15 minutes of your life that would be very well spent, if you choose to watch this. Some brilliant advice for the way you make decisions about what you do and how you do it.

I sat and watched this on Sunday and ignored everyone who tried to talk to me whilst it was on. It’s 18 minutes very well spent and will change the way you look at creativity and designing brands, businesses and products.

His belief is that all innovators think in the same way. They start with the ‘why’, rather than start with the ‘what’. So in effect, they design the idea or the reason before they begin to design the product or service that comes out of the process.

A few highlights.

1. Apple Computer are a company that start with why. Their ‘why’ happens to be to challenge the conventional way of doing things. Their ‘how’ is by designing beautiful intuitive products and their ‘what’ is computers, MP3′s, phones and all sorts of electronic gadgetry. Perhaps this is the reason I have my doubts about Apple at the moment, maybe they have been focussing a bit too much on the ‘what’ and not enough on the ‘why’.

2. If you hire people for the ‘what’, they will work for your money. If you hire people who believe what you believe, you are hiring the ‘why’ and they will work with blood, sweat and tears. This backs up what I said back here completely in my John Timpson book review.

3. When Martin Luther King had 250,000 people to hear him speak, you will notice that it was his ‘I have a dream’ speech, and not his ‘I have a plan’. Modern politicians with their twelve point plans for success seem to get it wrong  time after time after time, because it is never about the why, always about the what.

It’s really worth a watch. But do it with a notebook, like I did.

Google Chrome - Better than Firefox and Safari? - certainly less crashy and slow

I’m a bit of an Apple fan and believed they could do no wrong, but their battle with Adobe over Flash is killing them slowly and by a thousand small steps.

I don’t want Flash on my iPhone as I agree it may well slow it down even further, but I do want a browser that works.

I have had so many hanging pages in the last few weeks from Safari that I have completely switched to Google Chrome as my default Browser.

There have been a few of the most committed fans getting twitchy. Not least Tim Garratt when he got stiffed over his .mac account.

I do use Firefox as one of my browsers, but only so I can keep my shared Google calendar open as it uses a different user name and password to my other accounts. Maybe it comes back to connections again, but I never really connected with Firefox.

But Chrome is good. It is now much faster than Safari, allows clever plug-ins and seems to never crash. Even with sites that have Flash embedded on their front page.

Is Apple losing their grip? or is Safari due a major upgrade.

If you want to see a brilliant Google funded experiment with the power and processing of Chrome, have a look at this site. Put in your home Postcode, wait a few minutes and sit back and enjoy. The first few minutes are dull and then it will stagger you.

The X Factor effect and how brands need to recognise the changes in youth behaviour

I’m 44 years old and grew up in a village outside Plymouth in Devon. Having moved there from Oxford, it never felt like to most cosmopolitan place but I don’t think my childhood years were that different to millions of others of my age.

But young people today are totally different in some of the things they think are normal.

When I was on holiday recently I was talking to a good friend of ours Chris Bentley who lives in Kent.

What we noticed was that when we were kids, if you wanted to speak out loud in a language lesson (only French and German in those days) and try to put on the best accent you could, then you were seriously weird.

But now kids seem to love languages. Listening to my 12 year old son taking care of all the ordering for us on holiday and priding himself on the Spanish accent would never have happened when we were kids. Just use English louder was far more normal behaviour.

And then there’s singing and dancing.

I recently went to an School X Factor event where 13 finalists, who had been whittled down from many more entrants, were prepared to stand in front of all their peers and sing their hearts out. The standard was amazing.

Again, if you danced at a school disco as a lad, you would have been lynched.

But any brand needs to address these changes. Staying cool is tricky at the best of times, as tastes and norms change so completely over long periods. Even Google is being pegged back by the US investment market as it is not showing the growth it once was and is being overwhelmed by Twitter and Facebook in many areas.

Apple are now the most valuable brand according to the same Fortune article, but can even they keep it up for another generation?

So whilst looking at how your brand presents itself, sometimes it’s not just a design change that’s needed, it’s a cultural, brand definition change.

And that’s far more scary.

iPhone 4 is here and is in every professional's pocket

It may be a small straw poll but I have heard of two more professional services firms who have switched all of their phones to the rather excellent iPhone platform.

We did it ourselves last year with a great deal from 02 who gave us seven of them free as part of our contract – which in truth is not that massive at around £200 per month. I had a Backberry Pearl for a few weeks on demo but hated it.

But one firm – Innes England – have just had 40 of them and replaced all sorts of handsets for the switch.

The other is a specialist law firm who have had 30+ iPhone handsets too.

Now I haven’t heard of anyone switching lock stock and barrel to Blackberry. Have you? But I did buy one for my daughter for her birthday as her and all her mates have them and love the instant messaging function. (like Apple’s ‘face time’ in text – but actually usable)

So for me, this means that the markets are diverging. Blackberry is going after the PAYG market and Apple are trying to own the corporate market. As an app developer, this makes life much easier as you are only working on one platform, but it will push Apple into an almost monopolistic position in supplying this market.

Good. iPhone is just better, and better should win shouldn’t it.

Don’t get me wrong, I like it. It looks cool. Just like a laptop. But if you were going to shell out for one of these clamcase protectors, wouldn’t you just be better getting a laptop in the first place that has the extra features like multitasking and an inbuilt camera, more memory etc etc?

iHolder for iPhone 4

And Nokia haven’t missed the chance to take the michael either. have a look at their helpful site here.

It’s the first real test for Apple since the early accusations of screens that were too easy to scratch on the original iPhone in 2007. How they handle it will be a good barometer for the future of the brand. You can only really tell the power of a brand when things go wrong. If their products are genuinely NOT as good as people believe, slowly but surely the brand values will be undermined and the brand begins to wane.

Somehow though I don’t think this will happen.

And I still want one.

I’m not sure how they claim it’s 24% thinner and i’m not sure i need to be able to edit video on my phone or have face to face video chats (like my old Nokia phone used to be able to do years ago) but Apple seem to have, yet again, hit the design about right and will have people queueing up to own the new iPhone 4G.

Steve Jobs didn’t look too well, but he certainly got the crowd whooping in his latest keynote. He highlighted eight of the claimed 100 new features of the iPhone 4G device. How many of these will we need or use?

Who cares? I still want one.

I read today on Brand Channel that Sony are trying to become a ‘lifestyle’ brand alongside Apple. In the article Sony’s Executive VP Kazuo Hirai said that if they can offer movie downloads, game downloads and other entertainment, this would be a point of difference that is not available anywhere else.

What?

Sony are officially a Kevin Roberts Lovemark. One of those brands that we love over and above all reason. But this is evidence to me that they have totally lost the plot and are not just following the (Apple) market leaders, but they are a mile or two behind. Sony, when they launched the Walkman, created and defined a sector from scratch with the world’s smallest cassette player.

Apple’s iPod then came and took the whole sector from them, when they redefined the portable media player sector.

Sony have 33 million PlayStation users across the world, all of them plugged in to a wired or wifi’d world. It would seem a far stronger bet to build on this as a point of differentiation than trying to do it through their Bravia TV, Cyber shot cameras and e-readers, which are all a bit ‘me-too’ at best.

If they created a rental or fractional ownership system for games, entertainment, movies and music via the PS3, they would be onto a far more differentiatable (if there is such a word) product and one that has 33 million headstarts.

Otherwise for me, its Apple all the way.

I can imagine Apple launching a wifi TV – they already have a device that slings your picture from your mac to your TV, a wifi camera (that will be the iPhone 3gs then) and you can already read books on the iPod Touch/iPhone.

Sony have become a follower. They used to be radical. Lovemarks do radical things. Sony need to do something radical again, or they are in danger of us falling out of love with them little by little.

Apple are in serious danger of becoming mainstream at the moment. They seem to be on everyone’s shopping list and the research recently showed that more houses that have some wealth are choosing to add macs to their home computing set-ups. I wrote some more about this here.

What normally happens in line with this growth and move to mainstream, is a level of corporate arrogance that starts the beginning of the end for any brand. But Apple seem to be behaving slightly differently, with three examples that have happened to me this week.

1. My laptop broke

This has never happened to me before (yeah yeah yeah, I believe you). So I rang my old friends at Jigsaw who supplied it and they asked me to send it over for a free check to identify the issue. They went through it’s history and advised that it was just under two years old, so out of warranty. As the screen was totally dead, this sounded expensive.

The next morning, they called to say that it was a graphics card that had gone. Ouch. That sounds even more expensive. They went on to say that a few of them had gone wrong recently and Apple weren’t happy with this, so would be replacing them free. Result.

The machine was returned by taxi the next day in full working order again at no cost, even though it was out of warranty. Wow.

2. I couldn’t install Pages

This is part of a longer story but I am testing iWork and Pages (Apple’s version of MS Office/Word) in order that we switch all of the Purple Circle machines over to it, next time we need to upgrade. The cost difference for this with 30 licenses is £510 from Apple to £7950 for a Word upgrade. Who says Apple is the expensive option? Pages isn’t perfect, but it is very easy to use and with a more powerful dictionary, will be a better product that Word anyway. I had previously had the trial version downloaded and then wanted to install the full version which I had purchased, but every time I tried, it kept on saying my trial version had expired. aaaargh!

So i called the FREEPHONE number on the pack and spoke to a lovely person in Cork (just across the water from my family in Crosshaven), who spent 22 minutes talking me through solving the issue, which she did first time, again at NO cost to me. Wow two.

3. A broken Ipod

My Godson James had a problem with his iPod and took it back to John lewis from whence it came. After two weeks of sitting on it, they declared it broken and have just given him a brand new one for nothing. admittedly within warranty, but still a new for old replacement without any undue delay.

We have been huge fans of Apple since they declared they were going to be different with their unbelievable SuperBowl TV ad in 1984. It was at the time, the best ad I had ever seen and still enthralls me now. It was one of the reasons that I entered the creative world as I wanted to be associated with this sort of brilliance.

I liked it so much, I thought I’d share it with you again.

Apple are breaking the Microsoft monopoly and they are doing it by producing better products and caring more about their customers. Any brand that does this deserves long term success.