metacool

2007 TEDPrize Winners

Be sure to watch it all the way through to the end...

What I'd be doing if I was in Boston on November 15

 

The next Design 2.0 discussion will be held in Boston on November 15.  The speakers include  "Dr. Simplicity" John Maeda, Natalie Jeremijenko, Bill Cockayne, Jason Pearson, and the always interesting Allan Chochinov of Core 77.

Plus, there's robots shooting lasers and stuff.  Boston is one of my favorite cities, a veritable foaming cauldron of intellectual ferment.  Wish I could go.

A list of the contents of a salesman's bag

Tom Peters on what works.  Nice d.school mention.

Thanks, Tom!

Proving vs. Measuring

Earlier this week I gave a talk a the Design Management Institute's yearly International Design Conference in beautiful Manchester Village, Vermont.  I spoke on the topic of innovation metrics, and explored some of our latest thinking from the business design thinkers here at IDEO. 

What was interesting to me was the split nature of the feedback I received from the crowd.  I would say that most of the people resonated with my stated point of view that the innovation process can be made more predictable by thinking in a structured way about where you want to go and then using metrics and measures to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the design process going forward.  A smaller minority of the people present felt that I hadn't argued strongly enough along the lines of "Good Design = Good Business".  I hadn't expected that feedback.

In fact, I didn't try to argue that equation at all.  Not because I don't think that good design outcomes are a key driver of organic growth, but because it's not a provable point.  Success on the market is a complex thing, and it's a gross simplification to tie it back to what I would consider to be the somewhat myopic worldview of "Good Design", which is very much about a fetish for beautiful objects and less about creating good fit to broader webs of individual, social, and economic needs and benefits, which is the realm of design thinking.  Success has many parents, and good design is only one of them.  Instead, I believe that good design thinking can lead to a higher success rate when innovating, and that's the link to good business outcomes.  And that's where employing metrics to gauge and guide the innovation process comes into play -- they're a way to inform and improve the context in which our design thinking occurs.  It's about measuring and aiding the process of value creation via design thinking, not proving that design can create value.

metacool Thought of the Day

“The Scottish are a nation of engineers. But they are very creative engineers. They seem dour, but underneath they are quite romantic. It gets back to a sense of creating order out of chaos. Producing something very controlled is very Scottish.”
- Ian Callum

(in honor of all the great design thinkers who have come from Scotland, including my good friend David, who remains one of the most uniquely creative persons I've ever met)

This Thursday: Sustainability Conference at Stanford

The d.school's Clicks-n-Bricks class (part of the Design + Business movement at the d.school) is holding a mini conference on sustainability this coming Thursday.   Here are the speakers:

• Debra Dunn, former  HP Executive Vice-President who (among other things) led their sustainability efforts
• Bob Adams, who leads IDEO's sustainability efforts
• Andrew Ruben, Wal-Mart's VP of Corporate Strategy and Sustainability

Here are the details:

What is Designing for Sustainability?
d.school Mini-Conference Fall 2006
3:30 PM – 7:00 PM
Hewlett 200

And though my marketing professors would shoot me for saying this, it's really hard to beat the value of something which costs nothing.  How can something this good be free?  And it's anything near as good as the mini conference we held last Spring for CIA, it'll be really good.

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

When people send me emails or text messages containing the word "ISO" (which I believe stands for "in search of", as in that wierd Leonard Nimoy show which used to air on TV), I get confused, because I'm a believer in the idea of Italo-American hybrids by the name of Iso.  No, no that kind of hybrid.  This kind of hybrid:

The Iso Rivolta.  Corvette horsies meet Italian tailoring.  Accept no substitutes.

Props to my man Zeh for the guerilla street photography

Some Neato Design Thinking Videos & Podcasts

Here's some spectacularly neato design thinking stuff to take a look at.  Definitely worth spending more than a few hours on, with the added bonus that it's all in video and podcast form.  If you're anything like me, and your eyes hurt from reading so much, it's a pleasure to be able to sit back, relax, and imbibe words of wisdom from great design thinkers the world round.

• My colleague Bill Moggridge of IDEO is coming out with a wonderful book called Designing Interactions.  I suggest you buy it!  It's on my Xmas list. But also take some time to watch Bill's video interviews with an amazing group of design thinkers (for free) on the companion website to the book.  There are a bunch of my pals from IDEO on there, and also a blogger friend in the form of John Maeda, and a Stanford d.school colleague in Terry Winograd, and many other interesting people.  Fantastic.
• One the great things about teaching is that you get to hang out with people who remind you how much you can really get done in life when you stop worrying about doing it and just do it.  These people are called students.  Perhaps you know some.  I've been happy in the past year to get to know Matt Wyndowe, a student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business who was part of the Creating Infectious Action class I taught this past Spring.  Matt and his classmate Julio Vasconcellos are building an impressive collection of podcasts on the subject of innovation called, quite appropriately, iinnovate.  There you'll find podcasts with such luminaries as Mike Ramsay, David Kelley, and Andy Rachleff.  And remember, these guys are full time grad students, which has to be the equivalent of having at least three "real" jobs, even if they do go play golf on Wednesdays.
  

Enjoy!

Thoughts on to-do lists

Do you have a "to do" list?  Odds are you do.  Spoken or unspoken, written or not, we all carry around some sense of the stuff we should be doing (or not).  Companies and organizations do, too.  But they're mostly secret.  Let the world know what you're thinking of working on, and you're screwed, right?  Competitors will copy your amazing strategic plan in a snap, customers won't buy your existing offering as they wait for the next thing to come out, and whenever you have a key project schedule slip, shareholders will sue you for issuing misleading future-looking statements.  Clearly, it would be a bad idea to share one's to-do list with the world.  Or maybe not, if you're a business-by-design kind of organization interested in being innovative in a customer-centric way. 

If brands are about what you do in the world, and not just about what you say you do in the world, and if relationships are built around some notion of trust, then why not do something concrete which shows that you're investing in your relationship with customers for the long term?  And for me, that could mean putting your organization's "to-do" list out in public for all the world to see.  Here's something I saw a few weeks ago while on a sneak preview of Daniel Libeskind's new Hamilton addition to the Denver Art Museum:

This poster to-do list wasn't hidden away in some bureaucratic space administrator's back room.  No sir, the good people of the Denver Art Museum had the guts to print this thing in poster format and place it right smack-dab in the lobby.  Everyone could see it, everyone had to see it.  And I appreciate how open they are with the list:  we haven't put in seating, the store ain't done, and we know there are no signs.  We're working on it.  And as we improve the space, we'll check it off and let you know that we know that these are the things that make or break your museum experience.

Just think what could happen if more organizations put their to-do lists out in public.  I think we'd all feel a lot better about doing business with each other.  Say -- just for the sake of discussion -- that you run the FAA's website and you've found some embarrassing typos on your site.  But you can't fix them right away because your web admin is out hiking in Bora Bora (by the way, they've now been fixed).  What if you could add the "Fix Typos on Travelers page" on your public FAA To Do List blog, right after the entry "Make our site almost as good as that best website ever from Tenacious D"?  Knowing that someone intends to do something, that they are aware of their shortcomings and are trying to improve things, can go a long way toward making you believe.

Even better would be to open up that to-do list to anyone.  So when I find the typos on the FAA website, rather than writing a snarky post on my blog, I help 'em out by entering an item on their to-do list wiki.  Now I'm part of the solution, and probably part of the brand.  It's about leveraging the power of the many to create the best pile of real evidence possible about what works and what doesn't.  At some point along the line this starts to feel a lot like open source.  Might Mozilla really be one be one big public to-do list in disguise?

Back to the Denver Museum of Art.  I wish they had a publicly addressable to-do list.  I would add an entry right now.  Something like "fix those crazy interior angled walls that everyone kept tripping over."

Ouch!

It's design time

Today marks the start of the first-ever National Design Week

And remember, 2006 is the Year of Total Design.  There's still plenty of time left get some important work done this year. 

Just do it!

Beyond the box

Say what you want, think what you want, feel what you want about the rock band Tenacious D.

But when it comes to the design of B2C websites, I don't know that I've seen anything lately quite as fresh and innovative as The D's promotional website for their new movie.  It just could be the greatest website ever created.

Instead of the usual cluster of clickable static pages, we get a story, some humor, a lot of fun, and above all, an experience.  An almost cinematic experience.  It's the Tenacious D brand writ large, dude.  It's like inward singing but for websites.

( update 11 October 2006:  in the grand tradition of The D, parts of this post were written tongue-in-cheek.  Humorous.  As in, it's probably not the best website ever.  Because of this, I'm not going to be able to respond to every email and blog link I receive assailing my marketing and aesthetic tastes.  But you have to admit, it is pretty cool. )

Now that's what I call infectious action

A Firefox crop circle.  Created by a band of loyal (and unpaid) Firefox customers.

How might your brand stoke this kind of infectious action?

link via neural park

Learning to Innovate

BusinessWeek recently published a great piece about the growing trend of using design thinking as a means to teach people how to innovate.  I'm particularly proud that the Mozilla project from the Creating Infectious Action class I co-taught with Bob Sutton is the lead story in the article:

Tech geeks love Mozilla's Firefox browser, which is impervious to most viruses, but mainstream America has yet to embrace it. How does Mozilla move beyond invention (cool browser, neat functions) to an innovation that translates into market success (a Net tool so hot it upends Microsoft's Corp.'s Explorer)? It's a perfect problem for a classroom case study. So last spring, Mozilla's business development team turned to Stanford University. But instead of going to the business school, they headed for the double-wide trailer that housed Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, dubbed the "D-school" on campus. The course was team-taught by Stanford profs and industry professionals. Each student worked in a team that included a B-schooler, a computer science major, and a product designer. And each team used design thinking to shape a business plan for Mozilla.

It made a big difference. A B-school class would have started with a focus on market size and used financial analysis to understand it. This D-school class began with consumers and used ethnography, the latest management tool, to learn about them. Business school students would have developed a single new product to sell. The D-schoolers aimed at creating a prototype with possible features that might appeal to consumers. B-school students would have stopped when they completed the first good product idea. The D-schoolers went back again and again to come up with a panoply of possible winners.

This is a great overview of both the class we taught and the philosophy behind it.  There's a big difference between knowing how to analyze a business situation versus knowing how to create and execute on a business innovation problem.  For more on what we did in the class, here's a post I wrote earlier this year, and best of all is this post by Bob Sutton, which rightfully celebrates the students from the class. 

One thing I'd like to make clear is that I'm not anti-MBA.  Far from it.  I value my management education a great deal, and believe that an MBA provides individuals with very useful set of analytical tools, as well as the ability to thin-slice most business situations.  However, I do think that the typical MBA program is mostly focused on becoming a master of business-as-usual, which is a critical body of knowledge when it comes to running a profitable organization.  One way (and the best way, I believe) to learn how to engage in innovative behavior is to become a master of business-by-design, and that's what we're doing in our Business + Design classes at the Stanford d.school.  Organizations need to know how to do both.  And those organizations need doers and innovators who can bridge the worlds of business-as-usual and business-by-design.

The importance of being frequestly fractal

Yesterday I went to the FAA website to see the latest carry-on guidelines.  Here's what I saw:

What does "Frequestly" mean?  And how about the use of "our" instead of "out"? 

Here's the obvious observation of the day: typos like these aren't really helping the FAA brand.  I actually like the word "frequestly", and would find it to be brand enhancing if I heard it from Cranium or Virgin or Mini, but when the FAA speaks, we need it to sound like James Earl Jones.  We want the FAA to show us at every opportunity that they have their act together.  Brands are fractal entities, and the meaning of the whole is to found in the execution of even the lowliest detail.  Especially if your brand is all about rigor, safety, and juggling lots of big, heavy balls without dropping even one in a million.