12 January, 2012 | Written by edward boches 6 Comments

I need an Internet car

Fact: Twenty percent of the price of a new car is for the software.

 

My car didn't stop itself from hitting this tree, either.

Monday I take my seven-year-old car in to have the front end repaired. I hit a cement block in a local garage because my car didn’t let me know that it was there.  It tore off the bumper and part of the grill. As you can see from the image on the left, hitting things head on is a recurring problem.

 

If I had an Internet ready car, it would have warned me.  It would also have checked me in on Foursquare so that people would know where I was. It might have taken an Instagram image of the dangerous cement block so that others would be aware of it.

 

Looks like we can’t escape. The reason I’m still driving a seven-year old car is that it’s an Audi S4 Avant six speed. You can’t buy them in America anymore.  You can’t even get an A4 wagon without settling for an automatic. If you like driving, you don’t have many options these days.

 

But if you don’t like driving, life on the road will soon be grand. Your car will know traffic conditions before you go anywhere. Since it will have access to your calendar, it will let you know if you need to leave earlier than planned to make that meeting or if you can continue tweeting from the office instead of from the road. You’ll be able to tweet from the road because your dashboard will be an over-sized digital touch screen from which you can update your status, check your Gmail, and access your friends’ playlists on Spotify.

 

For me the best part will be the satellite connection that informs every McDonald’s I drive by that I’m in the vicinity, so it can send me real-time offers based on how many people are in my car. The heat sensors in the seats will let the cloud know if there are passengers occupying the back seat or just luggage.  And if they include digital scales as part of the system McDonald’s will even know if the car’s occupants are candidates for a Super Size meal or just a burger and fries.

 

Better yet, if the car can drive itself – inevitable within 10 years, I’m told – I can simply push the steering wheel out of the way and fire up the grill and deep fryer and make my own lunch.  Then I can even share what I’m eating for lunch on Twitter. From my car. While I’m not driving.

 

Have you ordered your Internet ready car?

 

Recommended song for this post: Baby you can drive my car.

 

 

 

13 December, 2011 | Written by edward boches 8 Comments

Lasting companies know how to re-invent themselves

Mike Markkula, right, Apple's first investor and father figure to Jobs. Fired by Jobs in 1997 his parting advice called for re-invention.

Like everyone else in America who still reads I am deeply engrossed in Walter Isaacson’s biography on Steve Jobs.

It’s a remarkably honest and thorough account. It introduces us to Steve’s early influences. It explains the genesis of his design obsession. It reveals his many flaws.

While the entire book chronicles the story of Steve’s life from childhood to the end, every chapter is a story in its own right. You probably have your favorite. The lost battle with John Sculley. The launch of Macintosh. The board trying to kill the best ever Super Bowl spot. (They failed because Chiat Day secretly refused to sell off the media.) Jobs’ questionably hesitant but triumphant return. The complex rivalry between Jobs and his sometimes nemesis, sometimes friend, one time savior Bill Gates. Or on another front, the confrontations with Michael Eisner that prompted Disney to back off its ill-advised attempt to re-write Toy Story.

Readers can cull endless lessons from these stories: how to simplify, how to believe in an idea, how to adhere to standards, how to trust your intuition, how not to back down. In some cases – personal hygiene, treatment of friends and family – we can also learn what not to do.

But one of my favorite lessons doesn’t come from Steve. It’s attributed to Mike Markkula. Upon his official return to Apple in 1997, Jobs fired Markkula from the board and then asked Mike to join him on one of his long walks. Jobs told the former chairman that his goal was to build a company that would endure. He asked Markkula’s advice. Markkula shared this.

“Lasting companies know how to re-invent themselves. Hewlett-Packard had done that repeatedly; it started as an instrument company, then a computer company. Apple has been sideline by Microsoft in the PC business. (by then Apple’s market share had plummeted from 16 percent to four percent). You’ve got to reinvent the company to do some other thing, like consumer products or devices. You’ve got to be like a butterfly and have a metamorphosis.”*

The language and the metaphor may not sound brilliant. But you sure can’t argue with the advice. According to Isaacson, Jobs didn’t say much that day in 1997, but clearly he agreed.

Lasting companies know how to re-invent themselves. I think the same might even be said for individuals.

Got a favorite story from the book of Jobs? Please share. And as always, thanks for stopping by.

Photo “borrowed” from Christopher Dernbach’s blog Mac History.

 

*Excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, page 320.

11 November, 2011 | Written by edward boches 8 Comments

Triumph of the City, maybe even Detroit

My friend Erik Proulx is in the midst of his second Lemonade film, this one telling the story of what we all hope might be Detroit’s resurrection. As with his first film, the original Lemonade, it’s not government policy or unemployment checks, or even the bailout of the automobile industry – don’t get me wrong I was in favor of a better stimulus package than the one we actually got – that restores an economy, it’s personal and collective optimism, achievement and creativity.

And so it will be with Detroit. The often ill-fated attempts at urban renewal and the erection of shiny glass buildings are never what make a city great – it’s the people who live there. Erik’s film focuses on such people and as an exploration into the spirit and passion of Detroit residents intent on bringing the city back it paints a picture of hope and possibility.

Erik released the extended trailer of Lemonade Detroit right as I happen to be reading Edward Glaeser’sTriumph of the City. Erik’s premise is that with enough will power and motivation (the latter often comes from having got kicked pretty good) people have the ability to turn lemons into Lemonade. Glaeser’s hypothesis is that cities magnify those qualities. They attract innovators and entrepreneurs, place them in proximity to one another and encourage interaction, collisions and social mobility.

In the late 1800’s right before Detroit became the center of the automotive universe, the city looked a lot like Silicon Valley in the very early days of the computer industry.  Dozens of small, innovative firms and an army of entrepreneurs – Henry Ford, Ransom Olds, David Buick – fueled each other’s ideas, created a community of competition and attracted investors.

A culture of learning and experimentation, and communication among and between industry pioneers, led to the growth of both a city and an industry. Detroit was a center of knowledge. If you were in the car business you needed to be there.

But unlike Silicon Valley, where constant learning, education, and ideas continue to attract thinkers, Detroit’s industrial model led to the opposite: a culture and a massive scale production process which, according to Glaeser, turned out to be “antithetical to the urban virtues of competition and connection.”

Instead, because the assembly line made it possible to be highly productive without knowing that much, it killed the need for learning and attracted the kind of worker for whom learning didn’t matter. According to Glaeser’s thesis, as soon as that happened Detroit was destined to die. “When a city creates a powerful enough knowledge-destroying idea, it sets itself up for self-destruction,” the author writes.

In the end the same industry that made Detroit great ended up destroying it. The vertical integration of the automobile companies crowded out new ideas, spinoffs and alternative industries.

Erik’s film suggests that if urban re-invention is possible it will emanate from a diverse mix with of human capital. Entrepreneurs, artists, educators and other creative people are the ones who’ll make it happen. They’ll make new connections, riff off of each other, and maybe turn Detroit into the kind of city that Glaeser writes about: one that attracts smart people and enables them to work collaboratively to build something lasting.

Kudos to Erik for celebrating the human spirit and making us all more hopeful.

16 October, 2011 | Written by edward boches 7 Comments

Good Belly Project uses food porn to fight famine

A couple of months ago some friends at Made by Many and Good for Nothing in the UK decided they had to do something, or at least try to do something, about the severe famine in East Africa. In Kenya and Somalia a child dies every six minutes. The worst drought in 60 years plagues the region. And the world isn’t paying much attention. 

So Made by Many and Good for Nothing started the 50/50 project – the idea being to get friends and partners — advertising and digital agencies mostly — to launch 50 projects in 50 days to raise at least $1 million, perhaps much more, for relief. Today is the official launch day for many of those projects. October 16.World Food Day.

Our project at Mullen is called The Good Belly Project. We realize that we can’t actually transport food to East Africa. We can’t secure a fleet of helicopters. We can’t establish an on ground presence.

So here’s what we did. We launched a social-media powered fundraising partnership with 17 of Boston’s top restaurants and their customers using Instagram. Every time a customer takes a photograph of their restaurant meal and shares it, the participating restaurant will donate $1.00 to the Good Belly Project, which transfers 100 percent of the proceeds to UNICEF’s East Africa’s relief efforts.

Yes there’s a kind of absurd irony in posting photographs of gourmet meals in order to help people who are starving. But at the same time there’s a logic to it. It’s the ideal time and place to remind people who have plenty to eat how fortunate they are.  It taps into an existing behavior – food porn is pretty prevalent on photo sharing networks like Instagram. And it gives the participating restaurants something in return for their contribution. A bit of visibility and cred for supporting the cause.

I hope you’ll join us over the next few weeks. You can frequent the restaurants that have offered to help.  You can post food porn images. And you can, perhaps, realize how fortunate you are to have food in your belly and maybe write a big fat check to help those less fortunate. Feel free to make that donation here, at the Good Belly Project.

Good Belly Restaurants (links and addresses):

 

 

 

13 October, 2011 | Written by edward boches 3 Comments

Creativity and collaboration, lessons from the Beatles

 

I can’t help it. I look at everything through the filter of either creativity, innovation or advertising. So while watching Martin Scorcese’s new documentary about George Harrison, I found this to be one of my favorite anecdotes. Paul McCartney recalls what it was like to prepare for a recording session.

Now, keep in mind that in the 70’s most advertising agency creative teams would insist on two weeks to copy and layout. Didn’t matter whether it was a full campaign, or a single ad. The Beatles, meanwhile, could generate a song a day. On demand no less.

The second part of the story, of course, is about collaboration. John and Paul would show up a week later with their seven or eight songs, all of which were news to their band mates, and within a matter of minutes George and Ringo would be adding riffs and the backbeat, making the idea, the song, the music better.

I imagine that anyone who has ever played in a band knows that this is how it works, or should.  But I couldn’t help but be inspired by these recollections from Paul as he talked about his non-writing (at the time) partners. “They’d go ‘uh huh.’ And George would be like, ‘I can see what you’re doing. I’m one of you.’”

That is how collaboration is supposed to work. It’s the epitome of celebrating the idea instead of the person who came up with it. It’s a great great lesson for all of us working as part of a creative team in the new on demand world.  If you’re not the one who makes the idea, be the one who makes the idea better.

Decades later, The Beatles still inspire. Think I’ll go and dig out some old LPs. Oh, and if you have not seen Martin Scorcese’s new two-part documentary George Harrison: Living in a Material World, you must. It’s on HBO right now.

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