The Dream Cafe

This edition first published 2015.

© 2015 Duncan D. Bruce and Dr Geoff Crook.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bruce, Duncan D., 1957-

The dream café: lessons in the art of radical innovation / Duncan D. Bruce and Dr. Geoff Crook.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-118-97784-2 (hardback)

1. Strategic planning. 2. Branding (Marketing) I. Crook, Geoff, 1945- II. Title.

HD30.28.B78423 2015

658.4′063–dc23

2014043908

Cover Design: Mackerel Design and Art Studio

Cover Image: To Come

The Dream Café offers an introduction to the lessons that brand owners can learn in a way that deliberately defies logic – that is, by emulating the way that the radical creative practitioners we commonly called avant-garde broke with convention, dismissed the naysayers and invented the future. The fact that artists and creative thinkers, from a wide range of backgrounds, could change the way we all think and do by initiatives that began with interdisciplinary conversations around a café table provides compelling evidence for a new way of engaging with the urgent task of brand innovation.

In order to practise what we preach we have avoided a conventional structure for our book and created an A to Z list of characteristics, actions and qualities that distinguish business that thrive from those that merely survive (and sometimes, don't), which is more akin to a series of ‘Menu Cards’. We believe that in a ‘time-short’ world the insights we offer are best read on the run, much in the way that you would snack at a café. When the experimental French film maker Jean Luc Godard was asked about his apparent lack of interest in conventional narrative principle, he corrected his interviewer by pointing out that his films do have ‘a beginning, a middle and an end’, but ‘not necessarily in that order’. It's much the same with this book: we want you to engage with it in ‘bite-sized chunks’.

Despite innovation's ubiquitous nature nowadays – along with its profound and exponentially significant influence on our lives – we still tend to respond to new and disruptive concepts with a mixture of apprehension, disinterest and disbelief. Science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke summarized how our reaction to new thinking evolves from scorn to ownership without any awareness of our power to delay or indefinitely postpone innovation, as we undergo the following reactions to any given new concept:

1. It's completely impossible.

2. It's possible, but it's not worth doing.

3. I said it was a good idea all along.

Anyone who has read about, or was involved with, Steve Jobs' return to Apple will empathize with Clarke's summary. Jobs had to ignore the entire board in order to reinvent the business, but we doubt that many of those board members would now be wanting to own up to not seeing the future.