Tom Fishburne: The Management Cartoonist

stop: the movie

This clever video is really making the rounds right now.  Quite a good parody of the creative process.  Thanks to both Su-May and my friend Ericka for sharing this with me.

silo farming

I've been reading a book on Steve Jobs called "Inside Steve's Brain" by Leander Kahney.  Really interesting distillation of some of the Apple magic. 

I was struck by the product development process, which is cross-functional in the extreme, with designers, engineers, marketers, and programmers all involved early and in a very connected way.

The book contrasted this with a typical step-by-step design process, where products are passed from one team to the next, and there's little back and forth between the departments.

It all got me thinking of the problems caused by rifts between deep functional silos, and prompted this cartoon idea.  I started thinking of the farm analogy after seeing this clever agency video on the source of creative juice.

It's always cracked me up to hear the creative team referred to as "the creatives", as if they're a different species.  In many companies, there's such a lack of understanding of different functional groups that it does feel like different species at times.  Which then makes it oh-too-easy to point the finger at another group when something goes wrong.

At method, we've tried to disband the functional silos by seating everyone at long inter-mixed tables, so you'll sit next to a packaging engineer, a supply chain planner, and a structural designer.  It helps, because you get the good chemistry from interacting all the time, and you often spark more ideas in an impromptu five minute chat than a scheduled cross-functional meeting.  But, it takes work to break the functional silo shackles.

And even more work to go "free range".

little miss corporate

For father's day, my girls gave me a bright yellow t-shirt that says "Mr. Perfect."  I felt pretty darn special.  The next day, I took them to the park and saw a couple guys wearing "Mr. Perfect" t-shirts.  "Wait a minute," I thought defensively, "I thought I was Mr. Perfect."

Suddenly, I started noticing the Mr. Men / Little Miss shirts all over the place, proclaiming all sorts of personality traits: grumpy, happy, naughty, etc. 

It made me think of the corporate world, where there is a whole other set of personality traits.  So, I thought I'd put a few of the worst offenders into a cartoon, in the spirit of the original Roger Hargreaves style.

It makes me want to make up mock t-shirts to wear around the office.

this one time, at Brand Camp

I have some exciting news to report.  I've been burning the midnight oil lately to finish a new cartoon book called This One Time, at Brand Camp.  I wanted to give a sneak peak of the cover and share a few quick details. 

This is my first book since I published Brand Camp in October 2004, and will include over 100 cartoons from the last four years. Following the format of this blog, I'm sharing liner notes and background insights on each cartoon.  It will also have a few cartoons that haven't been published before, and I've drawn a flipbook-style animated cartoon in the margins.  Should be fun.

Jackie Huba, author of "Creating Customer Evangelists" and "Citizen Marketers" has kindly written the forward.

Paul Williams, blogger extraordinaire from the Idea Sandbox, has offered to host my book on the Post2Post Virtual Book Tour.  This is a cool concept, where I'll make 5 stops in late August to some of my favorite marketing bloggers.  Still working out the details, but some of my heroes, including Seth Godin, John Moore, Ben McConnell & Jackie Huba, and Dan Roam are confirmed so far.  Woo hoo.

You can find the book here.

your brand in a recession

 

I've been hearing so much gloom and doom lately about the recession.  And how it spells disaster for marketing in general and premium brands in particular.  Consumers aren't shopping as much, they're only looking for value, blah, blah, blah.

It's obviously true that consumers change behavior during a recession (just look at Wal*Mart's performance versus Target recently).  But, I think there's a big opportunity for brands to adapt to provide a new story.  As Seth Godin describes it:

"Starbucks was the indulgence of a confident person happy to blow $4 on a cup of coffee. Starbucks can become the small indulgence for the person who just traded down to a small rented apartment."

I think the key is to keep your cool, avoid the temptation to drastically cut budgets, and take a fresh look at your brand in the light of the recession.  Rethink the role your brand can plan for your consumers now.

The brand where I work, method, was founded in the dotcom bust, and Inc. recently published an interesting article on companies like method that started in a recession.  It includes this great quote from Eric Ryan, "Starting a business in a recession is like vacationing in the off-season. It's a little less crowded, and everything starts going on sale."

Anyway, all of this reminded me of the classic over-simplified "This is Your Brain on Drugs" public service ad from the 80's (which is embedded in pop culture if you grew up in the US).  But, rather than leave it with the depressing "any questions?" from the original ad, I wanted to flip that convention around with a bit of optimism. 

Because I do think there's room to be optimistic.  Even with bad news on the doorstep.

the organizational bullwhip

In business school, I once joined an exercise called "the beer game".  Not quite as fun as it sounds, but interesting.  Our class piled into a computer simulation lab, and we acted out parts of a brewery supply chain.  We weren't allowed to talk to each other.  We could only place orders and fulfill orders for our part of the supply chain.  You had to guess demand based on the orders coming in.  Everybody else was also guessing, and you tended to overreact.  So, someone overreacting a little at the beginning of the supply chain created a ripple effect that makes you massively off by the end.

I picked up two things. First, that I'm crap at forecasting.  And, second, that there is something called the bullwhip effect, where one action magnifies exponentially downstream, like the cracking of a bullwhip.

I've been thinking there is a bullwhip effect within organizations too.  No one likes change, but of course it's constant in business.  But, when change happens, I've noticed the ripple effect is often harder than the change itself.  Particularly in the immediate chaotic aftermath when everything is up for grabs and people are trying to figure out which way is up.

Anyway, judging by many of the emails I got after my Five Stages of Missing Plan cartoon, I get the sense that there are quite a few "strategic shifts" happening at the moment and people feeling the bullwhip in one way or another.