As a follow up to my list of things to avoid in your sales proposals, here’s a list of somethings you may want to avoid in your conference booth.

1. Avoid numbing me with marketese. I’m surround by hunderds of other companies just like yours, filled with the same toothy Herb Tarleks, spouting the same pitch, with booths decorated with indistinguishably meaningless catch phrases and tag lines. “High Performance. Delivered.” None of this means anything. If this is what you’re putting out there, then you are wasting your money. If I asked everyone else on the floor if they deliver high performace, 100% of all answers would be “yes! of course we do! *grin*”.
2. Avoid empty words displayed large on slick posters for everyone to ignore. Don’t talk to me of “collaboration” or “interoperability” or other table stakes. I’m assuming you already have such things nailed, otherwise you wouldn’t be wasting millions to exhibit at this conference. Share an insight like “Its faster to edit than to type,” (not that I agree what that, but it tell me where you’re coming from) or tell me something exciting like “pays for itself in 2 month.” 2 months? I don’t care what that is, I’m interested. Of course please be sure its true as well as exciting.
3. Avoid sending too many androids to manage your booth. Nothing is less inviting to a conference goer than seeing a half dozen identically logo-dressed sales people standing about talking to each other. Its intimidaing. It looks like I’ll get pounced on. It looks like a staff meeting. I’m not going to ask my stupid question infront of a half dozen strangers who are friends with each other. Have a couple of your people dressed like regular folks. That way, when no customers are there, its still looks like there are always customers talking to your people. Thats more inviting. Oh, and when i get to speak with the VP who’s all casual in his rolled up sleeves and free from any logo tatooing, it makes me feel even more important, because he looks real, he looks like me and not like an android.
4. Avoid getting too clever with your booth stuff. I saw one both that featured an elevated level. This made the main floor level look dark and cramped, not exactly inviting. I saw another booth that was so clever with its animatronic rotating tagline display that is complete obscured the company’s name and logo for all but the birds who now live in the convention centre. I had to look hard to figure out whose booth it was.

Forget about the iPod giveaways, the automobile raffles, your claims of world-class performance, and the silicone booth decorations. Just be authentic. If you have a solution to my pain, I want to hear about it, really. Unlike most other times, I want to give you my attention–that is what I’m there for. So just be plain about your understanding of my pain, and how you can alleviate it, and you stand a pretty good chance of setting yourself up for a deal later on.

Is anyone truly surprised about the potential for privacy invasion that Google Desktop opens up? In case you don’t know, it’s a tool that indexes every peice of digital information and textual content on your computer and makes it all really easy to find.

And with the lastest version, it stores much of the information it collects on Google servers. The potential for abuse, by Google or other parties, should be painfully obvious (they’re giving you a very sophisticated data mangement tool for free people–they’re monetizing something to justify doing this, and that something is incredibly deep knowledge about you).

Have some mushy love letters on your hard drive? How about last years tax return? Have you mentioned over email anything about a desease you think you might have and that an insurance company might deny you coverage because of? Well with Google Desktop, your life is very potentially an open book up for bid (or subpeona, or a friendly “please” from law enforcement or private security firm).

I may just be having an tinfoil hat moment here and there could be no real problem here what so ever. But when armies of Greeks as standing outside my gates with a snazzy new gift they’d just love me to have, I perfer to err on the side of caution and decline their generosity. Beware of Greeks baring gifts folks.

(for my Greek readers I’m talking about metaphorical Greeks–I love Greece, so when I come to visit, can I stay with you? I’m kidding–unless the answer is yes, and in that case I prefer Egyptian cotton sheets, threadcount isn’t important as long as its Egyptian.)

PS.
And on the topic of privacy, if any of you frequent Yahoo! Groups, do check out thier privacy policy with special attention to what they call Web Beacons (cookies on steriods). The real kicker is Yahoo’s user-hostile policy of not only forcing you to opt out, but forcing you to opt out on each browser you use (that’s right, they don’t store your opt-out decision in your profile). And of course the opt-out form is buried neck-deep in meaningless textual obfuscation (I wonder if this tactic shows up in the newly published design patterns?).

In thier paper on pull as a new model for mobilzing resources “From Push to Pull – Emerging Models for Mobilizing Resources” John Brown and John Hagel quote William Gibson saying “the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.” Quite true. In terms of pull models the movie business has done it for decades since the old studio system fell apart. Professional sports teams (at least in North America) also loosely follow a pull model for assembling winning teams.

For decades now most movies have been produced as individual projects centered on a script that temporarily pulls various independent talents together for a time and then releases them back into the pool. In terms of product development this is a highly efficient and successful model. But please don’t forget that the old studio system did give us films like Metropolis, Double Indeminity and Casablanca.

While I have always agreed that a pull approach can harness creativity and sheer brain power in ways that more command-and-control push approaches cannot, I simply couldn’t get passed page 14 of Brown and Hagel’s paper. They exhibit exactly the kind of vague, intellectually vacuous, pompom-waving fluffiness that just plain makes me angry. Perhaps you can see what I mean in some of the examples they offer to help readers understand the power of pull.

• Li & Fung: This is a Chinese textile manufacturer and distributor. They demonstrate the power of pull by having 7500 business partners that help them satisfy their customers. Okay… they have lots of partners…
• Then there is ODM, a Taiwanese… uh… manufacture? (I think) of… uh… well I really don’t know. Clarity is irrelevant—all you need to know is that Brown and Hagel say they are another “compelling example of the application of pull models in distributed product innovation and commercialization processes.” Be sure to put that in your PowerPoints. Apparently ODM “creatively pull[s] together highly specialized component and sub-system suppliers to generate ideas for delivering higher performance at lower costs” Whatever that means. I’ll bet they help leverage synergies across the enterprise to reveal win-win scenarios for all stakeholders too.
• Cisco offers yet another compelling story of pull’s power. They “[pull] together appropriate capabilities from thousands of specialized channel partners to address individual customer needs.” You know, like pretty much every other business in existence. Perhaps Manhattan Pizza down the road is another example of the power of pull. Doesn’t Manhattan pull together the appropriate capabilities of its pepperoni partners to address my Tuesday night meat lover’s pizza needs?
• Cisco also uses e-training. They force their employees “pull” mass-produced yet “personalized” training presentations and watching them at their desks. Now that’s power! That’s pull!
• University of Phoenix is another pull success story, because they standardize their e-training material for a really really big number of students who have to “pull” the stuff across the internet with their browsers. This apparently serves students more effectively. Pull rulez!

To be a bit more serious, let me pick apart the U of Phoenix example to demonstrate just how fluffy this waste of 49 pages, toner and the power to run the printer, really is.

Hagel and Brown say “To serve its students more effectively, [The University of Phoenix] became one of the pioneers in using the Internet to help students pull educational resources to them when and where they wanted to participate in the learning process.”

To begin with what do they mean by “effective?” And effective for whom? The situation they describe (hyper-efficient delivery of hyper-standardized curriculum) strikes me as effective tool for accumulating content, but what does this have to do with the educational quality (presumably what the studen’t are interested in pulling, and how they would measure “effective”). So, is education about growth or content accumulation?

According to Brown’s own theories such a method of necessarily sequestered learning is striped of all potential social, environmental and serendipitous learning—which together provide dramatically more educational value and growth potential than plain old curricular training. Indeed Brown has already made a convincing case for the social life of information. Surely he is not now taking that back?

If we then to assume he is in fact not taking it back, then “effectiveness” cannot refer to the quality of the educational experience, nor can it be from the student’s perspective. “Effectiveness” must then be from the producer’s perspective, and refer to the economies of scale they can realize through hyper-efficiency of their distribution mechanisms and production standardizations.

But this is the language of push. This is the language of 19th industrial mass production. This isn’t the language of pull. This isn’t the language of an innovative new approach. Do Hagel and Brown even know what they’re saying? Or is this perhaps a computer generated paper that takes a theme as input and then scours blogs for related fashionable info-biscuits to assemble? Is this perhaps the result of a Chinese box, indifferent to the ultimate sematics and coherence of its output?

Hagel and Brown then go on to say “[w]hile the timing and delivery of these educational materials is customized, the materials themselves are still highly standardized.” Notice how it’s the timing and delivery that are standardized–how on earth can you standardize timing and delivery in a pull environment, since by definition you as the producer of content have absolutely no control over how and when your content is being pulled?!?!

I could go on and on, but I think I’ve made my point here: intellectually, this paper is gibberish. Perhaps it really improves in later chapters. I wouldn’t know because I reached my tolerance for nonsense by page 14. I just couldn’t persevere though the ambiguity, muddled thinking, intellectual curly-queues, contradictions, lazy rhetoric, etc. How can two people so highly regarded publish this kind of work?

Ok, this isn’t exactly design or innovation related, but I just have to say something about this

PresentationZen has a great post on one of last week’s Daily Shows where Jon Stewart interviews former DOD PR flack Torie Clarke (check out the clip, its painfully amusing).

In the Usual Suspects, Verbal Kint said “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

Well the greatest trick a spin doctor could ever pull would be to convince the world that spin doesn’t exist.

Stewart exposes Clarke’s spin and obsequious hypocrisy by getting her to admit that spin is pervasive in this no-spin era. Black is white and up is down folks. Welcome to the wonderful world of PR.

My appologies for the the lame title–I just couldn’t come up with anything less bad.  Regardless…

Blogrium has an interesting post on the sociology of innovation and the psychological perception factors that are conducive to fostering innovation within groups. 

I was immediately struck by the fact that this is a model of product design as a professional and multi-disciplinary practice.  Indeed many designers claim that design is a problem solving endeavour (top-right).  I contend that solving is only part of the equation; modeling and understanding the problem (bottom-left) is the other half.

Furthermore most design practice seems to be trapped in derivative stylization (bottom-right).  Need proof?  Pick up any design magazine.  Chances are regardless of which one or which time or year, it will feature the winners of some kind of mind-numbingly sterile design competition.  In it you will find that what passes for award winning design is really little more than a predictable and conservative fashion show of usual suspects.

And finally design at its best, mixes with other disciplines like engineering marketing to give birth to real innovation (top-left).  This means that design is not itself innovaton (and one shouldn’t conflate the two) but strongly related to innovation. 

So these four quadrants seem to cover the reality of product design and development quite nicely.  However, I was still unsatisfied.  Something was missing.  And toward the end of the post there it was: constraints.  The 2-D model does not include one’s ability to navigate constraints. 

By constraint navigation I’m refering to execution intelligence: the ability to successfully act on what has been percieved.  Sure you can see differences and similarities, but can you take that vision to market (financial market, product market, idea market, what ever)?  No market, no innovation.

So I included a third dimension and tweaked some of the terms (in my cumudgeonly way) to come up the following cube: Innovation^3.

 

 

I’ve put this on a permanent page at http://www.scoobr.com/niblettes_old/terms-i-like/

New terms I like….

• Ninged: falling into the chasm of usability, where despite the potential value only geeks can figure out how to use your product
• Flocked: falling into the chasms of usefullness or desirability, where despite offering an easy to use product, only geeks want to use it

(cheers to Umair over at BubbleGeneration)

• YA2.0N Yet Another 2.0 Name, pronounced “YAWN”

(thanks to readwriteweb.com)

The old ones…

• meme-peddler: someone who is constantly trying to coin new nonsensical terms and is alway up on the lastest buzz
• brandmeme: a corporate brand message masquerading as meme; intellectual product placement so to speak
• buzzhound: buys all of the meme-peddler’s latest wares, and is always anxious to uncritically show-off his newest purchases
• hype-o-condriac: someone with a strong over-sensitively to all forms of hype due to over-exposure
• hype-o-allergenic: an antidote to brandmemes and other forms of unwarranted hype

So Scott Adams has a basic formula for a successful comic. In order for something to be funny, you need at least two of the following elements:

• Cute (as in kids and animals)
• Naughty
• Bizarre
• Clever
• Recognizable (You’ve been there)
• Cruel

Looking through the funny pages (actually, the not-so-funny pages) this weekend I noticed 3 comics that followed his formula exactly. Mean talking animals seems to be the flavour of the day (Family Guy anyone?), and that hit 3 of 6 right there. Perhaps Adams is right.

This makes me wonder if there is a similar formula for innovation–surely a formula for innovation is no more unthinkable than a forumla for humour (then again, I don’t find many comics that try to pull off the formula to be terribly funny, except for the foxes above–they crack me up, probably cause they hit 4 of 6).

A couple of weeks ago I was speaking with a former professor of mine about innovation. He characterized innovation not only as something original, but also as a novel juxtaposition. Its an interesting point and it got me thinking…

Proust said “The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes.” (thanks to charukesi over at MindSpace for pointing this quote out (I love being able to quote Proust, Balzac or Zola, it make me feel smarter–plus their names sound funny)).

In The Discipline of Innovation Peter Drucker tells a story about how “a shift in viewpoint, not technology, totally changed the economics of ocean shipping and turned it into one of the major growth industries of the last 20 to 30 years.”

Then there’s modern print media. Sure Linotype was the technologically original innovation the helped make it possible. But it was really modern advertising as innovated by Pulitzer and Hearst that gave us the print media we are familiar with today. They re-imagined how printed information could be monetized. This reshuffled old constraints and opportunities into new and highly successful juxtapositions.

Picasso’s cubism would be an original; Duchamp’s readymade would be juxtaposition. While Descartes gave us original thought, Aquinas gave us exegesis. Portishead’s album Dummy is original; DJ Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album is juxtaposition.

And this last example really struck a cord with me. The Beatles made the White Album. Jay-Z made the Black Album. But Danger Mouse mashed them together and created something nether the Beatles nor Jay-Z nor anyone else had thought of.

DJs take other people’s music and mix it, scratch it, mash it, invert it, juxtapose it, to create new experiences for their audiences. In the same way a lot of new product innovation (especially online products) these days seems to come from mashing up other online products and ideas. I’m sure everyone is aware of the craigslist-and-google-maps find-a-rental mashup.

This kind of innovation strikes me as much easier to catalyze than entirely original innovations, because they are less about raw genius (happy birthday Mozart) and more about an accretion of alternate perspectives–something the net commoditizing incredibly efficiently. And these innovations-though-juxtaposition can often provide just as much value as their purely original cousins.

The drawback of innovations-through-juxtaposition is that they really only thrive in open and tolerant environments (perhaps this is part of what’s behind Richard Florida’s theories that tolerance can be causally connected to positive economic production). Meanwhile entirely original, raw genius innovations are like mushrooms and grow best left alone in dark basements.

Garr over at Presentation Zen has mentioned “the big duck” a few times. I love the metaphor, and it strikes me as rekated to Tufte’s cautions about decorating data.

It seems that we designers need to check ourselves evey so oftern to make sure we’re not just making glorious big ducks, but actually doing what’s best to solve the problems real people really experience.

So I’ve been slowly going over a number of design project proposals from both small and big design firms. I thought I’d take the opportunity to list some of the faults I’ve experienced so far (and the big guys are just as guilty as the little).

1. Avoid telling me what something is not, because I’m skimming your proposal at first, and will likely miss the negation. This means that I might think you are saying the exact opposite of what you mean.
2. Avoid weasle words and phrases, not just because they obviously make you sound like a fool, but also because again I’m skimming and when I hit a weasle word or phrase I seem to just jump to the next paragraph. So, if you have put something really good after the weasle, I won’t see it.
3. Avoid naked, mindless self-promotion, like “we believe that collaborating with us would be the best thing to do.” Obviously you think that–you want to make the sale and you wouldn’t be in business if you didn’t think that. So why waste my time making me read the empty marketeering? Don’t. It makes you look either obtuse and ignorant. You’re getting precious little of my attention, so please make every word count.
4. Avoid naked, mindless, mindlessness, like saying that you will work with stakeholders. Working with stakeholders goes without saying–who else would you work with, people with no stake in the project? Mindless blather wastes my time, makes you sound like an idiot and it tells me you think I’m an idiot too. That’s insulting, and insults are no way to land a deal.

Just a few thoughts on proposal writing–not that I’m an expert at writing them, but I’m getting pretty good at reading them.