metacool

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

The Fujifilm X-Pro1

metacool Thought of the Day

"Most people don’t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.

...when you read a biography of someone you admire, it’s rarely the things that made them happy that compel your admiration. It’s the things they did to court unhappiness — the things they did that were arduous and miserable, which sometimes cost them friends and aroused hatred. It’s excellence, not happiness, that we admire most.

...Fulfillment is a byproduct of how people engage their tasks, and can’t be pursued directly. Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself."

- David Brooks

 

What's a sleestak?

Where do great songs come from?  A great question, to which I must ask: what's a sleestak?

Every once in a while, I become obsessive about a special tune.  Case in point, I've probably listened to Tower of Power's Knock Yourself Out several thousand times.  When I encounter a piece I like, I need to listen to it over and over and over to unlock its secrets.  It drives my wife nuts.

Here's my latest obsession, a tune called Cloisonné:

Readers of metacool will know that I deeply admire They Might Be Giants.  Not only is their cover of Tubthumping the official anthem of all of us trying to make a dent in the universe, but over and over they create some amazing pieces of music which are highly creative, playful, and original.  Art.  They are also a case study in group creativity, having produced a stream of consistent innovation over a period of 30 years.  How many individuals -- let alone groups or organization or companies -- can lay claim to a track record like that?

Back to Cloisonné.  In the following passage, John Flansburgh talks about the creative process that lead to tales of second-story sleestaks breathing on his dice:

The story behind the song Cloisonne is pretty discombobulated. In an experimental period of putting Join Us together we created a series of electronic beats entirely without song ideas behind them. The idea was to make the tiniest drum machine-based beats that were still exciting. I probably spent twelve hours just editing and tweaking these sounds with no particular song in mind. The lyric is kind of from a Rat Pack point of view--like the guy singing is really into his own swagger, but he's also kind of out of date and out of it. The idea of not knowing what a sleestak is does come from my real life--I am actually exactly a year too old to have watched that show. Having to have Land of the Lost explained to you is slightly undignified, but thus is the fate of those who get old.

This version of the song is essentially our live band arrangement of the song. John L. is playing a bass clarinet, and we took Stan Harrison's inspired, highly chromatic sax intro and outro and mangled it in our fashion. Our apologies to Stan!

Personally, I like the Stan Harrison version on the album more than this one, but that's because the saxophone arrangement reminds me of The Borneo Horns, whose leader is arguably the greatest saxophonist in the world, Lenny Pickett, who played that incredibly gnarly solo on Knock Yourself Out, and who collaborated with Stan Harrison to create the Borneo Horns.  And yes, I've listed to my precious Boreno Horns CD thousands of times...  but enough of this beeswax, let's get back to our conversation about innovation and creativity.

Perhaps the astounding fecundity of imagination presented to us by They Might Be Giants can be attributed to several of my innovation principles.  To wit:

• Principle 2, Hear and see with the mind of a child: clearly They Might Be Giants are able to think differently about the kinds of things which other adults take for granted in day to day life.  Othewise, how do you go from Quonset huts to law enforcement to sleestaks?  Free association, creative association, and wordplay are all common behaviors in kids, but they get squeezed out of us as we jump through the hoops of scoring 90% on spelling tests, hitting 740 on the GMAT, and getting through that interview with the company we always wanted to work for.  You can see see and hear the way you did as a kid, but it takes practice.  Clearly the guys at TMBG are still in practice.
• Principle 11, Everyone needs time to innovate: I love the story Flansburgh tells above, because Cloisonné happened even though they weren't even trying to write a song.  They were screwing around with electronic beats for the sake of screwing around with electronic beats.  This is intrinsic motivation at its best, and it's the kind of time that's rarely accounted for in mainstream business.  Forget 10% time or 20% time or that funky offsite, how much time do people have for seemingly unproductive, totally unaccountable time to simply play with stuff?  Messing around is a surprisingly effective way to get to unique and novel outcome.
• Principle 19, Have a point of view:  Yes, they have one.  It's about telling interesting stories in unusual ways, and never telling the same one twice.  They aren't working from script vetted by 100 layers of focus group-approved marketing criteria.  This is them, and they are this stuff.

By the way, the generation of this blog post required nine spins of Cloisonné and another ten of Tubthumping.

What's a sleestak?  Yeah, I had to ask, too.

Innovation principles by Markkula

The genesis of these thoughts on marketing from Mike Markkula are detailed on page 78 of Walter Isaacson's intriguing biography of Steve Jobs.  In their clarity, simplicity, and actionability, they are stunning.  As a marketer, I take three lessons from them.

First, they are about people.  Markets are made up of individuals.  When striving to bring something new and cool to life, we're much better off imagining the life of a single customer than we are trying to disaggregate and disambiguate mountains of anonymized market data.  A holistic understanding of the customer experience you wish to enable is a great way to start creating mind-blowing products.  As a way of being, empathy is to product developers what The Force is to Jedi Knights.

Second, they are focused on the market.  Surely great marketing is always about the market?  Not always, and not so often: in my experience, many marketers worry more about communicating with each other internally than they do with real people in the marketplace.  They spend more time reading reports created by others than they do learning from the market directly.  They don't use products created by competitors, nor do they try to experience their channels in the way that an end user would.  They may or may not love their product segment -- I mean, can you imagine Steve Jobs hawking anything other than stuff he believed in? Significantly, none of Markkula's dictums explicitly mention the internal functions or structure of the enterprise.  Granted, it could be argued that "Focus" is about both the internal choices an organization makes about what not to do, as well as on all the market-facing features, line extensions, and complementary offerings it chooses not to invest in.

Third, they focus on the big picture and on the smallest details.  Yes, you need to understand where the market is going and how culture, politics, and macro economic trends may influence your future state in three to five years.  But you also must appreciate the nuances of texture, smell, form, sound, proportions, and color.  The realm of the visceral is always there, our minds and hearts want things to feel good and true.  Everything matters, and marketers (or designers, or businesspeople, or engineers -- it's all the same to me) ignore this truth at their peril.

 

Back on planet metacool, I believe the following innovation principles are at work in Markkula's document:

Principle 1: Experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world

Principle 3: Always ask: "How do we want people to feel after they experience this?"

Principle 9: Killing good ideas is a good idea

Principle 20: Be remarkable

 

metacool Thought of the Day

"Between the unknowns of birth and death it is our love and courage, the banishment of fear, that decides if we really lived."

- Steve Matchett

Innovation principles in practice: 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 17, 19

Principle 1: Experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world

Principle 2: See and hear with the mind of a child

Principle 5: Anything can be prototyped.  You can prototype with anything

Principle 6: Live life at the intersection

Principle 8: Most new ideas aren't

Principle 17: It's not the years, it's the mileage

Principle 19: Have a point of view

 

I love this video by Ice Cube.  It got me thinking about my approach to principles 6 and 8.

Ice Cube is a remarkable person.  When I learn in this video that he studied architectural drafting, his compositional approach to the structure of his music makes total sense.  And you can feel the authenticity of his knowledge of the architecture and built environment of LA.  Every great innovator I know makes for a great dinner partner, in the sense that they invariable have a wide array of life interests, for which many they are a bonafide expert.  Being interested in many areas, knowing a lot about a few but being willing and curious to learn about the rest, is the stuff that great innovators are made of.  Given all of this, I need to expand Principle 6, Live life at the intersection, to embrace the idea of being able to pull from, and make connections across, many buckets.

He ends the video by talking about Ray and Charles Eames engaging in mashup activity before mashups were cool.  There's a saying that if you're not stealing (from your predecessors), you're not designing, and that's been the thrust of Principle 8 for me: you should proceed with the humility to believe that someone, somewhere, created something you can learn from.  But I like the idea of sampling more.  Just as Ice Cube and other musicians sample each other's work to create new, perhaps we should substitute the notion of "sampling" for "stealing".  Take a sample of something already in the world, learn from it, extract the essence of it, and mash it up with your current threads to get to something wonderful, remarkable, and new.

 

Innovation principles in practice: 1, 6, 19, 20

Principle 1: Experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world

Principle 6: Live at the intersection

Principle 19: Have a point of view

Principle 20: Be remarkable

 

Innovation principles in practice: 14, 15, 20

Principle 14: Failure sucks, but instructs

Principle 15: Celebrate errors of commission

Principle 20: Be remarkable

 

RIP, Sergio Scaglietti

The great entrepreneur, marker, artist, and businessman Sergio Scaglietti passed away on Sunday.

Via his intuition-driven design process, Scaglietti created some of the most visual stunning cars of all time, such as the Ferrari 250 GTO pictured above.  In the humble opinion of this writer, he also brought to life the most gorgeous and lust-worthy designs ever marketed by Ferrari, which is really saying something.  His creations took a Modenese vernacular sculptural aesthetic and made it the international standard for all things red, loud, curvy, and fast.

metacool Thought of the Day

I really like these thoughts from Scott Cook, Intuit's founder. 

His expression "the boss is no longer the Caesar" gives me some new ways to think about Innovation Principle 12, Instead of Managing, Start Cultivating.

Your head is a melting pot

My eighth principle for innovators is titled "Most new ideas aren't".  To be honest, I've never been crazy about that title, because it focuses more on your ideas and less on what you're going to go with them.  So what if you ideas aren't new?  It simple doesn't do a good job of highlighting the major thrust of principle eight, which is to actively learn from the work of others.  As I wrote in the original description, it's all about learning from others (which now more than ever is a completely free activity):

Accepting that someone else already had your idea is liberating, because it frees you up to learn.  It moves the focus from what's going on in your head to what's going on in the world.  Much of innovating is actually about stealing ideas from one context, connecting them to other ideas, and putting them to work in another.  Where can you find analogous experiments or successes or failures that can inform your own work? Remember, before Facebook there was Friendster.  And before the iPhone came the Newton.  You can choose to live ignorance of what came before or what is happening in other parts of the world, or you can dive in and embrace all their hard-won lessons as your own.

Speaking of embracing someone else's hard-won lessons as your own, my friend and colleague Ryan Jacoby just pointed me to this fascinating interview with Tom Waits.  Touching on many aspects of his career and creative process, it's fun ramble of a talk.  To the point of this little essay of mine, Mr. Waits makes the following point about his own creativity:

Your head is a melting pot. You tell all the things you're listening to to get down and start melting. Trying to be original is kind of a futile thing.

I love this.  Instead of making a bummer statement about new ideas not being new, it encourages you to embrace the creative wildness brewing back there in yer head.  Crank up the heat.  Use a pressure cooker.  The more ideas you can access and learn from and combine -- either via your individual memory banks or those of Google or your social networks -- the better. 

"Your head is a melting pot." How does that work as a new title for Principle Eight? If you have any other ideas or suggestions, please leave a comment below.

Eight, by the way, rhymes with Waits.

 

metacool Thought of the Day

"Don't get ready, get started"

- Perry Klebahn

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

More Oregon Manifest: go IDEO!

A quick update: the IDEO x Rock Lobster team won the Creative Collaboration Bike award from the Oregon Manifest.

Go Faraday!

IDEO x Rock Lobster Oregon Manifest Faraday: a French porteur with a little lightning up its butt

A few of my colleagues at IDEO spent the summer collaborating with Rock Lobster to build our vision of what the utility bike of the future should be.  This was done as part of the Oregon Manifest.  What they created, in my humble opinion, is simply magical... and it goes by the name of Faraday:

 

Don't you just want to jump on it and ride away?

It's an electric bike.  There's a motor mounted in the front hub, super high-tech batteries are mounted inside the top tubes, and it's all controlled via a small throttle control.  How does it feel to ride?  Beautiful.  We engineered proprietary firmware and software which seamlessly integrates the push from the motor with the push you're getting from your feet.

If you're interested in voting for the best in show, you can do so here (and I wouldn't mind if you voted for Faraday!).

Here's what the judges had to say:

There is something profoundly elegant about this bike. I experienced it as a flawless design execution. While the idea of a front rack is not novel, the modular plug-in platform is brilliant. The prototyping and thought that went into deciding upon a frame geometry that would work well with front cargo appears to be accurate from my own experience. Having spent a bit of time working on improvements to existing electric assist integrations, I have great respect for the innovations and design execution for this facet to the bike. I have no doubt that the work that went into the design and fabrication of the electric side alone was easily equal to the rest of the bike.  -- Ross Evans

Contrasting with the other entries, the Faraday is a bicycle with two wheels, and it may be the better for it. It is an attractive machine that strikes a good balance between striking looks and understated aesthetics. Off all three entrants, this one probably is the most useful to most riders, as it’s easy to ride, easy to park, and easy to store at home. -- Jan Heine

This bike struck a chord with me almost immediately, my first thoughts were that this is a very well thought out bike and it is definitely my favorite of the three. Visually I love the traditional lines and the striking integrated racking system actually added to the appeal. Again we have the right type of drivetrain and braking systems, and the very smart addition of electric assist! What got me most though is what’s missing… a big, ugly, heavy battery that seems to be on every other electric assisted bike I’ve seen. Other savvy well thought out features continued to impress upon closer inspection. I really felt the data collection sensors to help determine just how much help you get from the motor was a very cool touch. -- Jeff Menown

My top pick of the three—and not just because it’s the sexiest and most conceptually successful. For me, the most important criteria are that the bike be practical, versatile, elegant, thoughtful, well-engineered, and, most important, a dynamic, real-world performance vehicle. And the Faraday is all of these things, despite its being one of those newfangled e-bikes, which run counter to my Puritanical belief that a bicycle’s engine is by definition its human. Otherwise, it’s a motorcycle, right? Well, dammit, this isn’t a motorcycle. It’s a brilliant update of the French porteur with a little lightning up its butt, and I love it. And a long-distance high five to those Californians for the clever name and great logo. -- Jeremy Spencer

As I write this, I have to admit that my eyes are welling up a bit with tears, so proud am I of the amazing IDEO and Rock Lobster folks who cranked on this project.  What you see here is the result of many late nights and long weekends; since I live near our office, over the past few months I popped by most weekends and looked in the window of our shop and they were always there.  I have a bunch of innovation principles listed along the right side of this blog.  But words are wind, and it just so damn affirming and inspiring to see people really live them and go beyond them.

Awesome work, guys.  Go Faraday!

Neal Stephenson on stepping away

If you're like me (because I hope I'm a little dorky like my colleague Joe Brown), you're making your way through Neal Stephenson's new book Reamde. I'm loving it. Along with Kevin Kelly's stunning What Technology Wants, I think Reamde is one of a handful of must-read books from 2011. In fact, based on the fifth of the novel I've digested so far, I think they're essentially the same book, albeit entered from different points on the fiction to non-fiction spectrum. Buy 'em both, read 'em both, compare and contrast.

Anyway, a few nights ago I stumbled upon this brief interview with Neal Stephenson while snooping for some additional information about Reamde:

[For some reason this, video has been pulled from YouTube in the last day or so.  To summarize, it's an interview with Neal Stephenson, and in it he says that he works for an hour or so each morning, and creates approximately a page of really good prose, and then he goes off and does something else for the day.  When he was younger and less experienced as a writer, he used to crank and crank, resulting in lots of subpart work which he then had to expend a lot of energy to dig out from under.  I'm leaving this blank video here as a reminder to reinsert it whenever the powers that pulled it decide to repost it.  It's a great interview.  Bummer.]

Sound familiar?  Stephenson's views on productivity and quality are evocative of those of Roald Dahl, whose thoughts I explored at the start of the year.  When it comes to works requiring intense concentration -- many of which seem to deal with the creation of works of language -- I am noticing that many of the best practitioners of the art not only know when to stop, but know when not to work.  This goes for everyone from songwriters to poets to novelists to practitioners of agile software development.  They stop while the going is good, and they refuse to work when they know their quality will be subpar.  Of course, this also means that they've achieved a state of self-awareness where they know that the quality of their content will drop after a certain amount of effort is expended.

When it comes to the matter of reaching a state of personal creative confidence, amassing enough experience so that you can do more in less time, gaining the wisdom to recognize when you're not functioning at your best, and coupling those two with the confidence to call it quits until the next time you meet your canvas feels like a holy grail of sorts. This brings several questions to mind for me, some personal, some not so:

1. How do you find the hour?  Whether commiting to an exercise regimen or a writing routine, making the time and commiting to it feel like a huge hurdle.  At a personal level, could I ever find an hour each morning to write?  I too believe that writing done in the cool light of the morning is writing done well, unlike the ill-considered words I spew now after a long day at work.  If I could find this hour of writing, it would mean I could finally crank out that book you've been bugging me to do about my principles of innovation.  On the other hand, it would mean going to bed earlier each night (I need my sleep), and that would imply less reading and the inspiration which comes with it. How do you find the hour?
2. If you stop early, how do you amass the hours you need to become truly proficient at something?  Can you get to a point of practicing your craft for an hour a day if you haven't first spent many days overworking yourself for 10 or more hours at a clip?  I practiced for many years as an engineer, and the practice of engineering was long and hard.  School was long and hard; I also obtained a humanities degree alongside my engineering diploma, and I can honestly say that each of my weekly problem sets for each of my engineering classes was equivalent in difficult and total time commitment to any of the end of term papers I wrote for my humanities seminars.  I'm not poo-pooing humanities work, I'm just saying that for me the study of engineering was long and difficult.  And then, once you are a young engineer learning your trade, the hours don't seem to drop.  Once, when I was still a neophyte praticing engineer, I complaining out loud about the fact that our head engineer -- who had at least 20 years of experience on me -- always left the office at 5pm, while I never got out of there before 9pm, chained to my CAD machine as I was.  A more experienced colleague of mine within earshot immediately remarked to me that maybe this other guy could leave the office because he knew how to do his job, and I didn't.  He was right.  I didn't really know how to do my job yet.  I see young designers grapple with this all of the time.  These days, having spent almost 20 years engaging in the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life I think I can leave at 6pm and feel pretty good about having put in a good day's work.  I suppose there's something in here about Gladwell's 10,000 hours rule, but at least for me, 10,000 hours doesn't feel like its enough if you're always looking to learn and improve...  I'm not quite ready to leave at 5pm on a consistent basis.  Not experienced enough yet, I suppose.
3. Where does the variety come from?  Stephenson is very clear about his need to seek out a variety of experiences outside the walls of his writing studio.  It's the un-pause which refreshes.  Many of the most creative people I know -- from engineers to graphic designers to professors to venture capitalists -- make it a point to end their days and weeks with with a sizable block of hours they can't account for.  This could come from grabbing coffee with a friend, playing a round of ultimate frisbee, or going for a long joyride in your friend's GT3 in the hills above Silicon Valley (who, me?).  Stefan Sagmeister closes his office -- totally shuts it down -- to give himself a year of "retirement" in which he goes and works on different stuff in order to refertilize the mainstream work awaiting him upon his return. Random encounters with interesting streams of life coming at you not only lead to the serendipity of which innovations are made, but they rest an rejuevenate in a way that the grindstone just can't.  Where does all of this variety come from?  As with finding the hour to write, it feels like it's a different form of discipline you need to impose upon yourself.

This is a long post because I clearly don't know what I'm talking about.  I'm just writing to think.  I'd love to hear what you think.  Thanks!

 

From bespoke to just plain "be": the validity of a strong point of view

This morning, emboldened by this insightful blog post written by my friend and colleague Paul Bennett, I slipped on a pair of Crocs and headed to work.

Now, my workplace is not a place where people generally sport Crocs.  It's also a place where nobody really cares about what you wear (anything goes), but where they also really care about what you wear (everything matters).  There's a tension there, and it makes life interesting.  So, upon strolling in the door, here's what my own two feet encountered:

The photo above doesn't do them justice, but next to my injection-molded plastic foam thingies stand a proud pair of gorgeous, yellow suede bespoke wingtips, crafted with love by a British shoemaker who was undoubtedly trained a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away by the wizened creature who invented cobblery in the first place.  In other words, it would be hard to put two products from the same category side by side and yet have such a gulf of experience, materials, approach, and point of view separating them.  As Paul notes, my Crocs are the footwear equivalent of the Volkswagen Beetle (the "New" one, methinks).  In constrast, if those yellow shoes were a car, they'd be an Aston Martin DB5.

But as designed objects, they're both completely valid.  One is bespoke.  The other, just like the original Beetle, is happy just to "be".  However, neither is better than the other; they are both high-integrity, authentic objects, not pretending or trying to be anything other than what they are.  They each mean something.  Both work because their designers and makers knew what was important. 

Yet another example of the power of a strong point of view and why it is such an imperative to have one before you start designing anything.  Points of view drive meaning.

 

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

Paul Budnitz Bicycle model No. 2

metacool Thought of the Day

"Quixote reminds us

That if we trust only when

Trust is warranted, love only

When love is returned, learn

Only when learning is valuable,

We abandon an essential feature of our humanness."

- James G. March

 

This is what intrinsic motivation looks like

Piano Stairs at IDEO from Rio Akasaka on Vimeo.

Intrinsic motivation, a killer input

Earlier this evening I came across an intriguing interview with racer, metal sculptor, designer, and archmaster of doing Shinya Kimura.  Here's an excerpt, with Kimura's thoughts italicized:

What were your early influences? 

The shapes and designs of Italian sports car like Lamborghini Miura and bugs.

Have you ever had another job? 

No

What are your favourite and least favourite parts of a bike build? 

I love to see the hazy idea of mine actually becomes materialized, that is the most favourite part of a bike build. Least favourite part is...polishing!

What are his hopes for himself and Chabott? 

Keep creating whatever I like.

What are his regrets?  

No regrets at all!!

Will he always be a bike builder or is there something else on the horizon? 

I don't categorize myself as a bike builder but I will keep building bikes and creating whatever I have in my mind as long as I live.

This morning I attended a demonstration of a cool new service, and got to meet one of the women behind its creation.  It turns out that this new business was launched as part of a Stanford d.school class last Spring, for which I was a judge.  But I didn't know about this service until today.  Why?  Well, in part because at the big demo fair they held as part of this class, where each of the student teams demoed their ideas, I spent too much of my allocated judging time talking with one team, who were unfortunate in that they had a team member who couldn't get out of what I would call "heavy sales" mode.  By that I mean, no matter what questions I asked about things like point of view, first-hand experience of the world, prototyping -- all the stuff you care about when engaging in the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life -- he kept on patronizing me with the party line, the premeditated marketing messages they had whipped up beforehand.  In other words, he was laying some heavy bullshit on me.  Bummer.

And you know what?  Bullshit is bullshit.  Bullshitters don't ship, and they can't attract intrinsically motivated people to be on their teams in any sustainable, long-term way.  Why?  Because we all want to be around people with that gleam in their eyes which says "this is going to happen".  Life is too short to waste your time working with people who are motivated by extrinsic factors, such as money, status, or grades.  It's the intrinsically motivated folks who sweat the small stuff, grok the big picture, and -- dare I say it -- think different.

When I look at the interview transcript above, I see someone who would be hacking on bikes even if there was no money in it.  Kimura's voice is that of a person who has pledged their life toward a specific passion.  A person who comes up with solutions in his dreams.  Who takes their inner desires seriously enough to try and make them reality, rather than repressing them in the name of what the outside world wants them to be.  When I interview folks to be part of the team at my employer IDEO, I'm always looking for the sparks of passion which are the mark of someone powered from within.  They are easy to see when they're there, and they are equally easy to smell when they is fake.  In my experience, having that intrinsic motivation makes all the difference in the end result.  Not only is it impossible to fake, but if you try to fake it, you will always sound like a bullshitter, which completely torpedoes the basis of everything you're trying to claim in the first place.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that intrinsic motivation is, in my opinion, a killer input.  Meaning that it is one of several key factors which define a space within which talented people can collaborate with other similarly aligned people to make magic happen.  I've said previously that trust is a killer app, but it's not an application, it's an input, just like intrinsic motivation.  The output is wonderfulness. 

And there are more; this is a subject worthy of more study.

 

 

photo credit: Chabott Engineering

What remarkable feels like

The anthem for everyone trying to make a dent in the universe

They Might Be Giants covers Chumbawamba

Björgvin Tómasson's Gameleste

What happens when you try to combine a gamelan with a celeste?  It's never been done before, so who knows?

As Björgvin Tómasson can tell you, what you get is a "gameleste".  This combination makes it a hybrid, something new under the sun.  It was built to be a part of Björk's intriguing Biophilia project, which looks to be a pretty stunning effort -- I certainly want to make it to one of her concerts!

I find this video very affirming.  Here's what it says to me: when trying to bring something new to life, you will be faced with many challenges.  Friends will question your vision, lawyers will come up with a million reasons why you shouldn't do what you want to do, and money people will demand the right to dig up your precious little seed of an idea each day to ensure that it's growing (they have to be sure to get their full money's worth, you know).

In response, just start.  Plunge in.  Create.  Excessive talking and planning is a sign that you are stuck in an emotional-intellectual mire of your own making.  That mire gets its power from our fear of the unknown.  In order to break its grip, you need to start - anywhere.  It's hard to break out of, for sure.  But we can all do it.  How did Björgvin Tómasson manage to figure out what a gameleste would be like when it did not exist?  By starting, by making it.  And now we all also know what a gameleste is all about, for the person who acts not only brings a new thing to life, but brings all of us along, too.

metacool Thought of the Day

“You know the old adage that the customer’s always right?  Well, I kind of think that the opposite is true.  The customer is rarely right.  And that is why you must seize the control of the circumstance and dominate every last detail: to guarantee that they’re going to have a far better time than they ever would have had if they tried to control it themselves.”

- Charlie Trotter

Great marketing is a mouthpiece for the truth

I'm a big fan of Porsche and of Jeff Zwart, individually and together.  I admire Porsche because their cars are still racing machines at heart, so their story about being about performance experiences is based on a core of truthiness. I deeply respect Jeff Zwart because his passion as a race driver informs his craft as as the one of the most sought-after creators of stories about automobiles and movement.  Both are purveyors of truth, and when they play together, things get really interesting.

For those not steeped in the world of modern motorsport, sometime in the early 60's came a point where race cars became so specialized that they ceased to be streetable machines, to be trailered henceforth to their places of competition mounted in the backs of lorries.  So sad.  Racing cars had shifted from something you'd park on the streets of Manhattan during the week and drive up to Lime Rock for a weekend race, to the mechanical equivalent of those ancient mandarin rulers who for the sake of status and fashion allowed their fingernails to grow so long that they were unable to feed themselves.  Ever faster cars and longer nails are interesting and make for some dramatic tradeoffs, but do not necessarily yield a better overall experience (especially for the person assigned feed the mandarin), and are certainly not particularly truthy.  So for a brand focused on communicating a story about race-bred performance usable on the road, what could ring more true than a story about a Porsche driven to the race course by its driver, who happens to be a consummate teller of stories?  It's a bold shift from the old marketing myth of Win on Sunday, sell on Monday to a true, honest statement of Sell on Monday, win on Sunday, drive home on Monday. 

As marketers we need to stop making myths and start finding ways to talk about the truth.  We each need to take an oath to the effect that, should we ever find ourselves locked in a conference room trying to whip up a value proposition statement to justify why consumers will buy the crap we're so desperate to sell, we will each reach over and slap the person on our left in the face (gently) and then all exclaim in unison "let's stop mythologizing and go out in the world to hear the truth it wants to tell us".  It's out there.  Go find it.  Porsche and Zwart have.  Great marketing is a mouthpiece for the truth.

By the way, Jeff Zwart will race this red beauty up Pikes Peak tomorrow.  You can see his amazing run from last year here:

 

The ballad of Lucas Ordoñez

I've spoken here many times about the power of experiential learning.  For many activities, learning by doing is an extremely sticky way to become adept at a new skill. The difference between reading about surfing, watching a video about surfing, and actually taking a class where you get up on the board (and get really wet, too!) is profound.  The former two provide you with lots of information about surfing, while the latter earns you true know-how about how to carve your wave through the water.  Deep know how is the killer app for folks who want to make an impact in the ring, as opposed to being spectators or pundits watching from outside.

But, what about computer simulations?  While they cannot model all aspects of an activity which takes place in the physical world, computers provide us with the opportunity for deep experiential learning, albeit with less fine-grained resolution than one would encounter in real life.  However, as they are not in fact real life, simulations can liberate us from the fear one encounters when immersed in difficult real life situations, such as being the leader of a group of people for the first time, or engaging in a dangerous physical activity.  Computer simulations can also provide us with access to learning scenarios which otherwise would be out of our reach due to limitations of time, physics, and money.

Joi Ito has spoken extensively about the power of the game World of Warcraft as a training environment for people interested in developing the skills needed to lead diverse groups of people in conditions of great uncertainty.  John Seely Brown has also written some persuasive essays on this subject, and here is an excerpt from one of them:

When role-playing gamers team up to undertake a quest, they often need to attempt particularly difficult challenges repeatedly until they find a blend of skills, talents, and actions that allows them to succeed. This process brings about a profound shift in how they perceive and react to the world around them. They become more flexible in their thinking and more sensitive to social cues. The fact that they don't think of gameplay as training is crucial. Once the experience is explicitly educational, it becomes about developing compartmentalized skills and loses its power to permeate the player's behavior patterns and worldview.

In this way, the process of becoming an effective World of Warcraft guild master amounts to a total-immersion course in leadership. A guild is a collection of players who come together to share knowledge, resources, and manpower. To run a large one, a guild master must be adept at many skills: attracting, evaluating, and recruiting new members; creating apprenticeship programs; orchestrating group strategy; and adjudicating disputes. Guilds routinely splinter over petty squabbles and other basic failures of management; the master must resolve them without losing valuable members, who can easily quit and join a rival guild. Never mind the virtual surroundings; these conditions provide real-world training a manager can apply directly in the workplace.

I wholeheartedly agree with Ito and Brown, and am of the opinion that many aspiring real-world project leaders would do well to log some hours learning to lead multi-player quests and raids in Warcraft.  Polyphony's Gran Turismo is another great computer simulation from a sticky learning perspective, as it allows one to get a sense of what it feels like to drive a variety of cars fast -- very fast -- around a multitude of road courses.  For a few hundred bucks, it allows almost anyone to gain elements of experience which heretofore were only available to person blessed with thousands and thousands of dollars in discretionary income -- as well as the willingness to get really hurt if things were to go all pear-shaped.

Enter Lucas Ordoñez, Spanish MBA student and Gran Turiso aficionado.  A few years ago, Ordoñez entered the GT Academy competition organized by Polyphone and Sony, which allowed him to pit his virtual driving skills against 25,000 other competitors, each one seeking to win a full scholarship for further real-world training in racing cars, culminating in the acquisition of a license granting entry into the world of professional racing.  Ordoñez had gained experience racing go karts as a kid, but picked up his auto racing miles via Gran Turismo. For those of you who aren't familiar with Gran Turismo, here's a quick video of him "racing" around a famous track you'd find in Germany:

Long story short, Ordoñez beat the odds and topped the Academy, beating out 24,499 other aspiring Sennas.  Here's a video showing what happened when he entered his first "real" race:

Pretty cool, eh?

But wait, it gets better: after more experiencing more racing success, Ordoñez was offered a ride in the vaunted 24 Hours of Le Mans race -- a truly spectacular opportunity for any racer, let alone one that's been doing it for less than three years.  And guess what, he did really well.  Not only did he and his team finish the entire 24 hours, an incredible achievement on its own, they took second place in class, earning the right to stand on the champion's podum.  Really, really amazing, especially considering that Ordoñez brought much less "experience" to the team than any of the other traditionally-trained racers he competed against.  This video gives a wonderful sense of the magnitude of this achievement:

My point here isn't to claim that video games change everything.  They don't.  Far from it.  But I do think that we can all stand to learn more about the world we live in by selectively choosing to spend more time with the high-quality games that really do put us in new learning situations.  Curiousity can be stoked and satisfied in myriad ways, so can't we all agree to move beyond the snobbery of the book and the university lecture and the formal training class to see the latent potential embedded in our silicon machines and the software that makes them sing?  This is the message of the ballad of Lucas Ordoñez... I can't wait to see where life next takes him.

Effective storytelling, a countermeasure against complexity

You may not like cars, or you may like them as much as I do, but I think we can all agree that the storytelling behind this Audi piece called Eliminating Luck is truly masterful. 

I admire the way they've taken a complex subject, a subject associated with myriad statistics and difficult to relate to numbers (how fast does 300 km/hr feel, anyhow?), and turned it into something lyrical and quite beautiful.  Effective storytelling is indeed an effective countermeasure when it comes to deconstructing complex situations and communicating their essence in an elegant way.

A love letter to Hewlett-Packard

About 18 years ago I dropped out of graduate school at Stanford and took a job as an R&D engineer at Hewlett-Packard Company.  Actually, "dropped out" is a bit too strong of a phrase; it was late June, I had just just won my Stanford undergraduate degrees a few weeks before, I was about to start my summer internship at NASA, it was hot out, and my new dorm room (Rains housing, for those of you in the know) was even hotter, and I was already sick of hearing cars downshifting for the stop sign just outside of my window.  Classes for my masters program in mechanical engineering wouldn't start for a few more months, but the prospect of yet another math class didn't feel like a Big Idea to me.  I forget the the exact chain of events, but I believe I first called Ford to ask (beg) for the job I had turned down a few months earlier, and then coincidentally someone from Hewlett-Packard called me to see if I would be interested in a position with them up in Vancouver, Washington, having passed their grueling phone interview screen a few months earlier.

So. 

I flew up to Portland, Oregon to interview with Hewlett-Packard, partly because I was desperate to get out of my room at Stanford and partly because I had never been to a CART race, and there was one happening the coming weekend, which was June 27 (what -- you think I've changed?  This one-track mind has taken years to develop).  The job interviews went well, and the race was pretty cool (the good folks at Hewlett-Packard allowed me to keep the rental car for the weekend), if I must say so:

The visit went well, I took the job, and in doing so became a very proud member of the Hewlett-Packard family, starting as a R&D Engineer working on ink-jet printing systems.  I enjoyed what in retrospect was an amazing two years, though I probably didn't fully appreciate everything at the time because I was relatively impatient from a career standpoint.  All things being equal, over my two years there, I was able to do foundational R&D work on what became HP's "off-axis" ink system (which you can stilll find in any large-format printer today), got to help take a new printer up the manufacturing ramp, was allowed to redesign a bunch of parts for another new printer, and was also asked to do some cool user research in the field, including one home visit in Wisconsin where I ended up helping some kids with their homework. 

The best thing about working at Hewlett-Packard was its culture, which was very "adult" in the sense that it was built on a sense of deep trust and respect between individuals and groups within the company.  One day I was using spray-mount glue in my cubicle (bad idea) and my manager stopped by, poked his head in, and said something to the effect of "You can pretty much do anything you want here unless you're endangering yourself or others, and right now you're endangering yourself or others," and then he walked away.  Lesson learned.  Working at Hewlett-Packard meant that I had the good fortune of working for some truly spectacular managers and mentors, such as Eric Ahlvin, Alan Shibata, David Gast, and Rick Berriman.  Looking back on my time there, I realize now the degree to which I imprinted on these people and on Hewett-Packard's culture.  In my approach to work and working with people, I think I've tried hard to live up to the examples they set for me, as well as the ethos that informed the culture of Hewlett-Packard. 

The best summary of the culture I experienced at Hewlett-Packard is summed up in the 11 Simple Rules drawn up by David Packard himself.  These are:

1. Think first of the other fellow. This is THE foundation — the first requisite — for getting along with others. And it is the one truly difficult accomplishment you must make. Gaining this, the rest will be "a breeze."

2. Build up the other person's sense of importance. When we make the other person seem less important, we frustrate one of his deepest urges. Allow him to feel equality or superiority, and we can easily get along with him.

3. Respect the other man's personality rights. Respect as something sacred the other fellow's right to be different from you. No two personalities are ever molded by precisely the same forces.

4. Give sincere appreciation. If we think someone has done a thing well, we should never hesitate to let him know it. WARNING: This does not mean promiscuous use of obvious flattery. Flattery with most intelligent people gets exactly the reaction it deserves — contempt for the egotistical "phony" who stoops to it.

5. Eliminate the negative. Criticism seldom does what its user intends, for it invariably causes resentment. The tiniest bit of disapproval can sometimes cause a resentment which will rankle — to your disadvantage — for years.

6. Avoid openly trying to reform people. Every man knows he is imperfect, but he doesn't want someone else trying to correct his faults. If you want to improve a person, help him to embrace a higher working goal — a standard, an ideal — and he will do his own "making over" far more effectively than you can do it for him.

7. Try to understand the other person. How would you react to similar circumstances? When you begin to see the "whys" of him you can't help but get along better with him.

8. Check first impressions. We are especially prone to dislike some people on first sight because of some vague resemblance (of which we are usually unaware) to someone else whom we have had reason to dislike. Follow Abraham Lincoln's famous self-instruction: "I do not like that man; therefore I shall get to know him better."

9. Take care with the little details. Watch your smile, your tone of voice, how you use your eyes, the way you greet people, the use of nicknames and remembering faces, names and dates. Little things add polish to your skill in dealing with people. Constantly, deliberately think of them until they become a natural part of your personality.

10. Develop genuine interest in people. You cannot successfully apply the foregoing suggestions unless you have a sincere desire to like, respect and be helpful to others. Conversely, you cannot build genuine interest in people until you have experienced the pleasure of working with them in an atmosphere characterized by mutual liking and respect.

11. Keep it up. That's all — just keep it up!

Wow.  These 11 principles are simultaneously super inspirational and super humbling.  Truth be told, on my bad days I fail to live up to all of these.  But I try, and I keep trying to improve myself vis a vis this list, and I think that was the magic of Hewlett-Packard's culture, which allowed you -- even encouraged you -- to improve yourself just as you were always trying to improve the stuff sitting on your test bench.  And it encouraged you to help the folks around you, too.  What I find interesting about Packard's points is that, starting with No.1, they're all focused on the people around you, not on your inner dialog or whatever.  If you're seeking to establish and maintain a collaborative, innovative culture, you could do a lot worse than to follow these 11 points.

I wrote this post this evening because earlier today I learned that David Kelley modeled much of IDEO's culture on that of Hewlett-Packard.  I left Hewlett-Packard to join IDEO, and in many ways I regard IDEO as a logical extension of Packard's cultural vision.  Trust and respect for your fellow colleagues are indeed the pillars of cultures which routinely create high-impact innovations.

Many thanks to my friend Bob Sutton for telling me about David Packard's Simple Rules.

metacool Thought of the Day

"I’m convinced that for an existing company to innovate, they must first make the decision to get rid of something. Unless you get rid of it, it will always be more a more compelling argument to improve the old rather than commit to the new. That small decision over time adds up to a total deflection, and you are never as motivated to innovate as the unencumbered new entrant."

- Richard Foster

Again, brands are defined by how they make you feel

Brands are defined by how they make you feel

An inspirational commercial highlighting the new Shinkansen service to the Kyushu region of Japan. Pulled from the air out of deference to the earthquake, it has gone viral on the web because it so inspiring. 

I love the way it makes you feel: optimistic, upbeat, we can do this.

Don't settle

My original working title for Innovation Principle 20 was "Don't settle".  This principle was inspired by one of my colleagues at IDEO, who has showed me again and again the value created by not giving up on an idea until the quality of its expression matches the magnitude of its potential.  

I evolved the messaging of Principle 20 to "Be remarkable" because I wanted it to feel more aspirational and open-ended, but it some ways I always go back to the phrasing "don't settle" in my head.  To be honest, I've been struggling with the wording on this one.  Is it about being remarkable?  Or is about sticking to your guns, never letting anything go?  While I'm a firm believer in embracing mediocrity in order to get the ball rolling, I'm also a stickler for doing amazing stuff.  Are these two at all compatible?

When I read this article about chef Daniel Boulud a couple of years ago, I filed it away under the heading "don't settle".  I just took another look at it, and noted this passage:

But during Round 8 of recipe tests, on Tuesday, he refuses to grade on the curve. He stoically appraises entrees and appetizers in what feels like a marathon episode of “Top Chef” — except that this judge has helped conceive the dishes and never seems very pleased by the results.

The lamb ribs confit with roasted lamb leg and spring beans? “Maybe a little more herbs in it,” he suggests. The Maryland lump crab cake with a curry sauce and pickled radish? “More crab, less garnish.” The passion fruit crepe with mango slices? “We’re still not there.”

We sit across from Mr. Boulud, shamelessly pillaging the leftovers and thinking: huh? Each dish seems head-spinningly yummy, but Mr. Boulud summons enthusiasm only when he tries a sausage called the Vermonter, and he cracks a smile only after a forkful of beer-battered haddock beignets.

“I think it’s good,” he says, like a man enjoying a guilty pleasure.

This excerpt hints at the relationship between "don't settle" and "be remarkable".  When it comes to the lamb and the crab cake and the fruit crepe, he's saying "keep working on it -- not remarkable enough yet".  Not settling.  But when he tastes something over the bar, such as the beer-battered fish beignets, he celebrates the outcome.  I think that's the key: if you don't have the honesty to recognize something remarkable when it happens, people around you will think nothing will ever make you happy, and from that point forward you'll always be operating in a climate of fear.  And a working climate infused with fear never ever never ever takes us to a happy place:

This principle is about a stepwise journey toward a remarkable endpoint.  It is fueled by trust, a trust that none of us will settle for anything less than being remarkable.  But it also requires a shared trust that it is okay to deliver an interim step that is less than perfect.  In other words, we need to be okay with each of us failing as individuals if we're ever going to reach somewhere remarkable together.  I can't imagine that perfect fish-flavored beignets could ever happen right on the first shot, you know?

Stanford Magazine on the Stanford d.school

Stanford's alumni magazine, titled -- you guessed it! -- Stanford Magazine, ran a great story on the d.school a few weeks ago.  The article speaks with my teacher/mentor/colleague/friend/hero David Kelley and others about not only the d.school, but on living your life well, and on the notion of achieving creative confidence (here's a secret: those last two items are deeply related).

It's definitely worth your time to read through the article.  I really liked this quote from Stanford President John Hennessy:

Creativity represents an important characteristic that we would seek to inculcate in our students, and obviously one that's harder to put a firm framework around.  It's unlike teaching some analytical method. Will a bridge stay up? Well, we know what to teach. You teach physics, you teach some mathematics and you can do the analysis.

It's much harder to teach creativity. [It involves] multiple routes, multiple approaches and, obviously, it's virtually impossible to test whether or not you've succeeded. The measure of success is likely to come long after, not unlike many of the other things we try to teach: To prepare students to be educated citizens, to prepare them for dealing with people from diverse and different walks of life. Those are things that play out over a long time, whether or not we've done a good job.

During my time as an undergraduate at Stanford, I was very fortunate to be able to pursue two degrees, obtaining both a bachelor of science in engineering and a bachelor of arts in a multidisciplinary program called Values, Technology, Science and Society [VTSS] (it is now called STS and is one of the biggest programs on campus, though when I was there it was quite small).  I spent a lot of time in the library.  Though VTSS sounds like something very technical in nature, it was actually an incredibly rich humanities experience, with a focus on topics which, if you've spent any time around this blog, you know that I love.  For example, my honors thesis was on the origins and development of the Ferrari aesthetic, looking at how meaning was created in Maranello via the mechanisms of storytelling, racing, and panel beating.  My VTSS teachers were an incredible group of people, really inspirational, and they helped me build up my creative confidence in myriad ways.  VTSS also gave me a way to take all of the product design classes with David Kelley which I otherwise would not have been able to do had I just pursued my engineering degree alone. 

I bring all of this up because I do feel that Professor Kelley helped, in Hennessy's words, to prepare me to be an educated citizen, to prepare me for dealing with people from diverse and different walk of life.  If the d.school had been around while I was there, I wouldn't have had to get the two degrees (though I would have anyway, as I'm always "doing both").  For me, as someone who was part of the founding team at the d.school, and who remains extremely passionate and optimistic about its mission and potential in the world -- it is an experiment still in its very early days -- it's very gratifying to see that mission be couched in these terms.  Ultimately, we are not teaching folks to be designers, we are helping them realize their potential as citizens and as happy, productive human beings.  Awesome.

I'll leave you with this recent d.school video which has students telling it all in their own words:

d.school bootcamp: the student experience from Stanford d.school

metacool Thought of the Day

Thanks to my friend R. Michael Hendrix for this awesome photo.

Get out there and hustle!

Wisdom from Francis Ford Coppola

I learned something significant today from this wonderful 99% interview of Francis Ford Coppola at the 99%. 

As you know, for the past year or so I've been playing around with the notion that an essential -- even critical -- element in any successful creative endeavor is the existence of a crisp point of view to guide decision making along the way.  A point of view is statement of what something must be, and in that declaration lies an exhaustive list of everything which it cannot be.  A point of view allows for consistent choices to be made, which lead to coherent, strong end results.  When something is criticized for feeling like it was created by a committee, it's not so much the committee per se which is at fault, so much as the absence of any unifying principle to guide the actions of individuals in the name of creating a sum total which is truly remarkable.  In terms of outcomes, having a strong point of view is the difference between the music of an ensemble led by Charlie Hunter and the stuff you'd hear in an elevator.  There's nothing wrong with group creativity, but it needs to have a point of reference for goodness navigation.

Which brings me back to the Coppola interview.  While I've never made a motion picture, I always watch the credits, and I'm always amazed at how even a film with a modest production budget can employ so many people.  How can they all know what to do?  What good looks like?  How to make the myriad brilliant decisions that lead to something being truly remarkable?  Here's what Coppola says, and it's totally about point of view:

When you make a movie, always try to discover what the theme of the movie is in one or two words. Every time I made a film, I always knew what I thought the theme was, the core, in one word. In “The Godfather,” it was succession. In “The Conversation,” it was privacy. In “Apocalypse,” it was morality.

The reason it’s important to have this is because most of the time what a director really does is make decisions. All day long: Do you want it to be long hair or short hair? Do you want a dress or pants? Do you want a beard or no beard? There are many times when you don’t know the answer. Knowing what the theme is always helps you.

I remember in “The Conversation,” they brought all these coats to me, and they said: Do you want him to look like a detective, Humphrey Bogart? Do you want him to look like a blah blah blah. I didn’t know, and said the theme is ‘privacy’ and chose the plastic coat you could see through. So knowing the theme helps you make a decision when you’re not sure which way to go.

 

One word.  I love the idea of boiling the point of view down to one word.  An exhaustive written treatment of the point of view would be read by few, internalized by even fewer.  But a single word?  Think of the last US presidential election, and you can see the power of a single word to communicate an entire political platform: Hope.  And because creative endeavors ever love constraints, the specificity of a single word will engender mountains more creativity than a list of ten or a hundred or a thousand.  Transparent plastic rain coats don't just happen, you know.

Rest in peace, David E. Davis, Jr.

"I suddenly understood with great clarity that nothing in life—except death itself—was ever going to kill me. No meeting could ever go that badly. No client would ever be that angry. No business error would ever bring me as close to the brink as I had already been."

- David E. Davis, Jr., on the liberating effects of the automobile accident which almost claimed his life

 

David E. Davis passed away today. 

I began reading his writing in December 1979, and it's not hyperbole to say that his influence changed my life for the better.  An amazing writer and raconteur, his magazines informed and inflamed my passion for automobiles, and provided me with a view into a fascinating world of colorful personalities, fantastic road trips, and his own singular point of view on what made for a quality life.  Everything I learned from his writing and editorial direction has informed my professional work.  As a consummate storyteller, he was truly a great American treasure.

I began corresponding with him via email a few years ago.  We exchanged views on a variety of topics, including the marketing of Suburbans as Cadillacs and the proper shade of metallic blue required to bring out the personality of a Ferrari 550 Maranello.  We tried to meet up at a running of the California Mille, but our schedules didn't overlap in the way we hoped, something I truly regret.  I left a copy of his book Thus Spake David E. with a mutual friend, and David wrote me a wonderful, humorous inscription with an offer of dinner sometime.  Though I took the time to thank him for his influence on me via email, I dearly wish I could have had that dinner and looked him in the eyes and told him so.  In life you've got to seize the day and make the most of things, and I didn't in this case, with regret.

The quote above is from a graduation speech he gave a few years ago.  Whenever I feel like life is kicking me in the teeth, I think about his points above.  The ability to pick oneself up from adversity, in the end, may be as important -- or more important -- as the instinct to go forth boldly in the first place.  For me, the lesson of David E. Davis is to live your life out loud, to keep on engaging with new adventures no matter what life hands you in return, and to do it all with as much vigor and chutzpah as you can muster.

RIP, David E.

Being remarkable: Sarah Kay

Sarah Kay

Gathering and growing opportunity streams

What could you do with 200 terabytes of data? 

As it turns out, astonishing things.  Particularly if you've accumulated the data with a strong point of view behind your gathering endeavors, as Deb Roy has done over the past three years:

Wow!  I hope you were able to watch through to the end -- those last few minutes are magic. 

As is the case with the Salman Khan video I wrote about last week, Deb Roy's massive collection of video data is an example of a real option at work.  By taking the time to develop, install, and maintain these data recording systems, Roy and his team of researchers opened themselves up to myriad opportunity streams, some predictable, some serendipitous.  They certainly created value far beyond the costs associated with gathering up 200 terabytes of data!  The result is breathtaking, remarkable, and takes our culture to a new place.

metacool Thought of the Day