Google of course just announced to the SEC their intention to go public. How will public life and investment scrutiny effect the world's most popular information search company? Business Week interviews Google's CEO Eric Schimidt and that's just one of the questions asked of this interesting leader.

Q: Are you working hard to find a way to create more lock-in with your users?
A: You're asking a perfectly reasonable question of a normal company. That's not how Google works. The way Google works is about innovation. We are awaiting the discovery of what will achieve your objective. Do you see the distinction? Innovation comes from invention, which you cannot schedule. That's the secret. When I look at Google News or (Google's social networking site) Orkut, I never could have anticipated their success.

Q: So you guys at the top level don't sit and say, "Gosh, we would be much better served with greater customer interaction, how can we accomplish this?"
A: I say that. But what we really talk about is how can we attract and develop this creative culture. This is important. The Google answer is an innovative one, it's a surprising one, which is why this is such a fun place to be. It's genuinely unanticipated.

(via mikel.org)

 
Multi-discipline design meets creative consultancy. Plastic toy soldiers meet very hot oven. Mosley meets Wilcox.

 
Three very different worldviews: naturalism, humanism and rationalism...
-Naturalism: Living systems are circular whereas industrial-age systems are linear. Why create inefficient systems that primarily produce waste?
-Humanism: Passion, curiosity and trust are the driving elements of the New Economy, messy though they may be.
-Rationalism: The predominant imperative for companies to make money in the most efficient way possible.

Only by embracing all three can we begin to understand what sustainability actually means, says Peter Senge in a typically thought-provoking MIT Sloan Management Review article that he (and former Volvo and IKEA senior executive Goran Carstedt) wrote in 2001 titled Innovating our Way to the Next Industrial Revolution (PDF file). In it he puts forward a very sensible extension of his systems thinking and organizational learning arguments: the New Economy warrants -- and rewards -- a more balanced and environmentally sensitive approach to production and human resource management.

Ecoefficiency gains are laudable but dangerously incomplete, say the authors, as is any strategy that fails to consider how the economic system affects the larger ecological and social systems within which it resides. Only a more integrated view will enable companies to innovate for long-term profitability and sustainability. Industrial-age systems follow a linear flow of extract, produce, sell, use, discard: the "take-make-waste" approach to economic growth. A systemic approach would reduce all sources of waste: from production, use and disposal.

How can managers adapt? In stark contrast to industrial-age, command-and-control management methods are the three core competencies that learning organizations must master to profit from sustainability. First, they must encourage systemic thinking so that they can sense the emerging future. Second, they must convene strategic conversations with investors, customers, suppliers and even competitors to build the trust needed to change outmoded mental models about what business success is. Finally, they must take the lead in reshaping economic, political and societal forces that stymie change. True learning organizations stand out by championing business models that foster sustainable growth.

(via droganbloggin)

 
All Work and No Play - Americans have stopped taking vacations. And that's bad for business.

As a nation of stressed-out workaholics, we need to shift our priorities, and be-dare I suggest it?-more like the Europeans, who down tools for weeks at a time without seeing their lives and economies fall apart. We should encourage sabbaticals with some sort of stipend that allows us weeks or even months away from the office. During our officially sanctioned absences, we'd be free to travel, take cooking classes, write that crime novel or do anything as long as it has nothing to do with work. If sabbaticals are accepted as the norm, careers won't suffer. We'd be more balanced, less harried and probably a lot more interesting as individuals.

 
Watch DJ prodigy (and aspiring cartoonist) Kid Koala dissect Moon River, courtesy of the BBC.

(via The Foolish Grin Project)

 
Colorstrology - find out which Pantone chip represents your birthday.

 
Within the perspective of SAP implementation, and using the metaphors of organism and nervous system for an organization and its management, IT consultant Sue White discusses The Networker Role and how the Corporate "Brain" differs from the Corporate "Mind".

This organization has a distributed "mind" rather than a centralized "brain." As such, it can both obtain information from many different sources and perform empowered actions at many different locations. Communications, and other creative activities, are enhanced, and occur in parallel rather than being constrained by linear or serial structures and processes. These organizations tend to be fluid and adaptable because they reflect ideas and applications from quantum physics, chaos and complexity theories, rather than the rigidity and structure of the Newtonian paradigm. In this case, the Networker Role is widely disseminated throughout the organization, and ideally at least, would be held (at least in part) by every member of the organization. Every individual in the corporation would both understand and accept his/her responsibility to gather necessary information (and/or other resources) and ensure that they were delivered to the person(s) who needed them.

 
The bizarre, twisted, surreal, fantastical photography of Margot Quan Knight.

 
The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida's fabulous book about creativity, work and cities is chock full of useful analysis and observations - such as these:

One person may be simultaneously a writer, researcher, consultant, cyclist, rock climber, electronic/world music/acid jazz lover, amateur gourmet cook, wine enthusiast or micro-brewer. The people in my interviews report that they have little trouble integrating such multiple interests and personae. This kind of synthesis is integral to establishing a unique creative identity. (p.13)

Where I grew up, we were conditioned to play the roles that we were dealt. We were not encouraged to create and build our visions, but rather to fit into the visions of a select few. I like to say that we were "institutionalized" individuals - because institutions defined our lives. (p.23)

Highly skilled craftsmen and merchants concentrated in towns and cities to serve the wealthy rulers who could pay for their services. In doing so they also found a brisk business serving each other. Farm families might grow their own food, make their own clothes and such, but specialized tradespeople living in cities had to buy goods other than their own. Cities became centers of specialization and diverse interaction - hubs of creativity. (p.59)

In the old days, bosses were people who knew their business better than the subordinates did, so both the typical organizational structure and the typical career path were vertical. As you stuck around and presumably learned more about the business, you moved up. But today, with growing specialization, this no longer holds true: [T]hose in authority," Barley writes, "no longer comprehend the work of their subordinates." (p. 114)

 
If you're young, ambitious, and looking for an opportunity to demonstrate your creative advertising prowess, check out these groovy competitions. Your choice: on-the-air, outdoors or in moving pictures...
-The first ever Junior Radio competition
-ihaveanidea.com's huge Win the Wall contest
-Maisonneuve Magazine's Digital Curiosity short film competition

 
Legendary adman David Ogilvy once said "Do not compete with your agency in the creative area. Why keep a dog and bark yourself?" Yet, too many advertising clients don't heed this advice. Every day, marketing people force their agencies to execute lame, watered-down advertising that everyone, including the target audience, despises.

Could you be one of those kinds of clients? Visit IamJack.com for some lessons on how best to treat your favorite ad creative team.

 
Jealous that there were patron saints for everything -- unhappy husbands, ecxema sufferers, the falsely accused -- but none for graphic artists, designer and art director W. Lynn Garrett of California created some. Meet the six Patron Saints of Graphic Design: Saint Anxieté (Patron of impossible deadlines and foamy coffee), Saint Concepta (Patron of brainstorming and procrastination), Saint Exacto (Patron of quick comps and missing fingertips), Saint Pantone (Patron of pretty colors and office pets), Saint Pixela (Patron of retouching and comfy chairs), and Saint Typo (Patron of spell checking and Google searches).

(via Metafilter)

 
Ever wonder what it would be like to ride a motorbike through the Chernobyl dead zone? Elena (aka Kidd of Speed), Ukranian and motorcycle enthusiast, shares an eery story about a town that one can ride through with no stoplights, no police and no danger of hitting any living thing. Chilling.

I have ridden all my life and over the years I have owned several different bikes. I ended my search for a perfect bike with a big Kawasaki Ninja that boasts a mature 147 horse power, some serious bark, is fast as a bullet and comfortable for a long trips. I travel a lot and one of my favorite destinations is through the so called Chernobyl "dead zone", which is 130kms from my home. Why my favorite? Because one can take long rides there and not see any single car or any single soul.

The people there all left and nature is blooming. There are beautiful woods and lakes. In places where roads have not been travelled by trucks or army vehicles, they are in the same condition they were 20 years ago - except for an occasional blade of grass that discovered a crack to spring through. Time does not ruin roads, so they may stay this way until they can be opened to normal traffic again........ a few centuries from now. ...

The most exciting thing about a Ghost Town ride is to hit the red line on my bike's tacho and split the silence with the roar of a wounded dinosaur, then close throttle so I can hear the ghosts whispering their curses to my 1100cc Kawasaki engine.

 
The very thoughtful weblog Newsdesigner.com sheds some light on that very busy International Herald Tribune logo (and other design matters as they apply to newspaper journalism). From Richar Kluger's book The Paper: The Life and Death of The New York Herald Tribune:

A strange device appeared as the centerpiece of the logotype at the top of the first page of the New York Tribune on April 10, 1866, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the paper's founding, and remained there ever after - a banner unique among the newspapers of the world. It is there still atop the International Herald Tribune. Staff members over the years came to call the odd little drawing "the dingbat," which Webster's defines as meaning, among other choices, "thing, object, or contrivance." A contrivance it surely was: in the middle of the crudely drawn tableau is a clock reading twelve minutes past six - no one knows why (conceivably it was the moment of Horace Greely's birth); to the left, Father Time sits in brooding contemplation of antiquity, represented by the ruin of a Greek temple, a man and his ox plowing, a caravan of six camels passing before two pyramids, and an hourglass; to the right, a sort of Americanized Joan of Arc, arms outstretched beneath a backwards-billowing Old Glory, welcomes modernity in the form of a chugging railroad train, factories with smoking chimneys, an updated plow, and an industrial cogwheel (over which the incautious heroine is about to trip); atop the clock, ready to take off into the boundless American future, is an eagle - all for no extra cost. It was a baroque snapshot of time arrested, an allegorical hieroglyph of the newspaper's function to render history on the run.

(via i love everything)

 
"At a time when the humanities are perceived as the domain of lackluster academicians, and as being increasingly abstruse and irrelevant, it is odd that college presidents and search committees do not try to bolster the one liberal art that embodies the scientific and analytical rigors demanded by a corporate, entrepreneurial age." So laments Atlantic correspondent Robert D. Kaplan in an article about the surprising usefulness of a liberal arts education at both figuring out and recounting military history. Four-Star Generalists highlights a few books that Kaplan claims do a good job at weaving together the many influences and outcomes of bloody battle.

Military campaigns, because they are fights for the sheer survival of nations and cultures, offer the most telling insights about the values, technologies, social relations, and intellectual life of historical periods. And because both death and defeat are undeniable, a military historian is forced to pierce the accumulated fog of philosophical abstractions and political agendas that frustrates other historical disciplines. Though rarely regarded as such, military history is as august a field as any in the liberal arts.

 
According to this Fast Company article, Hidden Asset, Tom Davenport (a professor of information technology and management at Babson College, and a fellow at the Accenture Institute for High Performance Business) is the most influential business guru you've never heard of. He discussed such things as reengineering, knowledge management, and enterprise systems before anyone else and was an early advocate of corporate innovation. Still is, here presenting his eight-point game plan for winning with ideas.

Right now, we're just starting to emerge from an economic and an idea recession, a protracted hunkering-down phase. But the signs are starting to point to the return of an idea phase. We're seeing some growth in the economy, and people are talking about innovation again. And even in this conservative climate, smart companies are still in search of performance-boosting initiatives. ... Bottom line: If I was an idea practitioner working within a company, right now I'd be cautiously raising some trial balloons for new initiatives that will enhance my business.