Calling in those McKinsey folks to review your profit and loss numbers in the middle of the deepest recession since the 1930s is a little like having Dr. Kevorkian over to offer a second opinion.

“No, really, I’m feeling fine. Just a little touch of the flu.”

“Not at your age. You know, if you were a new publication, you might pull through. But Harold started you back in 1925. That’s a long, long haul for a weekly. But look on the bright side: it’s been a good run.” Read more…

You’re third in line for takeoff, finally ready to depart La Guardia and get to your lunch meeting in Chicago. The pilot comes on the P.A. for a last-minute cheery message: “Thanks for your patience. We hope to make it up one we’re in the air and get you to O’Hare on time. Or at least someplace not too far from there. We’re thinking maybe Gary or Indianapolis. As the President says, we shouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the essential. So wish us luck.”

What if that were acceptable? What if we never got where we were hoping to go, and it was okay?

What are the implications when President Obama tells us that part of his philosophy is, “We shouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the essential?” Sounds reasonable, in a way. Don’t want to be a perfectionist about everything. Wouldn’t be realistic. Never get anything done. Got to compromise, make a deal. Make progress of some kind.

I’m not so sure about throwing the perfect overboard. Read more…

I don’t idealize a great many people that I’ve known, but Richard Maddy is an exception. A violin maker, legendary string instrument rebuilder, WWII paratrooper, and son of the founder of Interlochen Center for the Arts, I met Richard when we were both serving on the alumni board of the organization his father had founded. When the board would get bogged down in the minutiae and politics of whatever problem had wound its way around us, Richard was always there to remind us what we supposed to be doing. He would ask, in some form or another, “Is it good for the kids?” Read more…

Isn’t it great that our kids are stuck with us for a fairly lengthy period of time? If we screw up and say something that perhaps wasn’t the best possible parenting expression, they’re going to be around tomorrow, too. We’re going to get another chance to do better.

This is extremely important in the realm of parenting. Most of us have absorbed the wisdom that our kids will perceive negative comments about themselves so powerfully that it will take from 10 to 20 times the number of positive remarks to create a perception of balance. That’s why we need to hesitate when we tell our kid that maybe they could have tried a little harder on that quiz. Have we already told them on 10 different occasions how great they’ve done something?

I’m feeling the same way about customer service at the moment. Take great care of me (basically just do a good job) and I’ll keep using you. But screw up, especially if it makes me look bad, and it will take a long, long time before I trust you again. Read more…

A few weeks ago I posted an open letter to GM CEO Fritz Henderson on the first day of GM’s entering into bankruptcy protection, offering my concern that Mr. Henderson’s reliance on great GM design to save the company might be a problem since GM had put so much ugly tin on America’s roads. I also noted that GM’s culture needed to change, and this was their last chance to get it right. I didn’t mention that most experts on corporate change say it requires 3 — 5 years to accomplish, if you know what you’re doing.

In an amazing display of exactly what I was talking about, Mr. Henderson tossed my article over the fence and assigned the response to Global VP for all design, Ed Welburn, who wrote a public letter back to “Gerald Sindell of the Huffington Post,” which contained an impassioned defense of GM design, and the thousands of artists and modelers at work around the clock around the world creating beautiful new GM cars. Mr. Welburn invited me to visit GM dealerships, look at and drive the new Chevys, Buicks and Cadillacs. I was also invited to visit to global design headquarters in Detroit and see for myself. Read more…

Good morning Mr. Henderson —

Big day for you, no question. My best wishes go out to you on Day One running the new General Motors. Clean slate, pretty much, except for those legacy issues that might hold you back. A culture of poor vision, poor design, poor assembly, poor service. That’s a lot to change all at once, but you’ll need to do it. At your press conference you said the new GM would be bringing to the market, among other things, great design. That really struck me. I wondered what your process would be for inspiring, creating and recognizing great design. And how could a passion for great design be inculcated into the culture on a permanent basis? Read more…

A few years ago, my son Max and I were at the Guggenheim in New York, spiraling our way down through a show of Very Important Paintings. It was one of those shows that just wasn’t working for either of us. But we like to discuss what we’re looking at, just for the pleasure of comparing perceptions. I suggested we talk about the framing and ignore the art. An added bonus would be that anyone overhearing us would be hard pressed to connect our insights to anything we appeared to be looking at.

Within a few paintings, we had it down. “There’s a beauty. Great sense of mass, and it really works on the wall.” “You think? Seems a little over the top to me, and the felt’s fighting the forest.”

It was so much fun that whenever we happen to end up in a museum together, we just naturally fall into our discussion of the framing. The art has taken a secondary position. Read more…

  When the financial environment goes through a sudden and radical change, every person and every enterprise will go through an urgent rethinking, since anything and everything about the future that we once had reasonable expectations about is now open to question. Since the nature of a massive degraded environmental change is so complete and the future so unknown, many of us face change with a feeling of barely controllable panic. Read more…

This is from a speech I gave in Marin, California in May, 2008 to the Bay Area Consultants Network and also had recorded on video for use by my speaker’s bureau, The Bright Sight Group. The material is from a new book I’m working on, currently titled, Value — The Worth of Everything Including You. 

In the course of my work to help my clients understand the bedrock of differentiation, I discovered something that seemed to be a new concept regarding the roots of value. The new theory relates to classic and evolving economic theory, but it also suggests a revolution in the understanding of the meaning of value and of the relationship between value and pricing.

My speech begins here:

Oscar Wilde famously said that the cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

In classical economic theory, price and value tend to get blended together, almost as if they mean the same thing.

But intuitively, we are always comparing price and value. What is the right medicine worth that heals a child? What is a book worth that changes your life? What is a consultant’s insight worth if it turns your company around?

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a simple and reliable guide to the nature of value, and maybe even a guide that could explain what the price of everything ought to be?

Read more…

Frontpaged in the NY Times today in an article by William J. Broad and Cornelia Dean is a comparison of the two presidential candidates’ plans for renewing the United States as an innovation economy. Assuming that Obama will win the election, I think it is safe to say that America will return to a deep and long term investment in science education, and in direct investment in the kind of long-term research that most corporations eschew in favor of research that offers benefits in the near-term.

Shortermism is the enemy of innovation. It might even be the enemy of civilization. Read more…