Eight Ways to Kill an Idea
Happens all too often.
Ideas need time to be massaged and allowed to percolate to become great. Blue sky thinking is where great ideas come from.. not living w/in restraints :P
Through Open Eyes
observations and inspiration
Filed underarticle
how to be a social media junkie and keep your job (via blankanvas)
Here’s my social media consumption in summary – I blog an average of five times a week, I check my tweets periodically every hour with at least 5 tweets written daily. I log on to Facebook twice in a day. I read about 300 or so RSS feeds on my Google Reader each night. I also make it a point to reply anyone who has written to me, be it via my blog, email*, Twitter or Facebook, within 24 hours. And I attend about 4 blogger events each month.
And here’s another summary of what I do as a Digital Strategist for a leading communications agency that has close to 400 employees in Singapore alone – at any one time, I have at least 2 campaigns to supervise. If I were lucky, I’d have only a couple of meetings to attend to in a day. I produce about 3 proposals (with the Big Idea included) a week. I’ve been involved in over 20 pitches in the last 11 months. I conduct a regional Webex training once every couple of months across more than 15 offices in Asia. I make it a point to conduct social media workshops and presentations every other month as well for the local community. I make sure to always write personal emails when I’m reaching out to bloggers for any of my events. I don’t do auto-generated eDM blasts. Ever. I always follow-up with personal phone calls thereafter. I have an average of 1 event to organise per month. Modesty speaking.
Albeit my life as a social media junkie, I have never missed a single deadline in my role as a Digital Strategist to date. I balance both roles better than Jean-François Gravelet on a tightrope. How do I do it? Well, here are a few tips you may find useful.
Work comes first
I wish I could say I tweet for a living but I don’t. I’m not Mashable. I’m a salaried employee who receives a fixed amount of income in exchange for my service for a fixed amount of time per day, from 0900h – 1830h, 20 working days a month. My job pays for foie gras, Pradas and first-class tickets to the Bahamas. My blog doesn’t. Simply put, before I start tweeting away or playing Mafia Wars on Facebook, I’d be sure I’m done cracking the Big Idea for a client first.And if I may be blatant to my fellow cubicle citizens – if you have time to tweet, you have time to fucking reply your client’s email.
Set a daily schedule
Allocate time for every activity that happens in a typical day of your life. Even for emails. As a rule of thumb, I don’t blog at work, and I don’t work at home (save for instances where I’m done with the flu and have to work from home). Broadly speaking, my daily schedule goes like this:0800h: Log on to Twitter. Read tweets. Respond to mentions and direct messages. Have a cigarette. Review Facebook newsfeed too.
0900h: Clear emails upon reaching the office. Jot down today’s list of to-dos.
1030h: Take a 5-minute break. Tweet something funny. RT someone interesting. Decline Friend Request from some sleazeball on Facebook. Get back to work.
1200h: Clear second round of emails before heading out for lunch with Mrs Law. Read tweets and respond to mentions and direct messages whilst queuing up for chicken rice.
1400h: Clear third round of emails and resume work. Must strike off all items on today’s list of to-dos by 1800h.
1530h: Take a 5-minute break. Tweet something funny. RT someone interesting. Decline yet another Friend Request from some sleazeball on Facebook. Get back to work.
1800h: Clear final round of emails and review items left on today’s list of to-dos. If it can be helped, do not leave the office until they’re all done.
1830h: Drop a couple of tweets before leaving the office. Grab dinner with wife.
2200h: Log on to Google Reader. Read and absorb. Decide what’s interesting to blog about. Select up to 3 items worthy of blogging. Blog. Approve blog comments collected from the day. Respond to blog comments.
2330h: Log on to Friendfeed. Approve Friend Request. Reply emails. Log on to Twitter. Read tweets. Respond to mentions and direct messages.
0200h: Hit the sack.
Draw a line
Particularly for my case, granted the nature of my job, it is crucial for me to draw a line between my online world and offline world. At risk of sounding cold, I make it a deliberate effort not to get too close to anyone I meet online, be it bloggers or readers of my blog. It is not to say that I don’t appreciate them – as those who’ve called me at 2 in the morning can ascertain, but I don’t want to run into a case where someone might feel I’m practicing favourism on an individual when I’m running my campaigns or blog contests. Emotional attachment to anyone I meet online, quite naturally, may reduce my level of objectivity.I hope you’d find the tips useful. Anyone has anymore to add?
*If I don’t reply you, that usually mean your email was so badly written, it would have been beneath me to respond to your stupidity.
Front page image courtesy of Normal Watches
I need to prioritize.
Nice insight into Ziba Design (Portland's Ziba Design turns 25)
via oregonlive.com
Visitors sometimes ask why Ziba executives have no offices, why they sprinkle themselves among new recruits and midlevel staffers.
"You've got to feel comfortable with who you are and what you've accomplished," Vossoughi says. "If you're not comfortable with that, you do things like getting yourself a better chair than everybody else."
"We're not very good at settling," he says. "You stick the flag in the ground and move on to the next place."
Jonathan Ive on The Key to Apple's Success: goal is not to make money
Ahh, it's good to know that my intentions at work to extend our brand values and reasons for existence beyond profit is exemplified by the company everyone in the office is always referencing for design :)
via BusinessWeek.com
"Apple's goal isn't to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products," Ive explained.
Ive also had bad news for anyone looking to foster a design or innovation-driven culture within an enterprise that doesn't at heart "get" it. Unless the disciplines are acknowledged and embraced as core values by every employee, they won't gain traction. "We don't have identity manuals reminding us of points of philosophy for why our company exists," he said of Apple's internal culture. "I'm sure those things are very well meaning, but if you have to institutionalize stuff, you end up chasing your tail." In other words, unless the commitment to innovation or design is authentic and heartfelt, rather than this month's short-term strategy to cater to a hot trend, it will be nigh on impossible to build a true, innovation-led culture (and emulate Apple's success.)
Designers need to be fully engaged in a company's overarching mission, and should be resolved to oversee every stage of a product's life cycle, from concept to shop shelf and beyond.
Ive also had bad news for anyone looking to foster a design or innovation-driven culture within an enterprise that doesn't at heart "get" it. Unless the disciplines are acknowledged and embraced as core values by every employee, they won't gain traction. "We don't have identity manuals reminding us of points of philosophy for why our company exists," he said of Apple's internal culture. "I'm sure those things are very well meaning, but if you have to institutionalize stuff, you end up chasing your tail." In other words, unless the commitment to innovation or design is authentic and heartfelt, rather than this month's short-term strategy to cater to a hot trend, it will be nigh on impossible to build a true, innovation-led culture (and emulate Apple's success.)
Designers need to be fully engaged in a company's overarching mission, and should be resolved to oversee every stage of a product's life cycle, from concept to shop shelf and beyond.
via BusinessWeek.com
design is about cultural invention
Slide 44/44:
Here’s my challenge. Right now, put aside 100 hours over this summer. Do it right now, in your head. Put that time aside. 100 hours. 8 hours a week for the next 12 weeks. One hour a day, or one working day a week. It’s one summer out of your entire life, it’s nothing. Okay, you’ve got that 100 hours?
When you contribute, when you participate in culture, when you’re no longer solving problems, but inventing culture itself, that is when life starts getting interesting.
Using Design to Drive Innovation I BusinessWeek
Read the whole article here.
Design in Business
The complications come with these two questions: Where does the core idea around a differentiated, relevant, valued offering come from? And what is its relationship to this thing we used to call design? You know—the bright shiny objects.
In our practice, we refer to the former as innovation strategy, and to the latter as design strategy. Somewhere in between resides the opportunity for brand strategy, and we hope to create a system in which there is a seamless flow from ideas to brand meaning and, finally, to how that brand or product or service is expressed and communicated.
Putting all three aspects of this brand-building practice together provides validity in thinking about design as one of the primary idea generators for the creation of viable business platforms. Assuming that the manifestation of a business offering is realized in the context of a brand, that brand requires meaning, a defined expression, and then, given some success, a plan for continued opportunity development that sustains and grows the business.
How to Innovate
True innovation requires the adoption of a belief system that sometimes must prevail in the face of other data metrics. Read up on the great inventions and business wins and you will note that at the core of most of them lie belief, dedication, and the passion to succeed. Today's business leaders are often too afraid to move ideas forward without ironclad data proofs that they will be successful. All too often, they are the losers. Use your head, listen to your heart, and feel what's in your gut.
Is China becoming a global design superpower?
from Fast Company
I realized that it is unlikely that China will become a global design superpower given that most Chinese designers do not have an intimate understanding of the western consumer, their way of life and the cultural context that a western designer understands, because he/she have had a lifetime of exposure to the context in which their designs are going to be used. Great Designs are the result of an intimate understanding of the context. Without a clear understanding of the market, the user and the social drivers, a designer relies on guesswork and luck in order to produce a meaningful and lasting design.
For this same reason Chinese designers are the best suited to design for the Chinese market. Although some western-designed products (mostly with a strong brand behind them) break into china they seldom take on mainstream and the Chinese version of the product is quick to follow with a much greater reach.
Creating Cults and Cultures With Design | Fast Company
via fastcompany.com
"Companies that deliver these kinds of products and services have a creative and empowered culture that wants to understand the customer and that goes the extra mile when perfecting the design. This kind of culture has to come from the top.
There are companies that have achieved quite a lot of success without Steve Jobs at the helm. They've done it with a clear vision and empowered culture."
Why Design Still Has Such Limited Corporate Impact | Fast Company
via fastcompany.com
"With stiff competition forcing the need for short term gains, sustainable thinking and enduring process models might be a hard sell, but sell hard we must. The methods companies employ in developing products are in many ways even more important than the executions. Future design-thinking that excludes longevity as a priority is flawed. Non-sustainable, ephemeral business successes will fade. Designers can increase their impact and influence by creating not just timeless designs, but also the systems and models that allow the repeat of multiple new products, developed in responsible and efficient ways. Management should listen closely to designers who lead in this area. "
