Blackmore’s Night Home Again

You know the old adage, the best laid plans of mice and men, often go astray? That might have been the theme of my trip to the Gulf, so yep, glad to be back home again. My Garminfone, as good as it is, and it is, did not work like the laptop I needed it to. So none of you got the updates I promised on the road, on Trendbites anyway. The one thing that didn’t fail me was Twitter, and the Android app, Seesmic that supported twitter on the phone. A story of its own, I highly recommend it. Just don’t try to get a phone that is primarily navigational (and excitingly so) for social media. Smartphones haven’t come along that far. So I’ve returned it and have my eyes on others.

The documentary interview with Josh Tickell’s group about the Oil Spill, which was the destination, was in fact the highlight of the trip. Taking place on the garden side of Longue Vue House and Gardens, with a lush garden as the backdrop, director Tickell proceeded to find out just how much I knew about oil spills and their solutions. Turns out I know something about them and getting to know more and more about them as time goes on and what all that entails; me and thousands of others, government, civilian, engineers, scientists, fishermen and their wives and families, tourists, Convention and Visitor Bureaus alike.

And like the oil that has not been collected that remains below the surface of the water, somewhere (rumored to be about 25% of what spewed into the ocean), there’s alot more to the scene of the Gulf than just a big oil company whose well went wrong. There is not enough space for me to cover it in one article here, or ten for that matter. Suffice to say, there are two sides (or more) to every story.

Turns out Josh Tickell, the documentary director, is from Louisiana and uniquely positioned to tell the story of the region. After our interview, which lasted a few hours, I drove down to Grand Isle to see what was up on the coast. New Orleans is one thing, the city itself isn’t this time so much touched by the spill and its impact. The coast is another story.

Beyond the fact that no one was on the beaches, and what may have been a normally bustling summer vacation get away was now a vacation wasteland and instead a depot for oil clean up, it became clear to me how inextricably woven together the natives of this area are with the oil industry. They co- exist. And it’s unlikely even after months of watching all that extraordinary video with free flowing oil spewing into the ocean, that BP and friends, i.e., other oil companies, will leave the area, or, for that matter, be thrown out.

Instead, what everyone is really calling for is a solution, and a good one, a technologically advanced one, one that can be deployed rapidly to any spill in the world, simple, flexible, adaptable and effective….

Meantime, I understand Tickell’s documentary, which promises to be very fascinating and can cover the story adequately in ways I can’t, is due for wide release on the one year anniversary of the spill, Earth Day 2011.

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It starts. Heading for New Orleans this week to do an interview on MindTrust International’s solution to Oil Spills.

I’ve put a lot of planning into the trip to make it a journey as well as a destination. Besides spending weeks on helping to create such an entity as MindTrust International LLC, there have been many more weeks of containing our own spill over our solution to ready it for market. Pretty exciting stuff, but so is taking a trip to one of the currently harder hit tourist destinations in America.

So how best to shine a light on the Gulf region? Go there myself and take my dog to make it a vacation along the way, alas the classic American Road Trip.

I’ve had to rent a car (shout out to St. Louis’ Enterprise WeCar folks for the great service in getting one) and I decided it’s time for me to jump on the Smartphone bandwagon. This trip was a good excuse to do that. I wanted a phone to do it all….does that really exist? We know the Iphone’s popularity, but I’m not a huge fan of AT&T, and TMobile has in fact treated me pretty well over the years…..so, I decided on a Garminfone. And, well you will find out over the course of the next few days (you and I) how well it works, but it seems to do most everything plus let me find gas stations from wherever I am and the nearest McDonald’s (clean restrooms and cheap good coffee and green grass for the dog, all musts if one is to have a successful road trip).

More to come, hopefully from the road and from my new Garminfone, which almost sounds like Garcon, and that’s kinda apropos, don’t you think?

Image:  Norman Rockwell’s 1947 “Going and Coming.”

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The Virtual Life.  I think someone needs to do a television series around this.  Like how much of your life is dependent upon your ability to move around digitally with whatever you are doing, and suddenly when you can’t, what happens?

Not unlike a lot of things we use daily and take for granted.   Without a contingency plan in place, you are totally thrown for a loop (like oil companies not having a contingency plan for oil spills…it can be catastropic).

Further, I confess I felt violated.  It’s like someone broke into my home and stole my most prized possessions.

Weird.  Cause this kind of stuff, hackers and such, social media interruption….just didn’t have an effect on me and the people I’m connected to “out there”  like this several years ago.  But now? 

Huge.

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And not just the Gulf Oil Spill, but any future spills to come and not just in the Gulf, but on the other side of the world when, not if, that happens. An ex oil industry exec thinks that this current oil spill will not be the worst one to happen, that indeed there will be 3-4 more worse ones sometime in the future.

MTI, MindTrust International LLC, started innocently enough from a group of curious, passionate, and compelled-to-create individuals who got together virtually through an “Innovate the Future” thread on LinkedIn, their common tie only to innovate where there was none.

Innovation is itself a timely hot button, so much so even the MTI group has decided innovation itself needs innovating (our group focuses more on the collaboration it takes to innovate than “innovating’ per se: see diagoal: A Case For A Comprehensive Collaboration Model). Initially, after heatedly discussing different issues over several months, 33 pages through some 600 comments, some 20 individuals agreed to move to a private discussion. Through 12-15 active members and within two weeks the oil spill solution was borne. About a week later, one of the four of the lead architects of the plan had begun putting the solution in an invention disclosure and with some 11 of the group gathered on a bridge line to chat, hearing each other’s voices for the first time, further details were developed, honed and drafted. Another month later, MindTrust International formally came to be, claiming 9 of the original 15 active members from that private LinkedIn discussion group as its core members.

Next week, through one of the original member’s contacts, we’ll be interviewing with an award winning Sundance Film Festival documentary filmmaker to discuss the oil spill solution further and thus begins a journey with a specific destination in mind, that of making MTI’s Oil Spill Solution an oil company’s first “contingency plan.”

MindTrust International LLC is a collaborator for disruptive innovations in the world market in IT, consumer & industrial goods and services, and business systems and services.

Their core competency is in the people who form MTI hailing from all corners of the world bringing their own specialties in professions and expertise not only challenging the status quo but also each other. With offices all over the world, MindTrust International is currently headquartered in the United States.

Contact me at kim (at) trendsights.com for further information on our members and on our other initiatives. Like me, other members have their own businesses, their own individual projects or positions with other companies as they continue to work on MTI’s collaborations.

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This is a perfect example of how connected (pun intended) patterns and a well communicated premise points the way to the future.

In this case, it’s a business model for the web.

Open is King:

But that doesn’t necessarily mean free.

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This is something that needed to be done before the kimbro agency even launched its trend service formally in 2006. But, alas, in its original stages in the mid to late 90′s, TrendSights was offered as a complimentary service to stay in touch with clients and potential clients, and to that end I did not protect it with all the legalities necessary to keep it within my company domain.

After working for a while as a mid-sized firm’s VP Sales & Marketing in 2004 and 2005 with an obvious interruption to my business, I lost the domains for both kimbro agency and for TrendSights. Once I returned to private ownership, my answer was to own the domains thekimbroagency.com and kimbroagency.net (dropping the the), and naming the trend newsletter Trendcites.

For someone who is so big picture oriented, I am sometimes a stickler for detail (good for what I do), and was stubborn about keeping the name Trendcites because by definition cites means to name something, to call it out, versus sites which has to do with a location.

However, and I was told this by more than one person at the outset, (no it wasn’t just you) Trendcites looked like Trendcities. You know, what cities have you lived in in your life? It’s taken some time for me to correct, by going to the person who swiped TrendSights as their newsletter name to get it back, and start making changes to my email, the newsletters, stationery and so on….as well as creating a blog in 2007 that rhymed with the newsletter to help correct any misunderstanding from the misspellings of the newsletter (sigh). But, that was so last year. Now it’s Trendsights, matter resolved.

Going loopy after information overload by DeaPeaJay

Plus given the shape of the economy, I had to decide if it was worth making any corrections for. I have my misgivings about things that are published now so freely on the web. We are, if nothing else, a world overwhelmed by too much information, or suffering from information overload.

From Gawker’s “The New York Time’s Paywall: the stakes are small.”

While initially I didn’t agree with paying for content on the web, now I am beginning to think it’s not a bad idea. Media, such as the New York Times, should be well reimbursed by advertising, but if we are to maintain the sanctity of unbiased media or excellence in media then there needs to start being levels of professionalism in media clearly denoted. If it takes some paywalls to make that clear, then that’s the direction we need to move in.

It is my opinion that by having so much openness in the information arena, children, students, designers, educators and researchers have been exposed to rather high levels of crap (if I may be so blunt) and that has done nothing for what is getting put out there professionally. That sort of lack of professionalism is showing up in our schools, television, film, art, fashion, literature, journalism and much product created and put on shelves for us to buy and put in our homes.

That’s a rather sweeping statement and obviously there are many exclusions to it (especially my twitter friends and connections and OTR Gang and other personal favs…I’m a consumer too), but in order to render the high from the low in all things, I say we begin with the web. This is not to say that the newbies out there aren’t creating some rather weighty stuff because they are, and there is more to this movement of ugly design and banal journalism than an overwhelming amount of free web content…it also has to do with the catch 22 we are in economically and our seemingly obsessive addiction to outsourcing our manufacturing to China. Nor do I subscribe to media outlets like Time, Inc’s list of best blogs of whatever year or Twitter’s new thing with curated lists: these are helpful guides and sometimes interesting to peruse, but by no means exhaustive (word of mouth is still the trusted go to guide, by some 70% according to a Neilsen study). Not to mention the venerable Fast Company’s list of 100 Most Creative in Business for 2010 assigning the number one spot to Lady Gaga and including the 13 year old fashionista wunderkin, Tavi: really? Out of all the creative people in the world right now, these two, based on their popculture status are considered two of the top 100 creative people in all of the world? That’s what I call catering to the masses and not looking beyond the obvious (besides which, I’m thinking their deadline for submissions was short based on the intro paragraph’s mistakes in grammar and spelling).

(You can go gaga over Gaga, but when Glee does a better rendition of Bad Romance than Gaga herself, well I need say no more).

Something’s gotta give. My initial two cents is in the realm of taking back ownership of the rightful name of my newsletter, TrendSights. And next I’m gonna go after the guys who are trying to steal my TrendBites blog moniker and eventually get back ownership of the domain name www.kimbroagency.com in addition to www.thekimbroagency.com.

Then, well, you’ll just have to wait for my next announcement, coming to a social media network near you soon :)

So, again, what’s in a name? Take it from me, lots.

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Fashion and Flash, Washington University’s 81st Student Design Show, May 2010.

Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri claims the oldest four year fashion design program in the nation. But don’t let the handle of being a midwest design school fool you: students graduating this year have already held internships with such notable design firms as Ralph Lauren, Vera Wang, and Michael Kors.

Given that line up, you won’t be surprised to know there is actual talent there. The silhouettes were well thought out, carefully executed, and relevant to today’s market. Notable among them was Camilla White’s bridal gown. Corsetted and embroidered, Camilla pared a taupe bodice with a white silky tulle skirt that looked a real vision for taking that all important step in.

Charlotte Kerr, (left) Tessa Braun “Goa Get ‘Em” (right)

It was the sportswear though that set the tone to me for the evening. With eclectic prints, retro jumpers, and sweet blouse and skirt sets these collections could have been mistaken for the real thing.

“Modern Eclectic” by Mariam Ahmad (left) Tara Phelan “Fun In the Sun” (right)

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If you want any guidance or information on innovation the subject is readily available all over the web. There’s a page from the Daily Reviewer devoted to listing the top 100 blogs that write on innovation alone not to mention Harvard Business Review and BusinessWeek getting into the act.

So what new do I have to add to the conversation that will or could make any difference? Only that I am not going to promote a system in order to ensure innovation happens (one preferably lead by me ;)). It’s my own not just professional opinion but experience that informs that posture. As a rule I engage companies when I have worked with them directly on their change initiatives at the disruptive technology level as opposed to incremental (see how much I’ve learned by reading the blogs and engaging in LinkedIn forums?) which means something tangible got the ball rolling, then ideas naturally started pinging as a part of the conversation….., which then led to the systems just as a checkpoint or an ad hoc R&D model. Of course at the time, since I’ve been doing this dating back to 1997 (and earlier if you want to count the oh so successful Barrington Rep Group which I can no longer claim affliliation with), I didn’t realize that is what I was doing, it’s just the knack (read talent, education, experience and exposures) I had for finding exceptional talent and helping put it together in such a way that it became destined for commercial success with ready adoption by large corporate entities. It’s a record of success and achievement I am very proud of and only recently have come to understand its now infamous label of “innovating disruptive technology.”

So, it’s good we have some well versed academics on the job who can name that tune for the rest to learn and therefore benefit from. It is an important point though as disruptive technology is a whole other ballgame from incremental, carries more risk and therefore more reward, but does require going outside the box for solutions, again in my experience, so people become the other important foci to getting results from your innovation practices. Leadership styles can be a way, or at least a start, to get a handle on what might facilitate the process at least from inside the corporate view.

So currently Proctor & Gamble has launched their initiative “Design Thinking” that is in effect going to help them thwart the private label progress now being made and eroding their market share. It doesn’t say so much about innovation per se as it does about assuming a mindset that allows for innovation to come through. I can’t argue its merits….for a large corporation like that you have to do something to ensure a steady and consistent output of innovative product but more the better is P&G’s willingness to work with smaller agencies to help with those efforts. Everyone seems to agree that P&G alone, along with many other too large corporations, are not able to innovate with the same creative passionate interplay smaller agencies are capable of.
After all, that is how the Swiffer came about: not from P&G executives but them working with a small agency, Design Continuum, that created the Swiffer, one of P&G’s most successful consumer products yet.

So now the issue is, as one pretty astute forum member asked, if you aren’t IDEO, and you are working on change initiatives with corporations, how can you make sure you are not in the shadow of that corporation so you can go on to work with other companies in order to continue that sort of innovation? There is more than IDEO I can assure you that is out there creating and on the level of bringing such innovation to the table that the results have been nothing short of game changing and setting industry standards for over a decade. While that’s immense for society (at least for a decade), what about the little guy that did the heavy lifting?

It reminds me of the movie about the intermittent windshield wiper guy who lost everything fighting for the right to his invention that Ford Motor Company got most of the credit and therefore dollars for. Or how Mozart in his final days was so poor as to be forced to write compositions he would be commissioned for by some wealthy businessman….

I mean, why? Why kill off the goose that lays the golden egg? Do we live in such an environment of scarity that that kind of talent is to be robbed from instead of nurtured, supported, paid well so that they can live to do it again for others, making society all that much richer? Or are we to continue down this path of the self destructive robber barron mentality that only serves to make the rich richer? We all have families to support Mr CEO, so why not instead of building walls do like Berlin did in the 80′s and bring that Berlin Wall down. Society will be all the better for it and you will still be remembered fondly for what you did by historical standards and still gain riches as a consequence. It’s just this time you will bring along the people who helped you do it. So now what you will have done is become the P&G of your product cateogy instead of wilt and die after a decade of riding the little guy’s wave with no other BigIdeas generated in the process.

If you want to reinvent the wheel, do like the Wright Bros & create the airplane. Jack is nimble, quick and thinks outside the box.

So, my recommendation is, for the sake of society, the American Spirit and maybe even the world, open your hearts and minds and resources and build your next new BigIdea (psst, I can hear India nipping at your heels….).

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Image courtesy of Chado Ralph Rucci. Photographer: Dan Lecca.

Last night St. Louis, MO was graced with an unusual occurrence: a famed fashion designer, Ralph Rucci, gave a lecture at (admittedly a top ten school) Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. To say I was blown away would be an understatement.

On a side note, this is the second post in about two weeks that talks about fashion being on campuses (see post on L.L. Bean’s Signature Line), so there’s a movement to take note of.

But really my reaction came more from the individual himself than of a fashion icon making his way to St. Louis, the center of at least as far as typical New Yorker’s are concerned, the middle of nowhere. That in and of itself shows Ralph Rucci knows more than just how to cut a fine cloth.

The lecture at times ran intense because he covered more than just how he designed clothing which is probably even to students of fashion a sometimes too complicated topic to fully cover in just a few hours but he managed to give us a pretty good run through of what all was involved. Besides now having a new appreciation for his particular form of art, he being the only American to show in Paris as Haute Couture, he is a man who has bucked the system of the fashion industry, at least in the United States, and made it anyway.

Rucci has his own production facilities in the United States, for one. Secondly he has found other means of embellishing his garments besides Lesage who has grown too expensive for most to be able to afford, even at couture levels, and now he has a groundswell of support for his particular form of design, who he loves and caters to as lovingly as his couture clientele, one of whom is rocker & trendsetter, Patti Smith.

Rucci makes Vogue patterns with a whole online audience that clamors for them and has gone so far as to help them figure out how to make some of his more complicated pieces and now in order to further support that groundswell he will be introducing a line of goods he plans to sell through HSN, not in a limited edition but in a few collections a year. This too takes my breath away not because he has created an alliance with HSN, but because (while less expensive than his regular line of clothing, these will not be H&M or Target goods, they’ll still be much higher priced than the designer duds you find at these outlets now) he’s managed to get around the establishment once again by going straight to his customer and who loves, loves, loves him for it. What else really counts?

There was a woman who brought a full page print-out of a dress from his last collection, telling him how that dress moved her so much that it brought her to tears and she wanted to know if ever he was going to make things that the average woman who had a working life could afford (which launched into the discussion of HSN).

He went on to discuss how the fashion industry itself has all but disappeared from the United States and the dilemmas that presents for anyone who has an interest in a future in the fashion industry. Should the schools train students for occupations such as patternmakers for an industry that is not there anymore (at least in the U.S.)? He didn’t answer that himself. My own opinion is that they should, that if he can run a production facility and manage it, then it is possible. And wanted, plus needed. When he said he’d be making the clothing for HSN at his own facility he received a hearty round of applause.

Cy Twombly Untitled 1970 (I see the connection from this to his feathered dress on the right above, perhaps?)

He named several artists he was inspired by to create his works, notably Cy Twombly. I could see some of that inspiraton in his work too but it was not a literal translation, which speaks to his abilities once again. And apparently he himself is creating not just clothing but also works of art, paintings, that he is actually selling while looking to a life beyond fashion.

There wasn’t much that wasn’t covered while the lecture was only a little over an hour….he discussed the publishing industry and the banality of design, models on the runway, bloggers, the red carpet….all the things that are driving most of us with a passion for design in any industry, not just fashion, crazy right now. Again, I was bowled over by how much he had taken in himself throughout his career, still accomplished and was yet still so humble about it all.

Renaissance man, indeed. He even gave a shout out to Cathy Horyn at the New York Times as well as former fashion designer turned blogger, Fluff Chance, editor of fashion blog The Emperor’s Old Clothes indicating how Fluff (although he didn’t refer to him by that name but by the cat that inspired the name) was writing from a voice with a designers frame of reference unlike the new sensation round of bloggers. Hmmm, he speaks my language too.

His book, Ralph Rucci: The Art of Weightlessness is available for sale (think ahead for Christmas coffee table books, this is a good one).

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