Hasta La Creative!

Location, location, location. It’s more than a Realtors’ call to arms today. Some of the nation’s most influential business leaders are promoting the value of face time and physical proximity.

“Opportunities flow through congregations of people. Those with good ideas and information tend to hang out with one another,” Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn wrote recently. He added, “Collaboration happens best when information and ideas can bounce quickly to and from all the interested parties, ideally in the same physical place.”

Maybe Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer got Hoffman’s memo (or the two were on already the same page). Because here’s an except from a newly delivered internal Yahoo! HR document, acquired by Kara Swisher at AllThingsD:

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.

Yes, Mayer is calling for all Yahoos to gather daily in the same space and work as a team to advance the ball. Of course, some may be asking themselves what century Mayer is living in. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, for one, countered, “Automattic is 100% committed to being distributed. 130 of our 150 people are outside of San Francisco.”

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s New ‘No Telecommuting’ Policy Is A Giant Step Backwards For Working Parents ow.ly/hZQtU

— Mommyish.com (@mommyishdotcom) February 24, 2013

What do you think? Have you had positive or poor experiences working from a distance?

I worked remotely for BFG Communications for a short time. Also, AdPulp and Bonehook both rely on distributed teams to get the job done. So, you might say I am a big proponent of this model. You’d be correct, but I am also keenly aware of the value of the live team dynamic. Skype isn’t the same as being in a room together, and email or IM isn’t the same as working through a problem verbally. We’re human beings, we need to see each other laugh, smile and frown. We need to rely on one another, like wolves.

For me, the question isn’t whether to work in the same office or city or not. The question is how frequently does the team gather? The more often the better, because “out of sight, out of mind,” is real. In my opinion, a well functioning distributed team needs to meet regularly in person to help strengthen the human bonds that drive important projects and business forward.

The post Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer Gathers The Troops appeared first on AdPulp.

Threadless is on the cover of Inc.

Jake Nickell and Jeffrey Kalmikoff, two north side of Chicago graphic designers figured out how to create community and a thriving business in the same move. Academics, venture capitalists and the entrepreneurs who read Inc. are paying attention.

Threadless is at the vanguard of a new innovation model that is quietly reshaping a host of industries. Whether it’s called user innovation, crowdsourcing, or open source, it means drastically rethinking your relationship with your customers. “Threadless completely blurs that line of who is a producer and who is a consumer,” says Karim Lakhani, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “The customers end up playing a critical role across all its operations: idea generation, marketing, sales forecasting. All that has been distributed.”

Threadless runs design competitions on their site where members submit their ideas for T-shirts — hundreds each week — and then vote on which ones they like best. Threadless produces the most popular designs and sells them via their online store and at their new retail location in Lakeside.

Revenue is growing 500 percent a year, despite the fact that the company has never advertised, employed no professional designers, used no modeling agency or fashion photographers, has no sales force, and enjoys no retail distribution, except to their own store. Margins run above 30 percent, because community members tell them precisely which shirts to make – and every product eventually sells out. Threadless has never produced a flop.

Microsoft badly wants a piece of the online services and advertising action, estimated to be worth $80 billion a year by 2010. But not bad enough to pay $35 a share for Yahoo.

Microsoft’s bid to acquire Yahoo ended yesterday at 4:00 p.m. in a letter from Steve Balmer to Jerry Yang.

“I still believe, even today, that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table. But clearly a deal is not to be.”

My translation: What, our money isn’t good enough? Up yours, Yang.

“This process has underscored our unique and valuable strategic position,” Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang said.

“Yahoo is not a strategy; it’s a part of a strategy,” Ballmer told employees on Thursday.

[via The Seattle Times]

I have not purchased gas from Exxon since the Valdez oil spill. Yes, I’m a grudge holder.

According to the The Wall Street Journal, forces inside the oil giant are working to move the tanker in the right direction (not than anything Exxon does will ever win me back).

A majority of 300 adult members of the wealthy Rockefeller family, influential shareholders of Exxon, voted to support four shareholder resolutions at the company’s annual meeting in late May. The proposals include urging the company to create an independent chairman post, cut greenhouse-gas emissions and examine whether Exxon should take a more active role in developing sustainable energy technologies.

While most of these issues have been raised before by shareholder activists, the addition of voices from the Rockefeller family, who are well known for supporting environmental causes, adds considerable weight to the calls for change. Several members of the family will be holding a news conference Wednesday to discuss their concerns about Exxon’s direction.

Media entrepreneur, Om Malik, had a heart attack three months ago. Since then, he’s quit smoking, consumed less meat and started an exercise routine. He’s also retooling how he works.

Simplification Through Elimination

I was reading a review of the Macbook Air over on Macworld when I realized that the machine and post-recovery me have a lot in common. I have to be very careful as to how I use my mental and physical resources, for there is a high risk of relapse. Similarly, the Macbook Air comes with miniscule amount of storage space, so one needs to be careful about how to use it. The machine’s battery power limitations remind me of how much time I have to devote to work on a daily basis.

It has been hard to use the Macbook Air as my primary computer, just as it’s been hard to change all those pesky “little things.” Indeed, the Macbook Air is an acquired taste. It’s also an apt reflection of an effective “simplification through elimination” strategy.

Three months on, I am looking to eliminate a number of things from life: excessive public appearances, too much travel and many, many RSS feeds. I am going to cut down the effort I spend on certain projects and focus on making the most of what we have at hand.

The Macbook Air as simplifier is an intriguing idea. Maybe I need to get one. I noticed in response to Om’s piece that Steve Rubel says he only keeps two apps open on his desktop at a time–Safari and Mail. I currently have 12 apps open.

Charles Handy, an Irish author specialising in organisational behaviour and management, used the stage NPR’s Marketplace provided him to call for reform.

The tall towers that house our corporations are the new palaces of our day, the places where real power resides, but those towers are full of paradoxes. Made of glass, you can’t see inside. They’re pillars of our democracy, but they are run as totalitarian states. Their names are reduced to a set of initials. Their leaders are unknown to those outside. They are accountable, for the most part, to other institutions that sit in similarly anonymous towers. To the average person, they are foreign entities shrouded in mystery. It is no wonder that we look at them with suspicion, touched with envy.

When you see it laid bare like this, it’s hard to justify what we in Adlandia often do. Namely, the putting of a pretty face and a nice voice on top of these lurking, shadowy entities.

Mavericks at Work explores a new addition to the workplace lexicon—humbition.

What’s humbition? It’s a term Polly and I first heard from Jane Harper, a nearly 30-year veteran of IBM. It is, she explains, the subtle blend of humility and ambition that drives the most successful leaders—an antidote to the know-it-all hubris that affects so many business stars. “The more I know,” she says sensibly, “the more I know there is to know.”

I’m sure we all work with and for people who could improve themselves with this advice. Not that we don’t need to take a spoon or two of it ourselves, just for good measure.

Cherryflava points to a story in Architectural Record about design firms working to foster a culture of innovation.

Hire naive misfits who argue with you; encourage failure; avoid letting client input limit your vision; and fully commit to risky ventures. This is an extreme approach to fostering innovation in an otherwise relatively static office environment that was proposed by Robert I. Sutton. Writing in the Harvard Business Review in 2001, Sutton argued that fresh perspectives derive from mavericks with wildly diverse backgrounds and no preconceptions who challenge the status quo, champion their own ideas, and illuminate the metaphorical darkness.

Sutton points out that ignoring client input may seem counterintuitive, but clients can’t always imagine what’s possible. Ted Hoff, an inventor of the microprocessor, echoed that sentiment the next year, also in Harvard Business Review: “Don’t do what the customer wants; do something better.”

“Avoid letting client input limit your vision” is pretty advanced thinking (that might work in the academy), but also a necessary coping mechanism in advertising, because there are always ten reasons why you can’t do something, for every one why you can.

Steve Rubel calls content a commodity and says the “Attention Crash” is real and that it’s only going to get worse. Of course, he wouldn’t say those things without offering a remedy.

Enter the Digital Curator.

Information overload makes it difficult to separate junk from art. It requires a certain finesse and expertise – a fine tuned, perhaps trained eye. Google, memetrackers such as Techmeme and social news sites like digg are not curators. They’re aggregators – and there’s a big difference.

The call of the curator requires people who are selfless and willing to act as sherpas and guides. They’re identifiable subject matter experts who dive through mountains of digital information and distill it down to its most relevant, essential parts. Digital Curators are the future of online content. Brands, media companies and dedicated individuals can all become curators. Further, they don’t even need to create their own content, just as a museum curator rarely hangs his/her own work next to a Da Vinci. They do, however, need to be subject matter experts.

Rubel goes on to say curators are not editors. I veer off at that point. The act of sifting through vast collections and offering the juiciest parts is, in fact, a form of editing. I’ll also challenge his claim that brands need to be “subject matter experts.” Not exactly. But they do need to know who the “subject matter experts” are, and then hire them to curate and/or create content. Redken’s OutofTown.tv, where they turn to Flavorpill for expertise, is a good example.

In this day of quarterly numbers and short-term decisions, it’s refreshing to see a company move counter to this trend. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google is such a company.

Messrs. Brin, Page and Schmidt made it starkly clear in Google’s so-called “Owner’s Manual,” filed as part of the company’s IPO prospectus in April 2004, that they would not shy away from making big long-term bets at the expense of short-term gains.

“If opportunities arise that might cause us to sacrifice short-term results but are in the best long-term interest of our shareholders, we will take those opportunities,” the document says. “We will have the fortitude to do this. We would request that our shareholders take the long-term view.”

Google shares have sunk 22% in the past month as the search and ad giant looks to move into the mobile business by purchasing at auction rights to the 700 MHz spectrum. The price of entry is expected to be in the billions.