It was a tough week for all of us with the worldwide meltdown in the financial community distracting us with numbers too big to imagine and a vice presidential debate that looked like a reality TV show. Since I vowed to publish a blog; here I am back at it again on Sunday night. In the mayhem of last week I did take a break - laying in my inbox (physical metal tray sitting on my desk) was the October issue of Esquire Magazine- it was a nice break from the bleak and the dreary.
Esquire’s cover shot was a bold pronunciation – the 21st Century Begins Now - if this past week is a summary of the start its going to be a short race marked with a lot of carnage. So why am I writing about the 21st century and Esquire’s October magazine – good point let me stop rambling. Flipping past the gazillion pages of men’s fashion pictures – its fashion month / week in October for those of us wondering why the magazine had the weight of a Red Herring Magazine prior to the last bubble bursting in 2000 – I digress… getting back to the reason for this week’s blog… the Table of Contents for Esquire’s October issue is smoking hot! The pages are a cornucopia of visual stimulation – starting with the method for addressing The Profiles using a photomontage of the people featured in the magazine to tell a collective history.
The defining moment for the TofC is really the next set of visual stimulation – the 75 most influential people of the 21st Century – a DNA inspired snapshot of where these influential people sit, congregate, rank with each other. This “dashboard” summarizes where these people come from and if they are at all associated – sort of like the Esquire ranked “social network” or maybe we could just simple call this – commonalities. Esquire likes to call this a composite profile – isn’t that what we get from LinkedIn when trying to figure out who knows who and so forth. Again, back to the subject matter – the picture – in this case the Composite Profile is really a nice summary of disparate data silos ranked together to form a snapshot of what you are about to read; categories include Clerked for the Supreme Court (2 people), Harvard Degree (11), Over 50 (29), Dead (1), Formerly Homeless (1), Children of Accused Terrorists (2), Made Fortune in Oil (4), Rocket Makers (1), Business Chiefs (24), Been in Prison (1) – and the list goes on. Reading the summary sucks you in – I want to know who’s been to prison (Mike Milken) and who is the Rocket Maker (I don’t know) – I know that this snapshot compelled me to read this article and learn more. Imagine if you had all this data in a digital file every time you pulled up a spreadsheet – the underlying data drawing you in to learn more. What if you could click on a colored box and learn more about what each data set contains – what if all of this was automatic and you could find the rocket man without having to flip through pages of men’s clothing and reading all the bio’s to learn the story of one person or one data set. This is data manipulation at its finest – I want to learn about all the data in the little box colored tan – this is a reasonable request isn’t it?
What if you are in business and you could tell for instance you were not charging enough for one of your products and you had a simple tan colored box that signaled that your were undervaluing the selling price of that product and that product was one of your best sellers. Worse yet, what if that best selling product now called tan box is now outlined red to signify something wrong and this kept flashing on your screen calling attention to the fact the product was an outlier and in need of help. What if this simple to create picture was a dashboard in the form of a web page on every team member’s desk in a certain department with the responsibility of selling more of those products represented by the tan box on the screen? This would be pretty powerful information - pictures are more than pretty pictures getting you to read a magazine article – pictures stimulate our senses to want more information about something- it’s the trigger to say – that intrigues me –I want to know more.
One of the truly talented team members from Blue Rooster said to me last week – "pretty pictures don’t drive the world" – I wrote this down – I knew this was so far from the truth. What if that flashing tan box with the red outline was not calling out the rocket maker but displaying data points to regulators reviewing market prices for sub-prime mortgages – what if we could have seen 10 years ago that the model was broken – maybe a pretty picture could have driven the world.
Kudos’s to Esquire for another exceptional magazine – really great to read about people making a difference in the world and not one Investment Banker – uh err that was the guy from prison! The reference to the model being broken came from another article – Pressured to Take More Risk, Fannie Reached Tipping Point – NY Times 10/5/08. Fantastic explanation for what really happened in the financial markets – clearly supply was there and for some reason everyone felt they needed to pay less for riskier loans – the model was clearly broken – now where was that tan box with the flashing red outline? Thanks for reading. Kevin-