Where the suckers moon …

So the second book my friend Shane recommended was called “Where the suckers moon: The Life and Death of an Advertising Campaign” by Randall Rothernberg, the current director of the International Advertising Bureau. Since moving out of pure consulting into design I have been resisting the move into “advertising“. Despite working for a digital advertising agency (despite it’s ongoing transformation into a holistic brand experience agency). Where the suckers moon is a fantastic journey through the wonderful world of marketing and advertising projects. It picks up where Mad Men leaves off, the time when Madison Avenue ruled the world of advertising and takes you on a whirlwind journey through the maturation of an industry (both the Subaru car industry and the advertising space). Follow Subaru as they search for and select an agency. Follow the agency as it discovers that it’s not as simple as a great creative idea. Watch the politics and pressure of advertising unfold across a who cast of characters. The book is well written and takes you on a roller coaster ride towards a crescendo of doom you can feel building almost from Chapter 1. As a former Subaru owner (and someone who still remembers the “take the long road home” campaign, I found this book eye opening). What does this mean for me and my job? It sure helps understand not just the creative design teams, but the advertising people as well. High throughput creative concept generation … advertising production … versus application development versus mashups and integration … the business is changing fast. How to stay ahead and agile in this kind of down economy? Lean, fast, agile, high quality, and hurry up about it!

Filed under: personal improvement , advertising, book, growth, marketing

501

Ah the Levi’s 501. The iconic jean. The one piece of clothing I have lusted after since high school. The one piece of clothing I could never fit into. Even after my crazy running binge prior to the High School Formal at Otago Boys. Even after running half-marathons I was unable to really fit into a pair of 501s. So imagine my surprise when this weekend, I tried a pair on for giggles and discovered … they fit. They fit well, they aren’t tight, but they make me look like a rock star (well, I might be exaggerating there, but I have received many compliments on them and me after wearing them ).

So to what do I attribute my new 501′d shape? Maybe Levi’s like all other clothing sizes are getting bigger to keep pace with the expanding waistlines of the first world? Maybe my change in diet/portion size and my run 3-4 days a week regime really is fundamentally chaning the way I am. I feel grumpy when I don’t run. I feel grumpy when I eat too much. Maybe things really are changing.

The big challenge is that I signed up for the Nike Human Race. A Global race where millions of runners from around the world will all run a 10k at the same time. Syncronized by starters in major cities, or doe independantly through your Nike+ enabled running shoes. A bunch of my NY friends will also be running the race (probably) so it’s going to be fun. I want to beat my last 10k time of just on an hour. I had more than 200 miles on my last pair of Asics Kayanos and I literally bought a pair of Nike Structure Triax 11’s just for the race. Its my first pair of non-Asics running shoes in a long time. They were a great deal and got a good runners world review. So far they’ve been great.

However, 2 weeks ago I rode my bike for the first time, scouting a 5 mile loop at breakneck speed. I don’t think I stretched properly, and ever since my left calf muscle has begun to ache. Right at the top of the muscle, it doesn’t hurt when I run, it hurts afterwards. So I took 9 days off running last week (with associated grumpiness). Yesterday, in Detroit I went for a 4 mile loop through Birmingham, MI. It was pretty, hot, beautiful houses, I stretched and ran like the wind. Then after the shower, bam, my calf is in pain again. I am really worried that this means a month off recuperating. That would mean that I will need to find another cardio way to stay in shape without hurting my calf. Grrrrrrrrr, making me even grumpier!

Filed under: exercise, personal improvement, running

It’s all Jayse’s fault

So one other completely strange thing that has happened to me in New York is that I have stopped reading scifi. Well, maybe not stopped, but for those who know me well, I love scifi and I am no longer reading just scifi. I watch scifi movies, read (pretty much exclusively) scifi books, and imagine the future at every opportunity. I think this is what gives me my constantly sunny disposition: I am always imagining a better future.

So how did I stop exclusively reading scifi, you might ask? I have many favorite scifi authors: Iain Banks, Stephen Baxter, Vernor Vinge, the usual suspects. One of my favorite, push the edge authors was Jonathan Lethem. Imagine my surprise when one of my best friends in NYC mentioned that she loved this crazy author called Jonathan Lethem. Strange … that sounded familiar. She talked about his great writing, his stories of Brooklyn, and growing up, and how much she loved his books. So we got into a long conversation to the point where I realized … OMG … this is the same guy that I loved. He wrote both scifi and real novels (no offense to the scifi lovers out there). So she dared me to read one … and I read Fortress of Solitude. It was fantastic. A tale of growing up in Brooklyn, friendships, and relationships that were complex, yet familiar. A whole world of possibilities opened up to me. I quickly devoured the rest of Lethem’s non-scifi titles, then began searching around for more.

After a quick dalliance with Bradbury and a few others, Jayse introduced me to Haruki Murakami. Oh my goodness, Murakami’s books have a quiet power and grace to them. The evoke such feelings of pretty much anything you can imagine. His imagery, his language, his subjects, his characters, all come to life creating haunting emotional landscapes of story and emotion the likes of which I have never read. I was hooked. I inhaled 5 or 6 of Murakami’s works including: Dance, Dance, Dance; The Wind Up Bird Chronicle; Kafka on the Shore; Hardboiled Wonderland at the End of the World; and Norwegian Wood. Wow, I was mesmerized and completely enthralled by Murakami’s prose.

And hence the title of this post: it’s all Jayse’s fault. She is responsible for my rebirth from the safe cocoon of scifi possibilities into the gritty world of raw human emotions and feelings anchored in the here and now. It’s an incredible transformation. I have a lot to be thankful for, but this is one of the biggest transformations I have been through, beyond falling in love, getting married, and having kids.

Thanks Jayse, I think that’s a theme.

Filed under: personal improvement , books, literature, reading, scifi

Empathy

So I just got back from 4 days in Las Vegas at Camp O. It was a life changing experience. I have spent the last 17 years of my life learning to be a consultant. My friend Daniel taught me that consulting is basically the diagram below and the process is something like this:

1. Get you customers buy in to the hypothesis
2. Develop a structured interview protocol
3. Interview captive people who want to talk about their problems
4. Synthesize that information into an abstract model using affinity grouping and other techinques
5. Workshop your client until they agree on the model
6. Deliver the insight to the client who says “wow we never looked at it this way”

This approach has stood me well in the last few years. When my new employer flew me out to Vegas to do their customer empathy exercise I assumed it would work just fine. Boy, was I wrong. One of the things I loved about the early days as the big S was the user experience research field. Ethnography, user interviews, hunt statements, the like. I had forgotten how different to consulting that was.

The customer empathy interviews are completely different to anything I could have conducted before. It is the diametric opposite of the consulting process. The intent is to get to know someone so you can answer questions about product, marketing, etc as if you were them. It is about getting in side their heads, their life, their reactions, and using that to inform you design and idea. it is about quotes, feelings, emotions, responses, drivers. It has blown me away. To quote from Difficult Conversations:

The deepest form of understanding another person is empathy…[which] involves a shift from observing how you seem on the outside, to imagining what it feels like to be you on the inside.

The customer empathy process is something like this:

1. Try to work out where your demographic target hangs out
2. Go to that location and befriend your target
3. Explore your friendship/connection by asking about the why’s and responses to your questions
4. Build a persona of who this person is … demographics, likes, dislikes, quotes, emotional stories and responses
5. Use this to imagine how your target will interact with design and experience

The insights our team and others gained into our target customers, demographic and their focusing emotion (ours was anger) was incredible. I firmly believe that as interface development progresses from green screen to mouse-based to multi-touch gesture that we need to understand emotions in a much more significant way. Touch is a much more visceral sense as opposed to sight or sound (for me at least). To create useful interfaces that use touch, you must understand emotional response.

On another note, the process of working for 60 hours straight with only 3 hours of sleep created a team bond the likes of which I have never felt before. My team kicked arse and pushed outselves to levels we never knew we had. We lost, but we learned so much as we did it. Skip on Team Angry Money … and don’t forget “no pokey” …

Filed under: consulting, personal improvement

Considered action verus Reaction

I am struggling with another big decision (more on that later)and as always happens my RSS feeds provided me with an interesting pearl of wisdom. This article over at Slow Leadership brought up an interesting point:

The more carefully you consider your options, the more appropriate your actions can be. That’s important. Thoughts don’t change anything by themselves, but even a small action has the potential to change your whole world. To be “action oriented” should never mean rushing into any action, purely for the sake of doing something. Action is far too important for that.

Most of what happens to you begins from one of two places: chance events or your own actions. Chance events you can do nothing about directly, but the way that you respond to those events likely determines much of their effect—at least on you.

Even other people’s actions—another area pretty much outside your direct control—have relatively little impact on you until you respond to them by turning to some form of action.

Now, this kind of statement certainly seems obvious most of the time, but I am an intuitive person, I often trust my gut on things, when I should do a more holistic analysis … but that requires a certain discipline and often some “head space” for you to make up your mind, do the analysis, and invest in the big actions.

How do you find that headspace? Where do you go to find the answers? How do you do this while you are responsible for 3 projects, closing $1M deals, rescuing friends on the brink, playing Candyland with your kids, and trying to work out why you Infiniti ate 6 of your CDs …

If I work it out, I’ll let you know …

Filed under: consulting, personal improvement

Moving to New York City

Well, it’s been a while but I have finally decided to leave my current employer (a company that I love) to move to the big city and change jobs. When I got my butt out of government consulting I re-tooled myself into commercial consulting with a long term aim of international experience. Over the last 7 months I have come to realize a few things:

1. I am getting quite good at managing internal consulting systems
2. I can manage profit and loss, invoices, operations, staffing, people, pretty well
3. I hate doing those thing … they are a necessary evil but not what I wanted to end up doing

So … what do you do when you wake up every morning saying “oh no, I have to to X again”? Simple … move your own cheese. I went through another exercise of trying to work out where I wanted to work, what I liked, what I disliked, what industries I preferred and many other aspects. I read Drucker and HBR again on managing yourself, re-read the Seven Deadly Habits of Successful People, dusted off David Allen’s Ready for Anything, cruised lifehack and other great blogs.

I decided that I wanted to get back to the presentation layer. I am very excited about the push towards a richer client-side experience (DHTML/AJAX, Flex, Adobe AIR, and Silverlight) and very excited about the future potential of multi-touch interfaces (moving away from the “mouse” to a tactile interface). I went looking for companies that might be interested in what I can do, while not needing me to manage the operations side of the business (that I do not like!). Unfortunately, the only road up at my old employer is up to “general manager”, business unit lead, C-level business executive. There are no specialties (short of being bucked down the org chart a few levels!) at the Director level.

So things are getting weird … I am leaving a company I have been with for seven years, that has grown me from a simple software architect into a fully fledged Director and engagement lead. I am moving to a smaller company, who is growing quickly. I am moving away from my home of 10 years, Washington, DC. I am moving to New York City to get closer to some international experience. I will be away from the family for a few months while they finish the school year and we sell up the house. I am feeling rather unsettled.

Filed under: NZ vs USA, USA, ample sufficiency, personal improvement , family, moving, multitouch, nyc, rich internet application

Spare some time to think about this

So many of you probably think I’m some pinko commie subversive but this blog entry about giving pause really got me thinking. Spare some time to think about this It occurred to me that I am actually pretty focused on the present … what can I directly effect, here, and now. Yes I plan forward, and I’m sure I do my share of living in the past, but in all reality, I spend most of my time focused on the here and now. How about you?

Blogged with Flock

Tags: wblproductivity philosophy life

Filed under: Getting Things Done, personal improvement

Change of mood

So I caved and moved my blog over to a darker theme … better fitting my current mood … whatcha dink?

Filed under: NZ vs USA, personal improvement , look and feel, webdev

Design humor!

Wacka wacka wacka http://www.makemylogobiggercream.com/

Blogged with Flock

Tags: humordesign

Filed under: personal improvement

Considered action verus Reaction

 I am struggling with another big decision (more on that later)and as always happens my RSS feeds provided me with an interesting pearl of wisdom. This article over at Slow Leadership brought up an interesting point:

The more carefully you consider your options, the more appropriate your actions can be. That’s important. Thoughts don’t change anything by themselves, but even a small action has the potential to change your whole world. To be “action oriented” should never mean rushing into any action, purely for the sake of doing something. Action is far too important for that.

Most of what happens to you begins from one of two places: chance events or your own actions. Chance events you can do nothing about directly, but the way that you respond to those events likely determines much of their effect—at least on you.

Even other people’s actions—another area pretty much outside your direct control—have relatively little impact on you until you respond to them by turning to some form of action.

Now, this kind of statement certainly seems obvious most of the time, but I am an intuitive person, I often trust my gut on things, when I should do a more holistic analysis … but that requires a certain discipline and often some “head space” for you to make up your mind, do the analysis, and invest in the big actions.

How do you find that headspace? Where do you go to find the answers? How do you do this while you are responsible for 3 projects, closing $1M deals, rescuing friends on the brink, playing Candyland with your kids, and trying to work out why you Infiniti ate 6 of your CDs …

If I work it out, I’ll let you know …

Filed under: consulting, personal improvement , leadership, next action, personal improvement, strategy