My buddy Scott pointed me to this Diesel campaign embracing Stupid and eschewing Smart.
Some really nice overlaps with doing innovative stuff. The right approach might feel kind of stupid at first!
You might not
love the approach or the brand, but you have to admit that they're on
to something. Here's the Diesel site: http://www.diesel.com/be-stupid/
(Deliberation courtesy of kamshots. Check out his amazing London and Tehran street scenes.)
It's occurred to me recently that you're either starting or quitting.
There's really nothing true about the idea of "standing still." If it feels like you're standing still, it's just that you're starting slowly or quitting slowly.
If you feel trapped, figure out where you're pointing and step on the gas. Either way you should accelerate.
It's a bit like Red said in Shawshank: "Get busy living, or get busy dying."
It just made me wonder, what would I be buying and how excited could I get about what I had and what I could grow? Not only the assets, but also the potential.
If you took an aggressive growth mentality into these businesses, what would you do? Could you even do that?
I recently returned from a great vacation to Alaska. I heard a famous quote while we were in Glacier Bay that resonated with me: "Don't go to Alaska as a young person, otherwise it will ruin all the other things you see after it."
Fresh from vacation, I promptly hopped two redeyes for business in Sao Paulo, Brazil. That was staggering in a completely different way. I live in the big city, but Sao Paulo is staggering in its scale (21MM+ people in the area), diversity, height and breadth. It kept going and going, all of it very tall. Although the greater New York metro area has a comparable population and sprawl, it just doesn't strike me as ruthlessly urban as Sao Paulo.
Being there made me feel excited that, despite seeing awe-inspiring Alaska, there's lots of awe-inspiring things left to see.
[Editor's note: I'm on the road a bit more this week, so the posts are getting posted slower but thought of faster.]
(Mendenhall glacier, outside of Juneau.)
(Looking North in the Johns Hopkins Inlet, just East of the Johns Hopkins Glacier.)
(Sao Paulo: I had my camera with me, but not a minute to snap a shot. This is courtesy of licassuncao. It's kind of embarrassing to put it next to my shots above.)
(Glyph on brick from Zen's photostream on Flickr.)
I was wondering why if there was a "_", why there wasn't a complementary symbol that is at the top of the line, an "overscore" if you will? You might think of it as the carport of type. Or an omega to the underscore's omega.
I asked some of the world's top graphic designers at work, Mimi and Ken, if they had ideas or if such a character existed (These folks went to the world renowned art school at Yale for their graduate degrees in Graphic Design. Check out this year's student exhibition).
No luck.
Mimi and I even opened up the Glyphs for the Times typeface in InDesign and couldn't find one. There is an overbar, the symbol you might see over an e in the English language to indicate a long "e" sound like "eeek" or "eediot." But in the Times set, the overbar is significantly shorter than I'd like it to be. Mimi explained that if I wanted to I could design my own typeface. Alternatively, I could use some adjustment features to move the underscore up. Now, I have no real need for the overscore (yet). So I suppose I'm going to let this one ruminate for a bit.
(Thanks to brontedigital. And the dog? Who knows?)
I woke up this morning thinking about risk, innovation, growth, long-term growth gaps and near-term success. I thought about the adage "pigs get slaughtered" and it occurred to me that deer in headlights get run over.
(Thanks T Hall, sorry deer.)
Companies and leaders, the ones that are interested in doing something better, are out there making investments, learning, experimenting and setting themselves up for the next round of growth. I know because I get to work with them.
If you believe there will be a future, then betting on the future makes sense. Now is not only as good a time as ever, it's an even better time. The opportunity costs are lower. The cost of acquiring capabilities are lower. The constraints are inspiring and force you to build and do rather than ponder and strategize.
So as I'm apt to do when I want to feed my insatiable desire for confirming evidence and like-minded perspectives, I went looking for some and saw this. Nice rundown.
I saw this on the walk in this morning. It reminded me that I didn't have my camera with me and that my Blackberry camera just doesn't quite get it done.
But... it was an excuse to launch a new category on the blog.
