If this isn’t the corporate mea culpa of 2011, I don’t know what is:
This is what I have been trying to understand. I believe at least some of it has been due to our attitude inside Nokia. We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses. We haven’t been delivering innovation fast enough. We’re not collaborating internally.
Nokia, our platform is burning.
This choice little paragraph comes from an internal email reportedly sent to Nokia employees by CEO Stephan Elop. There’s much more in the full catastrophe (read it here) but he speaks with remarkable honesty of the crap storm that faces companies that lack the will, the leadership or simply the inspiration to transition to new ways of developing products or, more fundamentally, doing business.
At Sense Worldwide we’re lucky that our clients have already realised that they need to change. Inspired change is, after all, what we specialise in. But having heard countless auto industry execs, either first hand at the Detroit motor show or through coverage of their presentations at CES, talk about how they can’t match the pace of development evident in the tech sector, I wonder how long it is before car companies have their Nokia moment.
It’s only a personal perspective but when the auto industry says that they can’t match the tech sector’s pace of development, they’re probably saying “We don’t want to, because we’ve been doing things real well for a hundred years and it’s too expensive to change”. I’m sure Nokia’s been saying that since the introduction of their first car phone in ’82. Now their platform is burning and it looks like a leap into the arms of Google or Microsoft is the only thing that’s going to save them.
Question is, who’s going to catch the automotive industry?
Hat tip to @joesimpson for his excellent coverage of the auto events at this years CES
I’ve just had my eye drawn to a cute little competition being run by DesignBoom – in collaboration with Porsche and the Scuola Politecnica di Design – for which entrants have been asked to design a wrap “to enhance the visual appearance of the sports vehicle”.
There’s a clear impetus here, on the part of Porsche, to try and bring some of the visually-oriented expression of self that younger generations engage in online into their brand world.
Where once we projected ourselves into shiny new cars, using them as a representation of how we wanted to be perceived (and how we perceived ourselves), outlets like Facebook enable us to do this far more easily, cheaply and in real-time. These wraps are likely seen, from a marketing perspective, as the bridge between the two.
Yet it seems that until car manufacturers really – properly – get their head around the fact that cars themselves are no longer the social avatars of choice for a growing number of young people, we’ll have to put up with window-dressing like the wraps (or the fraught incorporation of Facebook and Twitter apps into in-car entertainment systems: “Hey guys, I’m sat in traffic! LOLZ”).
So that makes two brands trotting out old cars in a bid to highlight just how good their new cars are.
Firstly, we had Volvo asking journalists to drive old workhorses like the 240, 740 and 850 at the UK launch of the naughty S60. Joe Simpson, writing for Car Design News remarked on how much improved the overall performance of the new car was. Read the rest of this entry »
Now with a 10 minute highlights reel of the original 40 minute interview
Last week I was offered the enormous privilege of taking part in a project being run by Joe Simpson and Mark Charmer of the Movement Design Bureau. They’ve been tasked with looking at the perception of Ford’s sustainability message, from top to bottom and inside out. Having watched the project develop over the last few months, I leapt at the chance to be involved.
I was asked to review Joe and Mark’s interview with Sue Cischke, Ford’s group Vice President of Sustainability, Environment and Safety Engineering and provide my observations based on what I heard. Given Sue’s long and illustrious history in the industry, it wasn’t a task I took lightly. My take on things now been published for the world (and Ford) to read and I’m looking forward to seeing the reaction.
It wasn’t all about me, however, and I commend you to read the fantastic contributions from Dan Stuges, of Intrago, and Amy Johannigman and Robb Hunter from the University of Cincinnati’s storied Department of Design, Architecture, Art & Planning.
One of the really exciting aspects of this project is that 4 people have come together and drawn three different, but highly related (and, in my view, relevant) conclusions from Joe and Mark’s interview with Sue.
Although small in scale, the process amply demonstrates the power of the internet to enable collaboration and connection between geographically dispersed stake-holders, something that Clay Shirky talked about to great effect in his 2005 presentation at TED.
Head over to Re*Move to see the other critiques, plus a whole lot more on the Ford project.
About DownSideUp Design
I'm Drew Smith and I'm a design strategist and journalist. By day I'm an Executive Partner at Truth (no joke). By night I sleep (mostly). And once a month, I host an event called CreativeMornings/London.
DownsideUpDesign is a place for me to collect stuff that I like, often love and sometimes hate for safe keeping. All views represented here are mine and mine alone and do not represent those of anyone else.
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