For One Company Design is a Way of Life...Really!!

If you've never been into a Bang & Olufsen store, or seen one of their products in a magazine, then you've missed a real treat. B&O is the Danish electronics company obsessed with design, not just as a business imperative, but as their only imperative.

This months issue of Fast Company (December 2005) has a wonderful article that looks at the importance of design to B&O. Since its beginnings 80 years ago, the company has featured a combination of aesthetics and technology that are unmatched by any competitor. Sure the products they manufacture come with a pretty hefty price tag - $18,000 speakers, $19,000 brushed-aluminum plasma TV - but every one is stunning to both look at and use.

When I was a kid we used to travel to Atlanta to go shopping and one of the malls we went to had a B&O store. I could spend hours in there just admiring the telephones, phonographs and incredible speakers. As I've grown up, I have never missed an opportunity to stop in a B&O store whenever I get the chance, just to see what they have come up with lately. The 6-CD BeoSound 9000 - where the CD's stay put and the player moves has been one of my favorites since I first saw it.

What makes the B&O story even more amazing is that the person in control of product development and design is an outsider. A freelancer, David Lewis, who believes that being an outsider has significant advantages over being an insider. This way he is able to keep both his objectivity and his ability to develop products without being influenced by internal marketing or engineering issues. The CEO and the internal team focus on operations and execution. A combination that brilliantly plays to everyones strengths.

B&O may be a bit of an extreme example, but they have been very successful for a long time by living on the cutting edge of design innovation. For them it is a way of life, not just a brief affair with style.

Ask yourself, "Do I take design seriously enough - Is it a way of life at my company?" - "Do I have the confidence to turn everything over to an outsider?" - "Are my products really COOL!!! or just run of the mill?"

If you want to up the design quotient in your organization, you must look at it as a long term investment and not just a "project" or "initiative". Great design is a way of life requiring both courage and perseverence, but when you get it right, you can leave the competition in the dust.

"The Ten Faces of Innovation" ROCKS!!!

I just finished reading The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley, the general manager of IDEO in Palo Alto, California. IDEO is the wildly creative design and consulting firm that has been responsible for any number of innovations over the past two decades including the original Apple mouse, the Palm V and the Handspring Treo.

The Ten Faces of Innovation is one of those books that you can read on several levels. One level is an overview of how IDEO organizes its people and identifies their specific strengths. This helps them pull together teams that are both very creative and innovative. On another level, it is a guide for helping you identify your own personal work style, areas of strength and how best to contribute to a team. It is this second level that I found most interesting and engaging.

As a manager, the ability to pull together the most effective and creative teams fast is critical in today's business environment. If you understand and accept that the most creative ideas and solutions come from the right mix of people, this book can be very useful. You don't necessarily want all of the "best" people working on a project, but you want to be able to identify the best of the right kind of people who can pull together and each contribute in a unique and creative way.

Essentially the book breaks the innovation personas into three broader categories; The Learning, Organizing and Building Personas. Each of these areas has three or four specific persona types that more clearly identify how individuals within teams contribute most effectively. When you get the mix right, the results can be breath taking.

Reading the book, I was struck by how easy it was to not only identify the one or two personas that best fit my work style, but also how it helped me better understand the other personas and where each of us fits in an innovation team.

If you are in a business that relies on teams to get things done, I highly recommend The Ten Faces of Innovation. It will help you better understand how to build and contribute to an innovation team.

Andrew Speaking at Conference in January

For anyone interested, I will be speaking at the Corporate Communications Summit in Orlando in January on the subject of Coordinating Global Marketing Communications in a decentralized organization (trust me it's much more interesting than the title). Speaking on behalf of my corporate master, I will discuss efforts that we have had underway for the past several months to create the company's first truly coordinated global marketing campaigns, the tools and techniques we are using and some of the specific projects we are planning to coordinate through the system. As we get closer to the date, I'll try and post more of the details.

In addition, there are a number of other very interesting speakers who will be covering all aspects of corporate communications. It should be an informative three days. Hope to see you there.

Update: Conference, Day 2 | Wednesday, January 25, 2006 | 1:45pm
In this session, learn how to:

1. Better understand local challenges and issues
2. Educate headquarters marketing organizations about global issues
3. Identify appropriate technologies and solutions to facilitate global efforts
4. Measure success.

Topics covered include:

• Information gathering and analysis
• Education and process development
• Supplying information to support local strategies
• Implementing technology solutions to facilitate direct communications across the organization

SAVANTStats + Trends Introduction

Fellow SAVANTS,

We are introducing a new segment in our regular posts called, "SAVANTStats + Trends." It can be found here and it is also bookmarked within the table of contents to the right.

We hope SAVANTStats + Trends will provide a plethora of bite-sized facts -from color forecasts to teen trends- and bring inspiration to your daily work and revenue to your bottom line.

Strategies for Working with Your Design Team

Less is Better
We all know that the process of design is sexy, and we all want to be a part of it. Just as accounting has a function to evaluate numbers, design has a function: to communicate. I've gathered a few tips to help you work better with your designer or design team.

1) Garner only a handful of key-decision makers, perhaps only 3 to form the committee. Bringing in about 8 players can only homogenize the design that clearly lacks passion.

2) Let your design team know who those decision makers are before the design process begins; this includes those making design decisions. Choose one person to communicate needs to the designer.

3) Get as much input from the committee today to prevent future disasters. You don't want the expense of the CEO's midnight run to the printer to "move things on press" or an outside party "changing colors."

4) Focus on your target audience at all times because your bottom line is revenue. Discussions about adding bells and whistles distracts from the real goal and can ultimately delay progress and lose vigor in the end.

5) Keep market research and corporate standards at hand to prevent design subjectivity. A good question to ask your designer is how might the brochure attract and generate sales leads. Questions asking to change colors, change fonts, or perhaps make the logo bigger begins to undermine the expertise of your design team. If you don't believe your design team is doing a good job, replace them. Don't try to be one of them.

In the end, we all know I will never try to play an accountant's role -even on TV. Alternatively, for those of you who want to play with colors, please save the options for painting your homes.

Hurray for Honda

We recently decided to bow to the needs of our rather chaotic and creative lives and buy ourselves an SUV, but it couldn't be just any run of the mill family wagoneer with three rows of seats and room for the dog (we don't have kids and I don't think our four cats would appreciate a d-o-g in the house). So with this in mind, what do you get?

Well we needed something that could hold a lot of stuff. We do a lot of home rennovation so it had to be able to hold a 4X8ft sheet of plywood. It also needed to be easy to clean out, relatively maintenance free and comparatively inexpensive. Oh, and a coolness factor that fit our somewhat quirky sense of humor and outlook on life.

After doing some searching what did we get... TA-DA!

A Honda Element, and so far it has turned out to be everything we could have asked for and probably more. Honda sometimes describes the Element as a Dorm room on wheels, but from what I've seen they are selling more of them to fortysomethings that anyone else.

You may see one and think "Geez what an ugly car," but once you own one, they're absolutely gorgeous.

Right Answers

Anyone who visits my office tends to notice a couple of things. The first is that I generally tend to have lots and lots and lots of books and articles lying around, or on shelves, all related to marketing or brand, but looking at it from as many different angles as there are opinions. I believe firmly that in order to truly understand brands you have to understand as many different ways as possible of looking at it.

Sometimes it drives my colleagues nuts that I am constantly handing them another article about how companies in totally divergent industries and fields go about developing and building their brands. In my mind they are all valid approaches, regardless of the industry, target audience or products they are selling. In this age of constant disruption, if you're not willing to look beyond your comfort zone, you're going to get killed by the other guy who did.

The other thing I often get comments about is my collection of 1:18 scale die-cast metal car models. I have about 20 of them and most people just assume that I am a car nut and leave it at that. Though I like cars, the reality is something completely different.

When I first went to college I fully intended to become an engineer, but after less than a year I became frustrated by what I was learning. Everything only had one right answer. No matter whether you could demonstrate that your idea had merit there was one right answer and everything else was wrong. Then I was introduced to the Industrial Design program and the view that just about every problem and design challenge has multiple right answers, some better than others. I have carried this philosophy ever since then and found that it helps make most things in life, and business, easier.

So how does this relate to the little car models? Well almost all of them are two seat convertible sports cars which were essentially designed and created from the same fundamental brief. All of them are beautiful, functional and I'll bet a lot of fun to drive. Yet there are 20 different "RIGHT" answers.

I use the little car models as a constant reminder that no matter what I'm working on, chances are there are many different beautiful, successful and rewarding "right" answers to every problem. If you learn to apply this philosophy to your business it can make you much more flexible and open your eyes to a myriad of options you might never have considered before.

Saving Face: Messaging

Sunday's NYT reported that Tom Cruise had yet again, moved to another publicist -after recently firing his sister. After going 'off message' by jumping on Oprah's couch professing his new love, he derailed the real reason he was on the show: to promote his new film.

While publicists are generally ringmasters of an individual's personal life and career, it's up to the individual to adhere to the advice of the ringmaster to carefully chart the waters of public life. Tom's fall from public grace happened for many reasons, one of them being his choice not to abide by his publisict's plan.

Needless to say, Tom's new publicist needs to implement emergency messaging and that's going to involve his buy-in. Their strategies will be to reacquaint his fans with his famous boyish charm and dilute his personal criticisms on health issues.

Design Thought Strategy Messaging must remain positive -albeit personal or professional- to continue charting the waters to success. Finding a good ringmaster that you trust to assist you with public life is mandatory if you want to continue instilling trust in your clients. Finding a ringmaster who can provide damage control when messaging goes astray is worth his weight in gold.

I am incredibly lucky to have Andrew in my life and as a business partner to provide such guidance; I believe everyone needs an Andrew in their life. If you want Andrew in your life, contact him, I'm sure he'd be happy to help consult with you and your messaging strategies -he's definitely worth his weight in gold!

Self Promotion Revisited & Rewarded

A few weeks ago, I talked about including a SIGLine at the end of each of your emails. I'm here to tell you that it works!

Yesterday afternoon (on a Sunday!) I received a call from a potential client who had familiarized herself with our work at Surtex back in May. She and her art director are in need of my services and needed to follow one of the links I had provided for a library of images. During the course of the Summer, I had rearranged my files on my FTP server causing the link to become defunct (bad Lisa!).

A bit befuddled, she referred to my email and found my contact information. It was then she called me to tell me of their needs.

Design Thought Strategy: Info easily obtained equates with immediate gratification. Potential clients have only a few seconds they're donating to find you -don't make it difficult; it could mean losing business!