This American Life has a good rundown on the financial crisis. For those of you like myself who are outside of the U.S. of A, the TAL podcast is a must-listen, but this episode in particular helped explain a lot of things which were otherwise a little opaque and complicated.

A frightening take on the economy. It’s hard to not be pessimistic right now, but it seems we should eschew a growth-based economy for something more resilient. My eyes are on the Resilience community (an offshoot of biological studies). I haven’t seen much from them in the wake of the current crisis.

My friend at Lake Jane has posted a profile of Les Touilleurs, the best cooking store in my town of Montréal. Aside from having an attractive space, they do a few things very right. In a certain sense it might be seen as the opposite of a big-box commodity store.

A few of the things they do which I wish more stores would copy:

- No packaging. You can pick everything up and see how it actually feels in your hand. It also lets you more adequately tell the quality of what you are going to buy, which can be difficult behind the thick packaging on many products.

- Small, but good, selection. They have been known to discontinue items that are selling well if they decide the quality isn’t up to snuff. This sort of editorializing makes sure you get something really good, and builds a great customer loyalty. Yes, you could buy something cheaper elsewhere, but you know the one from here will be great, and will probably last at least 10 years if maintained well.

- An Excellent Staff. They really know enough to help you find what you want. These aren’t apathetic Best Buy workers who don’t care about what they’re doing, they take pride in their work and it shows.

- Educational Courses. Cooking workshops are held often in the in-store kitchen. Many top chefs from the city take part.

I have always been interested in design, but often cringe at the word because of the connotations of aesthetics it often carries with it. Visuals are important, but design to me is always linked more to function and the stories it tells rather than looks.

I just finished John Thackara’s book In the Bubble, and was pretty astonished how closely his design aesthetic matches mine. He largely avoids the sort of ridiculous “design can solve all our problems” futurism and sticks more to what’s most important to design: people and context. He encourages a “. . . shift in emphasis from what things look like to how they behave - from designing on the world to designing in the world . . .”

In a world where “design” too-often connotes fancy Voss water bottles, visually-pleasing but meaningless tubular steel chairs designed by famous architects, or modernist buildings which purposefully reject both history and the context in which they are built, Thackara’s point of view is refreshing. He writes:

Designers are needlessly constrained by the myth that everything they do has to be a unique and creative act. Rather than design everything from scratch, we should search far and wide for tried-and-tested solutions that others have already created . . . The capacity to think across boundaries, to spot opportunities at the juncture of two or more industries, and to draw relevant analogies from seemingly unrelated industries is as valuable as deep experience of a single sector . . . We need to recombine relationships - among people, ideas, and organizations and knowledge domains - and exploit scientific, natural, and cultural knowledge that is usually ignored, whether it be mimicking biology or learning from storytellers in India. Putting old knowledge into new context creates new knowledge.

Here is a piece of terrible design I thought I’d share. It’s possibly the worst terrace I’ve ever seen in my life. Granted, I took this picture in the middle of winter, but it looks only slightly better now that it’s summer.

The Long Views Blog has pointed me to an interesting list of the oldest companies in the world. It’s interesting to see the factors which allow a company to last for so long. They are generally small, family-owned, extremely specialized, and renowned for the quality of their products.

The first one on the list that I recognized was #32 cymbal-maker Zildjian, which was founded in Istanbul in 1623, which was followed closely by Kikkoman, a soy-sauce maker founded in Japan seven years later.

Sometimes a practice becomes so pervasive that it almost goes unnoticed. Case in point - hotels pretty much always try to charge you a whole lot for extra services. All hotels seem to do it. The proverbial 6 Euro bottle of water in the mini-bar is a great example. Sure, it makes money for the hotels in the short run, but it makes them come off as greedy, at least in my eyes.

I didn’t realize how bad things were until I stayed in a hotel that doesn’t do it. I recently had the pleasure of staying in the Hotel Excelsior in Frankfurt, Germany. It wasn’t the nicest hotel - it was pretty average in most ways. It was cheap and well located, but not fancy in the least. The difference came from the extras. Free internet in the room, free coffee and cake in the lobby at all times, free newspapers, free phone calls within Germany, and most impressively - free mini-bar.

After a long day strolling around Frankfurt, it was extremely satisfying to come back to two-bottles each of mineral water (sparkling and non), juice, pepsi, and even beer. The cost was negligible for the hotel, but it made us feel like they were taking care of us rather than gouging us for money.

Now, I understand that none of these were truly free - they were included in the price of our room. The important factor was that all the costs were up front - there we no hidden fees.

I have to imagine that it makes sense for the hotel as well - they go from being just another low cost hotel to “that hotel with the free mini bar”, a small distinction, but one that people will talk about.

Neatorama has an article on business blunders, which is pretty much a different take on a list from Forbes I posted a few weeks ago. The bad decisions are all examples of short-term thinking. Take, for example, the story of Schlitz, formerly the number one beer in the U.S.

[Schlitz President Robert] Uihlein cut the amount of time it took to brew Schlitz from 40 days to 15, and replaced much of the barley malt in the beer with corn syrup - which was cheaper. He also switched from one type of foam stabilizer to another to get around new labeling laws that would have required the original stabilizer to be disclosed on the label.

The results were predictable - the new beer tasted terrible and people quickly stopped drinking it. By the time the issue had been remedied, Schlitz had started its slide to obscurity.

ComputerWorld has an interview a business analyst on the long-term nature of Google’s business. The company’s stated goal is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, a goal which CEO Eric Schmidt was recently quoted as saying would take 300 years. In addition to talking long term, they have implemented some things which are encouragingly far-sighted.

A good example is their declining to split their stock, which is currently trading just slightly better than $475 per share. Splitting the stock 2 to 1, for example, would create twice as many shares each worth half as much. This is usually done to make the stock easier to buy. It’s hard to speculate why Google doesn’t do this, but it seems that the high price is intended to stop or discourage short-term investors - a play straight out of Warren Buffet’s playbook, the stock in whose company is currently hovering around $130,000 per share. In addition, they do not provide any guidance to investors regarding their expected quarterly performance, a small but important step to help investors look further than 3 months ahead.

The last long-term strategy I’ll mention is Google’s famous allotment of time for personal projects. This has lead directly to GMail, AdSense, Google News and several others. The company allows their engineers to spend 20% of their time working on whatever they want. This can let even the lowest level employee contribute to the company, and perhaps more importantly gives the employees an allotted time to daydream about the future of the company.

When something goes catastrophically wrong, it can be easy to blame the people immediately involved. They get lazy, tired, bored, distracted, jealous, or into any number of other possible mental states which can cloud judgement and lead to mistakes. When inevitable disasters occur, the short-term approach is to blame human error, but in many cases the longer-term approach is to blame the system and correct it instead. That isn’t to say that humans are never at fault - they are often grossly incompetent, but sometimes they receive blame which should rightly be aimed higher, at the system they work within.

David Sanborn Scott, explained the title of his book, Smelling Land , with this classic legend of a fleet of ships in a fog:

It is told that when the fleet was still some distance off the islands, a cabin boy came to the admiralâ??s stateroom to say, â??Sir, I smell land. I think we should heave-to until the fog clears.â?? Advice from a cabin boy to an admiral of the Royal Navy was neither expected nor welcome-especially not in 1707, and especially not to Admiral Cloudesley Shovell. The boy was reprimanded and sent away. Yet he must have gone on deck for another whiff, because soon he was back at the admiralâ??s door, no doubt apprehensive, but not enough to stop him repeating his warning: â??Sir, I smell land. I think we should put about.â?? And that is why he was swinging from the yardarm when the fleet crunched ashore on the land he had been smelling.

The easy response to the story is to blame the Admiral - blame he deserves - but it is also important to call into question the overly hierarchical navy structure of the time. While the truth of the story can’t be verified, as the fleet was largely lost (and roughly 1400 men with it) the story is a good parable for many organizations. Had the culture been a little more bottom-up, rather than top-down, maybe it wouldn’t have happened.

James Reason, in his article for the British Medical Journal, asserts that the role of culture in an organization plays a large role in how reliable, safe, and mistake-prone they are. Open, bottom-up, and “just” organizations are more likely to be less mistake-prone. He uses the example of the Chernobyl disaster, a disaster in which bad policies, faulty design, and lack of education turned a test of operations into a literal meltdown. The lack of a reporting culture in the USSR was the underlying cause, which itself was caused by a lack of trust between the top and bottom of the hierarchy. Nobody was willing to speak up about their lack of education on what they were doing, or on the faulty design of the control mechanisms in place. They didn’t want to be the cabin boy who smelled land.

Fixing cultures and other such larger systems is much more difficult than blaming whoever was at the instrument panel when things took a turn for the worst. As James Reason puts it “Blaming individuals is emotionally more satisfying than targeting institutions.”