A cautionary tale for our times, given the current lust for flashy, ego-driven architecture: 11 beautiful train stations that fell to the wrecking ball, often at the behest of brutalist architects in the 1960s. These train stations were more than Beaux Arts masterpieces; they were often the heart of their communities. Ripping them out, and replacing them with trendy 1960s Soviet-style blocks, were the starchitects of their time, designing for short-term fashions rather than the actual usage of the building or its connection with the community. The long-term consequences have been disastrous.

The link above includes great before-and-after photos. This is my favorite, from Rochester, NY. Here's the train station built in 1914, before it was torn down in the 1960s:

And here's what got built on that site, in 1965:

Begin a Google search for "should i" and you'll see what looks like the high points of a pretty interesting novel:

Just like a good Russian novel, it doesn't have a happy ending.

But begin a search for "should i get" and you see the arc of a story with a more positive ending. It's practically "Bridget Jones's Diary."

Any other good "autocomplete novels" out there? Post 'em in the comments.

Nice summary of the Hollywood blockbuster business:

People complain about Hollywood's tendency to be unadventurous with its big-money titles, but the moviegoing masses clearly get the most excited when they are not being surprised. In other words, the multiplex really rocks when movies are served up the McDonalds way: predictably and comfortably. "Transformers" is definitely that.

A thought on successful community. Atul Gawande reports how an "anchor tenant" (a leading member) can make or break the network:

The anchor tenants that set norms encouraging the free flow of ideas and collaboration, even with competitors, produced enduringly successful communities, while those that mainly sought to dominate did not.

Collaboration - even with competitors present - allows a community to thrive. If one member tries to dominate, though, the community withers.

This is much to the point of our Executive Councils, where members help each other, even in a context where competitors are present - and no one member owns the network.

Quote above is from The Cost Conundrum, from the New Yorker recently. I've listed it in the Gel Health recommended reading page, though I'd say it's required reading for anyone interested in health care.

Amazing range of participants already signed up for Gel Health.

A patient navigator can improve the patient experience as much, or more, than expensive technology investments. Most often these navigators are laypeople, possibly retirees, with some experience with the health care system:

Studies have found that patients recover better with a navigator to coordinate doctors' appointments, facilitate telephone contact between patients and doctors, arrange rides, help with insurance forms, and help patients prepare their questions for the doctor.

Defaults are sticky, says Kevin Kelly, and he's right. Too many choices, in too many tools, means that most people use the tool forever under the factory settings, even if a better setting is only a click away. And that makes the design of those settings super-important.

I think developers have an ethical responsibility to set proper defaults, by the way - which is why I included defaults as one of the most important issues in the letter to developers at the end of Bit Literacy.

A few weeks back, on my Twitter and Facebook feeds (what I've heard called "social not-working"), I posted:

Any company's ads that boast "we're authentic" or "we're for real" might indicate that the truth is exactly opposite.

I was surprised by the energetic response from readers - apparently there's a good bit of pent-up frustration with the overuse and misuse of authenticity, or purported authenticity, in packaging and marketing.

Here are a few of the comments, which together would serve well as a brief Marketing 101 class to anyone who packages or sells anything:

"The word 'fashion' functions the same way. If it is called fashionable on the packaging, it is not."

"Also, if 'My prerogative' is written on the back of your car, it's probably not."

"It's like people that will tell you how smart they are."

"Anything with the word 'classy' on it is not. Then there's 'gentlemen's club.' And action movies the content of which is for 'mature' audiences only ..."

"Or, 'We Get It.'"

"I once kept a list of all the brands with a line that included 'not just a' or 'more than a'. But then it became more than a list..."

"So true, Mark. This is also like people who start sentences with 'To be honest...'. Why? You're not usually honest?"

"What if they are Authentically Real?"

To which I reply, I only begin to believe when they promise to be Super Incredible Authentically Real. Then it's true, for sure.

- - -

P.S. If you're interested in more social not-working,...

• My Twitter feed

• My Facebook page

Meeting manners with the BlackBerry & iPhone: more people are tapping away on a device in the middle of a meeting. Much like second-hand smoke, it affects more than just the user, as the distraction spreads to everyone around the room.

I posted my response on my Twitter feed: if you really want people to focus on the meeting, get them to disarm first: pitch iphones & BBerries into a bowl on the conf room table.

Posted first few speakers to the Gel Health conference, coming up this October 22 in New York.

Remember that the early bird ticket price lasts only through this Tuesday - sign up soon!

How important is the work you do? A challenging time like this gets people (including myself) thinking about what's really important - and who's really important - in all of what we do.

Here are three quick lessons, each with a case study:

1. How important are you? Just ask a customer.

A team from Google interviewed dozens of people in Times Square the other day, asking a simple question: What's a browser? This was in an effort to understand and improve the customer experience of Google's own browser, called Chrome.

Turns out that over 90% of the people interviewed could not describe what a Web browser is. Most conflated it with a search engine. Here's a video, showing conversations not too different from listening labs.

(P.S. The project was led in part by Ji Lee, who spoke at Gel 2005 about his Bubble Project - watch the video.)

(P.P.S. I also wrote a quick piece called a reminder that not everyone twitters.)

2. Accept your unimportance. It may help.

A couple of weeks ago the podcast of the New York Times Book Review included an interview with Danielle Steel, the popular novelist whose books have sold over half a billion copies. I've never read any of her books, but what she said about her creative process rang true:

When I realize how unimportant I am, the book flows through me. In the same way, in life, if you go around feeling important and how terrific you are, you really miss the boat. I have a strong sense of my unimportance and how small I am and how vulnerable I am, just like everybody else.

I've seen this in my own work - in listening labs, making the customer the focus of the research - instead of playing the knowing researcher or super-smart consultant or some kind of "guru." My role as facilitator is to stay unimportant, so that the focus stays on lab respondents and the client stakeholders observing and discussing behind the glass. The more I get out of the way, the more I enable things to happen.

The full Danielle Steel interview can be downloaded here (see June 5) - and by the way, the Book Review podcast is excellent - a star in my media diet.

3. When people start believing their own hype, run.

The radio show This American Life ran a show called "The Watchmen" on June 5, covering the financial meltdown - and in particular, what happened at the ratings agencies that were supposed to be advising the world against bad investments.

The show - listen here - is a perfect example of what happens when people overestimate their own importance, believe their own hype, and focus on their own aggrandizement: namely, the world falls apart.

(BTW, This American Life host Ira Glass spoke at Gel 2007 - watch the video here.)

Consider the differences between these case studies. One person declares, "I'm an unimportant speck" - and can create a body of work beloved by millions. Another person declares, "I'm the most important person here at the center of the world" - and can mount a decent attempt at destroying the world.

How we approach our work is often what determines its outcome. The more it's about us, the knowers or gurus or smarter-than-thous, the less good the experience we create.

But the less it's about us, and the more we're willing to disappear as we create the experience, the better it gets.

As the Zen proverb says, "When you seek it, you cannot find it." I think that's true, so far as it concerns seeking one's own importance. The way to do something significant and meaningful and authentic is not to try to be important, but to try to create something good for someone else.

Speaking of Microsoft ads... from The Onion last fall, Microsoft ad campaign crashing nation's televisions

In the Huffington Post, Russell Bishop writes why to do lists don't work and concludes, "we need a 21st century way of managing all those 'to do's.'" Someone send this man Bit Literacy.

This, by the way, is exactly why more people need to hear about Gootodo, the todo list built precisely for that purpose... (todos usually come in via email, so just forwarding them to Gootodo gets them on the appropriate day's list). (You do have a separate todo list for different days, right??)

From The Onion: 90% of waking hours spent staring at glowing rectangles (if there ever was one, a clarion call for more bit literacy)

Six articles you should read on patient-centered healthcare.

And please send others I've missed - articles, blogs, or other resources - as I want to point to more than these six.

(This is all recommended reading in prep for our Gel Health conference this fall.)

Continuing this week's run of Gel speakers in the news, Charlie Todd was on the Today Show a couple of days ago, to promote his new book Causing a Scene:

Congrats to Bill Gurstelle for the favorable NYT review of his new book, Absinthe & Flamethrowers: the book "explores the significance of moderate risk taking to our happiness, well-being and career advancement. (Managers who take the greatest risks are the most successful, he observes.) It's also a book that contains meticulous directions for making a real, live, beastly flamethrower in your garage."

Bill gave an outstanding talk at Gel '09 which I'm hoping to post on Gel Videos soon.

Gel is rocking this week!

Joan Sullivan is principal of Bronx Academy of Letters, one of the highest-performing public high schools in New York City. It's also just a few years old and located in the poorest Congressional district in America, in the South Bronx.

Joan spoke at Gel 2009 about her work there, and what she and her team have accomplished - and then finished by introducing two of her alumni, who each briefly told their inspiring story.

Now Allison Hemming and The Hired Guns (who hosted the Gel Challenge a couple months back), having connected with Joan via Gel, are running mock interviews at Bronx Letters on Monday, June 15... more info here. You can join them to meet the students and help them get ready for jobs and college.

Great to see the Gel community partnering up to do such good work!

Yes, Twitter is all over the headlines. It's new and shiny and exciting - and deservedly so, as it's nicely implemented. But a reminder. Blogs were at that point before. After the glossy magazines all run the cover story on the latest and greatest trend, they'll be on to the next trend - and then who's left actually using the services? Beyond the Internet types, that is...

The NYT reports that of the 7-10 million blogs online, around 1% of them get most of the pageviews... and concludes:

That's a serious letdown from the hype that greeted blogs when they first became popular. No longer would writers toil in anonymity or suffer the indignities of the publishing industry, we were told. Finally the world of ideas would be democratized!

And then from this Reuters article, a similar conclusion about Twitter activity:

A tiny fraction of those who use the fast-growing social network phenomenon Twitter generate nearly all the content, a Harvard study shows.

That makes it hard for companies to use the micro-blogging site as an accurate gauge of public opinion, the Harvard Business School study showed. The Harvard study examined public entries of a randomly selected group of 300,000 Twitter users. The researchers studied in May the content created in the lifetime of the users' Twitter accounts.

It found that 10 percent of Twitter users generated more than 90 percent of the content, said Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, who led the research. More than half of all Twitter users post messages on the site less than once every 74 days.

Most of Wikipedia is written and edited by a tiny fraction of its users, too. That's not a bad thing per se - just a helpful antidote to any mesmerizing hype you might hear about everyone in the world joining hands into a shiny happy future 2.0. Most people don't have time to get involved, past glancing at what's quick & helpful, or quick & interesting.

Blogs and Twitter are both here to stay, just not likely taking over the world as the initial hype would have it.

Some clarifications on my "hundred million mistakes" column, on Microsoft's new Bing search engine. The dozens of comments have brought up several good points I thought I should address:

Several comments asked me what I think of the Bing.com user experience. It's good. The search results page is nicely laid out (a near clone of Google), and the extra rollover features will be helpful to that subset of users who use it. The results themselves seem to be pretty complete, too.

In other words, Bing.com offers mainly what Google offers, with some extras. And in turn, I'd add that Google offers mainly what Bing.com offers, with some extras. They're both good search engines; there's no major breakthrough on either side.

And that was my point: Microsoft launched a copy of Google and is spending a hundred million dollars to tell people to switch from Google to Bing, which offers nothing significantly different or better. In this experience-driven age, copying the market leader is not a catch-up strategy. Microsoft has lots of resources and lots of talent and can and should do better than this.

I remember several years ago Yahoo made the press for a major ad campaign - not sure how many millions, but it wasn't cheap - touting Yahoo Search, telling people to switch away from Google for no clear added advantage. We've seen this play out before. (Incidentally, Yahoo owns a great competitor to Google, in search, but has done little with it... a column I keep meaning to write and hope to soon.)

One or two comments brought up the XBox. There Microsoft entered a mature console videogame market dominated by Nintendo and Sony and carved out a significant market share. Very good point. In that case, though, Microsoft created something different and better than the market leaders - a super powerful game console, offering Halo (a game exclusive to the Xbox), at a more affordable price than the PlayStation. All together that created a compelling customer experience for the share of the gaming market that went over to Microsoft. Once again, I don't see how Bing.com is doing anything to significantly compete with fast, easy, free Google search.

In a way this is a heavyweight fight we've never seen before: two competitors offering a similar service, with one company spending a hundred million dollars, and the other spending zero. It says something about the times when one can predict the zero-spender as the winner.

As for those commenters who worry that I'm bashing Microsoft or have a "deep-seated prejudice" against it, I'm not sure what to say, given that I'm offering Microsoft advice for how to succeed. I will admit, though, to a strong bias - in favor of creating a good experience. If a company creates something good for users, I'm in favor of it. It's when a company is capable of so much more, yet chooses an increasingly outdated strategy to burn its money on, that prompts me to offer my two cents.