Which made me think.
What do I do, exactly?

It is a general problem, of course, in a post-industrial society. (A manageable problem for us without working-class parents, but God help those with. Like my boyfriend the copywriter, constantly plagued by visions of his father welding.) And like with any knowledge economy job, I spend my days doing a myriad of different things, high and low. But it has to be possible to identity the activities that actually produce the most value, and define it with those. Like the baker, who stacks baking-tins from time to time but will present his work as baking bread and making cakes.

So, this is what I do.
I write emails, and I drink wine with people that matter in my brand’s universe.

The first is creating value by facilitating value creation by other knowledge workers (mostly), enticing CEOs to give keynote speeches (gently) or editors-in-chief to subject to deadlines (forcefully).

The second is creating value by building network, and it is what working in media will be increasingly about. Other businesses too, but with relationship-driven brands like media brands, it will be, in fact, everything.

Which is why I will, being a generous kind of person, give away a secret that will help you succeed in this business.
There is a trick when drinking wine with people that matter in your brand’s universe.
Make sure it is white.
Red wine stains your teeth.

Good luck.

Bryan F – A master of media

“Architecture is always dream and function, [an] expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.”
Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower and other mythologies

Of course, this is true for absolutely everything.

For example, in a recent Harvard Business Review article, economists Gökçe Sargut and Rita Gunther McGrath claims that in the last thirty years, complexity has

[…] gone from something found mainly in large systems, such as cities, to something that affects almost everything we touch: the products we design, the jobs we do every day, and the organizations we oversee.
(Sargut & Gunther McGrath 2011: 70)

Complex does not, of course, just mean complicated. It involves the transition from chain to network, from separate to interconnected and interdependent systems. Business is then, to use the terminology of Karl Popper, not a clock anymore, it is a cloud.

It is apparent then, that the tried and trusted way of thinking about business does not work anymore. It is, essentially, broken. We need another way of approaching business problems, one that is more attuned to this complexity. Especially when we’re doing entrepreneurial things. (Yes, I know. Me too, I have a deep-rooted aversion towards the Entrepreneur with a capital E. Megalomaniac characters balancing between having great networking skills and sociopathy. Smug technophiles with the capacity for reflective thinking like that of a Giant Schnauzer. And so on. However. Contrary to popular belief, entrepreneurial ventures does not have to include this unsavoury figure.) Entrepreneurial in the sense of starting something, but also to reinvent or revolutionize an existing business – by for example launching new products, finding new markets, or changing organizational models. And it is in exactly this search for change, for revolution, that existing business models fail to perform in a world of uncertainty and intricacy. This is where another line of thinking is needed.

But what does work, then? What line of thinking can actually help navigating in an uncertain, fast, difficult world? A couple of years ago, design thinking claimed it was it. And I felt towards it in varying ways going through the same process I often do: (1) Infatuation (in this case fuelled by the efficient trick of the Common Enemy – taunting MBAs was very clever). (2) Followed by a growing sense of belonging to a club where less intelligent people sit around collecting buzz words as if they were stamps. (3) General hostility.

But, I’ve decided to be reasonable. I’m not convinced that a designer can come up with the solution to world starvation better than someone who actually knows something about it, simply by being seemingly magically creative. In fact, it is a bit too close to romanticism surrounding nature people. Another reason I’m not convinced is that I’ve been to design school, and every time we did a project that went farther than our actual field of competence, every idea we came up with was rather shitty.

But there are elements of design thinking that are better tools for dealing with clouds, rather than clocks. Better, that is, than the standard business school equipment.

Number one. Start using the whole of your brain.

That is, to approach business in the way that Roger Martin defines design thinking – as bringing together the best of analytic reasoning with the best of creative, emotional thinking.

Why this is needed to tackle complexity? Something the artist Dutch video artist Guido van der Werve told about what he has learnt from chess Grandmaster Leonid Yudasin might serve as an illustration. (I wrote about it once before.) The game of chess is, according to Yudasin, too complicated for a Grandmaster to learn all strategies and possible outcomes with his rational mind. Instead, they train their aesthetic sensibility; they look for what feels and looks “right” to them.

This part of the brain copes with those complex and quite mathematical chess problems much better than the rational part, in the Grandmasters’ experience. Clearly something that suggests that all ways of thinking should be represented when trying to solve business problems.

Number two. Stop being so bloody linear.

Iteration, constantly refining and retuning your idea throughout the design process, is of course another  feature that separates design thinking from traditional business thinking. This seems even more fruitful as an approach when the world seems difficult to predict and complex. And it is in entrepreneurial undertakings like discovering new products and offerings that the unpredictability and complexity is the biggest challenge.

But surprisingly often, the traditional business process, that starts with planning and then goes on to execution and then has a little feedback arrow meekly attempting to make itself heard in the end, is taken for granted. It is, however, rather hopeless when everything changes constantly, and inconsistently. Dust yourself off and try again. Again and again.

At least, that’s worth a try.

This autumn, I have been involved with something that is rather brilliant. ( I am allowed to say this without it being bragging, actually, since said brilliance is more other people’s than mine.) My company, business magazine Veckans Affärer, has joined forces with Resumé, the largest Swedish communication industry mag, and B2B agency Hilanders, to start a conversation. A conversation about where the industries that define Sweden (hard and heavy stuff like steel and paper) are heading, and what actually drives their growth in the 21th century.

This discussion, between the communication industry, top management in B2B coorporations, and the odd publicist, has been played out on – yes, yes, yes – all our platforms, of which the site b2bconversations.se might be the quickest one to access. (Or, if you’re one of those Facebook-is-the-new-Internet kind of people, well, here then.) It is in Swedish, so it’s not for everybody, but for Swedes, there is some quite interesting stuff in there.

And on the 7th December, the next step on this journey will be the B2B Conversations seminar, at the lovely Berns Salonger in central Stockholm. Big name speakers, a panel with a couple of communication people with very good resumés who will occasionally ring a funny bell of some sort (Yes, buying a funny bell is my responsibility. I haven’t yet gotten around to getting one, but whatever I choose, it will be spectacular.), oh yes, and wine. Stockholmers, I hope to see you there on the 7th. Do get in touch for discounted tickets, I’m sure I can get you some, but you have to act quickly – we close registration this week.

Coming around a corner, I saw him again, now in an intense discussion with another, similarly clad, youngish man leaning on his bicycle. Walking past them, I saw that The Jogger had produced an A4 leaflet (from where?) from a kitchen design firm and was now vividly describing his dream of minimalist cabinetry or elegantly built-in appliances to his friend The Cyclist. In the rain. A scene which had a certain poetry to it, two men in functional, brightly coloured materials producing aesthetic visions on a wet pavement. After years of coquettish self-hatred in the middle class over our love of sleek interiors, why not get over it and give in to modern life’s strange beauty?

‘Welcome to the new WillSmith.com. In the coming months we’ll be bringing you several ways to communicate with friends and interact with content and information from around the globe.’

willsmith.com

Oh dear.

For another day: let’s talk about the power of daydreaming in digital consumption and, yes, production.

It was never quite like this, but I wish it would have been.

… sometime in the future … but this month, Crédit Lyonnais finally decided that enough was enough. After five years of non-activity – save the odd deposition to cover fees – their bloody-impossible-no-hope-customer algoritms have, correctly, identified me. They’re closing my account for me.

With some types of products and services, consumers are thought to be profoundly boring. Like with bank accounts. Either hyperrational assessors of offers or safety junkies, clinging to a brand because it feels like an institution stuffy enough to lack the imagination needed to do anything remotely risky.

Well, I had a bank account for five years after moving from France, because I liked to toy with the idea that I was back in Stockholm temporarily.

Also, I thought 1 euro per month plus the additional sporadic 27 euro fee (I could never figure out what that one was for, actually), was quite cheap for this pleasurable sensation of faux cosmopolitanism.

I’m not suggesting that this is the most common rationale for keeping a Crédit Lyonnais account. I’m not even suggesting that I’m not an utterly, utterly silly girl. But I think that there’s some kind of poetry in the power of humans to take the most prosaic of services, and just go crazy romanticizing it. And it should be taken into account when trying to figure out the intricacies of ‘consumer behaviour’. That is all.