How to Keep Innovating

I hope you'll read this excellent article and take Buxton up on these ideas. I suppose I'm doing it, per the blog entry below. It never occurred to me to go out and try to be bad at something I love, but I'm about to do it.

How to Keep Innovating

BusinessWeek - Feruary 18, 2009
by Bill Buxton

The dogged pursuit of excellence might be the wrong strategy. Microsoft Research Principal Scientist Bill Buxton outlines some tips to keep innovating

I've recently been nagged by a somewhat peculiar thought: In a way, the dogged pursuit of excellence is the path to anything but. As you head down the road to mastery, you run a real risk that in fact you have nothing to distinguish yourself other than the depth of your expertise. That may sound like a good thing, but that expertise may not be either sufficient or satisfying.

To be clear, I am not suggesting for a moment that depth is not important. There are no shortcuts. One does have to put in the thousands of hours that are required to achieve mastery in pretty much anything worthwhile. But like anything else, there are limits beyond which the effort may well prove counter-productive.

In this vein, let me put forward a few balancing counter-propositions:

Always be bad at something that you are passionate about.

[Read more.]

Reinventing to thrive

These days, there's no such thing as a copywriter or an art director. Meaning someone who writes words or does layouts. No, what companies want is someone who can write copy, design and maintain websites, do Search Engine Optimization and social website marketing, design and lay out print pieces, manage a department and its budget, create Excel spreadsheets, do client contact and balance an egg on the tip of the nose. Simultaneously.

The astounding thing is, the companies who advertise these positions probably can get some newborn Journalism or IT grad who can sort of do all of these things. Some young stud or studette with lotsa moxie who positively reeks of "can-do" attitude.

How can one person do all things well? Perhaps the question is, how well do these companies need all those things done? Perhaps not very.

But it's fruitless to sit on the porch rocking and spitting and cursing at shiny new grads who seek to be all things to all people. It's time to leap out of the rocker and into the world of the variously talented. Therefore, I have recently ordered InDesign CS4 and accompanying manual with the goal of becoming a writer who can design, or a designer who can write.

Actually, design is not totally new to me. I studied it at MU, and for years, I have designed and produced self-promotional postcards and brochures. (I also have bugged art directors by making "constructive" over-the-shoulder design or font suggestions which have been met with varying degrees of gratitude.) I have a decent sense of design, color and proportion, and hey, I can write, too. I currently use Quark 6.5, which has its limitations.With CS4 under my belt, I'll be more of a double threat. And if I ever learn Excel, though I hope it never comes to that, I'll be the triple threat so in demand.

So freelance remains in my future. And I hope it will be a more interesting, colorful and lucrative one with the addition of slick graphic and Web skills to my bag of marketable tricks.

I am inspired by Hunter S. Thompson, who famously said, "When the going gets tough, the weird turn pro." He also said, "Buy the ticket, take the ride." So okay, Dr. Duke, here I go. WHEEEEEEeeeeeee!

Who stole Heinz's pickle?

When I was growing up, Heinz Ketchup was a staple food in our house, along with Hellmann's Mayonnaise, Idaho potatoes and round steak ("Ugh" re the latter).

Heinz was the best ketchup on the grocery store shelf -- thicker, more robustly tomatoey than those few other available brands. A slice of fresh Wonder Bread with a dollop of the red ambrosia spread on it made a swell after-school snack. It's still my favorite, but now my old friend is sporting a new look and a new attitude.

Instead of the familiar green pickle on the front label, Heinz Ketchup now sports a tomato on the vine, and a new tagline, "Grown not made." You can still find the pickle; it's moved onto the lid.

Why does Heinz Ketchup need the makeover? The brand seems solid. But in these tight economic times, store brands and less expensive ketchups are eating into Heinz's sales. So what's America's favorite ketchup to do? Obviously, hire a British firm to redesign the packaging and reposition the brand.

The new label's improvements are subtle enough not to confuse customers. The graphic of a pretty tomato on the vine emphasizes the "grown" emphasis in the tagline. I'm puzzled, though, as to how ketchup can be "Grown not made." If anybody figures out how to grow ketchup, s/he'll make a fortune. I also don't know why the Brits put "57 Varieties" right under "Tomato Ketchup," since the phrase refers to Heinz's pickle line, not its ketchup. Seems silly.

Heinz hopes to lure back straying customers with its new "whole foods" or "healthy organic" image (A completely false one, I might add, since all ketchup contains alarmingly high levels of sodium and sugar). Perhaps they think a "whole foods" image will justify its higher price versus competition. But I don't accept the idea. I, like many others, have been buying my second favorite. Maybe the cheaper Brooks Ketchup is "Made not grown," but for my money, on a hot dog it's pretty hard to tell the difference.

Stephen Fowler: America's Worst Husband?

I admit I've tuned in to "Wife Swap" on ABC a few times. But I've never seen an episode where one of the husbands cruelly insulted and humiliated his temporary "wife," and in front of his own children, yet. His nastiness has spurred a national revulsion that is way out of proportion to the importance of the show. Stephen Fowler (at left) is now labeled "The Worst Husband Ever." What an honor!

The reason I'm recommending this blog to you is so that you can read this letter, which was imported from Facebook. It is a superb example of intelligent ridicule. As opposed to Stephen Fowler's crude dagger to the gut, the writer expertly employs the neat stiletto to the ego. In its way, perhaps it is as cruel to Stephen Fowler as he was to his "wife," Gayle. But it is so much less brutish, more gentlemanly. Take a look and admire the style.

Japanese Use Obama's Speeches to Learn English

When Senator Barack Obama delivered his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, America sat up and listened. Here was a confident young black man communicating perhaps the clearest, most inspiring vision for the future of the country many had ever heard. Here was someone who eschewed the double-talk and dumb-speak of the typical DC politico.

From the convention floor to the White House, Barack Obama has flown on wings of well-chosen words. He has written three best-selling books and delivered innumerable speeches, all notable for their thoughtfulness and masterful use of language.

The rest of the world has sat up and listened, too. In fact, the Japanese people have bought more than 420,000 copies of "The Speeches of Barack Obama" since its release on Nov. 20 -- an "unprecedented huge hit" for an English-language text, according to publisher Asahi Press. Why? To memorize his words as a way to learn English and master their pronunciations.

EXCERPT:

Although the simplicity of campaign speeches makes them an obvious choice as a language-learning tool, other American presidents have rarely been so feted.

"We don't publish every single president's speeches," Asahi Press official Yuzo Yamamoto said. "Would you buy the text of former President George W. Bush's speeches?"

One shudders at the thought.

Logos scare consumers, and other new ad wisdom

Who the heck is Martin Lindstrom? And why is he saying all these counter-intuitive things about advertising?

Lindstrom is the author of a new book called "Buyology." The book "details the results of an extensive global study of 2000 consumers who submitted to brain scans as they were exposed to various sorts of marketing communications. One finding he cites is that brand logos in ads generate more consumer suspicion than brand awareness."

In other words, everything you thought you knew about logos (make 'em bigger, plaster 'em everywhere, deluge the consumer in logos) is WRONG.

Go see his short video, "Do Consumers See Your Ads But Forget Your Brand?," one of a series he's doing in association with Advertising Age online. It explores new and innovative ways of building brands. And we all can use some help with "branding," that oft-used but seldom-understood term.

An apostrophe! An apostrophe! My kingdom for an apostrophe!

The King's English shall henceforth be known as "The Kings English," at least in Birmingham, England.

Some bureaucrats evidently decided that including apostrophes on directional signs was an unnecessary expenditure of time and paint. The official explanation was that the apostrophes were "confusing and old-fashioned." The powers that be have been quietly doing away with the cute punctuation marks ever since the 1950s. Apostrocide!

Here in the U.S., it's more common to see the apostrophe misused and overused. At the supermarket, for example, you may see a hand-painted sign advertising "Watermelon's $3.99." On this side of the Pond, we love apostrophes so much, we scatter them everywhere, like sprinkles on a frosted donut. But the Brits? The Birmingham variety will have none of it.

What unfortunate punctuation mark will be murdered next, the comma?

See the whole story here.