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Getting at what really drives your brand’s growth. A discussion featuring Eric Plaskonos of Philips N.A., Sheryl Adkins-Green of Alberto Culver, Grant Harrison of Humana Inc., Delaine Hampton of Procter & Gamble and Zain Raj of Euro RSCG. |
There’s enough need for another 100 supermarkets in New York City, and yet the number of stores there is declining, specifically in low-income neighborhoods, reports David Gonzales in the New York Times (5/5/08). Currently, “only 550 decently sized supermarkets … remain in the city.” According to a study by the city’s planning department, “as many as three million New Yorkers live in … communities characterized by not enough supermarkets and too many health problems. Within those dense urban areas, the study estimated that 750,000 people live more than five blocks from a grocery or supermarket.” This presents a special problem for Della Dorset, whose local grocery store was demolished last year to make way for “new housing and retail developments.” It’s a problem for Della because she’s in a wheelchair, which she now must maneuver “several blocks uphill … returning home with plastic bags dangling from the handles and nestled between her feet.” The problem is largely a result of rising rents that low-margin supermarkets just can’t afford to pay, or price competition from gas stations or big-box stores they just can’t meet. But the consequences of this aren’t limited to mere inconvenience. Sometimes, the former supermarkets are “converted into drug stores that stand to make money coming and going — first selling processed foods and sodas, then selling medicines for illnesses that could have been prevented by a better diet.” According to Amanda Burden, the city’s planning director: “Many people in low-income neighborhoods are spending their food budget at discount stores or pharmacies where there is no fresh produce,” adding that the result is “a health crisis in the city.” To solve the problem, city officials are looking into economic incentives, zoning changes, or possibly making “city-owned property” available for new supermarkets. ~ Tim Manners, editor |
Karen Washington may be from Harlem, but she says she’s always known one thing about herself — that she wanted to be a farmer, reports Tracie McMillan in the New York Times (5/7/08). “When I was a little kid I used to watch the farm report,” says Karen. She began realizing her dream in 1985, when, as a single mom, she moved from Harlem to the South Bronx and started to grow her own vegetables, organically — for her neighbors as well as for herself. Before long she also helped “turn a vacant lot on her block” into a garden, and began helping “defend local gardens from developers.” Karen’s activism resulted in the formation of a coalition, La Familia Verde, which now runs a farm stand and is looking into starting a full-blown farmer’s market. “It’s not about making money,” says Karen. “We’re selling so that people in our neighborhood have good quality. There’s no Whole Foods in my neighborhood.” As ostensibly unlikely as Karen’s story sounds, it is far from unique: “This urban agriculture movement has grown even more vigorously elsewhere. Hundreds of farmers are at work in Detroit, Milwaukee, Oakland and other areas that, like East New York, have low-income residents, high rates of obesity and diabetes, limited sources of fresh produce, and available, undeveloped land.” The crops often taken on an ethnic flair. Denniston Wilks, who gew up in rural Jamaica (the island) but now lives in Brooklyn, raises sugar cane, yams, “bitter melons like those from the West Indies” and cilantro. He’s been at it since 1990, starting in his backyard but now farming, along with neighbors, in a vacant city lot. Because the soil tested for lead, Denniston and his neighbors “built raised beds of compost.” It’s all organic — they planted marigolds and put up fences to deter pests of all kinds, and import ZooDoo for fertilizer from the Bronx Zoo. “The city has been good to us,” says Denniston’s wife, Marlene. “All the property we work on, it’s city property.” Karen Washington, meanwhile, has now set her sights on opening an urban farm school, where she says she hopes kids will learn that tomatoes don’t actually originate from supermarkets. ~ Tim Manners, editor |
“Hard wooden chairs don’t do it anymore,” says Bruce MacMillan, who credits Starbucks with “the rise of the casual meeting room,” reports Elaine Glusac in the New York Times (4/30/08). Others point to books such as Dan Pink’s “A Whole New Mind” and Richard Florida’s “Rise of the Creative Class,” but whatever the drivers it’s clear that the old “coffee urn” approach to meetings is giving way to things like “wheat-grass shots on breaks.” Executive coach Leslie Marquard is making a business out of the trend toward these so-called “right-brain meetings,” where “better brainstorming” is encouraged via “comfortable, colorful furnishings and accessories ranging from Slinkys to … Guitar Hero.” Leslie set up Catalyst Ranch, one such “alternative meeting space in a former sausage factory, near the loop in Chicago.” The only problem is that clients have to come to her, and when she has to facilitate meetings at “endothermic hotel rooms with no windows and natural air.” Fortunately, this appears to be changing. For example, the W Hotels in New York provide Etch A Sketches and other toys in meeting rooms, while the W Seattle offers a ’sensory setup’ for meeting rooms, furnishing aromatherapy candles, stress balls and puzzles, mood music and black notepads with white lead pencils.” Wow. The Hotel Sax in Chicago meanwhile “has opened irregularly shaped meeting rooms with few right angels, including an oval foyer with a video wall and a room with a curved wall, low armchairs and an electric fireplace. One L-shaped space features a recessed bank of white leather seat pods opposite a water wall.” As for the payoff, Diana Peterson says a “right-brain meeting” worked its magic for her at a recent sales meeting at the Curtis Hotel in Denver, saying the “fun energy” resulted in “an increase in sales of 40 to 50 percent after the conference, versus flatter results from similar events in traditional settings.” ~ Tim Manners, editor |
Susanne M. Jaeggi has co-authored a paper that says it is possible to train people to increase their brainpower, reports Nicholas Bakalar in The New York Times (4/29/08). Susanne is a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at the University of Michigan who conducted a test showing that so-called “fluid intelligence” — the kind of intelligence considered to be innate and that can’t be taught — can, in fact, be improved upon with practice. Since fluid intelligence is basically the ability to “solve new problems without having any relevant previous experience,” training centers on “working memory — the kind that allows memorization of a telephone number just long enough to dial it.” According to Susanne and her research team, this works because working memory is “closely related” to fluid intelligence, basically relying “on the same brain circuitry.” So, after measuring their research subjects for fluid intelligence, the researchers “trained each in a complicated memory task, an elaborate variation on Concentration, the child’s card game, in which they memorized simultaneously presented auditory and visual stimuli that had to recall later.” A total of four groups participated for a half-hour “for “8, 12, 17 and 19 days, respectively,” with the level of difficultly continuously adjusted based on each individual’s success rate. Results were compared with a control group that did not receive the training, to ensure that the test participants weren’t just getting better at taking the test. While the control group did, in fact, improve, the trained groups improved far more. In addition, those who trained longer, improved more — regardless of how weak or strong their fluid intelligence was prior to the training. According to the study (link here) the training helped strengthen the ability to solve new problems, specifically “ignoring irrelevant items, monitoring ongoing performance, managing two tasks simultaneously and connecting related items to one another in space and time.” ~ Tim Manners, editor |
“Not only hasn’t the internet yet matured, it’s becoming an ever-more high-stakes game,” writes Andy Kessler, author of “How We Got Here,” in the Wall Street Journal (5/6/08). Andy makes this observation in the wake of Microsoft backing off its bid for Yahoo, which he thinks missed the whole point in the first place. He thinks the premise of that deal — “that adding Yahoo’s 20 percent web search market share to Microsoft’s 10 percent meant that it could compete against Google’s 60 percent” — ignored the “four key elements” that will shape the future of the web and whether Microsoft, Google or some other company ultimately dominates that future.
The first of those four elements is “the cloud” — those massive networks of servers sitting in data centers, where Google, flush with cash from its advertising business, dominates. The second element is what Andy calls “the edge,” or the ability to run programs on any type of device, be it a desktop, laptop, cellphone, GPS, digital camera, videogame controller or what have you. Andy sees an advantage to Microsoft here, in part because search increasingly is migrating to mobile devices, and “Microsoft software runs on about 20 percent of smart phones in the U.S.” Microsoft also holds an edge because of its Xbox platform, yet another place where search can happen.
Element number three is “speed” — primarily with respect to search results, but also where things like photo sharing, money management and multi-player games are concerned. Google’s search does lead with speed, says Andy, albeit at the expense of relevant results. The fourth element is “platform,” where the advantage, says Andy, is Microsoft’s. The issue, as he sees it, is that while Google wisely automates its enterprise, it unwisely keeps its platform largely closed to developers. Microsoft, however, has always been about creating a platform for developers, which this time could lead to search across devices, or perhaps game-changing with free search advertising. Yah-who? ~ Tim Manners, editor
It was 30 years ago May 3rd that Gary Thuerk sent the first known unsolicited bulk e-mail message, reports Ben Worthen in the Wall Street Journal (5/6/08). The message was an invitation to an open house event for a new computer “that he sent to 400 of the 2,600 or so people who had email accounts at the time” on the Arpanet, the predecessor to the Internet. Gary’s little email innovation was a success, leading to about $12 million in sales, he figures. However, he also came under fire, because at the time there was an “unwritten rule” not to “use the Arpanet to sell things.” Gary says he didn’t think he had done anything wrong since technically the email was an invitation, not a direct sales pitch. But someone from the Department of Defense called him and told him never to send another email like that again, and Gary didn’t. His feat does, however, maintain a place “in the Guinness Book of World Records, and he does promotional work for anti-spam companies from time to time.” And although he says he gets mixed reactions from people — some are excited when they learn of his claim to fame/infamy, while others “want to beat him up on the spot” — he thinks he doesn’t deserve any blame. “If the airline loses your luggage do you blame the Wright Brothers?” he asks. As for his own relationship with his innovation, he doesn’t have one. Gary says when he began receiving a flood of emails he simply changed his email address and “stopped filling out forms online.” He says he only gives out his phone number. ~ Tim Manners, editor |
Nick Massari had dreams of becoming a baseball star, but instead finds himself running Nanina’s Gourmet Sauce, a million-dollar pasta-sauce business, reports Glenn Rifkin in the New York Times (5/2/08). Nick found himself at Nanina’s because he had helped start the company as a student in an entrepreneurship class at Monmouth University. The class’s professor, John Buzza, was friends with a local restaurant chef who made a pasta sauce “that customers were always asking for, but he had neither the time nor skills to turn the idea into a business.” So, John turned his friend’s challenge into a class assignment.
“We had no idea how to begin,” says Nick. “But instead of getting lectured on how to do it, we went out and did it.” The 35 students in the class started by organizing into five teams, one each for “sales and marketing, finance information technology, research and development and production.” They created a business plan while also taking “a course in small business management,” and soon succeeded in getting their product on the shelf at a local supermarket. Today, Nania’s Gourmet Sauce is “sold in four major supermarket chains (almost 400 stores) in the region, including Pathmark and Whole Foods.”
The concept of the real world as a classroom for entrepreneurs actually was pioneered by Babson College in the 1970s. Babson actually gives teams of incoming freshmen “$3,000 in seed money … to create a company to sell a real product that will exist for the school year.” Prof. Andrew Zacharakis says every team has at least broken even and any profits are donated to charity. A total of 2,000 schools now have similar programs, and the Kauffman Foundation spends some $50 million a year to encourage more schools to join the fun, especially liberal arts schools. “We think entrepreneurship in business schools is often too narrowly focused,” says Kauffman’s Marjorie Smelstor. ~ Tim Manners, editor
The best way to burn new circuits in your brain is to develop some new habits, reports Janet Rae-Dupree in the New York Times (5/4/08). It’s not so much about ending old habits, because that’s just about impossible anyway — “once those ruts of procedure are worn into the hippocampus, they’re there to stay.” It’s more a matter of creating “parallel pathways that can bypass those old roads.” The quickest route, says Dawna Markova, author of “The Open Mind,” is to avoid the tendency to “decide,” because “to decide is to kill off all possibilities but one. A good innovational thinker is always exploring the many other possibilities.” That’s not so easy, because even though we were “born with the capacity to approach challenges in four primary ways … the brain shuts down half of that capacity” after adolescence, “preserving only those modes of thought that have seemed most valuable during the first decade or so of life.” That means we settle in either as more analytical and procedural or more collaborative and innovative in our thinking. Most of us tend toward the analytical and procedural, because of the educational “emphasis on standardized testing.” In either case, Dawna and her business partner, author M.J. Ryan (”This Year I Will …) say you need to stretch your brain if you want to be more innovative. This can be as simple as listening to a different radio station, or as challenging as listening to someone who disagrees with you. “Whenever we initiate change, even a positive one, we activate fear in our emotional brain, says M.J. ” If the fear is big enough, the fight-or-flight response will go off and we’ll run from what we’re trying to do.” She suggests the “Japanese technique called kaizen, which calls for tiny, continuous improvements,” because its incrementalism avoids “fight or flight” and keeps “us in the thinking brain.” Meanwhile, researchers have also found that those who “do something different every day” tend to lose and keep off weight. New habits can also decrease risk of dementia, since an active brain is less likely to atrophy. ~ Tim Manners, editor |
“The question we constantly ask ourselves is how to hit the price point that even Wal-Mart is not hitting,” says Steve Shore, co-founder of Steve & Barry’s, in a New York Times piece by Eric Wilson (5/1/08). The question everybody else constantly asks Steve and Barry is, how the heck to do you sell dresses for $8.98 when the cheapest dress on the Wal-Mart website is $14.92? Not only that, but how is it that the dress is of good design, decent quality and carries the imprimatur of actress Sara Jessica Parker? Steve and Barry say that the answer is not that they make their garments in sweat shops — in fact, they insist that they do not.
Instead, they point to the fact that Steve & Barry’s tend to open stores in “underperforming malls, where the owners are more likely to negotiate rents and offer other incentives; by building its own bare-bones displays; by maintaining only a small public relations office in Manhattan; and by manufacturing in countries like China, India, Madagascar and more than 20 others, including the United States.” But no sweatshops. Company execs also stay at discount hotels and work out of modest offices where some of the furniture was salvaged from Barry’s parents’ basement. Most important, though, is their ability to attract big-name stars to work with them.
It’s not just Sara Jessica Parker, who designed, and wears, an $8.98 dress sold exclusively at Steve & Barry’s (images here). It’s also Venus Williams, Amanda Bynes, and perhaps most famously, Stephan Marbury, whose Starbury footwear is also sold at Steve & Barry’s for just $8.98 a pair. As Sara Jessica explains: “I had never heard of Steve & Barry’s, and I didn’t know anyone who had ever heard of them … But I loved their manifesto and the idea of the marketization of fashion.” She also points out that, these days, people like to brag about how little they paid. Barry sums it up quite succinctly: “When you look at clothing now,” he says, “price is not the arbiter of what is good. It’s the clothes themselves.” ~ Tim Manners, editor
