A Thousand Splendid Suns

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

I started this book this morning and couldn't put it down. It's a moving, powerful story. Check out the reviews here.

A Long Way Gone

A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah

I didn't have any excerpts from this book. It was a heart-hurting, sobering read. Check out the reviews here.

Semper Discens

When I started this blog back in 2007, it was merely a repository of all the excerpts from books I had read. First it was private, then I took the leap to open it to the world (still shrouded in anonymity). Along came Twitter and in late 2008 I cast off my anonymity and added "me" to this blog.

Fast forward to the beginning of 2010 when I created my three guiding words. One of them - semper discens (always learning) - contained the goal to contribute my voice to the blogisphere. Not by way of sharing links and excerpts, but in sharing my own thoughts. I've made baby steps here, here and here and this week I officially started my second blog amandafenton.com.

I'll continue to keep this space alive to capture what I'm reading, and I hope you'll join me at my new blog to laugh, critique, agree and ponder the things I find interesting.

Why We Buy

Why We Buy: The Science Of Shopping by Paco Underhill

I found this book fascinatingly enjoyable. The "do good design" part of my conscious struggled at times knowing the negative environmental impact of our over-consumption. Still, great insight into why we buy.

My favourite excerpts...

In 1997, when this volume was originally written, the academic world knew more about the marketplace in Papua New Guinea than what happened at your local supermarket or shopping mall. Twentieth-century anthropology wasn’t about what happened in your backyard.

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To keep track of them, every camera is assigned a name—the video cameras are named after rock stars, the digital stills are signs of the zodiac. We find giving a camera a name rather than a number helps it last longer, and when Jimi Hendrix feels poorly, he gets to the shop faster than if he were camera number 26.

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Then we throw the tracker-hopefuls out into the real world, into a store setting, to see them in action. Most of them wash out at this point—you can teach technique, but not the smarts or the slight case of fascination required to do this work well. It’s weirdly addictive, and many of our trackers have been with us for a decade or more.

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I’d guess that at least one third of the time we go on location, we end up finding something very different than what our client told us we’d find. The store has six aisles and not seven, the shelf layout has been mysteriously reversed or that interactive machine we were hired to study arrived at the store nearly a month ago and hasn’t worked since.

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Even the plainest truths can get lost in all the details of planning and stocking a store. A phrase I find myself using over and over with clients is this: The obvious isn’t always apparent.

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There are surveys that do ask customers for information about what they saw and did inside a store, but the answers are often suspect. Sometimes people just don’t remember every little thing they saw or did in a store—they weren’t shopping with the thought that they’d have to recall it all later. In a fragrance study we performed, some shoppers interviewed said they had given serious consideration to buying brands that the store didn’t carry. In a study of tobacco merchandising in a convenience store, shoppers remembered seeing signs for Marlboro even though no such signs were in that store.

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The average time spent in a hypermarket, or multidepartment store—whether a Wal-Mart Supercenter in the U.S., a European Carrefour, or a Pick n Pay in Cape Town, South Africa—is about thirty minutes. That’s stopwatch time. But if you ask someone how long he or she spent in a store, that person will often double that number. In any commercial setting, time comes in three forms. There’s real time, there’s perceived time and then there’s a combination of the two.

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The flip side of that measure is what we call the confusion index, or the number of people walking around stores completely at sea. Remember that time is relative, so if the ten minutes you spend at a Target or Wal-Mart is spent walking in circles, it’ll feel like you’ve been in there for a half hour.

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The overarching lesson that we’ve learned from the science of shopping is this: Amenability and profitability are totally and inextricably linked. Take care of the former, in all its guises, and the latter is assured. Build and operate a retail environment that fits the highly particular needs of shoppers and you’ve created a successful store.

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In the five chapters that follow, we’ll see how the most elemental issues—the holding capacity of the human hand, the limits to what a being in motion can read, even the physical needs of the nonshopper—matter in determining the shopping experience. Take that same model and you’ll notice it applies to every physical environment you interact with.

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All of which means that whatever’s in the zone they cross before making that transition is pretty much lost on them. If there’s a display of merchandise, they’re not going to take it in. If there’s a sign, they’ll probably be moving too fast to absorb what it says. If the sales staff hits them with a hearty “Can I help you?” the answer’s going to be “No thanks,” I guarantee it. Put a pile of fliers or a stack of shopping baskets just inside the door: Shoppers will barely see them and will almost never pick them up. Move them ten feet in and the fliers and baskets will disappear. It’s a law of nature—shoppers need a landing strip.

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Throughout our work looking at the lobbies of business hotels, the lack of what we call an “information architecture plan” can have a disastrous effect on customer service. If the concierge or bellhop has to tell people coming into your hotel all day, every day where the bathroom is, well, I don’t care how much training you give people, you try answering the same question five hundred times a week and see if you don’t get cranky, too.

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There’s an interesting curve here: Greet people too early and you scare them away. Talk to them too late and you get a whole lot of frustrated customers. In our work with Estée Lauder’s cosmetic counters, we were able to plot this curve pretty precisely. Leave people alone for at least one minute. Let them play first, and then you go from salesperson to cosmetics coach.

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What can you do with the decompression zone? You can greet customers—not necessarily to steer them anywhere but to say hello, remind them where they are, start the seduction. Security experts say that the easiest way to discourage shoplifting is to make sure staffers acknowledge the presence of every shopper with a simple hello. Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton’s homespun advice to retailers was that if you hire a sweet old lady just to say hello to incoming customers, none of them will dare steal.

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That teaches us something about rules—you have to either follow them or break them with gusto. Just ignoring a rule, or bending it a little, is usually the worst thing you can do.

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The other related fact of newsstand life we noticed was that every customer had one hand already occupied, either with a briefcase or a tote bag or a purse or a lunch. Almost no one goes to work empty-handed nowadays. When you think about it, it’s a rare moment in the modern American’s life when both hands are completely free. Yes, we have backpacks and messenger bags, but those simply allow us to turn ourselves even more into pack animals. Add to the mix a mobile phone, a coffee cup or the occasional ice cream cone, and in most commercial settings, at least half the people you see are moving with only one hand free. I might even venture to say that finding yourself with both hands free is a little disconcerting, as we immediately think we’ve left something behind.

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We suggested that all drugstore employees be trained to offer baskets to any customer seen holding three or more items. My drugstore client gave it a shot. And because people tend to be gracious when someone tries to help, shoppers almost unanimously accepted the baskets. And as basket use rose instantly, so did sales, just like that.

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In other words, I end by saying, showing me a sign in a conference room, while ideal from the graphic designer’s point of view, is the absolute worst way to see if it’s any good. To say whether a sign or any in-store media works or not, there’s only one way to really assess it—in place. On the floor of the store.

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Thinking that every sign must stand on its own and contain an entire message is not only unimaginative, it’s ignorant of how human brains operate.

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At a bank client’s branch we studied there was a standing rack of brochures located in the general vicinity of the teller lines. But it was positioned a little too far away—customers standing behind the ropes could barely read the brochure titles, let alone grab them.

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In the majority of stores throughout the world, sales would instantly be increased by the addition of one chair. I would remove a display if it meant creating space for a chair. I’d rip out a fixture. I’d kill a mannequin. A chair says: We care.

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Stores that sell mainly to women should all be figuring out some way to engage the interest of men. If I owned Chico’s or Victoria’s Secret, I’d have a place where a woman could check her husband like a coat.

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One of the ongoing challenges in contemporary banking is getting older customers to use ATMs. The automated tellers can be intimidating if you’re not already comfortable with interactive touch-screens and machine-speak. Senior citizens can be taught, but it shouldn’t be by youngsters or officious junior VP wannabes; older customers prefer to be instructed by their contemporaries, all our surveys say—one older bank employee stationed by the teller lines can escort multitudes of senior customers to ATMs.

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3. That if the parent’s sustained close attention is required (by, say, a car salesman or a bank loan officer), then someone must first find a way to divert the attention of a restless, bored child.

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We did a study for Wells Fargo a few years ago showing that 15 percent of all those entering its branches are under seven years old. “What’s your most effective selling tool?” I asked a loan officer there. She reached into her desk drawer and pulled out a lollipop. She said it could usually be counted on to buy her two minutes of uninterrupted face time with a parent, all she needed. The bank also offers a coloring book starring a puppy who lives in a Wells Fargo branch. That and a handful of crayons can add up to a brand-new home equity loan, no question. In New York, Citibank produces an activity book for children. In both cases, the banks are buying quiet today and—given how we like to fetishize our happy childhood experiences—loyal customers of tomorrow.

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In study after study, we’ve seen that the single most important factor in determining a shopper’s opinion of the service he or she receives is waiting time. If they think the wait wasn’t too bad, they feel as though they were treated capably and well. If the wait went on too long, they feel as though the service was poor and inept. Quite simply, a short wait enhances the entire shopping experience and a long one poisons it.

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Interaction, human or otherwise: The time a shopper spends waiting after an employee has initiated contact actually goes faster than time spent waiting before that interaction takes place, our studies have shown. Having an employee simply acknowledge that the shopper is waiting—and maybe offer some plausible explanation—automatically relieves time anxiety, especially when it comes early in the wait. I once visited a big chain drugstore where the manager clearly loved customer contact. When the checkout lines got a little too long he’d leave his office and work the front of the store like some combination expediter–standup comic.

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If, during busy times, I had a choice between deploying three cashiers or two cashiers and a line manager, I’d go with the latter. The line manager can serve as a kind of precashier—he or she can gently suggest to shoppers that they have their orders ready or can offer to answer any questions the customers may have, thereby shortening both the perceived and the actual wait.

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A music store or bookstore of the future—couldn’t it be similar? It might resemble the comic-book clubs they have in Japan, where you can go in, rent a chair and read all your favorites. You would pay a small admission fee. In return, someone whose taste you admire and appreciate would serve as the emcee.

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When you arrive in a new place, fold up your old glasses and put on those gafas, megane, occhiali or óculos, I tell you—doors pop open. Windows appear out of nowhere. I’ve seen it happen again and again. Traveling someplace new improves your processing skills. It helps sharpen the old tacks. It reminds you that no matter who you are, you’ll probably end up coping just fine.

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When Blockbuster Mexico asked me to come down and do some consulting work, I said sure, absolutely, but I had one request—that the executive board visit the stores with me over the course of a weekend. But, but, Paco, they replied, we’ve never been in a store on a weekend! We’re out at our country houses! Again, this is an issue I run into over and over—top-level execs busy crunching numbers but never even once bothering to visit the actual floor.

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One of the easiest ways to gauge a store’s morale is to take a look at the amenities and spaces it provides its employees. This doesn’t mean you have to have a paid babysitter or masseuse on staff, but it does require a little care and attention backstage.

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In the Latin market, if someone walks in and can prove they have a home, a job and a mailing address, Elektra will lend that person the money to outfit their lives. In return, the customer agrees to make a small weekly cash payment. That said, the entire family takes responsibility for the loan. In essence, it’s a bank wrapped up in a consumer appliance and department store.

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Does the company charge high interest rates? Absolutely. But Elektra is also enabling social mobility. They’re lending money not to a single person but to an entire household, including extended family. The company’s bad debt ratio? Remarkably tiny. A lot less than for your typical bank. So it’s a win-win for Elektra, for Latin families, and for the entire Latin American standard of living. Genius.

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The best defense against complacency is to eliminate the distance between the floor of the store and the men and women who make the decisions about what happens there. The most intelligent management decree today is to push more responsibility and authority down to the store manager level. Senior brass must develop the tools for teaching managers how to make sure the store is serving the shoppers.

Chasing Daylight

Chasing Daylight by Gene O'Kelly

Amazing book. Should be required reading for every executive. My favourite excerpts...

But of all the things I loved about golf, the most important was that it allowed Corinne and me to have time to ourselves. In particular, we loved to play late in the day. The course tended to be emptier. The sun was lower in the sky, making the shadows longer and the trees bordering each hole look more impressive and beautiful. It was a magical time to play. When we were out there, we felt almost touched by something, our senses heightened. It was as if we weren't just playing golf, but chasing daylight, grabbing as much time as we could.

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IF WE TAKE CARE OF THE MOMENTS, THE YEARS WILL TAKE CARE OF THEMSELVES. —Maria Edgeworth

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I knew hope existed, and I knew it was largely up to me to uncover it. I remembered when my good friend Bill had had a seven-way heart bypass. After three days of lying in his hospital bed, he was told by the doctor that he could take 25 steps. Bill did his exercise in the morning, then asked if he could take 25 more steps later that day. Soon, he was shuffling down the hall four times a day. On one of his outings, he peeked into another room, where a couple of fellow heart patients lay quietly, IVs in their arms. "Wow, they have it a lot worse than me," he said to the nurse. "No, actually you have it a lot worse than they do," she said. "They perceive themselves as heart attack victims. You're trying to get better."

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My daily experience at the radiation clinic made me realize that proficiency was not the index I could always use anymore. Or even usually use anymore. Not everyone can perform at the level you'd like. Or that they'd like. They simply can't, try though they may. Maybe they don't have the physical energy. Maybe their will is shot. Maybe they're overwhelmed by what they need to do to make a good break with life. As difficult as my trip to the clinic should have been, I felt that each time I went there, my tolerance for people—that is, my tolerance for imperfection—expanded. I understood better the range of human capability; it was far broader than I'd thought. In my previous life, I'd dealt mostly with people at the top of their game. Now I was dealing with people whose capabilities had been diminished. By disease, doubt, fatigue. Things don't go according to plan.

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When things didn't go the way those of us there wanted, I watched people around me grow frustrated. I tried not to let it happen to me. I couldn't change what was happening, and neither could they. But they were having a far worse time of it by not accepting.

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You can't control everything, I told myself, as hard as it was to hear myself, a Type A personality, say those words. I wouldn't allow mishaps and bad luck and especially a defeating attitude to throw me off my goals, one of which was to try and make every day the best day of my life. The CEO, the micro-manager, needed finally to let go. I closed my eyes. I let go.

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In my opinion, and that of many others, the most important note the consultant sounded was that we would have greater success in achieving our goals if we tried not so much to control time—an impossibility, as it is outside us—and instead tried to control energy—eminently possible, as it is within

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The present felt to me like a gift. (Perhaps I should say the present was a present.) Living in it now, maybe for the first time, I experienced more Perfect Moments and Perfect Days in two weeks than I had in the last five years, or than I probably would have in the next five years, had my life continued the way it was going before my diagnosis.

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If I told you to aim to create 30 Perfect Days, could you? How long would it take? Thirty days? Six months? Ten years? Never?

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Looking at how some of the people around me had managed their lives, I lamented that they had not been blessed as I had, with this jolt to life. They had no real motivation or clear timeline to stop what they were so busy at, to step back, to ask what exactly they were doing with their life. Many of them had money; many of them had more money than they needed. Why was it so scary to ask themselves one simple question: Why am I doing what I'm doing? Part of me understood the vortex, of course. Part of me understood that they couldn't stop, particularly if they'd enjoyed success, because if they did stop, they would stop being relevant.

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Perfect often seemed to go hand in hand with unscheduled. I had a Perfect Day with Corinne and Gina not just because I was with my wife and daughter, but because it had all unfolded without total planning. What would have happened had I let spontaneity play a greater part in my life? Any part in my life? Would I have sacrificed success in the business world, something that had given me so much pleasure and satisfaction?

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Accounting is about predictability, about avoiding surprises. It's about, well, accountability. Wasn't there something "unaccountable" about spontaneity? Yet wasn't it part of life? To someone who'd lived as deliberately as I had, the idea was pretty sensational.

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Skiing, I realized, was much more authentic than golf. In skiing, you just reacted. Skiing tolerated mistakes. It was more forgiving. You could make mistakes in skiing and still have a good run, maybe even a great one. In golf, you didn't have that luxury. I loved golf. Don't misunderstand me. But maybe I should have done more skiing.

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My plan was to start from the outside and work toward the center. After all, you can't unwind your most important relationships first, then bide your time with those loved ones while unwinding far less significant relationships, those with acquaintances and long-ago college roommates; it makes no sense. Plus, the closer I got to dying, the more absolutely uninterrupted time I would want to spend with my immediate family. So I'd thought hard about the order.

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Given my attention to detail and my natural thoroughness, I had to remind myself how easy it could be to spend lots of time with the outer circle, which would ultimately be at the expense of the inner circles. I thought about how, during my previous life, I might have unconsciously been too consumed by the outermost circle. At work, with constant demands on my time, I'd got into the habit of meeting with certain people—good people, nice people, but nonetheless fifth-circle people. Was it necessary to have breakfast with them four times a month? I could have done less of that. Had I somehow been inspired to draw my map of concentric circles earlier in my life, when I thought I had forever in front of me, I could have delineated for myself how important certain people were and how less important others were, and perhaps it would have guided me in how I allocated my time (or my energy). Perhaps I could have found time, in the last decade, to have had a weekday lunch with my wife more than... twice? Where had I found the nerve to press so hard for our firm to rework its culture, encouraging our partners and employees to live more balanced lives, when my own was out of balance? I realized that being able to count a thousand people in that fifth circle was not something to be proud of. It was something to be wary of. Please don't misunderstand: the fifth circle is nice. The people who populate it are worthwhile, and belong in the first circle of other people. They're just not the people who should have consumed the time and energy that they did.

Learning about Amplify

Immediately after today’s #lrnchat, I connected with learnscape architect Paul Simbeck-Hampson who graciously took an hour of his time to orient me to Amplify. I had seen Paul tweet about it earlier in the week but wasn’t too sure how it would integrate with my PKM. After seeing him evangelize about it during #lrnchat, I decided to find out more. Thanks to screen sharing in Skype and my hastily scribbled mindmap notes, here are some of my main take-aways:

• Amplify hasn’t replaced any SM/PKM tools for Paul, only made it all better with faster response time to conversations with his network
• Peruse Google Reader as you normally would, then with one simple click email to Amplify and add your comment. With the Autopost functionality you can automatically share with the networks (Twitter etc) that you want. Why do this from Amplify? Sharing the link is one thing, but Amplify has the ability to host the conversation. Learning pros know this (or read The Cluetrain Manifesto if you want to know why that is a good thing for pretty much everyone).
• If you’re a Google Reader-mobile-reader like me, Ping.fm will use your “Share” feed to autopost to other networks. This will help avoid my Stars Wars collection of posts I need to go back and add to Delicious; it’s fast to click “Share” from the BlackBerry (looks like Ping and Delicious are having an API disagreement at the moment so I’ll have to check back another time to get that working).
• Did you know folders in Google Reader have their own feed addresses? So other people can follow the folder you’ve curated? Like maybe you have a rocking collection of PKM smarties. Grab the RSS address from that folder’s “show details” and pass along to a colleague worthy of the brain-food. Here’s one of mine I call Big Thinkers: http://www.google.com/reader/atom/user%2F11845447537890569848%2Flabel%2FBig%20Thinkers. Plus there is something nifty called Bundles. Need to learn more about this.
• If you’re a Twitter user like me, you can still use Twitter or your favourite Twitter client as you normally would.
• Sit down for this next part... Paul uses Gmail like I’ve never seen. If Amplify is his front-end interface, Gmail is the secret engine running his PKM from the back room. Most of us would just have an “Amplify” folder, but he has folders for @mentions, comments, posts, etc. Look up inbox zero and you’ll see Paul as an example.
• Why is this so cool? Because Gmail can go with you everywhere (mostly) via your smartphone. You can reply instantly, sometimes having to leave Gmail to go to Twitter etc, but if it’s a message via Amplify you can reply without leaving Gmail. Wow. On my BlackBerry I need to do things as fast as possible with as few clicks as possible so this is awesome.
• If you’re an iPhone/iPad or Android user there is also an Amplify Mobile to clip and share while you’re on the go. As a BlackBerry user I’ll have to see how I can use Amplify while on the mini-screen. Paul recommended Opera as a mobile browser so I’ll see if that helps.
• Chrome, meet Amplify. See ya later Delicious bookmarklet. With the clip feature in the Chrome Amplify extension, you can clip clip clip to your heart’s content and post. Not just post the content, but in true PKM fashion add your comment and tags, then choose which networks you’d like to autopost to (including Delicious for me – yippee). Want to do more than just clip? You can also share the URL, write a post or microblog from the same extension.
• For those SEO keeners out there, using Amplify maintains your presence on all the other sites which Google is indexing. Amplify = google juice. And you connect with your network where they hang out.
• More fun treats in Amplify: recommend (like a RT), groups (public or private), and listening to conversation so you don’t have to check back for comments on interesting posts.
• Other nifty gem I’d never heard of that Paul uses is Cooliris (peek at the right side of Paul’s page to see how it works). You can view photos and videos and share them without leaving the page.

My next steps:

• Set up some major labelling and filtering in Gmail a-la-Paul
• Download Opera for my BlackBerry
• Keep checking Ping.fm for the day they get an API peace treaty with Delicious
• Check back on Amplify to link Google Buzz (currently getting a fatal error)
• Figure out my new PKM flow: peruse Google Reader and Twitter as I normally would, share using Amplify, Twitter will probably be via a clip and Google Reader from the Chrome extension, and when I need to find things, I’ll still use Delicious
• Learn how to best integrate visiting Amplify the way I visit my Google Reader feeds and Twitter (Tweetdeck)

Want to learn more about Amplify? Check out these two videos:

Second Life Screencast by Paul Simbeck-Hampson

Amplify Demo

And of course send some love to Paul Simbeck-Hampson for taking the time to share all of this with me!

ZAG: The #1 Strategy of High-Performance Brands

ZAG: The #1 Strategy of High-Performance Brands by Marty Neumeier

Here are my favourite excerpts...

In a 1998 Gallup poll rating honesty and ethical standards across a range of professions, advertising people ended up near the bottom, sandwiched between lawyers and car salesmen.

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When BMW decided to launch the Mini Cooper, piles of research showed that Americans had no interest in an ultrasmall car and only wanted more SUVs. Despite this "fact," the zagmeisters at BMW stepped on the gas instead of the brakes and motored straight into profitable new market space. The intrepid folks at BMW had a lot in common with physicist Niels Bohr. Many years ago one of his colleagues was invited to deliver a controversial paper to a group of scientists, including Bohr. Immediately afterward his colleague asked Bohr how the paper was received by the other scientists. He replied, "We all agree that your idea is crazy. What divides us is whether it is crazy enough."The Mini people were crazy, too. Like a fox.

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A. G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble, has energized his company by putting a microscope on the need states of its consumers. Using ethnographic researc hin which researchers move in with consumers to observe their habits firsthand, they uncover need states like the one that led to their hugely successful Swiffer product. They noticed that the consumer had no easy way to spot-sweep dry spills without the hassle of a broom and dustpan—and found a solution that helped her get it done. "The simple principle in life," said Lafley, "is to find out what she wants and give it to her. It's worked in my marriage for 35 years and it works in laundry." When you're searching for a need state, don't think so much about the unbuilt product as about the unserved tribe.

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"Tell me," said my mother. "How do you see your future?" I said, "I don't know. I feel like I could be a leader of something—I'm just not sure what." She thought. "Well, that's not so hard. Just find a parade and get in front of it."

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All design relies on heuristic thinking more than algorithmic thinking—meaning that there is no set path, no mathematical formula, for reaching your goal. But you still need rigor and process, otherwise you'll drift from one thought to the next with no more hope of it making sense than the proverbial thousand monkeys with their thousand typewriters. WHEN FOCUS IS PAIRED WITH DIFFERENTIATION, SUPPORTED BY A TREND, AND SURROUNDED BY COMPELLING COMMUNICATIONS, YOU HAVE THE BASIC INGREDIENTS OF A ZAG.

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And what about your company? Where's your passion? One way to bring it into sharp relief is by completing the exercise that the corporate story experts at C2 (San Francisco) give to their clients to help them shape their visions. It goes like this: 25 years from now your company is wiped out. Now, sit down and write your company's obituary. What would you like posterity to say about you? You'll find that the answers are also the answers to the seminal questions: Who are you? Where does your passion lie? What gets you up in the morning?

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The relationship between purpose and vision was explained vividly by Peter Senge in THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE. Referring to the Kennedy years, he saida purpose is "advancing man's capabilities to explore the heavens." A vision, on the other hand, is "a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s." Everyone could picture that man, up there on the moon, planting an American flag in the soft sand.

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Complete this sentence: Our brand is the ONLY __________ that __________. In the first blank, put the name of your category (frozen pizza, furniture dealership, computer repair service). In the second blank, describe your zag (that tastes like Naples; that sells sustainably manufactured furniture; that makes house calls). If you can't keep it brief and use the word ONLY, then you don't have a zag. Your best option in that case is to make a list of all the competitors who could make the same claim, then start to shift your strategy away from theirs.

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Now that you've got the principle, here's a more detailed version of the exercise to help you pinpoint your onliness. It parallels the journalistic model of storytelling: WHAT is your category? HOW are you different? WHO are your customers? WHERE are they located? WHEN do they need you? and WHY are you important?

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In our workshops we demonstrate alignment using "the sacrifice game." In this exercise teams of participants start with a well-known brand, decide what makes it different and desirable, then prune back the brand to its core meaning by removing unaligned elements. Only then do the teams suggest new elements that might increase—not decrease—the focus of the brand. Thus they might decide that Ralph Lauren Polo stands for "classic upscale American clothing." To increase brand alignment, they might suggest that the company keep the clothing and accessories, but drop elements such as dog gifts, wall paint, furniture, TV show, magazines, and restaurants. They might then suggest adding one or two elements such as luggage or equestrian clothing.

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DAVID WAS NOTHING WITHOUT GOLIATH.

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In some categories, a 5% increase in loyal customers can produce a 95% increase in profitability.

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According to a recent survey of CEOs, today's top three business goals are: 1) sustained and steady top-line growth, 2) speed, flexibility, and adaptability to change, and 3) customer loyalty and retention. Most of the CEOs said they'd be satisfied with any two of these. My advice? Be different. Go for all three with a brand that zags.

The Brand Gap

The Brand Gap, Revised Edition (Marty Neumeier)

Here are my favourite excerpts...

So what exactly is a brand? A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company. It’s a GUT FEELING because we’re all emotional, intuitive beings, despite our best efforts to be rational. It’s a PERSON’S gut feeling, because in the end the brand is defined by individuals, not by companies, markets, or the so-called general public. Each person creates his or her own version of it. While companies can’t control this process, they can influence it by communicating the qualities that make this product different than that product. When enough individuals arrive at the same gut feeling, a company can be said to have a brand. In other words, a brand is not what YOU say it is. It’s what THEY say it is.

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Brand management is the management of differences, not as they exist on data sheets, but as they exist in the minds of people.

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Wanna bring a high-level marketing meeting to a screeching halt? Just do what brand consultant Greg Galle of Creative Capital does—demand unambiguous answers to three little questions: 1) Who are you? 2) What do you do? 3) Why does it matter?

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In the world of branding, creativity doesn’t require reinventing the wheel, but simply thinking in fresh ways. It requires looking for what industrial designer Raymond Loewy called MAYA—the Most Advanced Yet Acceptable solution. Creative professionals excel at MAYA. While market researchers describe how the world is, creative people describe how it could be. Their thinking is often so fresh that they zag even when they should zig. But without fresh thinking, there’s no chance of magic.

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Q: How do you know when an idea is innovative? A: When it scares the hell out of everybody.

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The 7 Criteria For A Good Name...

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These two principles create the basis of brand icons. Cognitive scientists estimate that more than half the brain is dedicated to the visual system, adding weight to the argument that a trademark should be strongly visual. Yet it can also involve other senses, including smell, touch, taste, or hearing. Take for example, the auditory counterpart to an icon, sometimes called an “earcon.” The experience of flying United Airlines is now inextricably linked to Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” and the Intel Inside brand would be less memorable without its “bong” sound bite.

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Finally, FEATURITIS, an infectious desire for MORE, afflicts everyone from the CEO to the programmer. The tendency to add features, articles, graphics, animations, links, buttons, bells, and whistles comes naturally to most people. The ability to subtract features is the rare gift of the true communicator. An oft-heard excuse for cluttered pages is that most people hate clicking, and prefer to see all their choices on one page. The truth is, most people LIKE clicking—they just hate waiting. Eternal waiting, along with confusion and clutter, are the real enemies of communication. Put your website on a diet. You’ll find that subtraction, not addition, is the formula for clear communication.

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The best studies are quick and dirty—best not only because they save time and money, but because they’re more likely to focus on one problem at a time. Why boil the ocean to make a cup of tea?

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If People Can Change Their Clothes To Suit The Occasion, Why Can’t Brands?

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If People Can Change Their Clothes To Suit The Occasion, Why Can’t Brands? The old paradigm in which identity systems try to control the “look” of an organization only result in cardboard characters, not three-dimensional protagonists. The new paradigm calls for heroes with flaws—living brands.

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Drama coach Stella Adler often told her students, “Don’t act. Behave.” Living brands are not a stylistic veneer but a pattern of behavior that grows out of character. When the external actions of a company align with its internal culture, the brand resonates with authenticity. If a brand looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, and swims like a duck, then it must be a duck. If it swims like a dog, however, people start to wonder.

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Pass out the compasses. Every person in the company should be issued a personal shockproof brandometer—a durable set of ideas about what the brand is and what makes it tick. Because no decision, big or small, should be made without asking the million-dollar question: “Will it help or hurt the brand?”

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A CBO is the executive who lies awake at night thinking, “How can we build the brand?”

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Differentiation has evolved from a focus on “what it is,” to “what it does,” to “how you’ll feel,” to “who you are.” While features, benefits, and price are still important to people, experiences and personal identity are even more important.

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Visit www.newriders.com and download a free Adobe PDF presentation of the ideas in THE BRAND GAP.

The Designful Company

The Designful Company: How to build a culture of nonstop innovation by Marty Neumeier

Here are some of my fave exerpts (until the Kindle advised I had passed my clipping limit for this item):

We’ve spent the last century trying to fill factories and making minor tweaks to the same basic idea of efficiency. The high-water mark in the quest for continuous improvement is Six Sigma, yet THE WALL STREET JOURNAL cited a 2006 Qualpro study showing that, of 58 large companies that have announced Six Sigma programs, 91% have trailed the S&P 500. We’ve been getting better and better at a management model that’s getting wronger and wronger.

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Thanks to unprecedented market clutter, differentiation is becoming the most powerful strategy in business and the primary beneficiary of innovation. So if innovation drives differentiation, what drives innovation? The answer, hidden in plain sight, is design. Design contains the skills to identify possible futures, invent exciting products, build bridges to customers, crack wicked problems, and more. The fact is, if you wanna innovate, you gotta design.

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Never has it been used for its potential to create rule-bending innovation across the board. Meanwhile, the public is developing a healthy appetite for all things design.

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There are only two main components for business success: brands and their delivery. All other activities—finance, manufacturing, marketing, sales, communications, human relations, investor relations—are subcomponents.

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If you can deliver customer delight, you can dispense with the high cost and relationship-straining effects of loyalty programs. Organic loyalty beats artificial loyalty every time.

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The antidote to change is organizational agility. While agility was not a burning issue when business moved at a more leisurely pace, in 2008 it showed up as wicked problem number three. Companies now need to be as fast and adaptable as they are innovative.

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Why does change always have to be crisis-driven? Is it impossible to change ahead of the curve? What keeps companies from the continuous transformation needed to keep up with the speed of the market? A company can’t “will” itself to be agile. Agility is an emergent property that appears when an organization has the right mindset, the right skills, and the ability to multiply those skills through collaboration. To count agility as a core competence, you have to embed it into the culture. You have to encourage an enterprise-wide appetite for radical ideas. You have to keep the company in a constant state of inventiveness. It’s one thing to inject a company WITH inventiveness. It’s another thing to build a company ON inventiveness. To organize for agility, your company needs to develop a “designful mind.” A designful mind confers the ability to invent the widest range of solutions for the wicked problems now facing your company, your industry, your world.

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As a thought experiment, imagine a future in which all companies were compelled to take back every product they made. How would that change their behavior? For starters, they would make their products with parts they could salvage and reuse at the end of their life cycles. This in turn would spawn whole industries dedicated to the design of reusable materials.

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Today we need a broader definition of design in which the key measurement is not styling but performance. As it turns out, the basis for a new definition was put forward 40 years ago by Herbert Simon, a leading social scientist and Nobel Laureate. In THE SCIENCES OF THE ARTIFICIAL he wrote: “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” Notice the careful selection of the words “everyone,” “changing,” and “situations.” Notice the careful omission of the words “artist,” “styling,” and “artifacts.” Neither poster nor toaster would have appeared in the illustrated margins of Simon’s dictionary. He believed that design was a powerful tool for change, not just a tool for styling products and communications.

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In its most basic form, the gap is the distance between “what is” and “what could be.” Western thinking has been mostly concerned with “what is,” and as a result we’ve gotten very good at analysis and argument. Traditional business has placed “what is” in the driver’s seat, while strapping “what could be” into the kiddie seat where it can’t disturb the driver. Yet imagine a capitalist society running entirely on “what is” thinking: Nothing would be ventured and nothing would be gained. Companies would look like identical cars with tiny engines and oversized brakes.

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Richard Boland, a professor at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western University, says, “The problem with managers today is that they do the first damn thing that pops into their heads.” After spending months studying the design process of architect Frank Gehry, Boland concluded: “There’s a whole level of reflectiveness absent in traditional management that we can find in design.”

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Despite being steeped in serious intent, however, this sequence no more describes the creative process than a wedding describes sex. The actual creative act is much wilder. Those who insist on tidy phases inevitably produce mediocre results, because a too-orderly process rules out random inspiration. Rule-busting innovation requires a sense of play, a sense of delight, a refusal to be corralled into a strict method. Design is a “ludic” process, from the Latin LUDERE, meaning “to play.” You can’t tell a designer to have an inspired idea by 9:30. Instead, the process has to “play” out while the designer bounces around in the space between logic and magic.

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Yet designers don’t actually “solve” problems. They “work through” them. They use non-logical processes that are difficult to express in words but easier to express in action. They use models, mockups, sketches, and stories as their vocabulary. They operate in the space between knowing and doing, prototyping new solutions that arise from their four strengths of empathy, intuition, imagination, and idealism.

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In the making mode, designers never know what the outcome will be. Instead, they learn what they’re doing while they’re doing it. Systems thinker Donald Schön referred to this phenomenon as “reflection in action.” He described it as a “dynamic knowing process” based on a repertoire of skilled responses rather than a body of knowledge.

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When you ask CEOs what keeps them up at night, the answer is usually shareholder value. When you ask them what drives the stock price, the answer is often earnings growth. When you ask what drives earnings growth, the answer may be innovation, or it may be a blank stare. If you probe more deeply into what drives innovation, only a few will understand that innovation comes from company culture. And when you ask what drives that, even fewer will say that visionary leadership is the key to fostering a culture of innovation.

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We play a little card game with our clients called “What do you really want?” It’s a simple tool for prioritizing initiatives by dividing them into visionary, strategic, and tactical initiatives, then arranging them left to right on a timeline. If a client asks us to help with an analyst presentation, for example, we might say, “Okay, but what do you really want—a presentation or a lift in the stock price?”

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Sumantra Ghoshal, a global business leader and author, called corporate business “under-socialized and one-dimensional.” He said that traditional management has only led to resentful customers, dispirited employees, and a divided society. Why would this change? Because it has to. In an era when customers are not only omnipotent but omniscient, when over-production leads to an ecological box canyon, a selfish focus on the bottom line is bad design. Good design, in contrast, is a new management model that deliberately includes a moral dimension. It’s a model that not only serves shareholders but employees, customers, partners, and communities. For the first time since the Industrial Age, successful businesses will be designful businesses.

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Companies don’t fail because they choose the wrong course—they fail because they can’t imagine a better one.

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According to Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor and author of SUPERCAPITALISM, the job of leadership is to help people overcome denial and cynicism so they can “close the gap between the ideal and reality.” This is the self-same “dragon gap,” the creative space between “what could be” and “what is.” The leader who can articulate a compelling vision gives people the courage to create. It turns out that painting a vivid picture of the future is a pure design problem. When you infuse a vision with design thinking, you use “making” skills to discover and illustrate a wider set of options. You begin designing the way forward instead of merely deciding the way forward.

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While the role of design manager is important, the role of design persuader may be even more important. What if the internal design department could jump-start design thinking by running educational programs on innovation, design thinking, and brand-building? The company that spreads the gospel fastest wins.

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So let’s say you’ve re-imagined your design department as an independent studio. You’ve acquired design management skills, built a core team of smart design thinkers, developed a professional process for engaging with internal clients, gained a reputation for thought leadership, and knocked down the walls to invite a higher level of creative collaboration. Respect is yours. Now you’re ready for the next big challenge.

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How do you get a bunch of independent-minded professionals to play nice together? By establishing sensible rules of engagement. At Neutron we’ve discovered that strong-willed people love to collaborate when there’s a sharp delineation of roles, an unobstructed view of the goal, and a strong commitment to quality. Conversely, they hate to collaborate if they believe their work will be mitigated by pettiness, confusion, and low expectations.

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A common problem with collaboration is that otherwise smart, well-meaning people disrupt the creative flow by disagreeing. This is not a habit we invented, but one we inherited. The Greeks, including Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato, believed that sound thinking came from discussion rather than dialogue—from finding flaws in the others’ arguments rather than advancing a concept together.

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If you truly want buy-in, give PowerPoint a rest. Substitute more engaging techniques such as stories, demonstrations, drawings, prototypes, and brainstorming exercises. Admittedly, these may require skills that many executives have yet to perfect, but they’re well worth mastering in the interest of a designful company.

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3. KEEP IT MOVING. It’s better to break slides into bite-sized ideas—usually one idea per slide—than to squeeze everything on one slide. Slides are free, so use them freely. It’s preferable to see a hundred slides that move at a fast clip than be forced to stare a single slide for more than a minute.

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If there’s a conceptual error here, it lies in thinking there are two distinct classes of employees: those who come up with ideas, and those who implement them. Naturally, it’s difficult to get employees excited about implementing initiatives they’ve had no hand in creating. You can empower like crazy and never generate enthusiasm among the disenfranchised class.

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CONCEPT COLLECTION BOX. Google also uses an “idea management system” that allows employees to email innovative ideas for products, processes, and even businesses to a companywide suggestion box. Once ideas are collected, employees can then make comments on them and rate their chances for success. This type of open brainstorm is an inexpensive tool that any company can use to build a culture of innovation. Anyone in the company can sift through the resulting ideas to find one or more ideas worth developing further. Companies who adopt this technique will soon discover that good ideas don’t care who they happen to.

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The designful company, to a large extent, is a democratic company. While some organizational experts have suggested the company of the future will look like an “upside-down pyramid,” a more apt description might be a “bottom-up pyramid.” Clearly, leaders must lead. But this doesn’t mean they need to come up with all the ideas. In fact, you could argue that they needn’t come up with ANY ideas, as long as good ideas are flowing up smoothly from the bottom. To make this happen, leaders will need to lighten the reins a bit. As Richard Teerlink said about his remarkable turnaround of Harley-Davidson, “You get power by releasing power.”

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GENIUS TEAMS. In addition to mining the wisdom of the crowd, companies can set up offline teams to crack any number of problems, whether routine or wicked. The advantage of this approach is that it moves a problem from the side of everyone’s desk to the center, where it can command the maximum attention. Genius teams can contain anywhere from five to twenty members—a small enough number so that the effort to collaborate doesn’t overwhelm the effort to solve the problem. To optimize the work of any team, small or large, you’ll need a facilitator to act as referee, coach, and trainer. In some cases it pays to bring in an experienced facilitator from the outside.

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Out of 100 innovative ideas, only 15 may be worth prototyping and testing. Out of those 15, only five may be worth serious investment. Out of those five, one or two may produce game-changing results. It’s a formula venture capitalists rely on, and one that established businesses would do well to adopt if they wish to compete at the speed of the market.

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To help decision makers fight a natural tendency to overvalue the proven and undervalue the new, I proposed a tool called the “good/different chart,” which groups new ideas into four patterns: 1) not good and not different; 2) good but not different; 3) good and different; 4) different but not good.

Bucket List

One off the bucket list....

Let My People Go Surfing

Let My People Go Surfing, by Yvon Chouinard, was a recommendation by @coryripley.

Here are my favourite excerpts...

Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but whatever man builds, that all of man’s industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent working over draughts and blue-prints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity? It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship’s keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of the human breast or shoulder, there must be experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.

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“So he gave me the companies, saying in effect, ‘Here’s Patagonia. Here’s Chouinard Equipment. Do with them what you will. I’m going climbing.’ “I had no business experience so I started asking people for free advice. I just called up presidents of banks and said, ‘I’ve been given these companies to run and I’ve no idea what I’m doing. I think someone should help me.’ “And they did. If you just ask people for help—if you just admit that you don’t know something—they will fall all over themselves trying to help. So, from there I began building the company. I was really the translator for Yvon’s vision and aims for the company.”

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One thing I did not want to change, even if we got serious: Work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis. We all had to come to work on the balls of our feet and go up the stairs two steps at a time. We needed to be surrounded by friends who could dress whatever way they wanted, even be barefoot. We all needed to have flextime to surf the waves when they were good, or ski the powder after a big snowstorm, or stay home and take care of a sick child. We needed to blur that distinction between work and play and family.

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I did the same thing in my search for business knowledge. Over the next few years I read every book of business, searching for a philosophy that would work for us. I was especially interested in books on Japanese or Scandinavian styles of management because I knew the American way of doing business offered only one of many possible routes.

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We knew that uncontrolled growth put at risk the values that had made the company succeed so far. Those values couldn’t be expressed in a how-to operations manual that offers pat answers. We needed philosophical and inspirational guides to make sure we always asked the right questions and found the right answers. We spoke of these guides as philosophies, one for each of our major departments and functions. While my managers debated what steps to take to address the sales and cash-flow crisis, I began to lead weeklong employee seminars in these newly written philosophies. We’d take a busload at a time to places like Yosemite or the Marin Headlands above San Francisco, camp out, and gather under the trees to talk. The goal was to teach every employee in the company our business and environmental ethics and values. When money finally got so tight we couldn’t afford even to hire buses, we camped in the local Los Padres National Forest, but we kept training.

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I’ve been a student of Zen philosophy for many years. In Zen archery, for example, you forget about the goal—hitting the bull’s-eye—and instead focus on all the individual movements involved in shooting an arrow. You practice your stance, reaching back and smoothly pulling an arrow out of the quiver, notching it on the string, controlling your breathing, and letting the arrow release itself. If you’ve perfected all the elements, you can’t help but hit the center of the target. The same philosophy is true for climbing mountains. If you focus on the process of climbing, you’ll end up on the summit. As it turns out, the perfect place I’ve found to apply this Zen philosophy is the business world.

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Even as I taught our employees the Patagonia philosophy classes, I did not yet know what we would do to get our company out of the mess it was in. But I did know that we had become unsustainable and that we had to look to the Iroquois and their seven-generation planning, and not to corporate America, as models of stewardship and sustainability. As part of their decision process, the Iroquois had a person who represented the seventh generation in the future. If Patagonia could survive this crisis, we had to begin to make all our decisions as though we would be in business for a hundred years. We would grow only at a rate we could sustain for that long.

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The history of Patagonia from the crisis of 1991–92 to the present day doesn’t make for such interesting reading, fortunately. By “interesting” I’m referring to the Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times.” For the most part the big problems have been solved, and there were no crises except those that were invented by management to keep the company in yarak, a falconry term meaning when your falcon is superalert, hungry, but not weak, and ready to hunt. The story is really about how we are trying to live up to our mission statement: “Make the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.”

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At Patagonia, these philosophies must be communicated to everyone working in every part of the company, so that each of us becomes empowered with the knowledge of the right course to take, without having to follow a rigid plan or wait for orders from a “boss.”

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It may be that someday fashion historians will credit Patagonia for inspiring men to go beyond gray sweatshirts and wear colorful clothes in the outdoors, but what I hope they remember is that we were one of the first to apply industrial design principles to clothing design. The first precept of industrial design is that the function of an object should determine its design and materials. Every design at Patagonia begins with a functional need. A piece of thermal underwear must wick and breathe and dry quickly.

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We ended up with a checklist of criteria for Patagonia’s designers to consider, and the list applies equally to other businesses. With clearly defined quality criteria for all aspects of a product, it becomes a straightforward matter to judge which are the best clothes—or automobiles, wines, or hamburgers. Here are the main questions a Patagonia designer must ask about each product to see if it fits our standards.

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RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE TOTAL What we take, how and what we make, what we waste, is in fact a question of ethics. We have unlimited responsibility for the Total. A responsibility which we try to take, but do not always succeed in.

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Is It as Simple as Possible? Simplify, simplify. —H. D. THOREAU One “simplify” would have sufficed. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, IN RESPONSE

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If a proliferation of colors and patterns drains profit, think what a mushrooming of styles can do. We’ve worked out an interesting formula. Each product Patagonia adds to the line (without dropping an old one) requires the hiring of two and one-half new people.

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The best-performing firms make a narrow range of products very well. The best firms’ products also use up to 50 percent fewer parts than those made by their less successful rivals. Fewer parts mean a faster, simpler (and usually cheaper) manufacturing process. Fewer parts mean less to go wrong; quality comes built in. And although the best companies need fewer workers to look after quality control, they also have fewer defects and generate less waste.

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We adapted the design for Stand Up Shorts from a pair of double-seated English corduroy shorts, and the idea for our very successful Baggies came from a pair of nylon shorts I spotted in an Oxnard department store. The ultimate Patagonia versions are more functional, durable, and far superior to the knocked-off originals, especially for their intended active outdoor use. Like creative cooks, we view “originals” as recipes for inspiration, and then we close the book to do our own thing. The inspirations for some of our best designs are like the fusion recipes of the best chefs.

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Are We Designing for Our Core Customer? All our customers are not equal in our eyes. There are indeed some we favor more than others. These are our core customers, those for whom we actually design our clothes. To understand this more clearly, we can look at our customers as if they existed in a series of concentric circles. In the center, or core circle, are our intended customers.

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If everyone thinks you have a good idea, you’re too late. —PAUL HAWKEN

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My relationship with Leffler taught me how important it is for the designer to work with the producer up front. This applies to every product. Building a house proceeds more smoothly and less expensively when the architect and contractor work out the real-world problems of a blueprint before the cement truck shows up to pour the foundation. Likewise, a rain jacket is better made when the producer understands from the start what the product needs to achieve and, conversely, when the designer understands what processes have to be followed and, finally, when everyone stays on the job and works as a team until it’s done.

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Consequently, we do as much business as we can with as few suppliers and contractors as possible. The downside is the risk of becoming highly dependent on another company’s performance. But that’s exactly the position we want to be in because those companies are also dependent on us. Our potential success is linked. We become like friends, family, mutually selfish business partners; what’s good for them is good for us.

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Let’s take a close look at a loose button and the consequences depending on who happens to discover it. Say the button falls off in your customer’s hand as she pulls the pants out of the washing machine. Your entire company, and your partners, have failed in the grossest possible way. That hard-earned customer will never again fully trust your claim to quality. Better for a quality control inspector at your warehouse to make the discovery during a spot check when the goods arrive from the port. Then further checks can be made, and all the pants with loose buttons can be removed from their bags, and the bags from boxes, and all the pants sent over to the sewing room and all the buttons sewn on right, then moved to a staging area and rebagged and reboxed. Better, but expensive; no on-time delivery today.

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That’s exactly what we finally did in 1991, though we’ve suffered through all the other stages too. That suffering taught us that taking extraordinary steps to set up the manufacturing correctly the first time is much cheaper than taking extraordinary steps down the line. If you’re committed to being the best, you’re

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For example, the Strategic Planning Institute has been collecting data for years on the performance of thousands of companies. It publishes a yearly report, titled PIMS (Profit Impact of Market Strategy). That report has begun to show quite clearly that quality, not price, has the highest correlation with business success. In fact the institute has found that overall, companies with high product and service quality reputations have on average return-on-investment rates twelve times higher than their lower-quality and lower-priced competitors.

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But what is the cost of a dissatisfied customer? Recently a worldwide survey of customers found that only 14 percent of Americans were likely to contact a company about a problem. In Europe the number was less than 8 percent, and in Japan only 4 percent. Correspondingly, other studies show that one-half to one-third of customers who have had problems will never purchase from that company again.

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We don’t want to be a big company. We want to be the best company, and it’s easier to try to be the best small company than the best big company.

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We get approached by prospective buyers almost weekly, and their intent is always the same. They see an undervalued company that they can rapidly grow and take public. Being a publicly held corporation or even a partnership would put shackles on how we operate, restrict what we do with our profits, and put us on a growth/suicide track. Our intent is to remain a closely held private company, so we can continue to focus on our bottom line, doing

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A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both. —FRANÇOIS AUGUSTE RENÉ CHATEAUBRIAND

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So we seek out “dirtbags” who feel more at home in a base camp or on the river than they do in the office. All the better if they have excellent qualifications for whatever job we hire them for, but we’ll often take a risk on an itinerant rock climber that we wouldn’t on a run-of-the-mill MBA. Finding a dyed-in-the-wool businessperson to take up climbing or river running is a lot more difficult than teaching a person with a ready passion for the outdoors how to do a job.

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Of course we do hire some people strictly for their technical expertise. We have employees who never sleep outside or who have never peed in the woods. What they all do share, as our organizational development consultant noted, is a passion for something outside themselves, whether for surfing or opera, climbing or gardening, skiing or community activism.

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The key to building a consensus for action is good communication. A chief in an American Indian tribe was not elected because he was the richest or had a strong political machine; he was chosen chief because of his oratory skills, which were invaluable for building consensus within the tribe. In this information age it’s tempting for managers to manage from their desks, staring at their computer screens and sending out instructions, instead of managing by walking about and talking to people. The best managers are never at their desks yet can be easily found and approached by everyone reporting to them.

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Subscribing to the concept of natural growth of the company helps keep us small enough to be manageable. I believe that for the best communication and to avoid bureaucracy, you should ideally have no more than a hundred people working in one location. This is an extension of the fact that democracy seems to work best in small societies, where people have a sense of personal responsibility. In a small Sherpa or Inuit village there’s no need to hire trash collectors or firemen; everyone takes care of community problems. And there’s no need for police; evil has a hard time hiding from peer pressure.

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When a problem comes up, the effective CEO does not immediately hire a consultant. Outsiders don’t know your business the way you do, and anyway, I’ve found that most consultants come from a failed business. Only by confronting the problems and trying to solve them yourself will you prevent them from happening again in another form. The key to confronting and truly solving any problem is to continue to ask enough questions to get past all the symptoms and reach the actual cause, a form of the Socratic method or what Toyota management calls asking the five whys.

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Under certain circumstances, the company will also post bail for those who have taken a class in civil nonviolent disobedience and are subsequently arrested in support of environmental causes. When a government is breaking or refusing to enforce its own laws, then I believe civil disobedience is the rightful course of action.

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If the United States were to start taxing polluters, stop subsidizing such wasteful industries as oil, timber, and industrial agriculture, put levy taxes on all nonrenewable resources, and correspondingly reduce the taxes on income, it would be the biggest step we could make toward becoming a sustainable society.

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These are the people on the front lines, trying either to make the government obey its own laws or to recognize the need for a new law. That’s why our earth tax, 1 percent of our net sales, goes primarily to them. I’ve learned from a lifetime of being outdoors that nature loves diversity. It hates monoculture and centralization. A thousand activist groups, each working on a specific problem that it’s passionate about, can accomplish much more than a bloated organization or government.

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Our financial contributions to activist causes have been significant (between 1985 and 2005 we gave twenty-two million dollars in cash and in-kind donations), but I’ve always thought we should provide them with more than just dollars. Among our other programs and in-kind assistance Patagonia holds a Tools for Grassroots Activists conference every eighteen months, where we teach activists the organizational, business, and marketing skills small groups need to survive in a competitive media environment. This is one of the most important services Patagonia provides. These people are often isolated, scared, and bravely passionate, and most of them are woefully unprepared to confront big business or big government with their teams of attorneys and “hired experts.” By giving them the tools to present their position clearly and effectively, we do as much good as by giving them financial support.

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When we were threatened by the CAC with groups picketing our stores, we relied on a strategy called Pledge-a-Picket. We said that we would reward every picketer who showed up at one of our stores by donating ten dollars to Planned Parenthood in his or her name. They chose to stay away, and the boycott collapsed.

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At a conference sponsored by Ecotrust and chaired by the Haisla, Eurocan attempted one of the most astounding bribes in history. It offered the Haisla all the logging jobs in the Kitlope for fifty years. Not an insignificant offer since it was worth $125 million in wages to a community of 750 people with an unemployment rate around 50 percent. Eurocan was astounded when the Haisla didn’t bite. In a profound display of commitment to the earth, the Haisla turned it down flat. Haisla elders confronted provincial bureaucrats, politicians, and timber barons and vowed that blood would run in the Kitlope if a single tree was touched. Within a year the new owners of the timber license for the Kitlope, West Fraser, relinquished all claims to the Kitlope without compensation. A complete slam dunk, a million acres of wild, unspoiled river was secured forever.

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Without the help of Patagonia and other environmental grant givers, programs like these would be impossible. They do more than save wild places; they profoundly affect communities and people’s lives. In this case, environmentalism was social activism at its best.

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They willingly work with us because they believe that what we are attempting to do is going to create a more sustainable business model for them and for society. They realize, as David Brower put it, “there’s no business to be done on a dead

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The Zen master would say if you want to change government, you have to aim at changing corporations, and if you want to change corporations, you first have to change the consumers. Whoa, wait a minute! The consumer? That’s me. You mean I’m the one who has to change? The original definition of consumer is: “One who destroys, or expends by use; devours, spends wastefully.” It would take seven earths for the rest of the world to consume at the same rate we Americans do. Ninety percent of what we buy in a mall ends up in the dump within sixty to ninety days.

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It’s common thinking that nomadic people move when seasons change or resources run out, but they also pack up and move when the leaders see that everything is going too smoothly, when the people become lazy and complacent. The wise leaders know if they don’t move while they are strong, they won’t have the fortitude to move when the next crisis hits. Robinson Jeffers wrote, “In pleasant peace and security how suddenly the soul in a man begins to die.”

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