metacool

Maira Kalman on the American Message

As far as this art and science of bringing cool stuff to life thing goes, Maira Kalman really nailed it in today's NYT.  You have to see it all.  It's the triple distillation of pure awesomeness.  Here's a quote:

Everything is invented.
Language.  Childhood.  Careers.
Relationships.  Religion.
Philosophy.  The future.
They are not there for the plucking.
They don't exist in some
natural state.
They must be invented by people.
And that, of course, is a great thing.
Don't mope in your room.
Go invent something.
That is the American Message.
Electricity.  Flight.  The telephone.
Television.  Computers.  Walking on
the moon.  It never stops.

I simply love what she's created here and am totally inspired.  Many thanks to my friend (and great innovator) John Lilly for pointing me to this.

Have a great week, everyone.  Go make a dent in the universe.

And no moping!  Always ask yourself, "What would Travis do?"  Just do it, that's what.  JFCI!

metacool Thought of the Day

"The next time you see somebody driving a Ferrari, don't think this is somebody who is greedy, think this is somebody who is incredibly vulnerable and in need of love.  In other words, feel sympathy, rather than contempt."
- Alain de Botton

Leading from behind

BusinessWeek just ran a good article about Mozilla's development process for Firefox.  As readers of metacool know, I'm a big fan of Mozilla, and look to them as a living example of many of the organizational trends that will become more widespread over the coming years.

I particularly like the idea of "leading from behind" mentioned in the article:

How Mozilla channels those efforts is a model for a growing number of companies trying to tap into the collective talents of large pools of software developers and other enthusiasts of a product, brand, or idea. "There's structure in it," says Mike Beltzner, who runs Firefox. "But at the same time you allow people to innovate and to explore and [give them] the freedom to do what they want along those edges—that's where innovation tends to happen in startling and unexpected ways."

At Firefox, Beltzer calls it "leading from behind." His team makes only the highest, direction-setting decisions, such as the date each new version of Firefox has to ship. It's up to Mozilla staff and volunteers to meet those deadlines through a process of identifying specific tasks that need to be done and accomplishing them. A system of recognition has formed among volunteers, who can be designated as "module owners" and given authority over certain areas, such as the layout.

Mozilla is a wonderful example of Principle 12 in action.

More on teams...

16: Grok the gestalt of teams

If you're going to get innovative stuff done in the world, odds are you're going to do it with other people.    If you haven't looked out the window lately, we're living in an ever more connected and interdependent world.  If there ever was a time for lone inventors to thrive, this is not it:  smart, action-oriented, high-EQ, multidisciplinary, interdependent teams are uniquely positioned to take on the broad, systemic challenges so in need of innovative thinking today. 

So if you're going to do remarkable stuff, you've got to learn to grok the gestalt of teams.

There's an entire literature on effective team roles and dynamics that I won't go in to here, but based on all my years of battling on the front lines to bring new stuff in to the world, here are a few of my favorite insights in to behaviors that make for exceptional teams:

• Build it out of T-shaped people:  an effective innovation team is composed of people who are really good at what they were put on earth to do, but also share a common way of getting things done in the world.  We want depth: an engineer needs to be an engineer's engineer, and we want the MBA to be capable of unlevering a beta in her sleep.  But we want breadth, too.  We need them both to not only get along, but to thrive in a symbiotic relationship centered on getting stuff done.  In my experience, what adds that breadth to a team is a group of individuals who are versed in the ways of design thinking. 
• Know thyself, and let everyone else know, too: a high-performing team is no place for posturing or secrets.  If you're good at something, we want to know so that we can you let you be the lead on that.  And if you're not so good at something, we want to know that too so that we can help you get better, or keep you from wasting time on that front.  The way this happens is for individuals to be proactive about disclosing this information through the course of the life of a team.
• Be friendly, because the networked world is your oyster:  imagine how powerful your small team could be if it were part of a vast network of experts and people wanting to contribute to your success, if only you'd ask.  Well, guess what?  Via the marvels of modern technology, you're already there.  Need someone to hack some code?  How about a coder in Bangladesh?  Need an expert on nanotubes?  Find her on Twitter.  Need some help with that marketing plan?  Why not befriend that VP that occasionally strolls by your team space?  The network your team needs to hit the remarkable zone is already there waiting to be asked.  Be friendly and invite those folks in.  Because they want to be on the team, too.

These are only a few points.  What matters to you when it comes to being part of an effective innovation team?  I'd love to hear.

As the cliched saying goes, "there's no 'I' in team"  (and you never want to be at the receiving end of the saying "there's no YOU in team", but I digress...), so get out there and grok the gestalt of teams.  Be the team, good things will happen.

This is number 16 in a series of 21 principles of innovation.  As always, your comments, thoughts, and ideas are most welcome.

metacool Thought of the Day

"What is it that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea -- to discover a great thought -- an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain -- plow had gone over before. To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find the way to make the lightnings carry your messages. To be the first -- that is the idea. To do something, say something, see something, before any body else -- these are the things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial."

- Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad

Leading tribes, cultivating movements, part II

Julia Kirby of Harvard Business Publishing has just written a lovely post about the Stanford d.school CIA team behind the push to turn part of downtown Palo Alto in to a pedestrian zone.  It's titled Starting a Movement, Learning to Lead.  Here's an excerpt:

So you tell me: is Creating Infectious Action a course in leadership? To be sure, it doesn't focus on individuals' leadership journeys. There's no competency model at its heart. But what is leadership all about if not creating a vision of something different and better, getting people excited about it, and mobilizing everyone to cooperate in accomplishing it? If you can go out there and create infectious action, I'm inclined to call you a leader. And if you can't, you probably shouldn't call yourself one.

I asked Captain Hughes what he'd do next with the toolkit he gained in Creating Infectious Action. Beyond Palo Alto and pedestrians, would the course have a lasting impact? "I've always said that if I ever get to be a General, I would definitely change a few things," he mused. Like anyone down in an organization, there were some procedures and policies--like aspects of the Army Physical Fitness Test--he thought were downright silly. "But now I think maybe you don't need to be a General," he said. "You just have to get a little movement going. Then you start getting people on board."

As I wrote in my post about Seth Godin's recent talk at TED, you can't manage a movement, but you can lead one, even cultivate one.  So yes, Creating Infectious Action is a course about leadership, where leading looks a lot like cultivating a garden. 

Man, what a great team.  This makes me so happy.

Paul Bennett & Egill Helgason on design thinking, Iceland, the future of the world economy, and a whole bunch of other important topics

I'd be posting these videos even if Paul Bennett and I weren't colleagues at IDEO, so rich and fascinating is this conversation between Paul and Egill Helgason, the host of the Icelandic show Silfur Eglis.  Design thinking is a central theme of their time together, and they touch on many important topics of the day, including transparency, community, and how we might move ourselves out of this mess.  It's definitely worth a listen.

And don't worry -- it's all in English!  Enjoy.

Leading tribes, cultivating a movement

This is the second of my favorite talks coming out of this year's TED conference.  Seth Godin takes us through his ideas about leading tribes.  I think he does a fabulous job of describing a different way of leading, a way that seems like the perfect fit to our highly networked, interconnected, and (potentially) interdependent world.

His three questions at 14:15 are priceless.

You can't manage a movement.  But you can lead one, even cultivate one.  Don't be a sheepwalker -- try and lead the tribe that matters most to you.

metacool Thought of the Day

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." 

- Winston Churchill

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.

A Harvard Business Review Debate: How to Fix Business Schools

 

I'm participating is something new for me, an extended online debate.  I'm a panelist for How to Fix Business Schools, which is being hosted by the Harvard Business Review.  Here's the blurb:

Are our business schools up to the job? Many critics have charged that the values imparted in MBA programs contributed significantly to the ethical and strategic lapses that led to the current economic crisis. Is that fair? And if so, what needs to change? How can business schools regain popular trust?

For the next several weeks Harvard Business Review will be discussing these and related questions in the HBR Debate: How To Fix Business Schools. For this online symposium, we’ve invited an impressive roster of experts to lead the debate—and to try to come up with solutions.

So there you go.  This should be fun: I can't wait to see what many of my co-panelists -- many of whom are former professors of mine or individuals whose writing has been a big influence on my own worldview -- have to say about the debate topic.

If I write anything particularly meaty or inflammatory I'll make a note of here on metacool.

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

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.

Fast Company stuff worth reading slowly

As I've said before, while I work at IDEO, this is not a blog about IDEO and I don't talk much at all about what's going on there.  However, I wanted to point out two cool things involving IDEO which I think have broad appeal to all of us trying to make a dent in the universe.

The first one is about David Kelley.  I hope you can read it.  After my parents and my family, he's way up there in my personal you-changed-my-life-forever-and-ever category.  He's been a teacher, boss, fellow gearhead, accomplice, hero. 

The second is Fast Company's list of the world's most innovative companies.  Yes, IDEO is in there (we're in the top 10!  Woo hoo!), but it's also super instructive to read through the list of 50.  It's also a really nicely designed web experience.  For me, it's affirming to see that so many innovative companies are also ones whose brands are part of my life or consciousness.  If I were to draw up this list on my own, it might look a bit different (where's Mozilla?), but here are some of the Fast Company 50 that are part of my life (some are major time sinks: hello Hulu and Facebook and Zappos!):

• Google
• Hulu
• Apple
• Amazon
• Facebook
• Zappos
• NPR
• Gore
• Lego
• Aravind
• Toyota

Enjoy!  Have a great weekend.

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! 

I don't care...

... what your politics are.  In my book, any week where Lewis Hamilton can become World Driving Champion and Barack Obama can be elected President of the United States of America is a very good week. 

A very good week for humanity, indeed. 

Optimism, perseverence, and courage will take us far.

Thoughts of Ferguson

I participated in The Business Summit at Harvard Business School earlier this month.  If you were to plan the most interesting time possible to gather 2,000 business leaders from across the globe, you couldn't have found a better time than October, 2008.

A highlight of the conference was hearing Professor Niall Ferguson lecture on the origins of the current macro economic climate.  His lecture was instructive and riveting.  You can see the video here.

He also penned a great article for Time magazine earlier this month: The End of Prosperity?

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.

metacool Thought of the Day

"To create is to potentially embarrass oneself in front of others. It is about the courage to be oneself and to be seen as oneself. Putting ink to a page, or pressing one's fingers against clay, or typing a line of computer code, or blowing glass and realizing mistake. Or success. With everyone watching. But most importantly, you.

So it dawned upon me how important it is to be creative. Because it means you have within you infinite capacity to experiment. You are unafraid to go somewhere new because you are creating a new thought process about your own creativity. You know that if you stop and no longer challenge yourself, you cease to be creative. You become still, silent, and the bow no longer connect with the strings and music is not made. And you do not exist. You show you do not have the courage to exist.

Creativity is courage. The world needs more fearless people that can influence all disciplines to challenge their very existence. Creativity is reflection aimed not at yourself, but at the world around you."

-  John Maeda 

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:

 

 

Hot! Liu Lectures @ Stanford

Check out the Fall lineup for the Liu Lecture Series at Stanford!  I've heard each of these wonderful people speak at TED, so this is a real (and free!) treat if you happen to be around Stanford on these dates.

Be sure to check out the Liu Lecture website for any last minute room or date changes.

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!

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. 

metacool Thought of the Day

"Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway."
- John Wayne

From Obama to Pink to Oprah

I was floored by this opening paragraph from a recent Economist article about Barack Obama:

Eight years ago Barack Obama was thoroughly humiliated at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles. He had recently lost a congressional primary in Chicago, and both his political and personal bank accounts were empty. The rental car company rejected his credit card. He failed to get hold of a floor pass and ended up watching the proceedings on a big screen in a car park. He returned home with his tail between his legs before the week was out—and left the celebrations to the people who mattered...

Imagine that: Obama's credit card was rejected and he watched from the outside.  And yet today he is in the middle of it all.  How do you go from the parking lot to the center stage in just eight years?  There is much suffering in life, and also the potential for great happiness and accomplishment, and often the difference between the two is a matter of persistence.  Luck plays a part, but by exerting energy toward a goal, you can make your own luck. 

This is what Dan Pink means when he says that "Persistence trumps talent" in his book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko.  Persistence trumps talent.  In other words, all things being equal, those that try are more likely to be the ones who do.  Here's an excerpt from Obama's acceptance speech from this evening that echoes that sentiment:

And when I hear a woman talk about the difficulties of starting her own business, I think about my grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle-management, despite years of being passed over for promotions because she was a woman. She's the one who taught me about hard work. She's the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life. She poured everything she had into me. And although she can no longer travel, I know that she's watching tonight, and that tonight is her night as well.

Someone who would agree with Obama on these points is Oprah.  And, as you know, she has.  I have to thank Dan Pink for introducing me to Oprah's magazine in his book A Whole New Mind.  I'm avid reader of Oprah magazine.  I find it to be a reliable monthly source of a good kick in the pants.  It's a monthly reminder to be think big and to be persistent.  I've been reading it for about four years now.  As an aside, I'm mildly tickled to tell you that I'm briefly mentioned (and only by first name) on page 307 of the September issue of Oprah.  Check it out.

But I digress. 

In life, pick where you want to go as much as you can, work like hell to get there, and be persistent.  Learn all the time.  Do good.  Engage everyone around you by pursuing your passions.  Help others.  Do good work.  Bring cool stuff to life.  Above all, start.

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

"There is a very thing line between being dismissed and becoming a field-marshal."
- Sam Manekshaw

My favorite new blogs: technohumanism & Our RISD

I really like technohumanism and Our RISD, John Maeda's latest new blogs.  For such as busy guy, Professor Maeda sure has a lot of blogs -- I count four on the metacool roster of cool destinations.  And maybe that's the point: if you're using a blog as a place to fool around with ideas, it helps open your eyes to the world, which then makes it easier to see the world, which then makes it easy to have things you'd like to blog about, and so forth.  Of course, it helps a lot if you start out with John Maeda's curiosity and energy!

If you have access to Monocle magazine, check out their recent profile of Professor Maeda's new role as the President of RISD.  Here's a quote where he is talking about where students of the future may come from:

"I want all these under-served areas that are massively creative and unique. How do you get to where the missing talent is? How do you find raw talent? Maybe it's ageless, maybe it's people who are 60-plus. I think all these stigmas can maybe go away."

If you're a reader of metacool, you know that greatly admire John's philosophy of doing both.  If I were 17 again and looking at places to pursue an undergraduate education, I would look quite seriously at RISD, for it is a place  all about exploration across boundaries.  When I was 19, after a harrowing freshman and sophomore years that felt like I was leaving my soul at the entrance to campus, I figured out a way to do both, and ever sense I've been happiest in life when I'm trying to do both.  Now, it's tough to do both at times (and I've been caught doing too much of both in the last six months), but life gets better and richer this way.  Why choose?  Do both.  One blog?  Why not two blogs?  One job?  Why not two?  How about three?  The only sell out is selling yourself short with false tradeoffs. 

Benjamin Zander on Leadership

This is the second of my three favorite talks from TED2008 (Jill Bolte Taylor's being the first).

Here Benjamin Zander delivers a nice insight in to what makes well-performed classical music a sublime aesthetic experience.  But what impressed me so much about Zander's talk was his message of leadership being about making eyes bright.  This is a truly moving TED talk, and an informative one as well.

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.

metacool Thought of the Day

"If we have a strong sense of purpose, good friends, loving relationships, meaningful work, and good health it’s very likely that we will also quite frequently experience happiness in our lives. Yet, happiness is a by-product of pursuing those other goals and I think that analogy applies to business as well. In my business experience, profits are best achieved by not making them the primary goal of the business. Rather, long-term profits are the result of having a deeper business purpose, great products, customer satisfaction, employee happiness, excellent suppliers, community and environmental responsibility—these are the keys to maximizing long-term profits. The paradox of profits is that, like happiness, they are best achieved by not aiming directly for them."

- John Mackey

Cybergenic is the New Telegenic

Cybergenic is the New Telegenic. 

Check out this awesome essay by Paul Saffo -- he really nails it:  Obama's 'Cybergenic' Edge

So many structural shifts are happening right now.  Most of the assumptions we have about how the world of power and influence works are based on paradigms dating back to the 50's and 60's.  New platforms and mindsets open up great value to those willing to work with them. This is an exciting time to be playing with the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life.

The new iPhone 3G is cool, but...

... a particular 59 seconds of the introductory demo was sheer brilliance.  At the Stanford d.school where I teach, I'm all over students like a broken record, repeating a mantra of "show, don't tell.  show, don't tell.  show, don't tell".  A great demo is one where you show how all your hours of process brilliance have created something truly remarkable, but the point of proof lies in only showing that which is remarkable, rather than telling us how you got there.  In other words, show, don't tell.

Take a look at the rhetorical brilliance of Steve Jobs in his iPhone 3G introduction here.  Forward the video to the 1:27:21 mark, and watch through 1:28:50 to see an awesome 59 seconds of demo magic.  Show, don't tell.

metacool Thought of the Day

"The iPhone is merely a triumph of guts. It's a triumph of someone forcing   people to do things they were scared of, and thus completely changing the paradigm of a multibillion-dollar industry."

- Seth Godin

More on leadership matters

Look at an organization which is doing great stuff in the world, and you'll very likely see leadership which knows whereof it speaks.  Not leadership who got there by doing something unrelated.  I've written recently about leaders who know what they are doing because they've done it before they were leaders.  Let's call them "do it - know it - do it" leaders.  These are folks such as Takeo Fukui (Honda) and John Heinricy (GM) as exemplars of this.  My friend John Lilly of Mozilla is another good example, and the list goes on and on: Steve Jobs, Wendelin Wiedeking, A.G. Lafley -- you get the picture. 

Roger Penske is another exemplar of this ethos, as illustrated by this New York Times article from a few years ago.  Here is a telling example of "do it- know it - do it" leadership at work, describing the scene around the Penske garages as Team Penske prepares to race at the Indy 500:

Early Friday, as crews prepared for the final practice before the race, a Penske employee, wearing a crisp white shirt, black pants and black shoes, stood outside the garage, using a paper towel to wipe down barricades printed with Penske's logo.

Most teams do not have such barricades. Penske's employees wear uniforms with embroidered logos, not stitched-on patches. They share one big toolbox, but each crew member has a drawer. Parts that can be polished are polished — every day.

"The real success is in the details," Penske said as he sat behind the desk in his motor home Friday. "I've tried to be a leader by getting my own hands dirty."

Then he washes them. Penske cannot say for sure that being fastidious off the racetrack results in being fast on it. What he can say, though, is that he has created a culture that has fostered loyalty. And loyal employees produce results.

Executional excellence is one part of the story.  Knowing which details to focus on is something that comes from experience in working in operational settings.  Dirty trucks don't show up on a P&L statement, at least not directly, but as a statement of brand integrity, they most certainly do over time.  To have a sense for this, you'd have to get out of the boardroom and take a look around.  But just looking isn't enough.  When you look, you need pattern recognition to see what is important, and that ability to see deeply can only be informed by relevant personal experience.

Morale and motivation and alignment are the other big wins of "do it - know it - do it" leadership environments.   Al Unser Jr. is quoted in the article as saying ""He is the one car owner of all the car owners I drove for who truly understands what a driver is going through out there."  Racing drivers put their existence on the line when they go out on the track, so it's easy to understand the importance to them of having someone who understand what they're going through, who will demand perfection in mechanical preparation as Penske does.  But why shouldn't that be the standard for any organization?  If I'm going to ask you to do something, especially something really tough and hard such as creating something meaningful from a blank sheet of paper, shouldn't I understand your task deeply enough to be able to do things that increase the odds that you will come out of it victorious and healthy and happy?  Otherwise why would you take the plunge with me instead of with an organization with better odds of success. 

If not for that, why are we all here?

A picture is worth...

If you haven't yet made Presentation Zen a part of your blog diet, I encourage you to do so.  PowerPoint presentations trying to do what should be better done with prose are destined to fail.  Getting an audience to believe in what you're saying, to go somewhere with you, is better done with spoken words over images.

For example, what better way to sum up the state of the Yahoo!/Microsoft transaction than this wonderful image, brought to us by Brad Feld? 

Touché, my friend.  Touché.

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

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. 

metacool Thought of the Day

"I've always thought that being early is a bit like being lucky. If you're early good things happen."

- Russell Davies

Jill Bolte Taylor at TED2008

This is the first of my three favorite talks from TED2008.  Not only does Jill Bolte Taylor use the best stage prop I've ever witnessed in a live speech, but she manages to talk about left brain and right brain in a way that helps us understand the power of living with a truly whole mind. 

Her presentation blew me away the first time I heard it, and my second and third viewings have been just as powerful.  I've already made some changes in my life as a result of her words.

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?