Finding design and inspiration in everything including LOLAI'BAO bags

Near  'La Defense'  at the christmas market I  bought last week 2 design bags from LOLAI'BAO  for my 2 daughters for their christmas gifts. Honestly I found theses bags attractive, beautiful and useful, that is to say the 3 main qualities required for really design product, and more, they are  created with exclusive fabrics and innovative materials (but in don't know exactly in which materials they are made to be honest)   and are designed for women who feel stylish, fresh, vibrant… and unique..
Unfortunatly my daughters did'nt appreciate too much theses bags and I tried to explain them what was unique and wonderfull in it : the idea of emptyness and simplicity that belongs to each product of their catalog...
At the moment, LOLAI'BAO is missing only one thing (but very importnat to my daughter's eyes)  they are not enough well known as a brand and their bags are not enough expensive. (and to be honest : no visibility enough about the material which is a true weakness...)
Below the bag I offered to my naughty daughters, am I a bad daddy ?

Outstanding Demo in math equations

I discovered from the Daniel Pink's blog the work of Graig Damrauer who has made abstracts concept in the form of math equations : have a look at it from my favorites one : Afterwards, I tried to make my own contribution to this work and I did some equations about software demonstrations :
Good Demo

Bad Demo
Great Demo = Demo2Win + PresentationZen (have a look clicking on the link)What do you think of this post ? please make also a contribution by sending me your own math equation about software outstanding Demo !

Using Viral Demo on YouTube to make a Buzz

Please have a look to this demo video that my company released on YouTube in order to promote its CRM solution. This video is both the opportunity to know more about Devorah Sperber's thread work ( she is obviously a great artist) and about our CRM soution that is also a kind of masterpiece without any concession on quality. Each of us in our company will have to send and to communicate this viral video to at least one customer he is in touch with, creating discussion, fostering branding and unleashing enthusiasm about it.

So, let's me share with you some rules for becoming viral and sought in a positive way by the others :

1) Deliver the buzz with Enthusiasm. It can’t be faked. You can’t expect your team to create buzz about your new project, product or service simply because you held a staff meeting and told them that it is something that matters to you or the business.

2) Design does matter .You can't expect create a big buzz without nice design. If you want your product to be shared and owned by a lot of people you need to create fun, visual and memorable design. ( thinking in order to make the daily life of the others easier and smarter is thinking like a designer)

3) Create real Value. You can’t fake value neither. There are measuring sticks available to everyone. A service that truly makes someone’s life easier, or a software solution (like our SAP CRM actually) that saves user's time and allows other companies to reach their business goals while reducing pains and training cost, leveraging the ease of use emotional needs.

4) Create Meaning. You need to respond to the emotional needs of the others, features is not enough and value neither, Providing meaningful material and message buzz will trump everything.

Thriving in the New Reality in 2009

There is no question that the world is facing an extremely challenging set of economic scenarios. Unlike the past years, we are no longer in a rapid expanding global economy scenarios and we all know that the world is in the midst of an economic upheaval of unheard proportions. Given all the bad news we've been seeing on the TV and in the newspapers, it would be really easy to consumed by the crisis ! It is tough but it is no time to lose confidence because in every crisis there is somes dangers but some opportunities as well and there is first the opportunity to transform ourselves in order to thrive in this new reality. Lets go back to the basic adopting the new reality behavior requirements vs old habit we used to do a few months ago.

Thriving versus Winning : In the new reality you don't necessarily need to make a lot of money in your pocket to feel succesfull but rather you can thrive in 2009 by adding more values to your customers, spending more time with them, sharing with them your knowledge industry issues (what you have learnt from others customers) discovering their pain points and finding out how you can help them and having an idea of what they should do in order to solve their problem and eventually having fun doing it

Contribution versus Competition : In the new reality, you have to think in term of contributions rather than competition : that means how can you today make this day a better day and how can you today make as a contribution your company a better place to live and work in.

Work Smarter versus Work harder : Unless you didn't work too much in 2008 I don't think it could be possible for most of us to work harder in 2009 ! I think that trying to work harder could end up into an worthless spiral without additional value or results. In the new reality you have to try to be smarter ( or less stupid i don't know) focusing on the Pareto's law : 20 % of the work drives 80% of the results and therefore we will have to focus on the right thing to do rather than systematically doing all the things right.

Simplicity versus Complexity : The customer business processes are often complex and will continue to be in the new reality no doubt about it, but our job is to make them simpler through our system software and through the value message we deliver to them. Simplicity is difficult to obtain but supremely powerful and beautiful (and visual and simple slides vs boring bulleted point slides are part of it)

Personalization versus Standardization : Being closer to the customer in the new reality will allow us to run more personalized software demonstration in the customers language and with relevant master data that will sound familiar to them ( and not widget data)

Possibilities versus hopeless world : Do not fall into the world of doubt, fear and uncertainty but take this world's new reality as still in essence full of opportunities and possibilities with freedom, abundance and spontaneity. Be fearless, trust yourself and trust your company.

Innovation versus Execution : Flawless sales and pre sales execution does matter in the new reality but innovation and creativity are more. The new area requires thinking differently in order to better serve our customer and to better help our colleagues. Creativity means not being paralyzed by old practices and expert knowledge but being able to think outside the box (but not as a cliché from job resume) to find solutions to unforeseen problems.

Big Demo : Proving God's Existence...

Just an idea that the big demo ever would be the demo of god existence isn't ? it shouldn't not be so far a software demo (that is of course the main dedication of this blog) but it would be obviously an outstanding demo as well. Related to this ontological topic, each of us behaves like our customer use to do with our software product: they don't know what to think about our product and they want some proofs, they want a demo that will prove our software existence related to their wishes.

Have a look now to Saint Anselm's work who was one of the first to attempt an ontological argument for God's existence and who proposed the following nice argument :

(1) God is the thought object than which no thought object can be thought to be greater

oh i assume everybody will agree with that definition , God indeed is that entity than which nothing greater can be conceived.

But now suppose that :
(2) God is only in the intellect that means God is thought of, but does not exist

But certainly in this case :
(3) any thought object that can be thought to exist in reality can be thought to be greater than any thought object that is only in the intellect

And it cannot be doubted that :
(4) God can be thought to exist in reality

Therefore :
(5) Some thought object can be thought to be greater than the thought object than which no thought object can be thought to be greater [1,2,3,4]

Which is a contradiction, because we have to abandon our supposition that God is only in the intellect, therefore God has to exist in reality, too.

This demo is based on the acceptation of the first premise (1) that suppose Existence is perfection and so as God is though as the perfect being he also need to exist to be perfect. For instance, if one had put the inverse principle that non-existence is perfection, he would have been able to prove in the same way the God's non existence. (see the Necessary nonexistence
by Douglas Gasking)

Our demo audience for software need proofs, they need to trust us and to agree with us at the beginning that means on the first features and principles for which we start with them to build our value proposition message.

Happy New Year 2009 in a world of possibilities !

I wish you all a very good year in 2009 both personal and professional. 2009 is predicted to be hard and difficult and may be it will be if we pay too much attention to the sad and solemn official speech that our French President did the 31 th of December in which he almost promised to french people "blood, sweat and tears". However i think 2009 will be what we will do with it, seizing all the opportunities and deciding by ourselves to find out or to reinvent some projects, aims and expectations in order to achieve and exceed them. "Crisis ? What Crisis?" said the progressive rock band Supertramp 30 years ago ! and Seth Godin himself wrote in his in his last post (apart from the fact he doesn't like usually news years event, what a funny guy!) : "The place where expectations are lowest: leadership. Everyone expects you to get in line and follow, not lead.The opportunity this year is bigger than ever: to lead change, to create a movement in a direction you want to go. While the rest of your world huddles and holds back, here's a golden chance to use cheap media, available attention and great talent to make something that matters". Another interesting thought is given by the Chinese language for which the word Crisis is the combination of two different characters : the first character means Danger and the second character means Opportunity. So rather living in the the world of "it is too difficult" the world of "complaints", "it can't be done", the world of "no chance, the resource is not here", "it's hopeless", the world of "people can't be better than they are" the world of "survival and scarcity" we can decide on the contrary to live in 2009 in another world that is the world called by Benjamin Zander the world of possibilities !

Learning from a young french stylist in New York

Following the idea that the best lessons often come from unusual places and unexpected situations, I watched a few days ago a great TV program on "Filles TV" show broadcast called "New York, New York" whose host is a young french designer, Juliette Longuet, who shares with us her knowledge about the urban, fast paced and trendy New York lifestyle. In this TV show concept Juliette is delivering tips and tricks about fashions, shops, people and parties in new york that are topics i don't care usually but that my daughter does ! And so, as i watched the TV with Melisande (strange first name isn't it ?) i focused my attention on Juliette's art of presentation and i wondered why i was suddenly interested in and not bored by what she was saying ! And indeed, Juliette was not boring because she was enthusiastic about New York ( her enthusiasm is indeed contagious a lot) and she used a friendly, warmly and conversational tone. Basically Juliette put on the table all the 5 elements of a great "demo" in order to electrify her audience :

First she set the theme of her presentation " I am going to show you some incredible addresses in New York that you can't find in the travel books"

Second she provides a clear outline of what is going on and about what we will learn and see, she gives us all the section and destinations of our travel in New York give a reason to listen

Third she closes and opens each section with a clear transition, she always make easy for us to follow her story

In the fourth place, she demonstrates enthusiasm, she uses words like fantastic, incredible, awesome.. she wants her audience to wow and she is passionate and exited.

And the Fifth element is that her program is visual, simple with fun musics and rhythms . Juliette gives us a show that is the secret of the outstanding demos which are not boring for the customer and deliver BOTH contents and shows.

Here, you will find a link to enjoy the TV program, Juliette and the city that never sleeps.
http://www.juliettelonguet.com/blog/category/juliette-longuet-tv-show/

Why kids and babies are more creative than adults ?

Let's me introduce you Juliette (the little girl) and Manon (the baby), my friends Patrice and Catherine's daughters.

I would like to share with you some ideas about the innate capabilities that child have about learning and being creative. In a recent post from Garr Raynold "Play is good for you" i watched a video with the following experience made by Tim Brown the CEO of Ideo(a design company). Tim carried out an exercise with the adult audience : he got them to take a piece of paper and to draw the person next to them, their neighbour as quickly as possible. He told them "you have 30 seconds to draw your neighbour" . What about the results ? laughs and embarrassment ! Indeed if you do the exercise with adults, what happen every time is that you got a lot of laughters, a lot of embarrassment and a lot of "sorry" as a hearing.
Why ? Because as adult we fear the judgment of our peers and we are confused when it comes to share our idea to people we think they are our peers around us and that fear causes us to be conservative in our thinking. That explains we have sometimes a lot of good ideas we do not dare to communicate.
If you try the same exercise with kids, they have no embarrassment, they are just quite happy at showing their masterpiece to the others. But unfortunately when they learn to become adults they become much more sensitive to the opinion of others and they loose their freedom

So, as adults , we have to learn or relearn from the playfulness of kids :

• We have to learn how not being afraid by the way other people think about us and treat us. Not only we have to learn how not to be afraid by the opinion of others but additionally we have to build a strong self esteem and we need to acquire the ability to put self doubt aside. We have to relearn how to refuses (and so do young kids) to accept the limitations that others have tried to impose on us , and more importantly, we have to make our path by not accepting any of the limitations that we have previously imposed on ourselves. No doubt about our creativity and worthiness
• As kid do and behave in a secure and trusty environment we need to learn again how to break the bondage of fear of success and fear of failure. That's the ability of a given person to take the right decision for himself and his life achievement and afterwards to take the appropriate action without regard to how consequences affect the others (see also the book Thick Face Black Heart of Ching-Ning Chu)

All the best for juliette and Manon as creative and successful persons

"Looking for Richard" , the director and the demo maker.

Long ago, Aristote said that a well-constructed story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end; so should every good movie and outstanding demo as well.

Act 1 : The director usually does not want to spend too much time on this first movie act, it is important in it to include some elements of action that will grab the attention of the audience in order to present some key issues and pain points that the audience doesn't know whether they will be solved or not, that's how you prepare your value proposition and the emotional connection with the public

Act 2 : As the demo director you use this time telling the story in detail, supporting your main idea and eliminating unnecessary information. You spend this time covering the main features that are important for your prospect and the operational benefits they are expecting

Act 3 : It is the end of the story, the sum of the operationals benefits that you summarize turns to be a measurable value as an evidence for your customer. And do not forget that, at the very end of your story, something unexpected is going to happen called "one more thing" that will surprise your customer with additional value again.

So what ? inside the same framework act 1, act 2, act 3 , all the great movies are innovating and bring something new. What is interesting in Looking for Richard is the "story into the story" concept. In the first movie level you get the great masterpiece from Shakespeare "Richard III" and on the second level you get the life description of how the drama has been built with the american actors, you get too some exciting thoughts about differents aspects of Shakespeare, America and theather and such topics about how to communicate Shakespeare to american audience, how can you do being Richard III while you are a movie star ( like John Wayne playing Hamlet) are put on the table.

So do not hesitate to innovate and to use at the demo level the "story into the story" concept in order to interact better and to learn more about your prospect. For instance you can handle the whole value proposition and in the same time focusing only on certain particular pain points inside this value proposal, or for instance you can also demonstrate all the scenarios your customer asked for and on a second level telling the story of the discovery you made with them, the pain points you discovered, how the interviews went and some funny anecdotes about it. The main idea is to tell the left brain story ( Demo as usual, Richard III drama) and also to tell another right brain story ( Discovery, the actor's life) that will help you to share more additionnal value with your customer.

here the trailer of "Looking For Richard" by Al Pacino