May 2012
21 posts
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How Can Companies Copy Cities Successfully?
Jonah Lehrer was an entertaining presenter at the 99% Conference, and he flagged some particularly fascinating research, from Geoffrey West, of the Santa Fe Institute. A theoretical physicist, West’s interest in “general scaling phenomena” led him to study cities. Lehrer then outlined the difference between cities and companies, which might seem rather dull but was actually...
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“No one gives a damn about graphic design and color. That doesn’t change...”
– A somewhat surprising assertion from well-known graphic designer, James Victore, speaking at the recent 99% Conference. Victore went on to describe his work for the NYC Department of Probation (see a slideshow of the work in the spacecontext designed by Jim Biber of Biber Architects.) It’s...
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WatchMy colleague Jeff Wordham gave this presentation at the recent Brandworks conference. It’s a smart take on how to think about — and organize for — launch, and includes principles for those thinking about the launch process (and those looking for ways to improve it.) The presentation includes persuasive examples from companies including Procter & Gamble, Hyundai and, yes,...
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“The crash will come. And Facebook—that putative transformer of worlds, which is,...”
– Much post-Facebook IPO post-rationalization going on. Marketplace’s Heidi Moore pointed out some stark figures: “Facebook’s market value at its highest: $112 bn. Today: $93bn. So Facebook lost $19 billion of value in one trading day.” And media commentator Michael Wolff...
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Radiolab's Jad Abumrad on the Messy Process of...
Jad Abumrad also spoke at the 99% Conference. The founder of the experimental radio show, Radiolab, and winner of a Macarthur Foundation “Genius” award last year, Abumrad was simultaneously self-effacing and steely. In particular, he had a refreshing take on how he answers the difficult question of how exactly he made Radiolab into a success story: “In those moments I find...
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Nest's Tony Faddell on Prototyping and Getting...
I recently attended the 99% Conference in New York, a refreshing gathering whose focus is less on the generation of ideas and more on their execution. (The conference’s name is a riff on Edison’s famous quote about the need for only 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.) The next few posts will feature some of the highlights, with the sought-after accolade of My Favorite Speaker* going...
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“This year, the costs of dementia care will be $200 billion. By 2050, $1...”
– A Life Worth Ending is a harrowing piece by Michael Wolff on the care of his elderly mother. As the intro puts it, “The era of medical miracles has created a new phase of aging, as far from living as it is from dying,” while the American healthcare system has become so systematically...
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WatchI’m completely biased, as the animator who made the film above is a friend of mine, but I love this submission for The International Douglas Adams Animation Competition, which challenges creative types to produce an animation to accompany a lovely audio recording of sci fi writer and Hitchhiker’s Guide creator, the late Douglas Adams, talking in 1993 about the evolution of the book...
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“Risk aversion is a hapless approach for a company that’s hoping to develop...”
– Sir James Dyson, founder of Dyson, outlines his approach to innovation, design and risk management, critical when the economic chips are down.
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“The design community needs to move on from the incessant argument over the...”
– In The Problem With “Design Thinking,” my friend Saul Kaplan goes a little nuclear on his designer friends. I actually think the discussion around design thinking (to which, I confess, I have contributed more than makes me in any way comfortable) has moved on, though I still think...
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“The apps were, in the jargon of information technology, “walled...”
– Why Publishers Don’t Like Apps is a great piece by Jason Pontin of Technology Review, explaining why apps haven’t proven to be the savior of publishing. The lack of linking and creation of “small, stifling gardens” is key, as are the economics of a business model that...
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“There is no single right answer or path forward, but there is one right way to...”
– Nominally a book review, Clay Christensen’s Life Lessons is really more of a lyrical spin through the acclaimed Harvard Business School professor’s life and works, with a nod towards his upcomigng title, How Will You Measure Your Life? It’s a really lovely profile, featuring a...
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“I think the people behind this Popchips ad are not racist. I think they just...”
– I don’t say this often, and I don’t say this lightly, but stop what you’re doing and go and read Anil Dash’s screed, How To Fix Popchips’ Racist Ad Campaign. It’s not what you’d expect. Because it would be easy to sound off about the thoughtless callousness...
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“From climate change to spiraling healthcare costs, from global poverty to food...”
– Wildly self-promotional post, as I co-authored Help Wanted 2.0 with Doblin’s CEO, Bansi Nagji. The piece was just published in Rotman Magazine. In it, we attempted to outline the practical ways in which people can think about wrapping their hands around the much buzzed-about topic of open...
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April 2012
29 posts
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“A few workshops and an extracurricular competition won’t produce business...”
– My colleague Melissa Quinn puts the cat among the proverbial pigeons with her Fast Company piece about the Rotman Design Challenge, organized by the Rotman School of Management, part of the University of Toronto. Quinn highlights the continued gap between the rhetoric of those promising to teach...
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Jay Doblin's Seven Levels of Design
While we think about design thinking as being something of a modern day phenomenon, it’s really as old as the hills. I’ve recently been combing through Doblin’s archives—and I came across a piece written in 1978 by the company founder Jay Doblin. In it, he lays out how the changing levels of design give different opportunities to innovate, and uses the redesign of a gas...
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“Most people actually have to leave their offices to get coffee. While wandering...”
– Enjoyed reading this NYT piece gently ribbing huge tech companies for their perks—and making the more serious point that perhaps such luxury actually ends up stifling innovation.
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“These DIY methods disrupt the traditional triangular relationship between the...”
– An interesting, provocative review of the Furniture Fair (Salone) in Milan from The Guardian’s Justin McGuirk. In From Handicraft To Digicraft, Milan’s Furniture Fair Looks To The Future, he looks at the influx of DIY types wielding Makerbots and Arduino-fueled products galore. Or, as he...
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“Don’t fire the people first. Fire the plan first.”
– How To Fail Less is a nice Q&A with entrepreneur Steve Blank, who explains his methodology of the “Lean Launchpad” for teaching entrepreneurship. Based on the idea initial hypotheses are most often entirely wrong, this approach to creating a business shares a lot in common with the...
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“Within minutes, our amazing commenters identified it as coming from the grille...”
– This is really an amazing story, of car blog Jalopnik posting a call for its readers to help the Waynesboro, VA Police Department in identifying a part that came off the car of a driver involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident. The commenters came good and two suspects are now being held in custody....
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“Rather than hoping that their future will emerge from a collection of ad hoc,...”
– Managing Your Innovation Portfolio is the lead feature story in this month’s Harvard Business Review. Written by my colleagues, Bansi Nagji and Geoff Tuff, the piece describes the practice of “total innovation,” by which executives can simultaneously invest in three levels of...
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“At this point, Sony just needs some strategy, any strategy, because that is...”
– So speaks Sea-Jin Chang, chairman for business policy at the National University of Singapore in this great New York Times story, How the Tech Parade Passed Sony By. Some really great insights into how once unassailable-seeming giants can fall from grace. Most interesting for me is the culture...
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“The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of...”
– Lots of approving buzz for today’s launch of the Innovator’s Patent Agreement by Twitter. Patents are a hotly contested tool of innovation, with patent trolls and high-dollar lawsuits stifling and impeding the flow of ideas necessary for a thriving economy and its flourishing businesses....
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“In 50 years, he says, there will be only 10 institutions in the world delivering...”
– Loved this Wired story about the disruption of higher education: The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Education Forever. The “he” above is Sebastian Thrun, Stanford professor and head of Google X, who founded KnowLabs (now known as Udacity) specifically to upend the...
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“In a bottom line driven atmosphere, it is important to remind those at desks...”
– Rachel Lehrer is just finishing up her MFA in Transdisciplinary Design at the New School. Her Core77 piece, Designing Handwashing: Diverse Nudges In A Hospital, looks at her seven-month-long project tracking handwashing compliance in, well, hospitals. It’s a fascinating insight into the many...
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“We knew we needed to change the fan belt, but we couldn’t stop the engine.”
– So said Gary T DiCamillo, former chief executive at Polaroid, in a 2008 talk at the Yale School of Management. DiCamillo continued: “And the reason we couldn’t stop the engine was that instant film was the core of the financial model of this company. It drove all the economics.” All...
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Watch“How on earth does a process engineer used to working with boilers end up producing a medical device that transforms his own life? The answer is a multidisciplinary team.” Love this TEDxKrakow Talk by Tal Golesworthy, who describes his own way of dealing with Marfan Syndrome, a heart condition affecting the ascending aorta. Disinterested in the traditional treatment, which requires...
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Best-In-Class Service
Piers Fawkes at PSFK asked me to opine on what constitutes good service these days. I had to come up with a list of five stores I particularly enjoy shopping at. Given that I actually loathe shopping, this was rather harder than it should have been, but it was an interesting exercise. Here was my starting point:
I’ve never really enjoyed shopping, which is why I quickly embraced the Internet as...
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“Humanities majors may well learn a great deal about the world. But they don’t...”
– Overlooking the fact that the Peter Thiel teaching at Stanford is the same Peter Thiel who paid 20 kids $100,000 to drop out of college and start a business, this is a great recap of Thiel’s first course at Stanford. Student Blake Masters took detailed notes, and there are some real gems (not,...
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“In terms of user experience, Facebook is like an NYPD police van crashing into...”
– Ok, one more piece on Instagram and Facebook, just because this quote really made me laugh. Thank you, Paul Ford for Facebook And Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out.
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“Instagram, an Internet start-up in San Francisco, has no revenue and about a...”
– Good analysis of this week’s mega-acquisition by the New York Times’ Jenna Wortham. For other analysis, both good and insane, see the Internet.
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Unilever's Open Innovation "Wants"
In Why Unilever Is Betting On Open Innovation For Sustainability, Joel Makower reports how Unilever is pushing the envelope when it comes to open innovation, having published its own list of ‘wants’ on which it is actively seeking outside help. These range from super serious, world-challenging issues (“safe drinking water”) to rather less dramatic problems that are clearly...
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“The future is sooner and stranger than you think.”
– I found this profile of LinkedIn founder, Reid Hoffman interesting for reasons other than you might think. I mean, sure, it’s interesting that he has a somewhat bohemian and academic background, and yes, it’s interesting to note the connections he himself made along the way that cemented...
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“I really kind of wonder about Frank Gehry. I just don’t understand how you can...”
– Simply lovely Q&A with Pedro Guerrero in Architect magazine. The 95 year old was the longtime photographer of the work and life of both Frank Lloyd Wright and Alexander Calder, and his stories are tender, wry and insightful. If you’re in Los Angeles, please go along to the retrospective,...
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“The general trend of the industry toward being a lot more litigious somehow has...”
– Google CEO, Larry Page sounds off about innovation and patent-trolling in a rare interview with Bloomberg Businessweek’s Brad Stone. Doesn’t really share too much you didn’t already know, though I confess I enjoyed reading his barely veiled digs at competitors such as Yahoo (see...
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“China still has a long way to go before it becomes an advanced center for...”
– Why China Lags on Innovation and Creativity is an interesting take from Richard Florida on why, despite its tremendous advances as a global economic power, it will take China at least 20 years before it becomes an innovation powerhouse. Well worth a read.
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“A product is not a set of screens — it’s the stories those screens enable.”
– Story-centered Design: Hacking Your Brain To Think Like A User is a great story by Google Ventures partner, Braden Kowitz. In it, he outlines his process for managing the complexity inherent in interaction design projects, and describes how he has moved away from a screen-based approach to one that...
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“The Tata Nano may not have changed the world, but frugal innovation will.”
– Good Economist story monitoring the trend of “reverse” innovation, “trickle-up” innovation or “frugal” innovation, however you like to describe it. This has been a story of growing importance in the past few years, and there are a ton of good examples here, from...