Earnest Calkins wrote in The Atlantic Monthly:

We demand beauty with our utility, beauty with our amusement, beauty in the things with which we live.

No quibbles with that, I’m guessing. We’ve all seen the explosion of the importance of designed beauty, from our cell phones to our kitchen appliances to our exercise apparel. Guess what, Mr. Calkins wrote the above sentence in 1927.

So how do we explain that it took decades for Apple to design beautiful computers, decades for Michael Graves to design beautiful products for Target, and decades for Oxo and Cuisinart to design handsome and ergonomic appliances?

It was true in 1927, but then there was such a long lag time before it became a dominant viewpoint. Here’s my curiosity… what is an emergent truth today that we have yet to embrace as a dominant viewpoint? Who are the Earnest Calkins among us who are saying wise things, yet to be acknowledged? Any ideas?

In his best-selling book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell says that meaningful work requires three fundamental elements:

• autonomy
• complexity
• a proportionality between effort and reward

In his soon-to-be released book (Dec. 29,2009), Drive, Daniel Pink says that three crucial forces combine to motivate people:

• autonomy
• mastery
• purpose

It is interesting that both of these very intelligent men have  come to some similar basic truths, each from their own vantage. Aren’t we fortunate that they share their ideas? We would do well to consider them seriously.

A provocative expression crossed my consciousness recently. Someone wrote, “Free costs too much.”

I size those costs with at least two measures, and there may be more.

For starters, giving away your product/service for free lowers the overall set of expectations at play in the markeplace. It hurts everyone when someone reduces the perceived value of what they provide to nothing… and it raises the bar on what people believe they are entitled to for free.

As if that weren’t enough, offering a product/service at no cost diminishes brand stature. The most cherished brands rarely even have a sale event, let alone consider no cost at all. Free is the enemy of brand differentiation and brand distinction.

There are some who advocate ‘free’ as a business model for leveraging other revenue streams. Seems more a bait and switch deception than a genuine strategy.