Nothing stands in the way of progress. The celebrated decisions of a couple decades ago are today’s eyesore, an obstacle to a bright and shiny future. Around this reality has grown the fascinating industry of building demolition. There are a number of ways to remove a building structure from the landscape. Some involve timed explosions, others are a matter of removing structure a piece at a time and carting it away, like large-scale surgery. It is impressive to watch buildings that in many cases took years to complete be edited out of modernity in a fraction of that time. Demolition is a very powerful tool for urban planning, and it allows the erasure of ideas that, with their brick and concrete, were probably thought to be permanent. I came across the video below of a Japanese demolition crew demolishing a building floor by floor, like the Japanese toy Daruma-otoshi. This video has been posted on quite a few sites, but it is what got me thinking about this post:

A few more videos of building demolition, but by precision implosion. The second video below should be noted for its smart, incisive commentary:

Dan Wieden, founder of Wieden+Kennedy, said that line about being stupid when asked about his job by Polly Labarre of Mavericks at Work. I believe that the full quote was “My job is to walk in stupid every day.” His point is that there is no way he could know everything, that he is aware of the obstacle of expertise, and that he will not always have the best ideas. So, coming into work “stupid” keeps his mind open to ideas from anywhere, and open to valuing them when they happened. Clearly, that strategy has worked well for Dan.

I read that Dan Wieden quote at Mavericks at Work a few days ago and have been thinking about it over the weekend. I believe it is a very powerful attitude about how we could approach our work and maintain important perspective. I think there is tremendous value in, every day, going to work ready to learn, anxious for surprises, and anticipating the new. In coming to work looking for change, for improvement, and to challenge convention. We need to go to work knowing that ideas can come from anywhere, and should, and that those ideas should be acknowledged, encouraged, and supported… arriving every day with the intent of building this, of making it happen, of not standing in the way. Every day we need to know that somebody, somewhere is better than us… and that is totally cool because we want to learn from them. We need to come in every day hopeful, hungry, and focused on being in a different place than we were yesterday, on being in a different place this afternoon than this morning. We need to spend more time listening than talking, more time trying to understand and see from alternative points of view and work to avoid reaction and to lessen our reliance on instinct and instead give ourselves the time to own our decisions, and be thoughtful about it. We should spend as much energy on building our team as we do building our careers, and realize that our team is better when it is made up of people who just might be, and probably need to be, smarter than us. Instead of adopting the persona of an expert, we should try that of a student. Being a student was fun, everything was about newness and possibilities. Being an expert is limiting.

We all see the well-worn grain of company “culture” begin to show in ourselves and the others we work with. We see the behaviors that are counter to doing things better, to doing them the right way, and we allow this to happen. We see people who have stopped learning, people who no longer have wonder and curiosity and no longer have passion and drive. This is a form of giving up, or retiring from what is important. This is not an option. Dan Wieden nailed it.

In a similar vein, I found an excellent, direct and honest speech by Dan Wieden on the W+K London blog Welcome to Optimism, which I have followed for a long time. Both the speech and the blog are totally worth reading.

Luis de Sousa put together a really interesting piece for The Oil Drum that captures a number of perspectives on the value of human labor power as compared to the power generated by a barrel of oil, and goes some distance in explaining why oil is such an efficient energy source, and why we are addicted to it. The post is fascinating, especially as the conversation gets increasingly complex, so definitely read it. Here’s a quick overview of some of the calculations that inform the comparison:

• One barrel of oil is equivalent to about 25,000 hours of human labor, which is about 12.5 years at 40 hours of labor per week.
• The average American uses about 60 barrels of oil or oil equivalent (coal and gas) per year. This is about 360 billion joules of energy.
• For a human to generate labor equivalent to the energy created by a barrel of oil would take an average of 10,000 hours would cost about $200,000 at $20/hour.
• A barrel of oil generates 1,700 kwh. A human averages 150 kwh per year.

I suppose a subtext of this discussion is the hard reality that we are still very challenged to offer serious, viable alternatives to oil as an energy source. This reality, coupled with a history that has seen industry, and by extension our economy, establish and refine an oil based energy infrastructure over most of the last century, perhaps explains why we still struggle with energy policy and change. Oil has become an integral, integrated part of not only our economy, but also our culture and society. Creating change in this situation is analogous to turning the proverbial freight train.

Came across this video yesterday and was mesmerized by it. I grew up skateboarding but was not particularly good at it. So, cool on one level by the moves these guys are pulling off, things I could never have dreamed of attempting without suffering a massive concussion (which I did, several times) or a broken wrist.

Cool on another level is the quality of the video. This short was shot with an HD Red One digital video camera, which is considered to be the current pinnacle, of sorts, of accessible high definition technology. The video above is incredible in detail, quality, and richness. It is not so much that it is film-like, but that it is something beyond film.

Definitely a highlight of my rather long day today was seeing these images taken by the ESA’s Mars Express robotic probe. The images depict the Echus Chasma series of canyons mentioned in the title, and I find them absolutely stunning. Planetary geologists believe that these chasms were formed by flowing ground water, and that they were carved over thousands of years. More images:

I absolutely geek out seeing the surface of Mars in such incredible detail. Our base of knowledge for Mars is growing rapidly, and it seems that with the Phoenix Mars Explorer, Mars Surveyor, and ESA’s Mars Express we have a trifecta of data and images streaming to us from the red planet.

On July 11th schneiderism crossed the one year mark, and is closing in on 250 posts. It has been a great experience. This effort has introduced me to and allowed me to cross paths with smart, cool people from all over the world. As an outlet, researching for schneiderism has brought me to amazing stories and discoveries, and kept me on the hunt for the bonds between design, innovation and leadership. It has also been a good time. Thanks for visiting.

Sleep is totally overrated.

John F. Schneider - author of schneiderism

Catching up on the deluge that is my RSS reader lately, I came across this image from APOD of the Caloris basin (also called Caloris Planitia) on Mercury recently snapped by the Mercury Messenger robotic explorer. It’s huge, and one of the largest impact basins from an asteroid-sized object in our solar system. The basin measures over 1,500 km across. The image above is a false color image in order to enhance details not visible in a true color image. The yellowish object dominating the image is obviously the impact crater of the Caloris basin, but the orange spots above denote volcanic activity on Mercury, which is new evidence provided by Messenger that the smooth plains of Mercury are actually lava flows.

I had previously written about Mercury and NASA’s Messenger mission here and here.

One company’s vision of the automobiles of the future. Volkswagen recently launched Volkswagen 2028, a website that explores VW’s perspective on a number of issues and how those issues might manifest themselves through design twenty years from now, a perspective rooted deeply in Volkswagen’s longer term brand strategy (read that as marketing). This is not so much about showing us futuristic concepts as much as demonstrating the response to different needs, constraints, and technologies. Responses that are increasingly important to people. Specifically, Volkswagen provides us with some detail in how, in the near future, they might respond to issues of sustainability, networked mobility, customization and personalization, and accident prevention. All of the concepts offer hypothetical technologies that either replace the traditional human-car interaction, or enhance it by steamlining and focusing the action of driving. It’s a good exercise, and I have no doubt that the issues and ideas addressed by VW here are the beginnings of some pretty sophisticated changes that we will see in automobiles. While I imagine that all automobile manufacturers are digging into these concepts, at least to some degree, it is interesting to see Volkswagen put it out there in such a cohesive and comprehensive way, though this is clearly as much about marketing as it is about showcasing advanced engineering thinking.

Matt Dickman recently conducted a really interesting reader poll over at his blog Techno//Marketer to get a sense of what people felt the most influential medium might be. The results are presented in the graph above. I believe it is a safe bet that his readers skew massively to the internet, but I believe they are still representative of the paradigmatic changes that have occurred in the greater media landscape. The broader theme here, that the ways in which people interact with information is changing, is something I am actively exploring myself. What is absolutely not surprising from Matt’s survey is the incredibly low performance of newspapers and radio. The EBITDA of newspapers has been trending down for years, and many historically prominent rags are facing irrelevancy to their audiences. Audience preferences and expectations with regards to how they engage information is changing, this interaction is very fluid, and while some struggle to adapt to this reality others have been slow to respond and are suffering the consequences of a dwindling subscription base and shrinking advertising revenues. That spells doom for those newspapers. The same is happening in radio, and the EBITDA of radio is tracking similarly to that of newspapers. At the heart of this is the reality that we are increasingly moving away from having things pushed at us, and increasing moving toward technologies and mediums that allow us to engage media and information in ways that are dynamic and customizable to our preferences. Also, there is an informational frequency issue and newspapers, especailly, have struggled to compete with the 24/7 nature of the informational engagement model of the web. Those that have moved to a comprehensive web strategy have struggled to find an appropriate revenue model, especially one that can scale. We are watching media evolution and the survival of the fittest, of the most innovative.

Going back perhaps a decade, many newspaper publishers failed to appropriately survey the landscape for strategic risk to their organizations. As a result, they missed important opportunities to substantively investigate and innovate their business models. The web has moved incredibly quickly and efficiently in becoming pervasive in our society, in our culture, and many publishers now face the incredible challenge of trying to change a business model when it is absolutely too late.