This past Saturday, the New York times published a front page article about the “Vast Remaking” of the economy. Vast is not overstating it, and perhaps underplaying the severity of what we’ll see in the next few years. Watching the dollar tide go out reveals weak business models and long-forgotten market needs. Yet while many are calling it a collapse, what we need to understand is that it’s really re-framing. Today’s job-losses are an indicator that old needs are finally going away, and that new needs will fill the vacuum.
I think a lot about how I’ll see these new needs as they arise, and you should too. Now is when the next great success stories begin, not when the next boom finally arrives.
A inspiring classic—worth publishing again.
1. Outlaw PowerPoint. Write down your vision as a story — with a beginning, middle, and end — to clarify what must change first.
2. Don’t rely on words alone. Bring your thinking to life: Create an exhibit, use diagrams, prototype ideas.
3. Make strategy an everyday act. The creation and re-creation of strategy shouldn’t be a process that you undertake only when budgets are due.
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For creatives, it’s about finding the opportunity in tough times.
A couple months into an already beat up 2009, and things are looking grim. What’s a creative entrepreneur to do? Earlier this year I chaired a panel for the AIGA called Design Through the Downturn, and the discussion surfaced some big ideas about the challenges—and opportunities—this new economy brings.
Opportunities? Yup, a number of people at the event observed that demand for creative services like design isn’t down, its just different.
There’s many ways demand will be different in the next few years, but here’s the one that might affect the creative businesses more than any other: a shift from artifacts to solutions. Read the rest of this entry »
Does Snickers understand marketing on the social web? Does its parent company, Mars? Read the whole article here.
1) “It’s the same old story – brand shirk the love of consumers in favor of control”
2) “Let’s face it – Mars, the parent company of Snickers, has been struggling to understand the web” Read the rest of this entry »
THE SEVEN RULES OF BRAINSTORMING (FROM IDEO)
1) Defer judgment
Don’t dismiss any ideas.
Any idea is a good idea, no matter how crazy.
Nothing can kill the spirit of a brainstorm quicker than judging ideas before they have a chance to gain legs.
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Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning “to cultivate”)[1] is difficult to define. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of “culture” in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions.[2] However, the word “culture” is most commonly used in three basic senses:
- excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities
- an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning
- the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group.
