David Parrish: T-Shirts + Suits/Part 2

Want to start a creative business? Best to know who you are first.

In his richly informative and enlightening book, T-Shirts + Suits: A Guide to the Business of Creativity, David Parrish gives us a checklist for self-evaluation. Like many of these sorts of evaluations, the primary value comes from forcing you to answer questions that you need to answer…but frequently avoid doing.

If you are thinking of starting a creative business, or have already done so, you will want to spend some time seeking the answers to these questions. Remember, if you don’t stand for something, you fall for everything.

The PRIMEFACT Checklist (Page 22)

People
What are the strengths and weaknesses of our people?
Employees, directors, members, associates, advisers and
other stakeholders.

Reputation (or Brand)
What is our reputation with our target customers? What are
the strengths – or weaknesses – of our brand or brands?

Intellectual Property
What intellectual property do we have? How is it protected?
How easily can it be turned into income streams?

Market Research / Market Information
What information do we have about market segments and market trends? What do we know about individual clients and their specific needs?

Ethos (or Values or Culture)
What is our ethos, our values and our organisational culture?
Do all stakeholders subscribe to this same ethos?

Finances (ie Money)
What is the current state of profitability, cashflow and assets?
How much money do we have to invest or can we borrow?

Agility (or Nimbleness or Change­ability)
Are we agile enough to seize new opportunities?
Are people prepared to change and ready for change?
Are there barriers to change?

Collaborators (Alliances, Partnerships and Networks)

What are the strengths and weaknesses of our associations with other businesses and organisations (including government)?

Talents (Competencies and Skills)
What are our core competencies?
What skills do we have available and what gaps are there?
How will we learn new skills?

The Hatchery…and Their famous Gauntlet.

The Hatchery is a New York-based vetting process for entrepreneurs. If you have an idea for a business that you are trying to get off the ground, this is an excellent opportunity to get some very hard questions thrown at you (it’ll make you stronger) and get your idea out there in the marketplace.

As they say, “Like American Idol for entrepreneurs”.

“The Hatchery provides a unique funnel for New York innovators to interact with investors, present their plans, receive expert feedback, and pave the way for them to receive funding. At the heart of our model the Gauntlet, an interactive process that gives entrepreneurs a forum to present their strategies to a range of investors.”

Payroll. Now Actually Easy.

Most of the people that I know that are internet entrepreneurs know their way around a P&L spreadsheet but doing payroll has never been top of their list.

A friend of mine mentioned that she was now using Intuit Online from Costco, of all places, and instead of using an accountant as she had been doing, she was now doing payroll herself in 10 minutes.

Cost is between $17.99 – $19.99 a month, depending on your Costco membership.

6 Metrics for Managing UI Design (Russell Wilson)

Russel Wilson has written some very good guidelines that begin to address the question, What are the success metrics? I have managed and lead several large Digital Creative groups and this is ALWAYS a thorny issue. This is very helpful:

Full Article here.

“As part of a recent management summit at my company, we were asked to fill out an RMPT matrix for our departments (I head up Product Design).  An RMPT matrix consists of (R)esponsibilities, (M)etrics, (P)rocesses, and (T)ools.  I have been intending to develop better metrics for both measuring and guiding our design efforts, and this exercise served as a catalyst to get me started.  Bear in mind that metrics help you focus your efforts and measure your progress, but you are also held accountable to them.

For (R)esponsibilities I specified the following:
1) Improve our products & innovate
2) Provide the UI design for new features/functions/products
3) Approve any UI design work done outside of Product Design
4) Validate our UI designs and explore user needs through user testing

Given those responsibilities (and that’s important because your metrics are linked to them) I then came up with the following metrics and met with my team who helped to refine them:

For a given period (e.g. a business quarter):
1) Number of layouts delivered
2) Number of interactive prototypes created
3) Percentage of product design requests completed by commit date
4) Number of users tested
5) Number of product improvements made
6) Number of product insights documented

Current Reading List for Digital Businesses

21 October 2008: If you have, or are starting, a digital business you’ll want to read these. (A special thanks to Tom Illmensee)…

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
Dan Ariely
A challenging mate to Freakonomics, Predictably Irrational examines how the world often works according to principles of irrationality in the places where we least expect it. Do you know why you still have a headache after taking a one-cent aspirin, but why that same headache disappears if the aspirin costs fifty cents? Do you know why recalling the Ten Commandments reduces people’s tendency to lie, or why honor codes are actually effective in reducing dishonesty at the workplace? Do you know why, after doing careful and extensive research on which car to buy, a random meeting with someone who had an awful experience with that car changes your decision? Why do we make decisions contrary to our better judgment? What is “better judgment?” Predictably Irrational challenges us to ponder these questions and demonstrates how irrationality manifests itself in situations (often very peculiar and hilarious situations) where rational thought is expected.

Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better
Gina Trapani
This book isn’t a computer user manual, and it isn’t a productivity system. It’s a mashup of both. It’s where you learn to practice big-picture productivity methods on your very own computer desktop. Whether you’re a Mac or Windows user, know only enough to get by or are the family tech support geek, there are tricks here for you. Whether or not you’ve been turbocharging your day with the tips from Gina’s first Lifehacker book, you’ll feast on this buffet of new shortcuts to make technology your ally instead of your adversary.

Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance
Jim Thatcher, Christian Heilmann, Michael R. Burks
This book gives you all you need to know about web accessibility, whether you are a web designer or developer who wants your sites to be accessible, or a business manager who wants to learn what impact the web accessibility laws have on your websites. After an overview of the accessibility law and guidelines, and a discussion about accessibility and its implementation in the enterprise, the book goes on to show how to implement accessible websites using a combination of concise references and easy-to-follow examples.

Make It Bigger
Paula Scher
“Make it bigger”-a familiar refrain to any graphic designer accustomed to presenting layouts to clients-is an apt title for a book that examines the graphic design profession primarily through the lens of the business community it serves. Veteran designer Scher draws from over three decades of design experience to provide readers with a firsthand account of the creative process, that is, advancing good ideas and personal vision within the corporate cultures and organizational dynamics that are predisposed to resist them.

Access 2003 All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies
Alan Simpson, Margaret Levine Young, Alison Barrows
One-stop guide to building databases and managing information with Access 2003

Access 2007: The Missing Manual
Kate J. Chase, Scott Palmer
Demystifies databases and explains how to design and create them with ease.

Why Software Sucks: …and What You Can Do About It
David S. Platt
It’s no secret that software sucks. You know that from personal experience, whether you use computers for work or for personal tasks. In this book, programming insider David Platt explains why that’s the case and, more importantly, why it doesn’t have to be that way. And he explains it in plain, jargon-free English that’s a joy to read, using real-world examples with which you’re already familiar. In the end, he suggests what you, as a typical user, without a technical background, can do about this sad state of our software – how you, as an informed consumer, don’t have to take the abuse that bad software dishes out.

Metaphors We Live By
George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Mark Johnson
The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are “metaphors we live by”—metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.

Adapting to Web Standards: CSS and Ajax for Big Sites
Christopher Schmitt, Mark Trammell, Meryl K. Evans, Kevin Lawver, Kimberly Blessing
Gives developers a peek into the process of the best designers in the world through the work of high profile, real-world Web sites that made them famous. The book focuses on deconstructing these top-tier large-scale sites with particular attention given to deconstructing CSS.

T-Shirts and Suits: A Guide to the Business of Creativity (Part 1)

Creativity and Business

David Parrish has written, perhaps, the best guidebook for a creative person in business, T-Shirts and Suits: A Guide to the Business of Creativity. In his introduction, he mentions that he is both a published poet and an MBA. This makes him the ideal person to answer the old question, “Is it creativity vs. business?”

David writes:
“Some people regard creativity and business as being like oil and water – they just don’t mix. They think it’s a question of choosing between creativity and business. I disagree.”

In these times of uncertain economic conditions and the relative ease of creating a digital businesses, it is inevitable that more and more creative people will be considering starting a business. Here’s a hint: go here and print out the free PDF and spend some time reading it and soaking it all in.

Creativity and business are absolutely not mutually exclusive but most of us have a proclivity towards one or the other but the fact is that a successful business requires both. David mentions that there is sometimes more creativity in an engineering group than in some advertising agencies and that is absolutely true. “The most exciting creativity, I believe, is the alchemy of blending apparent opposites, what we often call art and science, recognizing that they are not opposites at all, from which we have to choose either/or in a binary fashion, but the yin and the yang of the whole.”

If you read nothing else in the book, read pages 9 and 10 on Success, Profit, Lifestyle, and Why do it?

It’ll start you thinking about creativity, about business, and about what you will do next.

The difference between shouting to a group and speaking intimately with an individual.

During this tumultuous 2008 election year here in the States one hears the cry, “Drill, baby, drill!” with increasing frequency. And while this cry is about drilling for oil, there is another type of drilling that is changing everything from how elections are run to how soap is marketed. Let’s call it digital drilling.

In the article entitled, “It Worked For Bush“, the story is told of how traditional campaigning was turned upside down by what might be called database marketing…but that term seems inadequately quaint within this context. It’s more than database marketing, it is more accurately digital drilling because it drills down from a huge data cloud right to your doorstep.

“The pollsters also looked in the wrong places. On election day, every exit poll showed a clear Kerry lead. Yet the polls were wrong, because they were wrong in the weightings they gave to different socioeconomic groups and in the assumptions they made about who would turn out to vote. The Bush team had, in effect, destroyed all the methodology on which polling and electoral analysis had been based for the past 50 years.”

Let’s take a look at how this was done,
STAGE ONE:
The ability to digitally store and archive massive amounts of raw data.
STAGE TWO:
The growth in the quantity and quality of multi-sourced consumer information.
STAGE THREE:
The ability to link multiple data islands.
STAGE FOUR:
The analytical power to search and discover new, meaningful patterns and relationships of strategic and tactical value.

This begs the question who did this and how did they do it? TargetPoint Consulting was the company that did this work for the Bush campaign and they describe how, what they call MicroTargeting, completely changes the game:

Why Now?
“In a word: technology. Campaigns have always collected data on their voters, and there have always been mounds of census data, polling crosstabs and voter registration files. Unfortunately, that data was in most cases wholly insufficient to get the job done, or too large and complex for anything more than rough approximations, oversimplified target lists, and statistically insignificant intuition. Technological developments have brought desperately needed depth and clarity to our formerly flat and hazy perception of individual voters.

By using hundreds of data points, comprised of voter information, life cycle information, life style information, financial data, consumer behavior, geographic data, and political attitudes and preferences, MicroTargeting can be used to segment each of your voters into one of a number of mutually exclusive groups, each defined by a unique combination of a host of data points.”

Irrespective of your political inclinations, the issue of digital drilling is an interesting one. And if you are a marketer, the interest is more than a passing one because in a post-broadcast world there is a difference between shouting to a group and speaking intimately with an individual. And motivating them to action.

Digital drilling may help you do that.