It doesn’t fail, I had decided not to renew my HBR’s subscription and then I get the latest issue where the main article is pure gold. Which three articles have you read in your business life that deserve, in Olympic style, the Gold, Silver and Bronze Medal? Personally my Bronze medal goes to Alan Deutschman’s 2005 Change or Die. The silver Medal goes to Seth Godin’s 2003 In Praise of the Purple Cow , and now the Gold goes to Ed Catmull’s Creativity at PIXAR. Creativity at PIXAR is nothing less than the blueprint for Enterprise 3.0, encompassing Operations, Management, Strategy, Training, Talent, Management and sheer luck. All centered around creativity as practical strategy, with the background of Moore’s Living on the Fault Line, where functions that are not CORE are not part of the organization, the company is structured around fully integrated functions, like a 3-D puzzles, or a multi-dimensional (quantum) puzzle, where there are n-dimensions interconnected in more ways that it is visible or traceable, where the overall result is greater then the sum by a few orders of magnitudes. In a mature 2.0 business world, is your company still organized according to an org chart? How quaint! How 1.0. What can you do?

First you MUST read the article on PIXAR, it might make you think (again), it might make you ponder, it might make you angry, and be in awe. You might even hate it, and that’s ok too. If the article appeals to you and to your personality: make it part of yourself, make it part of your personal brand, and figure out a way you can deploy your new/changed vision into what you do.

Second, you can email the link to the article, or to this blog entry, to everyone you know, your boss (if you have one), partners, reports, investors. Blog about it, twit about it, FB-it, and let them know that you are open to talk and discuss its implications in what your do and in your relationship with them.

The third step depends on you and your company. If you are an entrepreneur in the making, this is going to be part of your DNA, and the DNA that you’ll pass onto your creation. If you are an Entrepreneur with a young start-up you are still in time to make these new ideas permeate into your company, into your people, and into everything you do, and most importantly in HOW you do “it”. If you are in charge of an establish company, change, real ecological change, takes virtually no time. It’s only the ripple effects of the change that take time to set in. If you work for an established company, and the corporate culture is on another planet from where PIXAR plays, you are in trouble. The article resonates with you and it has entered your thinking and expanded your worldviews; it’s going to be harder and harder waking up in the morning to go work which is just a job. The good news is that you hold the key, you have the solution to this dilemma, and you are in good company! Many employees are eager to fly solo and create something new, make a statement, and enrich people’s lives by creating a new brand. It still boils down to two points: plan and execute. Therefore – if that’s your situation – your first step will be to plan an exit route from your present situation. Will your inside view of your company, or of any organization for that matter, ever be the same?

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Photo Credits: tom.arthur

There’s a conspiracy of misinformation and half truths, one of them is the quote: “It’s not about you, it’s about the people that you choose to surround yourself with”. I believe consultants must have come up with this quote. It’s not wrong, it’s just that it is a 1/2 truth, for TWO main reasons:

1. Finding, convincing to join and retain top-notch employees & consultants is a rare skill and
2. Guiding these employees and consultant to follow the plan within the vision, and the guidelines is no small feat

Therefore, it is all about you, but not in a selfish way. Bill Gates surrounded himself of MVP (most valuable people), but he was the one with the vision, he saw what nobody else (who could execute) could see, and he sold to the team the concept to give 100% toward his vision. Sure he listened to everyone worth listening to along the way, incorporated thoughts and ideas into his own thoughts and ideas.

How does this affect you as the entrepreneur? It does, in many ways:

• The journey and the communication starts within you: not only WHAT you do, nor HOW you do it, but the essence of WHY you do it. Steve Job wanted to free people from using user unfriendly computers. Have you discovered the WHY you are an entrepreneur? is it only money?
• If it’s just money, that is the WHY and the WHO that will be the driving force of the business, that will determine the hiring that you will be doing (more WHO), your management style as well as theirs (HOW), the corporate culture of the company (HOW), the language and vocabulary that will show up over and over in emails, memos, web site copy, marketing collateral, and conversations (HOW).
• Strategy. Got a strategy to fulfill the vision, and a plan to achieve it. And if you don’t . . . that’s also a strategy, whether it is valid or invalid the point is mute, since it is part of the WHO you are. It would not be Debbie Fields, that Debbie that sold Mrs Fields Inc. for $800 million. Debbie said “if you don’t plan, plan on failing”.

Who are you? Who is the “WHO” reading this? If you are a successful entrepreneur and you are reading this, you already have your WHAT->HOW->WHO->WHY aligned.   If your company is not doing well and you believe you’ve given it enough time to mature, and it is still not working, you are in trouble: you’ve got your WHAT (your company products / services), you’ve got your HOW in place (brand, corporate culture, marketing, story, etc.), which are the product of a WHY that is not supporting the WHAT and the HOW, because it never went into realizing the WHO, which is you. What is your passion, what makes you tick, what makes you wake up at 5:00 AM before the alarm goes off, jump out of bed looking forward to work. Is it really work if you love it so much?

If you are an entrepreneur in the making you are in the best position, like a painter with a blank canvass you can paint any picture you want, you get to pick the theme, colors, tone, mood, and you can even cut the canvass Lucio Fontana’s style, and declare to the world that it is indeed a sculpture, not a painting. As an entrepreneur in the making, you don’t even have a canvass, you can go into any art form and medium of your choosing, and you can even make up your own art form or medium, and break all the rules there are and make then your own, John Cage did.

Business is indeed art.

And business is indeed the outmost form of self expression: think Steve Job and Apple, and how the iPod and iPhone is shaping and enhancing people’s lives, that is Art indeed.

WHO are you? What’s your art? What’s your voice? What’s your story? What’s your BRAND? Trutfully and congruently answer those questions to yourself, and that is just the beginning, the base for discovering the WHY, your WHY to entrepreneurship, which will lead to the HOW of doing things, which is going to be your own, and your own only style. From there it is a natural progress to build the WHAT, the vehicle that will carry forward your vision, the healthy WHO in the link WHO->WHY->HOW->WHAT.

You’ve got friends: Jackson, Walt, Paul, Ben & Jerry, Debbi.

AdAge has a great article on Nick Brien, worldwide CEO of Universal McCann [link].   However I must take objection to a couple of statements:

1. “When clients say, ‘Talk to me about new media,’ I say, ‘No I am not going to talk to you about new media, I am going to talk to you about new marketing,’”.   I  can see his point, but actually it is a new world altogether, a world where audiences are empowered with tools that leverage their numbers and voices:  social networks, blogs, message boards, email, SMS, social networks enabled services like slideshare.net, and social networks enabling services like flickr.com.  It should be no surprise here; the notion that Markets are Conversations has been around for quite a while now.
2. “A brand is ultimately a promise …” This is where Nick gets it really wrong!  Marketing is the promise, Brand is Love.  Brand is the relationship between the audience and the product;  it resides in the mind of the audience, where the company is acting like a Brand Trustee.  Apple Inc. is the trustee for the Apple brand, and the iPod brand, and the MacBook brand.  Audiences may fall in love with iPod but not with MacBook, or they might fall out of love for iPod and fall in love with MacBook.  And just like in any relationship, the promises you keep cement the relationship, the ones you don’t will be forgiven up to a point, and then might be turned against you.  Marketing is the promise, the communication of things to come.

All in all, read the article.  The first half is better then the second half, but again, if you consider the audience (advertisers) and the context (AdAge), we can forgive a couple of inaccuracies.  Can we?

Tim Manners from Reveries has the uncanny ability to take the essence of news, information, and fact from the marketplace, connecting the dots, and deliver to his audience models and patterns reflecting the trends of cultures, costumes and markets.

Today he tackles the interesting pattern of using the logo as a container, that can be adapted within certain context in order to engage the audience and reinforce the brand. If you believe that the brand belongs to its audience, and that the company that holds thee trademark is only a Trustee of the brand; the concept is very easy to “get” and to assimilate.

Markets are indeed conversations, and the logo is part of the conversation as well, with the Brand Trustee telling a relevant story, that resonates with the audience, and the audience interacting with the brand in ways that are inimaginable to the brand managers of circa 1995.

If you are overly obsessive about the minutia details of you highly serious brand, you might not want to poke fun at yourself, or modify the logo unless it is approved by the board under recommendation of a subcommittee with the proper focus group and market research, but if variety and fun is your brand personality, why not add a little spice and variety to your brand, starting with your logo?

Inspired by: Study: TV Spots Reduce Consumers’ Sensitivity to Price ChangeDo your own research and you can prove anything you want. An easy way is to take a subset of a complex event, and draw conclusions linking your offering to the subset, bypassing totally the complex event.

The principle of “Price is an issue in the absence of value” correctly presupposes that brand is a big component of value. When we as consumers evaluate the purchase of one item over another one, brand is indeed one of the component of our perception value, and price becomes an issue only when the brand it’s not enough to justify the price differential with a less expensive brand.

Big Brands spend a lot of money on TV advertisement today, no doubt about it, and YES TV advertising does sustain Brands (A), especially the BIG ones. And BIG brands do enjoy the principle of “Price is an issue in the absence of value” (B), which results in a less price sensitivity of the consumer (C).
But there are many factors that sustain brands (A1, A2, ….An), therefore the correct logic is

(A1, A2, ….An) -> B -> C

Simplify the formula to

A -> B -> C

is what logic describes as “Non sequitur”, if it were true, a massive TV Advertisement campaign would be sufficient to enable any company to increase their prices without any loss of market share.

Building a brand is not as simple as deploying a TV advertisement campaign, it might have been at some point in time, but it is no more. And the concept of brand is now a Complex meaning, a mesh of Love, Trust, Community . . . (add your own qualities here), and it belongs to its audience, not to the company.

Good readings are:

• Trading Up: why we buy the things we buy;
• LoveMarks: brands as a Love relationshionship.