Within a few paintings, we had it down. “There’s a beauty. Great carving and it really jumps off the wall.”

“You think? Seems a little over the top to me. Maybe more of a transition from the warm outside to the cold reality.”

Now whenever we happen to end up in a museum together, we just naturally fall into our discussion of the framing. The art has taken a secondary position.

In the marketplace of ideas, somewhat like the marketplace for art, framing has an important role to play. I suspect that poor framing or no framing could significantly lower the initial esteem in which a painting would be held.

Poor framing of ideas is much more harmful. Even brilliant and valuable ideas that are poorly framed are highly likely to be lost. Brilliant framing can be so effective in launching ideas that often the framing and the idea become intertwined forever. Ronald Regan’s Cadillac-driving welfare queens, although completely fabricated, changed the perception of welfare for decades. Welfare had not changed at all. The framing had.

What is the purpose of a frame? A frame separates one thing from another. The known world ends at the frame, and what is contained within the frame can stand alone and be contemplated. Have you ever seen a huge frame for a tiny picture? All that matted space creates a kind of visual silence that beckons, “Step closer and see the tiny treasure I protect.” Just imagine how a postage stamp might look in a twelve foot wide by ten foot high massive frame. Who would be able to resist walking up to that postage stamp and trying figure out what could be so important about it that it deserves this much visual space?

Wouldn’t you like your ideas to receive the same attention? What was Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg indicating, as quoted in the NY Times recently, that when she speaks what she says is ignored until someone else also says the same thing? Is it harder for a woman to achieve the space that great framing might provide? Maybe she needs to clear her throat before she speaks, or speak much louder, or be much funnier. Or maybe she needs to whisper, forcing everyone to draw closer and to hang on her every word. Clearly, her current framing strategy needs some work.

For those people, businesses and organizations that want to be seen the way they want to be seen, masterful framing is essential. And in a crowded and noisy marketplace, sometimes you will need to create some quiet around yourself to be able to be heard. Simple is powerful. A single idea may be all that someone can get about you, at first.

If we work together, that’s one of the first things we’ll be discussing. First, who you are and what you stand for. And then we’ll be looking for all the ways to put what’s valuable and unique about you in a context that will frame you — separate you from a noisy world so you are perceived the way you want to be.

So much so that we cancelled XM.

And then came BBC Radio 3 on the web. BBC Radio 3 is what I would also want in Paradise if I could somehow get my record fudged. The BBC has unlimited funds with which to do great things (raised through a tax on TVs and the lottery) so unlike our public radio and TV there is no sponsorship, no pledge weeks, no endless non-commercials from Exxon and the local law firm. And very, very little self-promotion about what you just heard what you’re going to hear later and how all this was brought to you by people just like you who, if they knew better, would probably be listening to the BBC.

Strangely, as I write this on Saturday morning, the BBC is playing the live feed from the Met in New York. We could listen to the Met directly over our local college station that also feeds it, but the station puts out a poor quality signal. So the Met sounds better coming from New York via London to San Francisco via the web. Amazing.

It was too good to last, this classical music paradise. You know how it is with little perfections, that bakery shop around the corner with their dreamy cream puffs and one day the door doesn’t open and the counters are gone. And you notice the ‘Retired’ sign in the window. Two weeks ago, the BBC signal suddenly turned into a parody of itself — a digital hash with echoes and a rapid chopping effect. You could tell what they were broadcasting, but it was unlistenable. No classical radio when I was shaving. No classical radio Sunday morning. No classical radio during dinner. Every few hours I would try the feed again, hoping against hope that it was some technical error that someone had overlooked. But that seemed absurd. How could the mighty, perfectionist BBC, the greatest institution in the history of broadcasting not know that something was wrong with the single greatest source of culture available in the entire universe? Impossible.

So I searched the BBC’s technical websites to see why they were scrambling our signal. Maybe they had changed policy and weren’t going to let the rest of the world freeload on the British taxpayers. Seemed reasonable, but sad if true. But I could find no statement, no press release, no mention of an intent to scramble their feed to outsiders.

I found a BBC technical website that seemed preoccupied with the event surrounding the fact that some department was moving across the street. I wrote that my signal had been screwed up for days and wondered if that were intentional. I explained I had tried on several different computers. I also mentioned that rebroadcasts of BBC Radio 3 programs were streaming just fine.

Imagine my surprise when I got a Google alert this morning from the BBC website. Someone read me, checked out my concern, and discovered that the BBC signal to the entire world had indeed been unlistenable for weeks. And they fixed it.

I am pleased to announce that as of this morning, BBC Radio 3 is back on the web.

Shows you something about the leverage of the social media. A single radio listener can save paradise for the whole world. With just a few keystrokes.

I wrote this piece the morning General Motors entered into bankruptcy. When I hear a CEO say something that’s almost self-delusional, I wonder if he’s trying to rally the troops or really believes it.

Surprisingly, GM responded with an open letter to me. I took them up on their offer to survey their models and dealers, and I wrote a long private message back to their head of design. When I was unable to get any response, I followed this piece with something, although tongue-in-cheek, would have been a radical way to express their new committment.

GM has still not begun to touch the potential of the social media to begin to forge genuine relationships with their customers.

Good morning Mr. Henderson —

Big day for you, no question. My best wishes go out to you on Day One running the new General Motors. Clean slate, pretty much, except for those legacy issues that might hold you back. A culture of poor vision, poor design, poor assembly, poor service. That’s a lot to change all at once, but you’ll need to do it. At your press conference you said the new GM would be bringing to the market, among other things, great design. That really struck me. I wondered what your process would be for inspiring, creating and recognizing great design. And how could a passion for great design be inculcated into the culture on a permanent basis?

Your passenger vehicle sales are now one-fifth of what they were at their peak. You’ve lost sales to all those well-designed and well built Japanese, European and even American cars. I can’t imagine that without great design you will be able to get people like me out of their Audis and Hondas.

And that’s what worries me. I really wonder if General Motors can suddenly start to make stuff that’s well-designed, from both the engineering side, as well as the interior and exterior. Can an organization that has made so much truly ugly stuff suddenly start making great design?

I went to your new website gmreinvention.com and perused the portraits of the top team, just to get some clues about the design sense there. I see mostly corporate-type guys, in ties and suits, and the one thing that doesn’t leap out is, “Wow — great design sense.” What leaps out is, “Older white guys wearing suits to the office in Detroit, except for one woman and one black guy.” And while we’re all looking at this new website together for clues about the new GM, does it worry any of you that the portfolio of the woman, Susan E. Doherty, is described as: “North America VP, Buick-Pontiac-GMC.” Didn’t anyone tell the web designer that Pontiac was buried several weeks ago?

The first clue that I will be looking for that will indicate whether you might be getting it will be how you go about changing the old GM logo and branding. Will you step up to the world class level of your competition, or will we have more lipstick-on-a-pig level efforts? The truth is, if your new logo and design efforts are synthesized for you by an outside agency working with your marketing people, chances are the new look of GM will be as disconnected from your aspirations as the current worn-out GM blue and white letters over a thick bar.

What should your process be to discover your new image? A significant number of top team people from a broad spectrum of leadership is going to need to get together and decide what the new GM really stands for. If you don’t get this critical first step done right, the chances that anything else you do will be able to accurately express your aspirations for the new GM will be zero. If you don’t know who you are and can’t articulate it, a whole bunch of people throughout the organization are going to be making up their version of what the new GM is, and it’s going to be way, way too much like the old GM.

Once you have those retreats to figure out who you are, then you’ll be able to talk to designers about that new logo. You will be able to tell them what you want to convey, instead of the other way around. And when they get it right, you’ll be the ones who know.

In the meantime, the whole world is watching. And we’ll know, too, when we see that new “GM” for the first time, what your future is.

The plight of the typical independent bookstore, such as City Lights in San Francisco, highlights the challenges for the little guy trying to compete against the online giants. In this piece we take a look at what a retailer really has to offer, and how to turn that into a successful business. The small retailer has some real competitive advantages over the giant online store. The challenge is to let go of the old business model and make the most of the new reality.

This piece was written for Huffington Post, so there’s a lot more that could have been said about the opportunities for the small retailer to capture and build a thriving community. It starts with taking advantage of the fact that you’ve got real people in your store. Capture their contact info, give them a discount for staying in touch. Build a loyalty program (the more you shop with us, the better your discount.) If you give it a little effort, you can create a relationship built on value and trust that no one can complete with.

Here’s the original post:

She seemed like what you might call ‘a nice person.’ He seemed decent enough, too. His voice a tad too loud, but not meaning to be obnoxious. They were just enjoying the days between Christmas and New Years, chatting, flirting, browsing the new non-fiction cases at City Lights. Multitasking ran deep in their veins. They were joking, scanning book jackets and discussing several topics at once.

I would have turned back to my browsing, when suddenly it caught my eye. She wasn’t even looking at her phone, but in a well-practiced gesture that you might not have seen if you weren’t paying close attention, she hovered her phone over the book and snapped a picture of the cover. It took less than a second but there was no mistaking the intent. City Lights had lost another sale. That $35 book would soon be coming her way from Amazon at $24.95.

The store was bustling with customers. We try to visit regularly because the browsing is always so superb — it’s impossible to glance at a shelf without discovering a terrific book that you haven’t heard of before. A year ago I had been scanning a category of books near the cashier called “Books With CDs” and Arnold Steinhardt’s exquisitely crafted Violin Dreams fell into my hands. (And I bought it there.) I’d never heard of it before and never seen a mention of it in print since. If not for City Lights I would never have discovered one of my favorite books of all time.

Browsing is like middle children — something you take for granted but when it’s gone society loses something important. Middle children are the buffers in a family, the ones who learn to negotiate between the typically aggressive eldest child and the clingy youngest siblings. Middle children are like saints, actually. (Full disclosure, yes, the author of this piece is a middle child, but you probably already knew that.) It was predicted a generation ago, and clearly now come to fruition, that with the shrinking American family and the decline of the numbers of middle children, we would become a more contentious people. Clearly this explains what’s going on in the Senate.

Browsing has a big role to play in society, too. Browsing is the enabler of serendipity. Without browsing, the chances for the out-of-frame discovery are terribly diminished. I am still waiting for someone to say, “I discovered this really great book on Amazon.” What would our world be like without serendipity? That would be gray, dear reader.

Busy as the store way, the City Lights cashiers had nothing to do but chat with each other and answer the occasional reference question. They just weren’t ringing up sales. City Lights had become a free browsing service for Amazon.

We took a break from browsing and headed out for some non-touristy North Beach food. We stopped in front of a restaurant and were immediately assaulted by a hawker who swept down, apparently attempting to entice us with a breath that sang of fresh garlic. She announced the specials in an accent so obscure that even as we read the menu along with her, not a word could be understood. The dim sum parlors provided a different sort of browsing: plates of wax food that was meant to speak directly to one’s salivary glands.

And then I got it. Both the restaurants and City Lights were providing a browsing experience. The difference was that the customers browsing the restaurants came in and actually bought stuff. But people browsing the books at City Lights were buying their books from Amazon, even while they were still right there in the store!

What to do?

If I ran City Lights and wanted to stay in business, I’d put big signs in the windows and behind the cash register: “We’ll meet Amazon’s Price!” Apparently City Lights management believes that they can’t make enough money trying to match Amazon, but I have news — making $7 on a book is better than making nothing on it. The day I was there thousands of dollars in sales were being lost. And as long as you have the traffic, do what the carwashes do. Sell other stuff to your customers at full price: accessories like reading lamps and bookmarks, gift cards, even Smithfield hams, dammit! But don’t turn your bookstore into a browsing facility for Amazon. You can’t go on like this.

I left the store a little depressed, fearing for a great institution. As we walked by The Stinking Rose, another North Beach fixture, I noted a woman in her thirties deep into her book as she sat by herself in the window. There was no question where she had bought her copy: she was reading a nice fresh volume of Kerouac.

So City Lights had managed to make at least one sale. I hope it wasn’t the last.