— 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 guest appearance from Doblin’s own Larry Keeley, playing the role of merry contrarian, as per.
I’m still of the old school way of thinking that technology is a fantastic, amazing tool that works best when harnessed in the name of a really good idea. So I can do without the trend for turning everything and its cousin into an app. But this one is pretty smart. The Pain Squad app is designed to help sick children collect critical health data about how much pain they’re feeling. Turning pain management into a game, complete with leveling up and encouraging words for the kids via celebrity videos just might help the patients imagine that they’re not on their own in dealing with their illness. And the exploitation of the touchscreen functionality of the iPhone helps get around the real problem with data collection: getting people to do it consistently. Of course, not every patient will have an iPhone, or a smartphone of any kind, and it would be sad to eliminate the poorer sections of our community because of this absence, but this is well put together and hopefully, just a bright beginning.
[via Brent Choi]
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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 and disrespect of an ad campaign that for absolutely no apparent reason depicts Ashton Kutcher dressed up in vaguely Indian garb and coming out with patter that might have seemed out of place in British comedies from the 1970s (which did a lot to perfect the art of casual racism). Easy, but unhelpful. Instead, Dash takes a hard look at the culture in which this type of “creative” output was ever deemed appropriate, and has tough words for all concerned. Most of all, he pleas for all of them to avoid the usual measures of crisis management. Dash writes,
Those superficial corrections don’t change the process. Back at the office, the Chief Marketing Officer knows that all the people who hate that brand followed them on Twitter for the day to see how they’d respond, so they later crow to the CEO, “We got a 12% bump in social media metrics, looks like I get my bonus!” The PR firm says “Well, aside from the tiny minority of people who complained, we actually got a ton of media mentions, so I can still use this to pitch ourselves to our next client!” The advertising firm says, “We can still talk about making an ad that got millions of views on YouTube, and having worked on a multimillion dollar campaign for a national consumer brand”.
And the end result is, nothing actually changes.
It’s absolutely true, and anyone reading it who’s had any kind of tangential experience of content creation or advertising or marketing or design or the twenty first century knows it’s so. Sometimes mea culpas that follow such gaffes are somewhat genuine, but let’s face it, we live in a society that exploits cynicism to an extraordinary degree. This piece calls for us to be more thoughtful, to think harder, to accept our personal limitations and to be prepared to have an honest discussion about the imperfect society in which we live. It’s a beautiful, thoughtful, heartfelt piece of writing that has completely made my day. Really. Go and read it. Now.
— 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 innovation. Let me know what you think!
![Thoughtful piece by Timothy Egan about e-books and the threat of Amazon on the livelihood of publishers and independent book store owners, pointing out that despite the howls of “o me miserum” and fraught hand-wringing, “we have more books, more readers, a bigger audience for words, on pixels or paper.”
I’ve wondered before about those consumers who are less focused on bargain basement prices and who might want to know that a percentage of their money is going towards those actually producing the content (so I’m a writer, color me biased.) But the fear of innovation and transformation from those who wish things could just stay as they used to be is potent, dangerous and, ultimately, irrelevant. It’s useful to remind ourselves that markets shift, worlds change, whether we like it or not. Or, as Egan puts it:
Publishers need to reinvent their own future. They could offer packages. They could partner more with communities of interest, from environmentalists to religious conservatives. And, most important, they could start believing in tomorrow, instead of being afraid of it.
[Encyclopedia image via Stewart; Story via Maria Popova]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3eh0soFTB1qikpxao1_1280.jpg)
Thoughtful piece by Timothy Egan about e-books and the threat of Amazon on the livelihood of publishers and independent book store owners, pointing out that despite the howls of “o me miserum” and fraught hand-wringing, “we have more books, more readers, a bigger audience for words, on pixels or paper.”
I’ve wondered before about those consumers who are less focused on bargain basement prices and who might want to know that a percentage of their money is going towards those actually producing the content (so I’m a writer, color me biased.) But the fear of innovation and transformation from those who wish things could just stay as they used to be is potent, dangerous and, ultimately, irrelevant. It’s useful to remind ourselves that markets shift, worlds change, whether we like it or not. Or, as Egan puts it:
Publishers need to reinvent their own future. They could offer packages. They could partner more with communities of interest, from environmentalists to religious conservatives. And, most important, they could start believing in tomorrow, instead of being afraid of it.
[Encyclopedia image via Stewart; Story via Maria Popova]
![“Striiv, a newer entrant in the growing market of exercise-tracking gadgets, caters to the crowd that would rather play FarmVille or walk for charity than pore over numbers.”
Using The Addictive Power Of Gaming To Make You Exercise More is an interesting Fast Company Exist piece about the burgeoning trend for those looking to “quantify the self”, that is use technology to monitor data pertaining to their own life. Now come the devices for those who aren’t perhaps so engaged with this type of health-tracking. For, as author Ariel Schwartz writes, “other fitness-starved people may not be motivated by data as an end in itself.” Y’think?
Using game-inspired techniques won’t mean that “fitness-starved” people will in any way be interested in forking out $99 for a fancy pedometer, of course. But I did think the kicker to the story was interesting: Striiv is already working with two of the four largest health providers in the United States. Linking this type of idea to some form of preventive medical outreach program, or in some way using this as another tool in a system focused on prevention rather than retroactive care could elevate this to the level of really interesting.
[Story via Beth DiLeone.]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3edni7i2q1qikpxao1_500.jpg)
“Striiv, a newer entrant in the growing market of exercise-tracking gadgets, caters to the crowd that would rather play FarmVille or walk for charity than pore over numbers.”
Using The Addictive Power Of Gaming To Make You Exercise More is an interesting Fast Company Exist piece about the burgeoning trend for those looking to “quantify the self”, that is use technology to monitor data pertaining to their own life. Now come the devices for those who aren’t perhaps so engaged with this type of health-tracking. For, as author Ariel Schwartz writes, “other fitness-starved people may not be motivated by data as an end in itself.” Y’think?
Using game-inspired techniques won’t mean that “fitness-starved” people will in any way be interested in forking out $99 for a fancy pedometer, of course. But I did think the kicker to the story was interesting: Striiv is already working with two of the four largest health providers in the United States. Linking this type of idea to some form of preventive medical outreach program, or in some way using this as another tool in a system focused on prevention rather than retroactive care could elevate this to the level of really interesting.
[Story via Beth DiLeone.]
— 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 “design thinking” (or “business thinking”) and what actually happens, and she has pointed words for both sides of the equation. The key, as she argues, is that the education system as a whole is outmoded, and we need no less than its meaningful reinvention so that both designers and MBAs can realize, appreciate and embrace the true value of the others’ craft, with real results.
RIP, David Weiss, who Art in America reports has died, aged 66. Weiss and his longtime artist partner, Peter Fischli were way ahead of the current penchant for Rube Goldberg-inspired filmmaking. Above is an extract from their film, The Way Things Go (Der Lauf der Dinge), the 30-minute extravaganza they created in 1987. As Flo Heiss, executive creative director of ad agency Dare commented on Twitter, the film is the “most copied, magical artwork of all time.” Thoughts to friends and family.
[via Matt Jones]
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 pump as an example. Check this out:
So, apart from making me wish I’d had the chance to meet Jay, what does this mean? Well, it means that 35 years ago, designers were thinking about increasing their scope from object to system, about how to elevate themselves from beyond providing the superficial aesthetic appeal of a product to considering its strategic consequences, even its point of existence. And honestly I think it’s telling and somewhat depressing that we’re still struggling with this whole discussion today.
— 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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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 puts it, rather more eloquently: “All over Milan, this tension between mass production and self-production, between handicraft and digicraft, was to the fore.”
I confess I stumbled slightly over his later assertion that hackers have traditionally been “outlaws”. Maybe I’m wrong, but I always thought of the original hackers (the Woz types and those attending the Homebrew Computer Club back in the day) as those who were willing to share just about everything and “hacked” purely for the joy of learning and understanding… very much in line with the spirit of these present day hackers. It was only in the interim that a more nefarious splinter group of hackers arose, with less idealistic goals at their heart. Anyway, I digress. The killer point of McGuirk’s review comes at the end and any would-be innovators would be wise to pay attention:
This was not a particularly strong year for innovative products, with many companies playing it safe or re-upholstering old classics. So let’s just accept that there was a more compelling story to tell. This groundswell of participative design, rapid manufacturing techniques and hacking is starting to challenge Milan’s design orthodoxy, making us forget about products and think about processes. Because the furniture fairs of the not-too-distant future will be for exhibiting new services and technologies, not just objects.
Now that’ll be a furniture fair worth attending.
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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 design techniques of prototyping and iterating.
[Story via Erik Van Crimmin]
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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. Small comfort for the victim’s family, of course, but a heartwarming tale of the power of crowdsourcing.
[Story via Nicholas Thompson]
— 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 innovation ambition: core; adjacent and transformational. Most crucially, the system allows them to manage the balance between the three and thus avoid the many factors that commonly trip up innovation initiatives. Super interesting premise, and well worth the read (if you can get behind HBR’s paywall, that is.)
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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 piece, the part of management (and innovation) that’s so difficult to get right—and yet potentially company-threatening when done wrong. Hiroko Tabuchi writes:
Sony’s recent leaders have had trouble wielding authority over the sprawling company. Sony remains dominated by proud, territorial engineers who often shun cooperation. For many of them, cost-cutting is the enemy of creativity — a legacy of Sony’s co-founders, Mr. Morita and Masaru Ibuka, who tried to foster a culture of independence.
What started as a positive — a culture of independence — has morphed and evolved to become a real problem for the company and its future survival. Tabuchi continues:
Executives complain privately of recalcitrant managers who refuse to share information or work with other divisions. One executive said he was startled to discover that a manager whose position had been eliminated had been rehired under a different title. (“Or maybe he never really left,” said this executive.)
This should, of course, be astonishing. Managers who don’t share information? Are you kidding me? But, of course, we know that it’s not only not astonishing, but likely a common condition within many large, established organizations. All companies are dysfunctional in their own ways, of course, but wherever human beings are involved, unexpected or suboptimal behavior is always mere moments away. Executives have to be very conscious about the corporate culture they are fostering—and yet way too many of them don’t even realize it’s something to be considered.
