[ Baltimore: To Be Determined ]

Behind our offices there used to be a giant mural. It featured the bricks of our building melding into a stage curtain, which in turn parted to reveal the prow of the USS Constellation. The ship cut through churning water. The Inner Harbor stood proud in the background.

Actually, the mural is still there; it’s just hidden. No longer visible to cars streaming toward Baltimore’s stadiums, the mural is now part of an alley behind a new building that will house...whatever. And while new construction should be welcomed for the jobs, opportunity, and sheer energy it brings to our city, it’s sad to see this proud image of Baltimore’s sailing past covered up.

But it’s our present image that currently concerns us. By now you’ve probably had more than enough time to digest (or forget) last summer’s much ado about the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association’s tourism slogan. Bright and cheery ads, banners, and a website all trumpeted, “Baltimore: Get in on it.” From almost the moment it appeared, reactions to the campaign were...mixed, to put it kindly.

In an editorial, the Baltimore Business Journal’s Joanna Sullivan blamed the widespread resistance to the branding effort on Baltimore’s continuing “inferiority complex.” We respectfully must disagree: you can love a city and still loathe its tagline. (Similarly, Cornerstone practically runs on Diet Coke...but we vastly prefer The New Seekers teaching the world to sing in 1971 to G. Love teaching the world to “chill” in 2005.)

Meghana Kulkarni, in The Urbanite’s August 2006 issue, summed up the campaign’s central problem in a nutshell: “Seems like we answered the question, ‘What do we have that everyone else has too?’” Of the 14 icons that make up the logo, at least eight are generic to any large town, let alone a world-class city. As for the tagline, what specifically are we supposed to be getting in on? Kulkarni wisely notes
that a successful civic slogan, whether official (“What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”) or controversial (“Keep Austin Weird”), emblazons its city with one distinctive notion, from which the rest of its character can be extrapolated.

BACVA’s mistake was in focusing on everything Baltimore has to offer – in their own words, “the totality of the Baltimore experience” – instead of focusing on what Baltimore is – the essence of the Baltimore experience. Branding is an act of peeling away layers to find the core. Slapping on a new facade (or 14) just obscures the central work.

True, last summer is long over; in fact this summer is speedily approaching. But what’s important is what you can glean from the debacle. After all, it’s easy to nod in agreement with these principles. It’s another to apply them – to focus the same coldly critical eye on your own advertising. Are you trumpeting all that you do, or what you do best? Are you merely establishing the credentials that put you in line with your competitors, or are you shouting what makes you unique?

Perhaps this test is the most telling: when you last circulated your marketing campaign for comments, did everyone point out what could still be excised? Or did they start dolloping things back in? Sometimes, everyone getting in on something doesn’t help. In the rush to answer dueling constituencies, you can forget to address who really matters: the audience.

Meanwhile, we’re glad a new building went up behind us. We wholeheartedly want what’s good for Baltimore. But we miss viewing our sailing mural, so emblematic of this historic city’s unique charm.

Huh. “Charm.” Now there’s an interesting notion to attach to a city. Maybe one worth a campaign.

[ On Camera Phones & Candy Sushi ]

This past summer we went to a party where we had been promised “a form of sushi.” What we got were desserts made to look uncannily like sushi. On one plate, Rice Krispies treats topped with Swedish Fish were wrapped in green Fruit Roll-Ups. On another, chunks of Twinkies had been stuffed with candy corn and sprinkled with red sugar beads that looked like roe.

The partygoers were thrilled. One said, “This is why camera phones were invented!” and she happily began snapping photo after photo until the “sushi” was devoured. Afterward, everyone else begged her to email the pictures so they could have copies, too.

At work the next day, we received another surprise: a link to a broadcast of the World Cup. But this wasn’t streaming video. Instead, the program converted TV coverage of the game into images made from letters and numbers. In the tiny window, soccer players animated as stacks of keyboard symbols duked it out. In the ‘90s, similar pictures were all over the primordial Internet, only to disappear as graphics evolved. To see them back from extinction and animated made for a weird marriage of nostalgia and future shock. Watching soccer this way was enthralling and unexpected and fun.

Novelty sushi. The latest cell phone technology. A frivolous new way to watch sports. So what did these moments have in common?

Delight.

How often does pleasure take us by surprise? How often are we caught off-guard with laughter? And how often do we put something into the world that delights in return?

The best products, services,and advertising create delight, or make delight easy to capture and distribute. The sushi and the soccer program were novel experiences; the camera phone and a fast computer made them shareable.

The “delight factor” is easy to overlook. Businesses want their product to be the best, so they spend time adding features and gadgets. But that doesn’t necessarily make something more fun. (In fact, more features can just make something frustrating. VCRs also had clocks, but did you ever see one that didn’t read “12:00”?) Style, efficiency, or service can often trump something that’s “better” in the technical sense, especially if we’re caught off-guard by how good something is. iPods didn’t win by being the best music player; they won by being surprisingly sleek, stylish, and easy to use. The world was waiting for the next portable music player, but no one saw the iPod coming.

What business are you in? Are you building delight? Are you getting the job done, not only well, but well in a way that surprises? Not every business venture has the pizzazz of a camera phone. But every business can profit from doing more than just covering the bases. Can you reshape your products? Can you shake up your services? Can you make your advertising sing? Of course you can.

And you emphatically should. Because we never wanted a camera phone before. But since that party, getting one has become a high priority. After all, who knows what surprise might end up on our plates? There is delight to be captured, and as consumers we’re willing to spend on the products that will make that easy. And meanwhile letters and numbers take shape on our screen. They flicker; they form themselves into crude figures; they resolve into something greater: people at play.

[ On Diamonds, Pencils & Corporate Chemistry ]

It’s easy to see why employees and managers get frustrated when the time comes to nail down an organization’s values. No matter how hard you work to capture your company’s unique essence, the values always seem to come out strikingly uniform and bland.

Honestly, who doesn’t value Excellence? Is any company going to say they don’t care about Character, Quality, Partnership, Communication, or Integrity? So what’s going to make your corporate values distinct?

Corporate culture. Personal connections and interactions. In short, chemistry.

The analogy is an apt one. Think back to high school. You learned that when a lot of carbon atoms bond a certain way they form a soft substance that slides apart easily: graphite (the “lead” in pencils). But under a different set of circumstances, these same carbon atoms bond another way, forming the world’s hardest mineral: a diamond.

The elements are the same. What changes is how the bonds are expressed. The resulting substances are radically different.

The same is true for organizations. Instead of chemical bonds, we mean the bonds between people – in other words,your organization’s culture. The values may be the same, but it’s your company’s culture that affects how these values get expressed...and how they get put into action.

For instance, two firms might both name one of their values to be “Communication.” A large computing firm might see Communication to mean having clear email protocols and using online discussion listservs. A small consulting firm might see Communication represented at the weekly round-table discussions attended by the whole staff.

One structure isn’t necessarily better than another, nor will it work equally as well for all companies. A diamond is useless if you’re taking the SATs. And you’d look silly exchanging engagement pencils with your future spouse. Likewise, round-table discussions might be unwieldy in our giant tech firm. And a rigid email chain won’t foster freewheeling brainstorming sessions among our consultants. The goal of clear Communication may be constant, but the path to achieving it is different for each company. The same goes for the rest of your values – Integrity, Quality, Partnership, Efficiency, and so forth.

So when the time comes to define your core values, take some extra time to look at how those values actually play out in day-to-day operations. By understanding your organization’s culture,you can track how its values are put into play,and by pointing to the values as models for behavior,you set goalposts for performance. By understanding your organization’s chemistry...how the bonds between people are forged, broken, and transformed...and how values get brought to life...you can stir up quite a reaction.

www.cornerstonemtm.com

[ On Bullet Points, Shuttle Explosions & Loving the Paragraph ]

“Executives don’t read.” That’s what we’ve been told, again and again. “They don’t have time.” “What’s the gist?” And worst of all: “Can you put it in bullet points?”

We know of one consulting firm that doesn’t even use word processing programs anymore. They do everything – everything – in PowerPoint.

We think that’s a shame. We use bullet points ourselves – in everything from office emails to the work we produce – but it’s difficult to fathom an entire workweek composed of nothing but. Besides the horrific image of flavorless slide after flavorless slide, we think it’s just bad communication...and bad business.

What gets lost with bullet points? Story. Nuance. Shading. Bullets fragment ideas and concepts. Bullets can emphasize or de-emphasize the wrong information. They masquerade as facts, when they are, in fact, just points.

Growing up, you learned to read critically. When an argument is fishy, something feels out of place. But when you read a PowerPoint slide, you have nothing against which to judge what you’re being told. What happens if the person who wrote that slide is misinformed? If they’re leaving something out? If they have an agenda?

Or what if they’re just bad at organizing? We learn to privilege information at the top and left of the page. So what happens when someone delivers a dire warning – say, about a shuttle explosion – in the bottom right?

In 2003, the space shuttle Columbia was damaged during takeoff by a falling piece of foam. Upon re-entry, it disintegrated, costing seven astronauts their lives. Later, The New York Times learned that a significant danger sign – the foam chunk that initially struck the shuttle was 640 times larger than anything NASA had tested for – had been flagged by engineers during a review of the initial damage. Yale professor and design information expert Edward Tufte pointed out that this crucial information was buried at the bottom of a cluttered PowerPoint slide. The alarm was there, but went unnoticed. Three years later, the shuttle program is only now getting back on its feet.

Chances are, the use of bullets isn’t going to cost your company what it cost NASA. But it could mean the difference between landing a client and losing one, or between being a step ahead of the market and being behind. So we hope the next time someone hands you a bulleted list, you don’t take it at face value. Ask to see the research. Take the time to have someone walk you through the analysis.

But it’s the larger assumption about upper-management attention spans we’d like to tackle, too. Maybe it’s true that you only read bullets. But maybe you haven’t had reason to read more.

We’d like to give you that reason. We’d like to give you a break from bullet points. We want to give you something to think about over your morning coffee – with content, conversation, and yes, even whole paragraphs. So we’ll be sending more of these short missives. We believe you have five minutes to pause, read, and reflect, and that as a smart business person, you’re hungry for the chance to do so.

www.cornerstonemtm.com