I’ve never claimed to be a good boss; nor, have I ever said that I’m good at hiring. Doing so is one of the hardest things that I’ve had to, and I struggle to find a set of consistent rules that work. We’ve hired people who worked well here, and others who haven’t. Still this topic has been floating in my mind for a few months.

You’re probably a fine person; meanwhile, I believe I’m a generally decent human being. If we met over drinks, we’d probably have a fine time and perhaps even become friends. If, however, I hired you to work at smashLAB, you might end up hating me.

Last night I tweeted that I had achieved and maintained “inbox zero” nirvana. I’m sure there are countless posts on the topic, but thought I’d briefly share how I made sense of the communication barrage that I was once drowning in.

“So, do we just say ‘fuck it’ and change our name?” was the question I started the day with. Over the past year we’d watched pages of accolades and general “good stuff” about our design studio erode into comments like: “smash lab = fail”. (Actually, that was on page one of Google for some time.) Nine years in business and we were contemplating dropping our moniker. How did this happen?

As you likely know by now, I’m a big-time self-promotion slut. That’s right, let’s just say it. I’ll pretty much do anything to get you to love the things we do at smashLAB. So, today I’m doing it again, plugging our own stuff, and hoping that you’ll give it a try too. (And love it. That’s right… love it.)

I don’t know your design process, so, it would be foolish for me to generalize. For the sake of this post however, I’m going to have to. When I’m finished you can feel free to tell me that: (A) I’m a moron, (B) It won’t work; or, (C) This is how you always did it anyways. Any of those are fine–including (D) You might be on to something. Regardless, here’s my hypothesis.

In the past year we’ve been approached by six different agencies wishing to acquire smashLAB. Some were big players, two were regional firms, and the others were working as agents for other operations. Needless to say, we found all of this quite flattering, even if it wasn’t really on our agenda.

It’s summer and I’ve been writing very little. (Lately the beach has taken priority.) A couple of weeks ago, Mark Dudlik asked me a few questions for a magazine he’s involved with called Fill/Stroke. Mark’s been kind enough to allow me to repurpose this piece on ideasonideas. Here goes… (and now I’m off to sit in the sun).

A year ago I started to write a book on creativity. In it I discuss how we’ve made this notion so mythic that it has become ridiculously exclusive. This seems rather silly, given that it’s learnable, just like any other discipline. The point, however, is that all this time has passed, and I only have half a book ready (I’m a walking cliché—sorry folks!)

Of my daily reads, Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch is one I most enjoy. It’s an amazing look into the new ideas (some great, and some “not so much”) that people have for the web. Today I took special notice of Erick Shonfeld’s post about Google’s search tool: SearchMash. In part, I’m interested in anything “Google”, but this time I also found something a little fishy.