Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1518

Last night before bed I decided to buy a book on my Kindle (iPad app) that I’ve been meaning to read for awhile. It’s called Poke the Box and it’s by Seth Godin. It’s a short read and it’s meant to be that way. You could easily read it in one sitting.

The book is about taking initiative. Taking action. And drawing your own map. It’s about not being scared of failure and realizing that failures are how you learn. It’s about poking the box, which is a computer programming reference. Programmers learn by poking the box (computer) and seeing what works and what doesn’t work.

As I read through the book I’m reminded of something that venture capitalist Ben Horowitz wrote a few months ago on his blog :

"Every employee in a company depends on the CEO to make fast, high quality decisions. Often any decision, even the wrong decision, is better than no decision."

Both Godin and Horowitz are, in a way, talking about the same thing: You have to keep moving. Make decisions. Start stuff. And stop worrying so much about being wrong, because it’s virtually impossible to know how things will eventually play out in the future.

A perfect example of this is Starbucks.

The first Starbucks in Seattle didn’t sell brewed coffee. It sold beans. And had it continued along this path, it certainly wouldn’t have become the brand that it is today. In fact, it may have failed completely. It wasn’t until Howard Schultz saw what they had started and combined it with what he had learned in Italy, that the Starbucks experience of today was born.

The important thing is that somebody (Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl and Gordon Bowker) took the initiative to start and build a Starbucks. It didn’t matter that they got the recipe wrong, they poked the box and it ultimately lead to something magical.

The same reluctance to poke the box can also be found in city building.

Here in Toronto we spend a significant amount of time debating and vacillating around transit decisions (as well as many other things). Should we build LRT? Or should we build subway? What should we replace the Scarborough Rapid Transit line with?

But we’ve fallen into analysis paralysis.

The original Transit City Plan was announced on March 16th, 2007. It’s now 2014. And transit still sucks. Imagine if we started and finished, say, 2 kilometers of rapid transit each and every year. Forget worrying if it’s LRT, subway or a horse drawn space ship. We just kept moving.

Something tells me that we’d be better off, even if we did make a few mistakes along the way.

One of the things I think the real estate industry is notoriously bad for is transparency. It’s getting better, but we’re nowhere near as transparent as some other industries, such as tech. In tech, you get companies like San Francisco-based  Everpix who fail and then release all of their private documents to the public , including revenue, subscribers, cap table and so on.

Could you imagine a real estate developer failing and then releasing all of its financials? This is what we paid for the land. This is how many units we sold. And this is why we failed. It doesn’t happen (or at least I’ve never seen it).

Sure you might be able to get some of this information with a publicly traded real estate company, but that’s because they have to be more transparent. Everpix was 7 employees working out of a co-working space. They didn’t have to do this. But they did it because they wanted to help the larger startup community. They didn’t want to let a good failure go to waste.

But at the same time, I actually don’t think that transparency is all about being altruistic. Transparency can also drive the bottom line. Every company wants to stand out from the competition and engage with its customers on a deeper level. But in order to do that, I think you need to give your customers something to engage with . You have to put yourself out there.

One way to do that is to be more open and transparent. Be genuine and tell your customers who you are, what you believe in and, perhaps most importantly, why you’re doing the things that you’re doing. I like Simon Sinek’s philosophy that “ customers don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. ”

If you love cities, then I’m willing to bet you probably also love maps.

I just stumbled across a neat tool called Map Stack . It was created by San Francisco-based Stamen Design —probably one of the leaders in beautiful maps. The tool is one part Photoshop and one part Mapbox, and it allows you to quickly create an endless array of cool looking maps. Like these:

I spent 2 minutes and made a watercolor version of Toronto’s financial district:

This tool aside, I also really like Mapbox . When we were designing and building Dirt , we ended up using them for our map underlay because we wanted something beautiful and we didn’t love Google Maps for that reason. Though we missed Google Streetview, we were happy with the decision. Other apps using Mapbox include Foursquare and Pinterest.