Jessica Hagy nails it yet again.
Funny how a throwaway line can be so empty and so loaded at the same time.
This’ll get you thinking twice the next time someone asks how you’re doing. (As one of her readers comments, “Fine is the little sister of shitty.”)
Jessica will be speaking at PCBC in June btw. Twice actually. See here and here for details.
George Casey, one of the sharpest and most knowledgeable minds in real estate, observes an interesting—and, I think, encouraging—trend among builders emerging from the housing meltdown.
Eschewing the long-established tradition of naming companies after their founders, we’re beginning to see builders instead defining themselves by the product they create. (And when your product is as emotionally resonant as home and community, I would argue that’s a wise move…especially if your name happens to be Petkoski. See below.)
George writes, “[These] new businesses have a unique and one-time opportunity to name themselves whatever they choose. In doing so, the founders have the chance to impact what people think about that company (and what that company’s future employees think about the company and themselves) for a long time to come, even before they create or sell their first product.”
So you have Larry Webb starting The New Home Company, and Tom and Caroline Hoyt considering renaming McStain as The Sustainable Neighborhood Company or something similar. But my favorite is Bill Petkoski, who’s in the process of forming The Cottage Home Company, an infinitely more graceful name than Petkoski Homes, had he chosen that option. (No offense, Bill, but it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.)
Now granted, these examples are anecdotal evidence, not proof of an industry sea change. Skeptics might point out (rightly so) that a name is nothing but a thin veneer of paint if the company’s underlying values and behavior aren’t aligned.
But don’t underestimate the psychology of a name. I think George nails it in the opening sentence of his blog:
“Names are important. What we call ourselves and what others call us helps to define who we are and what others perceive us to be. They can also influence what we become in the future.”
If that’s true, then I consider it a good start that these builders are stamping their values, not their egos, on their companies.
[ NB: There's an interesting parallel in the social, political and cultural factors involved in the naming of public housing projects. David Lancaster points us to an article here, another example that names do matter in more than cosmetic ways. ]
Bicycling Magazine has published its list of the top 50 bike-friendly cities in America.
Kudos to Vinester Nate Garvis’s hometown of Minneapolis, which received the #1 ranking.
And I can’t resist bragging on my college town of Davis, California—a city that boasts more bikes than cars—which was awarded the top spot in the under-100,000 population category.
It came as no surprise to yours truly, who spent four years cycling to classes, football games, bars, you name it. (Although to be honest, it had more to do with poverty than purity.)
Here’s an interesting pair of perspectives on rational and irrational behavior…and the merits of each.
First, Anaiis Flox shares a vulnerable, heartfelt account of mismatched expectations — the inherent conflict between (her ex-boyfriend’s) rational, ordered, cultural norms vs. (her own) irrational, messy, spontaneous desire. What begins as a relationship story is ultimately a profound commentary on what it means to pursue a life of meaning and purpose.
In her words, when you challenge the conventional order of things, when you make “irrational” choices with your career or your life:
“They’ll say you’re crazy. They’ll say, ‘I wish I could be as impulsive as you are,’ and that you should grow up. Life isn’t like that – there are norms, you know. There are ways to do things. You don’t talk to people at the security line at the airport. You get through it as fast as possible, go to your gate, wait for them to board you, sit down and be quiet. You go to your job, bust your ass, go home, change, go to some social thing, entertain the same questions, go home, watch bad television and do it all over again. Polite, proper, efficient. That’s life, right? Then you get old and maybe play some golf, then you die.
Fuck no.
The only way to remember who you are is to refuse to let anyone or anything dictate what you want. I write to share my triumphs and defeats and to remind you that wanting something other than herd-like, soul-crushing monotony is not only natural, but necessary.”
Still, we can’t all skip off to Provence to paint and sketch and journal. Someone needs to keep the trains running on time. To that end, Seth Godin makes a compelling case for being rational about when—and when not—to be rational.
He points out, “If you’re running Adwords on Google, I hope you’re making rational decisions based on clickthrough and conversion. On the other hand, were you rational when you fell in love? Did you do the math? Medical analysis?”
“There’s room for both rational and irrational decision making,” he concludes, ”and I think we do best when we choose our path in advance instead of pretending to do one when we’re actually doing the other.”
In some ways I’m an unlikely advocate for the irrational life. I live in the suburbs. I work for The Man. I have two young children and I instinctively, unwittingly feed into the “stranger danger” mentality.
But if barreling as quickly and mindlessly as possible from point A to point B is considered rational rather than robotic…and getting sidetracked by conversation and connection with (gasp!) strangers is considered irrational rather than human…
Then give me irrational every time.
Here’s a fantstic video introducing Youngme Moon’s soon to be published Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd, which is described as “a book about realizing the true meaning of a word that has lost all meaning.” (An excerpt can be downloaded here.)
Dr. Moon is an award-winning Harvard business prof whose marketing courses are among the school’s most sought after. She makes a compelling argument that in many product categories, competitive differentiation no longer exists. Or, to be more precise, the distinctions are so nuanced and insubstantial that they’re no longer perceived by consumers.
Product proliferation has not led to product diversity, but rather the opposite: Sameness.
She writes, “[A]s the number of products within a category multiplies, the differences between them start to become increasingly trivial, almost to the point of preposterousness.” (Well of course our homes are different…our elevations are Northern Tuscan!)
When this happens, “[T]he category has reached the point where it is possible for product heterogeneity to be experienced as product homogeneity. Which is not to say that the distinctions between products are not real; it is simply to say that they are real only in the same way that synonyms have discrete connotations.”
Moon likens this to a competitive treadmill—a cycle wherein businesses are, unintentionally and unknowingly, running a race to nowhere.
“In category after category, companies have gotten so collectively locked into a particular cadence of competition that they appear to have lost sight of their mandate—which is to create meaningful grooves of separation from one another. Consequently, the harder they compete, the less differentiated they become.”
If the book is as thoughtful and insightful as its preview, it’s well worth ordering. I did.
