Robert's PlayGround

Small is better

This Summer, as usual, I took a large pile of books with me on my holidays. However, I chose to spend my nights sleeping this time so i finished only three books in two weeks. Eckart's Notes was one of them and I raced through it. Eckart Wintzen is the man who turned a small ICT company BSO into a big multinational one. Wintzen found that if you want to grow fast, you have to stay small. This thought lead to a management filosophy later known as 'cell division'. A company should never exceed a size of 50 - 60 co-workers. By the time a BSO company employed 50 people, its management had to find and prepare a new management team. And when the company reached 60 people, it was divided in two new companies - each about thirty people in size. Both new cells split up the business according to strict agreements. One of the big merits of this management filosophy is the transplantation of the comporate DNA (culture , knowledge) into ambitious, coherent cells. Along with it goes a style of management that is at least as interesting as the principle of cell division on itself. It comprises such things as sharing and trusting. On the go Wintzen gives a great explanation of the the true meaning of assigning work to others (Dutch: 'delegeren'). I recommend this book to anyone involved in management (as an entrepreneur, a 'manager' or a consultant). And not just for its contents - Eckart Wintzen is a gifted storyteller and writer.

Branding by books

Reading Tom Himpe's book on alternative advertising got me thinking a lot about exciting and engaging ways of making brands connect with people. Much of the stuff he has collected, acts in some sort of public space. But there is even more to be found in more intimate settings. I rediscovered an interesting example on our cook book shelf tonight. It is a book about soup made by Only - a Dutch ad agency that can be easily insulted by calling them just that. I admire them for their very original approach to brand communications. The soup book is made for the Salvation Army and its title reads "Soup for sharing". Its not so difficult to imagine why. Some time ago Only developed a brand for the Salvation Army,  based on the thought of sharing. This brand is called '50/50'. In Holland the Salvation Army is well known for collecting old clothes and other household textile. Only got the brilliant idea to reuse these second hand clothes and let fashion stylists take them apart and put them back together into fascinating combinations. Much alike Dance4Life, who succeed in bringing a remote issue to the attention of youth by addressing them in their own language, Only helps the Salvation Army get noticed again by a young and upper class audience. They make the Salvation Army contemporary - cool if you like. The soup book was originally a Danish concept I believe. But Only executed the idea quite nice. The book comes in a cover made from recycled woolen blankets. And they got a set of successful young angry chefs to deliver recipes for soup. Equally talented photographers made the pictures. It's subtly infused with a message too. The Soup is great. The book looks great. And the Salvation Army gets my sympathy and support. Just before updating my Blog I found a pocket book among our toilet reading stuff (sorry): it was issued by a social organisation that protects nature in the Netherlands.  In stead of printing some dull magazine or just sending me a request for money, we got an educative book about landscapes, plants and animals just around the corner and various routes for talking a walk or a hike in nature. Very inspiring. Dutch people can get Soup book here and obtain the nature book by Stichting Natuurmonumenten here. I can recommend both books as a gift. To yourself if you like. 

Maps of inspiration

Some time ago I ran into this extraordinary book: atlas of experience. A designer and a cartographer joined their talents to make a book with maps of our mental world. The result is amazing. These maps can offer a whole new approach on many type of processes that you might go through alone or with others. Playfull. Imaginative. Inspiring. Only recently I ended up on their website. Go here for the Dutch version. On the site you can design your own maps and order them. The book is a bargain and well worth buying. There are books and sites with maps of Love and Business as well. The maps inspired the Dutch creative hotshop Selmore to present their agency and filosophy as an imaginary destination. They used a map of experiences: "the road to Selmore. View this photo ." Suddenly Tom Tom's and other navigation systems seem so 2005; paper maps rule!

63

Sixtythree? For a moment I couldn't resist thinking of the Answer to The Ultimate Question Of Life, the Universe and Everything in Douglas Adams' "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy". Sixtythree what? Sixtythree percent of all advertising 'sticks'. In other words: 37% of all advertising is wasted... Thats what I read in an Adage article on the new book "What Sticks". Why does that make me think of Douglas Adams again... Ah, it's probably the Don't Panic! response.

Effective : waste = 63 : 37. That sounds so much more comfortable than the 50% sheer waste of advertising once claimed by Dutch advertising & branding professor Giep Franzen in the ninetees.
Then questions start popping up: have we improved since the ninetees or are we just measuring effect in a different way? when is advertising effective anyway? which 37% is waste? how much money are advertisers wasting on other investments? is 63% efficacy bad, good or great? why is the sub title for the book What Sticks "why most advertising fails..." whilst reporting a percentage of 37? Probably some of the answers are in the book. For some intuitive reason I'm not yet dying to read it.