Open up your mind and say, ahh...

It’s always struck me as fitting that Koolhaas has never built a freestanding building in New York (despite the fact that it was his ideas about Manhattan that launched him to fame in the late 1970s); it’s as though his vision of the city is just a bit too far ahead of schedule for the rest of us.

The 30-year dry streak was reconfirmed this fall, when OMA’s proposal for a 41-story tower at 425 Park Avenue was put aside for a Foster + Partners design. The decision was not altogether unsurprising: Foster has a proven track record as the architect of two of the city’s biggest office towers of the past decade.

But it’s still worth noting OMA’s design, if only for what it says about Koolhaas’s evolving ideas about the city. Luckily, thanks to the developer’s (very rare) decision to videotape and upload footage of the competition pitches, we get it straight from the horse’s mouth: A YouTube video shows Koolhaas hunched over a laptop presenting the design to developer David Levinson.

“I wanted to think about New York as though there had been a plan,” Koolhaas begins. “Europeans write manifestos and never realize them, in New York, things are realized without any kind of plan.” (Indeed, Koolhaas has called his seminal book Delirious New York a “manifesto” for Manhattan.) The grand plan, in this case, is the grid extended from Central Park down to Times Square. The site at 425 Park is torn between the two poles of Central Park (ten blocks north) and Midtown (a few blocks south). Imagining the 650,000-square-foot volume being pulled in either direction, the OMA team gently torqued the structure until the facade began to vortex. It’s an incredibly elementary–and subversive–move: amidst a tightly regulated north/south framework, the building twists and shimmies like a dancer.

The resulting “Brancusi-like” tower looks almost organic–not at all what you might expect from OMA, which might have worked against them. Inside, though, there are more details that deserve mentioning. In particular, the decision to create a thin vertical atrium through the first 15 floors of the building, connecting the lobby to a public atrium above. Small footbridges sprout from all sides of the chasm, creating what you’d imagine to be a cacophonous space of intersecting companies, events, and spaces. It’s what Foucault calls a heterotopia, a space that is neither here nor there, inviting social interactions that are unplanned. Koolhaas called these kinds of spaces “architectural mutations” in Delirious New York–like mushrooms, they pop up in the dark corners and crevices of the city.

This proposal, like so many other OMA plans for Manhattan, has been put aside for Foster’s clean, middle-of-the-road technocratic vision of the future. But the doomed design is still a fascinating look into how Koolhaas conceives of a city that’s changed rapidly since he wrote about it in 1978.

H/t Design Boom

Architects may come and architects may go, but ol’ Frank Lloyd Wright will never stop influencing the next generation. French firm Influx Studio entered their Spiral Garden Museum in a conceptual competition to design the new Taipei City Museum of Art, and its silhouette is a bit familiar. “Of course, as shown in the diagrams, we’ve taken the idea of the Guggenheim but revisited it in this new context,” architect Mario Caceres tells Co.Design. Here, however, the views extend out and over sprawling greens and adjacent urban skyline.

Following the curving pathways of the surrounding park, the ramp that circles the structure climbs at a low 4 percent grade–the maximum allowed for wheelchair accessibility–and there’s also a bike lane that goes from the ground all the way up. On the inside, the swirling, sprawling levels offer a bit of fun for the whole family, including three floors of children’s museum, and two each of the contemporary museum of art, and art gallery mall and plaza (all dictated by the competition guidelines). “The shape allows a great openness and flexibility,” Caceres says.

Atop it all is a sky terrace which, though stunning, makes the building look precariously top-heavy, a potential liability in earthquake-prone Taiwan. The submission didn’t place, but FLW’s legacy lives on (and on… and reaching even further back, a classics-loving reader at designboom referenced the visual similarity to Botticelli’s depiction of Dante’s Inferno!).

(H/T designboom)

Jordan Kushins

Jordan Kushins is a freelance writer based in beautiful San Francisco. She is an avid crafter, bicycle rider, and former associate editor at Dwell. Check … Continued

The World at Work is powered by GE. This new series highlights the people, projects and startups that are driving innovation and making the world a better place.

Name: WILL Interactive

Big Idea: WILL Interactive develops Virtual Experience Immersive Learning Simulations (VEILS), which are interactive movies that force users to make serious decisions as a learning experience.

Why It’s Working: With more than 70 games on topics including the military, financial decision-making and youth education, WILL Interactive has developed a new form of educational and therapeutic media.

Walk in the shoes of a soldier on the battlefield or learn how to avoid foreclosure in a precarious housing market — if you make a mistake, simply start the game over.

WILL Interactive has found a way to encourage game players to solve real-world problems using interactive role-playing games.

WILL has created more than 70 “serious games.” That term, the site explains, “means games that are designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment. Higher end serious games are designed to inherently engage their target audience through the use of interactive gaming attributes, which, in turn, ultimately educates them on how to solve a specific problem, task or objective.”

The company patented its signature medium, Virtual Experience Immersive Learning Simulation (VEILS), in 1998. VEILS enables players to take on the identities of characters in a movie, and each of the characters’ actions result in a different reaction and outcome for the player. This idea evolved into serious games for social good.

One of these games is Ways Home, an interactive game developed in cooperation with Fannie Mae that guides users through various scenarios and teaches them how to avoid foreclosure. Another is Leading the Way, developed with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs — the game helps returning soldiers prepare to navigate the worst-case scenarios of re-entering civilian working life.

The company’s website states that WILL is the only entity that “holds the patent for the interactive behavior modification process that has been shown in independent studies to improve individual’s knowledge, attitudes and behaviors.”

The company recently launched the WILL Interactive Challenge, asking players to solve a real-world problem using the game’s interactive technology. In the competition, which began on December 14, 2011 and ended April 20, 2012, contestants were asked to create a proposal detailing a virtual experience that could impact the real world in a positive way. The winner will be announced on June 6 and will be awarded $500,000 to develop the idea using WILL’s technology. If the idea is commercialized, the winner will receive royalties and co-branding recognition on the simulation.

What real-world problem would you like to see solved using serious games? Tell us in the comments.

Series presented by GE

The World at Work is powered by GE. GE Works focuses on the people who make the things that move, power, build and help to cure the world.

Forget what the competition is planning: Apple does not envision the iPad and MacBook Air converging at any point in the near future.

Today, the company released its second-quarter financial results ($39.2 billion in revenue, $11.6 billion in net revenue), and despite selling 11.8 million iPads, Cook took time during an earnings call to discuss the potential threat of the PC and tablet spaces converging. Many expect Microsoft’s latest offering, Windows 8, to unite these two sides of the spectrum, making the tablet not a post-PC device, but just a PC in a different form. But Cook didn’t sound too concerned. “Anything can be forced to converge,” Cook said. “”You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are not going to be pleasing to the user.”

An analyst on the call broached the subject with Cook, suggesting that it’s almost inevitable that ultrabook and tablet experiences will be combined going forward. It’s a notion Microsoft has long subscribed to. “We view a tablet as a PC,” then-Windows Phone president Andy Lees said in July.

Apple, on the other hand, is living in the post-PC world, and fully expects the iPad to eclipse sales of the PC in volume. Cook boasted that the iPad has already sold 67 million units since launching in 2010; by comparison, it took Apple 27 years to sell that many Macs, five years to sell that many iPods, and three years to sell that many iPhones. In other words, the market for iPads is huge–just as Cook expects it to be for Macs for sometime to come.

Combining the two products–as is Microsoft’s aim with Windows 8–has its downsides. “The problem is that the converged products are about tradeoffs: You begin to make tradeoffs to the point where what you have left at the end of day is not pleasing to anyone,” Cook said. “The tablet market is huge…I also believe that there is a very good market for the MacBook Air…But I do think it appeals to someone who has different requirements. You woudln’t want to put these things together because you are compromising both, and not pleasing either user.”

“Some people will prefer to have both together, but to make the compromise of convergence–we’re not going to that party,” Cook continued. “Others might, but we’re going to play them both separately.”

My recent post, “Why Small Businesses Should Scrap Strategic Planning,” set off a barrage of conversations, mostly from entrepreneurs who agree. Big companies have to make all their strategic decisions at once during an annual strategic planning session because it is too difficult and costly to get their team together more frequently. Small companies get to take the opposite approach: They tackle strategic choices as they come.

Consider Zor Gorelov, the CEO of SpeechCycle, a company transforms how phone and cable companies like Telstra, Cablevision, and Cox deliver customer service. Last week I got a chance to sit down with Zor in the SpeechCycle headquarters. Deep in Wall Street, next to a sunny window overlooking the Statue of Liberty, I asked him to lay out the strategy that’s driven such dramatic growth (SpeechCycle was recently recognized by Deloitte as a “Technology Fast 500”). He walked through five pivotal decisions that collectively compose a disruptive strategy that, so far at least, position them as the uncontestable leader in what they do.

1. The perfect exit: Before launchined SpeechCycle, Zor, a 25-year-old Russian engineer, recognized that while Soviet-era hospitals could not afford even basic sheets, they still wanted cutting-edge IT systems to keep up with the West, so he started building them. He launched a software company and saved just enough to buy tickets and get out of the Soviet Union with his wife and young son.

2. The search for meaning: After a stint at Bell Labs and Microsoft, followed by launching and selling BuzzCompany.com, one of the first Internet messaging software companies, Zor became fascinated by how humans extract meaning from speech. This lead him to launch SpeechCycle with several cofounders to realize a simple insight: They could help large firms use software to listen to and understand their customers better. Because they focused early and intensely, they now have unparalleled expertise using proprietary “High Definition Statistical Natural Language Understanding” technology to understand certain types of conversations.

For example, they know the virtually infinite ways a customer might complain about a slow Internet connection. Do you? If you don’t, you might want to try SpeechCycle, which would enable you to have your phone system simply ask, “What is your problem?” while your competitors guide their customers through the torturous “Press 2 for an option you don’t want” process.

3. Borrowing a road: In their first days, Zor and his cofounders, who bootstrapped the company, figured their best target customers would be electronics firms like HP. They were desperate to win clients so they sat down with a list of 1,500 consumer electronics companies and started cold-calling to win their first customer, a second-tier printer manufacturer. It soon became clear they were barking up the wrong tree because most customers call their phone and cable service providers when they have a problem. You don’t call Linksys when your router is down, do you? You call your Internet service provider first. SpeechCycle now serves leading telecom service providers instead.

4. Use the cloud: On a high-stakes phone call with HP, their target client told them that HP is very unlikely to buy software from a small software company. They simply don’t do that. So years before “software as a service” or “the cloud” were known terms, SpeechCycle adopted that model.

5. Sell value: Early on it was difficult to get customers to take a leap and pay this relatively young, unknown company to do something they were not convinced yet was possible, so the SpeechCycle team pivoted their pricing plan, saying, “Only pay us when it works.” If a customer calls and cannot solve their problem through the automated SpeechCycle enabled system, if they hit “zero for an agent,” SpeechCycle does not get paid.

Now, somewhere at Harvard Business School, a professor is telling impressionable students that the way to create a strategy is to sit down, think, and then document a set of decisions like this. They might even call up SpeechCycle as an example, and argue the company’s strategy is disruptive because they focused on:

1. Getting better than others at extracting meaning from utterances

2. Serving service providers, not hardware makers

3. Moving early to the cloud

4. Adopting value-based pricing

5. Creating a pricing plan that makes it easy for potential clients to sign on

And while this is true, it overlooks how innovative disrupters like SpeechCycle arrive at their strategy. They strategize immediately, as needed, not in November every year. They strategize in 10 minutes in the hallway, not over three days in a boardroom.

The key to outthinking your competition is to make smarter decisions at every turn. So the next time you make a decision, stop what you are doing and think for 10 minutes. Break your thought process apart into five steps. My book, Outthink the Competition, provides tools to manage these steps precisely, but here is a short version:

1. Imagine: What do you want to achieve? Real-life example: I am about to get on a phone call and want the others to hang up motivated and in action.

2. Dissect: What must be true? They have to (a) see we are making progress, (b) hear excitement in my voice, and (c) know what to do next.

3. Expand: Come up with 10 or more ways to achieve what must be true. I can list out all my achievements this week, I can put them in the right order, I can drink an espresso, etc.

4. Analyze: Choose the 1-3 ideas that will have the biggest impact and that are the easiest to do. I decide to list out my achievements and put them in an order that weaves a narrative of momentum.

5. Sell: Think about how to communicate your plan. Since the people on the phone are analytical, I will communicate my achievements with numbers (e.g., we had 2 new pitches, raised $3 million in new commitments, etc.).

Try it out–and if you have a breakthrough, tell us about it in the comments.

Image: Flickr user Michael Broxton

What does a real-life CEO have in common with the central figures of a fictitious Mafia crime family in The Godfather? According to Justin Moore, CEO and founder of Axcient, plenty. 

Moore is a serial entrepreneur, early-stage advisor, and angel investor. He’s currently at the helm of Axcient, a company he founded that provides backup, business continuity, and disaster recovery services to the small and mid-sized business (SMB) market. Right now, Axcient is protecting more than 2 billion files and applications for businesses across North America.

Moore also happens to think that The Godfather is “one of the best movies ever made” and had a chance to watch it again when the film was aired extensively last week to mark the 40th anniversary of its premiere. Though a decade had passed since the last time Moore watched it, his recent viewing offered an unexpected reward. This time he found the film rife with teaching moments for CEOs running a business today.

“I certainly don’t endorse crime or violence, and I’m not suggesting business should operate like the Mafia,” explains Moore, “but there are some universal themes in the movie I can relate to as a CEO.” Moore says The Godfather offers valuable lessons in community and team building, making tough decisions, and playing to win while not neglecting friends and family.

Here are five essential leadership lessons Moore distilled for Fast Company.

1. Build a powerful community. 

Someday, and that day may never come, I’ll call upon you to do a service for me. ~Vito Corleone

Uttered in the iconic rasp of Marlon Brando, the words of Vito Corleone illustrate how he creates a loyal community among those he has helped. Moore says, “By granting these favors and helping people with their problems, Vito Corleone is building a network of influence–relationships that may or may not deliver a specific or quantifiable return, but all which serve to strengthen his power base and which have the potential to be reciprocal in the long run.”

Moore says building strategic partnerships enables companies to work through challenging markets and fast-track overall success. “As a CEO, I see it as part of my job to be a super connector, networking with the technology and investment community without an expectation of reciprocation. Partnerships forged through time, trust, and mutual benefit–such as those Axcient has built with HP, Ingram-Micro, and a vast network of service providers and resellers–are the types of community relationships that bring about the greatest returns.”

2. Hold people accountable. 

What’s the matter with you? I think your brain is going soft. ~Vito Corleone

The Godfather reminds us of the importance of being tough when necessary. “As soon as Vito Corleone allowed a few moments of weakness to be seen by his enemy, they attempted to assassinate him. And it was largely because of failures of his team,” Moore observes.

“In business, accountability isn’t achieved by a murderous rampage. But the lesson is this–to be successful in business you have to be tough, and you have to be extremely focused on hitting goals and getting results,” says Moore. That doesn’t mean patience and understanding don’t have a place, he says, but ongoing tolerance of low-performing people or products just eats away at the success of the entire company. “You are ultimately responsible for all of your employees and shareholders, and that requires tough and swift decisions.

3. Don’t get emotional. 

It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business. ~Michael Corleone

“Many people don’t like to talk about the fact that in business, there are winners and losers. When Sonny Corleone reacts impulsively and emotionally, he gets taken out. In business, if you don’t take the opportunity to out-sell, out-bid, or out-market your competitor, they’ll take you out. I’m not suggesting doing anything outside the boundaries of morality or rightness–simply pointing out that when people make emotional decisions, they start making bad decisions. To lead successfully, you have to take your emotion and ego out of the equation.”

Likewise, Moore says it’s important to play to win. In business, that translates to knowing the competition and always staying at least one step ahead. “Operate your business with integrity and have respect for competition, but you also need to seize opportunities to eliminate your competition and win.”

4. Be decisive. 

Moore says that he, like most people who appreciate The Godfather, watch the movie with a combination of shock and respect. “Shock because he is so ruthless that he kills his own family member, but respect for the fact that Don Corleone knows exactly what he wants, executes decisively, and commands respect through unwavering leadership.”

While you don’t have to kill anyone to prove a point, as soon as you know what choice to make, move forward. “Know who on your team is making the right choices, and trust them to take decisive action as well. Hesitation too often leads to missed opportunities.”

5. Spend time with your family. 

Do you spend time with your family? Because a man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man. ~Vito Corleone 

Moore isn’t endorsing 1940s machismo, but he is decrying 100-hour workweeks that many entrepreneurs fall prey to in hot pursuit of the next big thing. Though he’s been dedicated like that in the past, Moore finds it’s not sustainable in the long run. 

“A leader can’t be successful in creative problem-solving and making excellent decisions unless that person is connected to people and passions outside of work. I find that it’s often time with family and friends that gives me the perspective I need to build the relationships and make the decisive actions required for continued success in business,” says Moore.

Think we missed any big leadership themes from The Godfather? Get thee to the comments and let us know.