Time: 13:08 | 06/29/2010 | Download MP3

Summary
The roundtable discussion continues with Jamie Dihiansan, Jason Fried, and Ryan Singer. In this part, the trio discusses the difference between art and design, speed vs. aesthetics, cultural impact on design, architecture, and more.

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During the original intro to this Q&A about Gen. McChrystal’s dismissal, NY Times reporter John Burns mentions how R.M. Williams boots from Australia are now the standard boot of choice for war reporters.

...the band of brothers and sisters who have gone to war with their pens and notebooks, their flak jackets and helmets and R. M. Williams boots (from Australia, and by habit heavily scuffed; they are as indispensable to this generation of war correspondents and photographers as the dangling cigarette was to the generation of Ernie Pyle).

If a boot becomes the standard choice among war correspondents, I’m thinking it’s gotta be pretty damn good. Not sure if there’s a specific model these guys favor, but here’s a look at R.M. Williams’ Rigger Boot.

Unsurprisingly, the company seems pretty cool too. Like Saddleback Leather, R.M. Williams sells by using its history and educating customers. The founder’s backstory tells of his years in the bush and how he learned to build boots from a guy named Dollar Mick.

R.M. first went bush in his teens – lime burning and building in stone in Victoria and on the Western Australian goldfields. In the late 1920’s, he signed on as a camel boy with the missionary explorer, William Wade, in his treks across Australia’s central western deserts. He learned valuable bush lore and survival skills from the aboriginal peoples of the area, and honed his stock handling and bushcraft skills from the stockmen of the desert fringe cattle stations…

A self-taught genius in leatherworking, Dollar Mick passed on his skills to the 24 year old R.M. who made and sold his first pair of riding boots for 20 shillings to a man from Hilltaba Station whose name he can’t remember.

Having worked on some of the great pastoral runs of the interior, no one knew better than R.M. what men who were born in the saddle wanted when it came to footwear.

The catalog explains why the company builds boots from one piece of leather, the types of soles used, and the benefits of handcrafting.

Related: RM Williams Boots – Everything You Wanted to Know [styleforum]

Back when he helmed Disney, Michael Eisner used to rely on institutionalized creative friction:

The whole business starts with ideas, and we’re convinced that ideas come out of an environment of supportive conflict, which is synonymous with appropriate friction.

Gong Show meetings were one of the ways he fostered this conflict, according to Disney expert Bill Capodagli.

It’s a concept where, two or three times a year, any Disney employee can present an idea for a full-length feature animation before Michael Eisner,CEO and chairman of the board, and Roy Disney, vice chairman of the board, and other executives. Hercules, the animated film, for example, came about from an animator’s idea that was presented at a Gong Show. The company benefits because they get thousands of good ideas from their employees, some of which are developed into feature films. And the employees benefit because they know they have the freedom to submit ideas that will be listened to. Even if their idea is “gonged,” they celebrate it and learn from it.

The Little Mermaid and Pocahontas also came out of Gong Show meetings. Eisner also held “charettes” — meetings with architects and theme park designers, whom he liked because they were “so brutally honest.” When developing movies and TV shows, he’d often hold meetings that lasted 10+ hours (“the longer, the better”).

Eventually everybody gets hungry, and tired, and angry, and eager to leave. But everybody also becomes equal. There is no pecking order. All of a sudden it gets really creative. You may have a ten-hour meeting, but it’s during the last half hour that the best ideas come out…Sometimes you have to be worn out and burnt out to become authentic and original.

Oof. It must suck to have so much corporate hierarchy that you need to meet for the length of an Isner-Mahut Wimbledon match to reach a point where co-workers can talk to each other like equals.

This is part of our “Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” series which profiles companies that have $1MM+ in revenues, didn’t take VC, and are profitable.

In 2004, Gwyn ap Harri was a full time teacher with a couple of ideas. One was to use screen recording software for kids to demonstrate what they had learnt in the classroom. After doing a search, he didn’t find any suitable software for use in schools. One piece of software was almost there, so he contacted the creator, who lived in Beijing. After a few modifications, Gwyn put it on the market and sold it to a few schools.

He kept teaching and used the cash from those sales to fund the development of one of his other ideas: realsmart. The product started from his own frustrations. “As a teacher with all the usual pressures of getting results out of kids, I ended up teaching to the exam, and the kids weren’t learning anything real,” he says. “I had to be part of the solution, not the problem.”

So he came up with realsmart. “realsmart is certainly not a traditional piece of educational software,” according to Gwyn. “I recognised that at the epicentre of what I was doing was the young learner. So many educational products have the teacher at the centre, and they’re not.”

“realsmart is based on self assessment rather than the teacher telling you what to do,” continues Gwyn. “Students own their portfolios and can build them at their own pace. It’s based on the idea that we learn as we reflect and record our learning, not when a teacher tells us we’re a B- and could do better. It tries to help us learn like we do in the real world ie on our own, with our friends to help us, and occasionally some feedback from an expert.”

Students use realsmart to build “learning portfolios” via collaborative websites, blogs and podcasts, mind maps, and more. “It’s assessment software that doesn’t have any grades or percentages or deadlines or anything like that. They’re quite hard to explain in a few words, which is why we have loads of videos showing them off on our website,” according to Gwyn.

Gwyn ap Harri at Arsenal football stadium, where smartassess sponsored the Achievement Show 2010.

Getting off the ground
It wasn’t an instant hit though. “We used the money from the screen recording software to create our first version of realsmart, but it looked crap, and it didn’t do that much to be honest. It was like trying to sell half a car. We knew we weren’t going to be able to sell enough to fund the next step. We were spending more on diesel than we were bringing in.”

Music biz guru Bob Lefsetz has been publishing “The Lefsetz Letter,” an industry newsletter, for over 25 years. After reading this Newsweek article about 37signals, he offered some great commentary about similar lessons he’s learned in the music business.

Here he talks about how all the marketing in the world can’t replace a product that sells itself:

As Ahmet Ertegun once said, a hit is a record that gets a listener to jump out of bed, put on his clothes and go to the all night record store to buy it after hearing it on the radio. I listen to the radio in my car all day long. But it’s rare that I have to write down the title of a song and rush to my computer to download the track. Happened with Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy”. And, in the CD era, with Alanis Morissette’s “Hand In Pocket”, I had to go home and rifle through hundreds of CDs to find “Jagged Little Pill”. And then there’s Walt Wilkins/Pat Green’s “Wrapped”… Point is, hit records sell themselves, like drugs. If your record is not selling itself, you’re never going to make it. In other words, if you’re working me, you’re in trouble. Your track should be so great I hear about it from someone else!

And then he explains why he loves picking fights:

I was listening to Richard Roeper on Howard Stern, he lamented the guest hosts from Hollywood who co-starred with him on “At The Movies” would say nothing negative, for fear of alienating some potential business contact. But it’s when you say something negative that you endear yourself to a group! And if you’re offering a better product…

Are you willing to state your truth and own it? Elton John talks shit about other people. But most acts demur. I’d like Jon Bon Jovi if he just said SOMETHING or SOMEONE sucked. But he’s so busy sucking the public’s dick I miss no chance to beat him up, point out his band’s foibles, because he’s not real…and I know many people agree with me. Then again, most people are indifferent! And only by taking a side can you get them to care!

The whole thing is full of gems. Check it out.

World Cup fan who uses Campfire? Type /play vuvuzela

Not everyone’s crazy about it though:

A couple months back, we took a look at how tech companies stack up when measured by revenue per employee. Here are some other links (some recent, some older) that discuss payroll and efficiency:

Royal Pingdom reports Google had $209,624 in profit per employee in 2008, beating out Microsoft, Apple, Intel and IBM.

According to an ‘08 article from The Financial Times, Nintendo produced more than $1.6 million per employee—more than investment bank Goldman Sachs’ $1.24 million per employee during 2007.

CNBC looked at how much revenue S&P 500 companies generated per employee over a fiscal year.

Automobiles & Components
Industry Leader: Harley Davidson (HOG)
Annual revenue per employee: $641,612
Annual profit per employee: $62,848
Employees: 9,300

Industry Leader: Amazon.com (AMZN)
Annual revenue per employee: $962,319
Annual profit per employee: $33,237
Employees: 20,600

Business Insider illustrates the value of a unique visitor for several different types of web properties.

“The Craigslist Anomaly” is Michael Slater’s search for lessons from the site’s success.

Replicating this success is not, of course, something that any new site could rationally aspire to do. Perhaps the central reason for craigslist’s great success is that they took a function that was being done offline (classified ads) but could be better done online, and translated it quite simply to to online world. Their goals were modest, and they weren’t trying to build a huge franchise—they were simply trying to solve a problem. Ironically, this led to a huge and powerful franchise.

SI.com looks at the baseball teams that got the most bang for their buck over the last decade.

Florida took advantage of the system over the past decade. The Marlins found a way to spend as little as possible and win just enough—well, maybe. They did win one world championship in the decade but gave their fans only one other pennant race. Here’s a good question for fans: would you take one world championship every decade if it meant punting eight of the other nine years?

Another baseball piece: In “MLB Payroll Efficiency,” Purple Row attempts to correlate number of wins with year-end payroll over a three-year period.

This is part of our “Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” series which profiles companies that have $1MM+ in revenues, didn’t take VC, and are profitable.

In April of 2009, Adii Pienaar (from Cape Town, SA), Mark Forrester (London, UK) and Magnus Jepson (Stavanger, Norway) met up in London at the FOWD conference. It was the first time they were all together in the same room. Rather surprising when you consider they’d already been running a successful company called WooThemes for over a year together.

The backstory: Pienaar had started a business called Premium News Themes which released the very first premium WordPress theme in November 2007. Soon after, he got an e-mail from Jepson about collaborating. A month later, they released their first collaborated theme.

Then Forrester entered the picture. He was visiting Cape Town in January 2008 and Pienaar met up with him to discuss working together. They released their first theme together a month later and continued working on more. All the while the trio continued to do freelance work on the side.

By July, sales were far exceeding the earnings from freelance work. So they gave up the freelance work, formalized the relationship, and began focusing exclusively on the company they dubbed WooThemes. Now it’s a full fledged business that designs and develops templates for WordPress as well as Tumblr, ExpressionEngine & Drupal.

Time: 15:34 | 06/15/2010 | Download MP3

Summary
A roundtable discussion featuring three members of the 37signals design team: Jamie Dihiansan, Jason Fried, and Ryan Singer. In this part, the trio discusses their respective roles, working at 37signals vs. Crate and Barrel, copywriting in design, design inspiration, and more.

More episodes
Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS. Related links and previous episodes available at 37signals.com/podcast.

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Like this episode? Please share it with your friends: