Design story: The Decanter from Landor Associates on Vimeo. My friends over at DOXA turned me onto this video. I am struck my a number of things in it: 1. There is nothing new under the sun. “At the moment of truth at the store” was spoken by Walter Landor in the film some 50 years [...]

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Tiffany & Co should not be on Facebook

May 10, 2010Uncategorized

Steve Rubel’s recent post on the ubiquity of social networking, and how all luxury brands need to figure it out NOW misses two fundamental issues. One about social and the other about luxury. He starts out by talking some very common ideas about how social is taking over the web. If you read Steve for [...]

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Just read: Scott Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen

April 12, 2010Books to Read

I met Scott Belsky last fall at a conference and then spent a little time with him in NYC recently. He was kind enough to send me an advance copy of his new book, Making Ideas Happen. I have not had a book lay my soul bare like this one did in a long, long [...]

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Anti-microbial tray liner?

March 8, 2010Uncategorized

So, my tray table on US Air has this hideous ad. Some questions: 1. Was my flight cheaper because of this? 2. Who sells this for them – the in flight magazine? 3. What is an anti-microbial tray liner? It was the most interesting part of the ad, but no mention of any details. 4. [...]

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Now What?

March 5, 2010Lists

Been thinking about what to write next and have too many ideas, so I’ll just put them all out here, and see if anyone is reading and cares: 1. The Seven Brand Archetypes 2. How Ideas Take Shape 3. Communication Architecture (con’t) 4. The Top 10 Book & Thinkers on Ideas (IMHO) 5. Deconstruction (con’t) [...]

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Sifting my Dunbar number out of siloed data

February 22, 2010On Ideas

You’ve probably heard more than you care to about the Dunbar number – the idea in sociology that you cannot maintain more than 150 real friendships. I began to wonder about myself. How many people do I really contact in a given period of time – say a month? This started me on revealing a [...]

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What is an hour of your attention worth?

February 18, 2010Attention

Read the very disappointing cover story on my new Fortune magazine that came in the mail today. I’ll post more about it with observations when I have more time. But Jeff Jarvis was interviewed for the story and he had an interesting comment about attention. It got me thinking about all of the media and [...]

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The 4-to-1 Ratio

February 17, 2010Culture

Image via Wikipedia We have a 4:1 input to output ratio on our head — why is it so hard to use them in this proportion? Seeing and Hearing are art forms. Really Seeing and really Hearing are anyway. The act of observation. The art of listening. Even when we listen we are watching – [...]

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Jeff Jarvis & Jaiku’s Founder discuss Google Buzz http://bit.ly/cLa9VW

February 17, 2010Stream

Jyri Engeström, the founder of Jaiku, is a brilliant thinker who has the best thoughts on Buzz that I've heard to date. Jarvis adds a bit to the conversation, but it's worth just running this in the background while you work for Jyri's insights. Listen to it here: http://bit.ly/cLa9VW Thanks for my friend Bill Sobel [...]

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