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.

Funny observations by Inc. Magazine writer Jason Fried:

“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.

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.

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.

I’m generally not a great fan of noodley blues jazz, even as delivered in the guise of interplanetary transmissions. But Sun Ra had his thing and his thing was nothing short of spectacular. He was a brilliant storyteller.

Dr. W.B. (Pete) Clapham Jr. is another lyrical storyteller, though somewhat less colorful and well known. In 1973 he published a prosaic looking and poetic reading textbook titled _Natural Ecosystems_. Here’s an exceprt, where Pete gives us a simple and heady overview of energy:

“Energy can be defined as the capacity to do work, whether that work be on a gross scale, such as raising mountains and moving air masses over continents, or on a small scale, such as transmitting a nerve impulse from one cell to another. Three sources of energy account for virtually all the work of the ecosystem: gravitation, internal forces within the earth, and solar radiation. The last is of greatest interest to us. It is important not so much because there is more solar energy than any other kind but rather because the sun is the ultimate source of energy for virtually all living things. In addition, solar energy heats the earth so that ecosystems can exist, and it drives many other natural phenomena, from atmospheric circulation to cycling of water through the ecosystem.”

When you listen to Sun Ra’s “endless story”, you hear a lot of repetition. There are any number of ways to interpret his use of repetitive structures, including: homage to the folkier roots of jazz; the influence of composers like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and later works by Stravinsky; and maybe even a deeper philosophical message about the cycles of life in the natural world. We might conclude from the video passage above that he’s riffing on the repetitive elements within a broadly non-repetitive natural system, reminding us that while it’s important to be here now, it’s also important that we be not-so-wrapped-up in a single melody that we forget the rest of the arrangement. Otherwise we risk mistaking a sentence for a chapter, or a chapter for a story.

Dr. Clapham’s book is a solid chapter in a grand story. It’s easily worth more than $1.49 plus $3.99 shipping in very good condition paperback via Amazon.

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.

No blogging recently. My main project this year has involved regular writing about management, behind a corporate firewall. I’ve had no interest in practicing more writing here.

That project has been fun. For the past year I’ve been acting as a part time, remote, interim CEO for a client, while leading them through a restructuring effort. The project was another fine opportunity to refine a variety of ideas that I’ve been referring to generally as the “growth management” approach.

The areas of emphasis on this project included:
* collaborative planning and project management;
* strategic design and integration of tactics between departments;
* business process re-engineering, and
* financial management.

The restructuring was a success and an excellent learning experience for the whole team, myself included. I look forward to building on this practice.

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.

The Jomox “Resonator Neuronium”. Obnoxious name and I enjoy obnoxious names.

The Youtube comments are as funny as you’d expect – ranging from “This is bar-none the coolest thing on youtube…” to “very bored piece of hardware[...]”

There are other ways to generate atmospheric loops and I’ve never seen any that can be as dynamically and organically modulated; it has the potential for highly expressive if inherently unpredictable performances in the hands of a skilled tweaker. The video gives a quick impression of how the Resonator interacts with sequenced midi data and heavy delay. I believe it has 1/4 inch stereo inputs too.