https://www.facebook.com/events/334862703229224/

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The Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright
Written as a series of “fellowship assets” meant to guide the apprentices who worked with him at his school, Taliesin.

An honest ego in a healthy body

An eye to see nature

A heart to feel nature

Courage to follow nature

The sense of proportion (humor)

Appreciation of work as idea and idea as work

Fertility of imagination

Capacity for faith and rebellion

Disregard for commonplace (inorganic) elegance

Instinctive cooperation

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The Marketer: Seth Godin
The always insightful Seth Godin shared his “Unforgivable Manifesto” with artist Hugh MacLeod a few years ago.

1. The greatest innovations appear to come from those that are self-reliant. Individuals who go right to the edge and do something worth talking about. Not solo, of course, but as instigators of a team. In two words: don’t settle.

2. The greatest marketers do two things: they treat customers with respect and they measure.

3. The greatest salespeople understand that people resist change and that ‘no’ is the single easiest way to do that.

4. The greatest bloggers blog for their readers, not for themselves.

5. There really isn’t much a of ‘short run’. It quickly becomes yesterday. The long run, on the other hand, sticks around for quite a while.

6. The internet doesn’t forget. And sooner or later, the internet finds out.

7. Everyone is a marketer, even people and organizations that don’t market. They’re just marketers who are doing it poorly.

8. Amazing organizations and people receive rewards that more than make up for the effort required to be that good.

9. There is no number 9.

10. Mass taste is rarely good taste.

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The Designer: John Maeda
RISD president John Maeda elaborates on 10 laws for business, design, and life:

1. Reduce: The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.

2. Organize: Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.

3. Time: Savings in time feel like simplicity.

4. Learn. Knowledge makes everything simpler.

5. Differences: Simplicity and complexity need each other.

6. Context: What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.

7. Emotion: More emotions are better than less.

8. Trust: In simplicity we trust.

9. Failure: Some things can never be made simple.

10. The One: Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

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The Writer: Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy’s “rules for life,” originally written when he was 18 years old, do contain some useful gems.

Get up early (five o’clock).

Go to bed early (nine to ten o’clock).

Eat little and avoid sweets.

Try to do everything by yourself.

Have a goal for your whole life, a goal for one section of your life, a goal for a shorter period and a goal for the year; a goal for every month, a goal for every week, a goal for every day, a goal for every hour and for every minute, and sacrifice the lesser goal to the greater.

Keep away from women.

Kill desire by work.

Be good, but try to let no one know it.

Always live less expensively than you might.

Change nothing in your style of living even if you become ten times richer.

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The Company: Apple
When Steve Jobs went on medical leave in 2009 and financial analysts were making dire predictions, Apple COO Tim Cook boiled the company’s culture down to what was essentially an 8-point manifesto.

1. We believe that we’re on the face of the earth to make great products.

2. We’re constantly focusing on innovating.

3. We believe in the simple, not the complex.

4. We believe we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.

5. We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can focus on the few that are meaningful to us.

6. We believe in deep collaboration and cross pollination in order to innovate in a way others cannot.

7. We don’t settle for anything other than excellence in any group in the company.

8. We have the self-honesty to admit when we’re wrong and the courage to change.

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Hewlett Packard
HP’s creation story is two guys working out of a garage. Innovation is a core value. What follows are the Rules of the Garage:

Believe you can change the world.

Work quickly, keep the tools unlocked, work whenever.

Know when to work alone and when to work together.

Share — tools, ideas.

Trust your colleagues. No politics.

No bureaucracy. (These are ridiculous in a garage.)

The customer defines a job well done.

Radical ideas are not bad ideas.

Invent different ways of working.

Make a contribution every day. If it doesn’t contribute, it doesn’t leave the garage.

Believe that together we can do anything.

Invent.

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The Sporting Life Blog

We believe that life is to be lived in an extraordinary fashion.

We believe that art, music, and literature are the foundations of society.

We believe that living well is a state of mind.

We sing the love of speed, adventure, and danger.

We live life with courage and audacity.

We believe that the ultimate rebellion is in the mind, and by the example we set with the actions we take.

We believe in physical, mental, and emotional fitness.

We believe we are the guardians of the Earth.

We believe that class and manners are invaluable commodities.

We are always Gentlemen and Ladies…or at least try to be.

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Stormhoek:

We’re a small South African vineyard. We make the best South African wine for the money, end of story.

We believe in punching above our weight. In this regard, we’ve been pretty fortunate. We’re known for trying out relatively “out there” marketing ideas. We do that for a reason. When you are a small company in a relatively isolated part of the word, thousands of miles away from your main customer base, you frankly have no other choice.

We believe that even a small company like ours can change the world, even in a small way. Why shouldn’t a small wine company in South Africa see large international companies like Google and Microsoft as their competition? Why should the battle only be confined to other small South African vineyards? It makes no sense.

“It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it.” There’s more to life than wine. Sure, we love wine, we love making it, but it’s a big world out there. We try to make allies not just with other wine geeks, but with other interesting people trying to do amazing things. This is why we’re so drawn to the internet. That’s where passionate people invariably head for.

On one level, we take ourselves very seriously. On another level, we try to keep a sense of humor about it all. We try to “keep it real”, which is another way of saying, we try to keep it interesting, as much for ourselves as anyone else.

We believe the wine business can use a good kick in the pants. We certainly try to do our part. Burying oneself in the usual blanket of wine clichés to us is not a viable marketing strategy. With hundreds of thousands of vineyards out there, and only so many distribution channels available, you face two stark choices: Either rise above the clutter, or face a lifetime of misery and woe.

We live in extremely interesting times. The internet has changed everything. Our story is proof of that. Get with the program or reconcile yourself to entrepreneurial oblivion.

It’s just wine, People. Sure, we make excellent product. But let’s not get too carried away. At the end of the day, even the best Bordeaux is just fermented grape juice. What’s more interesting to us is the conversations people have over a bottle of wine. There’s a human element to all this we find utterly mysterious and fascinating.

You only live once, and not for very long. Try to make a difference while you’re here. It isn’t just about the money, and it sure as heck isn’t about making “a good product at a good price”. It’s about doing something that matters. It’s about doing something that resonates with both yourself and the people you care about.

We humans are incredible beings. Doing something that continually reminds us of this simple, basic truth is where the real fun is.

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These aren’t the sort of things likely to show up in an ad but it doesn’t hurt to have it show up in one way or another on a website, blog, brochure… or just on the wall by your desk.

You can easily see how something like this could be beneficial to your organization when it comes to understanding where it stands in the marketplace, how to explain it to people without boring them to death or over promising on what you have to offer. And it helps you define what your company actually stands for. What’s your company about?

When company’s “story” gets told by your employees, in their words and deeds, and passed along in a flash from a single consumer to consumers around the world, it better be great. Marketers had better think in terms of a whole, coherent, compelling story, with the customer in the middle of your company’s motivation.

David Riemer, former marketing director at Yahoo!, talks about this subject extensively: http://bit.ly/g4UTLj

best wishes,
Barrett Rossie

Business is relationships.

Leadership is storytelling.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/why-peter-gubers-book-tel_b_829773.html