The Vine

Hugh MacLeod is a brilliant, unorthodox, provocative thinker on brands and relevance and creating meaningful interactions with customers.

Hugh nails it yet again with this recent post. He writes:

“Too many brand managers ask the question, ‘What message do I have to craft in order to get people to buy my product?’ It’s a dead end. A far more useful and profitable question would be, ‘What can I do to make my customers’ lives more interesting and meaningful?’

And ‘Meaningful’ always has a social dynamic. We find meaning via our relationships with our fellow creatures. ‘People matter. Objects don’t.’

A bottle of barbecue sauce isn’t going to instantly change anyone’s life for the better. But that 4-hour-long conversation with an old friend, sharing a plate of ribs and brisket, with some Shiner Bock… Well, that might. So you want your product to be there when it happens; you want your product to be around during your customers’ significant moments.”

If you’re a builder or developer, good news, your product already is around during your customers’ significant moments. But walls and windows (and patios and parks and plazas) are just objects. It’s not until human beings animate them that they become places of significance.

Okay, duh, that’s stating the obvious. Then why is real estate so often marketed on the basis of objects, and so rarely as a story of people and relationships? As Lisa Kalmbach recently commented, “no homebuyer thinks in terms of price per square foot.”

One last thought. A lot of marketers now get this, and all kinds of brands are rushing into the “significance” space. It’s the sophisticated ones, however, that understand how and when (and when not) to insert themselves into the picture.

Dev Patnaik makes an excellent case here for the virtues of hybrid thinking, a discipline he describes as “the conscious blending of different fields of thought to discover and develop opportunities that were previously unseen by the status quo.”

He cites the widely celebrated transformation of Procter & Gamble from a 200-year-old consumer products manufacturer to a world-class design innovator. Much of the credit is attributed to Claudia Kotchka, P&G’s VP for design strategy, and her success is heralded as the power of design thinking applied to traditional business models.

Except Claudia’s background is accounting, not design. In fact, Patnaik asserts, the key to her success is that she isn’t a designer. Instead, she immersed herself in the world of design and blended in her previous experience in accounting, marketing and other fields.

It strikes me that Dev is speaking to the very reality of our industry today. With staffs now stripped to the core, it’s unlikely that anyone in your company is doing just one job (or even two). Everyone on your team is multidisciplinary—and that’s to your great advantage. Hybridity is precisely what you need, Dev suggests, because the challenges you’re facing are too great for any single skillset to solve.

Taking it a step further, he writes:

“Hybrid thinking is much more than gathering together a multidisciplinary team. Hybrid thinking is about multidisciplinary people … folks who can connect the dots between what’s culturally desirable, technically feasible, and viable from a business point of view.”

Granted, this housing collapse and the dismantling of our organizations has been painful. But the recipe for growth and reinvention and discovery of new opportunities—previously unseen by the status quo—calls for precisely the conditions we have today.

We already have the hybrid people. Now let’s engage them in hybrid thinking.

Michael Cannell has an entertaining piece in Fast Company about the (not incidental) connection between architectural and footwear design.

As he points out, “What are shoes, after all, but mini buildings for your feet?”

To offer one illustration: the Eamz shoe, inspired by Charles and Ray Eames’ iconic chair.

What’s even more interesting, to me anyway, is the shoe’s backstory. (It has a ring of mythology to it, but, like Fox Mulder, I want to believe.)

As the story goes, designer Rem D. Koolhaas—nephew of the Rem Koolhaas—had a broken heart.

In his attempt to win the girl back, he downsized architecture “to its smallest and most vulnerable scale, that of a woman’s foot.” The girl, alas, was gone. But a shoe company was born.

Caterina Fake—cofounder of Flickr and Hunch—offers this great perspective on work, productivity, clarity, and purposeful meandering (contradictory as that may sound).

She writes:

“Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can be seen. But you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right thing.”

Amen.

 Here’s a great way of shaping the path…make it fun.

I scored an advance copy of Chip and Dan Heath’s next book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, due out Feburary 2010. (You probably know the Heath brothers from their previous bestseller, Made to Stick. If you haven’t read it, buy a copy now. It’s remarkable.)

I’ll honor the authors’ request to not quote or review the pre-release galley, but there’s one idea in particular I can’t resist exploring here:

What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.

In other words, we frequently conclude that people behave the way they do because it’s their fundamental nature—that’s just the way they are—when in fact behavior is largely influenced by circumstance or environment.

Case in point: roundabouts. Unlike the traditional, four-way intersection, which is regulated and stop-and-go, a roundabout is inherently cooperative. To drive through one, you have to be more aware and accommodating of other drivers. And while roundabouts don’t necessarily reduce the number of collisions, they dramatically reduce the severity of them.

Roundabouts don’t make us better human beings. But they do, apparently, make us better drivers.

I don’t mean to oversimplify change. It’s hard. But in many cases, the way to make it easier is by addressing the situation, not the person.

If you want to lead people to a particular outcome, shape the path that gets them there.

Tongue-in-cheek humor, courtesy of my three-year-old daughter’s favorite cartoon series.

Here’s a fascinating talk from USC faculty member David Logan on the five stages of tribal culture.

He points out that humans naturally form tribes, always have, always will. But tribal influence can range from destructive to empowering to life-changing. What great leaders do is forge tribal culture that nudges people—individually and collectively—toward a greater purpose.

It’s a powerful message delivered in just 16 minutes. Well worth watching.

The Daily Beast recently unveiled its rankings of America’s smartest cities.

The study reviewed the 55 major metropolitan areas with a population of 1 million or greater. Judging criteria were divided into two halves: Education, measured by per capita bachelor’s degrees and master’s degrees; and “intellectual environment,” measured by nonfiction book sales, institutions of higher education, and levels of political engagement.

Nice showing by Vinesters Walker Smith (Research Triangle), Bert and John Jacobs (Boston), Nate Garvis (Minneapolis-St. Paul) and multitudes in the Bay Area and Denver.

Yours truly (Sacramento), not so much. But hey, we beat Fresno.