Glenn Bachman | The Green Business Guide

October 29, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors. We have four fantastic guests on the show today. Three authors, and one musician. We’re doing a show of course in the traditional format of Sound Authors. We’ve scheduled this show quite a while ago, and that’s why we’re back to the four-segment method. Again, tune in next week and the week after. We’re doing brand new varieties of shows with all sorts of different kinds of guests. Always authors and musicians: Sound Authors both. At the end of the show we’re going to talk to a musician. His name is Jacob Moon. He’s based in Hamilton. A wonderful singer/songwriter. Before that, we’re going to talk to the author of ‘Skinny Bitch,’ Rory Freedman, a New York Times bestselling coauthor. They’ve sold millions of books literally. Before that, at 3:15 or so, we’re going to talk to Dr. D.A. Henderson, the author of ‘Smallpox: Death of a Disease.’ In this world right now where we’re always talking about the H1N1, let’s talk about smallpox and the havoc it wreaked. Without further ado, at the beginning of the show, I’ll be talking to Glenn Bachman. Glenn has more than 30 years of experience in improving the economic and environmental performance of organizations and products. His book is called ‘The Green Business Guide.’ Welcome to the show, Glenn Bachman.

Glenn Bachman: Thank you so much.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about this book: ‘The Green Business Guide.’ Green stuff has been really hot for the last couple of years, and with the Obama presidency, it’s gotten even more so.

Glenn Bachman: That it has. The guide is intended to be a blueprint or a roadmap for small and medium sized businesses. What I have found in looking around as to what could be used as a roadmap if a business or an organization wanted to go green was not very detailed in the nuts and bolts of the how-to. I found that a lot of businesses understood why they would want to go green, but they didn’t really understand what it was that it would mean in detail. So what I had decided to do was to write a book that would consolidate different resources from all over the place, whether it’s from environmental organizations, EPA, business best-practices, my own experience, and pull that together in a single unified document that could be used in making or allowing an organization to go green.

Dr. Kent: What does it mean to ‘go green,’ exactly?

Glenn Bachman: There’s differing concepts on that. I use ‘green’ as ecological friendliness. A lot people use the term ‘green’ and use it as though it was also the same as ’sustainable.’ However, sustainable businesses take not only the ecological friendliness, but they expand that into economic performance as well as social equity issues. Fair-trade, for example, or comparable pay for women and men, things of that nature.

Dr. Kent: And for you, ‘green’ means?

Glenn Bachman: For me, ‘green’ means ecological performance. By ecological performance, I’m talking about ensuring that the business or the organization is using a minimal amount of energy, that the energy that is being consumed is clean energy, that the water use is reduced, that they’re pulling water in minimal amounts from either public or private sources. When they are getting rid of the water, the water is being returned to a natural system with a minimal amount of contaminants or temperature change, or things like that. That packaging is reduced, material use is reduced, and things like that.

Dr. Kent: In business right now, it seems to be quite trendy to say that you’re green, and I know that there’s some things where you can trade some of your electricity against something that’s sustainable, or you could do many things as a business. You can install solar panels on the roof. What does it mean for a business to call themselves ‘green’?

Glenn Bachman: I think that fundamentally what they’re saying is that the way that they’re approaching the delivery of their services or the manufacture or sale of the products that they have is that they are doing it in a manner that is least injurious to the natural environment. You’re right to point out that they’re getting a lot airplay right now, because there’s certainly businesses that aren’t being truthful about being green. They recognize that to call themselves green is a way of taking advantage of what some perceive to be a fad, but that in fact they are not being green, because they’re, for example, reducing their packaging size, but perhaps they still have contaminants that are embedded into the product that they’re selling. That type of green, or non-green, has been dubbed ‘green-washing.’ Sort of like white-washing, only green-washing, where an organization is making claims that it’s green when in fact it is not. I think that what those businesses are doing that are legitimately trying to become green is they are aligning themselves with a greater population of consumers, whether those consumers are individuals or corporations like Wal-Mart, or what have you, that are recognizing that it makes business sense and family sense to go green. That by reducing the impact now it’ll be more likely that we’ll have a more palatable and inhabitable earth decades from now and generations from now.

Dr. Kent: Where’d you get your start in all of this?

Glenn Bachman: I think probably my path for this was from architecture. I was doing construction in high school during the summer, and that turned into architectural design interests in college, which turned into urban planning interests as I was trying to integrate shelter energy production and food production into neighborhoods, and I then became an energy planner working in the northwest where I was doing projects. I did about 50 different energy-related projects in the Pacific northwest as part of this environmental company that I was a partner in. Ecology has probably always been a part of my background. Probably the very first appreciation for that came from my grandfather.

Dr. Kent: When creating a green business guide, we’ve talked about sometimes it’s not necessarily green, but what are the best practices a business could fairly easily implement?

Glenn Bachman: I think part of the best practice is to demonstrate the leadership in the company to say, ‘We want to change the way that we are doing things and become more green.’ The leadership is critical. That’s best practice number one. Best practice number two is probably to engage everybody in the organization to look for opportunities for saving energy, for conserving water, for reducing resource use, things like that. Then, I think that on the nuts and bolts side, probably what you want to be able to do is focus on lighting, that’s probably common to most businesses, and then depending on the nature of the business, a mom-and-pop grocery would be most interested in lighting and refrigeration, whereas warehousing might be more interested in - if it’s non temperature controlled - it might be more interested in transportation issues and how to reduce the impact of moving goods from the warehouse to their point of use.

Dr. Kent: One of the things in this new administration has been green technology can really start to drive the economy. What does that mean, and is that possible?

Glenn Bachman: It is possible. In fact, President Obama just gave a speech today at Massachusetts Institute of Technology which was pretty much a statement of his green philosophy and also I would say in some ways a motivational speech saying ‘Go get ‘em.’ Energy technology and green technologies are moving very rapidly. It’s much like what the computer world was looking like 25 years ago and actually continues to be today. There are really some amazing things that are coming out in terms of developing fuels for transportation out of algae, out of different types of agricultural products. There’s different technologies that are being created on rooftops where shingles can understand what the temperature is and change color to reflect during overheated times so that the solar radiation doesn’t penetrate the building, or the solar radiation doesn’t get absorbed as heat into the building. Or in the wintertime turn into a darker color when it is desirable to have that penetration and to acquire more heat. We’re getting micro wind turbans that can be attached to rooftops that look very small. You would hardly even notice that they are on the rooftop.

Dr. Kent: When you mean micro, do you mean the kind that’s on like a little kids hat, or do you mean really small?

Glenn Bachman: I mean probably a little bit bigger than a little kid’s hat. We’re not going to get a lot of useful energy out of something that small. But think maybe 10-times larger than that.

Dr. Kent: So maybe like two feet tall or something?

Glenn Bachman: Yes, but instead of thinking in the vertical access, think in the horizontal axis, a hamster cage or something like that, running along the full length of a ridge. It can capture the wind energy, transform that into a generated electricity.

Dr. Kent: I’m curious about the roof that changes color. I remember as a kid just walking out along a simple asphalt road how hot it would get. Just color is pretty significant.

Glenn Bachman: It is. That’s one of the reasons why in ‘The Green Business Guide,’ the book, there are a series of recommendations on how to deal with paving: those huge parking lots that we see when we go to malls and outside parking lots when we are in the heat of the summer, when we’re walking across the entrance to the store, we’re boiling out there. So we try to shield those with vegetation: trees that will shade the asphalt and prevent the solar radiation from being absorbed.

Dr. Kent: It’s going to be profitable, but it’s a massive change for a lot of businesses. What is the resistance?

Glenn Bachman: The first set of resistance is that over the years, I think that we’ve seen that green technologies have been expensive. I think that because of that, the perception is that the green technologies are not having a very favorable return on investment. A lot of the greening of a business can be categorized in terms of changes, transformations that are no cost, like reminding people to turn off the lights in the storage room when they’ve gotten their ream of paper out of storage. Or they could be very low cost, such as installing compact fluorescent light bulbs, and removing incandescent bulbs. Those in a full use area have a payback often of six to eight months depending on what the cost of electricity is. And then there’s other costs that are greater. What I encourage the businesses to do is to look for the low-hanging fruit: those things that can be implemented easily with very little goading on the part of management or workers, and then to look at those other programs that can be implemented that would be a relatively short return on the investment. I think that the second thing that we’re seeing is that in the past, a lot of these technologies were not as confidant, as skilled, as efficient, as effective as the ones that they were being designed to replace. An example of those were some of the early fluorescent bulbs that flickered, that hummed, that were a distraction in the workplace, and so folks weren’t installing those. Those problems have been remedied, and as a result of that, there have been greater penetration of those types of programs in action in the workplace. I think that overall, there is just a certain malaise, that this is the way we’ve done business. It’s really not been a focus of attention until the problems associated with the climate change, with the resources, such as petroleum, silver, others that are used in industry, because they’re finite resources, they’re not as available because of the growing clientele of consumers, and as a consequence, the price of a lot of these resources are going up, and if the prices are going up, the operating expenses for the businesses obviously go up. So, they’re looking at ways of just reducing their input in order to stay competitive, and that’s the advantage that they’re seeking.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s so fascinating talking about green business, and I hope to talk to you again sometime. The book is called ‘The Green Business Guide,’ by Glenn Bachman, subtitled, ‘A One-Stop-Resource for Businesses of All Shapes and Sizes to Implement Eco-Friendly Policies, Programs and Practices,’ and of course it’s out on Career Press, and it’s been such an honor chatting with you.

Glenn Bachman: My pleasure.

Dr. Kent: You can find out more online, just again look up, ‘Glenn Bachman’ and ‘The Green Business Guide.’

Posted by jamie | Filed Under Design, TRANSCRIPTS, Business, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Glenn Bachman | The Green Business Guide

October 29, 2009 | Comments Off

Interview with Glenn Bachman [17:11m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From Amazon.com:

Glenn Bachman, CMC, AICP, is president of Raven Business Group, LLC, a management consulting firm located in Massachusetts. Combining his expertise in strategic thinking, environmental management, and systems analysis, Glenn’s practice has evolved into sustainability consulting: assisting organizations that desire to become more ecologically and socially responsible, while maintaining their profitability. He has more than 30 years of experience in improving the economic and environmental performance of organizations and projects through consulting and training engagements. Bachman’s portfolio includes Environmental Impact Statements, energy facility cost-benefit analyses, strategic plans, business plans, and environmental audits and reports prepared for business, non-profit organizations, educational and governmental clients. He has a BA from Bowdoin and a masters in planning from the University of Oregon. Glenn is also vice president of the board of the Apeiron Institute for Sustainable Living, a non-profit organization working to promote sustainable practices in Rhode Island area households, businesses, schools, and government, and the author of ‘The Green Business Guide.’

Posted by jamie | Filed Under Design, Business, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Interview with Ella Curry | Sound Authors Radio

December 13, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. Today is August 29th, it’s the anniversary of many things today but of course this week has been very interesting as it was the anniversary of women’s right to vote and the I have a dream speech yesterday. My next guest on the show is the host of the black authors’ network radio and has done many other things, including web design and other creations. Welcome to the show Ella Curry.

Ella Curry: Hello, how are you?

Dr. Kent: Very good. Give me a nutshell of what you do for the world.

Ella Curry: Okay; I’m the CEO and president of EDC Creations and that’s a graphic design firm in Maryland. I’m also the founder of the Literary Society Bookclub and I’m the founder of the black authors network radio show. That pretty much covers all 24 hours of my day!

Dr. Kent: I’ll bet it does. Now tell me a little bit about how important to you is this week in history?

Ella Curry: This week in history is very important for me because I guess you can tell from my accent that I’m from the south. My family worked years in the civil rights movement and actually we have four generations to watch Barack Obama accept the nomination to run for the presidency last night and that was phenomenal because two generations were very active in civil rights and never thought they would be living to see this day.

Dr. Kent: I watched the entire speech last night and it was so well choreographed with the fireworks and the music beforehand and just it was amazing to see that every time they panned to faces, everybody in the audience, all of those thousands of people were just transfixed watching the stage.

Ella Curry: Yes, I think everyone there and I don’t even think it was the décor; it was just soaking in the fact that there is this many people here to see an African American man accept this kind of honor. I think they were just really soaking in the vibe, the feel of the event. I don’t even think it had anything to do with the glamour of the stage. It was the message that he was bringing about change.

Dr. Kent: People really had tears in their eyes, it was good to see. Now you’ve got some radio shows, you work with this graphic design firm; what drives you?

Ella Curry: I have a love for literature. I’ve been reading ever since I was a small kid and I have a collection that’s phenomenal of books. And I worked at the ### Bookstore before they went out of business as a buyer and a lot of people submitted their books to the bookstore for review or sought placement on our bookshelves. I was the head buyer’s executive assistant and it was my job to turn these people down. I wasn’t allowed to tell them why, I was supposed to send out a form letter. It was heart-wrenching because a lot of times they would email me back because I was the only contact they had or they would call me and it’s like I had just killed their dream. So I turned my marketing company around and focused primarily on the literary world so I could help these people see where they went wrong.

Dr. Kent: Give me an example of that.

Ella Curry: We had a certain protocol for submitting books. You had to download our submission form and you had to send all the required items and one of those items was a professionally prepared press kit. A lot of people never researched ### bookstores to know that we had guidelines on submission so when they didn’t follow them, that said that they didn’t really take interest in what they were trying to put out. We didn’t spend a lot of time researching for them and another thing was a lot of the people that submitted books didn’t know what a press kit was or didn’t take the time to prepare one and that said a lot about them. They weren’t industry savvy. So with EDC Creations I started reaching out to authors to teach them how to come across as a professional industry savvy individual.

Dr. Kent: Have you ever thought of getting in there yourself and writing a book?

Ella Curry: You know I don’t think I have the heart to write one. Now that I’m on the promotions side of it and I’ve been on the retail dividing side of it. Its kind of a tough industry, I don’t think I ever want to write one, because it’s not writing that’s hard, it’s actually promoting it and getting it out to the reading public.

Dr. Kent: I’d like to sit here and talk some more about Barack Obama if that’s okay with you. I feel like the whole world should be abuzz about this thing and I was actually kind of amused. I always watch CNN and CNN sometimes has a little bit conservative approach but last night they were just like kids in the candy store, they loved it. I really loved that too. What network did you watch?

Ella Curry: I watched I think Fox network. I watched it on channel 7 so I’m almost certain that’s Fox News Network.

Dr. Kent: Was it pretty much the same?

Ella Curry: We were a few minutes ahead of CNN for some reason because I was watching it and my family in Alabama was on the phone and we were all watching it and it came on here in DC before it did there.

Dr. Kent: Wow. When he talks about a message of change, they said he really needs to and if we thought about Barack Obama as an author with that incredible speech, did he pass the grade? Did he fit the bill?

Ella Curry: I think so and I’d read his other books and he has a new one that’s going to release. So I think he did incredible. He did a fantastic job because there was some doubt in a few peoples minds if he had the political maturity to hold this position. He came across very confident and the one thing right now in this society we need to hear is that somebody understands us and where we are. The one thing that stood out the most for me and it almost had me teary eyed was when he said his mother was lying in the bed dying of cancer and she was on the phone fighting with the insurance company. That broke my heart because there’s a lot of people in the south, that’s where I’m from and know the most about, that have no healthcare. And a lot of them die from tragic death because they don’t have money to get their medications or to have surgeries that they need and that kind of thing, so that was what brought tears to my eyes. I’ve had people dear to me to die because they didn’t have healthcare.

Dr. Kent: It was such a moving thing for him to say in a public speech like that. I can’t imagine not tearing up talking about personal stuff like that about myself. I was really moved by the speech, I’m really moved by a candidate. I don’t usually come out and talk about it on the show, but it was really a special night last night. I feel like my grandchildren are going to be watching that speech.

Ella Curry: I had my 13 year old watching it and she was very nonchalant because she’s grown up in a time and place where there’s not much racism in her life. She’s not affected by it or nothing tragic has been brought to her attention about racism. She attends school here in Maryland and African Americans and Caucasians are the minority in the school. There is all sorts of races, I’m serious, it’s all the Asians, India, Latinos from different countries, so she is not really, this doesn’t mean a lot to her now at 13 because she’s grown up with it. She doesn’t see black or white, she doesn’t see any of the different prejudices that I see at 43. I’m thinking that when she looks back at this at a later date as an adult, it’s going to have a significant bearing on her at that time.

Dr. Kent: Oh I think so. You also have black author’s network radio so it is important to you to focus in on black authors. It’s fascinating in the industry there are a lot of authors, something like hundreds of thousands every year. How is it to focus on black authors?

Ella Curry: Well you know when I started black authors network radio, I wanted to give the self-published and the new authors a platform because the publishing houses they get a lot of energy, they have a lot of publicity, but I wanted to give the people who were just entering the industry a fighting chance to get their work out there. Over the past month, we don’t always have just African American authors on the show. We have American community leaders, educators, and people in the media, but we also bring in people that aren’t African American because we need to know their perspective, their take on what we are saying. a lot of times with black people, we blame everything that’s happened to us on the government or white people or anybody but ourselves and a lot of times when we have shows like radio shows, we beat up other races and the government but no one is ever there to speak out for the other side. So doing my show, I sometimes bring on non-African Americans so they can stand up and answer these challenges.

Dr. Kent: It is such a fascinating time. I grew up partially in the south in Louisiana and Shreveport and it was such a divided city, and just a horrible thing to see how divided people were. Now I live out on long island and I teach here at the university. It’s so diverse and again the kids don’t see a different race when they look at each other but where I grew up in Louisiana you sure did. It was a big issue. What’s your take on that; the difference between north and south with respect to race?

Ella Curry: Let me tell you, back in the day my mother was the first African American woman in my county that openly dated a white man so I have to say my childhood was very difficult. Black people didn’t like us and white people didn’t like us. Where I lived there was a clear divide. There was white people in their section and black people in their section. And I don’t care how affluent the black person was; they didn’t cross that line and live anywhere but in our section. So I had issues that arised with the KKK and a number of other things in our community. So I grew up I have to admit quite a bit racist. I had some hard opinions about white people, but they were formed due to things that I had been through.

I worked in the textile industry as a manager and I was one of the few black people to be a manager. I am sure I was not paid half what my white counterparts were paid. So I had reasons to be racist but I’ve moved to Maryland and I brought my daughter and my child introduced me to another way of thinking. She now has white friends and Indian friends and I didn’t want to teach racism, I didn’t want to teach her to have these hard feelings I had. So these people started coming into my home and therefore I had to meet their parents. So now I seen that some of them had the same challenges that I had.

Dr. Kent: That’s what’s so fascinating about last night looking at all the faces watching Barack Obama, you know?

Ella Curry: I’m now I don’t guess you don’t really call Maryland the north, but it’s northern for me coming from Alabama. Its different mindset where I’m at now. My neighbors are its like I live in the United Nations. I have people from all nationalities living in my community and I have to intermingle with all sorts of races because of my child. I don’t have any of those hard feelings I had when I was in Alabama because I was continuously exposed. It was in my face every day that people didn’t like me because I was black. But here I feel like I stand a better chance here. I own my own company, three companies and they are very productive and we offer a lot to the community. I could never run the business I run here in my hometown in Alabama. And that’s sad.

Dr. Kent: I think that’s what I see a great deal of hope in Barack Obama. What do you see possibly happening if he’s elected president? I sure think that he will be but what do you see happening for healthcare and for human rights and those things?

Ella Curry: The main thing with healthcare, he may not be able to get the universal healthcare passed, and I’ll be okay with that. But if we can just get help, supplements for people who cant get their medicines. If he can just get insurance; you know during Hillary Clintons reign, she got the first kids and that most of all the kids in the rural America was able to have health insurance. It didn’t pay everything, it was based on your income, but it was more than we had. The kids were being taken care of.

If Barack Obama can get something on that level, lovely. But the one thing I see that’s going to change for the African American community if he’s elected president is this: All African American kids now have hope. Our young black men can see another black man as president, that means that anything is possible and that’s the most powerful thing for me is now we have young black men in droves registering to vote. They have hope now, they can see it happening.

Dr. Kent: I sure do hope if the whole African American population comes and votes, man that’s going to be a wash. It would be amazing. Even in Florida I heard that if the African American population comes out, that might decide Florida.

Ella Curry: If he gets that crew, that’s phenomenal.

Dr. Kent: Well this has been a real honor speaking with you. We can find you on the web, the marketing work you do and the design at edccreations.com. Where else can we find out about you?

Ella Curry: Actually its edc-creations.com and you can also find my work, my book club and the literary work at the sankofaliterarysociety.org.

Dr. Kent: I really hope you continue to do what you’ve been doing for authors. It’s a rough world out there for authors and of course hosting a radio show is the best thing in the world so I love that you’re doing that as well. Gosh, I sure hope Barack Obama wins this election.

Ella Curry: Oh most definitely; he’s going to win. And when he does, I’m going to put it on the front page of the Sankofa literary society – all over.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been a real honor speaking with Ella Curry. We can find out about her on the web at edc-creations.com or sankofaliterarysociety.org. Talk to you soon, thanks for being on the show.

Ella Curry: Thank you.

Dr. Kent: My next guest after the break is going to be Leonard L. Berry. He’s the co-author of Management Lessons from the Mayo Clinic: Inside one of the world’s most admired service organizations. There’s a lot of insight in that book, especially how to run businesses and so forth. Come on back for that.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Design, Art, TRANSCRIPTS, Business, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Interview with Stefan Sagmeister | Sound Authors Radio

November 2, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors! Today is Friday, June 13^th. It’s thought of as a pretty spooky day, an unlucky day but let’s think of it as a unique day, one we don’t see that often. It’s the birthday of William Butler Yates; of course he’s not around anymore, he died 69 years ago but he was born on this day in 1865 and much more to think about on this day. I have four guests on the show. My first guest is world famous artist, author, and ne’er do well Stephan Sagmeister. My second guest is Julia Hallisy, my third guest will be Aaron Lazar and my last guest is a musician of course on sound authors we always feature musicians along with the authors and her name is Molly Mason of the famous duet of Jay Ungar and Molly Mason. My first guest, his name is Stephan Sagmeister and he is well known for doing among other things cover art for the Rolling Stone, Lou Reed and many others. His new book is called In My Life So Far. Its gorgeous, it’s striking, it’s new. Welcome to the show Stephan Sagmeister.

Stephen Sagmeister: Thanks so much for having me, it’s a pleasure.

Dr. Kent: Did I say your name correctly?

Stephen Sagmeister: Absolutely.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little bit about this book, In My Life So Far. It’s so interesting. It’s not something that you page from page to page. You can lay it out across the table, you can mix and match. What was the idea behind it?

Stephen Sagmeister: Well it’s basically a little magazine that I found in my diary. At one time I had set down and really tried to think about what had I actually done so far in my life. What do I know by now and made a little list. It was one of the many lists that I made. In my design company we work for clients and even there we started to get clients that really gave us an incredible amount of freedom that basically said oh we have a book that we want to fill up but we don’t want to fill it up with promotional advertising, what can we fill it with?

So in answer to that question we take things from the diary and these little things I’ve learned from my life so far and published them. To give you an example, let’s say the city of Paris has billboards and we took five billboards with very large, complex typography put up there trying to look good in my life. The magazine comes out of this realization that my fear of competition or the designer always to be the nice guy can be fairly limiting in itself. We put it up all over Paris; it seemed like a very self indulgent thing for me at the time but we got lots of reaction.

It wasn’t not only oh can you send me a print I would like to glue them next to my toilet bowl and reminded of it. As we went along, more and more reactions came and we did more and more magazines, pretty much all over the world. The book Things I’ve Done in My Life So Far really features I think 20 of them. Originally they show from Japan to Lisbon and put all together in publication.

Dr. Kent: Not only do you have this In My Life So Far, this brand new book, but there’s a website where you invite other people to contribute. Tell me a little about www.thingsihavelearnedinmylife.com.

Stephen Sagmeister: So that’s because of the book about eight weeks ago we put that site up inviting everybody who thinks that they have learned something. Of course I would invite all of your listeners to write that down and design it in a way that they feel is appropriate to what they’ve learned and then upload it. You just go to thingsihavelearnedinmylife.com and in the beginning you can check out all the stuff up there.

There are hundreds of magazines up there that have been put up. There’s a wonderful book up there already. I remember I think one of the things that comes to my mind quickly is a taste for a sort of two image piece up there where you are going down a mountain says if you are not crashing you are not trying and the second picture you see him all bruised up with a big fat smile on his face and says you are not trying.

Dr. Kent: What inspired you to do this book? You had friends that said look at all these journal entries or was it in yourself that you decided to do this? Where was the core of the project?

Stephen Sagmeister: As a designer I actually do a good number of presentations and here and there you know about our book. Sometimes in front of channel audiences, sometimes in front of live audiences pretty much around the world and here and there I show some pieces of the series and I always got the most resonance with them.

So I started to do presentations that only had these series in there, that didn’t show any of our other books, no record covers, no identity just to see pieces and again I got a very good resonance. So from there it was a pretty short step to say oh it probably must be a neat thing to have all 20 of them collected for a presentation.

Dr. Kent: What exactly when you were a young artist where did your style develop? Because in looking at this book and looking at your websites, in looking at your album covers and all of that you have a style. Where did that start to form?

Stephen Sagmeister: Well I grew up in the Austrian Alps in a very small town that is a beautiful area so I think that was one set of influences that definitely came from there. Starting with the apartment I grew up in, there were many signs from my granddad hanging about. My granddad was a known sign painter early in the 19^th century. So we had a lot of his magazines here in and he was a conservative man but he was long gone by the end of the 19^th century. He was still working in that style as he carefully got typography on them.

That’s basically what the situation in our apartment. Outside, if you take a step outside there was a lake in the Austrian Alps a good number of ### that again would sell little ### with magazines on them. Then I went to Oslo which of course is much more open influences in the depression but also in England we had a group called the Vienna 1900 in the recession that also new England was from in the 70s we had a group and it was called the Influential Group in Vienna Extremists of a great number of famous artists or important artists in Austria came out of.

I think because I grew up in a small town I always had this desire to live in a big city. The first time I saw New York I realized very quickly that this was kind of the mogul of metropolis was a symbol of a big city and I wanted to live here and got a scholarship to study here. I’ve loved it ever since.

Dr. Kent: With your design and your artwork it’s always fascinating that whatever you’re doing it seems like it’s emerging out of the space that’s already there if its something that’s concrete. Who did you look at as being influences? Was it Warhol, was it the abstract artists? Where was your great inspiration?

Stephen Sagmeister: Probably the biggest thing influencing my life was another designer who used to be a boss of mine. His name is Peter Collins. He used to run a company here in New York called ### company. He probably might be best known for being the creator of that magazine called Colors that was a very influential magazine in the 80s and 90s.

I would think that him and his staffs approach as well as his socially caring approach and big heart really was a big influence from many angles. I always kept my studio very small because in the design world the only thing more difficult than design is to figure out how not to grow. Everything else is pretty easy and that turned out to be very virtual and in many other cases. Peter died very early that I’m still very good friends with his widow Myra Collins who is a fantastic illustrator I know in her own right.

Dr. Kent: You have a unique thought about branding. Branding is of course in the business world, everything is the brand. What’s your take on that?

Stephen Sagmeister: I think that many other things its power is completely over estimated by the practitioners. If you listen to the head of an international branding agency, you will think that they have influence over our minds that we couldn’t even begin to understand. At one time I worked in these places and we met many of the people who were running these places. By and large they are a surprisingly unintelligent group of people that would love to manipulate our ways but when it comes down to it not quite intelligent enough to me.

In most cases I found that the average consumer make decisions on the quality of a product or a service if that product is in a category that is actually possible. I think branding has surprisingly little influence in product and service categories, we can know the difference. Coffee for example, most people know the difference between a good cup of coffee and a bad cup of coffee, branding though is almost a stamp of approval but in a minor role. A bigger role is how good is that cup of coffee? In other categories, let’s say vodka. Vodka consumers have not a clue between a good vodka and a bad vodka and they of course base their decisions on is it a beautiful bottle, do I like the name?

Typical branding items. But I think that those categories where the consumer really doesn’t have a clue are in the minority. In most other ways its pretty much is the product good or is the product bad? If you look at a brand realistically of course its part of the brand but its not what most international branding agencies have an influence on. It’s basically the company.

Dr. Kent: So, you’re sort of well known for this what they call hand-made design, which is something that is really gorgeous and sometimes shocking. Where did those ideas come from and how have they been accepted by the public?

Stephen Sagmeister: Well I think that I’ve realized that we now have about 80 years of modernism. If I look at the foundation of modernism, be it ###, its been 80 years and at least 40-50 of those 80 years modernism has been predating the dominant styles throughout the world of pretty much anything. Be it product design or graphic design. And of course initially there was an incredible reason and desire for this simplicity and this form full of function for this to happen.

Now that we have it as the status quo over the years, an unbelievable amount of simple boring things have come out of this movement and very much mechanical development has happened. If you ask a regular consumer, I don’t know if I ask my mom who designed this book or who designed this website? She would probably think a machine did it. Or, who designed this newspaper? She would be completely unaware. She would be aware that there was a journalist who wrote that article but she would be totally unaware that there was probably a designer designing the typeface, designing how that article was laid out and that there was many meetings involved behind it. So I think there is a pretty valid sense of making or bringing some subjectivity back into this.

Some human touch if you will and I’m not even arguing that every piece of design should be done per se, I don’t know say a time table for the port authority probably doesn’t need to have a human touch it can show a table that shows the time in a pleasing and concise manner. But even there, let’s say that I look at the emergency exit instructions in the planes. I actually collect these things. I have hundreds of them. They look the same pretty much from every airline. You have the modernist, simplistic icons of little figures, some of those pulling on emergency handles and so on.

Now pretty much in every plane I’ve ever been when they do the emergency drill it almost never see anybody taking that card out of the backseat pocket in front of them and actually look at it because they’re just so boring. There’s now a couple of airlines, Virgin Atlantic is one of them, that redesigned those much sweeter with a little bit of fun in it. They tell you the same content in a more pleasing manner. Last time I took a plane to London on Virgin, I actually, not the whole plane, but I saw eight, nine, ten people actually checking it out. So I think even in these very factual very dry situations, there is room for some more emotion.

Dr. Kent: It’s really been an honor speaking with you and through the years in perusing through your biography its extraordinary how many places I have seen your artwork in the past from album covers to other things. This book is extraordinary. In My Life So Far; it’s beautiful, it’s something you can, I mean I plan to put it on the table and look at it again and again. So it’s been a real honor, this is a gorgeous book.

Stephen Sagmeister: Well, thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure.

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show will be a woman named Julia Hallisy; come on back for that, its going to be a good one.

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Stefan Sagmeister | Art & Design

June 13, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Interview with Stefan Sagmeister: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Today we spoke with Stefan Sagmeister — it was a real pleasure. His newest book is called Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far.This book began as a list designer Stefan Sagmeister made in his diary under the title Things I have learned in my life so far, which includes statements such as “Worrying solves nothing” and “Trying to look good limits my life.” The list reveals something that is profoundly true: Although human beings have been pursuing happiness for countless generations, it is not so easily achieved. And we need constant reminders to keep us on the right path. With the support of his clients, Sagmeister transformed these sentences into typographic works, from billboards in France to sign-toting inflatable monkeys on the streets of Scotland. Accompanied by essays from design historian Steven Heller, Guggenheim chief curator Nancy Spector, and UK psychologist Daniel Nettle, as well as Sagmeister’s own words, the series is revealed as a complex blend of personal revelation, art, and design—an eclectic mix of visual audacity and sound advice Stefan is the founder of the New York based Sagmeister Inc. Since 1993, he has designed branding, graphics and packaging for clients as diverse as the Rolling Stones, HBO, the Guggenheim Museum and Time Warner. He is a five time Grammy nominee and actually won a Grammy for the Talking Heads boxed set. Stefan has won practically every important international design award. In 2001 a best selling monograph about his work Sagmeister, Made you Look was published by Booth-Clibborn editions. Solo shows on Sagmeister Inc’s work have been mounted in Zurich, Vienna, New York, Berlin, Tokyo, Osaka, Prague, Cologne and Seoul. He teaches in the graduate department of the School of Visual Art in New York and has been appointed as the Frank Stanton Chair at The Cooper Union School of Art, New York. Stefan lectures regularly all over the world. http://www.thingsihavelearnedinmylife.com/

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