Er, that's it really. Voting on this finishes at midnight (BST).
read these books
I just finished reading Apex Hides The Hurt by Colson Whitehead which is a brilliant novel about a naming consultant. It's one of those books which makes you question a lot of the stuff you do every day while simultaneously giving you ideas about how to do it. I love the way it's set in the present but also seems to be in a slightly timeless, slightly disturbing Americana.
And it didn't really occur to me until I'd finished it, but Mr Whitehead also wrote The Intuitionist, which is similarly brilliant and odd, and concerns a fierce dispute between factions of elevator inspectors. On the one side there are Empiricsts, on the other, Intuitionists. It should feel familiar to planners and market researchers.
IT conversations on Thursday
Most of you would probably run a mile from a site called IT Conversations but you'd be wrong because a) IT people are always lovely and b) there's a ton of really interesting stuff on there for non-IT people, specifically for all you planners. This is one of my favourites and I think I've posted about it before, somewhere in the mists of time, it's Joseph Chamie, the UN's head demographer making demographics interesting and funny as well as, well, destiny.
More IT Conversations suggestions every Thursday in a regular feature I'm cleverly calling 'IT Conversations on Thursday'.
(And have a go with the Newspaper Clipping Generator)
good enough
"Good enough is not good enough" Chiat Day always used to bug me by saying that. I know what they were trying to say but it was the worst sort of sloganeering because 'good enough' is, by definition, 'good enough'. That's what it means.
Anyway, I was reminded of that because there's a lovely piece about the power of good enough at Dear Ada which manages to connect a Timex watch and a toasted cheese sandwich. Good stuff.
another what the web is for
Through the serendipity of trackbacks and the gift economy of polite email I found this netsquared place - remixing the web for social change - what a fantastic idea. There are tons of interesting ideas in here and here. Have a look. Brilliant.
music for working
I know most of you have been pandora-ing for ages but for some reason I'd resisted. It never quite delivered the specificity I wanted. But the other day I just relaxed and tried to grow a station of good music for working. Quiet, slow, harmonic, no words. I rather like what they've come up with. If you want to listen too, scroll a long way down, on the right, and click on 'music for working'.
crazy ad guys and the theatre of insight
This report in Business Week about Crispin Porter reminded me of one of the hidden purposes of planning which we're never really supposed to talk about; the theatre of insight.
The problem with advertising (and a lot of creative businesses) for journalists and clients alike is that the story of the process just isn't that interesting. ('We all sat around and talked about it for a while and then some of the guys came up with quite a good idea and we noodled with it for a bit, argued about it for a bit and it turned into something good'). When a journalist turns up, or when you've got a pitch or something you want a more dramatic story to tell, something with a bit of tension,discovery and ideally some appearance of intellectual rigour. That's where planning comes in (or 'cognitive anthropology' in Crispin's case, I know, I know):
"Two-hour in-home interviews with two dozen GTI buyers, all men 18 to 30, were done in five cities. The researchers sent the subjects an assignment in advance of visits: Make a collage with magazine pictures to illustrate how they felt about Japanese "tuner" cars, like Honda Civics, on which owners tack thousands of dollars in speed-enhancing and cosmetic accessories. Then cut out pictures representing the European tuner cars like GTI and BMW M cars that are accessorized at the German factories. One GTI fan contrasted cutouts of Tweety Bird and a tuner "dude" wearing a chrome dollar-sign necklace to represent the Asian tuner "posers" with images of a black wolf and Ninja warrior depicting the "more authentic and serious" Euro tuner crowd.
Crispin's researchers then asked them to write epitaphs on paper tombstones after the phrase "Here Lies the Japanese Hot Hatch," and recipes that begin with, "My perfect recipe for driving is..." One recipe reads: "One S-curve, a pinch of fishtail, two parts turbo toast, an ounce of hard rock music. Combine and bring to a boil." The strategy drawn from all this was to flog the GTI as tuned in Germany by speed-happy engineers rather than at some U.S. neighborhood retail joint."
It's a bit like the famous Goodby Got Milk research. It's not just great strategy, it's a great creation story. The drama of the story, the thrill of the chase, the excitement of the solution. Sure you could have got to the same place through common sense and a couple of hours around the big table, but that's not the point; planning is drama, planning is story, planning gives you something to talk about. Planning gives you that all time favourite pitch strategy - The Theatre Of Insight.
I'm not knocking this in any way. It's a valid use of the craft, I just think it's worth acknowledging that often what we're doing is looking for an interesting idea creation story, not neccesarily splitting the strategic atom.