Pithy Nuggets

I gave a short presentation on Tuesday to the WPP Fellows in New York. It was entitled "10 things I may or may not have learnt or am still trying to learn, that may or may not be useful, masquerading as pithy nuggets of my work philosophy and presented as an attempt to pass a handy hint or two to younger and smarter people so they can get further than I have done quicker than I have done" Here are the slides:



The tips themselves are:
1. Eat your greens
2. Snuffle for truffles
3. The central question
4. Go to the source
5. Find common ground
6. WPP is a corporation
7. The Binary Brief
8. Take a stroll on philosophy beach
9. Take a risk when buying shoes
10. The slide is self explanatory

Feel free to suggest additional tips. I can extend the presentation or swap out from my original ten.

Walkscore

Following on from my post of my journey to work, I found Walkscore. It is an website that enables you to see how good any area in the States is for walking. It calculates how walkable any area is based on proximity to a variety of amenities. There are many things that it doesn't include in its calculation (public transport, weather, crime, etc.) but I like the intent.

Debrand that Ad

I noticed this ad on the subway: a spoof of the 'transform yourself' genre of advertising. It was sufficiently oddball for all three passengers around the ad to start talking about what, or who, it was for. On closer inspection the small print revealed 'absolut'. I still made a visit to the site, http://www.bekanyenow.com/ which is a little different from http://www.bekanyewest.com/ , a ticket sales site, where I mistakedly first went. It just goes to show it isn't always easy to remember web address from an ad, even one that was relatively interesting.

This Morning's Journey to Work

For the full journey visit This Morning's Journey to Work on my flickr pages.

Innovation and J.K.Rowling

J.K. Rowling gave the 2008 Harvard Commencement Address. She spoke wonderfully, with huge insight and wit on the importance of imagination and failure.

Rather than just post the speech through You Tube, I have linked to the FutureThink blog that has the speech on You Tube, as the blog in itself is no bad thing to have a look at.

Click here and have a look.

Intangible Brand Value

Strikes me that paper money is possibly one of the best examples of creating intangible value. The paper itself isn't really worth much. We can't eat it or grow crops on it. Yet because we all believe in its value it has value.

View from Heaven

What a great view to have from our meeting room at Buzz. The meeting room is called 'Heaven'. Our other meeting room is called 'Hell'. It doesn't have such a good view. They were named, and dressed, for a Hallowen party a few years ago. The area by the elevators was called purgatory. Other views from places where I work or stay are here.

Revenue Generating Units

Yesterday I heard that Comcast used to refer to its customers as Revenue Generating Units or RGUs. Coincidentally I saw a British Airways ad that said they don't carry passengers, they carry people. It reminded me of my arrival at the Hampton Inn, when in the most unlikely circumstances - Hampton Inn in TX at 2am on a windy rainy night with me trying to enter through a door I wasn't meant to enter - I was given a most un-RGU reception.

Creative Critics

Post Secret

The American Visionary Art Muesuem (see earlier post here), had some of the postcards that Frank Warren has collected for his Post Secret project. Post Secret is an ongoing art project, in which people mail, anonymously, their secrets on a postcard. It started as a blog but has expanded out to videos and books (see the website here). Unfortunately, the blog only posts 20 secrets each Sunday, removing the previous weeks secrets. Nevertheless it is still pretty captivating stuff.

Crabs at Obrycki's

What a fantastic place. Lots of tables, lots of people, little pretention (see an earlier post on authenticity) and delicious food. The servers lay brown paper on the table, deposit hard shell crabs on the brown paper, provide a wooden mallet and a knife and off you go. The fries were also excellent, as was the beer, as were the jumbo crab cakes. I can't recommend it highly enough.

And to clear away, the servers just wrap everything up in the brown paper.

American Visionary Art Muesuem

The American Visionary Art Muesuem is one of the few mueseums in the world dedicated to art by the self-taught. Its founder is Rebecca Alban Hoffberger, a former midwife and psychiatric nurse (she was also the first American to apprentice mime under Marcel Marceau in Paris, aged 16) who wanted to "trumpet the wonders of raw human creativity." Some of the exhibits, and the stories of the artists who created them, are quite tear-inducing; the permenant collection includes the only work by an anonymous asylum mental patient in Britain who never showed much interest in anything until he found a fallen tree from which he carved a life-sized likeness of himself. The chest of the figure is sunken as the artist had tuberculosis. He died not too long afterwards. In contrast a few of the artists appear as obsessive eccentrics; the ex-world record hitchhiker's robot family, the painted concrete mountain as an homage to God, and the like.

I can't find images of the things I liked the most on line, so you will have to visit yourself, but I did find the educational goals on the website which are great. It is worth a trip.