Great Blog

In my post a month ago about Snohetta, the Norwegian architect firm, I referred to their practice of always developing a particular vocabulary for a project before starting to draw. That popped back to my mind yesterday as I listened to Tom Kelley at the Idea 2007 seminar in Helsinki. Kelley is the general manager of IDEO, a Silicon Valley-based design firm, and the author of The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation. The ten faces in the name of the latter book refer to the different competencies that a successful design team must have.

In his presentation he named the three most important of the ten –The Anthropologist, The Experimenter and The Experience Architect – and concentrated on them. The most important of the three seemed to be The Anthropologist, the one who observes the people working with the device or in the circumstances that IDEO has been assigned to improve. “We always do the anthropology first, before we start designing”, he said

In the world so full of computer-based CRM, customer insight, customer-oriented this and that and questionnaires thicker than a phone book, physically going to where the challenge is and observing people in action sounds very fresh. And here observing does not mean sitting behind a one way mirror making fun of a focus group in a conference room, but actually going where the action is. According to Kelley, you can ask people, if all you want is to make minor improvements to what already exists, but if you want to find out what your customers actually need and you want to make innovations, then you have to go to them and observe. “Don’t ask them, watch them!” was his message. It is also the “secret” of the success of IDEO, one the world’s most famous design firms.

One immediately begins to wonder what would happen if one combined IDEO’s anthropology approach with Snohetta’s vocabulary approach?

Tonight I attended a mini-seminar that featured two prodigies of Finnish politics and finance, the director of The Bank of Finland Erkki Liikanen and the director of the financial group Sampo Björn Wahlroos. The think tank EVA had asked them to discus the US sub-prime crisis and its possible effects on the international and the Finnish economy. The discussion took place at the famous Mirror Room of Hotel Kämp.
Is the crisis over, or is it going to get worse, was what Satu Huber the moderator wanted to know. This is of course a question relevant, not only to director Liikanen whose bank is responsible for the monetary stability of Finland and to a multimillion euro investor like Mr. Wahlroos, but to anybody with any investments or any loans, that is practically everybody.
A fair summation of the very enjoyable discussion that took place would probably be to say that things might start getting better after Christmas but that things are more likely to get worse, Mr Wahlroos being the more pessimistic one of the two. Both agreed that sub-prime loans are more an indication of deeper problems than the cause for instability in the financial markets. In general, after a long period of overlooking risks, the risks are being reassessed and investors are fleeing from bad investments to quality ones and this is happening throughout the financial system. Those with money want to know exactly what they have gotten into. “Flight to quality” was the term that Mr. Wahlroos used several times. For Mr. Wahlroos the current quality asset is cash.
I cannot help thinking that the last time I heard people saying cash is king was during the stock market turmoil exactly twenty years ago. Yet, I walked out of the seminar feeling that this time around we have better bankers handling whatever is to come. Man, I hope I’m right.

The annual mega gathering of publishing professionals ended in Frankfurt last weekend. I did not go, but those who did, say it was a good book fair. For me it became a great fair when I received an excited phone call from the fairgrounds telling me that the our Minister of Culture Stefan Wallin had submitted Finland’s letter of intent to the Buchmesse to become the Guest of Honour in 2011.

It is bold move for Finland. It is going to cost a lot, and it is going to take a lot to put together an interesting presentation, but it is also an amazing possibility. I did a feasibilty study on The Guest of Honour programme for the Finnish Literature Information Centre (FILI) in the spring and - although I have visited the bookfair nine times - I had never before understood what an amazing reach the Guest of Honour status and programme have in German-Speaking Europe. It is like buying the Super Bowl half-time ad in the cultural life of Germany. No one can escape you. The book Fair is the biggest annual cultural event in Germany and 40% of the media attention is dedicated to the Guest of Honour. This is because the the guest country is the news every year, everything else stays pretty much the same.

So it is not really an honour, or an exhibition - it is a huge medium, and it is available to the guest country for the whole year, all around Germany. For Finnish literature, Germany has been the spring-board to the rest of the world for long. If Finland gets the status – Iceland is applying too but we remain convinced of our chances – well have much more than a spring-board, we’ll have a literary trampoline the size of Germany to show what we’ve got. Better start getting ready for the show…

The other night I went to see Cirque du Soleil’s show Delirium. Having admired the Canadian circus wizards on TV for years I was psyched to see them in Helsinki. Yes, the effects were amazing, the punk-glitz costumes fascinating, the make-up humorous, the props surreal and the music rocked and rolled. Now, there’s something missing here already… yes the acrobatics - they were also amazing, especially the unreal hula-hoop girl. It’s just that there was so little of that.
Walking out of the performance I felt both satisfaction and emptiness. Yes, I had finally seen them, and it was a good show, no doubt. But I had expected more - a more unique experience - more individual excellence, more moments of time standing still. When I listened to people around me exiting the arena I heard many of them muttering the same thing.
What we had experienced was modern brand management: spreading the good thing as thin as possible to rake in as much money as possible.
My Cirque du Soleil experience is still hovering in my mind as I’m now reading Dana Thomas’ Deluxe - How Luxury Lost its Lustre, a detailed and smart journalistic account of the contemporary luxury industry. In her book Thomas describes how in just twenty years the industry has diluted and inflated itself into the exact opposite of its promise. When everybody is carrying the same badly made handbag thinking that the logo on the fabric makes her special, it is consumerism, not luxury. And someone is laughing all the way to the stockholders’ annual meeting.
Luxury, as we know it, was born to serve the royal courts of Europe, and recently, through the mechanisms of global capitalism it has been “democratized” into something that everyone can and wants to buy into.
Or the so-called luxury brands have. Thomas ends her tour of the high-end fashion world with a few stops at providers of what she calls new luxury. And what is this new luxury? Well, it sounds very much like old luxury: it’s handcraftsmanship; it’s impeccable materials, its real commitment and care for your customers. It is the human element.
That’s what I missed watching Cirque du Soleil. What made them great was how they served old-school circus acts in a modern setting. But when the setting takes over and the moments of watching someone performing an amazing act of skill, daring and beauty are rare (optimized someone would say, because they are costly), the magic is lost. The magic is in the uniqueness of an incredible human performance.
Dana Thomas’ book predicts two things: there will be more of what we have seen so far, much more, and because of that, there will also be more of those who decide to put the personal back into business.