The Best Place To Work

Le Chateau de Touffou is one of the best places to work I know. I have had the good fortune to go there twice to work and both times have been magical. It is not the grounds and the magnificent architecture and art or the sense of history, but the long meals (4 course lunch and dinner, with wine that go against modern day work practices) and most importantly Madame Ogilvy who has lived in the chateau for almost 40 years. It is her home and that it is a home makes all the difference to people's ability to get on with one another and to work productively, at least in my experience. Every company should have one (or for smaller companies, a slightly less grand one).

For the full set of pics, click here, and go for the slideshow in the upper right.

War and Peace

It's a monumental read. I started in February when we were in ski-ing in The Alps and it has taken me almost until our summer holidays to finish it. There were periods where it was unputdownable and other periods where it was almost unpickupable. My favourite storyline/ character set were the Old Prince, Prince Andry, and Natasha. There was real verve and pathos in that story, especially when Andry was dying.

The big idea in the book? That history isn't just about the story of the leaders, and leaders are not the makers of history. It is the stories of many many many people and that history is created by movements beyond individuals. And if history is that way, so is society in the present.

The huge array of characters and the length of the book reinforce that. It is the stories of the peasants and the infantry as much as the story of two kings. (Look at the thickness! Here it is compared to my Mac Book Pro)

I have read War and Peace and Anna Karenina in the last couple of years. My grandmother gave them to Jill and I went we got married and it was for her that I embarked on them. To my mind the climax of Anna Karenina is one of the most gripping pieces of fiction I have ever read. I preferred it as a novel to War and Peace, though the themes developed in War and Peace are more interesting to me.

Brand Design

Some notes I made on brand identity and brand design that I wanted to keep a hold of:

"In its earliest form, when animals were branded with a hot iron to demonstrate ownership, the resulting mark was to give the animal a distinguishing and recognisable identity: in this case identity meant ownership.

The way we talk about brands today has evolved but they still need a distinguishing and recognisable identity.

We often talk about having a differentiating idea at the core of a brand but that core idea still needs a differentiating identity; a way to bring the idea to life.

In today’s fast paced, multi-media, multiple branded world sensory shortcuts that carry meaning are more important than ever. The most obvious of these in the branded world are the visual cues: the associations with a logo, the power of colour, the rich meaning of visual brand equities. But, increasingly, smell, touch, sound and the ‘feel’ of a brand space or brand experience are part of a brand’s identity.

What brings all these elements together is the notion of brand design. We believe that great brand design is fundamental to having a great brand. And the philosophy of design runs deep, deep into the DNA of the brand and is manifest through every expression of it. Think about Apple. Their identity is expressed through brilliant, coherent design again and again. Across products, packaging, website, retail environments, communications, time and geographies."

Article In Design Week On Blogs

Excuse a little bit of self-indulgence. The truth of it is, if I don't put it here I don't think I will have a record of it in a few months time!

Design Week
Blogs rule, but watch the rules
09th July 2009 By Christian Barnett

Blogs are a great way to promote your consultancy. Christian Barnett offers some advice on setting one up.

A good blog can inspire its readers and galvanise a community around it. And though it is possible to get one up and running in the time it takes to read this article, having recently launched our ‘Making brands beautiful’ blog I wouldn’t recommend it.

The most important thing is to work out the purpose of the blog. Many blogs fail because they are rudderless, leading to a never-ending series of ‘what we/I did today’ posts. State your blog’s objectives _ consider things like ‘to give the “outside” world a sense of what it is like to be “inside”’ (check out http///wklondon. typepad.com/), or ‘to give the chief executive a platform for his/her views’ (http:// designthinking.ideo.com/) or ‘to showcase great work’ (www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog).

It may be worth having someone on the project team quickly set up their own blog. The best way to do this is to go to one of the free blog-hosting sites, like Blogger, Wordpress or Typepad, and just set one up. It takes five minutes. Get used to the mechanics of posting - try posting a picture or a short film, and think about how you generate content. Spend some time exploring competitor blogs - what are they doing? Is it arresting or interesting content?

You will also need to work out how your blog will be organised. If it isn’t easy to navigate around, people will not stay. Think about the type of categories you may have, how much of each post will be displayed on the main blog page, what widgets you may have, and so on. The blog also has to be designed - think about things such as width of copy, choice of colour palette, font and type of imagery. The question of the blog’s relationship to the website needs to be given some thought, too. It is also at this point that you may need a little bit of help from experts to host your blog. They can help tailor the navigation and design to your specifications.

Finding compelling content time after time is a challenge. Of course, the blog’s objective will guide the content, which is another reason to get the objective clear and empowering. The best blogs seem to have a fairly conversational, rather than corporate, tone - they don’t waste time, and they are prepared to stick their neck out a little in terms of stating a point of view or making interesting connections.

Giving posting rights, especially in a group with more than 50 people, requires a little thought. It could result in chaos to give all company members posting rights in one go. We learned that the best way to get people posting is not based on hierarchy, but on ‘bloggers vs non-bloggers’.
Put simply, some of the older ‘digital immigrants’ in the consultancy were not as blog-savvy as the younger ‘digital natives’. The lesson is to find your natural bloggers and let them lead the way.

We also put a short training session together so everyone in the consultancy was able to do some posting. It meant we were able to spread out the enthusiasm to post - having a glut of posts all at the same time is almost as bad as having no posts, so the ideal is to have a steady stream.
It is worth going live internally first, to give the blog a test run and see if you are able to generate the right content sufficiently often.

You are then ready to launch externally. By now, people should know the type of content, how frequently they need to post, how to tag it to get it up the search engine results, and such like.
The level of ‘ta dah’ surrounding any blog launch is up to you. It could provide a nice platform for some marketing activity, or you could let it grow organically as people find it through searches, online word-of-mouth and the like. It is cheap, though time-consuming, to market a blog in the blogosphere using links, commenting in other’s blogs places, building an online presence via Facebook and Twitter, and so on.

Don’t forget to set up an analytics programme to measure blog activity. Google analytics never cease to amaze me with the depth of information. You can find out which posts get the most visits, from which geographies, the percentage of new versus returning users, and so on. It is a really valuable, and free, feedback loop.Allow a couple of months for the entire process. Unlike the five minutes it takes to set up the one-person blog, you need time to get everyone on board. But a good blog is worth it. It gives a real insight of what your consultancy is all about.
We found that it was a great way of showing where we found beauty in all its nuances to reflect our consultancy philosophy.

Good luck.

Posting notes:
Have an objective for your blog
Don’t ‘police’ content - it should be fluid and conversational
Get your blog right internally before you share it with the outside world
Try to enjoy posting, so it doesn’t become a consultancy chore

T-Shirts To Convey Feelings

Hmmmmmmmmmmm!

Crusty Bread, Wine and Cheese

Difficult to beat it. After a long week, I can't think of a better way to wind down with a little indulgence. The only thing I would do is to exchange the dinning room table for a outside wooden table by a French rural retreat.

Taking Something Out

I have been feeling a little stodgy of body and musty of head recently, and wondered if I could feel a little lighter in both areas by changing my diet.  So I radically cut down on diary and bread intake. It worked. But there was an interesting side-effect; I started eating much more 'creatively'. Rather than just grab a nearby sandwich, I thought about what foods might go together to create a meal. And though it took longer to get my lunch during the week, my lunches started to get more interesting, varied and satisfying. 

The third Peter Gabriel album (Peter Gabriel III or 'Melt' as it is now know) contains NO cymbal hits. Apparently, Gabriel insisted on this to the drummers used on the album.  When you don't know that it feels like something is missing, but you aren't quite sure what it is. Though what is missing is replaced by things which are more inventive, for example the 'grated' big drum sound that Phil Collins used extensively in the 1980's was created for the first track on Grabriel III, 'The Intruder'. Listen to the album. Knowing what Gabriel took out increases the appreciation of what is already a great album. 

In Sao Paulo the Mayor declared an end to visual pollution ie out of home posters and billboards, and signage over a certain size, as he believed it was taking over the town. One effect of the ban was that brands became more creative and inventive in their public communications, using street artists, deploying brand equities in an intelligent and dramatic way, using brand colors to full effect. It is worth having a look at this post, on the Coley Porter Bell blog for some more details.   

Perhaps one way of being more creative is to take something away, or remove one part of the equation. 

A Revelation In Every Cup

Green Mountain Coffee. Great company. Great marketing team. Wish them great success.

Here is TJ in Ad Age's CMO column.

The Signalbox Experience

Just to complete the trio of 'experience' posts, here is the St. Albans signal box. Apparently, it is the only restored signal box (in England) that is still on its original site. It is being restored by a group of local enthusiasts and it is open for the second and fourth Sundays of each month. We went in and got a very enthusiastic volunteer show us how all levers work: 

Unfortunately, he wasn't able to control the real trains on the real track so we had settle for a pretend scenario of a pretend train coming down the track in order to press buzzer, ping bells and pull and push levers. Perhaps that was a little virtual after all!

For more details on the St. Albans signal box click here. 

You'll Never Know What You'll Find In The Park

Demonstration of the Roman army's tortoise formation during the Roman Museum's 70th birthday celebration in Verulamium Park.  We also saw Roman surgeons, potters, surveyors, gladiators, weavers, and some fearsome cavalry:

The point is, if there needs to be one, similar to my previous post about the power of getting out and experiencing stuff first hand being such a good thing, especially for kids.