Chris Writes.

Last night, I went to the second commonwealth club event I’ve attended this week – not bad considering it was Wednesday. For some reason, I even threw down another stack of twenties to join the club for the year; something about it being non-profit and needing money.

I had no real expectations going into this: I knew very little of Ted, other than he had his CNN affiliation. I even suspected it would reek of republicanism and media control – even more so once I arrived and realized I was probably the youngest person there, and the average age was probably 55 to 60. But when it was over, I was pleasantly surprised.

Ted was gregarious, a steamroller of a conversationalist that used the interviewer like a cat toy: batting at it viciously at first, then abruptly wandering off, ignoring it completely. She’d try to interject a new question, and about half the time, he’d barrel over the question with a delayed continuation to the previous answer, or to continue an anecdote from 5 minutes ago, or to introduce a complete non sequitor. Ever seen someone play several chess games at once? It was like that. Lots going on inside his head, but to an observer, it risked a rather messy appearance.

So, the short list of his accomplishments includes founding CNN, owning and running the Atlanta Braves (that’s a baseball team, I think), and managing a massive foundation that targets nuclear disarmament, an end to oil dependence, and a reduction to climate change. There’s a bunch more, but even still, that’s a good list. As he quipped early though, you only get to live to see one renaissance. He followed this by noting that Alexander the Great conquered the world, but that’s all he did. Indeed.

After joking around about not being able to remember if he had Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s (yesterday was his 70th birthday), he waxed nostalgic about his family, his marriages (including once to Jane Fonda, with whom he still speaks weekly for his ‘dose of humility’), and noted that life is rather like a B-Movie, in that you don’t want to get up halfway through and leave, but you don’t really want to sit through it again either.

He had some harsh words for the auto industry, with a laissez-faire attitude that I can only agree with (granted, I do work in the bike industry, so perhaps I’m pre-biased), and he mused his surprise at how much stupidity is out there. He referred to newspapers as an obsolete technology (again, agreed), but to refer to it as a technology was an interesting twist: McLuhan would have simply called it a cool media. He likened it to an abacus.

Amidst more jokes, he offered insights about how his land (he’s the largest private landowner in the USA) is all empty land that is good for nothing except raising his 45,000 bison (!!!), which, oddly enough, makes it *perfect* for wind farms and solar panels. He slammed the government for maintaining subsidies on gasoline (which is why it’s $2.29 a gallon here, and $6 to $9 a gallon in the EU), and then pointed out that these artificially low prices aren’t sustainable, and they’re driving alternative energy companies (wind and solar, particularly) out of business at exactly the time that they’re needed.

No mention of bicycles, but no matter: here’s a guy who started with less than nothing, worked hard, enjoyed success, was crushed, and then rose back up again. And now, he’s happy to spend the rest of his life having fun. And he looks healthy enough to think he’s got a good chunk of time left, which is good cuz he’s certainly passionate about trying to fix some of the problems that, as he points out, take more than four years to fix, thus putting them outside the realm of what the US government will tackle.

I helped a friend get a new bike recently.  She’d crashed badly a while back, and while parts of her bike are still mostly fine, lots of bits were demolished. From having been in similar situations myself, I know full well that it’s not just the bike that gets damaged.

It had been a while since I’d been so involved in helping someone else get a new bike, and I was nostalgically reminded of days long ago working in a bike shop for 40-60 hrs a week while putting myself through undergrad, fueled in large part by the elation that pretty much everyone has when they get a new bike.  I honestly love the excitement of new bikes; there’s simply nothing like it. It can return adults to carefree adolescence in a way that few things can. This one simple thing kept me thrilled with my job when I worked in a bike shop: every day, I got to see that kind of excitement in people. I miss it sometimes.

I took this shot last weekend at the Pilarcitos cross race.

I went to see Guy Kawasaki last night, as part of the Commonwealth Club speaker series. I can’t comment on any pending American application to the Commonwealth, but Canada’s still a Commonwealth member, so I of course felt right at home. It was loosely tied to Guy’s new book, though mostly because you could buy the book there and have him sign it.  His actual discussion rambled in lots of directions, he tried (perhaps too hard or too often or both) to be funny, but when the hour was done, he’d packed quite a bit in.  Some nuggets and fun anecdotes:

While working at Apple, he worked directly with Steve Jobs, from whom Guy learned “an appreciation for elegance”.  He followed that up with something I agree with all too often: that a heavily feature-laden thing (like my Samsung Blackjack cell phone, or this full suspension mountain bike frame I saw at Eurobike) can be full of features and bereft of any sort of smartness or sensible design.  Today we tolerate clunky and ugly things less and less, and values elegance more and more:  Beautiful lugged steel fixed gear bikes.  White carbon road bikes.  A perfect wine glass.

Guy’s answer to improve innovation: increase immigration. Let EVERYONE in, and let the smartest and brightest shine and rise to the top. As a Canadian living in California, I can hardly fault his idea. Protectionism is shown in so many ways to impede progress, yet to apply this conclusion to immigration remains taboo. Can’t say if this would improve bike industry innovation, but it was a thought provoking idea, and it exemplifies his willingness to try unproven ideas.  He is, after all, a venture capital guy kinda Guy.

“I was offered the chance to be the first adult at Yahoo, and turned it down because of the commute.  I figure that decision cost me 2 billion dollars.”

“If you’ve gotten funding for your business, run your business as if that’s the last round of funding you’ll ever actually get. Because it might be. Given the climate today, that’s probably all you’ll get.”

“Being young and unproven is not a hindrance to getting VC funding.”  The collective sigh of relief in the room when he said this could have propelled a decent-sized sailboat.  He challenged the idea that the best ideas come from proven teams with proven ideas, and pointed out that the ideas that were unproven in every way have provided some memorable and enduring successes.

Worth an hour on a school night, for sure.

So a few assumptions to start off this post:

1. Real estate values go down as the number of neighboring houses go vacant. Said differently: desolation is a downward spiral.
2. Retail follows a similar pattern: empty malls suffer because nobody wants to be the only store in an otherwise empty mall.  Or: retail success relies on network effects.
3. The North American auto industry is in serious trouble, has a history of acting like malls (by cramming lots of dealers together along single streets), and now faces perilous uncertainty as potential closures threaten to devalue locations, and lessen the valued network effects they relied on by being located together.

If I haven’t made any unfounded or dubious assumptions so far, then I have an idea that might be worthy of consideration.  Last night on my way home from portland, I happened across Mike, the Rapha-clad editor/photograper of Velodramatic.  We’d emailed in passing, traded blog comments, but had never met in real life.  The flight back to San Jose we shared an exit row and rambled on about bikes, cameras, and blogging.  One of the ideas we discussed that stuck with me: turn the soon-to-be-empty auto dealerships into bike dealers.

So imagine, if you will, the inevitable closing of a few big auto dealerships.  What if instead of leaving them vacant, part of the government bailout was set aside to help finance bike shops opening locations in auto malls?  Big, bright showrooms, lots of parking, the option for test tracks of all kinds (tarmac and dirt), and the chance for cars and bikes to share an audience.

Let’s not kid ourselves: it’s unlikely that someone buying a car is going to buy a bike instead just because they see a bike shop nearby.  And a cyclist isn’t likely to drop their interest in a new bike because the new Ford Focus is across the street.  But maybe, just maybe, they’ll be thought of as complements.  The opportunity for bike rack sales, for cross promotions, for awareness that both cars and bikes share the same roads, for peaceful driver and cyclist co-habitation, and for a captive audience that is primed to change their transportation (whether bike or car).

The upside here is more for the bike shop than the car dealerships, at least on the face of it.  But the downside of having an empty dealership across the street can’t bode well for a car dealer.  And who knows, what if you could tack a $2000 bike onto your car financing, walk across the street, and pick one out?

The existing buildings, infrastructure, parking, and locations are all pretty good for bike dealerships – the only catch being that they’re clearly bigger than necessary.  If there was a way to make them affordable to bike shops who currently suffer in tiny locations with terrible parking, it could be a solid and lasting assist to both car and bike dealers.

Last night, for the first time, I attended a Commonwealth Club lecture in San Francisco, to hear the Dean of the Rotman Business School, Roger Martin, speak about innovation, opposable thumbs, and other things that are really, really useful.  In the spirit of full disclosure: I attended Rotman, and even graduated, so I was predisposed to thinking this was going to be an illuminating evening. Thus, as one might suspect, I was not disappointed. But truth be told, it was even better than I had expected, by a factor of at least 17, and in ways I did not at all expect.

Roger shared the stage with Darrel Rhea, CEO of Cheskin Added Value, and for 90 minutes they batted around the topic of innovation as if it were a delicious chew toy that was also wrapped in bacon. Some favorite quotes from Roger:

“Any new idea cannot be proven in advance.”
Think about this statement, and then think about Stan Day when he decided that a twist shifter was a good idea.  Look at what he’s built with SRAM, based on a single, and extremely unprovable idea.

“The advantage of the current times is that people are willing to change.”
This is the part where we all say: “Hey!  Ride a bike!  It’s better than driving in all kinds of ways!”.  And then we realize that people are ACTUALLY LISTENING!   Holy pasgetti monster, there’s a new uprising of urban riding.

“Great design is about making something holistically elegant.”
Shimano Coasting: a bike industry rarity, in that everything about the entire system was thought out in advance.  It’s not just nice new wheels for your old titanium road bike, or new a new set of shocks for your aging (and perhaps purple anodized) Zaskar LE.  It’s the entire riding experience, as valued by a group that the bike industry didn’t value much (that is, until recently; see “willing to change”, above).

“There are no great innovations that didn’t happen.”
How many ideas are left undone, unmade, and unfulfilled?  As Roger points out: probably no great ones.  Self-fulfilling as this may be, the fact remains: if a new recumbent design is supposed to be the panacea of the bike industry, and never actually achieves that, there is probably a reason.  And that reason is that it’s probably a crap innovation.

“Cut off a bit of the future, and make it the past in a useful way”
Ideas can’t be proven in advance (see above), so sometimes you gotta try a taste of something, and then convince others it tastes so good that they’ll let you order a bottle, case, barrel, or even the entire vineyard.  Cervelo didn’t get to be where they are by throwing all their chips down at once.

Over the course of the evening, Roger also touched on some classic Rogerisms, including abductive logic (thinking that is beyond inductive and deductive, and instead imagines “what might be” instead of “what is” or “what will be”), the value of validity over reliability, and the quest of having a “transformative impact”: to solve multiple problems in multiple ways. But the crowning allegory of the evening, for me, came from his Proctor&Gamble playbook.

“A group of division managers had to make big strategy powerpoint presentations each year.  They hated it, but though it was valuable to the C-level folks they presented to.  The same C-level folks found it unproductive, but kept doing it because it seemed like it was valuable to the division managers.  Everyone was better off without it, but nobody knew that until someone asked both groups who it was benefiting, and then realized it was nobody.”

Props to anyone who’s fought through a situation like this, and found resolution.

My twitter feed from a few minutes ago.  Me, my girlfriend, and John Cleese.  Amen.