Serendipity Book

HiPPOs kill ideas

An acronym you may not have come across which was used recently in a presentation by Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP product management and marketing at Google ...

Avoid HiPPOs: A hippo kills more people than any other animal. In business, hippos kill more products & ideas than anyone, A hippo is the highest paid person’s opinion. Hippos say “I think…”

Via David Knox (a blogging P&G Brand Manager!)

Making stuff and thinking about it

A haiku by MIT's John Maeda set in type by the Mississippi-based Public Design Center:

The Secret of Happiness

The philosopher Dan Dennett started his 2002 talk at TED with this statement which contrasts painfully with much of the self-help pop-psych blah-blah orthodoxy on happiness today:
"Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it."

Image: a serene lion pictured in Fisherman's Wharf, SF

Advice on plagiarism from Albert Einstein

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." Albert Einstein

The TfL saga has once again taught us that whilst the internet has made it much easier to plagiarise others, it is also making it far easier to get caught.

Image: my photo of Matt & Graham copying a statue at Cliveden in '05

Frank Gehry: "Healthy Insecurity"

Frank Gehry describes the healthy insecurity he still feels when he embarks on new projects:

"For me every day is a new thing. I approach every project with a new insecurity almost like the first project I ever did. I get the sweats. I start working. I don't know where I'm going. If I knew where I was going I wouldn't do it. When I can predict or plan it I don't do it - I discard it. So I approach it with trepidation. Obviously over time I have a lot more confidence that it's going to be OK. I approach project work with what I think is a healthy insecurity."

From a conversation with Richard Saul Wurman at TED 2002

Image: my photo of the entrance to the building Gehry designed for Chiat/Day in LA taken in 2005

David Byrne: "Analysis is like a lobotomy"

Jon Howard recently posted a fantastic quote by David Byrne of Talking Heads:

"Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off? I’m afraid that everything will get homogenised and be the same. I’m afraid that reason will triumph and the world will become a place where anyone who doesn’t fit will become unnecessary."

Image: my photobooth shot of Barbapapa (not David Byrne)

Apple: "We don't do market research"

Unsurprisingly it appears that Steve Jobs is not an advocate of new product development research. This quote comes from an interview with Apple's 'benevolent dictator' from Fortune earlier this month:

"We do no market research. We don't hire consultants. The only consultants I've ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway's retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products."

However, whilst Jobs clearly likes to give the impression he is flying by the seat of his pants you can be sure that his judgements are founded on some pretty solid knowledge, albeit not the necessarily knowledge that can be bought from a research company. His approach should not be confused with decision-making based solely on intuition, impulse or gut-feel.

Let's not forget how Stephen Colbert addressed George W. Bush after all:

"We're not so different, he and I. We get it. We're not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We're not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut."

Image: my photo of the omnipresent Apple ads in San Francisco in 2006

Celebrating curiosity

A snippet of the wisdom of Petworth's finest former exec creative director, Paul Arden, courtesy of the wonderfully obsessive image hunters of fffound.com and the type-obsessed graphic design blog AceJet170:

The consumer does not

This quote from David Ogilvy currently has pride of place on my office wall:

We can all now vulgarise society

Bill Bernbach once said: "All of us who professionally use mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarise that society. We can brutalise it. Or we can help lift it on to a higher level."

I think we can now safely remove the words 'professionally' and 'mass' from that quote.

Now anyone who publishes on the internet or creates any kind of public content -- even through small actions like commenting on a blog or rating a review on Amazon -- now has the power to vulgarise society.

Use it wisely.