— In The Year of CEO Failures Explained, NYT tech writer, David Pogue gives his take on why the leaders of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Netflix and the Flip camera messed up. It boils down to their failure to remember why they’re in business in the first place (to serve customers). And, as Pogue points out, this omission backfired, at least in two out of those three cases (Cisco CEO John Chambers still has his job, and the Flip is still dead.) I was also taken by Pogue’s surprised analysis of the state of MBA students that our business schools are producing, many of whom have the same attitude and approach as these stumblers. “Maybe all of those M.B.A.’s pouring into the workplace know something we don’t. Maybe there’s actually a shrewd master plan that the common folk can’t even fathom,” he muses. “But maybe, too, there’s a solid business case to be made for factoring public reaction and the customer’s interest into big business decisions.” Now, wouldn’t that be something.
Pentagram partner, Michael Bierut closed the first day of Design at Scale, and did so with mastery and aplomb. He laid out the cliches of what designers supposedly like… and then neatly shot down each one, with a series of things he actually loves. Hugely entertaining and, as with all the best presentations, also educational. Here’s a brief recap of things Bierut truly loves about design:
1. Incredibly Short [Design] Briefs
When Robert Stern became the head of Yale School of Architecture, there was panic in the halls that a new reign of fusty neoclassicism dawned. Instead, when commissioning Bierut to work on a new identity for the school, Stern simply said “I just want to surprise people.” The result: an identity which never uses the same typeface twice. The only consistency, said Bierut, is “lack of consistency.” Bold, memorable, clever.
2. Briefs that are Filled with Paradox and Internal Contradiction
Bierut trotted out some of the classic contradictory desires clients can express when trying to commission a design. They want old and new; male and female; consistent and ever-changing; timeless and surprising. “A lot of designers hear this and roll their eyes,” he said. But he gets to thinking about a way to hit both ideas. He showed work for Saks Fifth Avenue, most recently designed by Bierut’s former boss, Massimo Vignelli and which he updated to include a world of vigorous modern abstraction that also nods to the heritage of the department store. (Read Logo A-Go-Go, a NYT story from 2007 with details of the project.)
3. Working on Things I Don’t Know Anything About
Bierut told the story of working on the Harley-Davidson museum, confessing that he himself is not much of a hardcore biker, having never actually sat on a motorbike before. But rather than let this be a cause for dismay, he instead got to play the role of reluctant spouse to his partner, Jim Bieber. In the process, the museum became a destination for more than just those obsessed with every nut and bolt of the Harley machine. An important nuance here: you might not know anything about a subject, but you have to have passion for discovery. Not knowing and not caring is a recipe for disaster.
4. Working with Impossible Restrictions
This is a common theme from designers, who often recoil in horror at the nightmare of an open brief calling on them to do whatever they like. Bierut talked of the challenge of putting a sign on Renzo Piano’s building for the New York Times. Times Square isn’t known for its subtlety, while the occupants of the NYT building wanted the fancy exterior of their fancy building to speak for itself. Bierut helped devise a cunning plan to hack up the Times’ logo into 923 pieces and then mount said pieces onto the rods already covering the building. Cunning and ingenious.
5. The Very First Idea
Another great story, of the challenge when Citibank merged with Travelers back in 1998. On the very first meeting of the first day they worked on the project, Bierut doodled the “T” of the word “Travelers” as an umbrella handle. Now, he said, you see pretty much that exact idea everywhere. “99% of the word was done on the first morning.” He also good-humoredly acknowledged that partner Paula Scher insists she did the fateful doodle.
6. When the Very First Idea Gets Thrown Away
Bierut told of his desperate attempts to get the Museum of Art and Design to see sense and buy into a logo he’d developed which involved the lettering “A+D.” Despite his valiant efforts, they weren’t buying it, and the eventual solution, a typeface that recalls the architecture of the original building while providing a legible alphabet to write in, was clearly superior. Stop digging, said Bierut. Accept you’re not always right.
7. Being Told Exactly What To Do
Another project that caused heartache and teeth gnashing was the New World Symphony in Miami, Florida. Asked to create a logo for the Frank Gehry building, Bierut came up with a series of solutions that the client absolutely hated. Having presented one idea, he recalled, “they were supposed to see it and ask ‘how can we thank you?’ Instead the question was ‘is this supposed to make us feel nauseous?” In the end, the company founder Michael Tilson Thomas sent a series of his own scrawled ideas. Usually a cue for designers to feel uppity and upset that a client is trading on their toes, Bierut welcomed the input, and used it to come up with the final (gorgeous) solution. See a video of the process here.
[Image c/o DMI.]
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David Brooks channels academics Elizabeth W. Dunn, Daniel T. Gilbert and Timothy D. Wilson in his NYT op ed, The Haimish Line, a lovely look at how we so often miss the point of what’s really important in our quest to live life to the full. He writes:
We also live in a highly individualistic culture. When we’re shopping for a vacation we’re primarily thinking about Where. The travel companies offer brochures showing private beaches and phenomenal sights. But when you come back from vacation, you primarily treasure the memories of Who — the people you met from faraway places, and the lives you came in contact with.
Lovely.
** Update. On posting this to Twitter, I got a super interesting backlash/response. Cameron Tonkinwise wrote scathingly that “Brooks Bourgeois” has missed the point. “Plenty of wealthy baby boomers are decluttering to experience the good life: that leads to this.” Sam Potts also chimed in, pointing out that an organized safari is “hardly an authentic experience of Kenya and Tanzania. It’s all a script.” I still think that Brooks offers a useful recasting, from Where to Who, but these notes are a good reminder to remember that just because you feel at one with the apparently happy, jolly servers in the down-home tourist center, that doesn’t mean your glow of goodwill to all men is necessarily reciprocated.
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Dinner Theater, Starring the Kitchen is a delightful New York Times piece about the theater of dining, written by the theater critic Christopher Isherwood. He lyrically describes the experience of eating a chef George Mendes’ Portugese-inspired restaurant, Aldea, where there is no barrier between dining room and kitchen.
In watching the drama of a top-tier meal being prepared, you are witnessing the creative process as it takes place, all the grind that the artists put in to the preparation of the finished product. It’s not possible — or advisable — for a theater critic to hang around the rehearsal room as a new stage production takes shape. But watching Mr. Mendes and his staff at work was a moving reminder of how much finely focused collaboration is involved in the creation of all kinds of aesthetically pleasurable experiences.
File under: worth checking out when you have a spare moment. New York Times’ Joe Fiore describes new site Beta 620 as “a new home for experimental projects from Times developers — and a place for anyone to suggest and collaborate on new ideas and new products.” Most interesting.
— Sam Sifton’s New York Times review of Masa tunes into the fact that being strong in one discipline is no longer enough. In this case, exquisite food isn’t enough to make up for awkward service, even at Masayoshi Takayama’s legendary Japanese restaurant in New York’s Time Warner Center. This is a regular topic of conversation at Doblin, particularly in relation to the theory of the Ten Types of Innovation, which says that one type of innovation is all well and good, but it won’t be anywhere near enough to build a lasting business.
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In Pain at the Pump? We Need More, HBS professor (and Monitor* co-founder) Michael Porter and Daniel C. Esty, commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, make the case that Americans need to suffer *more* sticker shock, not less, when it comes to filling up at the pump. This, they write, is the only way to motivate “changes in behavior and technological investments.” In other words, the authors figure that the change we need to see will happen a lot faster if everyone is put off their usual routine by finding they’re totally strapped for cash. A political hot potato, if ever there was one, but they avow that their goal isn’t to raise revenue, but to spark innovation. “Entrepreneurial spirit would be unleashed in companies from multinational enterprises to back-of-the-garage inventors,” they conclude. “By stimulating major gains in energy productivity and renewable energy, our approach would help stimulate global growth and free up resources to meet other pressing needs.”
* Potential bias alert. I work for Doblin, a part of Monitor Group.
This beautiful, thought-provoking image by Rodrigo Corral and Jennifer Carrow illustrates Dangerous Arts, a Salman Rushdie-penned New York Times op ed calling for the release of Chinese artist and activist, Ai Weiwei. Ai, who was arrested by Chinese authorities on April 4th, produced 100 million ceramic sunflower seeds as part of an installation held last year at the Tate Modern gallery in London.
— Alice Rawsthorn writes about the new exhibition, Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life in a New York Times story, Coming Clean on the Story of Dirt
The New York Times recently ran an interesting piece on how retailers are experimenting with store design to increase sales. One story that stood out: Wal-Mart.
Two years ago, it remodeled, trying to hang on to Target shoppers who traded down to Wal-Mart during the recession.
Out went the pallets of items like juice boxes or sweatshirts stacked in the centers of aisles. Merchandise on “end caps,” displays at the ends of aisles, slimmed down. Shelves got shorter, and Wal-Mart whittled the number of items it carried by about 9 percent, so as not to overwhelm shoppers. Customer satisfaction scores soared.
Despite those ratings, Wal-Mart has been encountering one of the longest slides in domestic same-store sales in its history.
“They loved the experience,” William S. Simon, the chief executive of Wal-Mart’s United States division, said at a recent conference. “They just bought less. And that generally is not a good long-term strategy.”
So now Wal-Mart’s back to piling high, hoping to capitalize on shoppers’ subconscious connection between messiness and value. Remains to be seen if the reversal will pay off, but it’s a good reminder that a focus on matters of customer experience can never overshadow the cold, hard reality of the bottom line, at least in the minds of chief executives.
Image from the Walmart Stores stream on Flickr
