Build Your Own Garage: Blueprints and Tools to Unleash Your Company's Hidden Creativity

Two marketing and communications experts present a cutting-edge model for managing group creativity, expanding on the ideas introduced in Bernd Schmitt's revolutionary Experiential Marketing. Bernd Schmitt, a leader in experiential thinking, introduced the concept of the 'experience organisation' a business that thrives on innovation, buzzes with ideas, rejects bureaucacy, questions convention and allows the spirit of its employees to soar. Now he teams up with Laura Brown to show not only that these companies exist, but how any company can become one. Build Your Own Garage is at the forefront of the new field of study focused on the dynamics of workplaces that feature breakthrough ideas and new initiatives. Using the metaphor of the garage to represent these most successful busineses of the new economy, the authors draft blueprints that bring together the on-line experience, branding, communications, cultural perspective and people to foster maximum corporate creativity. Using examples drawn from real life, Schmitt and Brown demonstrate everything from how the physical environment and size of an organisation can substantially improve the quality and flow of ideas, to the relative effectiveness of various e-commerce models.

Ever since Hewlett-Packard emerged from one in 1939, a "garage" has come to symbolize the no-holds-barred mentality that fosters the kind of creativity that drove this company--and the dozens more it spawned--to heights theretofore unknown. Bernd Schmitt, a Columbia Business School professor who has written several well-received marketing books (Experiential Marketing, Marketing Aesthetics) takes this image to the next level in Build Your Own Garage by relaying strategies that readers can adapt to their own enterprises whether they are housed in a converted parking structure or not.

As one might suspect from a book that advocates the unorthodox, Schmitt chooses to deliver his ideas in an unconventional manner. Each chapter begins with an elaborate short story by Laura Brown that encapsulates its central concepts (such as a vampire tale based on Bram Stoker's Dracula that illustrates how "the strictures of traditional corporate culture are enough to suck the life energy out of anyone"). Also sprinkled throughout are photographs and images by graphic artist Gail Anderson, which simultaneously reinforce the book's themes (on topics including technology, branding and "customer experience management") and distance it from buttoned-down management tomes that espouse the very group-think Schmitt is trying to eliminate. Those seeking new ideas who are not turned off by unique presentations should find this intriguing. --Howard Rothman

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