I am pleased to announce that I'm now writing the occasional essay for LinkedIn as part of its Influencers group. Here's my debut effort.
What will I be writing about, you ask? Since my personality and brain haven't been changed out for something better, I'll be writing there about the things I'm passionate about, which all in some way roll up to pursuing the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life. Basically metacool stuff. Sometimes I'll write something specific for LinkedIn, other times I'll post my thoughts both here and there. Please give me a follow there if you're interested to see what comes up.
I would also appreciate any feedback and guidance you might have on future topics to cover there and here.
Earlier this week Virginia Postrel published a great Bloomberg article titled Why Silicon Valley is Winning the Robocar Race. It's a provocative look at what's happening at the intersection of digital technologies and cars, and it also serves up a heap of great insights as to why Silicon Valley works the way it does. In it Virginia quotes digital big thinker and doer Brad Templeton, Stanford Revs Automotive Research Program Executive Director Reilly Brennan, and yours truly.
I really like the following passage:
The world of software -- Google’s world -- also produces a different
mindset from the world of traditional car manufacturing. “Software
companies have an amazing ability to release something un-perfect and
slowly work their way up,” says Brennan, the executive director at Revs. Consumers anticipate progress, making early adopters more tolerant of flaws and shortcomings.
Of
course, early automobile adopters were also tolerant. Silicon Valley is
where Detroit was in the 1920s or ’30s, when cars were the newly
indispensable technology. Its critics are culturally marginal, while its
products remain touchstones of prosperity and progress. It’s only
lightly regulated. Silicon Valley’s ever-optimistic innovators assume
that if they’re doing something cool and important, nobody will
seriously try to stop them. That cultural confidence -- or outright
cockiness -- is as crucial as any particular technology to delivering on
the decades-old promise of self-driving cars.
I also love her use of "robocars" instead of the usual "autonomous cars" phrase. It's sounds so much more sexy and interesting. It's like saying "sushi" instead of "cold, dead fish", and I heartily encourage all of us to adopt it in lieu of the other one.
In the article I'm quoted as stating that even in the new Porsche GT3, "the entire experience is mediated by computers", ergo the title of this blog post. The reason I said this is that with the new GT3, the steering, the suspension, the transmission, even the alignment of the rear wheels are all guided by computers. The computers aren't driving the car, but they do help you drive the car, to give you the ultimate Porsche driving experience, even if you're no Jeff Zwart when it comes to driving prowess. If you're interested in learning more about the new GT3 and how its systems work, please check out the following video featuring GT3 product manager Andreas Preuninger:
Note well, product managers: Preuninger gives one helluva great product demo. If you can't talk with this level of passion and insight about your product's raison d'etre, you have to find a way to make that happen. Either make your product more exciting, or get more excited about it, or both! Excited product managers correlate very highly with amazing product experiences, and are likely even causal in achieving that outcome.
As an aside, I borrowed the image at the top of this post is from Virginia's article, and it comes from a 1930 Saturday Evening Post advertisement. It depicts an engineer of the future controling an automated highway system of some sort. Doesn't his control dial look a lot like a Nest thermostat?
I'm very happy to be interviewing Chris Bangle onstage next week as part of an Open Garage series event at the Stanford Revs Program. Our discussion will focus on the topic of "Designing for Difference in a World of Sameness". I have nothing but respect for what Chris did at Fiat, BMW, Mini and beyond. He knows what it means to believe passionately in a set of ideas, and to bring forth change to create something new in the world as an embodiment of those ideas.
The car I drive is a sculpture created by Chris and team, so you can imagine how stoked (and honored) I am to be having this discussion with him.
I'd love to hear what kinds of questions you'd like me to ask Chris -- please leave a comment below with your ideas, and I'll use them as input and inspiration for our talk. Thank you!
Earlier this week I moderated a discussion with Stefan Bradl and Lucio Cecchinello titled Embracing Risk in the Pursuit of Victory. Bradl and Lucio were appearing as part of the Open Garage series hosted by Reilly Brennan, Executive Director of the innovative Revs Program at Stanford. Bradl is a rookie phenomenon in the MotoGP motorcycle racing series. Cecchinello, also a successful motorcycle racing champion, is an entrepreneur who is CEO of LCR Honda MotoGP, the racing team that enters a motorcycle for Bradl in MotoGP.
Live discussions are always an exercise in improvisation and serendipity. As a moderator, you can frame up a discussion, but you've got to go where the ideas take you, and weave a narrative from there. Panel discussions are jazz where as a moderator your job is to lay out the chord changes and roll with whatever comes along. Most "sage on stage" presentations are something more akin to a piano recital, less sponteaneous but beautiful in a linear way.
The point of view I brought to the discussion was that -- for racers and innovators both -- risk is not something to be avoided at all costs, but is instead a source of great opportunity. Whether you're probing the limit of adhesion on a MotoGP bike through the corkscrew at Laguna Seca, or figuring out how to design a technology to a place where it is both delightful and business viable, you're pushing for something remarkable. You can't be remarkable without taking a risk, whether that risk is financial, technological, emotional, or personal (or all of the above). Healthy opportunity, in many ways, is proportional to smart risk-taking.
I had a great time speaking with Stefan and Lucio. My impression was that the audience enjoyed the discussion with the racers on stage. You can see an unedited video of the evening here:
I'd like express my deep thanks to Reilly for asking me to moderate this discussion, which was a big honor for me. And many thanks to all the team at LCR, who are an extremely friendly, fun, good-hearted bunch of hard-core racers.
You can find it here on pp. 34-35. The topic is Game Changers. At the risk of tooting my own horn, I think it's one of the better things I've written on the subject of innovating. Here's an excerpt:
How to spot one? Beware of self-proclaimed game changers; most are just marketing hype. Real game changers trigger resistance from competitors and rule makers. Or, like Jim Hall's fan car, they violate unspoken taboos...
In 1992 I received a direct mailing talking about a new magazine called RACER. The mission of RACER, to provide a window into the world of racing, was tremendously exciting to me. As a mechanical engineering student who wanted to become an engineer with Penske Racing or McLaren, it was very difficult to find reputable sources of information about what was going in the world of racing and racecars. I didn’t own a TV, the internet at that time was about very bare text message boards, and the few European racing magazines were too expensive for me to contemplate subscribing to. I would read as much as I could for free when I had the time to hang out at a local café and bookstand (which was not very often), so as a result I barely knew anything. Case in point, when I applied for a job at Rahal Racing, tracking down their address in Ohio required an entire afternoon of card catalog searching at Stanford’s Green Library. I kid you not. Things have changed in the past 20 years.
I became a charter subscriber. RACER went on to blow my mind as it expanded my horizons. To feed my design engineering curiosity, it featured achingly gorgeous monthly photographic profiles of important race cars. It helped me understand the complex strategies – sporting, business and organizational – which drive successful racing teams. From a people perspective, RACER gave me insights into the thought and behavioral patterns of legendary design innovators such as Dan Gurney, Adrian Newey, Gordon Murray, and many more.
Above all, RACER’s crisp editorial point of view helped me crystallize a deep belief in the power of acting over just talking, the value of making decisions, and the stark reality that in order to win a race, you have to first show up and start. It made a big impact on this impressionable college kid. For those of you who don’t know much about racing (or perhaps don’t care – which is fine, just keep reading metacool!), being a racer is a lot like being an entrepreneur (and most racers are entrepreneurs): it means making the most of what you’ve got, and putting everything you’ve got into what you’re doing. It’s about being remarkable. It’s a world where, in the words of racer Roger Penske, effort does indeed equal results.
RACER celebrated its 20th anniversary this past weekend with a big party (it was a good one, I must say!) at the Long Beach Grand Prix. And as part of this big milestone, it is being relaunched as RACER 3.0, with a new aesthetic approach and a big new attitude – with a bunch of future innovations in the works. The extremely gnarly relaunch cover of the May 2012 issue is pictured above, and it features my favorite new race car, the Delta Wing. Does that look killer, or what? The theme of the issue is “Game Changers”, and I’m deeply honored to have written its introductory essay. Thank you, RACER.
If you happen to already subscribe to RACER, I hope you like what I wrote. If you don't subscribe, please do! Here's a link to an online version of the article.
For now, let’s all get back to making a dent in the universe! WFO, people, WFO. Be a racer!
About 18 years ago I dropped out of graduate school at Stanford and took a job as an R&D engineer at Hewlett-Packard Company. Actually, "dropped out" is a bit too strong of a phrase; it was late June, I had just just won my Stanford undergraduate degrees a few weeks before, I was about to start my summer internship at NASA, it was hot out, and my new dorm room (Rains housing, for those of you in the know) was even hotter, and I was already sick of hearing cars downshifting for the stop sign just outside of my window. Classes for my masters program in mechanical engineering wouldn't start for a few more months, but the prospect of yet another math class didn't feel like a Big Idea to me. I forget the the exact chain of events, but I believe I first called Ford to ask (beg) for the job I had turned down a few months earlier, and then coincidentally someone from Hewlett-Packard called me to see if I would be interested in a position with them up in Vancouver, Washington, having passed their grueling phone interview screen a few months earlier.
So.
I flew up to Portland, Oregon to interview with Hewlett-Packard, partly because I was desperate to get out of my room at Stanford and partly because I had never been to a CART race, and there was one happening the coming weekend, which was June 27 (what -- you think I've changed? This one-track mind has taken years to develop). The job interviews went well, and the race was pretty cool (the good folks at Hewlett-Packard allowed me to keep the rental car for the weekend), if I must say so:
The visit went well, I took the job, and in doing so became a very proud member of the Hewlett-Packard family, starting as a R&D Engineer working on ink-jet printing systems. I enjoyed what in retrospect was an amazing two years, though I probably didn't fully appreciate everything at the time because I was relatively impatient from a career standpoint. All things being equal, over my two years there, I was able to do foundational R&D work on what became HP's "off-axis" ink system (which you can stilll find in any large-format printer today), got to help take a new printer up the manufacturing ramp, was allowed to redesign a bunch of parts for another new printer, and was also asked to do some cool user research in the field, including one home visit in Wisconsin where I ended up helping some kids with their homework.
The best thing about working at Hewlett-Packard was its culture, which was very "adult" in the sense that it was built on a sense of deep trust and respect between individuals and groups within the company. One day I was using spray-mount glue in my cubicle (bad idea) and my manager stopped by, poked his head in, and said something to the effect of "You can pretty much do anything you want here unless you're endangering yourself or others, and right now you're endangering yourself or others," and then he walked away. Lesson learned. Working at Hewlett-Packard meant that I had the good fortune of working for some truly spectacular managers and mentors, such as Eric Ahlvin, Alan Shibata, David Gast, and Rick Berriman. Looking back on my time there, I realize now the degree to which I imprinted on these people and on Hewett-Packard's culture. In my approach to work and working with people, I think I've tried hard to live up to the examples they set for me, as well as the ethos that informed the culture of Hewlett-Packard.
The best summary of the culture I experienced at Hewlett-Packard is summed up in the 11 Simple Rules drawn up by David Packard himself. These are:
1. Think first of the other fellow. This is THE foundation — the first requisite — for getting along with others. And it is the one truly difficult accomplishment you must make. Gaining this, the rest will be "a breeze."
2. Build up the other person's sense of importance. When we make the other person seem less important, we frustrate one of his deepest urges. Allow him to feel equality or superiority, and we can easily get along with him.
3. Respect the other man's personality rights. Respect as something sacred the other fellow's right to be different from you. No two personalities are ever molded by precisely the same forces.
4. Give sincere appreciation. If we think someone has done a thing well, we should never hesitate to let him know it. WARNING: This does not mean promiscuous use of obvious flattery. Flattery with most intelligent people gets exactly the reaction it deserves — contempt for the egotistical "phony" who stoops to it.
5. Eliminate the negative. Criticism seldom does what its user intends, for it invariably causes resentment. The tiniest bit of disapproval can sometimes cause a resentment which will rankle — to your disadvantage — for years.
6. Avoid openly trying to reform people. Every man knows he is imperfect, but he doesn't want someone else trying to correct his faults. If you want to improve a person, help him to embrace a higher working goal — a standard, an ideal — and he will do his own "making over" far more effectively than you can do it for him.
7. Try to understand the other person. How would you react to similar circumstances? When you begin to see the "whys" of him you can't help but get along better with him.
8. Check first impressions. We are especially prone to dislike some people on first sight because of some vague resemblance (of which we are usually unaware) to someone else whom we have had reason to dislike. Follow Abraham Lincoln's famous self-instruction: "I do not like that man; therefore I shall get to know him better."
9. Take care with the little details. Watch your smile, your tone of voice, how you use your eyes, the way you greet people, the use of nicknames and remembering faces, names and dates. Little things add polish to your skill in dealing with people. Constantly, deliberately think of them until they become a natural part of your personality.
10. Develop genuine interest in people. You cannot successfully apply the foregoing suggestions unless you have a sincere desire to like, respect and be helpful to others. Conversely, you cannot build genuine interest in people until you have experienced the pleasure of working with them in an atmosphere characterized by mutual liking and respect.
11. Keep it up. That's all — just keep it up!
Wow. These 11 principles are simultaneously super inspirational and super humbling. Truth be told, on my bad days I fail to live up to all of these. But I try, and I keep trying to improve myself vis a vis this list, and I think that was the magic of Hewlett-Packard's culture, which allowed you -- even encouraged you -- to improve yourself just as you were always trying to improve the stuff sitting on your test bench. And it encouraged you to help the folks around you, too. What I find interesting about Packard's points is that, starting with No.1, they're all focused on the people around you, not on your inner dialog or whatever. If you're seeking to establish and maintain a collaborative, innovative culture, you could do a lot worse than to follow these 11 points.
I wrote this post this evening because earlier today I learned that David Kelley modeled much of IDEO's culture on that of Hewlett-Packard. I left Hewlett-Packard to join IDEO, and in many ways I regard IDEO as a logical extension of Packard's cultural vision. Trust and respect for your fellow colleagues are indeed the pillars of cultures which routinely create high-impact innovations.
Many thanks to my friend Bob Sutton for telling me about David Packard's Simple Rules.
Stanford's alumni magazine, titled -- you guessed it! -- Stanford Magazine, ran a great story on the d.school a few weeks ago. The article speaks with my teacher/mentor/colleague/friend/hero David Kelley and others about not only the d.school, but on living your life well, and on the notion of achieving creative confidence (here's a secret: those last two items are deeply related).
It's definitely worth your time to read through the article. I really liked this quote from Stanford President John Hennessy:
Creativity represents an important characteristic that we would seek to inculcate in our students, and obviously one that's harder to put a firm framework around. It's unlike teaching some analytical method. Will a bridge stay up? Well, we know what to teach. You teach physics, you teach some mathematics and you can do the analysis.
It's much harder to teach creativity. [It involves] multiple routes, multiple approaches and, obviously, it's virtually impossible to test whether or not you've succeeded. The measure of success is likely to come long after, not unlike many of the other things we try to teach: To prepare students to be educated citizens, to prepare them for dealing with people from diverse and different walks of life. Those are things that play out over a long time, whether or not we've done a good job.
During my time as an undergraduate at Stanford, I was very fortunate to be able to pursue two degrees, obtaining both a bachelor of science in engineering and a bachelor of arts in a multidisciplinary program called Values, Technology, Science and Society [VTSS] (it is now called STS and is one of the biggest programs on campus, though when I was there it was quite small). I spent a lot of time in the library. Though VTSS sounds like something very technical in nature, it was actually an incredibly rich humanities experience, with a focus on topics which, if you've spent any time around this blog, you know that I love. For example, my honors thesis was on the origins and development of the Ferrari aesthetic, looking at how meaning was created in Maranello via the mechanisms of storytelling, racing, and panel beating. My VTSS teachers were an incredible group of people, really inspirational, and they helped me build up my creative confidence in myriad ways. VTSS also gave me a way to take all of the product design classes with David Kelley which I otherwise would not have been able to do had I just pursued my engineering degree alone.
I bring all of this up because I do feel that Professor Kelley helped, in Hennessy's words, to prepare me to be an educated citizen, to prepare me for dealing with people from diverse and different walk of life. If the d.school had been around while I was there, I wouldn't have had to get the two degrees (though I would have anyway, as I'm always "doing both"). For me, as someone who was part of the founding team at the d.school, and who remains extremely passionate and optimistic about its mission and potential in the world -- it is an experiment still in its very early days -- it's very gratifying to see that mission be couched in these terms. Ultimately, we are not teaching folks to be designers, we are helping them realize their potential as citizens and as happy, productive human beings. Awesome.
I'll leave you with this recent d.school video which has students telling it all in their own words:
I returned this morning from the TED conference in Long Beach. This year I found it exceptionally inspiring. And also draining: the content on stage, the people you meet, the people you don't meet,the locale, all of the activites -- it's a jam-packed five days that leaves you feeling simultaneously energized yet also a bit like a spent tube of toothpaste. Wow.
I logged on this evening to write a summary of the week, but in the course of seeing what my friends wrote about their experience there, I came across John's amazing story of his experience in Long Beach, and decided that all I'm going to do is quote him here. What he wrote is just beautiful, and it captures the essence of what happens there:
... Every time I go, there are at least a couple of experiences that I have that change the way that I look at the world, the way that I want to be when I go home. TED makes you want to be better, smarter, more present, more thoughtful, more impactful, more human. To be a better citizen and a better professional and a better dad and a better husband and a better friend. That type of inspiration doesn’t happen all that much, and it’s worth the price of admission every time.
And that’s why June Cohen and Tom Rielly, on the TED team are two of my true heroes. They both have chosen to spend their lives working on building up TED outside of just the week of the conference every year. Tom has built the TED Fellows program, which started out pretty damn great and at this point is starting to move into basically ass-kicking-terrifyingly-awesome territory. And June, who put TED Talks online for everyone to see, including subtitling into 80+ languages.
That, my friends, is how you change the world.
That’s how you take this beautiful, wonderful experience for a few people in California each year and turn it into something that anyone — anyone! — can use to make themselves, their community, their world better themselves.
Well said, John. I can't wait to post some of my favorite speaker videos. I had tears streaming down my face in just about every session of the conference.
TED is something different from what it was half a decade ago. If you can ever go in person to one of their events, or to a TEDx event, I heartily recommend you do so, but I do agree with John that the essence of the TED brand experience is by no means limited to those who hear it in person. If you can take the time to watch and absorb the videos which appeal to you -- and many of those which won't at first glance -- you can have the same kind of transformational experience. Perhaps even better.
I was delighted earlier this month to learn that Fortune had named me to their list of "The smartest people in tech".
When it comes to advancing the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, there are inspiring things going on at IDEO and Stanford these days, and I'm very proud to be a member of these teams of amazing people.
If nothing else, working on metacool over the past half decade has helped me meet a ton of people I would never have encountered otherwise. And thanks to another friend I met via metacool, I recently had the great pleasure of meeting Jörg Bergmeister, one of the most talent racing drivers working today.
Those of you out there whose eyes roll back in your head whenever I talk about cars can rest easy (relaaaxxx -- let those eyes roll baaackkk), because when Jörg and I met, we didn't talk about automobiles so much as about human-machine interface design and how new technologies may reshape the dominant paradigms of automotive design surrounding us today. Our specific topic of discussion was the amazing new Porsche 911 GT3 R Hybrid, and yes we did geek out a bit on gearhead stuff at the beginning of our interview, but on the whole I think we ventured in to some very interesting territory. In fact, we touched on many of the themes I surfaced in this post I wrote a while back about making green red.
By the way, have I mentioned how totally gnarly Jörg's 911 looks?
My favorite part of our conversation came when I asked Jörg about how he stays inspired, and his answer was just wonderful:
Racing is the one thing I love -- well, not the only thing, but I've
done it my entire life and it has been my hobby and I made it my
profession. I'm very fortunate to make my hobby my profession. I think
that's enough inspiration. I just love, love racing.
Words of wisdom. Can you make your hobby your profession, and achieve a "cold fusion" state of permanent personal inspiration. What a way to remain always inspired! I love it.
By the way, have you ever noticed how much the nose of a modern 911 looks like the skull of the ur-land animal Tiktaalik?
Hi. I was recently asked by the nice folks over at blogs.com to come up with a Top 10 list.
I have lots of favorite blogs. You can see a few of them here to the right of this page, and many more gnarly ones over at Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness. It was actually difficult to come up with a Top 10 list because I like so many different blogs, but after some serious procrastination I whittled it down to ten... or eleven.
Things have been a bit quiet here at metacool over the past few weeks. While I've been busy dealing in gnarlyness over at my other blog, I haven't forgotten about the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life.
In fact, I've recently written two articles which might be of interest to y'all:
I'll be writing more about metacool-ish topics in the world of transportation for Aol Autos in the coming months, and maybe more at BusinessWeek, too. Writing essays like these is not at all like the process of blogging (at least for me), so it was great to have great editorial help from Helen and Reilly to help me along the way.
At the end of the film Truth in 24, Howden Haynes (race winner Tom Kristensen's race engineer) admits that his team's victory has left him emotionally numb: he's not elated, he's not sad, he's just kind of there, hovering above his elated peers, not able to experience everything you'd expect him to be feeling after having guided his drivers to an underdog victory over the course of 24 grueling hours at Le Mans. I've seen the movie many times (it's my favorite bit of in-flight entertainment), but I could never quite understand why Haynes reacted that way to what seemed to be a peak life moment. But thanks to some friends, the last week of my life has been horizon-expanding, and to be honest, somewhat overwhelming from an emotional standpoint: which brings me to this past Thursday evening, where I found myself sitting in my Beijing hotel room thinking "how in the world did that just happen, and how come I feel this numb?". Now I have a sense of why Haynes felt the way he did, and let me tell you why.
A week ago I hopped on a plane to Beijing to be a spectator at the Race of Champions (RoC). My carry-on luggage consisted largely of one Arai helmet stuffed full of nomex balaclava, and one Amazon Kindle filled up with the latest and greatest reads in business and innovation. Truth be told, I was so excited to finally be headed to RoC that I could hardly read any of those books -- so instead I spent the flight with my eyes glued to the afore-mentioned Truth in 24, watching my heroes Kristensen and Pirro (who would be racing at RoC) race their way through the French countryside. I kept thinking about my helmet up top, too, because ever since I was a boy I had wanted a racing helmet, and now I had one, and thanks to my friends it looked pretty killer, too. Wasn't sure if I was going to get to use it in Beijing, and knew that it was overkill to bring my own when there were plenty of loaner helmets waiting there for me, but I just felt like I wanted it to be this way.
Upon landing, I embarked on a three-day blitz of totally engrossing automotive experiences. I met a bunch of my racing heroes, and even got to break bread with them. I made a bunch of new friends. I got to tour the Forbidden City with the future of Western capitalism. And I got some seriously good rides.
Jean Jennings, an automotive journalist I've been reading since the days when my mode of transportation was a pimped-out Mongoose BMX bike, once wrote that she took up being a co-driver in rallies when she realized that a professional race car pilot could give her a better racing experience than she could get at the wheel herself. That was certainly my experience in Beijing, where I was fortunate enough to ride along with the following kinesthetic geniuses:
For whatever, reason, all of the planets aligned at the end of Wednesday evening's Race of Champions shoot-out, and in space of five minutes I went from being a jet-lagged spectator to sitting beside a very focused Michael Schumacher as he warmed up our orange X-Bow in anticipation of the final against the amazing Mattias Ekstrom. After a couple of warmup laps, and then three laps driven in anger, "we" came in second:
Coverage of my race with Schumacher starts at the 2:56:00 mark on the video (my race with Priaulx is at 0:55:30).
The race itself was amazing, feeling like one seamless set of control inputs on the part of Schumacher as we flowed our way around the track. We lost by just a few tenths, but man was it a great run on this part. My abiding memory will be from our cooldown lap, when Schumacher turned to me with a twinkle in his eye and we both shared a laugh at the site of Ekstrom doing a massive stalled burnout against the barrier. Upon stopping, we shook hands and that was that.
So all of this is why I found myself in my hotel room getting ready for the post-race party, and -- somewhat Hayne-like -- simultaneously feeling ecstatic, happy, and dumbfounded. My heart was yelling "DUDE! TOTAL UNABASHED GEARHEAD GNARLYNESS!!!!!!!!!!" and my brain was saying "wait a second, did that just happen... and with these guys??!!???...". Soul-mind dissonance. Sitting at home at my keyboard today, of course, I'm totally happy, grateful and thankful to have had this amazing life experience.
My intent in writing this post wasn't to toot my horn in public about my blessings, nor was my intention to process my emotions in public. I just needed to write all of this in order to get to a point where I could express my sincere thanks to a whole bunch of special people, and to have you understand why they mean so much to me.
So, here is a public "thank you" to all of the folks who made my time in Beijing so special and memorable, in no particular order: Paul, Martin, Andy, Michele, Travis, Fredrik, Tanner, Owen, Marie-Helene, Tess, Cris, Mattias, Brian, and... many others.
Most of all, though, I want to give a big, heartfelt thanks to Jim Hancock. Jim was the one who invited me to RoC, and he did many things big and small make my time there truly remarkable. Jim and I met several years ago via metacool, and I've learned a tremendous amount from him since then. Not only is he one of the most intuitive, natural marketers I've ever met, he's also an extremely generous and fun person to be around. Above all, he's a pure racer, and I will be forever grateful for this Race of Champions experience, which let me feel like a racer, too.
Dreams can come true -- you just need a little help from your friends.
And now for something not-so-completely-different, on Friday I'm participating in a Digital Think In for National Public Radio. A group of us are going to spend the day formulating and envisioning a digital media strategy for NPR. I'm really excited, as there's going to be some juicy business design involved, especially as we work with issues around the "social", "open", and "platform" aspects of their service.
Anyhow, if you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them -- please drop me an email or leave a comment. The official Twitter hashtag for the event will be #NPRthink, and of course you can always find me at @metacool.
If things have seemed quiet around metacool, that's because they have been quiet around metacool.
I was out on a vacation for the past couple of weeks, and took a fast from everything web-related (except for Twitter, which doesn't feel the same to me), including email and blogging and everything else I do via Firefox. I highly recommend it. I should have plenty of stuff coming out over the next few weeks.
Anyhow, the fast is now broken. The photo above was taken at Dirty Al's, home of some of the best fried shrimp I've ever had in my life. I highly recommend those, too.
I'm happy to announce that I just joined the board of the Boulder Digital Works (BDW). At this time back in 2004, I was busy helping the Stanford d.school achieve lift off, so it's really cool now to be part of another design education startup. And now the idea of a design curriculum combining business, technology, and human issues is much more accepted in the mainstream, which to me makes the focused mission of the BDW even more exciting.
As John Maeda recently noted, the missing partner to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) is IDEA (Intuition, Design, Emotion, Art). As a person who was trained on both sides and now works and plays across STEM and IDEA, I feel strongly that our education programs need to combine both in order to create the T-shaped people that can go out and make a difference in the world (Principle 6).
Finally, as a native of Boulder, BDW gives me another excuse to get back to the place where I came to love and admire the fine art of driving in the snow. Can't wait. Hope the board meetings are in February!
Over the past few months I've been writing up a series of 21 Principles. We're now 16 principles deep, with more to come soon. The feedback I've received so far has been very helpful, and has helped to push and improve my thinking in multiple dimensions (that would be Principles 4, 5 and 8 at work). For those of you new to metacool, I have a running roster of these principles on the right side of this blog window.
These principles are intended to underpin a general theory of innovation. They are not meant to be principles of design thinking, though some of them are obviously closely related to the theory and practice of design thinking. Inspired by the simplicity work of my friend John Maeda, I'm trying to figure out what I think and know at this point in my life when it comes to all things innovation. Hence my working through these principles in public in a messy kind of way (that would be Principles 9 and 10, with a little dash of 14).
So here's where I need your help, in triplicate:
What is missing? When it comes to innovating, what situations or dynamics or practices have I not touched on yet?
What is wrong? How am I being dumb, silly, foolish, pigheaded, idiotic, unintelligible... and just plain wrong?
What resonates? What matched up with something you've experienced in your life? And if it did, would you be willing to share your story with me?
Please leave me a comment or shoot me an email.
As always, thanks for all your help and for the conversations!
On a friend's suggestion, I just watched the DVD of the film Once. I really liked it.
It's a musical. A musical! But not in a South Pacific kind of way, with big production values and mountains of dollars behind each scene. Rather, the music is just there, and it is written and performed by the actors. I found the result incredibly moving and poignant, and meaningful in a way that a slick, over-thought production could never be. There's such value to be had in taking talented people and letting them do their thing, and taking what they do on the spot and accepting it for what it is. Not perfect. Not probably as good as it could have been on paper, but unique and meaningful in a way that would be impossible to replicate any other way.
Artful. Authentic. Inspiring.
For me this is important because I'm increasingly wary of the over-intellectualizing of things and processes where talent should in fact reign supreme. If the results are good, why try and distill out an algorithm? Heuristics rule, man.
You know, at the end of the day, most good stuff happens because someone good and talented sat down and worked really hard and kept on trying even as things kept breaking. Brilliant marketing schemes are the result of hard work. Innovative business models just happen... by being in beta over and over and pounding away. Heuristics rule. And sometimes you just get lucky.
I've started using Twitter again. I first began using it about two years ago, but did not manage to make a habit of it. But now I'm back on, and I'm really on.
I'm hoping that my Twitter stream acts as an extension of what already goes on here when things are running right at the metacool blog. I promise I won't use it to update you on the type of breakfast my dog just ate (I don't have a dog). I guarantee you I will focus on the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, because at the end of the day all of this material has to come from somewhere, and I only have one brain to offer up (on a good day). Compared to this blog, my Twitter stream will be more concise, more cryptic, less considered, and will arrive on a more frequent basis. It will also be made up of a lot more questions than answers as I poke around for insights in an extroverted kind of way.
I hope you can come along. On the right side of this screen you'll find a new readout of my Twitter activity.
On Twitter you can find me under the name... metacool.
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.
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.
You heard it here first: I've fallen in to a classic creative trap called "how can I ever be as good as [insert existing thing here]?
A few weeks ago I ripped off a quick post about Travis Pastrana and the future of the world economy. It took me 15 minutes, I'm not sure where it came from, and it was easy, easy, easy to write. Largely because I wasn't worried about who would read it, words just poured out of my fingers. I just wanted to catch the thought and get it down on paper. The thing is, people liked it. People really liked it, and since then I've been spending a lot of time -- too much time -- thinking about what I could write that would be as good as that one, and in the process of doing so I've stopped writing.
What a mistake. I've fallen in to a classic creativity trap. And I should know better.
The reality about bringing cool stuff to life is that you actually have to bring a lot of crappy stuff to life along the way, and sometimes good stuff happens. And sometimes great stuff happens. But spending your time doing nothing in the name of perfection is a sure recipe for failure. In other words, for something great to happen, things first need to happen. If anything, 2009 is a year for all of us to laugh in the face of perfection and embrace sins of commission. The good stuff will come.
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!):
One of my resolutions for 2009 is to do more original thinking (via my writing here) and less pointing to other stuff. 2008 was a very busy year for me on many levels, which led to less writing and more pointing. And to be honest I lost some interest in this blog in favor of thinking about gnarlyness on one of my other blogs, but after some reflection over the past couple of weeks -- as well as the inspiration of meeting (!) some life heroes and observing how they've found ways to live their lives to the fullest (hint: cancel your cable TV subscription, fly to England when you want to, don't be afraid to let it all hang out, communicate with integrity and passion), I now have a crisper point of view about where to go with things here, and I hope you'll like it. I hope most of it means back to the future. Without promising too much, hopefully the quality and frequency will both go up. As a wise man once said, do both!
So, less pointing, more thinking.
Of course, since I'm an imperfect man living an imperfect life as best I can, allow me the liberty of pointing to something right now: Walking Eagles
Let's hope 2008 was the year where walking eagles did their stuff, and that in 2009 we can all soar.
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.
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.
Little did I realize upon starting this humble blog several years ago that it would be a ticket to some strange and wonderful trips. For instance, over the past year this blog has introduced me to many of the folks behind the magazines (this was pre-web browser historical timeframes) that taught me about the worlds of cars, engineering, aesthetics, design and marketing. These new friendships have been very meaningful to me.
And now I'm writing about glamour. Deep Glamour, that is. If you've ever met me in person, you know that I'm not quite a full-blown sartorialist (though I'd like to be). So thinking about what glamour is and what it does is a nice challenge from a personal growth standpoint, and an exciting one. Deep Glamour looks like it will be a fun and interesting blog about all the things that orbit this fuzzy but oh so compelling notion of glamour. I hope to post something every week or so as long as the management will have me.
Part of being innovative and creative is finding safe ways to take a first step. So, faced with an unknown domain, I wrote about cars, which is a cozy domain for me.
My intent in writing metacool was to have a personal sandbox for playing with ideas, so there you go. Please check out Deep Glamour -- I've been a huge fan of Virginia Postrel for many years, and in fact her writing was a significant point of inspiration behind my return the mainstream of design thinking a few years ago. As you'll see on the blog, her thinking is deep and will make you think and think and think.
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.
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:
Personally, I haven't had much luck with RSS readers. I suffer from the "weekend barrier" -- I'd rather not spend the time to curate my own collection of RSS feeds, and I often wonder what I'm missing out there that I simply don't know about.
Enter Alltop, a new experiment from Guy Kawasaki and friends. I like it as brain food: it feels like the New York Times in terms of breadth, but deeper in passion due to the laser focus of each of the "contributors". It's curated RSS, or perhaps even an edited newspaper, but with a radically streamlined business model, with each of the "contributors" having an individual revenue stream of their own design. As such, Alltop represents a disruptive business model relative to the New York Times. Let's see where it goes.
And yes, metacool is part of Alltop! Definitely take a few minutes to wander through the various sections -- lots of cool stuff!
I'm happy to say that metacool turns four today. Huzzah!
Four years ago my wife vacationed attended a yoga camp or something in Hawaii and I stayed behind in California because of work commitments. Me, at home by my lonesome and wondering how I might learn a bit about how ideas diffuse across the web, decided to indulge my 3rd-grade ambition to be a writer, and cranked up this blog by writing a one-liner about the merits of ugly cars. Thus was born metacool.*
Some 838 posts later, I'm still at it, and I thank you for your patronage and for the great conversations. The great thing about taking risks in life and just doing something is that unexpected things emerge, stuff you never anticipated would happen. I can honestly say that this little blog landed me two great new jobs, a new hobby that routinely transports me to a state of flow, and an incredible group of new friends. Via metacool I've been able to befriend people everywhere from the Middle East to Japan, and just about everywhere in-between. I've quite literally met some of my heroes, too. I am very grateful for all of these human experiences.
My wife has been my biggest supporter. I can be a bit obsessive about my passion for the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life. For example, she came with me the day I visited the Ducati factory, the Pagani atelier, Fiorano raceway, and the Ferrari museum, all without even a pitstop for a coffee, let alone lunch. That's love. Please join me in thanking my wife for her patience and support over the past four years as I've dribbled out these posts. I'd likely be a little fitter, our household a bit more together, and more rested than I am now if it weren't for the time I spend writing stuff here. But it is so fun, and I've learned so much. My wife is just great, and words fail me.
Thanks for quattro, let's go for otto. And flow.
* actually, I already had a mailing list going on Yahoo Groups called metacool. Blogging on TypePad, as it turned out, is much cooler than spamming your friends.
Spring is in the air, and the team here at metacool world headquarters just returned from a week-long management retreat where, among other things, we decided to revamp the way we go to market. It's time for some market segmentation. Instead of delivering metacool goodness through just one tube called metacool, we'll now be delivering metacool goodness through two of these tube structures which we're told make up this internet thing. More than double the fun, and a new way for me, I mean us, to investigate some passion areas without boring the majority of you all to tears.
If you dig my coverage of the more visceral aspects of our designed environment, please tune your radios to my new blog called Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness. Where metacool is all about the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness is focused on the visceral side of things. If I were to imagine a Venn diagram of sorts, then this new one would overlap 90% of its area with the older one. One can't understand the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life without understand the visceral sides of things, but many folks interested in the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life bore easily when fed gearhead gnarlyness more than once a month. Hence the segmentation.
If it helps, allow me to sketch out a prototypical target audience member for each blog:
metacool: early forties, with 2.3 years of graduate school; enjoys a fine red wine and dines on gourmet Vietnamese cuisine at least 2x per week; can name the drummer on every Coltrane album; also reads the NYT, Winding Road, the Economist, and Monocle (but is unsure where the last publication is going); recently augmented the 1964 Aston Martin with a Breezer Uptown 8 bike.
Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness: mental age of 14 regardless of true physical age; likes music a whole lot but suffers from hearing loss from standing too near to too many aluminum-block Can-Am V8's; likes any number of fine cuisines but is equally comfortable with cheese doodles and a fine light beer from Golden, Colorado; used to read Road & Track, Automobile, Car & Driver, Autoweek, Autosport, Racer, Motor Trend, Car, Air & Space, and Bicycling, but dumped all of those subscriptions for Winding Road alone; recently modified the 1964 Aston Martin with a supercharged Chevy small-block conversion, and added a Boeing Stearman to the internal combustion corral because of the sound it makes. Secretly prays each night to receive a Ford rocket Galaxie from the Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy. Or both.
Does that help? In other words, I am both of these blogs, and they are both me. I want to have a way to explore visceral stuff more deeply without turning off the rest of you. I am mildly dismayed when metacool is called a "car blog" (it isn't -- I merely use cars as a lingua franca to talk about innovation), but I would love it if Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness were labled as such. One of my favorite public intellectuals is Russell Davies, and all I'm really doing here is aping him or Kevin Kelly, each of whom maintain a nice collection of inter-related blogs. Looking at what Russell does, hopefully Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness is to metacool aseggsbaconchipsandbeans is to we're as disappointed as you are.
This new blog is a working prototype. The graphic design is rough, and some of you loyal readers will recognize some older content. Thank you for patience and feedback as it moves forward.
Let me know what you think by dropping me a line or leaving me a comment.
AFAQS*:
Why are you wasting your life blogging about cars? Well, I don't really blog about cars that much. But I believe it is vitally important to understand the visceral side of things if we're going to make much progress on planet Earth. Why doesn't everyone drive a fuel-efficient car? Why doesn't everyone ride a bike instead of driving a fuel-efficient car? Why don't we ride public transportation? All of these have to do with what I call the challenge of making green red, and unless you dive deep in to our reptilian psyches as I plan to do here, I think you lose the big picture.
Will there be less Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness on metacool? No. But there will be more at Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness.
Will the character of metacool change? I think so, but only gradually. When I started writing metacool, I was but a lad in my early thirties without a care in the world and a hot 240-horsepower car in the garage. Now I'm an old man with two kids, a mortgage, and a real job, and my hot car now gets out-dragged by a Camry from Hertz. As I move through the world, I'm actually less interested overall in aesthetics and product-related stuff, and more interested by macro economics, psychology, and organizational dynamics. I hope metacool continues to be interesting across those domains.
Oh my goodness, this has to be the most boring post I've ever written. Let's get back to business!
Yeah, I dig the MacBook Air, too, but Apple's big announcement of January 15th pales in comparison with big news coming out of metacool today: I'm very proud to announce that today we shipped yet another fantastic offering to market. It's much cooler than that other thing.
Coming from the same corporate gene pool, as it were, very little distinguishes this version from that of our last announcement in 2005 -- they share not only total cuteness but an amazing list of features and functionality. And yet each one is uniquely individual. Look at this feature list and eat your heart out, Apple Design Team:
a complex, powerful, yet low-power consumption bio-computer running a self-teaching, open-source operating system
a huge amount of information storage capacity -- won't run out for decades, hopefully even a century
completely cradle-to-cradle in terms of production materials
low mass -- all of this in a package only a few pounds heavier than the MacBook Air: a total of 8 pounds, 9 ounces, to be exact
timeless aesthetics; built for the ages
Branding is still TBD. Am going to sleep on that (I really need to sleep, come to think of it).
HonestIy, I can't say that this one is in any way better than the previous one -- I love 'em both. But, I would say that metacool's software development process has certainly benefited from the real-world experience gained over the past 31 months of intense development activity. To quote Indiana Jones, it's not the years, it's the mileage.
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.
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.
Here's a link to an interview I did with Samsung's DigitAll magazine. Also interviewed are Dave Lawrence of Shimano, Pandora's Tim Westergren, and Chris Beard from Mozilla. There's some interesting stuff in there.
Sorry for the recent radio silence here at metacool. Everything is a-okay. Been busy at conferences, endurance car races, taking care of the family, and work. The good news is, I'm now swamped with interesting ideas. It'll all brew up in to some good blog fodder, I reckon.
In the spirit of always being in beta, never leaving well enough alone,
and continuing to use this blog as an intellectual sandbox, the staff
of metacool have made a few small changes to this blog.
First, a shift from nouns to verbs. Sharp-eyed web surfers will notice
that the topical categories on metacool are no longer nouns. Instead
of “design”, there’s “designing”. Innovation is now innovating,
leading has replaced leadership, and marketing is, well... marketing.
Doing seems more important to me than ever, and so the verbs have it.
Second, we’ve rounded up a group of books and placed them under the
heading of — hold on to your seat, folks — COOL BOOKS. I find myself
going back to these again and again for clarity, insight, and
inspiration. This list is partly for me, so that I can remember what I've read that worked for me. Hopefully you'll find it useful, too.
Here's a great Director's Commentary centering on the new Boeing Dreamliner. In this video interview, Fortune's David Kirkpatrick interviews Teague CEO John Barratt about the development of the Dreamliner's passenger experience. I enjoyed hearing about the design process used to get to the final result, which looks quite promising.
Though I have to admit that at a personal level I'm a bit reticent to fly in a plane made largely of carbon fiber, I do admire Boeing's return to a structural paradigm pioneered by aircraft of seventy years ago, such as the innovative Lockheed Vega, piloted by the equally groundbreaking innovator Wiley Post.
The big thing about playing video games used to be that they were the new golf, a novel way to hang with friends and business associates in order to maybe bond, collude, or even get some productive work done. But it's not just about golf anymore: Aili McConnon from BusinessWeek just published an article about the intersection of work and gaming, and I'm here to tell you that video gaming is about work. I even landed a quote in there referencing the lessons to be had from playing MMOG's:
The lessons learned in these games become increasingly useful as
companies become less command-and-control and more a series of
distributed networks around the world. The future of work
is here; it's just disguised as a game.
The article also talks through some interesting game-related stories from McKinsey, J&J, and Philips, and also has a great insight from my Stanford d.school partner in crime Bob Sutton.
I really do think that you can learn a lot about where this whole Web 2.0 thing is going by playing games online. Learning by doing, serious play, and all that.
I recently wrote a brief essay on the subject of "Der wird Millionar" for the Folio magazine of the Swiss newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung. I talked about the design of the Toyota Prius -- I've been thinking a lot about the Prius lately -- and, more broadly, on the topic of how green products need to become much more red. In essence, on what I believe is the critical importance of understanding what makes for unabashed gearhead gnarlyness and then building that sensibility in to green market offerings.
The essay is available here. I wrote in English, but I think it sounds cooler in German.
Be sure to check out all the other "Der wird Millionar" essays in the issue by this amazing group of thinkers and doers:
I have a new article about design thinking and risk in the Spring 2007 issue of Rotman Magazine (PDF download). It's on page 57 of what is a quite impressive collection of articles -- lots to chew on in there. Low risk, I assure you.
This one, as with Getting to Where You Want to Go, is a result of my continuing professional collaboration with Ryan Jacoby, one of my colleagues at IDEO.
As always, please let me know what you think with an email or a comment below.
update 28may07: I'm pleased to announce that this article can now be found over at BusinessWeek magazine