A secret informant slipped me this manifesto from Stanford's new Institute of Design (aka the "d.school").
Pass it along to your friends! Join the design thinking movement!
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A secret informant slipped me this manifesto from Stanford's new Institute of Design (aka the "d.school").
Pass it along to your friends! Join the design thinking movement!
27 February 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (2)
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Most business magazines would have you believe that a big, nasty monster called "commodification" really does live under the bed. Or perhaps in the closet. This view of world believes that dwindling margins, shrinking revenues, outsourcing to China, and the great sucking sound of WalMart are all inevitable parts of doing business circa 2005. The monster is going to get you...
Hogwash. Creating cool stuff that matters is the best way to avoid the commodification trap, and cultivating the ability to create that cool stuff in a cool way makes things even sweeter. To illustrate this point, I'd like to point you to economist Virginia Postrel's recent NYT article on American Leather, a furniture manufacturer using lean manufacturing, enlightened employment practices, and a modular design philosophy to create (and claim) real value in the marketplace. In an industry rife with cost and price pressures, American Leather's sales are growing 17% per year year. And their products are pretty nifty.
Not that it's been an easy ride for the firm. Its co-founder Bob Duncan came from an engineering background, which enabled him to implement the innovative manufacturing culture that defines American Leather, but that training didn't prepare him for what it really took to get something to market. Says Duncan:
At the end of the day, you have to sell the stuff. You can have the coolest products. You can build it in 20 minutes and deliver anything you want. But if nobody buys it, it's irrelevant. As an engineer, the biggest thing I've learned in the whole process is how hard it is to sell things.
I love what American Leather has done and what they stand for. Designing your venture to create the products people want in the way they want them is the best way to beat the commodification monster.
26 February 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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"To me, doing design doesn't mean giving form to a more or less stupid product for a more or less sophisticated industry. Design for me is a way of discussing life, sociality, politics, food and even design."
- Ettore Sottsass
23 February 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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Five simple steps to creating a product dynasty, a la Kazunori Yamauchi:
Today is one of those hallowed days that makes even this thirty-something professional giggle like a kid on Christmas morning. Why? Because today -- today!! -- the talented crew of Polyphony launches Gran Turismo 4, a tribute to focused vision, technical virtuosity, and the entrepreneurial moxie it takes to design every fractal element -- from large to small -- to the hilt.
Excuse me while I go flog my Toyota Celica WRC rally car through the snowy forests of Finland.
22 February 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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Where does your offering start and end? Where should it start and end? What could you do at the borders of your existing offering to help it deliver a more delightful user experience?
The people behind the Everquest online fantasy video game asked themselves these questions and came up with something pretty special:
While playing EverQuest II just type /pizza and a web browser will launch the online ordering section of pizzahut.com. Fill in your info and just kick back until fresh pizza is delivered straight to your door.
How cool is that? Pizza on demand isn't a traditional video game feature like better graphics and more complex story lines, but it is an amazing way to enhance the video game experience. And it's a good example of how customer-centric innovation doesn't always need to be something big and scary. It might just be about asking the right questions.
21 February 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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I've always worked in product development. It's an intensely social environment where people are constantly telling each other stories to get their point across. Accordingly, I've probably sat through at least one PowerPoint presentation for each day I've spent in the office.
It's often painful. So painful, in fact, that next time someone stands up in a meeting and begins reading directly off their PowerPoint prezo, I swear I'm going to every-so-politely inform them that the last person to read to me out loud was my mother and that procedure ceased circa 1974. Trust me, I can read, and if there's some text around, I'd rather digest it myself than try to listen to you and read it myself at the same time.
Here's the problem: PowerPoint wasn't designed as a tool for documenting complex thoughts or piles of information. As a wise man once said, trains of thought need tracks. And those tracks are best constructed of prose, which is what Microsoft Word is for. So when people use PowerPoint as a medium for complex and complete sentences, tables, lists of bullets, etc... they're not helping their story or their audience get to a good place.
Cliff Atkinson shows on his blog that removing text from PowerPoint improves both information retention and transfer. And I recall Seth Godin advising that we use no more than six or so words on any PowerPoint slide. Use a photo or drawing instead, he says. Removing text from your PowerPoint decks forces you to become an active storyteller, and that's fine, because that's what we humans do when we're around one another.
So. Word = Prose Documentation. PowerPoint = Active Storytelling. If you need both outcomes, use each program to write up two different documents.
21 February 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)
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Today Robert Scoble said something terribly trenchant about marketing:
"You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed."
He's right.
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) isn't about blogs. It isn't about geeking out and being a blogger, either. Forget blogs. RSS is about giving your customers the ability to say "Yes, I'd like to continue to hear what you've got to say." You'd have to be a total coward of a marketer not to try using a RSS feed (whether you call it a blog or not) to have a conversation with your customers. It'll take a bit of work, and you're going to have to put some writing and thoughts and feelings out into the public domain and maybe take a risk or two, but that's life.
Good marketing takes guts.
19 February 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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As a design thinker, I wouldn't dream of embarking on a development project without first establishing my point of view (POV). Establishing and growing a POV is an integral part of my design process. Think of a POV as your take on why whatever you're creating merits a place in the universe. What makes it remarkable?
As it turns out, establishing a strong POV has everything to do with good storytelling. For help in illustrating this idea, I direct you to the writing of Scott Rayburn, who is growing a tasty new blog around teaching great public speaking, and to some extent, storytelling. He insists that to create a good story, you need to understand your Big Idea:
First, wade through all the fact and figures and themes of a subject and distill everything down to an idea that can be expressed in fewer than 10 words.
Next, shape your message around those 10 words... When your audience hears your presentation, what is it you want them to remember above all else?
So the concept of the Big Idea is to storytelling what POV is to design: don't leave home without it. Now, I believe that to make your designs take hold in the world, you need to be a good storyteller. So it's delightful to think that perhaps design thinkers already know the right process for designing -- and telling -- good stories.
17 February 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
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Do you care -- really care -- about expressing your brand as best you can?
The people at Nikon really care. They recently reissued their famed SP 35mm camera from 1957, and it's incredible the length they went to make this new offering look, feel, and even sound like the brand-defining original.
How incredible? Well, Nikon engineers used computers to create a sonic "fingerprint" of the original and then fine-tuned the materials of the new SP to make it sound exactly the same. For example, rather than using modern titanium for the focal plane shutter, they chose to employ rubberized silk -- the way things were circa 1957. This is an expensive design decision, not to be taken lightly. Assembly lines for this kind of shutter are way more expensive to run because the fabric precludes a modular, streamlined production flow, and demands a very tricky fine tuning of each unit. By the way, this is not the sort of thing they teach you at Harvard Business School. Can you imagine standing up in your next marketing meeting and saying "We're going to go with this production method from the Eisenhower decade because it's the best thing for our brand. Oh, and it costs a bundle and isn't technically advanced, either."? It would be tough for me, too.
But it's absolutely the right choice, because it makes the new SP sound right, and that's worth everything here. Sound really does matter. How far would you go to make your brand sound the way it needs to sound?
Read Sound Matters & Sound Matters, part 2
thanks to Valentin Sama for the reference
15 February 2005 | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)
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For a whole host of reasons, I've become obsessed with the idea that most of process of bringing cool stuff to life is about telling great stories. Great stories are a way to communicate a complex value proposition, evoke emotions, relate a new offering back to its brand, or to shape the Reflective elements of a design that create "brand" in the first place. And storytelling is a wonderful way -- perhaps the only way -- for innovators to convince key stakeholders, partners, and collaborators of the worth of their quest.
Storytelling holds the potential to take business thinking from the cold, dry left-brain world of 4P's and 5C's and 6 sigma to a warm, rich world of ethos and pathos. It's about being human.
Example: when I was marketing QuickBooks Online, I had a helluva job on my hands: how do I convince really busy, really technology wary, really penny-wise small business people to adopt a non-sexy accounting software solution that requires the use of a scary new technology platform (the Internet) and a strange business/transaction model (software as service)? I spent months iterating my way to what, in retrospect, is an obvious solution: tell stories. And not just any stories, but stories told by users themselves, telling them in a "keep it real" kind of way. As you can see here, I created stories using raw, basic photos, and didn't do anything to edit the verbatim words of my customers. Zilch, nada, nothing. In turn, these stories are compelling to prospective customers because they ring true, plain and simple. They're good stories in a way that a traditional software industry white paper could never be.
This is why I can't wait to start reading John Winsor's book Beyond the Brand. On his blog he provides a nice excerpt which explains the key elements of compelling storytelling:
See the rest of his blog post here. I, for one, look forward to using his wisdom to enhance my ability to tell good stories.
14 February 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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Seth Godin is blogging about English Cut's bespoke suits. "In an era where you don't have to wear a suit," says Seth, "a $3,000 suit is nothing but remarkable."
He has a point, but at a time where progressive organizations have dumped formal job titles, and where title inflation runs rampant in those companies where they're still in use, to be truly remarkable one needs to go beyond mere Savile Row tailoring. No, in this era of the post-modern economy, to be well and truly remarkable demands nothing less than a good old fashioned peerage. If it's clothes that make the man, it's a royal title which makes The Man.
I'd quite fancy an org chart tag like Consignore Rodriguez.
Want to be remarkable? Why not do it to the hilt?
thanks to Alex for the tip
13 February 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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I get quite a few questions that go something like this: "How does a busy fellow like you find the time to blog?"
To which I answer, "Blogito ergo sum" -- "I blog therefore I am (creative)".
I try to make blogging an integral part of my creative process. I find it a great way to slosh thoughts across the right and left sides of my brain and, on occasion, come up with something interesting. This humble blog of mine is a sandbox, a place for creating quick idea probes which I launch on a whim. Blogging is a nice way to be fast, cheap and out of control.
It does take time, but a lot less than you might think. Along with flying planes and racing cars, being a writer was something I aspired to even as young boy. Actually, books, writing, and literature have always played a more central role in my life than even cars (and if you know me, that's really saying something). However, though I wanted to be a writer, I never thought I had the time to be a good writer. But while perusing William Gibson's blog early last year, I came to understand why it might be worthwhile to start doing even a little bit of writing here and there. And how little time it might take. Says Gibson:
I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here.
That's a remarkable thought, isn't it? And so I took Gibson's word for it and started writing this blog. I don't know what I dropped in my schedule to make it happen, for I wasn't a big watcher of TV, nor did I feel like I had oodles of empty time sitting around waiting to be used. But still, I find the time and by finding it, I make the time.
I honestly believe that blogging has made me more creative, if creativity can be defined the ability to see patterns and make connections. Forcing myself to write on an almost daily basis about foggy topics has been like an injection of neural lube for my design-thinking brain cells. I may not actually be creative, but for sure my fingers are more limber and thoughts flow more easily through to full expression -- much as they did musically back when I used to play my saxophone at least three hours a day.
Perhaps blogging is a perfect form of structured procrastination, a term coined by Stanford professor John Perry. Structured procrastination, Perry says, is a way to ".. be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important." Think about that. Instead of procrastinating and not getting anything done, why not procrastinate as a way to get some other cool stuff done while you're mustering the will to tackle that big gnarly thing slouched over in the corner? Per Perry's definition, blogging certainly qualifies as difficult, and if you believe that at least one soul, somewhere, somehow is hoping that you'll post something soon, well, then you've got the timely and important part there, too.
Blogging isn't the most important or urgent or important/urgent thing I do. Far from it. But it is a way of getting to good stuff that makes the really important stuff I do work better.
11 February 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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"What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?" - Thomas Keller
10 February 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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As of late I've been getting reacquainted with the thinking of Professor Eric von Hippel of MIT, who studies the innovation process. It's intriguing stuff. Here's an excerpt from his paper "Breakthroughs to Order at 3M":
Not all users are created equal with respect to the development of commercially-important innovations and innovation prototypes. Research shows that almost all user-developed ideas and prototypes of general commercial interest tend to be developed by “Lead Users” – that is, users that: (1) expect to get high benefit from an innovation and so have a strong incentive to innovate and; (2) that are ahead of a target market with respect to one or more important trends...
The point is, if you want to find users that are actively exploring and testing new ideas, it is a waste of time to survey users in the center of the target market. Instead, you must develop methods to seek out users that are at the leading edge with respect to needs that are important to that market – even if such lead users are rare and hard to find - because that is where interesting user idea generation and innovation is concentrated.
You can see more of his writing here.
07 February 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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The Yamaha Chivicker
03 February 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Why you should really focus on creating net promoters (not net detractors):
01 February 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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