ICONSMASHER

I have been hearing from a few different people about how great Pop!Tech was.  It’s a TED competitor that just took place in Maine last week.  The “usual” line-up of digital visionaries (Clay Shirky), social activists (Jessica Flannery of Kiva.org), performance artists (Imogen Heap), and Intellectuals Liberals Admire (George Lakoff)

A relative bargain at $3500 vs. $6000 for Ted, and no application essay!

http://www.poptech.org

As I look over the site and the concept, it’s amazing how shamelessly they are copying TED.  They have an incubator, Pop!Tech Fellows etc.  It’s cool to see that competitive dynamics exist even in the world of prestige, high-IQ conferences.

FYI, Method designed Ted.com

I realize that I chiefly consider The New York Times to be The World’s Best Newspaper because of its new analysis essays and its coverage of popular culture.  It’s really hard to write about something inherently frivolous and ephemeral in a serious way, but their writers do it week after week.

Ginia Bellafante’s article (A Bleak Show for Bleak Times) about the apocalytic and even messianic imagery in Terminator: The Sara Connor Chronicles (“one of the most resplendently grim hours on television”) got me thinking about other ways in which death, pessimism, and doomsday scenarios are making their way into popular culture.

It seems counter-intuitive that mass culture could be such a downer.  I think in many way it speaks to the sophistication of modern audiences that they are seeking some kind of catharsis through entertainment.  How else can you explain the success of The Dark Knight?  I have the feeling that future historians will point to it as a defining view into our times, like Rambo or The Matrix.

The other area where I see this trend very clearly, oddly enough, is in men’s fashion.  Skulls on everything but everything.  And not stylized flash art Ed Hardy-style.  Macabre Khmer Rouge-style piles of skulls on T-shirts, waistcoats, suit jackets.  Definitely not my taste.

I had an interesting interaction with a nameless PR guy last week.  He runs a matching service that links industry experts with journalists looking for quotes.  I signed up and the emails came thick and fast- 2-3/day, 5 days week.  Of the hundreds of opportunities over three weeks, only one was suitable for me (on how an MBA helps a non-traditional career) and I never heard back from them.  So I unsubscribed. The exit form asked me why I was leaving, and I cited low quality of opportunities. You know, things like the Fort Wayne New Sentinel, Water Efficiency Monthly, Steamboat Springs Pilot & Today.

The PR guy wrote me back immediately.  “The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, and the Today Show are low quality sources? Wow… OK then..”  I HATE being spun like this.  Just because you say something is X, doesn’t make it so.  I can understand having pride in your work, but it ticked me off to have him come back at me with such BS.  We had a (heated) email exchange, and he had to have the last word: “It’s cool - PR isn’t for everyone”.  True enough.  I think the reason I couldn’t do (this kind of) PR is because I really believe in the difference between fact and fiction. More explictly, I think it’s important to be honest to yourself and others about what you personally believe.  I think this is why I had a problem with advertising when that was the dominant part of my work. I have a really hard time feeling good about telling people a product is great when I know it’s crap, or, more often, when I know I wouldn’t explictly recommend it to a friend over some other, better, product.

It’s always gratifying when people reach out to me for career advice.  It reminds me that I am getting to a somewhere that other people want to go- and I think there are few enough experience strategy types that it’s sometimes hard to measure my progress.  Plus Method is hiring and I personally looking to build out the Strategy team, so the timing is great.

In response to one such request, I dug up this presentation I made at the Haas School of Business in 2006.  I think a lot of the thinking is still relevant to the market today.  I think one difference is that the (MBA) education system has caught up to the whole design/innovation/strategy approach, particularly in the form of the Stanford d. school program.  I would have loved to get that kind of training - I feel like I’ve had to feel my own way through most of my career. So I am always happy to pay it back.  Drop me a line in you want to chat!

Here’s the post, which originally appeared on Threeminds on 05/01/06

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Last week I had the opportunity to guest judge final projects for an unusual business school class taught at my alma mater, the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.  Design as a Strategic Management Issue is one of several electives that teach design literacy to MBA candidates and graduate students from the Engineering and Information Management programs.  In this project-based class, teams of students have the opportunity both to manage a design project, and to act as designers for a website, a package, or a naming and logo project.  I took the class myself about six years ago, and it was one of my inspirations to start a career as a strategist in creative services.

With that in mind, I gave a short presentation on Careers in Creative Services at the end of class.  It’s written for an audience of soon-to-be-graduating MBA’s, but it speaks broadly to the evolution of the agency world from my perspective, and specifically to the current state of the art- Experience Design - as a way to combine the best elements of brand advertising, direct marketing, customer insights, and usability.  Here is a PDF of the presentation with brief speaking notes. Download mcornes_haas.pdf