metacool

1: Experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world

The signature behavior of people who routinely achieve innovative outcomes is that they constantly seek to experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world. 

Instead of only reading someone else's market research summary, they go in the field and shop across the category in question.  That way they can get a feel for all the intangibles which are lost in translation, as language, photos, and even video are imperfect mediums.  Honda's innovative rethink of the pickup truck came from Saturday mornings spent in the parking lot of Home Depot.

Instead of taking someone else's diagnosis of a problem at face value, they seek a second opinion, and the deliverer of that second opinion is their own person.  When there's a problem on the production line at Toyota, they don't wait for a PowerPoint to circulate with photos and diagrams of the bug in question.  Instead, everyone concerned walks over to experience the bug firsthand.  And then they ask:  why, why, why, why, and why?

Instead of spending sixty minutes talking about what might be done, they build four 15-minute prototypes to immediately jump to the lessons that only come when you start breaking things.  At the Stanford d.school, we hold "Iron Chef" prototyping sessions where small teams receive a problem statement from the audience (show me a way to run fast on the Moon!), and then they prototype the hell out of it for five minutes.  And invariably they get somewhere interesting that would have been unreachable via conversation and hand waving.

Instead of only reading second-hand source or searching on Google, they go to the place and talk to people and see the sights.  Talking to a person living on a dollar a day is much different than reading about it, as important as that background knowledge is.  Experiencing the Mona Lisa in person is something quite different than viewing it on your MacBook.  In order to understand what was really going on in Dubai, Joi Ito picked up house in Japan and moved there.

To truly start living as a design thinker, experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world.

This is the first of 21 principles.  Please give me your feedback and ideas.

David H. Liu Memorial Lecture Series in Design at Stanford

The David H. Liu Memorial Lecture Series in Design starts up again next week.  The speaker roster is truly amazing, and they should be an awesome experience. 

If you're anywhere near Stanford on these dates, I highly recommend stopping by.  Do check the series website for any room or date changes.

Yet another thought on prototyping...

Thanks to everyone who gave me input on these thoughts.  I particularly like this build, which was related to me yesterday:

As you make a prototype, assume you are right and everyone else is wrong.  When you share your prototype, assume you are wrong and everyone else is right.

metacool Thought of the Day

"I might look successful but I've had many failures.  People take failure too seriously.  You have to be positive and believe you will find success next time."

- Tadashi Yanai

source: Monocle, Issue 22, p. 81

Another thought on prototyping...

Here's another stab at articulating this foundational concept:

Prototype as if you are right but listen and observe as if you are wrong:  this approach develops better solutions faster, and forces you to never settle.

What do you think?

A thought on prototyping

My colleague Bob Sutton has a great set of "15 Things I Believe", which you can find along the left side of his blog.  No. 5 is one of my favorites:

Learn how to fight as if you are right and listen as if you are wrong: It helps you develop strong opinions that are weakly held.

I was thinking about Bob's belief today in the context of innovating on a routine basis.  What if I built on his belief but modified some of the language?  Here's what I came up with:

Try to prototype as if you are right but listen and observe as if you are wrong:  it helps you develop more valid ways of doing, and limits our tendency to settle for the merely adequate.

What do you think?

Director's Commentary: Adrian Van Hooydonk

This awesome Director's Commentary focuses on the thinking behind the reworked BMW 7-series.  Narrated by BMW design maestro Adrian Van Hooydonk, it's important on two levels.

First, it's amazing to hear an expert take us through the intricacies of making a car look good.  Cars can be magnificent works of scuplture, but rarely does success come by accident.  As we listen to Van Hooydonk describe the interior and exterior design details, we get a glimpse at the extreme amount of attention to detail required to pull off a product experience as complex and multifaceted as a car.  Such is the state of technology and design process at BMW, even a rear tail light has become a sophisticated mechanical-eletronic subsystem, and one designed to the hilt.  What a far cry from the incandescent-bulb lit taillamps of my old 1969 1600-2!

Second, once again we see the importance of having a clear point of view to guide design decisions.  Listening to Van Hooydonk, it's clear what is important when it comes to the design of a 7-series: power, sport, elegance, strength, authenticity.  Staying on brand means designing to those parameters and throwing out everything else.  Which sounds a lot like the art of strategy making to me; perhaps the most important aspect of designs informed by a strategic point of view is that the design does come to embody that strategy and as such forms the basis for a completely coherent brand identity.  In my experience it's much easier to have effective marketing communications if your offering actually is designed in manner that's congruent with your messaging.

I consider organizations such as Apple, BMW, Zappos, and Pixar to be part of a select few capable of nailing a complete and compelling user experience.  They each do so by betting on the talent of their designers and creators.  Clear and compelling vision, coupled with quality execution, does in fact win over the long haul.

Travis Pastrana and the future of the world economy

While not trying to be flip about such a weighty topic as the state of the macro international economy, I believe this daredevil bigwheel jump by Travis Pastrana elegantly captures some of the key elements that will help consumer-facing brands thrive over the next few years.

(No, it's not about shooting bottle rockets at night in your underwear.  Skip ahead six seconds)

I reckon there are five in total:

1. Optimism is the New Courage:  Travis wouldn't attempt this mondo backflip if he wasn't optimistic that he could land it.  Sure it's dangerous, sure it's risky, but he has the skill and the experience to know that he can pull it off.  That's optimism grounded in reality.  Just as the fundamental rules of the marketplace haven't changed in our current predicament, it's not like Travis is facing a whole new set of laws of physics -- so why not be optimistic?  His bigwheel is not his usual motorcycle (or a Subaru, even), but it has wheels and he can deal with the downsizing.  That's optimism.
2. Use planning to minimize the stupid risks:  even Travis is wearing a helmet for this one.  And notice that this is his third-time-charmed attempt.  Now more than ever, when the price of failing is so high, it's a good idea to minimize secondary risks even as we embrace big leaps.  That might mean building an extra prototype, running another market test, or getting out in the field with customers more than usual.  These days your big or small leaps really need to work, so a little extra midnight oil is probably worth it.  There's enough risk out there as it is, why not cut out all the dumb risks to better focus on the big ones?
3. Potential Energy = Cash: Pastrana's maneuver is all about converting potential energy in to kinetic energy.  If you're like me, you held your breath for those scary seconds he was inverted.  But if you think through your physics, you know that 90% of the success of this jump was set up at the start; with the right amount of potential energy on tap, Travis knows that he can make the jump so long as he's able to execute all of the routine details.  But without that energy, even the best execution won't hack it.  Cash is the potential energy of the business world.  Without it, you can't pull off a stunt of any size. Like Travis, you want to do anything you can to maximize your potential energy/cash.  If that means canceling your trip to the nifty event across the country, or eating rice and beans instead of steak, or riding a train instead of flying, you just have to do it.  Save and conserve your cash: you don't want to be caught low, slow, and out of ideas.  Or money.
4. It's not about the flight...:  Bombing down a ramp and flying through the air is one thing, sticking the landing is quite another.  Above all, we cheer for Travis because his sheer talent allows him to nail landings like no other.  So, what's next?  What happens when you make it through these Schumpterian flames?  If you're successful now, will you or can you be successful when things turn up?  What's the balance? Landings are important... where will yours take you?
5. Dress for success:  There's no better time than a downturn to use surface aesthetics to convey a sense of optimism, planning, and control.  The posture you and your brand take in the world will define you.  So put on your best, put your best foot forward, and let other people know that you've got your act together.  Hell, even Travis wears pinstripes.

Many thanks to my friend Reilly for pointing me to this video.  The weird resulting thoughts, however, are those of yours truly, and should not be blamed on him.

Director's Commentary: Elizabeth Gilbert on the creative process

Here's a fabulous talk from last week's TED conference.

Listen as Elizabeth Gilbert provides us with a Director's Commentary about her own creative process, and then shows us why we might be better off if we thought differently about where creative leaps come from.

Stuff I'm liking

Can I say that? 

"Stuff I'm liking."  Grammar?  I think it works.  It's somewhat Borat-ish, but I think it works.  Hey, if I have a blog, and I publish something to the web, then it exists, right?

Here's some stuff I'm liking, with commentary as to what I see in it:

1. Nuts, Bolts, and Jolts:  a wonderful collection of aphorisms and observations by Rich Moran.  It's an informative guide to surviving the hairball, and fun to read, too.  You may recognize Rich as the author of last week's fabulous thought of the day.  My idea octet of "organizational survival" books would start with Nuts, Bolts, and Jolts, and also include (in no particular order) The No Asshole Rule, Saint Joan, Orbiting the Giant Hairball, Don Quixote, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, The Knowing-Doing Gap, and Up the Organization.  I'm liking it.
2. Pink's Travel Tips:  Mr. Pink has a future in broadcast media, I think.  These are witty and they teach you something, too.  HAHU!
3. Creativity and the rise of optimism:  this essay by Paul Bennett (full disclosure: Paul is a colleague of mine at IDEO) is really inspiring.  If a blog post could be an anthem, this would be my anthem for 2009.  We have to be optimistic.  This one helps us be that way.
4. The Honda Fit:  I love the way it looks.  It's more Mini than the Mini.  It's a modern interpretation of space maximization within a tightly constrained footprint, and it's not beholden to stylistic flourishes from the Eisenhower period.  I dig it.  With a more hyper iVTEC or a turbo diesel mill in there, it would truly be one for the ages.
5. The Monocle Weekly:  I'm surprised how much I enjoy listening to content streaming over the web.  Ah!  It's like radio for your house; or, more precisely, I'm rediscovering the joy of listening to intelligent people go deep on an interesting subject, something I only ever experience when driving in my car.  I'm liking it.
6. Miracle on the Hudson:  we all know about the incredible feat of calm thinking and flying that lead to an Airbus being safely ditched in the Hudson.  Leave it to Bob Sutton to pull some very interesting team dynamics lessons out of that episode.  Fascinating stuff.

I'm really liking all of it! 

Innovating is...

I really enjoyed the recent conversation here on metacool about the meaning of designing.  A bunch of us took at a stab at completing the sentence "Designing is...".  Check out the comments here to see some of the thinking.  I'm still mulling this stuff over; there's some good provocations there.

Now, what does innovating mean to you? 

Innovating is...

Director's Commentary: Making Monocle

Here's a Director's Commentary by Dan Hill, who played a key role in the design of Monocle, which is not just one of my favorite magazines, but also a brand being successful at the seemingly impossible task of building something new and different in a down economy.  In reading his detailed account of how the design of Monocle came to be, I was struck by two big things:

First, the all-important commitment to a strong, focused point of view.  In this case, the brains at Monocle chose to be ever calm and centered:

In terms of rhythm of updates, we deliberately decided less is more, and flying in the face of conventional wisdom (if you can have wisdom in a medium only a decade old) we produced editorial at a steady rate - essentially a well-made film or two per week - rather than bombarding the user with content. Deciding to filter, reflect and craft rather than immerse the user in a constant flow of data in lieu of information... this sense of quiet calm exuding from Monocle was another important statement: that you don’t have to clutter websites with every possible bit of information you can. And that - particularly for the busy people that enjoy Monocle - information overload is not something we wished to contribute to.

The second notable aspect of their approach is a strong dedication to smoothing friction in every aspect of the user experience.  They took a human-centered approach to almost every detail of Monocle, including the structure of each URL used on the Monocle website:

In terms of user generated content, or user discussion of Monocle pieces, my view was that we didn't need comments on the site as people increasingly have their own spaces to talk, discuss, comment - whether that's blogs and discussion fora, or the social software of Facebook et al. So a more progressive approach would be to ensure that everything is linkable and kept online - with clean, permanent URL structures - thus encouraging people to point to articles from the comfort of their own sites... The web is intrinsically designed for linking and archiving, so I ensured that Monocle.com would do that. A simple point, and one the industry discovered long ago - in my case, after much work at the BBC - but fundamental nonetheless. It’s still surprising how often it’s forgotten by new entrants, given this basic premise of pointability has underpinned almost every mature online success, from Amazon to YouTube.

As such, it's worth pausing to note that the URL structure was considered as part of the design job. See later on multidisciplinary teams, but the architecture of the site, and further, the environment it sits within, are as key to me as the visual layer pinned on top. I always reference the Eliel Saarinen quote: "Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context - a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan." The larger context for this site is that portion of the web that cares about Monocle, or the topics covered, and designing for that environment includes making elegant URLs - as the tokens by which Monocle.com is referenced. Thus, the pointablity, linkability, permanance and appearance of those URLs and site structures become fundamentally important.

Thus, the URls might not be as clean as they could be - it took a bit of negotiation to get EPIServer, a .net based CMS, to output them - but they're fairly understandable e.g.:

http://www.monocle.com/sections/affairs/Web-Articles/Christine-Loh/
http://www.monocle.com/sections/design/Web-Articles/Beijing-Olympic-gold-rush/
http://www.monocle.com/sections/business/Magazine-Articles/Spot-the-shopper---Beijing/

i.e. type of section / type of content / title of content

It's no accident that Monocle is such an engrossing experience.  This kind of total experience rarely happens by accident. 

metacool Thought of the Day

"When you're making something of high quality, you have to polish it a certain number of times.  This is actually a number of trial and errors.  When you think about how much you can polish something in a four-year development period, you're talking about how many times you can do trial and error and then speed becomes the defining factor.  When you all share that speed as a team, you can polish a car like never before.  It's that simple, really."
                                - Kazutoshi Mizuno, Chief Vehicle Engineer, Nissan GT-R

I love this insight of Mizuno's, because it speaks to one of the fundamental aspects of design thinking as it  relates to the process of innovation: iterate, iterate, iterate.  I often relate "business by design" to "business as usual" by using a sporting analogy:  business as usual is about efficiency and accuracy, about swimming as fast a race as one can.  And there's a time and a place for that.  Business by design, in contrast, would be a swim race where you where rewarded based on the number of laps you could get in within a certain amount of time.  You want to do lap after lap, because with each stroke through the water, you gain the opportunity to learn something new, to try a different approach.  The sum of all those small learnings and insights -- together with the occasional big leap -- is what ends up being called innovative behavior.

But I like Mizuno's notion of polishing more than I do that of laps.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  Keep trying for perfection even though you know it will never come in a full sense, but with each try some new learning emerges.

So how quickly can you polish and iterate?

quote source: Gran Turismo TV, "The GT-R Legend Inside Story"

Innovating, not innovation

At IDEO (the firm I work at), we recently held a "chain reaction" event across all of our offices:  Shanghai, Munich, London, New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Palo Alto.  Self-nominated teams in each office crafted their own chain reaction experience, each of which was triggered by another chain reaction experience sitting in another office.  It all took place on one Friday morning...

Why?  Because... just because.  Because it is fun.  Because it is there.  Because cultures that play on a routine basis are more likely to be innovative routinely.  Because the question "how can we be more innovative?" is better couched as "how can we be more comfortable acting in innovative ways?".  It's about encouraging a behavior, not a thing.  A verb, not a noun. 

Since innovative behavior is about both the practitioner and the environment they live in, why not do something that buffs both?

You can see more about this grand world exercise at IDEO Labs

PS:  the "trick" in the NYC/SF transition was done using a body double 

What is design thinking?

Here's a great interview with Roger Martin, Dean of Rotman.

He provides a very crisp definition of what design thinking is about.  Design thinking is about creating better things, while traditional analytic thinking is about choosing between things.  We need both, but surely the world would be in a better place if there was a bit more design thinking in play out there.  Which is why we now have places like Rotman and the d.school and the entire design thinking movement.

By the way, if you don't read Rotman magazine, you should.  And if you haven't read Martin's book The Opposable Mind, go out an grab a copy today!

On Anathem and points of view

Exactly: a point of view is the set of conscious constraints a design thinker adopts in order to make a specific statement.  In the case of Anathem's Millenium Clock, it is about a design which can be complex and nuanced because of a ready supply of labor to run and maintain its myriad mechanisms.  Another point of view could have been to design a very simple clock with few moving parts, the extreme version of this point of view being a sundial.

I submit to you that, as a rule, things that are remarkable are born from a strong point of view.  Those that are not remarkable are often the result of a muddled point of view, or no point of view at all.  Having a point of view requires making choices among many possible alternatives.  Having a point of view means having a vision of what good looks like as a means to make those choices.  You can feel it when something was created with that vision in mind.  And when that vision was not in play, you can feel the lack of it.

Creativity and the Role of the Leader

Last year I participated in a Harvard Business School colloquium titled Creativity, Entrepreneurship, and Organizations of the Future.  I had a great time contributing to the conversation there and learned a lot, too -- in other words, it was a classic HBS experience (I really love the place).

The October issue of Harvard Business Review has a summary of the colloquium written by professors Teresa Amabile and Mukti Khaire.  It is titled "Creativity and the Role of the Leader", and it's available for free right now on their site.  I'm quoted in it, and so is my blogging and teaching buddy Bob Sutton, among others.

Here's my favorite portion of the article:

By the colloquium's end, however, most attendees agreed that there is a role for management in the creative process; it is just different from what the traditional work of management might suggest.  The leadership imperatives we discussed, which we share in this article, reflect a viewpoint we came to hold in common: One doesn't manage creativity.  One manages for creativity.

What do you think?

Making green red: the ALMS Green Challenge

This past weekend I watched some fantastic racing at Road Atlanta courtesy of the American Le Mans series.  Audis were dicing with Peugeots, Ferraris with Porsches, Porsches with Acuras, and Corvettes with Aston Martins, among other marques.  All of it awesome, technology-centric racing put on by the American Le Mans Series (ALMS).

What made this particular running of Petit Le Mans unique was the debut of something called the Green Challenge.  An innovative behavioral incentive program developed jointly by the ALMS, the US Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Society of Automotive Engineers, the Green Challenge allows racing teams to score points for sheer speed and for energy usage and carbon footprint.  Teams are evaluated on the total greenhouse gas life cycle of the fuel type they use in the race, which could be cellulosic ethanol, bio-diesel, and ethanol/petroleum blend, or a hybrid internal combustion/electric source.  For the gearheads among you, the following formulas are used to evaluate Green Challenge performance:

• Performance Energy Coefficient (the amount of energy used):  [total normalized fuel consumption during race] \ [1,000,000]
• Greenhouse Gas Coefficient (the amount of greenhouse gases emitted): 3 * [ (upstream C02) + (downstream C02)]
• Petroleum Fuels Displaced: Y * [ (upstream petroleum energy) + (downstream petroleum energy)]

As a general rule, competition is good for spurring on innovation.  From high-minded endeavors such as the X PRIZE, to the (very scary) technological leaps seen during WWII, high stakes seem to breed a combination of focus and access to resources which help support innovative behavior.  In the parlance of Ways to Grow, competition helps set the context for revolutionary innovative outcomes.  To that end, here's what Margo Oge, Director of the Office of Transportation and Air Quality at the EPA, has to say:

Automobile racing spurs innovation in safety, performance, and now, we are happy to say, clean technologies.  Racing is the ultimate test track.

Amen.

I admire this high-minded, innovative approach on the part of the American Le Man Series.  Rather than take a pessimistic, let's do less-bad approach to racing -- which would have gone in the direction of greatly restricting fuel consumption, which is terrible for competition -- they chose to pursue an optimistic, pro-fecundity and consumption approach to being green.  As Bill McDonough has shown us, we can make a paradigm shift to a system where inputs and outputs flow in ways that enable consumption without harming our environment, rather than assume that all consumption must trigger an increase in entropy. This initiative is only the tip of the iceberg, but it is a fantastic start.  I tip my hat to the leadership of ALMS.

And the title of this post?  It refers to an article I wrote for NZZ Folio a year ago, called  Who will be the next millionaire?  My point then was that we need to find ways to go green while going red, which is my code for maintaining our ability to enjoy things that are sexy, fast, and cool.  I still believe this is true, and that we are in the early days of making green tech and clean tech sexy.  This is one of the reasons behind my new blog Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness -- it's an exploration of what makes red red.

For those of you who didn't catch the race, here's the last lap.  Allan McNish is a hero, a pure racer.  Here is a drive worthy of the great Nuvolari.  Very inspirational stuff:

 

 

Design thinking in the New York Times

The New York times ran a great article yesterday called "Design is more than packaging".  Of course, if you're part of the metacool community, you already know that.  But it is great to see this meme getting out there and sticking.  I'm very happy to see that the article was published in the Business section.  Cool!

Among others, the article mentions IDEO, my employer, and the Stanford d.school, my other employer.

A couple of quotes.

Tim Brown:

Design thinking is inherently about creating new choices, about divergence.  Most business processes are about making choices from a set of existing alternatives. Clearly, if all your competition is doing the same, then differentiation is tough. In order to innovate, we have to have new alternatives and new solutions to problems, and that is what design can do.

George Kembel:

It would be overreaching to say that design thinking solves everything. That’s putting it too high on a pedestal.  Business thinking plus design thinking ends up being far more powerful.

Well put, gentlemen!

How did I not know about this before?

But now I do.  The remarkable, inspirational, crowd-sourcedable, springwise

A great source of inspirational kicks in the pants for all of us generative business designers.  Wow.

Acumen Fellows

If I knew then what I know now, and if the Acumen Fund had existed then, I would have applied to be an Acumen Fellow.

If you are someone -- or know someone -- who is able and interested in making a change in the world, please tell them about this program. 

More on Startegy

Seth Godin posted some interesting thoughts earlier this week in a post called 'Where to' might not be as important as 'how loud'.  Here's an excerpt:

In marketing (and thus, in life) it might be a lot more important to know, "How are you going to do the next thing?" or "How are you going to do your vacation?"

Direction is drilled into us. Picking the right direction is critical. If you don't know the right direction, sit tight until you figure it out.

The hyperactive have trouble with this advice. So they flit like a hummingbird, dashing this way and that, trying this tactic or that strategy until something works big, then they run with it.

What we're seeing, again and again, is that both of these strategies rarely work...

The alternative is to do your best to pick a direction (hopefully an unusual one, hopefully one you have resources to complete, hopefully one you can do authentically and hopefully one you enjoy) and then do it. Loudly. With patience and passion. (Loud doesn't mean boorish. Loud means proud and joyful and with confidence.)

This feels similar to what I said the other week about the benefits of startegy over strategy (and I'm happy to thinking anything remotely close to Seth).  What do you think?  Should I keep pursuing this startegy thing here at metacool?  Is it of interest?  Is it cool?  Please give me some feedback with a comment below or drop me an email.

Thanks.

 

metacool Thought of the Day

Forget strategy

An innocuous typo I saw today got me thinking:  what if we used a word called "startegy" instead of "strategy"? 

When faced with a blank sheet of paper, we tend to spend too much time engaged in discussions about strategy, otherwise known as "strategery", and too little time learning by doing.  In this context, talking a lot about what to do and why is inappropriate because we don't know enough about context and contraints. When you're getting out in to the world and starting things, guiding evidence has a way of surfacing in a way which doesn't happen within the cloistered confines of meeting rooms. 

Revolutions don't just happen, they get started.  Startegy. JFCI!

What's on Dieter Rams' iPod?

Check out Gary Hustwitt's cool new blog Objectified.  The blog is about his upcoming movie by the same name.  Here is what it is all about, in Gary's words:

One reason that I’m delving into the world of objects in this film is that I, admittedly, am obsessed by them. Why do I salivate over a shiny new piece of technology, or obsess over a 50-year-old plywood chair? What does all the stuff I accumulate say about me, and do I really need any of it in the first place?

Those of you who followed the making of my first film, Helvetica, know that the reason I make these films is not that I have a comprehensive knowledge of the subject matter. I wasn’t an expert on graphic design, and I’m certainly not an expert on industrial design. But they’re both fields that fascinate me, and that I want to learn more about. I’m interested in industrial designers because their work influences so many aspects of our world yet most of the time it’s taken for granted. And I think that, especially today, it’s crucial for us to re-examine how we make and use consumer products at every level.

And if you could get all of these designers and design experts together at a dinner party, what would they talk about? This film will hopefully represent that conversation. I’ve been lucky to be able to include an amazing group of participants in the film so far, and I sincerely thank them all for their time and knowledge.

The term objectified has two meanings. One is ‘to be treated with the status of a mere object.’ But the other is ‘something abstract expressed in a concrete form,’ as in the way a sculpture objectifies an artist’s thoughts. It’s the act of transforming creative thought into a tangible object, which is what designers in this film do every day. But maybe there’s a third meaning to this title, regarding the ways these objects are affecting us and our environment. Have we all become objectified?

About Dieter Rams: nothing.  What's cool is what is on his reel-to-reel.  Man, that thing is awesome.  If Apple sold one, I'd buy it in a second.
 

What's old is new again

I spied this vintage Honda Cub on the street today in Palo Alto.  And yes, that is a tasty Cayman S just behind it, looking quite gnarly crouched down on a lowered suspension and some expensive three-piece wheels.  But I digress.  Let's focus on the Cub for now.

As our societal context changes, value propositions that were of no value can suddenly gain back their value, and vice versa.  In a world of cheap gas, a Honda Cub is an inferior mode of transportation in many ways to a Flabigator XL SUV.  But expensive gas is enough to bring one out of mothballs and use it to carry quite a bit of stuff, as witnessed by the large trunk strapped to the back of this one.

Innovation is about finding ways to grow that are right for you.  Do the ideas need to be new to the world?  Not likely, especially since there are few new things under the sun.  It may be as simple as looking back to times past in search of analogous situations.  People are still people.  What worked then that could work now?

There's something about GINA.

I've received a large number of emails from folks asking my opinion of the BMW GINA concept car.

Here's what I think:

• GINA is about being remarkable.  And being remarkable, whether it be in the domains of design, engineering or marketing, takes guts.  BMW excels across all three of these domains, and does so in no small part due to having the courage of its convictions.  Sometimes these convictions are too strongly held, witness iDrive in all of its befuddling infamy.  But from iDrives to flame surfaces to Bangle Butts, BMW seems to be a place where errors of commission are forgiven.  It's about guts, in other words, and GINA is an tangible expression of those held by the brave folks from Munich.
  
• GINA is about a return to a paradigm of flexible, articulating structures.  GINA's anthropomorhpic nature is quite sticky from an emotional point of view, but I find it most interesting in terms of a return to a structural paradigm used by early aviation pioneer such as Louis Bleriot.  Being covered with a fabric is not a new idea -- many cars used to have leather bodywork (and we still have lingering fabric convertible tops out there) -- but combining that fabric with an articulating structure is new for automobiles.  The wing of a Bleriot monoplane flexed in response to pilot control inputs.  To see that wing in motion is to see organic motion very different to the mechanistic slides and pivots that characterize modern airplanes.  When the light hits it just right, there are few mechanical structures more beautiful than a semi-translucent Bleriot wing.
  
• GINA is a platform for a new age of open innovation and co-creation.  As Chris Bangle states in the video, attaching the fabric covering to the space frame does not require a great deal of time.  Imagine the cool stuff that could happen if BMW enabled "civilians" to riff on their own fabric covering patterns.  Or perhaps non-structural elements of the space frame could be easily modified within specified parameters to allow for surface improvisations.  And even the parameters controlling the wink of GINA's eyes could be made available for public hacking, so that you could upload new software routines and choose to have a sleepy car or a caffeinated autobahn stormer.  Most BMW's, I'd wager, would be the latter.
  

I'll take mine in a matte finish.

Man, how are we ever going to get disruptive?

Two of my favorite books on innovation are The Innovator's Dilemma and -- you guessed it -- The Innovator's Solution.  However, not all is well and good in the world when it comes to my relationship with these books: my dilemma is that I am lacking a good solution in terms of influencing people around me to actually read them.  Short of actually taking a class with Clay Christensen and reading the books because you're so afraid he's going to cold call you on the day when you've forgotten to memorize the killer chart on when to spin a venture out versus leaving it inside, I can't imagine a motivational technique for encouraging each and every page to be read (me, I've read each ten plus times... but I'm a geek that way). 

But maybe it's more about getting people to a disruptive state of mind?  Maybe it's about getting them on the bus?  If convincing folks to read either edition of Innovators is tantamount to dragging old wild horses to water and teaching them a new trick, then I can't help but admire this alternative solution from the Boulder office of CP+B:

A Disruptive Thinker Transport!  Why didn't I think of this? I find this fantastic piece of graphic design particularly funny, but then I grew up in Boulder and suffer from a bit of that locale's typical twisted (or is that disruptive?) sense of humor.  When this thing makes its way up to Gunbarrel, massive seas of Legacy Outbacks part and make way.  Make way for disruption!  Yield to the low end, Volvo 240 wagons of the world!

Read more about it at John Winsor's fine blog.

Amazing design thinking @ D6

I attended All Things Digital last week, and -- much to my surprise -- walked away with more than just a more informed view of where the digital ecosystem is headed.

As cool a conference as it is, I didn't expect to have an emotional experience.  But there you go, my hat got knocked in to the creek by the amazing work being done by Dean Kamen's group at DEKA. Take a look at this video and tell me that you aren't blown away by the wicked combination of elegant engineering, high-minded problem solving, and a darn-it-we'll-solve-this-challenge-no-matter-what sensibility:

For the impatient among you (and who isn't in this Web 2.0 world), fast forward to about the 2:30 mark.   You can read more about these arms here.

Each time I see this stuff I get tears in my eyes, and to see innovative engineering like this makes me feel optimistic about the future of the profession.  As organizations age, I believe there's a tendency for established disciplines to cease to be creative, to become more critical than generative.  Success naturally leads to conservatism and a desire to preserve the status quo.  Engineering, more so than other disciplines, is prone to this dynamic.  Great engineers push hard to find elegant solutions to seemingly impossible problems.  Mediocre ones don't.  Innovation is really about being innovative.  In other words, it is a way of being, and it is a personal choice.  Let's keep thinking of these arms from DEKA in all that we do. 

Why management matters

When it comes to being innovative and the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, does the kind and quality of management matter?

Yes.

I've written before about the importance of having management who knows what good looks like.  I think we'd all agree that a computer company should have people who know the best computer when they see it, and that a restaurant's menu should be the result of a passionate chef.   

Part of the reason behind the emergence of cars like the amazing new CTS-V out of General Motors is the presence of product development executives like John Heinricy, who is the one who pedaled the CTS-V to a record time around the famed Nurburgring.  It may be the most obvious statement of the year, but a simple strategy for creating winning offerings is to put power in the hands of people who know what good is, and know how to bring good to market.  That's what GM is doing these days.  As you watch Heinricy at work in this video of the record lap (via a camera strapped to his head), ask yourself if your management team could take their own products to the limit in their own way.

Glass Houses

A pretty good Billy Joel album, and a simply great day of design thinking I experienced just the other week at the Philip Johnson Glass House.  I was fortunate to take part in a Glass House Conversation hosted by John Maeda on the subject of Simplicity.  Keen readers of metacool will no doubt recall that Professor Maeda's book The Laws of Simplicity is one of my all-time favorites (be sure to watch his brilliant TED talk here).  His thinking has had an enormous influence on my work.

Each of the attendees were asked to be the guru for one of the ten laws of simplicity.  I chose the 5th law, Differences, which states that simplicity and complexity need each other.  I spend a lot of my time designing and implementing organizational systems which enable people to do things they otherwise couldn't.  I find time and time again that solutions that aspire only to simplicity tend toward the simplistic, and those that embrace only complexity veer off toward a morass of complexity.  Balancing the two, and figuring out where to place the complexity so that it creates value, and how to position the simplicity to extract that value, is the art.  Here's the illustrative example I brought with me to the Glass House, a snapshot of the dashboard from a Toyota Prius (you were expecting something other than a car from me?):

The cockpit of the Prius is one of the simplest on the market.  A digital readout replaces traditional gauges, buttons are few in number and highly considered in placement, and even the gearshift is just about going foward or backward or not.  And yet the Prius is arguably the most complex car you can buy.  Its gas-sipping nature stems from having not one but two motors, connected to the driving wheels by a fiendishly clever transmission orchestrated by a suite of chips of immense processing power.  All of that complexity without a mediating layer wouldn't be the car that non-car people love to own and operate.  The Prius is a great example of the 5th law.

I saw the law of Differences in action at the Glass House.  Having only ever seen the Glass House in history books, I didn't have a feel for the complexity of the campus on which it stands.  Over time, Philip Johnson built a family of structures which work together in quite interesting ways.  For example, did you know that the Glass House has a sister structure in the Brick House?  Here's a view of the two of them:

All of the mechanical needs of the Glass House are met by the Brick House.  An underground umbilical shaft connects the Glass House to a feed of heat from the Brick House.  The Brick House also contains a bedroom for those times when one might like to engage in... er, some more complex acts of human nature than would be appropriate in a public setting.  A Glass House without a Brick House to power and feed it would be untenable.  Even from a purely formal aesthetic sense, the two houses work better together than apart.  Simplicity and complexity need each other.

I really enjoyed the afternoon of conversation on design, business, technology and life.  I've had a fortunate life of exposure to some pretty amazing people and experiences, and this was right up there.  I'd like to show you some photos, not to gloat, but to share some fun stuff from the day in the name of creativity and openness. 

An amazing group of chefs prepared a meal for us in the Glass House.  It centered on themes of simplicty.  Wine was served.

We sat at table together and talked and ate and watched the weather go from stormy to sunny and back again.  You can't help but be immersed in the weather in this architecture.

We had assigned seats.  I sat in a white chair and ate more than my fair share of the edible centerpiece, which was quite tasty in its own right.  This is my favorite photo from the day:

Words of wisdom from Jeff Bezos

BusinessWeek recently ran a wonderful interview with Jeff Bezos on the subject of managing and leading innovation.  Thoughtful and illuminating, he had me nodding my head and saying "yes", "yes" and "yes" again.  Some highlights:

On the liberating nature of constraints:

"I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out. When we were [first] trying to acquire customers, we didn't have money to spend on ad budgets. So we created the associates program, [which lets] any Web site link to us, and we give them a revenue share. We invented one-click shopping so we could make check-out faster. Those things didn't require big budgets. They required thoughtfulness and focus on the customer."

On cultivating a purposeful portfolio of innovation:

"With large-scale innovation, you have to set a very high bar. You don't get to do too many of those [initiatives] per unit of time. You have to be really selective."

On the right timing for innovation:

"My view is there's no bad time to innovate. You should be doing it when times are good and when times are tough—and you want to be doing it around things that your customers care about."

metacool Thought of the Day

"I have said that knowledge is the purpose to act, and that practice implies carrying out knowledge.  Knowledge is the beginning of practice; doing is the completion of knowing."

- Wang Yangming

Location Change: d.school Conference Now at Hewlett 201 on the Stanford Campus

ALERT!  ALERT!

We have had a BUNCH of folks sign-up for our conference on Creating Infectious Action so we are moving to a bigger room. It is now in Hewlett 201.

Here is the link to the new location.  The event still goes from 3:30 to 6 with a reception to follow.  See you there!

May 1st Innovation Conference @ Stanford d.school

The Stanford d.school class I'm co-teaching on Creating Infectious Engagement is holding a conference next Thursday May 1st from 3:30 pm to 6:00 pm.  Will you please come if you are in the area? 

We've held a conference the previous two years of teaching the class, and each one has been a highlight of the quarter.  Previous speakers have included luminaries such as Steve Jurvetson, Perry Klebahn, Dennis Whittle, Mari Kuraishi, and Jessica Flannery.  Folks that knock your hat in the creek.

This year is no exception.  I can't wait to hear all of them speak, and Ruggy Rao in particular is one of my favorites. Please RSVP to Joe Mellin at ciersvp@gmail.com if you will be joining us so that we can arrange for the right quantity of tasty vittles and libations.

Where?  Our KILLER new d.school space at Stanford Building 524.  This building is right across from Old Union, near the Design Loft.

Since this is all about creating infectious action, please tell your friends all about it!

 

The ultimate long tail business model?

Here's the most radical version of a long-tail business model yet:

Icon Group International

Here's the video summary:

metacool Thought of the Day

"When I am no longer controversial I will no longer be important.'
- Gustave Courbet

Are people upset with you?  It is because what you've done is so bad it is shameful, or because it is so polarizing, so rooted in a strong point of view that all but the most progressive or forward-thinking people don't understand and "get it"?  Do you want to design for the mass market of today or tomorrow?  Are you designing under the old paradigm or for a new one?

Having a strong point of view, informed by real human needs, is at the core of how design thinkerdoers behave.  They make choices, and thus end up with strategies grounded in the needs of real human beings, real organisms, and the planet, and end up with something whose value proposition is intelligible, which creates real value for a real soul somewhere in the world, and is designed to spread and reach the right people, whether that be a bushel or a billion.

Making choices, taking the route which may be controversial or even painful, is about being willing to live with innovative outcomes. 

Want an innovative culture? Status differences blow

When it comes to bringing cool stuff in to the world, I'm a big fan of Honda.  If you've been around metacool for any period of time, then you know that I admire Honda a great deal.  I've written about Honda's ability to innovate on a routine basis, about the fact that it is led by someone who really -- really! -- knows the business, about its ability to advertise truth rather than myth, about the pickup they make which I dearly want and am only waiting for the diesel model to arrive to purchase, and about kick-ass minivan race cars made by Honda's own employees on their own time because, well, kick-ass minivans are a kick in the ass if you're a racer.  Just about everyone at Honda, it would seem, is a racer, as explained in this great article in Fortune:

Unlike Toyota (TM), which is stodgy and bureaucratic, Honda's culture is more entrepreneurial, even quirky. Employees are paid less than at the competition, and advancement is limited, given Honda's flat organization. Their satisfaction and fierce loyalty to the company come from being around people like themselves - tinkerers who are obsessed with making things work.

At the risk of making a broad generalization, I would say that innovative startups and more mature organizations capable of innovating on a routine basis (like Honda) share two key elements in common:  first, a remarkable lack of status differences among employees, and second, a low-friction environment when it comes to the meritocracy of ideas.  I actually believe the latter is a function of the former.  Why? 

We all have 24 hours a day to live our lives.  We have finite time and energy at our disposal.  If we all start with the same account balance, some of us choose to spend it worrying about what our boss's boss thinks about us, or on over-preparing for that internal review meeting, or on wondering what our growth path is.  Others say "this is this" and get on with being generative, pushing ideas as far as they can go, and helping others see what works by gathering real evidence from the world and letting opinions fall by the wayside.  Status differences are energy sinks.  Do you want to spend your life worrying or producing?  Dramatic status differences lead to dramatic wastes of energy. 

Show me a group of people who worry less about where others think they stand, and more about how things are really going and how they might do things better and cooler, and mark my word, that's the group of innovators.

A wonderful example of a disruptive business model

Here's a great example of a low-end disruptive business model: Psychotherapy for All

The more I work on the creation of disruptive business models, the more I'm convinced that there's almost always room for a disruptive model.  One just needs to start with human needs and look hard, work hard for it.  The design process needs constraints.  A lack of viable solution spaces is more a reflection of poor innovation process than a statement of fact; it is a lack of generative contraints which leads to dead ends. 

I can think of no better design constraint for the genesis of disruptive business models than trying to serve the needs of people living on a few dollars a day.  What, for example, might happen to pace of innovation in our US healthcare system if we were to take notes on disruptions such as this one, or from the Aravind Eye Care System? 

Director's Commentary: Amia Chair

Here's a marvellous Director's Commentary about the Amia chair.  Thomas Overthun, a colleague of mine from IDEO, and Bruce Smith of Steelcase take us through its genesis.

Watch the video, and find out why an integral part of innovating is being willing to cut everything in half.  It's all about strategy that makes your hands bleed: I challenge you to find something in your work life that you should cut in half on the bandsaw, if only metaphorically.

Why not?

Rethinking management education, organizing for routine innovation, Charles Eames, and the importance of holding the air gun trigger down

Just the other week I had the pleasure of dropping in on one of Bob Sutton's graduate courses at Stanford.  I was supposed to be on paternity leave, but if you haven't noticed yet, I have this thing for racing and cars, and well, it's only a ten-minute walk to the Stanford campus from where I live, and my wife is a kind and charitable soul when it comes to indulging my passion for gearhead gnarlyness.  Call it a busman's holiday. This particular class (pictured above) deals with navigating innovations through complex organizations.  Yes, that's a real NASCAR racer.  Yes, those are real live Stanford graduate students.  And yes, that's what February in California looks like.

So what's going on in the photo?  A very interesting exercise in teamwork which exposes and illuminates all sorts of juicy issues in organizing for innovation.  In this class, Sutton, co-teacher Michael Dearing, and guest lecturer Andy Papathanassiou of Hendrick Motorsports get teams of students to go through the process of changing the tires on a NASCAR machine.  It is harder than it looks: the tires and rims are heavy, the car wants to fall of the jack (well, it is on jack stands, but it feels like it wants to fall off), and the lug nuts seem to be cross-bred with jumping beans.  You can read more about the class exercise here and here.

After 60 minutes of watching teams of students go from zero to hero in terms of their tire-changing acumen, my head was buzzing with lessons for those studying the art and science of bringing cool things to life:

1. Mind your modalities:  How do you want to grow?  What are you trying to accomplish?  At first glance, changing a tire is easy, right?  Take it off, grab a new one, bolt it on.  But how might one reduce the cycle time by 10%?  50%?  90%?  How would you organize teams to reach those goals?  And on the other hand, how do you create teams that are able to change tires in a hurry in the heat of the Daytona 500 without missing a beat?  And how do you get one team or organization to be good at both innovating and executing?  I think it is all about minding your modalities, knowing what you are shooting for at any instant.  If we want to commit to taking 20% off of our tire changing times over the course of a racing season, perhaps we need to start an R&D department whose function is to create extreme variance, to find those weird solutions that will lead to paradigm shifts.  And perhaps we need to establish a test team whose job it is to sort through the revolutionary stuff coming out of R&D in the name of focusing and honing a few promising solutions.  And then we need to find a way to train our front-line team so rigorously that they can execute flawlessly on that killer idea birthed in R&D, and matured by the test team.  Minding modalities is about recognizing when it's about business by design versus business as usual, and structuring and leading things accordingly.  It's about embracing variance when it is needed, and driving it out when it is not.   The best racing teams, such as Hendrick, Penske, and Ferrari, know how to do both.  They are masters of innovation modalities.
2. Seek out constraints:  when staring in to the abyss of a blank sheet of paper, constraints provide a vital toehold, a way forward.  Not necessarily the way forward, because rarely is innovating a linear process, but a way forward nonetheless.  NASCAR is an incredibly constrained environment when it comes to the design and operation of race cars.  Everything is templatized and mandated to the nth degree by a central organization.  And yet, creativity flourishes, the leading edge continually moves forward, and the garden blooms.  Sure, there are some a few "cheating" weeds here and there, but that's racers being racers.  Cheating is just a way of signaling that that a constraint is likely invalid.  Constraints = Progress.  Infinite possibilities lead to stasis.
3. Organize for information flow:  How do you design an organization so that it can innovate where it needs to innovate and execute when it needs to execute?  Here's a clue: drawing org charts won't get you there.  Ideally, one thinks first about critical information flows which need to occur in order for certain outcomes to be realized.  Once those information flows are identified, the organizational structure emerges fairly organically, with an org chart as a by-product.  I was thrilled to meet Andy Papa at this class exercise, because Hendrick does a wicked job of organizing for creative information flow.  As a pioneer of the multi-car team in NASCAR, Hendrick has cracked the code on how to structure an organization such that variance-reducing, execution-minded focus (separate teams each competing to win the NASCAR cup) can coexist with a non-zero, variance-embracing, innovation-seeking worldview (everyone in the organization sharing information in order to identify patterns which lead to revolutionary and evolutionary innovations, and hopefully, victory for all).  Racing teams have no choice but to evolve or die, and to make tough choices or cease to be relevant, so I often look to them for inspiration when faced with organization design challenges in my own work.  You read it here first:  Hendrick is the New Apple.  Or the new GE.
4. Learn by Doing: I'm entering broken-record mode here, but the teams that did the best in this class challenge were those that dove in and started changing tires.  Instead of arguing over who would be the CEO of rickybobbytirechangers.com, and who would be leading the war for talent, these teams got down on the ground and got their hands dirty.  By the wail of the air gun, thee too shall witness one's strategy emerge.  And so it happened -- the best way around a NASCAR wheelwell can't be thought through in one's head, but has to be iteratively solved with hand and heart and brain.  In other words, strategy that makes your hands bleed.

Note to self: if ever I find myself swapping out new rubber in a big hurry, keep the trigger down on the air gun.  WFO, baby!

The most interesting blog post I've read in 2008

Mr. Rogers, The US Senate, Mary Baker Eddy, A Sneaker Sanctum: Just Another Day in the Neighborhood

Director's Commentary: 2007 Honda Odyssey One Lap racer

Here's  a fantastic Director's Commentary for gearheads.  Honda's Bradley Buchanan takes us through all the design work that went in to the creation of an Odyssey that hauls at both ends. 

What a sound this thing makes!  And how it hunkers!  It has all the gravitas of a hairy-armed first-generation Porsche 911 Turbo.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: there's a market out there for vans that pack the punch and handling of a BMW 535i.  People in my demographic and psychographic could easily absorb 10,000 of these a year in North America alone.  I'd buy one in a second, especially if it were powered by a turbodiesel. 

Space is the ultimate luxury. 

Space coupled with warp-speed performance?  Well, that's nirvana.  Honda, are you listening?

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

The Harvard Robotic Fly

(click thru to witness an amazing video)

Here's an excerpt from the accompanying article:

Designing an automated fly implied having the ability to make lightweight, miniature working parts, a process that Wood says took up the bulk of his doctoral study, because of the lack of any previous research on which to draw. “For years, the thrust of our work was ‘How do we do this?’” says Wood. “There was no existing fabrication paradigm, given the scale we were operating on, the speed we wanted to operate with, and things like cost, turnaround, and robustness.” His research group developed and fabricated a laser carving system that could meticulously cut, shape, and bend sheets of carbon fiber and polymer—both strong but lightweight materials—into the necessary microparts.

And how to power those wings to beat 120 times per second? To keep this 60-milligram robot (the weight of a few grains of rice) with a 3-centimeter wingspan to a minimal size and weight, Wood says, you can’t simply use a shrunken version of the heavy DC (direct current) motors used in most robots. So he and his team settled on a simple actuator: in this case, a layered composite that bends when electricity is applied, thereby powering a micro-scale gearbox hooked up to the wings. Wood says the actuator works even better than its biological inspiration. The power density—a measure of power output as a function of mass—of a fly’s wing muscles is around 80 watts per kilogram; Wood’s wing design produces more than 400 watts per kilogram.

That's some kick-ass engineering at work.  Professor Wood, you are one gnarly dude.

Many thanks to the folks at Telstar Logistics, a key member of the metacool horizontal keiretsu, for bringing this innovation to the attention of our R&D group.

Director's Commentary: Philippe Starck

My favorite talk from TED2007.  As one might expect, this is a meta level talk, a Director's Commentary about being a director dreaming big things.  A meditation on designing life. 

Here's a transcript of Starck's talk.  Let's just say that this is a very provocative and intriguing twenty minutes.

metacool Thought of the Day

"Most new ideas are bad; and the good ones are mostly not new."

- James G. March

Halloween and the weird and wonderful workplace

Moonwalking designers in a Halloween parade featured prominently in my earlier post about the weird and wonderful culture of my own innovative workplace.  I recently learned about a similar Halloween parade at Zappos, a significant sponging agent for my disposable income, and a remarkably innovative retailer in its own right.

Might there be a causal link between putting on killer Halloween parties and forging corporate cultures capable of innovation on a routine basis?  Or does the causality flow in the other direction?  Or both ways?  Or is this merely correlation, and not causation?

No matter.  I really dig the Poltergeist reference at the end of the Zappos video.  Very nice.

Creativity, Entrepreneurship, and Organizations of the Future

Tomorrow I'll be part of a panel discussion at Creativity, Entrepreneurship, and Organizations of the Future, a conference presented by Harvard Business School.

Professor Jim Heskett will be moderating our panel.  He's written a provocative post on the HBS Working Knowledge website about tomorrow's discussion.  There's on open invitation there to leave your comments, ideas, and thoughts on the subject.  Please do so, as we'll be tackling at least some of them in the time we have tomorrow together, and the discussion will continue online through December 18.

The agenda of speakers at the conference is simply mind-blowing.  I expect to walk away with more than a few new ideas and insights, all of which will no doubt make their way in to metacool.  The entire conference is being held in honor of Professor Thomas K. McCraw, author of my favorite book of the year, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction.

My time at Harvard Business School changed my view of the world in many ways, and as a result fundamentally changed my life.  It is very meaningful to me to be back on campus exploring design, innovation, technology, business, and life.

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

The salt-spitting machines of Speed Week, as seen through the eyes of BW Jones. 

Here, here, and here.

Collaborative Innovation and Collective Intelligence

I recently had the great pleasure of writing this article with Doug Solomon.  Titled "Leadership and Innovation in a Networked World", and published by the MIT Press's innovations journal,  this essay takes a look at what's happening to the state of the art of getting stuff done in a world where having meaningful interactions with people via things like Google Docs, iSight video cameras, and yes, even World of Warcraft, has become an everyday reality.  Here's the heart of the article:

Unfortunately, by seeking the rare brilliance of a limited few instead of the statistically likely success of the connected many, the “lone genius” worldview has limited our ability to make meaningful progress in everything from technology, to organizations, to education, and all the way to society. We’ve done very little to systematically develop technology to support the innovation process. Overall, we are still in the “horseless carriage” days of living in a truly networked world. We can do better, but how do we begin to engage this new way of being? We believe a path to the future can be found by paying conscious attention to evidence of what works in the world today, and by asking the following questions as we work:

• What are some of the enabling collaborative tools available today?
• What lessons can be learned from organizations doing networked innovation?
• How do things get done in a networked world?

Writing this essay was a chance to learn by doing.  Though Doug is a colleague of mine at IDEO, and we sit in the same building, we almost never see each other because we're always off cranking on some interesting, but separate, project.  That, plus the fact that we're both crazy busy, led us to use Google Docs to help us write the article in a collaborate way.  We began the essay at 11pm in the lobby of a hotel after the first day of the Fortune iMeme conference, and then proceeded to write it whenever we each had time.  For me, that meant waking up at 5am on a Sunday for some quiet working hours, or writing a few lines while sitting, delayed, on the tarmac at DFW.  Over 744 (!) revisions later, Doug and I had what I hope passes for a coherent essay, and during all those days of writing, we only worked face-to-face two or three times.  There's something to this technology-enabled collaboration stuff.