Science-inspired design

Mathieu Lehanneur reminds me of why I love Frenchmen and humanity in general – pure, unadulterated selfishness channeled into doing good.

Amazon gets set

What gorgeous colors and elegant poses, I would kill to be allowed inside with my camera.

 

School of Drucker

I couldn’t resist buying the Harvard Business Review this month, despite the €22 price tag. Peter Drucker sealed the deal. The “social ecologist” or business guru, depending on the perspective, was born exactly 100 years ago and to mark his centennial, HBR asked a pertinent question “What would Peter do?”.

Key themes (according to Moss Kanter at the Harvard Business School):

The primary job of a manager is to look out for the long-term health of their organizations, this means looking outside their walls, at society

Knowledge workers cannot be controlled, they must be motivated

Not-for-profit organizations are necessary ingredients in producing a good society

Now there are countless books on Drucker’s thought system, so instead of presenting his ideas in light of today’s events, they invited some leading figures to share how Drucker shaped their own work. Interesting, but did not address the question.

What A.G. Lafley learnt

“The purpose of a company is to create a customer”

“A business is defined by the want the customer satisfies when he or she buys a product or a service. To satisfy a customer is the mission and purpose of every business”

What Frances Hesselbein learnt

“the greatest success is in meeting social needs”

What Oscar Motomura learnt

“The number of people who are really motivated by money is very small. Most people need to feel that they are here for a purpose, and unless an organisation can connect to this need to leave something behind that makes this a better world, or at least a different one, it won’t be successful over time.”

What Zhang Ruimin learnt:

I wrote his words on a picture of the Titanic sinking “The assumptions on which the organization has been built and is being run no longer fit reality.”

 

Classic McQueen

Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels, Jean Fouquet

“This is one of my favorite paintings in the world. What inspires me about this is the bold colour of red in the angels perceiving the darker side of heaven and the gray blue angels depicting the lighter side. I’ve always been inspired by 14th/15th-century art and this painting in particular.”

Alexander McQueen shares a moment.

Change of habit

Elvis in the film ‘Change of Habit’

Martin Seligman has a few interesting words about the science of happiness. In the well known study on nuns, it was shown that the most optimistic and cheerful ones lived almost 10 years longer. These were the ones that used positive words like “happy” or “eager” in their personal statements, when accepted into the convent. Half of those that mentioned at least one happy word, were alive at age 94.

Some people are naturally optimistic, but to a large extent it can be taught, which is useful if you work in sales or wish to live into your 90s. The psychologist explains that with practice, optimism becomes a sticky skill. Plenty of information, including case studies and questionnaires can be found at his website “Authentic Happiness” and if you register, you actually receive an email saying “Welcome to Authentic Happiness“.

Disgusting collaborations

Leica M7 Hermes Edition

Marni for Ladurée

Sophia Coppola for Louis Vuitton

Well, not at all disgusting, more like my Christmas wish list.

Battleship Rodchenko

Perhaps we should abandon advertising altogether and focus on constructivist marketing, marketing with a social purpose. This time, constructivism would be grounded on free enterprise. The purpose, of course, would be to serve the customer. Ok, enough. Rodchenko does have many interesting, if formalist, pictures of people in everyday work conditions.

Mourning Xe

Apple has esprit de corps, France Télécom does not. After all, people would kill to work at Apple, but kill themselves if forced to work at the maligned France Télécom. More than any other type of organization, save perhaps the nation itself, the army has esprit de corps, surely that’s where the very term was born. So what to make of private military contractors?

There are currently 250 thousand contractors fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The figure is rarely bandied around, but it does represent half of America’s fighting forces. Most of these guns for hire are army veterans, though many are not even American. In fact of map of PMC deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan would color the globe. To date at least 1,360 private contractors, working for the U.S., have lost their lives, and countless were seriously injured. No trumpets or flags. Their sacrifice was largely ignored. Soldiers are heroes, contractors are just doing a job.

Workers at France Télécom too, are just doing a job, not that the number of deaths are comparable. Their esprit de corps, founded on firm nationalist values, upheld by society, disappeared with the company’s privatization. Radical transformation, however, was not accompanied by cultural reinvention. Employees and clients had been mobilized around certain goals and beliefs, not least idea of a collective France. Today it seems like the company’s primary goal is not to serve customers, formerly known as compatriots, but to make a profit.

Blackwater, the largest, most charismatic, private military company, was so successful on the ground and caused such an impression that it actually had to do reverse branding, changing its name to an unmemorable ‘Xe’. Though they did keep the red and black claw logo. Together with others like Triple Canopy and Dyncorp, Xe is leading the privatization of war. Undoubtedly they need to profit in order to exist, but soldiers too need to profit.

Romantic notions of patria overshadow the fact that companies like Xe, by assuming the responsibility of serving their customers, exercise a civic duty. That’s when true esprit de corps, and respect, arises. Private military contractors or anybody who takes on that responsibility should be celebrated.

Poppies are red, cornflowers are blue

Whatever happened to the French symbol of remembrance?

Bling

Conspicuous Consumption and Conspicuous Altruism (no less a form of display).

Brooch Diplomacy

Highly dexterous in symbolism, Madeleine Albright made speeches out of brooches. The bee pin was used whenever she felt talks amounted to “something like a sting”; Mandela called for a zebra trot and after Saddam Hussein’s government called her a serpent, she wore a golden snake pin.

Read My Pins: The Madeleine Albright Collection is at New York’s Museum of Arts & Design

Evolution of a film poster

Jane Russell, 1943, The Outlaw, Howard Hughes

Aping Evolution

Steve Jones, the UCL biologist, Darwinian proponent and media darling, challenges the assumptions of Evolutionary Psychology, on BBC Radio4. Nice walk through the latest research, with commentary from leading academics.

Evolutionary Psychology or EP does not hold the monopoly of Darwinian studies among social sciences. It’s in open, often violent, competition with other fields, namely Sociobiology and Behavioral Ecology.

After Psychology, I actually studied ‘Human Evolution and Behavior’ at UCL’s anthropology department (memorably, while chatting with Steve Jones, perfectly oblivious of his stardom, a handsome young professor remarked his absence the day before…. “couldn’t make it, lunch with the Queen”). The main difference in their approach to evolution is that psychology holds that the human mind evolved in a static environment, what they call the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, thus all their stories begin with a naive “Once upon a time, in the EEA, a Homo ancestor….”, in contrast, anthropology correctly assumes the environment is changeable across time and space, which makes the story infinitely richer.

Being neither a psychologist, nor an anthropologist, Steve Jones brings an educated impartiality to the game.

Kelly is a dolphin

“All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their pools clean.

Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification.”

What’s next, mutual funds? fat bonuses? The Guardian has a full article on dolphin intelligence, considerably more interesting than a live dolphin show.

That was October

Britain’s better off with the conservatives

How will Cameron out-Saatchi Saatchi? The advertising agency that followed Thatcher to power in 1979 and in two more victories, is, since 2007, campaigning for the Labour Party. So much for moral conviction. Meanwhile, after divorcing Saatchi & Saatchi, the Tories have enlisted help from a number of agencies. It will be interesting to see the upcoming battle.

McSapiens

Another excellent Banksy.

Herzog’s reading list

Operatic improvisation, hellish amazonian settings and fiendish actors, Werner Herzog is a film director’s director. However interesting, these are just footnotes. That both his parents were biologists is perhaps more relevant trivia. What’s amazing about Herzog is the consistency and philosophical focus. He is concerned, indeed fascinated, by the survival of men in extreme environments. This universal theme is patent throughout his films, in different guises.

To talk with the man himself, you can join the Rogue Film School, an informal seminar group, open to aspiring film-makers that share his philosophy. In preparation for the Rogue gatherings, Herzog suggests the following works:

Virgil – Georgics

Hemingway – The short happy life of Francis Macomber

The Poetic Edda, translated by Lee M. Hollander (in particular the Prophecy of the Seeress)

Bernal Diaz del Castillo – True History of the Conquest of New Spain

Mrs. Logic

“Whenever Ayn Rand met someone new, she would open the conversation with a line that seems destined to go down as one of history’s all-time classic icebreakers:

“Tell me your premises.”

Once you’d managed to mumble something halfhearted about loving your family, say, or the Golden Rule, Rand would set about systematically exposing all of your logical contradictions, then steer you toward her own inviolable set of premises: that man is a heroic being, achievement is the aim of life, existence exists, A is A, and so forth—the whole Objectivist catechism”.

Ayn Rand makes a surprise appearance in the New York Magazine. The article totally misses the point, by suggesting that the woman herself was torn by the impracticalities of objectivism. She wasn’t really like the heroes of Atlas Shrugged or Fountainhead, impossibly beautiful and infallible, quite the contrary, she was human. I believe it is called fiction. How much simpler it is to judge the artist by his personal conduct, rather than ideas.

City Branding

Woody Allen has been offered $2 million to lift Rio de Janeiro from its cultural rut. Like Barcelona and London, Olympic cities themselves, Rio is looking for some New York veneer, that combination of safe and edgy, consumption and culture. If the project goes through, the director, famously allergic to sun, will shoot a film set in the city, in an effort to highlight its cultural attractions.

By comparison the ‘Incredible India’ campaign cost about $4 million a year. So did Portugal’s ‘West Coast of Europe‘. City branding is not cheap. But while an advertising campaign is eventually forgotten, a film remains. Most importantly it does not look like advertisement. Did a film like Match Point, Woody’s first attempt at branding London, succeed in improving recall, likeability and purchase interest?

Think big

Design thinkers are very kind, empathetic, people, they share their thoughts on TED so we don’t have to purchase the book. Though judging by the long-winded talk, I might not.

Another introduction to the subject is Roger Martin’s new book The Design of Business. Martin, the dean of Rotman School of Management, defends this idea that design is the key to success. Together with Brown’s Change by Design, they were meant to create some kind of momentum around the philosophy. But neither the FT reviewer, nor, I suspect, the audience at TED, were convinced this is an original approach.

(art) work

It is the dream brief for a designer, “I leave it in your capable hands to do what ever you want… and please write back saying how much money you would like.” is how Mick Jagger discussed an album cover with Andy Warhol. No proposals or prototypes, just the graphic solution. This is exactly what Paul Rand proposed to a stunned Steve Jobs, when he was commissioned to design the logo for NeXT.

Design wisdom seems to suggest that the best kind of work is collaborative. Yet, here you have the exact opposite, the designer cooperates, rather than collaborates, with the client. “In my short sweet experience” designers are usually more committed to a fair day’s work, than effective problem solving and, despite artistic pretensions, you forced to participate in the process, deliberating on proposals and what not. By taking on the responsibility, Warhol and Rand traced the natural limits of collaboration in design.

Perfect match

Marilyn Monroe and Groucho Marx – the beauty and the clown.

Pure Vogue

Clockwise, French Vogue: Helmut Newton 1975; Terry Richardson, concept Carine Roitfeld, July 08; Steven Klein, concept Emmanuelle Alt, October 09 and Mario Testino, also Roitfeld, July 08

In this month’s French Vogue, the voluptuous Dutch favorite Lara Stone, is entirely black. A beautiful ebony. Just like a black model, except she is not black. Courting controversy? Most certainly, but then so was the Italian Vogue when they ran an issue featuring only black models. Both have generated enormous publicity, which increased sales among their (predominantly white) audience. The western editions of Vogue, just like their South American and Asian counterparts, can rightly be accused of discrimination. Vogue discriminates between brands, photographers and models, to excite the imagination and pockets of their readers.

By American standards, French Vogue is politically incorrect. It was so when Helmut Newton took that famous picture on the Rue Aubriot in 1975 and it is today, under the helm of Carine Roitfeld. I loved the “Just Married” spread, where a glamorous gold-digger poses with a feeble nonagenerian and the “up-yours” fur piece. These spreads connect with their European base. Gratuitous and often of bad taste, but also fun and dead honest! Libertinage, opportunism and fur are just that, politically incorrect.

Have we lost the art of dressing up?

“There has been a huge shift from wearing clothes to please your man to wearing clothes to impress other women. The old notion of glamour falls into the former camp. Young women love dressing up, but it is a very different glamour from the outdated, man-pleasing version.”

The Telegraph reviews Joan Collin’s docu-show for ITV Joan Does Glamour.

Maybe… Yes… On Second Thought, Maybe… No…

“I think, I’ll…” by Ed Ruscha, one of the paintings chosen by the Obamas to decorate the White House. It deals with indecision and confusion, an embarrassing joke or the key to winning a Nobel peace prize?

The Most Fun You Can Have With Your Clothes On!

BBC Radio 4 caught the Mad Men fever. In a two part show, a British Don Draper traces the history of advertising since the start of his career in the 1960s. Guests include Maurice Saatchi and Richard Dawkins.

I too watch Mad Men. Even though each episode is no more than a combination of disconnected cliches about 1960s America – suburban housewives were bored, philandering men were in reality dissatisfied, parents were cold and unresponsive, everybody was a racist – as if we were an entirely different species today. Mad Men, those who worked on Madison Avenue for the first advertising agencies, were all this, but worst, because, as the BBC explains, they “worked inside your head, playing around with words, to embed brands in your brain”, their job was to “manage minds”. It is a nice, almost endearing, conceit. If only it were that easy to sell products and people that stupid.

Mad Men is in a sense a eulogy to the belief that a commercial message alone can guarantee success. When one man, a telepathic genius like Don Draper, Maurice Saatchi or Richard Dawkins, could change minds. I suspect that was never the case.

NB. You have 4 days to hear this program (starting now!). The BBC likes to archive stuff and does not allow you to pay for content on demand (woe betide).

Antidote for the recession: fun

Finale of the Spring 2010 Chanel show. A gorgeous man and two women frolicking around in a barn.

Inscription on Andrew Carnegie’s tombstone

Here lies a man

Who knew how to enlist

In his service

Better men than himself

Kind? Sometimes

Frans de Waal asks, in the WSJ, “Are humans hard-wired to be ruthlessly competitive or supportive of one another?” Really that answers the question. Humans are supportive of one another, precisely because they are ruthlessly competitive. For social animals, and nobody would deny that human beings belong to this category, it pays to be cooperative. We descend from people who were exceptionally successful in hunting in teams, sharing mothering duties and trading. I groom you for hours, you help me next time that bully comes along. Chimpanzees and even Marmoset Monkeys have an innate sense of fairness. Socially inept individuals with a poor sense of fairness are ostracized by society.

De Waal, a brilliant primatologist, knows very well that sociable primates benefit from altruism, indeed it is an expression of selfishness, yet he persist in misrepresenting this behavior. For years he has preached the notion that humans are closer to our fun loving cousins, the Bonobos, than the more violent common Chimps. Yet both are driven by the same instincts – survival and reproduction.

The discovery that Ardi, our new 4.4 million year old ancestor, had smaller canine teeth than chimpanzees is a perfect subject to caricature. Unlike Chimps, they must have been peaceful says de Waal, disingenuously. That just means they were brainy. Instead of thrusting its claws at an enemy, the Ardipithecus ramidus would have taken him for a walk to philosophize about the future of mankind, then unexpectedly pushed him of a cliff. We are capable of such machiavellian actions because we can grasp people’s emotions and predict their behavior. Empathy enhances altruism and aggression. It did not evolve, as de Waal, suggests, only to do “good” (in an abstract 21st century sense). In times of plenty, I’m sure Ardi would have been a model of peacefulness. To a large extent environments dictate the shape of empathy.