It’s possible to misunderstand rules; a useful rule can appear useless, and vice versa. At times we need to break rules in order to understand how and why they might help.
The picture above is an improvised drum kit made from kitchen tools. There’s nothing particularly special about it except that it solved a design challenge. And so an unusual design will sometimes disprove our previous assumptions.
Writing can be an exercise in both following and breaking rules. Rules aren’t something to be afraid of, they’re something to use. Consider:
“When you are writing, do not worry about how often you use the word I. Use it as much as you need to. Just as you can weed out other words you no longer need when your work is nearing completion, so you can weed out extra Is by combining sentences or editing phrases. It is very easy to take out what is no longer needed at the end. It is much harder to give yourself enough material to work with at the beginning. Say “I.” This word lets you speak from your experience.”
- Shiela Bender in “Writing Personal Essays” (1995)
I’m not convinced I’ll have the patience to follow this advice. I’ll try!
Here’s an excerpt from the latest issue of Tape Op, where Larry Crane interviews with two of the three founders of Propellerhead, a Swedish software manufacturer. Propellerhead produces Reason and other audio tools. The interview includes this practical take on design project management:
Ernst Nathorst-Boos: “I usually say that we’ve got four energy levels, if you will. If we don’t do anything, our products stop working because Microsoft and Apple bring out a new OS. That’s a lot of work – maintaining it. Then we have smaller feature updates of stuff you need to add because people are asking for them. Then the next one is bigger strategic features that you want to add to an application. Those may take several updates before you realize the idea that you had at the beginning. The fourth level is actually doing more products, not just Reason or Record. Then reality tries to pull you down to the first two levels all the time. It’s a lot of prioritization. The hard part for us is not coming up with new ideas, because we’ve got an incredible inflow from everywhere about ideas. The hard part is selecting out of those 300 the 12 that you can actually do.”
To recap:
1.) Keep pace with changes at the life support level.
2.) Respond to the most compelling change requests.
3.) Develop in longer term, bigger picture changes that support brand positioning.
4.) Diversify by invest in complementary markets.
I enjoy the simplicity of Mr. Nathorst-Boos’ quote; he’s not interested in giving you a breakdown of their development framework — why should you care? — rather he’s sharing a broader perspective, a brief and amusing look at their development process. Notice his care in reinforcing a positive aspect of existing market behavior, what he calls the idea flow.
Additionally, Nathorst-Boos offers a sense of how this type of deconstructive thought could work in other types of design projects, particularly projects in a hyper-competitive and rapidly changing markets. Innovation happens elsewhere, and if you encourage idea flow, great ideas will come from all directions.
Design project managers take note; it’s smart to promote idea flow even when you have more ideas than you know what to do with. Next, rely on a set of internal guidelines to help you extract the best and most actionable ideas from the rest.
“Unfortunately, years of language dilution by lawyers, marketers, executives, and HR departments have turned the powerful, descriptive sentence into an empty vessel optimized for buzzwords, jargon, and vapid expressions.”
If you enjoy Jason’s point of view, check out the excellent book Hot Text by Jonathan and Lisa Price. Originally published in 2002 on New Riders, Hot Text is a practical guide to help business copy writers tighten up their online prose.
Writing effective copy is much easier said than done… I’ve said it, I’ll try to do it, and I’ll inevitably slip up. A manager’s day doesn’t afford a lot of time on issues of grammar or style. It can be seductively easy to rely on pop-management shortcuts. This often buries whatever useful and compelling ideas were in the message to begin with.
Overtures on my mind lately. Basil Dearden used the overture in the 1966 film “Khartoum”. The full edit, including the overture, is available in Hulu. The current youtube version unfortunately skips past the intro program:
One of the most memorable film overtures appears in Alexander Sokurov’s “Spiritual Voices” (1995), a five part video diary of Russian soldiers in northeastern Afghanistan. The first 40 minutes of the series consist of a sequence of mostly static landscape images, accompanied by classical music, and the director’s occasional narration. It’s a remarkable design decision, it works on many levels of the story, most noticeably in setting the tempo and emotional tenor for the balance of the material.
Another effective use of the overture can be seen in Ridley Scott’s “Kingdom of Heaven” (2005). This film didn’t win me over, nor was it intended to. Nevertheless, the score and other big budget details are as well produced as you might expect:
Finally, a different type of cinematic overture. “Restrepo” is another Afghanistan war diary, from Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, and recent winner of the Sundance 2010 best documentary prize. Like “Spiritual Voices”, this video doc is set in eastern Afghan border country. Restrepo’s story and production methods demand comparison to Sokurov’s, although the intention and direction of each led to quite different results. Both examine the lives of soldiers at a close angle; Sokurov’s footage edited to accentuate the timeless themes of infantry life, whereas Restrepo feels cut as an overture to modern warfare.
In 1990, environmental economist Herman E. Daly published a work in the journal of the Society for International Development titled “Sustainable Growth: An Impossibility Theorem”.
The premise of this short article is straight forward; in a world of finite resources, indefinite economic growth is not a viable option.
In Daly’s words:
Impossibility statements are the very foundation of science. It is impossible to: travel faster than the speed of light; create or destroy matter-energy; build a perpetual motion machine, etc. By respecting impossibility theorems we avoid wasting resources on projects that are bound to fail. Therefore economists should be very interested in impossibility theorems, especially the one to be demonstrated here, namely that it is impossible for the world economy to grow its way out of poverty and environmental degradation. In other words, sustainable growth is impossible.
It’s unavoidable – the economy relies on a massive but not limitless quantity of natural resources and life supporting services. Common wisdom has been slow to catch on to this fact.
Business leaders are intelligent and well educated. They can conceive of the limits of growth. And then what?
In 1941, Simon and Schuster of New York published a non-fiction work titled “Men of Wealth” by author John T. Flynn. The book was an ambitious project in that it attempted to summarize Flynn’s complex perspective on twelve of the world’s great economic success stories.
Flynn’s narrative style comes across as sincere, reverent, and frustrated. I’d argue that he deserves a flattering interpretation; his tone invokes a heavily labored revisionist tract, and the end result is human and endearing.
Here’s Flynn describing the role of wealthy businessmen in the wake of the first great US market crash:
“The process was completed when in October, 1929, we heard Gabriel over Wall Street and the President, as that fateful premonitory shiver ran through our economic structure, summoned around him the College of Captains. At that moment, every phase of our life was in the hands of businessmen. The test for their power was at hand and, led by a great engineer and great industrial ministers of state, these bankers and manufacturers and utility magnates were to seize the depression in its infancy and crush it. In that hour the Great God Business might be said to have become supreme, even though the very earth shook under the images of the idol.”
Flynn seemed on the verge of saying something important about theories of prosperity and governance. Perhaps his message was obscured by his great determination to express himself dramatically. Or was the message obscure by design?
Welcome to the redesigned Plan Resonate. I’ve tried to clean up the site; it was long overdue.
The new design runs on WordPress 2.7.1 – I’m very happy with it. WordPress people have done a great job reorganizing the control panel for this release.
The layout is based on a theme called “Blueprint” that uses the Blueprint CSS Framework. Both the theme and the framework have excellent attention to detail and are a pleasure to work with.
The new visual design features a logo designed by Mark Mazziotti. Mark’s challenge was to express the corporate and subversive sides of my work. I think he did a fine job and I’m thankful for his help.
The site is a work in progress and will continue to be so indefinitely. Send comments and suggestions.
Former Chief Executive Officer of the Chrysler Corporation, in his 1984 autobiography “Iococca”.
“Loan guarantees, I soon learned, were as American as apple pie. Among those who had received them were electric companies, farmers, railroads, chemical companies, shipbuilders, small-businessmen of every description, college students, and airlines.”
“In fact, a total of $409 billion in loans and loan guarantees was outstanding when we made our $1 billion request. But nobody knew this. They all said that loan guarantees to Chrysler would set a dangerous precedent.”
“Loan guarantee” was Chrysler’s semantic response to the popularly named “bailout”. This week automakers are negotiating a new bailout, modeled after Wall Street’s TARP plan.
Maybe we should check on the TARP plan first to see how they’re doing? Brad’s review is pretty funny. I also enjoyed reading former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich’s views on TARP and Chapter 11:
“There’s no good reason for taxpayers to continue bailing out the Street. TARP hasn’t worked. Some $350 billion later, credit markets are still quite frozen. The only obvious beneficiaries of TARP have been the executives, creditors, and shareholders of the big Wall Street banks, who have come out better than they would have had there been no Wall Street bailout.”
Reich presents these (not shocking) conclusions while presenting a reasonable plan to help automakers survive the current economic conditions. Reich’s plan is that we make use of existing Chapter 11 protections for failing businesses. In the most basic terms, Reich proposes that the state provide $1 of public money for every $2 risked by the industry shareholders.
Catastrophic collapse of the automakers is probably not a politically viable path. Reich’s plan looks like a moderate, next-most-expedient option for rebuilding a deeply flawed industry.
