Steve Jobs gave an interview as part of a Smithsonian oral history project that’s one of the greatest things I’ve ever read, full stop. If you read this (along with the Playboy interview I’m about to mention), and you read between the lines, too, you’ll know what Steve Jobs knew.

One of the things Steve Jobs knew was that motive matters. Your motive is what’s in your heart and your mind when you’re making or doing whatever it is you make or do that people pay you for.

Walter Isaacson, in his Jobs bio, quotes from another equally lengthy and superb interview with Jobs, from 1985, for Playboy. Jobs’ recalls what his dad told him about one of the hallmarks of a real craftsman.

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

That’s a long run-up to my point: I had Steve Jobs on my mind when I visited the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, to see an exhibition on furniture maker Sam Maloof. In The Wall Street Journal article that resulted from my visit, I couldn’t help but reference good ol’ Steve.

On the surface my article is about Maloof, an American midcentury woodworker-modernist who became a legend in his own time. Beyond that however, it’s about integrity and motives and bringing soulfulness to your work. Since it lives outside The Wall Street Journal‘s pay wall, you can read it for free here.

Havana, Cuba: where a Yankee imperialist *is* a Yankee imperialist.

There’s a great expression in American English: “Where you stand depends on where you sit.”

It means: your point of view is probably highly correlated with what you think your place in the world is.

It’s a simple idea, but I have found it extremely powerful to keep it in mind when working on place branding jobs, or doing any kind of corporate identity work that involves getting to know the culture of an organization or a nation. And I’ve been grateful — and amused — whenever I’ve stumbled across something that makes me realize my perspective is just that: a perspective, not [necessarily] the gospel truth.

Example 1:

Once I wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal about the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, England. When I visited the museum, I found one placard on the wall which put the American Revolution somewhat differently than did my childhood history texts in Southern California:

Colonial rebels: The American War of Independence

By 1765 thirteen very different English-speaking colonies stretched along America’s east coast. But, from Georgia in the south to Massachusetts in the north, one thing united them. They disliked Britain imposing taxes on them.

The colonists kept spreading westwards, seizing land and starting wars with the local people. They expected British troops to defend them. But they objected when parliament tried to recover its defence costs by taxing them.

And so on. Not inaccurate — but certainly framed from an angle alien to the one I grew up accepting as reality.

Example 2:

In Havana, Cuba, the one-time presidential palace now houses the Museum of the Revolution. Outside the museum is the tank which supposedly (but why shouldn’t it be so?) Fidel Castro himself drove at the Bay of Pigs invasion. The text is all about Yankee imperialist invaders and heroic rebuffs. So, too, is the placard beside the pieces of Maj. Rudolph Anderson’s U-2 plane, which the Cubans managed to shoot down in 1962 just prior to the Cuban missile crisis. To an American it’s entertaining to read. Sure, it’s propagandistic, but it makes you realize there’s another side to the coin.

But my point is simple: I always try to remember that mine isn’t the only way of looking at things, and — possibly even more vitally — that people’s perspectives are always as real and truthful to them as mine is to me.

I envy you who are about to watch this speech for the first time. You’re not likely to run across it elsewhere, and it took me some hunting to unearth. God knows why because it’s absolutely effing brilliant from start to finish. Phil Collins (not the drummer) was a speechwriter for Tony Blair. He gave this highly entertaining hour-long talk to a London writers’ group called 26 on 16 October 2008. In it, he offers not only candid and hilarious behind-the-scenes tales from No. 10 Downing Street (apparently the prime minister liked to work on his speeches “wearing some combination of boxer shorts, Ugg boots and track suit”) but also glorious tips and insights that can be extrapolated to the creative process generally (“The moment you know you’ve matured as a writer is when you delete a great line because it’s not relevant.”). Humble, eloquent, thoughtful.

Note: some of the best stuff comes in the Q&A, which forms roughly the second half of the video clip.

Annual 26 speech 2008 from Tom Clarkson on Vimeo.

PS Never mind, but at 56:50 of the tape, that’s me in the audience winning a DVD with a smart-ass (but correct) answer to the question who said “History will absolve me”. I was trying to explain that nobody said it, exactly, because it was Fidel Castro who said it and he said it in Spanish (“La historia me absolverá”) in his 4-hour (!) courtroom speech defending himself in the Moncada barracks bombing trial in 1953 . Which I just happened to know because I’m weird.

Just as people often have a tendency to want to blurt out exactly what’s on their mind, so do companies seem to want to tell you, in their slogans and straplines, exactly what they want you to know about them, and in the least poetic, least inspiring, most pedestrian language possible. The unfortunate result of this bad habit is a surfeit of boring offical utterances like “The world’s local bank” (which at least has an idea in it) or “The simple plumbing solution” (simple and solution are always in extremely heavy rotation; I wish I held shares in those two words!).

The missing ingredient, in a word, is musicality — just, quite plainly, the way the words sound. Rhythm. Cadence. Tone. Timbre. Vibrato. Phrasing. When it comes to a slogan, these things matter not as much but MORE than the content. They are the forgotten criteria of sloganeering.

In his book You Are The Message, Roger Ailes gives an anecdote about Mark Twain which illustrates my point. Twain, trying to get dressed one morning, pulled out three shirts in a row that were short a button:

Twain flew into a rage, swearing like a stevedore. When he was through, he was startled to see his wife standing at the door, fuming in her own way at his intemperance. Carefully, slowly, and without a trace of emotion, she repeated every obscene word just uttered by her husband….When she was through, she stood impassive and silent, hoping her display would shame Twain. Instead, with a twinkle in his eye, he puffed his cigar and said, “My dear, you have the words, but you don’t have the music.”

There you go: it’s what you say and the way that you say it.

Something I’ve just run across has stopped me in my tracks and compelled me to write a quick post about it. If you work with marketing or branding in any way, this idea — it’s kind of a thought experiment, or in NLP terms a “re-frame” — may interest you, also.

First, two seconds of background…. I’m working this morning on my chapter on measuring and monitoring place brands for the upcoming third edition of Destination Branding. Doing some reading and research for it. I discovered that in the Q4 2005 edition of what was then called the Anholt-GMI Nation Brands Index (which was less than a year old at the time), a company called Brand Finance added “a new and very exciting dimension” to the NBI: a financial valuation of the 32 country brands in the index.

Now, I’m a huge sceptic of brand valuation — or, to put it more exactly, I’m a vociferous champion of the limits of brand valuation; brand valuation can be useful, but mostly by examining its delta, its change over time (the absolute figures brand valuation comes up with, in the context of place branding at least, I don’t trust [speaking of provenance] for a New York minute).

Having said that (as Larry David would say), I love the idea behind the “royalty relief” method Brand Finance uses to perform the valuations:

This approach assumes a country does not own its own brand and calculates how much it would need to pay to license it from a third party. The present value of that stream of (hypothetical) brand contribution payments represents the value of the brand.

Even if the figure arrived at by the valuers has little more validity than a finger in the breeze, “royalty relief” is still a great way to think about your brand — whether you’re a place, a company or an individual person: if somebody else owned your brand, your good name, how much would he or she charge you to rent it?

Or, to turn it around and add action implications, if you owned your brand (as you, in point of fact, probably do), and wanted to rent it out, will what your doing right now, today, this week, this month, mean you can charge higher rent for your brand in the future?

Follow up: As if to confirm my point about the delta being the thing, Simon Anholt’s just written a piece for Foreign Policy about how Obama raised America’s brand value by $2 trillion.

What I want you to notice is how it manages to be: 1) real; 2) helpful; 3) humourous but not jokey (good, since Innocent’s cornered the market in ha-ha quips). It conveys, “Yeah, okay, this is a computer talking to you, obviously, but behind that computer are real people who are competent and caring. And whom you can get a hold if you really need to.” Compare and contrast with the typical: DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE bla bla bla, and the brand value of taking this higher — and not any harder — road becomes crystal clear.

Hello,

It’s Little MOO again. I thought you’d like to know, the following items from your order are now in the mail:

1 x MiniCards (100)

You requested Royal Mail delivery, which means it should reach you between 1 and 2 business days.

Remember, I’m just a bit of software, so if you have any questions regarding your order, the best place to start is with our Frequently Asked Questions. We keep the answers here:

http://www.moo.com/help/

If you’re still not sure, contact customer services, (who are real people) at:

https://secure.moo.com/service/

Thanks for ordering with MOO – we hope you love your order,

Thanks,
Little MOO, Print Robot

MOO
“We love to print”

More surprising to me was the thought — obvious enough when you think about it — that “trial volunteers who got real medication were also subject to placebo effects; the act of taking a pill was itself somehow therapeutic.”

What fascinated me most was this inset box, and what it suggests about design and branding:

What turns a dummy pill into a catalyst for relieving pain, anxiety, depression or the tremors or Parkinson’s disease? The brain’s own healing mechanisms, unleashed by the belief that a phoney medication is the real thing. The most important ingredient in any placebo is the doctor’s bedside manner, but the colour of a tablet can boost the effectiveness even of genuine medications.

Yellow pills make the most effective anti-depressants, like little doses of parmaceutical sunshine.

Red pills seem to contain power and can give you a more stimulating kick.

White tablets — particularly those labelled ‘antacid’ — are superior for soothing ulcers, even when they contain nothing but lactose.

The colour green reduces anxiety, adding more chill to the pill.

More is better. Placebos taken four times a day deliver greater relief than those taken twice daily.

Branding matters. Placebos stamped or packaged with widely recognized trademarks are more effective than ‘generic’ placebos.

In other news, buying branded handbags gives consumers more pleasure than buying generic bags. Anyway, read the original article if you want.

Victor Niederhoffer

Value created | Ballyhoo deflated | Damsels rescued

I was thinking of this because my friend Rhymer Rigby, knowing I’m an ‘identity guy,’ talked to me whilst researching a piece he wrote for the Financial Times. His article is about how people use business cards to represent themselves. My quoted contribution is meager –

“It’s an opportunity to be expressive and wear your thoughtfulness on your sleeve, and most of the time it’s a missed opportunity,” says Mr Hildreth.

– and I’d like to expand on my thoughts here.

By thoughtfulness I mean, for instance, leaving off the fax machine number. When was the last time you received a fax, or sent one? Yet, when was the last time you tried to ring someone up, got an earful of carrier tone, and realized you dialed the fax number by mistake?

Exactly.

My business card has the following information: name, email address, website URL, mobile phone number, and the three social networks I use most avidly. There’s some personality in the form of my doodles (which I’d been attempting, I think rather unsuccessfully, to incorporate into my corporate identity). I have found oftentimes I give somebody a card and a couple of days later he or she connects to me on LinkedIn or Facebook. The system seems to work.

The same rule applies to business cards, I suppose, as applies to good writing or good conversation: leave out the boring parts.

Postscript: Cheers to Wayne Elise for Tweeting about this post (and for partially inspiring it in some conversations we had last weekend). I could mention that Wayne — who probably doesn’t have actual printed business cards — identifies himself in his email signoff as ‘head honcho’ at Charisma Arts. I find this wonderful. It says exactly what his role is and communicates something of who he his as a person; it also suggests (i.e., communicates indirectly) far more about the company itself than would ‘CEO’ or ‘Founder’ or ‘President’, all of which would be equally descriptively accurate but far less evocative of the kind of outfit Charisma Arts is. Wayne’s title shows, furthermore, how personality can coincide with clarity and amplify it; one wouldn’t be perfectly sure what the ‘President’ did or didn’t do (or even whether her or she was a sole proprietor putting on airs), but if you’re talking to the ‘head honcho’ then you’ll probably guess the score pretty accurately: small and/or informal company closely run by one characterful individual.

It’s a hoax. ‘Karen’ is an actress named Ditte Arnth Jorgensen. It was perpetrated by Visit Denmark as a way of positioning the country. VisitDenmark CEO Dorte Kiilerich defended the controversial viral ad in the Danish newspaper Politiken:

Karen’s story shows that Denmark is a broad-minded country where you can do what you want. The film is a good example of independent, dignified, Danish women who dare to make their own choices…We tell a good and sweet story about a mature, responsible woman who lives in a free society and shoulders the responsibility of her actions. And she uses a modern social medium.

Most commentators either are agreeing with Ms Kiilerich, saying, yes, it’s a helpful portrayal of Denmark, or disagreeing with her, saying that’s the wrong story to be telling about Denmark.

I say both sides are wrong.

They’re wrong because they’re looking at the content of the message. They should be looking at the fact of the message.

Anthropologists (and economists) use a concept called honest signals. (It’s a wonderful concept; I’ll surely write more about it another time; read a primer here). And the honest signal that’s being sent here is that a public body in Denmark had the mindset and the moxy (that’s an Americanism for wherewithal, for testicular fortitude) to dream up, script, approve the script for, produce, and launch this particular ad.

And that, frankly, that honest signal, says a lot about Denmark. It says Denmark is not like other places. It says Denmark thinks differently. It says Denmark is not Russia, Egypt, America, Ireland, Mexico, Malaysia or countless other countries whose tourism departments definitely would NOT have created that ad.

That, I believe, is the real message of the Danish mother seeking.

(Not a real festival, by the way.)

The work that I did with Saffron on the national image of Lithuania featured an extended rationale, a robust strategy and a set of clever tactics for cajoling, fostering and earning a new-and-improved reputation for the not-so-small northeastern European country of 3.5 million whose big city of Vilnius was/is European Capital of Culture this year.

The 176-page four-colour printed edition also featured our ideas for a possible design style that the country could adopt. But the Lithuanian Development Agency (our client) did not include that graphical, fold-out appendix in the hi-res PDF Selling Lithuania Smartly: A guide to the creative-strategic development of an economic image for the country which they made available online earlier this year.

To download the complete, final, unexpurgated volume of recommendations, including the appendix of notional designs, click here.