve been experiencing here in the DC area this week, it struck me that I am a very seasonal kind of guy. Which is why I dread being forced to move to California. Something about sharply marked seasons fits very well with my personality. At least when I am able to harmonize my own manic-depressive mood swings with the local seasons. In my winter post from exactly 6 months ago, I noted that I like bouts of extreme, deathly cold because they represent rebirth and renewal. Deathly summer heat on the other hand, feels like suddenly hitting the pause button in the middle of the most exciting action in a movie.
The Philosopher’s Abacus
July 4th will be the three-year anniversary of Ribbonfarm. I normally celebrate with a retrospective-plus-roundup, but this year, I thought I’d do something different. I am not entirely sure what you guys get out of my writing, but for me, the act of writing this blog has clarified, reinforced and (for better or worse) hardened a certain philosophy of life. This philosophy is a set of coupled choices on a set of either/or spectra. The best visualization I could come up with is something I call the philosopher’s abacus. Here’s a picture (feel free to share, pass along etc.)
I believe the abacus represents fundamental genetic constraints that define a life-philosophy design space. I believe it is nearly impossible for humans to transcend the abacus. Let me explain how it works.
WOM, Broadcast and the Classical Marketing Contract
Word-of-Mouth (WOM) vs. Broadcast is the emerging Mac vs. PC debate in marketing. There are relevant facts, but they don’t matter, because battles inevitably turn ideological. If you did the Mac-vs-PC ads for WOM vs. Broadcast, an episode might go as follows:
WOM: Hey Broadcast, how are you doing?
Broadcast: Great, I just finished a multi-million dollar Master Marketing Plan for my Fortune 100 client, with a textbook positioning strategy, a great branding theme and 3 superbowl ad concepts. All in just 3 weeks.
WOM: Oh wow! That’s impressive. How did the customers respond?
Broadcast: Very funny WOM. We both know it takes months of stakeholder conversations and focus groups before you can roll out a marketing campaign. If all goes as planned, 50% of our marketing will work; we just won’t know which 50% of course, ha ha. Even someone as good as me can’t break the Golden Rule of Marketing after all.
WOM: Well actually Broadcast, I just finished a 3-week concept-to-execution campaign for a small business, for just $800, where we used a Facebook page to talk to customers. And I know exactly which pieces worked, and why.
Broadcast: Oh I have a social media component in my master plan too. We’ll have a Facebook page AND a Twitter feed AND a blog AND a YouTube Channel. And we’ve already sourced the first 50 professionally written blog posts. So looks like I am a little ahead of you there, WOM. You really should try more planning instead of just jumping in. You’ve got to maximize reach and optimize your channel mix; it’s all about eyeballs baby.
WOM: You do know that Twitter is not always best for all types of conversational marke….
Broadcast: Tweet Tweet Tweet Tweet TWEET TWEET TWEET TWEET. I can’t hear you. TWEET TWEET TWEET TWEET TWEET TWEET
The WOM-vs.-Broadcast debate, which is currently at this level, is incredibly shallow and juvenile (though sometimes entertaining). The WOM camp is getting prematurely smug, and the Broadcast camp is defending the wrong parts of classical marketing. So let’s try to take the conversation up a notch.
