Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1091

Back before the 2008 financial crisis, I did a short stint working for a real estate developer in Dublin, Ireland. 

Most of our projects were in Ireland, but our consultant teams were sometimes from all over.

One day we were having a meeting with our architect from Germany and we started talking about a particular project’s green space.

But this wasn’t the sort of green space that was supposed to be actively used. It was a green space that, I guess, you were just supposed to look at and admire for its greenness. 

So one of my Irish colleagues asked, while referencing the proposed design: “How are we going to keep people off the grass?”

Our German friends didn’t immediately appreciate the concern and responded with: “What do you mean?”

Irish: “How will we stop people from walking and hanging out on the grass?”

German with serious face: “Oh. We will put up a sign.”

At that point, every Irish person in the room just started laughing and more or less said: “Yeah, that’ll never work.”

Cultural differences can be subtle.

Here is a good follow-up to yesterday’s post about Ian Schrager and Edition Hotels. It’s a short post by Seth Godin that I’m going to reblog here in full:

The gulf between “risky” and “feels risky” is huge. And it’s getting bigger.

It turns out that value creation lives in this gap . The things that most people won’t do (because it feels risky) that are in fact not risky at all.

If your compass for forward motion involves avoiding things that feel risky, it pays to get significantly better informed about what actually is risky.

I like this distinction, a lot.

I’m traveling for work right now, which is why you may be noticing shorter than usual posts. But stay tuned because I’ll be making a big announcement later this week on the blog.

A few weeks ago Surface Magazine interviewed Ian Schrager . If you don’t know who Ian Schrager is, you should look him up. He started Studio 54 in New York (along with Steve Rubell) and is largely credited with inventing the boutique hotel genre. His latest project is Edition Hotels , which launched in London in 2013 and in  Miami in 2014.

What I found particularly interesting about the interview are the “serious snafus” that Edition experienced at the outset. There was a project in Waikiki and a project in Istanbul. Both failed. Here’s a guy who invented the genre and had partnered up with Marriott to pioneer a new brand. And it wasn’t until Edition London that they were able hit their stride.

I say all of this not to poke fun at their failures. Nobody should do that. Poke fun at not trying instead. My point is the exact opposite. To create something new and amazing, such as Edition, you often have to subject yourself to a few scrapes and bruises along the way.