brand driven innovation

I was at home the past couple of days. Doctor’s orders. I’m ill just about once every 87 years so I don’t fight it. Once past that first day of actually feeling bad and having to reschedule all your meetings it’s actually not all that bad: I found myself in the middle of an ocean of time giving me the opprtunity to guiltlessly read for hours on end without disruptions.
I was all out of novels to read (just finished Ian Mc Ewan’s last one, on Chesil Beach) and I certainly didn’t feel like starting on the huge stack of branding, design and innovation books that I still wanted to read but not now thank you very much. So I went to my bookshelves to look for one of those ‘Special Books Worth Reading Twice’.

There’s actually plenty of those: books that read like music, and become richer, deeper and more personal the more you read them. I mean, I must have listened to the Dark Side of the Moon at least 500 times in my life. The same goes for Bach’s Goldberg Variations. So I like to read some books more than once. There’s Kerouac’s On the Road. Salinger’s Cather in the Rye of course. Both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. The Magus by John Fowles, I believe I read that one three or four times. Mantissa is also great. There’s the World According to Garp and the Cider House Rules By John Irving. Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The Shipping News by Annie Proulx. Atonement by Ian McEwan. Actually most of the work by Ian McEwan.

And then there’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig.

(image from www.psybertron.org/pirsigpages.html)

I remember being about 15 and noticing this book in my father’s library. I thought the title was really cool and asked my father if it was any good. He said give it a try and find out, it might just change the way you look at your life. If not, at least it will forever change the way you fix a flat tire on your bike. This was like 1984, 10 years after it was published. I devoured the thing, literally. I ruined his copy. I’m a wild reader, I consume books. Sorry Dad, I’m not even sure if I ever replaced your copy

Anyways, I fell in love with the book and used it in my freshman year at university. I was to write a paper on the old adagium of Form Follows Function. My paper stated that it’s silly to say that form follows function, since form and function are equal in hierarchy, both following from something deeper, something that defines the product before there’s either form or function. Call it quality, or soul. I suppose I didn’t know half what I was talking about at the time but I aced the paper anyway and I owe a big thank you to Bob Pirsig.

Because that’s what the book’s about. It sort of solves this whole problem we have with dualism: subject object, rational emotional, left brain right brain. We’ve been stuck with this way of thinking since Aristotle, or so they say. (I’m a bit rusty on Greek philosophy so don’t quote me on this). And it’s a relief to hear a man with a scientific background plus an IQ of 170 offer a plausible alternative for looking at things.

I just finished reading it for what must be the fourth time, with about 20 years between now and the previous time. And boy is it contemporary. And relevant to 21st century design, technology, user centered innovation and the brand as the soul of the enterprise.
I may go a little bit over the edge here, I am still a bit under the weather after all, but this book, with its 33 years behind it, is a must read for any designer trying to pair beauty with technology, any innovator trying to match corporate strengths with user needs, any brandbuilder trying to capture the soul of the enterprise while having to deal with everyday busienss economics, and any design manager faced with the task of managing a process that defies management.

Hell, just dust off your old copy, go get a new one or check your father’s library. And read it. Now.
Thanks.

Here are some resources:

design and science.org quoting and referring to Pirsigs work
moq.org discussing Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality.
a pirsig page with some fun resources and a full text download which I’m not sure is quite legal.
more pirsig pages with lots of resources from a real fan.
matt kundert’s pirsig blog.

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 10:14 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.