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!

Stretch! is a catchy title for a management book. The book came out in 2004, on John Wiley & Sons, by authors Graeme K. Deans and Fritz Kroeger, and includes a bold claim in the subtitle: “How Great Companies Grow in Good Times and Bad”.

Their main premise is that businesses can, through the force of will, hard work, and clever management, position themselves for revenue growth and value growth, at all times, in any market conditions. It’s a confident premise, and the authors’ refer to impressive sounding research numbers that support their conclusion. They claim to have studied 29,000 companies over 14 years, and taken “input” from over 1,000 “executives”.

Their research is exclusively focused on publicly traded companies. For that reason alone, managers of private business should be somewhat wary. And if the publishers chose an aggressive pitch, the authors’ focus is not quite down-to-earth, but thoughtful and occasionally insightful. There are plenty of good ideas here that private businesses can use.

I appreciate their analysis of pricing:

“Pricing is the most neglected area in business operations and perhaps in management as a whole. [...] The fundamental tenet of demand markets is that prices are set by the market, giving consumers the balance of power and leaving companies out in the cold. This is only half-true, however. Research reveals that most customers are familiar with fewer than 100 price points. Furthermore, emotional patterns and ties to products tend to be much more influential than previously believed, both in the B2C and B2B market space.

The argument is that purely cost-based pricing methods undermine seller power and result in sub-optimal margins. Price is a psychologically weighty point of brand contact (both internally and externally), and buyers have little-to-no incentive to voice support for price hikes. They’ll never ask for it! But their actions will often betray their willingness to pay more. This willingness may be conscious, or not; rational or not; it doesn’t matter. What matters is whether or not price increases will reinforce your brand narrative and support healthier operating margins.

Demand is often less elastic than managers perceive it to be.

Dodes’ka-den is described as “a kind of guerrilla filmmaking”. The 1970 production was month long exercise in rapid and cost effective design decision making. In the course of this exercise, Kurosawa established a bold new aesthetic for color and character driven storytelling. His use of color is iconic, and surreal, while never disrupting one’s emotional engagement with the narrative.

It’s tempting to interpret Dodes’ka-den as the foreshadowing of stylistic techniques yet to be fully revealed. Tempting; the film is minimal and schematic in relation to Kurosawa’s body of work. As strong as his feeling for color was in 1970, the thoughts come across as an emerging dialect, while later expressions “Kagemusha” (’80) and “Ran” (’85) – both of them – present formal and immersive master courses in a stunning visual language.

For the sake of discussion, let’s assume you’ve decided on CD. Let’s also assume that you’re going to work with a producer to help manage the entire project. Here’s a basic overview of some key details in producing a commercial CD.

Think of a CD project as having four management areas:
1.) content
2.) packaging
3.) promotion
4.) distribution

There are many different types of producers and some offer a broad scope of services. One of the roles a producer may take on is to make effective design decisions regarding the project’s narrative in all four areas listed above. In other words, the story of the content should be reflected in the packaging art, in the choice of packaging materials, the the types and location of promotion, in the sources of distribution, and so on.

Some producers will go so far as to match the sonic qualities of the recording with the style graphics (album art, web art, band publicity images, etc.) For example, they are aware that a certain microphone matched with a certain pre-amp will allow them to create a specific texture in the mix. That texture will translate through mastering as a design motif – and that motif or idea can be repeated in other management decisions across the full scope of the project. This may seem extreme, but repetition is a great storytelling technique, and great stories out-perform mediocre ones.

It’s usually not difficult to create a consistent set of aesthetics and related marketing decisions. Many artists enjoy making the decisions that most directly impact their creative vision. In the scheme of production obstacles, some producers will facilitate decision making, and if needed they can be called upon to make good decisions.

Other producers will join a project with the explicit understanding that they have creative direction over all areas. In this latter case, you entrust the producer to do a good job turning the vision into an product. You’ll likely have plenty of opportunities to provide input, but the contract will be structured around the understanding that the producer has decision making authority.

From my experience, the larger challenges with packaging, promotion and distribution have to do with market familiarity. Do you know the market? Meaning, the producer will probably have more and better information about the what, where, and with whom to get things done.

With manufacturing, for example, there are a wide range of vendors, near and far. A label will traditional be involved in that decision. But in the case of an independent act, you can either learn for yourself or search out someone who knows.

Another timely issue, one that’s difficult for artists and professional producers alike, is to stay current with the constantly changing state of online promotion and distribution. Questions to consider:

• Blog outreach?
• If so, which ones?
• Partner with an online distribution company?
• If so, which one?
• Partner with a label?
• If so, which one?

Some of the most technical questions have to do the bands web presence. Not every producer has first hand experience with social media, or web development project management. Nor should they! My point should be clear – different producers bring different skills to the project.

The point that I’m working towards is to establish narrative integrity in all aspects of the project.

Please remember too that you can and should handle as many of the production tasks as you’re comfortable doing. Do it yourself and you’ll have a great learning experience. Alternately, you can hire an independent producer with the skills you’re looking for.

The right producer will do much more than help you write, rehearse, refine and record your content. She’ll have a strong sense for all major decisions in the four key areas listed above (content, packaging, promotion, and distribution). This style of producer will bring a diverse set of skills and experience – ranging from songwriting, to engineering, to budgeting, to emerging technologies.

As distribution and production costs continue to change, I expect this style of producer to become increasingly common. It’s what I’ve done on the last three projects I’ve produced; not by choice (the creative process is often more fun), but by necessity. Artists have limited budgets and now more than ever they can use good advice for making the most of their ideas.

(1.) an emergency rainy day fund,
(2.) life insurance coverage,
(3.) a specific sum for the purchase and furnishing of a home,
(4.) the education of children, and
(5.) a fund to create or supplement retirement income.

Ira doesn’t mention the importance of paying down high interest credit card debt. It was a different time!

Far from being embarrassed by their nepotistic practices, most family-owned companies call attention to them as a guarantee of stability and quality. According to Yale business professor Ivan Lansberg, family-run companies take a longer strategic view, are more humane employers, and display a strong work ethic; they also “worry a helluva lot more about quality because the bosses name is on the product.”

Excellent book for those of you who care about the topic. He starts with history – natural, social, political, and economic history of nepotism. Spends over half the book discussing specific examples of nepotism’s impact on American history and cultural development.

Digital Media Wire announces Slicethepie.com taking in $2M in their third round of venture funding. Slicethepie is another site where fans prepay artists as a means to get closer to the person and/or creative process. Meanwhile, Mr. Van Buskirk looks at Slicethepie’s first album (The Alps’ Something I Might Regret) released under the new model.

Ms. Sobule didn’t sell shares in the record. She gave away premiums, pledge drive style. Slicethepie actually distributes ownership in the product.

Experiencing minor technical difficulties from upgrading WordPress. Stop.

Dear WordPress PR Minions and Blog Scraper Bots,

Thank you for your wonderful new release including the fabulous fix on xmlrpc.php. I’ve been using wordpress for some time and I can honestly say I’ve never enjoyed xmlrpc.php more.

Unfortunately, during the upgrade process, one of your scripts took the opportunity to revisit the careful formatting used in all of my previous posts. We’ve got a small problem.

This description might not be technically accurate – the problem looks as though the visual post editing engine is designed to replace some special characters with their visual counterparts, by default. As a result, my blockquotes are now all broken.

The database now serves all my previous “<blockquote>”s as “<blockquote>”s.

The < and > symbols have been replaced with their visual counterparts.

Presumably there are some cases where this character replacement during upgrade trick would be great. In my case it’s a real drag… I depend on the handy blockquote feature to puff up all my posts. The solution appears to be to go back through each post, enter code view mode, and replace all instances of < & >!

If you could please forward this message to a volunteer tech support person – whomever is tasked with making my free software fun and blockquote friendly – that would be convenient. I can be reached via the email.

Thanks for your help.

Warm regards,

Jeffrey Osborne

UPDATE: Forgot that I’d made a backup. Theoretically I should be able to import all my old posts with the proper html. Will try it sometime soon and report… Nope, giving up on importing the posts and going through each post manually. Fun… Not too much work. The only negatively affected posts were ones written since a certain date. I’m guessing that was the date of the previous upgrade to 2.3.

[tags]WordPress 2.3.3[/tags]

“Some analysts still predict economic calamity if the United States does not continue to consume twice the combined energy total for Africa, the rest of North and South America, and Asia except Japan. But what have more careful studies taught us about the scope for doing better with the energy we have? Since we can’t keep the bathtub filled because the hot water keeps running out, do we really (as Malcolm MacEwen asks) need a bigger water heater, or could we do better with a cheap, low technology plug?”

McKinsey Global Institute has released a study on reducing greenhouse gas emissions in which they pay particular attention to the concept of “energy productivity”. Richard Stuebi at Cleantech Blog has shared some thoughts on the issue.

It’s curious and a little obvious to see these ideas finally catching on. Lovins and many other policy experts at the time were at least 30 years ahead of the policy curve. It’s a clear illustration of how even in today’s world of technocratic experts, science and economics can take several decades (or more) to influence political will.

[tags]Amory Lovins, Soft Energy Paths, Energy Productivity, McKinsey Global Institute[/tags]

According to our colleagues at the AP via Seattle Post-Intelligencer, there have been better times to be a confident consumer:

“Over the past year, consumer confidence has deteriorated greatly, underscoring the toll of the housing collapse and a credit crunch that has made it harder for people to secure financing for big-ticket purchases such as homes, cars and appliances.”

Haven’t the neuroscience folks concluded that insecurity, fear and jealousy are the top consumer motivators? If so, we should celebrate low consumer confidence as a positive indicator!

I’ll admit that preying on peoples’ low self-esteem is somehow contrary to human nature… yet in the absence of brain scan data, such moralism is scientifically meaningless. Carry on scholars.