I must admit that I cringe when I see people taking the first path, coming over all fake and desperate. Apparently I’m not alone, since most people I know opt for the second path. Authenticity provides a comforting moral high ground as well as an excuse for not going out there and doing anything really scary.

Part of me is pretty sure that we need to do scary things, though. I had a chance recently to talk to Rob Adams about the dilemma. His advice is summed up in the title of this post. He loves the New Zealand culture, and wants us to stay true to it. But being understated and phlegmatic doesn’t mean we have to be cowards. So make that call you’re afraid to make. Walk right up to that guy who could open a massive door for you. Tell that lady what you think a fair price is for your product, and why. There’s no need to be a dick about it, though. What’s required is bravery, the courage to put yourself out there. And it should be you who’s out there, not some dick version of you.

It’s a pretty simple formula and, once I understood it, I started seeing it all over the place (thanks Lance, Rowan, Nicole, Pel…). I’m trying my best to put it into practice. I’ve got a ways to go, but definitely recommend you try it.

Calling it that wasn’t the screw-up. The screw-up was that we started the company because we wanted to run our own business and be cool. That’s not really enough of a vision. Our first client was a magazine who negotiated a discount by featuring us on their cover all pimped out in Zambesi and Versace. The story (of the business and the article) was about us, not about our customers.

The other day Peter Thiel said that being an entrepreneur wasn’t a useful goal. It’s a side effect – like becoming rich or famous. He said that you should become an entrepreneur if that’s the best way to achieve a goal you’ve become passionate about. If you can better achieve the goal within a corporation or NGO, you should be there.

Runtheotherway lasted 18 months. My memory and filing is a little vague, but I think our second business is 8 years old today. The vision for Lee ter Wal was about partnering with geeks to communicate complex stories. We’ve been lucky to work with lots of cool geeks in organisations large and small. Some of you probably don’t call yourselves geeks, but we affectionately think of you that way anyhow.

Our mission now is to ramp up the ‘partnership’ bit of the vision. We’ve been putting fees at risk, depending on whether a defined outcome is achieved, and taking equity instead of cash. I really like what that does to the designer-client relationship, so I’d be grateful if you could keep your eye out for opportunities to work in that way. Don’t worry about the title of this post. It’ll be fine.

My client had consulted with customers and conducted research before designing the new offer, so to see it go down in flames was pretty shocking.

Capturing the feedback on video is a really useful discipline in these sorts of cases. When we looked and listened closely, it became clear that how the offer was being phrased was more of an issue than the offer itself. It wasn’t that the language was difficult. The issue was that they were talking to customers the way managers at a company talk to each other, or talk to the government. We changed the vocab to match the audience, and tested the same offer with further groups. The results were now favourable.

Spin doctors are experts at using phrasing to manipulate perceptions. You never want to go near spin – but language often does need a doctor. If you’ve got something special to offer, you want your customers to know the truth about you. So it’s both arrogant and stupid to pitch to them in Latin when they speak Italian.

Spend more time listening to the way your customers speak. The coolest part is discovering the Italian phrases that describe their world so much more richly than our Latin ever did.

Every 3 minutes, somewhere in the world, a designer is receiving that brief. I’ve had it half a dozen times in my career.

Taken literally, the result is awful. A big mess on the left that turns into something simple and symetrical on the right. Unfortunately, your friends will say it’s great. Don’t forget to test on real people.

If your value proposition is the creation of simplicity, having a whole lot of complexity in your logo will not serve you well.

Your logo is also not the perfect vehicle to convey 5-7 magical things that set your business apart. More on that next week.

He’d mocked up the visuals, using just the word “Easy” as placeholder text. My job was to come up with an actual title, plus some supporting benefits. But I was so taken with that one, powerful word, that I felt we should go with his original mockup. “Easy” really summed up the product’s point of difference. And to convey the service that went with the product, we used an image of a smiling young lady.

It really stood out against the competing Big Boys’ Toys tech product brochures, and the client team loved it.

The visually-minded among you will have noticed the problem: You can’t label a smiling young lady “Easy”. Doh.

I’ve spoken before about the importance of testing on real people, and in this case the screw-up was detected by Shaun’s wife. It was not, however, detected by us or by the client team members. The design solution was good in theory, and so marketing people gave it a pass.

We work in increasingly cerebral environments, where “good in theory” tends to get equated with “good”. But they’re not the same thing, and we all need to get out more.

We produced a “before and after” diagram aimed at strategic decision makers. It beautifully illustrated the behavioural changes required, and the various efficiency gains that these would make possible. The client liked it, as did a small test audience of CEOs and CFOs.

When the material was used in practice, however, it emerged that operational staff were also key decision makers, along with the strategic managers they reported to. The strategic managers were conceptual thinkers. But the operational staff were concrete thinkers, and they found our diagram shallow and unconvincing.

One of the most important principles of business-to-business design is to identify all of the different decision makers, and tailor material to them. Four years ago, we failed to live up to that principle.