Books Informing our Practice Part II

Publishing on the blog should be more straightforward. We prepare new posts in advance, but then we prioritise the multiple pieces of content for the different parts of our business, projects, and clients.

Our first book recommendation was posted in July, and we are publishing a second part almost four months later. It's my fault; sorry.

As the first three recommendations we published, the three I'm bringing today are essentials in our library.

We often recommend Company of One to our clients facing the scaling-up dilemma and how some options can impact their personal lives and represent a higher risk than needed. The Business of Aspiration is another classic, and we recommend it to our clients who work with consumers, especially in fashion, culture, and design. 

The Delft design guide was a "bargain bin" find. I was browsing a major retailer's design section on an ultra-discounted pop-up and found a few gems. My 2013 edition cost less than 5 euros, but it is worth all the 35€ that the publisher is asking for a 2020 revised edition.

How quickly the next chapter of "Books Informing Our Practice" will be published depends heavily on the feedback I receive from you and other readers. I'm sensitive to pressure, and you can reach out to me on Barbot Bernardo's Instagramand LinkedIn pages. 

I hope you enjoy these books as much as I do.

Miguel

PAUL JARVIS - Company of One: Why Staying Small is the Next Big Thing for Business, 2019 (Penguin)

"A refreshing approach to entrepreneurship centred on staying small and avoiding growth - maximising happiness, sustainability and profitability.

Paul Jarvis left the corporate world when he realised that working in a high-pressure, high-profile world was not his idea of success. Instead, he now works for himself out of his home, and lives a much more rewarding and productive life. He no longer has to contend with an environment that constantly demands more productivity, more output and more growth."

I'm not quite sure, but I think I first heard of this one on the Hurry Slowly podcast (this episode). When the book was published, I was co-managing two small businesses with Alice, setting up the basis for Ofício and this expanded version of Barbot Bernardo, and navigating the ever-changing retail landscape with Velo Culture (that we later sold to the two amazing guys running it today). By then, we were leaving behind the challenges of the financial crisis (Portugal was under an IMF assistance programme until 2014 and endured several years of austerity afterwards) and seeing a much better prospect for the world we were working on. Remember that this was just two years before Brexit directly impacted our business and Trump's first presidency happened. Then, Covid and its emotional and financial rollercoaster landed. 

If staying small was something we couldn't escape in such an unpredictable landscape, it became our doctrine. Being lean and focused on delivering value to our clients, slowly expanding our business, and developing and nurturing our amazing small team became our priorities, and that's why this book still resonates with me. 

If your favourite local bookshop doesn't stock it, you can buy this book directly from Penguin.

ANA ANDJELIC - The Business of Aspiration: How Social, Cultural, and Environmental Capital Changes Brands, 2020 (Routledge)

"The Business of Aspiration is about how consumers' shifting status symbols affect business and brand strategy. These changing status symbols, like taste, aesthetic innovation, curation or environmentalism create the modern aspirational economy.

In this book, marketers will find examples, analyses and tools on how brands can successfully grow in the modern aspirational economy. The Business of Aspiration answers questions like, "what is good for my brand long-term?", "how is this business decision going to impact our culture?" or "what are the main objectives of our growth?" Marketers will learn to shift their brand narrative and competitive strategy, to create and distribute new brand symbols, and to ensure that their brand's products and services create both monetary and social value."

I first heard of this fantastic book on Ana Andjelica's substack Sociology of Business, which is a must-read for marketers and strategists working with everything "aspirational." 

I spent 5 years studying marketing in the late 90s before starting a consulting career. My professional experience, at least for the past 14 years, has heavily depended on complex and often intangible value propositions (and vibes). My previous venture brought this "aspirational" side to a not-very interesting market: bicycles, and I like to think we nailed the narrative when we first launched in 2012. A few years later, the first iteration of Ofício was very connected to Saber Fazer's technical and aesthetic side and later evolved into a graphic design studio working with artists, creatives and independent entrepreneurs. Barbot Bernardo's was founded in 2021, and our strategic design clients (well, we are not using "business consulting" anymore. Very demure, very aspirational.) are neighbourhood coffee shops, hotels, architecture and design practices, fashion designers, craftspeople, artists, health and lifestyle companies and many other creative businesses that have a lot to learn with each other's experiences.

Books like this make the contemporary culture and design consumer much easier to understand.

If your favourite local bookshop doesn't stock it, you can buy this book directly from Routledge.

ANNEMIEK VAN BOEIJEN, JAAP DAALHUIZEN AND JELLE ZIJLSTRA - Delft Design Guide: Perspectives - Models - Approaches - Methods, 2020 (BIS Publishers)

"Delft Design Guide provides an overview of the perspectives, models, approaches, and methods used in the bachelor's and master's curriculum of Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). Some of these are unique to the university, others are well known and are used by designers worldwide. Designing products and services at this faculty is considered a systematic and structured activity, deliberately and purposefully, and with moments of increased creativity.

The methods and techniques are each described in a practical one-page text, illustrated for further clarification and enriched with images that should encourage reflection and further reading."

Over the past years, especially after moving "full time" to our new space in Porto, Portugal, I've been experimenting and mixing a cocktail of many different ingredients, from strategy to graphic design, from book publishing to content creation, from small niche entrepreneurial ventures to big EU-funded cooperation projects. 

This complexity and our small team make visual tools extremely important to designing and assessing our business strategy. On the one hand, we must be increasingly organised to deal with complexity and maintain a healthy habit of being very responsive to internal and external requests. On the other hand, we must constantly reassess our strategic path and deliver assertive feedback and instruction to a team that, for the good or the bad, is made of visual thinkers (we all come from creative backgrounds). 

The move from calling part of our services  "business consulting" to "strategic design" was also informed by changes in how I'm now pitching our services to entrepreneurs, most tiny businesses run by creative people. Instead of more classic theoretical models delivering even more complexity, I'm now invested in streamlining the projects, making them more straightforward and visual. I want the client to envision a big strategic picture, but I also want them to focus on the more important trends and action lines, which they will keep in mind every day for the next few years.

That's why this book is gold and I had a sort of dopamine bomb drop when I stumbled across it in that depressing shopping mall. It provides more than 150 pages with models for strategic thinking made specially for visual thinkers and I'm currently using a lot of them (and updated a good part of the models I was using before). 

If your favourite local bookshop doesn't stock it (or if you can find a 2013 edition in the bargain bin), you can buy the 2020 revised edition directly from BIS.